Passage at Arms (21 page)

“Maybe I’m used to more heat.”

He slugs his coffee back and leaves without saying another word.

New tension grips the ship. She can’t Climb till Varese gets his magnetic containment systems stabilized. The hunter-killers are closing in.

Fisherman is the center of attention. His board remains pleasingly silent.

Dead in space. Seven hours. Varese hasn’t re-established the balance among several hundred minuscule current loads in the CT containment fields. The field control superconductor circuitry suffered localized overheating.

Time drags, except when I calculate how long it’s been since the Leviathan yelled for help. Then it seems time is screaming past.

We’re still at general quarters. The friends of our retired friends could turn up any minute. They’ve had long enough to get a fast attack destroyer from Rathgeber here and back again.

The honeybuckets are getting the best of the atmosphere systems.

I’m scared. Goddamned scared. It’s bloody murder, sitting here unable to do a thing.

The Commander keeps growling at Varese. How long? I can’t hear the reply, but it’s noncommittal. The Old Man tells Piniaz to charge accumulators. He’s getting ready for a shoot-out in norm.

Damn! If I weren’t keeping notes, keeping somewhat occupied, I’d scream. Or do like Nicastro. The Chief runs around like an antsy old lady, driving everyone crazy with his fussing.

I’m continually amazed by how these men take their cue from the Commander’s slightest action or remark. Already they’re steeling themselves for hard times to come. You can see it in the way they stand or sit. I’m getting a little better feel for the Old Man.

While the screws are tightening he doesn’t dare scratch at the wrong instant.

A lot of pressure would come down on a man who became too conscious of that.

It’s easier for a Ship’s Commander aboard a normal ship. He has his quarters. He isn’t on display all the time.

As toed as we are, we won’t make much of a showing if the other firm catches up.

Varese still reports unsatisfactory stabilization after twelve hours. That’s a lot of getaway time lost. Suddenly, Fisherman shouts, “Commander, I have a tachyon pattern.”

I lean and check his screen before the crowd thickens. The pattern is alien. Definitely alien. I’ve seen nothing like it before. The Commander orders, “Power down to minimum, Mr. Varese.”

The Climber drifts in the track of the destroyed warship. Her neutrino emissions are a candle in the conflagration of the wake.

Running is pointless. The other firm can detect us if we can detect them. The hyper translation ratios of their hunter-killers exceed those of our Climbers. Swiftness is the critical element in destroyer design.

We can’t run. The Commander won’t go up till the magnetics are stable. So we’ll pretend we’re not here.

The odor in Ops grows thicker. Tempers grow shorter. Only Fisherman, preoccupied with his board and prayers, maintains his equanimity.

He is, I suspect, secretly delighted at the prospect of a quick out. Here’s a chance for an early encounter with his God. Hey! Big guy in the sky! How about disappointing the silly sack of shit?

The hunters skip here and there, watching and listening. Sometimes they charge right past us, keeping Fisherman’s detector chirping like a cricket’s convention.

“At least eight of them,” he says, after they’ve been rooting around for three hours. “They look hungry.”

“That’s a lot of firepower just to keep a second-rate writer from getting a story.”

The joke falls flat. He says, “Not much else for them to do, sir. No convoys to watch.”

The hunters are stubborn and crafty. One destroyer, doing mini-jumps along the course of the Main Battle, skips right over us. Pure luck saves us being detected. Another, creeping round in norm, gives herself away only because she hasn’t powered down enough to conceal her neutrino emissions adequately. Like us, she’s running with sensors passive. Active radar would nail us in an instant.

The hours roll on. Men fall asleep at their posts. Neither the Commander nor the First Watch Officer protests.

Each time I begin to relax, thinking they’ve moved on, another of their ships whips into detection. I can’t sleep through that.

“How come they keep on?” I wonder out loud. “You’d think they knew we’re here. That they want to spook us.”

“Could be,” Yanevich says. “The Leviathan might have gotten some boats away, too. They could be looking for survivors.”

Not bloody likely. Not at those velocities.

Yanevich and the Commander are spending more and more time with Westhause. Their faces reflect a deepening concern. The Leviathan’s wake is dispersing. It won’t mask us much longer. Canzoneri keeps coming and going. The computers must’ve noticed something else.

I stop the First Watch Officer during one of his forays into my part of the compartment. “What’s up? Why the long faces?”

“They’re going to get a fix pretty quick. They’ve been taking readings on our neutrino emissions from before we went silent. Their computers will figure it out. We’ll have them in our pockets.”

“Damn. Should have known. The ripples never settle in this pond, do they?”

“Nope. They just keep going till they get mixed in with other ripples.”

“So what’s to do?”

“We run first time it looks good. They know we’re around. There’s no way we’re going to bluff them, even if they can’t computer-fix us. They’ll keep quartering till they get a radar contact.”

“Stubborn bastards. How’d they catch on?”

“Who knows? Maybe the Leviathan had an observation drone in her missile screen. Or an escort we didn’t spot. Anything. How doesn’t matter.”

Fifteen minutes later we have one of those rare moments when there’s nothing in detection.

“Power up,” the Commander orders. “Engineering, stand by for hyper and Climb.” Varese has the magnetics close to stable. Looks like the Old Man is willing to take a chance.

“Case like this,” Fisherman says, “it’s better to Climb first, then run. Unless they’ve got somebody doggo right on top of us, they won’t get a track on our Hawking point.”

“We’ll make a hell of a racket getting started. And draw a hell of a crowd of mourners if Mr. Varese doesn’t have the magnetics right.”

“Yes sir.” He isn’t especially worried.

There’s a rush to the honeypots. We may stay strapped in for hours.

How much longer can I stand their stink?

“Discharge accumulators. Vent heat. Secure all Class Two systems,” the Commander orders. Acknowledgments and action-completed reports come back as quickly. People are anxious to leave. “Mr. Varese. How do your magnetics look?”

I don’t hear the response. That’s not reassuring.

“Commander, I have a tachyon pattern,” Fisherman says.

“Very well. Engineering, shift to annihilation.”

The feathers on Fisherman’s screen are faint but nearly vertical. Their foreshortening is extreme. The dorsal and ventral lines are almost invisible. The hunter is coming right at us.

The Commander says, “Take hyper. Max acceleration. Mr. Westhause, make a course of two seven zero at thirty degrees declination.” His voice is calm, as if this is just another drill.

The Climber stutters, moves out. The compartment lights dim momentarily. The hasty shift in power is touchy but successful. The Climb alarm tramples the Commander’s line. Afterward, he adds, “Mr. Westhause, make your course two four zero at twenty-five degrees declination.”

‘Type two fool ’em, sir,” Fisherman explains. “Show them a course they can fix and hope they think you’ll swing way off it in Climb. We’ll make a little change instead, and stay up a long time. They’re supposed to look everywhere but where we’re at.”

“Supposed to?”

“We hope. They’re not stupid, sir. They’ve been at it as long as we have.”

My companions grow hazy. The screens and display tank die. The nothing of null peers in through the hull.

We’ve pulled our hole in after us. We’re safe. For the moment.

For the moment. The destroyer has yelled “Contact!” Her friends are closing in. Their combined computation capacity is producing predictions of our behavior already.

Despite Fisherman’s prophecy, I’m startled when the Commander doesn’t go down after the customary hour. All those drills... wake up, monkey! This is for real. There’re people out there who want to kill you.

The air is raunchy. Interior temperature has climbed a half-dozen degrees. The Old Man’s only response is to have Bradley release a little fresh oxygen, then blow the atmosphere through the outer fuel tanks. They’ve been allowed to freeze. Supercold ice makes a nice sink for waste heat.

It isn’t a ploy which Command approves. Climbers aren’t engineered for it. Our air is rich with human effluvia. It’ll contaminate the water as it melts.

Operational people don’t care. Heat is the bigger problem. They willingly strain the filters with contaminants.

It takes only five hours for that water to match interior temperature. The ship is generating too much heat.

The Commander lets temperature approach the red line. We’re sweltering. The superconductors flash warnings, but they do so long before any actual danger.

The air feels thick enough to slice.

The Commander orders heat converters and atmosphere scrubbers activated at hour nine in Climb. From then on, in my humble opinion, it’s all downhill.

The machines which hold temperatures down and keep the air breathable are efficient and effective, but are powerful heat generators themselves.

This heat isn’t the sudden, shocking heat we experienced when the Main Battle died. This is a creeping heat. It comes on as inexorably as old age. Weariness doesn’t help when one is battling its debilitating effect.

The Climb endurance record is fourteen hours thirty-one minutes and some-odd seconds, established by Talmidge’s Climber. Talmidge commanded one of the early craft. It carried less equipment, fewer personnel, and entered Climb under ideal pre-Climb conditions.

Sitting here in stinking wet clothing, sucking a squeezie, unable to leave my station, I wonder if the Old Man is shooting for the record.

By hour eleven I’m toying with the notion of a one-man mutiny. The Commander’s voice breaks through the mist clouding my mind. What’s this? Hey! He’s counting down to an emergency heat drop?

We’ll plunge into norm, vent heat briefly, then get back up and see what our detection systems have to say about the habitability of this neck of the night.

“Isn’t he a little too cautious?” I croak at Fisherman. The TD operator is barely sweating. “They can’t have stayed with us this long.”

“We’ll see.”

From the corner of my eye, while I’m watching the lances of the energy weapons discharging the accumulators, I see the weak V on Fisherman’s screen.

“Contact, Commander. Fading.”

“Very well. He’ll be back. Mr. Westhause, we’re making for Beacon One Nine One. Get out of here before he fixes our course. Drop us again as soon as we’re beyond detection.”

The emergency venting procedure lasted forty seconds. Each second bought about one more minute of Climb time.

Two hours roll past sluggishly. The Commander takes us down again. He’s kept the ship up on pure guts. Throdahl, Berberian, and Laramie have gone slack in their harnesses. Salt tabs and juice only help so much.

This can’t be doing our health much good.

It seems the more experienced men should handle the hardships easier. Not necessarily true. Nicastro is the next to go. Is it the cumulative effect of ten missions? Tension? The physical wear of hustling round seeing to everyone else?

Nicastro isn’t quiet about going, either. He screams as sudden cramps tear at his legs and stomach. My nerves won’t stand much of this.

I suspect the Commander wanted to stay up longer. Losing both his quartermasters changes his mind.

“Mr. Yanevich, work on Laramie and the Chief. Use stimulants if you have to. Junghaus, keep a wary eye.”

“Aye, Commander.” This time five minutes pass before he announces a contact.

“We’re gaining on them,” Yanevich tells me as he massages Nicastro’s calves. There’s barely room to lay the Chief out on the deck grating. The First Watch Officer grins like a fool. “Better get some salt into him.” He shouts into the inner circle, “We have any calcium pills in the medkit?”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Shit.”

Westhause whips the Climber off at a wild angle. He asks, “Commander, you want to change beacons? They could get a baseline?”

“No. Keep heading for One Nine One.”

Despite a temperature fit for making raisins, I’m shivering. Internal is down twenty degrees and falling. Humidity is a sudden ten percent.

“What are you fucking smirking about?” I snarl at Yanevich. And, “Shit! I’m getting as foul-mouthed as the rest of you. Anyway, seems to me that if the bastards can hang on this good, they’ll run us down. How the hell do they do it, anyhow?”

Nicastro groans, tries to throw Yanevich off. The Commander helps hold him down.

“They’ve got a giant think-box at Rathgeber. Instel linked to all their hunters. Human brains cyborged in for subjectives. And nothing else for it to do. By now they know what ship this is, who’s commanding, and how long we’ve been out. They’ve made an art of it. The head honcho at Rathgeber is sharp. And he gets better all the time.”

“So why didn’t we stay put and let them chase their computer projections?”

“Because that’s the oldest trick of all. We would’ve come down in somebody’s lap. See, our main problem is, we’re outnumbered. They can follow up a lot of projections. They’re probably working the top forty from that last contact.”

“And we’re not going to do anything about it?” Why is he so cheerful? That irritates me more than the other firm’s stubbornness.

“Of course not. We don’t get paid to slug it out with destroyers. We beat up on transports.”

Next tune down we vent heat completely, dispose of accumulated wastes, and take hyper before the opposition shows. We’ve shaken them. The Old Man says it was an easy routine. I find the assertion dubious.

I race for my hammock the instant he lets us off battle stations. The men who had difficulty getting through Climb are supposed to have first shot, but this time I’m taking advantage of my supernumerary status and my commission. I’ve had it. I can be a candy ass once in a while.