Passage at Arms (27 page)

“Mr. Piniaz.” Icicles dangle from the Commander’s words.

Let’s not count missiles before they’re hatched. Whatever they have, they’ll use them intelligently. I don’t like this. My stomach is surging up round my Adam’s apple. We should be running, not dancing.

But the Commander is in command. His job, and curse, perhaps, is to make decisions.

“Ready, Commander,” Westhause says.

‘Take her down.”

We drop almost too close for the destroyer to see, in a perfect trailing position, which presents her with an impossible fire configuration.

“No imagination,” the Commander mutters. “Fire!”

The Energy Gunners drain the accumulators.

The opposing Commander skips into hyper before we more than tickle his tail. He sends return greetings by way of another missile spread.

Through the chatter of Fisherman, Rose, Berberian, Westhause, and others, conies the Commander’s, “That’ll give him something to think about.”

Ah. I see his strategy. Little dog turning on big dog. Maybe we’ll startle them into a mistake that’ll give us a chance to break completely free.

An hour dancing with the hunter-killer. They’re disconcerted over there. We’ve spent no more than five minutes in Climb. Our ability to vanish gives us a slight advantage in maneuverability. The singleship has lost track of our Hawking point. We can duck their missiles, appear unexpectedly.

The hunter-killer has quit wasting missiles. It’s now a beamer duel.

“Hit!” Piniaz cries, in a mix of glee and amazement. “We hurt her that time.” This is his second victory cry. Our horsefly game has paid off, viewed strictly as a one-on-one.

“She’s gone hyper,” Junghaus says. “Not putting weigh on. Looks like drive anomalies.”

“Coward,” the Commander jeers. He’s won the round. They’re staying in hyper, where we can’t reach them without using a missile. A missile they can, no doubt, dodge or intercept. Climbers make their easy kills because they appear out of nowhere, making their missile launches before the other team can react.

The petty triumph feels good. We made monkeys out of them. But behind the good feeling there’s the worry about the destroyer’s sisters. They’ll be forming their shell around our sphere of range.

“Commander, singleship is putting on headway.”

“Ach! Getting too busy around here.”

“She’s launched, Commander.”

“Climb, Westhause! Emergency Climb!”

The Climber shakes as if she’s in the jaws of an angry giant hound. What a shot! Dead on our Hawking point. Only my safety harness keeps me in my seat. The ship feels like she’s spinning. One missile. That’s all a singleship carries. She won’t be hitting us again. Let’s hope we break away before she gets a good lock on our point. Don’t want her dogging us forever.

I catch a glimpse of my face in the dead visual screen. I’m grinning like a halfwit.

‘Take her down, Mr. Westhause. To hyper. Junghaus, check that destroyer.”

Seconds pass. Fisherman says, “Still no weigh on, Commander. Drive anomalies are worse.”

“Very well. What do you think, First Watch Officer? Did we damage her generators?”

“Possibly, Commander.”

“Easy meat, eh? Make a launch pass, Mr. Westhause.”

We make the run, coming in from behind, but the Old Man doesn’t give the order to launch. The destroyer wriggles, but not well enough to get away. She doesn’t shoot back. Out of missiles. Damaged. Easy meat indeed.

“Take us out of here, Mr. Westhause.”

Victory enough, Commander? Just let them know you could’ve taken them?

He pauses behind me. “That’s for Haesler. They’ll understand.”

Piniaz’s comm line is still open. The gunners all grumble about the lost chance to avenge their Chief. The Old Man scowls but says nothing. Must be a malfunction in the switch down there.

“Make for that star now, Mr. Westhause.” Throughout the action, between maneuvers, the Commander and astrogator have been eyeing a sun with what seems an unhealthy lust. Why get in there where the mass of a solar system will complicate our escape plan?

Another case of my not knowing what the hell is going on.

The star is an eleven-hour fly. In Climb. Blind. With internal temperature rising every minute. It passes in silence, with crew taking turns sleeping on station. Piniaz and Varese get little sleep. They wrestle with the agonizing chore of redistributing the work of the men we lost.

I’ll take in some of Piniaz’s slack, though I’d rather stay in Ops. That’s where the action is. I assume a post at the missile board while an energy-rated Missileman moves over to cover for Holtsnider. Covering Missiles shouldn’t be difficult with only the one launch bay armed. The control position for Launches One and Four can be abandoned.

Varese ameliorates his shortage by using Diekereide and commandeering Vossbrink from Ship’s Services. Bradley can cope without Voss.

Westhause again demonstrates what a fine astrogator he is. He brings us down so near the star that it appears as a vast, fiery plane with no perceptible horizon curvature. And he manages to arrive with an inherent velocity requiring only minimal angular adjustment to put us into stable orbit.

How does he manage so well with a computation system scarcely more sophisticated than an abacus?

The roar of the star should mask the Climber’s neutrino emissions and confuse all but the closest and most powerful radars. I’m told orbiting or slingshotting off a singularity is even more effective. “Vent heat.”

It’ll be slow going this close to so mighty a nuclear furnace. Typhoons of energy pound our black hull.

“Fire into the star,” Piniaz tells his gunners. “We don’t want him seeing beams flashing around.”

Slow work indeed. After a time, I ask Piniaz, “Will continuous firing strain the converters?”

“Some. More likely to cause trouble in the weapons themselves, though.”

Another in an apparently endless string of situations I don’t like. “How long before the other firm figures what we’ve done?”

“They’ll be checking stars soon,” Piniaz admits. “The trick isn’t new. One of the Old Man’s favorites, in fact. We once star-skipped all the way home. He’ll bounce us to another one as soon as Westhause has his numbers.”

“Where’d you serve before you came into Climbers?” I ask, hoping to profit from a talkative mood.

Piniaz gives me a queer look and dummies up. So much for that. The man is as self-contained as the Commander, and less interested in coming out.

Next star-stop is an eight-hour fly. The troops again nap on stations. Westhause slides us into another gem of an orbit. I think we’ll make it. The Commander has forced the enemy to enlarge his search sphere. He can no longer adequately monitor it. Visiting Ops, I suggest something of the sort to Yanevich.

He raises one eyebrow, smiles mockingly. “Shows what you know. Those people are pros. They know who we are. They know the Commander. They know our fuel margins.” He nods. “Yeah. We’ve got a good chance. A damned fine chance, with Rathgeber gone. We’ve gotten out of tighter places.”

Doesn’t look that tight to me. Been no contact for over twenty hours.

The crew haven’t used the hours well. To a man they’re on the edge of exhaustion. They need to rest, to really relax, in order to bury the ghosts of those we left behind...

Some of the old hands are eyeing me oddly. Hope they’re not thinking I’m a Jonah-----Convince yourself, Lieutenant.

Would those men be alive if you hadn’t elbowed your way aboard? Would Johnson’s Climber still be part of the patrol?

A man could go mad worrying about crap like that.

9 Pursuit

We keep chipping away at the mission duration record. Yanevich says the longest was around ninety days. He doesn’t remember the exact figure.

Memory gets tricky out here. It adapts to the demands of Climber service. For instance, the men we lost, I can’t remember their faces.

I knew none but Chief Holtsnider very well, and he not as well as I’d like. I can make a list of physical characteristics, but his face won’t come.

It takes an effort to mourn them.

The lack of feeling seems common enough. We’re under pressure.

We’ve found ourselves an uninhabited star-covert. It has planets and moons and a full complement of asteroidal debris. A fine place to get lost. And just as fine a place for the opposition to have installed a low-profile detection probe, a passive observer as easily detected as our own beacons.

This guilt I have, about not hurting enough for those we lost, isn’t an alien feeling. I used to feel the same way at funerals. Maybe it’s a result of the socialization process. I just don’t hurt.

Our grief and anger didn’t last long after Johnson’s girls mounted Hecate’s Horse, either. Maybe this pocket society has, o room for them.

Piniaz has shifted me to the gamma radiation laser. The weapon has a beam that can punch through the stoutest shielding when properly target-maintained. It’s a notoriously unstable weapon, and this unit is no exception. It’s been acting up for weeks.

The first indication came when it produced barely discernible anomalies in the power-pull readings. The draw varied despite a constant output wattage. The tendency of the input curve was upward, which meant we were putting more and more energy into waste wavelengths.

That doesn’t cripple the weapon as a device for shedding heat, but it does bode ill for its future as a weapon.

That’s bit one of a score of problems plaguing the ship. Mold that can’t be beaten. Stench that seems to have penetrated the metal itself. One system after another getting crankier and crankier. In most cases we’ll have to make do. We carry few spare parts, and not many are available at beacons. Main lighting has begun to decay. The men are spending more and more time on corrective maintenance.

Stores, too, are getting short.

It’s scary, watching a ship come apart around you.

It’s even spookier, watching a crew disintegrate. This one is definitely headed downhill. We’ve reached the point where Command’s policy of having men bounced from ship to ship is paying negative dividends. They don’t have that extra gram of spirit given by devotion to a standing team.

That’s critical when you’re down to the bitter end and barely hanging on.

I say, “Mr. Piniaz, I have trouble here. Output wattage oscillating.”

Piniaz studies the board sourly. “Shit. Guess we’re lucky it held up this long.” He rings Ops. “Commander, we’ve developed a major stress oscillation in our gamma gas cartridges.”

“How bad?”

“It won’t last more than ten minutes if we keep using it.” To me, Piniaz remarks, “I’ve been saying we should be using crystal cassette lasers since I got here. Will they listen to me? Absolutely not. They just tell me crystals burn out too fast and they don’t want to waste the mass-room needed to haul spares.”

“Wait one while I get some numbers, Mr. Piniaz.”

“Standing by, Commander.”

“No replacement cartridges?” I ask. “In the bombards we could change units in five minutes. Like click-click.”

Piniaz shakes his head. “Not here. Not in the Climbers. You have to go outside to get at the cartridges. But Command’s main argument is that we’re never in action long enough to need spares.”

“But this star business...”

He shrugs. “What can you do?”

The Commander says, “Mr. Piniaz, go ahead and use it, but only when Mr. Bradley needs it to sustain internal temperature.”

Piniaz snorts. “Heavier load on the others.”

I listened with one ear while the Old Man talked it over with Yanevich. My bugs steal everybody’s privacy. They decided the weapon was wasted, that the ship has to move to a cooler hiding place. Fine with me. Having all that incandescent fury under my feet is doing nothing for my nerves.

Westhause is calculating a passage to the surface of a small moon. Its gravity shouldn’t put undue stress on the ship’s structure.

Varese, too, overhears the comm exchange. He reasons out the consequences. “Commander, Engineering Officer. May I remind you that we’re low on CT fuel?”

“You may, Lieutenant. You may also rest assured that I’ll take it into consideration.” There’s a touch of sarcasm in his tone. He has no love for Varese.

My guess is we have no more than thirty hours Climb time left. That’s a tight margin if we haven’t been lucky with our sun-hopping.

Are they still after us? It’s been a long time since the raid. A long time since contact. Maybe they’ve overcome their emotional response and gone back to guarding their convoy.

What’s going on out there? We’ve had no news, made no beacon connections. The biggest operation of the war... Being out of touch leaves me feeling like my last homeline has been cut.

Has the raid given Tannian’s wolves the edge they need? Have they panicked the logistic hulls? Once a convoy scatters, no number of late-showing escorts can protect all the vessels. Climbers can stalk the ponderous freighters with virtual impunity. Some will get through only because our people won’t have time to get them all.

Uhm. If the convoy has scattered, the other firm might feel obligated to keep after their most responsible foe. They know this ship of old. Her record is long and bloody. She’s hurt them. Her survival, after what she’s done, might be an intolerable threat.

I’m caught in the trap of circular thinking that lies waiting for men with time on then’ hands and an invisible uncertain enemy on their trail. I want to shriek. I want to demand certain knowledge. Even bad news would be welcome at this juncture. Just make it certain news.

Varese and the Commander, during the computation of the fly to our new hiding place, have a rousing battle over the level of our CT fuel. Finally, against his better judgment, the Old Man says he’ll make the passage without Climbing.

“Goddamn!” Piniaz explodes as an illumination tube above his station fails. “Damned shoddy Outworlds trash...” He excoriates quality-control work on Canaan, insisting nothing like this would happen with an Old Earth product. He’s vicious and bitter. The men tuck their heads against their shoulders and weather the storm.

He has a point, though his claim for Old Earth manufactures is specious. The human race seems incapable of overcoming human nature. Just do the minimum to get by.