Passage at Arms (29 page)

The buffeting gradually increases. “Take her down another hundred kilometers, Mr. Westhause.”

I didn’t pay much attention to the moon when I had a chance. Is it big enough to have a molten core? Are we trapped between fires? Does the Executioner have the firepower to tear the moon apart?

Waiting. Thinking. Always the fear. What if they blast away till there’s nowhere left to go?

God. They must have brought a Leviathan. Nothing else has so much firepower.

Suppose they destabilize the moon’s orbit? The Commander and Westhause are betting on its stability. What if the moon can’t take it and breaks up? What if? What if? Will there be any warning when it sours? Or will internal temperature just shoot up too fast for us to react?

Maybe they’re punching their missiles deep by throwing them in hyper. Their sudden materialization and explosion would crack the mantle to gravel, except that that massed energy weapon fire will have turned it to a sea of lava. The water ice, surely, has boiled off into space by now.

Why are they so damned determined to skin this particular cat? I never did anything to them.

It’s stopped. Suddenly, like a light switch being thrown. What the hell? God. I thought it would drive me insane. Alewel did lose his cool for a minute, holding his head and screaming, “Make it stop! Make it stop!” Piniaz had to sedate him.

Silence. Stretching out. Getting spooky. Stretching, stretching. Becoming worse than the bombardment.

Have they gone away? Are they laying back, waiting for us to come down?

The Executioner, they say, is a master of psychological warfare.

I unbuckle and venture to the honeypot. Sacrifice made, I prowl the confines of the compartment, trying to calm myself. Piniaz endures my footsteps for five minutes before snapping, “Sit down. You’re generating heat.”

“Shit, man. That seat’s getting hard. And wet.” “Tough. Sit. You’re in the Climbers now, Lieutenant.” My restlessness isn’t unique. This silence is a rich growth medium for the jitters. Nobody looks anybody else in the eye.

Ten hours. Somebody in Ops is whimpering. Curious. We’ve been up this long before. Why is this time harder to endure? Because the Executioner is out there? They use a sedative to quiet the whimperer.

The Commander’s methodical madness has proven effective. Internal temperature increase is lagging well behind the normal curve despite the fact that we haven’t much fuel to use as a heat sink. Soon after the whimperer goes quiet, the Old Man orders the atmosphere completely recycled. Then, “Corps^man, I want the Group One sleepers given.”

It’s warm now but I shiver anyway. Sleepers. Knockouts. The last ditch effort to extend Climb endurance by reducing metabolic rates and making the least critical men insensitive to their environment. A desperation measure. Usually applied much later than this.

“Voss, why don’t you just hand out capsules?” I ask the Pharmacist’s Mate as he comes through Weapons with his injection gun. It looks like a heavy laser with a shower-head snout.

“Some guys would palm them.”

I roll up a tattered sleeve. Vossbrink ignores me. He turns to Chief Bath, whom I consider more important to the ship’s survival. The Chief looks like a man expecting never to waken.

“Why not me? How do you choose, anyway?”

“Psych profile, endurance profile, Commander’s direction, critical ratings. You can almost always find somebody to do a job. Can’t always find somebody who can take the heat and pressure.”

“What about when we go down?”

He shrugs. “They’ll be gone. Or they won’t. If not, it won’t matter.”

I lean his way, offering my arm. The sleeper looks like an easy out. No more worries. If I wake up, I’ll know we made it.

“No. Not you, sir.”

“There’s nobody more useless than me.”

“Commander’s directive, sir.”

“Damn!” Right now I want nothing more than total absolution of any responsibility for my own fate.

Fourteen hours. Feeling feverish. Unable to sit still. Soaked with perspiration. Breathing quick and shallow because of heat, stench, and the low oxygen content of the air. Pure oxygen. It’s supposed to be pure oxygen.

What the hell is the Climb endurance record? I can’t remember. How close are we? Looks like the Old Man means to break it. And stretch it with every trick ever tried, including predicting his heat curves with the discounts of the men we lost.

Don’t look at the bulkheads. Mold blankets them now. I can almost see it spreading, sporulating, filling the air with its dry, stale smell. Jesus! There’s a patch of it on Chief Bath’s shirt. I’m coughing almost continuously. The spores irritate my throat. Thank heaven they don’t give me an allergic reaction.

The last of our juice is gone. We’re down to water and bouillon and pills. Yo-ho-ho. Famine in the Climbers.

Where’s that fearless old spacedog who jollied the boys on the beacon? Ho! The life-takers have whisked away his disguise.

Vossbrink came round an hour ago. He bypassed me again. I cursed him mercilessly. He gave me a tablet I’m to swallow only on the Old Man’s orders.

Those of us still conscious are a little insane. I want out, but... I don’t have enough residual defiance to take the tablet. Been thinking about it, but can’t get my hand to my mouth.

Christ, it’s gloomy in here!

Maintaining a tenuous touch with reality by hating the Old Man. My old friend. My old classmate. Doing this to me. I could cut his throat and smile.

And those bastards out there. Why the hell don’t they go away? Enough is enough.

Westhause and the Commander are the only watchstanders left in Ops. I can’t hear anything from Engineering, but somebody is holding out. Only Bradley is active in Ship’s Services. The Ensign is stubborn. Here in Weapons I have two open-eyed companions, Kuyrath and Piniaz.

Kuyrath suddenly throws himself toward the Ops hatch. Muttering, he tries to claw his way through. What the hell?

Aha. Another reason for the sedations. This could be contagious. The madness howls along the frontiers of my mind. I force myself to rise, to stalk Kuyrath with a hypo Vossbrink left for this contingency.

Kuyrath sees me coming. He leaps at me. His eyes are wild, his teeth bare. I punch the hypo into his stomach, yank its trigger.

For a dozen seconds I shield my testicles and eyes, writhe away from champing teeth, evade clawing fingers, and wonder what went wrong. Why doesn’t he fold?

He collapses.

“What’s going on back there?”

I stagger to a comm, mumble. Somehow, the Commander understands. I stare at Piniaz. Why didn’t he help me?

His eyes are open but he isn’t seeing anything. He’s out. The bastard. What the hell did he do?

“All right.” The Commander sounds like he’s talking from the next galaxy. ‘Take Alewel’s board.”

“Huh?” I’m getting foggy. Want to give up. The exertion drained me. I can’t get the drift.

“Take over on Alewel’s board. I’ve got to have somebody on Missiles. Where’s Piniaz?”

“On Missiles. Somebody on Missiles.” I stagger to Alewel’s seat. The Missileman is curled on the deck grates. His breathing is strained and ragged. He’s in bad trouble. ‘Tired. Going to take capsule now. Sleep.”

“No. No. Come on. Hang in there. We’re almost home. All you have to do is activate the missile board.”

“Activate missile board.” My fingers act of their own accord. My hands look like thin brown spiders as they dance over the slimy, mold-green board, caressing a wakening galaxy of key-lights. I giggle incessantly.

“Where’s Piniaz?”

This time the message gets through. “Sleeping. Gone to sleep.” Alewel is making a thin, whining sound.

“Damn. Be ready to launch when we go norm.”

“Ready... Launch missiles.” One spider starts dancing the arming sequence. The other explores the mysteries of the safeties.

“Negative. Negative. Get your hands away from that board. Waldo, I’m going to have to go back there.”

A semblance of reason returns. I draw my hands back slowly, stare at them. Finally, I say, “Missiles prepared for launch. Launch Control standing by.”

“Good. Good. I knew I could count on you. It’ll be a while yet. Just hang on.”

Hang on. Hang on. Only five men conscious in the whole damned ship and one of them is hollering hang on. Till when?

Till the Commander and I are the only ones left? Suppose the party is still going on when we go down? It won’t matter to the others, but what am I supposed to do? Bend over and kiss my ass good-bye?

Alewel has stopped making noises. He’s even stopped breathing. Mostly I feel puzzled when I look at him.

I don’t think he’s the only one. It’s that bad in here.

I drive myself back into rituals of hatred and anger, thinking up tortures to inflict on the Old Man. Curses and threats rip themselves from my throat in an evil imitation of a Gregorian chant.

It passes the time. It keeps me going.

Skulking on the borderlands of lunacy, I find myself victimized by one of time’s relativistic pranks. Before it seems possible, another two hours have fled.

“Hey down there. Stand by. Going down in five.” West-hause. He sounds choky.

I glance at the time. A new endurance record, no doubt about it. Hurray.

“Uhm.” The Commander. “Damn it, Waldo. Not now. Wake up. We’re almost there. Shit.” He sounds as if speech is pure torment.

Reluctance to leave the ghost world inundates me. Even hell gives one a sense of security, I suppose.

What happens if the whole crew passes out before a Climber goes down? I guess she’d keep heating till her superconductors failed, her magnetics went, and she destroyed herself in a sudden annihilation.

Why do I feel less uncomfortable now than I did two hours ago? Internal temperature is higher than ever before. Literally, we’re cooking.

Haltingly, the Commander says, “All I want is for you to be faster on the trigger than anybody waiting for us. Quick enough to keep them from getting out an instel.”

“I’ll try.”

“Ten seconds. Nine... Eight...”

It’s a savage plunge to zero Bev. The concretization of my surroundings stuns my conscious mind.

The frightened old tree ape in the back of my mind is on survival watch. I finish the launch sequence’before the venting machinery begins humming. In fact, I start before the ship is all the way down, and launch before any instrument has anything to say about targets.

The way Tannian fusses about wasting missiles, this could earn me a Board of Inquiry...

Except there is a target. The Old Man and Mr. Westhause made an astute guess.

We break cover less than ten thousand kilometers from the bones of the murdered moon. Fate does us a favor. She puts the watcher in the gap, not a hundred kilometers from our drop point. I can see her on gun camera. So. They thought we were gone, but left somebody just in case. They always do.

“About damned time it went our way,” I mutter.

The missile is on its way. The Fire Control system barely has time to lock it on target.

The Commander holds norm for just four seconds. Hardly long enough to make a microdegree’s difference in internal temperature. We run.

The missile, accelerating at one hundred gravities, strikes home before the gentlemen of the other firm get their thumbs out of their ears.

In essence, a classic Climber strike. With a lot of luck thrown in.

The Commander goes down again five light-seconds away. He vents heat and watches.

The destroyer dies. And neither the radio nor tachyon detectors react with anything but blast noise. No messages out. The Commander played the right card. He outwaited the hunt. The Executioner has gone looking elsewhere.

The glare of the fireball fades. I check the temperature. It’s falling slowly. Maybe a degree a minute. The minutes tramp away on the feet of snails.

The destroyer got no message out, but that treacherous probe remains.

The first hunter hypers in an hour later.

A dozen men have recovered sufficiently to resume work.

Several more are gone forever.... The Commander commences a new ploy. He calls me, says, “Program the Eleven bird for maximum straight-line hyper fly.” Piniaz hasn’t recovered. For the moment I’m in charge.

The new arrival is moving away from us, into the nether reaches of the system. Westhause hits hyper and runs.

Five minutes pass. Fisherman reports, “She’s turning, Commander.”

“Very well. Weapons, stand by to launch. Mr. Westhause, stand by to Climb.”

The minutes roll away. The hunter gains slowly. “She’s close enough, Commander,” Canzoneri says.

“Thank you. Weapons? Ready?”

“Aye, Commander.” I quickly hammer orders to the missile. The destroyer will recognize the fake if the weapon tears away too fast.

“Ready, Mr. Westhause? Go, then.”

I launch. My surroundings ghost. The Commander directs Westhause onto a new course. This should work. It’s a new trick.

The missiles can run for hours in hyper. I programmed its translation ratio high. Hopefully, we’ll get a good start before the destroyer gets close enough to unravel the deception.

Fearless Fred will roar like a wounded bull when he hears about this.

The Commander no longer gives a damn what Command thinks. He wants to bring his people home alive.

We drop back to norm as soon as the destroyer has time to pass the limits of detection. We drift for hours, on minimum power, still venting heat. That’s a laborious process. We can’t use the energy weapons for fear of giving ourselves away. The hunt should be gathering again.

Normal cruising temperature feels incredibly cold. I’m in pain when it hits a pre-Climb level.

We have twenty-three men effective when, after three hours, the Commander takes us up again.

We leave three men behind, buried in space, eulogized and mourned only after the vessel is safely in Climb. Picraux and Brown from Ops, and Alewel. They were luckier down below.

“It’s criminal,” Fisherman mutters. “Out the garbage lock. It’s criminal.”

“You maybe want to keep them aboard?” Yanevich demands.

Fisherman doesn’t answer. Heat and bacteria would work horrors during an extended Climb. The bodies got a gross enough start as it was.