Passage at Arms (25 page)

“Away One,” Piniaz sings. “Away Two.”

A missile’s exhaust scars the view on my screen. I hit my triggering key.

A lance of emerald hell, startling against the monochromatic background, slices a corner from the screen. It sweeps on continuous discharge, vaporizing rock and exposed plant. There’s chatter in Engineering as they compensate for the surge of power being drained from the accumulator banks.

“Christ!” comes through from Ops at the same instant. “The bastard is right on top of us!”

“What?”

“Away Three,” Piniaz chants. “Away Four. Klarich, what the hell is wrong here?”

A sewing machine stitches a line of black holes up the cracking tower an instant before my screen goes white with the violence of the first missile. It blanks. The bulkheads ghost.

Four seconds. It seemed much longer. Everything happened so slowly?

“Twelve minutes,” Nicastro intones. “Commence target evaluation and selection.”

We’re safe now. Outside, lunar rock is boiling and fusing into man-made obsidian.

The Commander says, “Mr. Piniaz, reprogram one missile for above-surface pursuit. Berberian will give you the data. We had an incoming destroyer at eight o’clock.”

Piniaz has problems of his own. “Commander, we’ve got a jam in the elevator on Launch Three. Looks like the lead dolly kicked back and knocked the mid dolly out of line. The Seven missile is against the well wall. Programming and command circuits have safety-locked.”

“Can you clear it?”

“Not remote. I’ll have to send some people out. Which target do you want dropped?”

“Forget the destroyer. We’ll take our chances.”

I slam my fist against my board. If we survive two more passes, we’ll still have two missiles aboard.

The screen starts sending up target data. I sigh. Things look a little better. Indications are we got Rathgeber’s comm center. They can’t call for help. And the destroyer, which may have been crippled, was the only warship around.

I’m obsessed with going home. Home? Canaan isn’t home. My personal universe has shrunk to the hell of the Climber and the promised land of Canaan. Canaan. What a choice of names. Whoever selected it must have been prescient. Odd. I consider myself a rational man. How can I make of the base-world a near-deity?

Does this happen to all Climber people?

I think so. My shipmates seldom speak of other worlds. They don’t mention Canaan that much, and then only in a New Jerusalem context. The quirks of the human mind are fascinating.

I see why they go crazy planetside. That business at the Pregnant Dragon wasn’t for tomorrow we die. People were proving they were alive, that they had survived a brush with an incredibly hostile environment.

So. I’ll have to adapt my behavioral models. I’ll have to see where and how each man fits this new scheme. And the Commander? Is he a man for whom no proofs carry sufficient conviction? Is he a prisoner in a solipsistic universe?

“Sixty seconds,” the good Chief says. Christ, twelve minutes go fast. I’m not ready for another plunge into the hexenkessel.

Alarm! I start, scattering notes.

“Away Five.”

I begin shooting immediately. I can’t see the purpose, but any action holds the fear at bay. The movement of a finger makes work for body and brain for a fractional slice of time.

“Away Eight.”

Climb alarm. “Thirty minutes. Commence target evaluation and selection.”

“Magic numbers,” I murmur. Seven and Eleven are the missiles that can’t be launched.

“Eh?” My nearest neighbor gives me a puzzled look and headshake. The men think my brain was pickled by civilian life.

The bugs don’t give me a thing. Engineering is a graveyard peopled by specters reciting rosaries to Fusion and Annihilation. In Ops, Yanevich observes that the destroyer weathered the first pass and was trying to run. The Commander’s silence says this is no news to him. Nicastro ticks time in colorless tones.

Tension mounts faster than the temperature. Third time counts for all.

I amuse myself by nibbling tidbits of target evaluation data. Seven fusion warheads can do a hell of a lot of damage.

Molten rock and metal and people are quickening into concave black glass lenses. A billion days hence, perhaps, some eldritch descendant of a creature now wallowing mindlessly in a swamp will gaze on that lunar acne and wonder what the hell it means.

I wonder myself. What’s the point?

Well, we can honestly say we didn’t start this one.

Right now, with death a-stalk, the only question that matters is, How do we stay alive? The rest is foam on the beer.

The universe is very narrow, here in Rathgeber’s shadow. It’s a long, lonely hallway through which even close friends can do little to ease one another’s passage.

Again the ship lies panting in the embrace of that cold-hearted mistress of Climber warfare, Waiting. Months of waiting. Climaxed by what? Eight scattered seconds of action. Damned minuscule flecks of meat in a huge, hard sandwich of time.

Almost indigestible.

My butt is driving me crazy. I can’t count the times I’ve stayed seated longer, but those times I had the option of moving. Getting up could become an obsession. Got to move. Got to do something. Anything...

Nicastro’s countdown grows louder and louder. The ass-agony vanishes. Death is a bigger pain. I have a sudden, absolute conviction of my own mortality.

The orbitals will have their guns out. That hunter-killer will be ready. She’ll be laying back, a big iron bushwacker eager for a dry-gulching.

Unless we were damned lucky and skragged her instel wave guides, she’ll have howled for her packmates. They’ll come whooping to avenge the base. We’ll pull pressure off the squadrons stalking the convoy. I should be pleased with such success. But I can’t get excited about the gospel according to St. Tannian.

The destroyers will be hours getting here. They’ll be way too late to help Rathgeber. But I know they’ll catch our trail. The way my life goes, it can’t happen any other way.

Must be getting old. They say pessimism is a disease of the aged.

Here we go!

Missiles away. Energy weapons blazing. My little cannon sowing its seeds. There isn’t much to see. The same old bleached bones of an aborted worldlet acned by ground zeros. The silhouettes of startled beings in spacesuits. They’ll remain forever in my memory, taking one futile step toward cover.

Ghostdom returns with a ship-wide shudder.

“Commander.” Varese is speaking. Softly, metallically. “A low-intensity beam brushed us on the upper torus, at plates twenty-four and twenty-five. Damage appears minimal.”

“Very well. Keep an eye on it.”

Damned well better. Let’s not buy any trouble we could avoid with a little attention to detail.

I secure the cannon board, then bestow a negative blessing on our illustrious Admiral. His madman’s game put us in this predicament. Being a pawn on a galactic chessboard wasn’t what I had in mind when I asked on. The rewards are too small, except in pain and doubt.

“Secure from general quarters,” the Commander orders. “One hour, gentlemen.”

I exchange glances with Piniaz. This is an unprecedented breach of Climb procedure. The crew is supposed to remain at battle stations any time the ship is in Climb.

No one argues. We all need to move around, to interrupt tension with frivolous activity.

Yet work goes on. I’m the one man free to stray far from my station. I duck into Ops when the hatches open.

Fisherman hasn’t moved, though in Climb he and his station are useless. Yanevich, more the butterfly than usual, flutters round the compartment. Westhause and the Commander hug the astrogation consoles. Already they’re trying to outguess the hounds.

Rose, Throdahl, and Laramie have a tricomer game of When I get back to Canaan going. It ignores the fact that we have missiles aboard. They’re banking on the elevator damage’s being irreparable. The names, addresses, and special talents of loose women volley around, often accompanied by the hull numbers of the ships of the men who have primary claim to them.

Chief Nicastro is staying out of the way, imitating a statue. He moves just once that I see, to thumb a switch and announce, “Forty-five minutes.”

I want desperately to badger the Old Man. Will he go norm and clear the elevator right away? Will he run as far and fast as he can? I can think of arguments for both courses.

He has no tune to waste on me.

Time has turned its coat. It’s gone over to the other firm. It’s become their standard-bearer, almost. Whatever the Old Man decides, he has to do it quick. The death hounds are slavering toward Rathgeber.

No one has time for me. If they’re not on station, they’re busy scrubbing mold. They’re losing themselves in ritual. I’ll try Ship’s Services and Engineering.

Same story. The Commander’s ploy hasn’t worked. After a moment of release, the men have grown tense again, retreating into themselves. Even Diekereide is stone-silent.

Trudging back, I note a lump in my hammock. “Where you been, fat boy?”

Fearless opens his eye, yawns, meows softly. I scratch his head listlessly. His purr has no heart in it either. “Going to be hard times,” I tell him. He’s getting lean. He’s been on short rations lately.

Fearless is in one of his lonely moods. So am I. I’m a little hurt. They’re shutting me out. We share a silent commiseration, the cat and I. My thoughts, when not lusting after hammock, wolf after other worlds, other times, other companions. I’m very sorry that I’m here.

The reporter, the observer, ideally, remains neutral and detached. However, I’ve altered the experiment simply by being here. I’ve tried to be both remote and intimate, born Climber man and reporter. I’ve failed. My shipmates, so young, came to Navy with near-virgin pasts. Trying to mirror then: innocence, I’ve kept my own past fairly private.

And so I’ve been hiding from myself as well.

There with the cat, waiting and wishing I could sleep, I rediscover my once-had-beens and should-have-dones, the tortoise shell of pain and past all men drag with them forever.

A dam cracks. It begins as a leak... I understand why so many mouths are sealed.

This ship is filled with a conviction of imminent death, tainted with only the slightest uncertainty.

Maybe now... Maybe in a few hours. The condemned man wants to order his life and explain everything. To, perhaps, make someone understand.

These men are just reaching their conclusions of condemnation. Maybe, now, I’ll learn more than I ever wanted to know.

The conviction has hold of the Commander, I’m sure, though he hides it well. His face is more pale, his smile more strained, his primary expression the one you see before the body goes into the coffin.

This is a ship manned by zombies, by corpses going through life-motions while awaiting cremation. We died the moment that destroyer sent her call.

We know she did. Fisherman caught the leak over of an instel link during second attack.

Nicastro is listless because his revelation came early.

“Five minutes.”

“Take care, Fearless.” I’m sure we won’t meet again. “Make yourself a home here.” I ease him back into the hammock.

A syrupy silence has swamped Weapons. The gunners have had time to mourn themselves.

They don’t seem afraid. Just resigned or apathetic. I suppose that’s because they’ve been waiting for so long. Why panic in the face of the inevitable?

Fear is a function of hope. The bigger the hope, the greater the fear. There’s no fear where hope doesn’t exist. I park myself in Ops.

The general alarm sounds briefly.

“This’s the Commander. We’re going norm to clear a jammed missile elevator. EVA is required. All compartments will remain prepared for extended Climb. Mr. Piniaz, sustain your accumulators at minimum charge. Mr. Bradley, maintain internal temperature at the lowest tolerable level. Scrub atmosphere. Empty and clean all auxiliary human waste receptacles. Distribute combat rations for three days. Mr. Varese, Mr. Piniaz, select your working parties. Suit them and brief them. Mr. Westhause, take us down when they’re ready.”

We go norm in the depths of an interstellar abyss. The nearest star flames three light-years distant. The universe is an inkwell with a handful of light motes populating its walls. It’s a forceful reminder of the vastness of existence, of just how far beyond the Climber’s walls other realities lie.

The constraints of concerted activity nibble away at the pandemic gloom. Embers of hope and fear begin to glow. My belief in my immortality revives. The big goal, survival, looks more and more attainable as the little problems come to successful conclusions.

When you think about it, how would God Himself find us amid all this nothing?

There isn’t much for me to do. Visual watch is a waste of time. Fisherman will spot any traffic long before I could. To kill time I help Buckets with the honeypots. A minor morale builder. Having finished, I feel a sense of accomplishment. It segues over into the bigger picture. I get this feeling of having yanked old Death’s beard with impunity.

The Seven missile is solidly wedged. A riser arm has to be removed from the lift linkage before the missile can be manhandled into proper alignment. The riser arm and related hardware then have to be reinstalled. Only afterward can the missile be elevated into the firing rack in the launch bay.

Piniaz wants to replace the entire riser assembly with another taken from the number two elevator. He’s afraid the arm is warped and will jam again when he tries to elevate the Eleven missile.

“Negative,” the Commander says to the proposal. “We’re pushing our luck now. We can’t stay put long enough. Use the old arm. How long for that?”

“Five hours,” Chief Holtsnider says from Launch Three. The Chief doesn’t belong out there. That’s Missileman’s work. Piniaz disagrees. He wants his best man on the job. He says Chief Missileman Bath doesn’t have enough EVA experience.

“My ass, five hours. You’ve got two. Get done or walk home. Mr. Varese, your men just volunteered to help Chief Holtsnider. Two hours.”

Varese had Gentemann and Kinder out examining the torus plates touched by the other firm’s beam. They’re in the lock, coming back. They do colorful things with the language when Varese tells them to turn around. I use my camera to watch them glide out the safety lines to Launch Three.