Christ, am I blown out. Seems like a week since I got any sleep. A couple catnaps since I left Sharon . . . Let’s don’t even think about that. An incident. Best forgotten. Sordid. And already looking good in retrospect.
The sleeplessness wouldn’t be bad if it weren’t for the stress. Enemy ships out there . . . Maybe we see them and maybe we don’t. No wonder these men are lunatics.
We’re in hyper now. I have to get some sleep while I can. If I don’t sleep before Fuel Point I’ll go hyper-bent when we go norm and the pressure comes on again.
The others aren’t doing badly. But they’re accustomed to it. Most of them have been here before.
Damn! Why did I pick such a crazy way to make a living?
A dull day is about done. Just finished a second bout with my hammock. Sleeping there is worse than I expected. Someone is going on or coming off watch all the time. And every man of them just has to stop to use the sink. If they aren’t washing themselves or their socks, they’re using the damned thing as a urinal.
This flying donut has only one head. Bradley says there were three in the original design. One low-grav and two universal-gravity stools. That last two went the way of the shower. Eliminated in favor of increased weaponry mass.
The lines form before watch change. The men going on watch want to take care of their business because they’ll have no chance later. Those who need to squat line up outside the Admiral’s stateroom. The others just hose into the sink and spritz with a flash of water. Sometimes it takes a half hour to get them all by.
Then it’s time for a repeat performance from the retiring watch. That’s good for another half hour. And all the while they’re jostling and cursing one another, banging me around, and digging into their endless inventories of crude jokes and improbable anecdotes.
I’d hate to wash anything in that sink. The odor alone keeps me awake.
I’ve been looking for a better home. And have concluded that said place doesn’t exist, though I should be admired for my persistence. Like the men looking for the eido.
Eido. I thought the word came from eidolon when first I heard it. Ghost. Specter. Spook. Someone you don’t see, slipping around behind you, watching over your shoulder. But no, it comes from eidetic, as in eidetic memory.
Crews have a game with which they begin each patrol. An intellectual recreation caused by, I suspect, a grave error in Psych Bureau thinking. In extended hard times the eido might become a more abused scapegoat than the creature I call the gritch.
The eido is a human Mission Recorder, a crewman with a hypnotically augmented memory. He’s supposed to see, hear, and remember everything, including the emotional impact of events. He’s always one of the first-timers, supposedly because that maximizes objectivity.
This is a facet of Climber life they don’t mention on the networks. A puzzling facet. When first I heard of the eido, I thought him a pointless redundancy. Then I began to wonder. He’s a tool of Psych Bureau, not Climber Command. The Mission Recorder works for Command. The distinction is critical. Psych looks out for the men. The differences between Bureau and Command often become a wide, fiery chasm.
Psych is the only power in the universe able to overrule the Admiral, it seems.
Command’s task is to turn the war around. Psych is supposed to put the right people in the right places so the job gets done efficiently. More importantly, Psych is supposed to minimize the damage done people’s minds.
The point of the hunt here is to spot the eido so you know when to hold your tongue. You don’t tell anyone else when you find him. You just stand back and grin when somebody says something that might haunt him later.
Now I understand the crew’s coolness. It’ll be a pain getting them to open up. I’m a prime suspect.
I’ve been running with the pack in hopes I can show them that I’m not the head spy. My work would be hard enough without the eido crap. Navy men are paranoid about having their secret thoughts fall into Psych Bureau’s hands. Out here they’re equally paranoid about their illustrious supreme commander.
A while ago I asked the First Watch Officer if he knew some way I could make the men more comfortable. He grinned that savage, sneering grin of his and said, “You sure the eido knows what he is?”
Hell of a man, friend Yanevich. Always knows the right thing to say to send you howling off into the swamps of your mind, hunting the million-word answer to his dozen-word question.
Fuel Point is a big patch of nothing in untenanted space within a tetrahedron of stars, the nearest of which is four light-years away. A look through my video screen shows me nothing familiar, though I know we aren’t more than ten lights out of Canaan. Captured, I could reveal nothing.
“Has anyone ever been captured? In space?”
“I never heard about anybody,” Fisherman replies. “Go ask the Patriot. He keeps up on that stuff.”
Carmon says, “I don’t know, Lieutenant. Not that I’ve heard of, anyway. Have we ever captured any of them?”
Well, yes, we have. But I can’t tell him so. I’m not supposed to know myself.
A continuous shudder runs through the ship, transmitted from the mother. She has a lot of velocity to shed before we match courses for fueling. Throdahl has an open carrier feed into the Operations address speaker. Occasionally we hear chatter from someone aboard the mother, trying to contact the vessels we’re to meet.
Junghaus looks concerned. “Maybe they didn’t get away.”
Last word we had, the tanker was dodging after an accidental brush with an enemy singleship. “Maybe they called the heavies in time.” He seems genuinely stricken.
“Then we’ll just have to go back.”
“No we won’t. We’ll stay here till they send another tanker.”
Aha! comes the Light.
“Got you on the upside, Achernar,” a remote voice says. “Tone it and decline. Metis, over.”
Fisherman visibly relaxes. “That’s the tug. Guess we were sending off the band.There’s so much security stuff sometimes, mere’s mixups in stuff like wavelengths.”
Or that might be the competition talking, trying to lull us with that idea. That suspicion apparently occurred to no one else. Everybody is cheerful now. In a moment, Throdahl has, “Achernar, Achernar, this is Subic Bay. Starsong. Go Mickey. Lincoln tau theta Beijing Bohrs. Over.”
“Why not shibboleth?” I murmur.
“Subic, Subic, this is Achernar. Blue light. Go gamma gamma high wind. London Heisenberg. Over.”
“The sweet nothing of young love,” Yanevich says over my shoulder. “We found the right people.”
“Why a Titan tug? What’s to move around out here?”
“Ice. They built a hunk a big as the Admiral’s head, years ago. Metis will slice off a few chunks and feed them to the mother. She’ll melt and distill it and top our tanks.”
“What about heavy water? Thought it had to be all light hydrogen.”
“Molecular sorters. The mother will take the heavy stuff home to make warheads.”
“Subic is the tanker?”
“Uhm. A few hours and you can help pray us through fueling.”
Antimatter is why we’re fueling out here. There’ll be one hell of a bang if anything goes wrong. And the CT does come from somewhere else. Somewhere very secret. Nor would it make much sense to run it in through the fleet blockading Canaan.
“You think Climber duty sounds hairy?” Yanevich says. “Dead is the only way they’ll get me on a CT tanker. Those are some crazy people.”
I think about it. He’s right. Sitting on a couple hundred thousand tonnes ot antimatter gas, knowing a microsecond’s failure in the containment system will kill you . . .
“I guess somebody has to do it,” he says.
The tanker must have done some heavy dodging. Our relative velocities are all wrong. It’ll take several hours to lay the ships in a common groove. I suppose I should scribble some notes while I’m waiting.
The Old Man, First Watch Officer, and several others are with me in the wardroom. This is our third supper. The Commander tries to conduct that one meal as if we were aboard a civilized ship. It’s difficult. The fold-down table is painfully cramped. I keep banging elbows with Lieutenant Piniaz.
The Old Man asks, “How are you sleeping?”
“This’s no pleasure spa on The Big Rock Candy Mountain. But I’m coping. Barely. Damn!” Piniaz has his elbow in action again.
The Weapons Officer is a remarkably tiny and skinny man, Old Earther, as dark and shiny as a polished ebony idol. He calls a city named Luanda home. I’ve never heard of it.
This little spider of a man scaled the enlisted ranks in corvettes. He volunteered for Climbers when they offered him a Limited Duty Officer’s commission. At twenty-nine he is the oldest man aboard. Unfortunately, he isn’t the paternal sort.
Both Ensign Bradley and his leading cook, a piratical rating named Kriegshauser, hover over the conclave, listening. Here’s where the secrets will fall, they reckon. They’ll rake them in like autumn leaves. If the cook hears anything, it’ll be all over the ship in an hour.
“Maybe not a spa.” The Commander grins. His grin today is a ghost of that of days ago.
He’s playing to his audience. He does a lot of that. Like he’s firmly convinced that the Commander is a rigidly defined dramatic role, subject to very limited interpretation by its players. He suspects that he’s been miscast, perhaps. His specific audience seems to be Kriegshauser. “But I think a few people are pushing. This old hulk hasn’t seen so much sock-washing and ball-scrubbing since we ran into Meryem Assad’s Climber on patrol.”
Kriegshauser adopts the blandest, most innocent of faces. He pours us each a touch of the Commander’s coffee. I begin to understand.
“Could be you’re a good influence, though. They could be worried about their image. But I doubt it. Kriegshauser hasn’t changed his underwear since he’s been in the Climbers, let alone washed it.” The Old Man doesn’t check the cook’s reaction.
“He’d better do something about the chow if he’s worried about his image,” I say. “I’d be doing it a favor calling it reconstituted shit.”
“That you would. That you would. And you wouldn’t hurt any feelings, either.”
The stuff is terrible. Tubes of goo and boxes of powder yield the base ingredients. Kriegshauser and whomever gets stuck as helper of the day mix the stuff with water and a little oil of vitriol. Climber people are unanimous. They insist it looks and smells like crap, but probably lacks the flavor.
It’s chock full of vitamins, minerals, and amino acids, though. Everything the human body needs to run well. Only the soul has been left out.
Too much mass, of course. There’s no constituter, as on the big ships. Now I understand all those duffel bags filled with fruits and vegetables.
I’ve been worrying about roughage. After the accident I went through a prolonged diet-freak period. I still worry sometimes. Roughage is important.
In the old Climbers there were fresh stores. The reefers and freezers went when they increased the missile complement to its present level.
The Commander bites into an apple. His eyes smile over top it.
The only thing to like here is the reconstituted fruit juice. Plenty of concentrates. Plenty of water. The crew likes to mix them. Bug juice, they call the result. Sometimes it looks it.
Water is in long supply. It serves as fuel, atmosphere reserve, emergency heat sink, and primary dietary ingredient. It keeps the belly full, the house warm or cool, the air breathable, and the fusion chamber purring.
“Permission to jettison waste,” Bradley asks in a transparent effort to attract the Commander’s attention. If the Ensign has a weakness, it’s this wanting to be noticed by superiors. I look round to see who’ll explain what he’s talking about. He does the honors himself.
“After the water is salvaged, our wastes, including the carbon from the air, get compressed and jettisoned. No room for fancy recycling gear.”
“Hang on to it,” the Old Man says. He turns to me. “Can’t you picture it? The mother plowing along in norm surrounded by a cloud of shit canisters.” He smiles, munches his apple. Just when I give up on hearing the rest, he says, “A million years from now an alien civilization will find one. It’ll be the biggest puzzle in their xenoarcheological museum. I can see them putting in fifty thousand creature hours trying to figure out its religious significance.”
“Religious significance? Is that a private joke?”
The Old Man waves his apple core at the First Watch Officer. Yanevich says, “He’s laughing at me. I help poke around the pre-human sites on leave.”
The Commander says, ‘They’re old, and nonhuman, and Mr. Yanevich’s friends have an explanation for everything there. Unless you ask the wrong question. If they tell you something had ritual or magical significance, they’re really saying they don’t know what it is. That’s the way those guys work.”
My surprise must be obvious. Yanevich wears one of his delighted smiles when he looks at me. People are infinite puzzles. You put together piece after piece after piece, and you still have hunks that just don’t fit.
The battle alarm shrieks.
It makes a bong-bong-bong sound not especially irritating in itself. But you respond as if someone has dragged their nails across a blackboard, then fired a starter’s pistol beside your ear.
The wardroom explodes. I’m a little out of practice, a little slow. I try to make up the difference with enthusiasm as I pursue the more able men upward. I happen to glance down as I reach the hatch to Weapons.
The Commander is staring at a watch and grinning.
“A drill. A goddamned drill right in the middle of supper. You sadistic bastard.”
The gimp leg betrays me. The Ops-Weapons hatch slams before I get to it. So there I hang, a great embarrassed fruit dangling from the compartment ceiling.
“Come down here,” Piniaz says in a too-gentle tone. “You can’t reach your station in time, I’ll put your dead ass to work. Take that goddamned magnetic cannon board. Haesler. Energy board.”
Crafty little Ito. He covers his most useless weapon with a spare body, then shifts Leading Spacer Johannes Haesler to the system he’s supposed to be learning anyway.
The all clear comes in five minutes. Piniaz turns the compartment over to his Chief Gunner, Holtsnider. I follow him to the wardroom.
“Your buddy ain’t too nimble,” he growls at the Old Man. His attitude toward the Commander is one millimeter short of insolent. The Commander tolerates it. I don’t know why. Anyone else would find himself hamstrung.
“He’ll loosen up.” He smiles his thin, shipboard smile.
I grab a squeezie of orange juice and start nursing. Kriegshauser puts the drinks up in “baby bottles” because parasite gravity is too treacherous for normal cups. It varies according to some formula known only to the Engineering gang aboard the mother. Once Diekereide and I were playing chess when the pieces just up and roamed away.
“Damned drills,” I say, feeling no real rancor. “I forgot about that crap. Never did get used to them. Your mind says they’re necessary. Your gut keeps saying bullshit.”
“A bitching spacer is a happy spacer,” the Commander observes.
“You’ll find me a very happy-type fellow, then.” I try to laugh. It doesn’t come off. Piniaz’s snake-eyed stare makes me nervous.
The next drill comes while I’m asleep.
They put off fueling again, so I decided to grab some hammock time. No go. Wearing nothing but shorts, I give it my best go. And barely make it to Weapons. Shaking his head like a disappointed track coach, Piniaz points to the cannon board. He doesn’t say a word. Neither do I. I’m the only man aboard sleeping outside the compartment containing my duty station. Isn’t that excuse enough? No. You don’t make excuses in Navy. Not if you don’t want a crybaby reputation. “Hello, board. Looks like we’re going to be friends.”
The show of good humor is just that. A show. I rumble. I fume. I try hard to remember that I vowed that if I blew up, it wouldn’t be over something beyond my control, or because of conditions I accepted beforehand. I’ll gut it out. If my leg makes it harder for me, I’ll just try harder. My companions are gutting something out, too.
The other breed of sleep disturbance has ceased. I guess Kriegshauser passed the word.
This crew has a strong respect for the Commander. That’s how it’s supposed to be, and here it works well. It encompasses the new men as well as those who have served with him before. I suspect it has to do with survival. The Old Man brings his Climber home. That, more than anything else in this universe, impresses the men.
I’ve begun to note quirks. Fisherman, who is hyped on Christianity, brought tracts in his fifteen kilos. Chief Nicastro gets furious if anyone passes him to the left. Better you ask him to drop what he’s doing and let you by. Kriegshauser never removes his lucky underwear.
The Commander himself has a rigid ritual for rising and departing his quarters. Faithfully observed, I suppose, it guarantees the Climber another day of existence.
He wakens at exactly 0500 ship’s time, which is TerVeen standard, which in turn is Turbeyville and moon time. Kriegshauser’s helper has a squeezie of juice and another of coffee waiting. He passes them through the curtains. At 0515 the Commander emerges. He says, “Good morning, gentlemen. Another glorious day.” It’s customary for the watch to respond, “Amen.” The Commander then descends to Ship’s Services and the Admiral’s stateroom, which is never occupied. He washes up. He accepts another squeezie of coffee from the cook, along with whatever is on the breakfast menu. He then makes his way back to Ops and his quarters, where he secures his copy of Gibbon, ousts the Watch Officer from his seat, and reads till precisely 0615, when the morning reports come in, fifteen minutes before they’re technically due. Following morning reports, he goes over the previous day’s decklog, then the quartermaster’s notebook. At 0630 he lifts his eyes and surveys his kingdom. He nods once, abruptly, as if to say we villeins have pleased him.
Remarkably, the men give a collective sigh. It begins with those who can see the Old Man and spreads around the Can and into the inner circle. Our day is officially begun.
We keep our rendezvous with the CT tanker our fourth day out of TerVeen.
We begin by undertaking the long, arduous process of rigging for operational mode. A lot of the hardware, including my little nest, has to be realigned for the new gravity.
As senior vessel, by right of having survived sixteen patrols, our ship will fuel first. To do so we’ll stand off the mother a thousand kilometers. If there’s a screwup, only we, the tanker, and anyone else nursing will blow. Several ships will fuel at the same time.
The reorientation for operational mode is complete. I have fed myself and cleared my bowels. We’ll go to action stations before fueling, so I saunter on up to Ops and cunningly occupy my seat before the exterior screen. That’s a difficult task now, what with the gravity still aligned parasite. Crafty operator that I am, I’m going to be on time.
The Old Man ambles by. “You won’t see much from here. Go on down to Engineering.”
I like the idea. I love to observe from the heart of the action. But that means wasting the on-time coup. “I’d just get in their way.”
“Mr. Varese says there’s room.”
“Really?” I can’t picture Varese making room for me, or inviting me down. We haven’t warmed toward one another. This thing sounds arranged.
“Go on down.” His tone is a little more forceful.
Varese is waiting at the Engineering hatchway. He wears a smile that’s painted on. “Good morning, sir. Glad to have you. We’ll give you the best show we can. I do want to ask you to help by staying in the background.” He talks like that most of the time, like he’s trying to keep his temper, and still I get the feeling he did invite me, that I’m not here entirely at the Commander’s insistence. Varese doesn’t want me underfoot, yet wants me to watch his crowd in action. A quaint character. A proud papa. “This’s a good place here, sir. The view will be somewhat limited, but it’s the best we can provide.”
His strained affability and politeness is more disconcerting than his usual hostility.
The seat is a good eight meters around the curve from the center of action. Still, I could be trying to follow the fueling from Ops.
“Take notes if you like, but save your questions till we finish. Don’t move around. There’ll be some hairy moments. We can’t be distracted.”
“Of course.” I’m no moron, Varese. I know this will be delicate.
The anti-hydrogen has to be transferred without losing an atom. The tiniest whiff might pit or scar the Climber’s CT globe. Even if the tank weren’t breached, the risk of its being weakened is so feared we would have to return to TerVeen for repairs. Command has geniuses creating new miseries to inflict on crews who make that sort of mistake.
Varese will command the Climber during fueling maneuvers. He’s closer to the action, knows best what needs doing.
We commence our approach before the general alarm. Varese opens communications with Ops.
“Range one thousand meters,” Ops reports. That sounds like Leading Spacer Picraux speaking. “Range rate one meter per second. Activating spotter lights. Secondary conn stand by to assume control.”
Varese responds, “Secondary conn, aye.” He surveys the idiot lights on a long board, points to one of his men. Engineering’s one viewscreen lights up. Outside, directed by Fire Control, searchlights are probing the tanker. She’s too close for a good overall view. She’s a huge vessel. Her flanks show luminescence in coded patches.
Our computers guide the approach with a precision no human can match. They have us in a groove that’s exact to a millimeter. And every man here is sweating, holding a hand poised should Varese order manual control. No spacer ever completely trusts a computer.
“Range, five hundred meters.” That’s the First Watch Officer. “Range rate one meter per second. Secondary conn assume control.”
“Secondary conn, aye. This is Mr. Varese. I have the conn.” He lifts a spring-hinged safety bar, trips three safety switches. Diekereide repeats the process on his own board. Varese inserts a key into a lock on a dramatically oversized red switch handle.
All that redundancy says even the ship’s designers respected the hazards of CT fueling.
The computers, communing with their tanker kin, ease the Climber into position beneath a vast, pendent flying saucer of a tank.
“Second Engineer. Commence internal magnetic test sequence.”
“Aye, sir.” Diekereide bends over his board like an old, old man trying to make out fine print. “Shahpazian. Activate first test mode.” He begins a litany which includes primary, secondary, and emergency tubes; elbows; valves; junctions; skins; generators; control circuits; and display functions. Most involve shaped magnetic fields like those containing the plasma in a fusion chamber. I note that this system is also triply redundant.
“Activate second test mode.” The litany begins anew. This time Diekereide counterchecks the test circuitry itself.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Varese satisfies himself that his Climber had adopted the most advantageous attitude in relation to the tanker. “Stand by the locking bars,” he orders, speaking to someone aboard the other vessel. “Extend number one.”
I lean forward as much as I dare, trying to see the viewscreen better.
A bright orange bar slides out of the tanker’s hull like a stallion’s prang, gently touches the Climber’s globe. Varese studies his side displays, gives a series of orders which move us less than a centimeter. The locking bar suddenly extends a bit more, penetrating its locking receptacle. “Number one locked. Extend number two.”
There’re three bars. They’ll hold the Climber immobile with respect to the tanker.
“Maser probe. Minimum intensity,” Varese says. In seconds his boards show a half-dozen green lights. “Maser probe. Intermediate intensity.” More green. The pathway for an invisible pipeline is being created.
Varese double-checks his board. There’ll be no redundancy to the ship-to-ship. “Bring your probe up to maximum. Mr. Diekereide, how do you look?”
“All go here, sir. Ready to flood.” He returns to his ongoing checklists.
“Stand by.”
“Aye, sir. Shahpazian. Arm the hazard circuits.”
“Achernar, Subic Bay, we have a go on one. I say again, we have a go on one,” Varese says. “Subic, standing by for your mark.”
“Subic, aye,” a tinny voice replies. “Clear from Achernar. Thirty seconds. Counting.”
The flashing lights have me hypnotized. I stop taking notes. There’s little enough to record. Too much takes place out of sight.
“Thirteen seconds and holding.”
“What?” The hypnosis ends. Holding? Why? I stifle a surge of panic. Print data rush across the viewscreen. It says another Climber is maneuvering nearby, approaching another tank. Achernar wants her a little farther along before letting the tanker nurse us.
“Thirteen seconds and counting.” Then, “ . . . one. Zero.”
“I have pressure on the outer main coupling,” Diekereide says.
“Very well,” Varese replies. “She looks good. Open her up. Commence fueling.”
“Opening outer main valve. I have pressure on number two main valve. Opening number two main valve. I have pressure at primary tank receiving valve.”
“We’re looking good.” Varese moves across the compartment, toward me. “This’s a tricky spot. His first time doing it himself. Got a good go, so I’ll leave him to it.” He grasps a cross-member and stands beside me, watching his apprentice.
“He has to bleed it to a few moles at a time to begin. To annihilate any terrene matter inside the tank. No such thing as a perfect vacuum. It’ll be hotter than hell to there for a few minutes.”
“You travel with the tank open?” That hadn’t occurred to me.
He nods. “Space is the best evacuator. Another reason we fuel so far from anywhere. Not much interstellar hydrogen around here. Comparatively speaking.”
I try guessing how much energy might be blasting around the tank’s interior. Hopeless. I don’t have the vaguest notion of the hydrogen density in this region.
Deikereide opens the final valve. We all tense, waiting for something to go boom.
The tanker constricts her internal tank field. Diekereide bombards the compartment with a barrage of pressure reports. And then it’s over. Almost anticlimatically, it seems. I was so tense, waiting for something to screw up, that I feel let down that it hasn’t.
Disengagement reverses the fueling process. The only tricky part involves venting the CT gas still in the ship-to-ship coupling.
The cycle, from Varese’s assumption of the conn till he yields it again, takes a little over two hours. When we finish, he and Diekereide shake hands. Varese says, “Very good show, men. The best I’ve ever seen.” He must mean it, so seldom does he have anything positive to say.
“We were lucky,” Diekereide tells me. “Usually takes three or four tries to get a go. The Old Man will be pleased.”
The Engineers commence operational routine. I don’t pay much attention. Diekereide has launched one of his long-winded and rambling explanations. “When it comes time to Climb,” he says, after telling me things I already know about the tank atop the vane and the magnetics which prevent the CT from coming in contact with the ship, “we bleed the CT into the fusor, along with the normal hydrogen flow. Instead of fusing, we annihilate, then shunt the energy into the torus instead of the linear drives.”
I don’t pay much attention. The way to listen to Diekereide is through a mental filter. Let most of the chatter slide, yet catch the gems.
“There isn’t any way to beat the fogging. It’s because the ship is separated from the universe. If you can’t stand it, stay out of null.”
He’s describing the subjective effects of Climb. When a vessel goes up, its crew experiences a growing insubstantiality in surroundings. From outside, the vessel becomes detectable only as an apparent minuscule black hole. There’s a continuing debate over whether this is a real black hole or just something that looks and acts like one. It has moments when it violates the tenets of both Einsteinian and Reinhardter physics.
In essence, a ship in Climb can’t be seen from outside, which is valuable in battle. Unfortunately, said ship can’t see, either. Astrogation in Climb is tricky work. Which explains Westhause’s ardent affair with his Dead Reckoning tracer
In null you have no referents, but you can maneuver. Even if you do nothing, you retain our norm inherent velocity and whatever weigh you put on in hyper. It vectors. You have to keep close track unless you don’t mind coming down inside a star.
“That’s really no problem, though,” Diekereide says. “Unless you’re operating in a crowded system, you won’t come down in the middle of anything. The statistical odds are incredible. Build yourself a dome on a one-kilometer radius. Paint the inside black. Have a buddy take a blackened pfennig and stick it on the dome somewhere while the lights are out. Then put on a blindfold, pick up a target rifle, and try to hit the coin. Your odds are better than ours of hitting a star by accident. The real danger is heat.”
Every machine, even the human machine, generates waste heat. In norm and hyper ships shed excess heat automatically, by leakage through their skins, and, especially in Climbers, through cooling vanes. Our biggest such vane supports the CT tank. There are others on both the can and torus. The vessel has lots of lumps and bumps waiting its basic can and donut profile.
In null we can’t vent a calorie. There’s no place for the heat to go.
Heat is the bane of the Climbers, and not just because of the comfort factor. Virtually all computation and control systems rely on liquid helium superconductors. The helium has to remain at temperatures approaching absolute zero.
One way to cripple a Climber is to keep on her so tight she has to stay up. If she stays long enough, she’ll cook herself. Forcing that is the principal function of the other firm’s hunter-killer squadrons.
We aren’t as unpredictable and evasive as the holonetnews would have people believe.
That little black hole, that little shadow we cast on hyper and norm, can kill us. “A pseudo-Hawking Hole,” Diekereide says. “Named after the man who posited substellar black holes.”
A Climber’s shadow is minuscule but still distorts space. If someone comes close enough, with equipment sensitive enough, he can locate it.
“There’re three ways to hammer on a Climber in null,” Diekereide says. He holds up three fingers, then folds one down. “First, and most effective in theory, and the most expensive, would be to send a drone Climber up to collide with your target and blow its CT. That’s no problem right now. The other firm doesn’t have Climbers. Let’s hope the war ends before they figure them out.”
“Oh, yes.” My tone is sufficiently sarcastic to raise an eyebrow.
“The other ways sound more difficult, and probably are, but they’re what the other team has to work with. Their favorite is to concentrate high-wattage short-wave energy on our pseudo-Hawking. Doesn’t physically hurt us, naturally. But every photon that impacts on our shadow adds to our heat problem and shortens the time we have to shake them. They use fusion bombs the same way, but that’s a waste of destructive capacity: Your pseudo-Hawking’s cross section won’t intersect a trillionth of the energy. But they’ll do it if they want you bad enough.
“One thing they did, till we got wise, was to maneuver our shadow into their fusors. That puts a lot of heat in fast. But if you know what they’re doing, you can maneuver and destabilize their magnetic bottle. They’ve given that up.”
The other method of attack is plain physical battery.
A pseudo-Hawking point is so tiny it can slip between molecules. It doesn’t leave the other firm much room to obtain leverage. But they’ve found their ways, usually using graviton beams from multiple angles. A Climber suffers every shock as the coherent graviton beams slam her Hawking point a centimeter this way or that.
“I went through one of those my first patrol,” Diekereide says. “It was like being inside a steel drum while somebody pounded on it with a club. It’s more frightening than damaging. They have so little cross section to work with. If it gets too bad, you go a little higher and cut your cross section. It’s a game of cat-and-mouse. Every time out they try some new tactic or weapon. They say we have a few of our own in the cooker. A missile we can launch from null. A device we can run down from null to vent heat while we stay up.”
“And a magnetic cannon?”
He snorts derisively. “I’ve got to admit, that’s the only new gismo we’ve actually seen. What use the thing is, is beyond me.”
“Ambrose, I’m getting a feeling about it. Nobody sees any use for it. Command isn’t so thick they’d stick something on just because the Admiral’s nephew thought it up.” That theory has gone the rounds. Strange tales crop up to explain anything Command doesn’t see fit to illuminate. “Maybe it’s some special, one-shot thing. Special mission.”
“Think so? The Old Man say something?”
“No. And he wouldn’t if he knew anything, which he doesn’t. Orders haven’t come through yet.”
“Anybody tell you how Tarkenton took out one of their Main Battles during the siege at Carmody? That was in the Eight Ball. Her third mission.”
Climber Fleet Tannian has developed a plethora of legends about famous patrols and Commanders. Tarkenton’s story is one of the big ones. His kill came during the war’s darkest hour. It threw the enemy fleet into total confusion. The ship he skragged was control for the entire Carmody operation.
Those were the glory days, the easy days. Tarkenton is still alive. He commands Climber Fleet Two, far in toward the Inner Worlds. I saw him once, shortly after his appointment. He’s a lean, hollow-eyed man who travels with a guard of ghosts.
There’re a thousand stories, and I’m sure I’ll hear them all. Diekereide dearly loves to talk.
One he tells is about the Executioner. The Executioner is the other team’s best. He commands a pack of hunter-killer specialists. They operate more like bounty hunters than an escort squadron.
“We don’t have to worry about him. They sent him to take on Tarkenton’s Fleet six months ago.”
You have to admire a man who makes a name for himself in destroyers. Destroyer people do the most thankless, unnoticed work there is.
I return to Ops after action stations secures. I want to see what the Old Man does with his fueling luck. Diekereide made a good guess. He wants to shake down his new hands and get the feel of the refitted ship.
“Not bad when you can walk around, is it?” Yanevich asks as I amble in.
“No. But the mode can be confusing. We’ll go parasite again just when I get the hang of it.”
He winks. “So it goes. So it goes. Have a seat.” He offers the viewscreen chair.
I don’t refuse. My leg is aching and I want a better look at Subic Bay. I didn’t see much of her from below. I switch to augmented infrared and skip from camera to camera.
The image, when I find it, has a spectral look, which isn’t unusual with infrared.
“That a new-type tanker? Or is the augmentation screwed up?”
The only tanker I ever saw consisted of a long rectangular girderwork with a perpendicular squashed-egg CT tank on either end. A flying dumbbell. Drives were at the ends of crossbars athwartships amidship, turning the dumbbell into a giant jack. Crew’s quarters were inside the arms.
Subic Bay’s main structure is similar, but she’s twice that other vessel’s length. She has lesser dumbbells crosswise at either end, giving her four tanks instead of two. The thwartships crossbars are longer. They mount heavier drives and probably provide roomier quarters.
Two Climbers are nursing. A third is maneuvering into position. I suppose the naked tank is the one we used.
“First one of these I’ve seen myself,” Yanevich says. “The new Kiel class. They’re trying to speed things up. Put more Climbers into action and get more missions per ship. Which means they have to get more CT to Fuel Point faster.”
“How about safety? Seems like doubling the handling capacity would cube the chance of disaster.”
“Never lost a tanker yet.” He grins at my sour expression. “Those people are careful. They know they’re sitting on a live volcano. You think our OC was bad? You should see those people. They stay out a year at a time. When they cut loose, they cut loose.” He glanced at the screen wistfully. “But they do have mixed crew.”
The absence of comrades of a more delicate persuasion is having its effect. Conversations have grown less impersonal and professional. Throdahl is entertaining the watch with an intimate account of his relationship with the black radiowoman. His friend Rose is playing straight man. It’s obvious they’re old story-swappers.
Throughout, Fisherman stares at his displays and pretends deafness. His particular faith has a strong fundamentalist bent.
From the shadowed jungle gym of the inner circle, Laramie calls, “Wouldn’t it be a candy game if we ran into a she-ship out? Link locks, and holiday routine for the crews.” He giggles. When he laughs, Laramie sounds like a nine-year-old girl being tickled.
“Yeah,” someone muses. “Wouldn’t it be straight dusty, making it in null grav?”
Rose has a story about it. His is as unlikely as all such tales. Nobody believes a word, of course. Convincing the listener isn’t their object. The someone again mentions how he’d like to try it in free-fall.
Someone else says, “You want to try it, go down and see Hardwick.”
The old hands snigger.
Nicastro pauses between me and Fisherman. “So soon you forget, Spook. Your playmate isn’t with us this go.” I’m surprised. The Chief doesn’t usually join the game. He pats Fisherman’s shoulder. “Good board, Junghaus.”
Good board? Either he has something in detection or he doesn’t. Good and bad have nothing to do with tachyon gear, only the operator’s skill at interpreting what he sees. When he has no contacts, he can do nothing but watch green lights and a blank screen. Only when yellow shows does he have to pay attention.
Then it dawns. Fisherman is short on confidence. He needs reassurance. His faith is one attempt to bolster it.
“How did Laramie get the name Spook?”
The Chief says, “Earned it in boot camp, I hear. Because he has a talent for becoming invisible when there’s work to do. Buckets got his name because he has the chamberpot detail when we Climb. A reward the Old Man gives people who get on his nerves. The men below can explain their names better than I can.”
Nicknames intrigue me. How is it some people attract them, some repel them? There were people in our battalion who always had one. Subject to momentary change. Some I never did know by a given name. On the other hand, I’ve never had one myself. I worried about it when I was younger. Didn’t they like me?
I suppose I lack color.
Yet Rose and Throdahl are colorful enough. Throdahl’s “Thro” is the only thing I’ve heard used on either of them. It’s curious.
Rose is telling a new tale. This one from his recent leave. “We’re cruising this road south of T-ville, see, and here’s this bitch, maybe sixteen, just shaking along. Kicking up dust. Javitts spots her and says, ‘I’m going to pick this up.’ She ain’t even hiking. Like maybe she’s headed for the next cabbage patch. Javitts wheels over, asks her does she want a ride. She fish-eyes us maybe half a minute, says okay. You never seen a mover like Javitts. Ten minutes, man, I shit you not, he talks her into stopping by the barracks while we shift to Class A’s. Soon as he gets there, he calls this other bitch to say we’re going to maybe be a little late. All the time we’re driving, he’s talking shit. Now it’s my turn while he’s on the horn. I’m thinking, what do you do to follow his act? I don’t have to worry. She starts talking first. Man, you wouldn’t believe it.”
“Not from you,” Throdahl says. “You got shit coming out your ears. But you’re going to tell it anyway, so get it over with. We can’t stand the suspense.”
“One of these days, Thro. Pow! You know that? Wham! I got my right hand registered. Know what’s wrong with you? You got no couth, Thro. Damn right I’m going to tell it. Get some class.”
“What about the slut?”
“You got less couth than Thro, Barbarian. What she does is, she turns to me and says, ‘You know, I started fucking when I was eleven.’ I shit you not. Just like that. Straight off the bulkhead, and wearing the shit-eatingest smile you ever seen. Dusted me. Only thing I could think to say was, ‘You should be pretty good, then.’ And she said she is, and started telling me about all the guys she screwed and how they all told her she was the best they ever had.”
“Get into her?”
“Fucking well right. Let me tell it . . . ”
“Hey,” one of the inner circle calls down. “You pick her up on Heyrdahl Road? She have a big Caesarean scar?” That’s Laramie again.
“Yeah. So?” Rose sounds a little defensive.
“He ain’t lying, guys. That’s the slut that gave me the clap last time we were in.”
General laughter. Catcalls.
“You get that certain feeling when you piss?” Throdahl asks and hoots at his own comedic triumph.
“Knowing him,” Laramie shouts, “he better start worrying about spitting.”
The First Watch Officer leans past me and punches the general alarm button.
The Commander descends from his eyrie in seconds, surveys the silent compartment. He smiles when he sees me at my station.
He thumbs a switch on the shipwide comm. “This’s the Ship’s Commander. I have the conn. Stand by for maneuvering exercises. Department heads, report.”
Each reports his men on station and ready.
“Engineer, what’s your influential status?”
“Go, commander.”
“Astrogator, are you clear?”
“Clear, Commander.”
I glance at Westhause’s back. He seems as embarrassed as Fisherman. Curious. He was no prude at the Pregnant Dragon.
“Engineering, take hyper at my mark. Stand by. Execute.”
For an instant the ship’s interior seems to spin and twist away into a geometric surreality.
“Departments heads, report.”
Again all bailiwicks report a go.
“Mr. Westhause, program me a ten-minute Inoko Loop.”
The maneuver is a four-dimensional figure eight. Jokester astrogators call it a Moebius trip. This one will return the ship to her starting point in the stated time.
Aboard normal warships the Bridge Engineer would relay the astrogator’s program to his own department. Here the astrogator and Chief Quartermaster handle the data relay.
“Ready, Commander.”
“Execute.”
There’s no sensation of motion. Momentum has no detectable effect inside an influential field. There’s no evidence of movement inside the display tank, either. Westhause has chosen a small, slow, lazy, tight loop involving very little relative motion.
The man is deft, quick, and certain. He’s a first-rate astrogator. It’s nice to know I’m flying with an expert.
The Climber completes the loop. The Commander polls department heads again, drops hyper, conducts yet another poll. Everything is go-go-go.
He has Westhause program an hour’s loop with secondary loops built in. Again the results are satisfactory.
There’s but one test left. A Climb.
A terrible cold hand seizes me as the Commander begins the countdown. We’re in hyper again. For a few minutes I’m wholly convinced that we’re going to die. Then there’s a conviction that nothing can happen to this Climber. I’m aboard. Nothing can happen to me. Then the premonition of doom returns. Back and forth, a ball pounded by emotional racquets.
Worrying, I miss the antimatter ignition sequence. My first hint of how far matters have progressed is the Commander’s ‘Take her up.”
There’s no mistaking the groan of the Climb alarm. Tannian’s PR people have saturated the media with it.
“Annihilation stabilized,” Engineering reports.
“Take her to ten Bev,” the Commander orders.
“Ten Bev, aye, sir.”
My companions suddenly acquire an ectoplasmic insubstantiality. They seem to glow from within. And the scene has become black and white. It’s like looking into a big holo cube with its color module out. Gone are the flashing green, amber, and red lights. Gone are the colors of the nonuniform clothing the men all wear. Gone are the color-codings of piping, wiring, and conduit.
It’s a spooky scene, these surroundings. Almost an argument for Fisherman’s beliefs.
The glow in the men has nothing to do with life-force or souls. The hardware glows too. Even the atmosphere sparkles. During one of his lectures Diekereide told me we’d be sensing the energies binding subatomic particles when we saw the glow.
I can also discern the big darkness beyond the ship’s hull. That’s the spookiest part. A big black nothing without stars, trying to push its way in. A black dragon keeping mouth and eyes closed till it’s close enough to gobble these fools who dare enter its lair.
I admit that I was warned. I didn’t believe. The warning was useless. I’m scared shitless.
“Systems check,” the Commander says. “Department heads report.”
All departments are go. TerVeen treated the ship well.
“Take her up to twenty Bev.”
I mutter, “Holy shit.” I’m drowning in my own sweat, and with no better excuse than fear. Internal temperature hasn’t risen, a tenth of a degree. My animal brain snarls. The heat converters are secured. The accumulators for the energy weapons haven’t been discharged. Fuel Point might be attacked. We could be caught with our endurance limited . . .
The Commander won’t discharge a weapon here, fool. That would be a dead giveway. A subtle treason. The signature of an energy weapon lasts forever, though it flees the scene at the velocity of light. It can be backtracked to its point of origin.
I’m not the only one sweating before the drill ends. Fisherman, too, is soaked and twitching. Will he settle down? Will the pressure of combat be too much for him?
“Astrogator. Let’s see your ten-minute Inoko again.”
I stare at a lifeless screen and wonder how Bradley’s troops put up with Climb. Their only clues to current events are the alarms. They’re shut off from both the universe outside and the rest of the ship. Theirs is a tiny world isolated within our slightly larger universe.
“Loop completed, Commander.”
“Very well. Take her down to twenty-five Bev.”
‘Twenty-five Bev, aye, sir.”
Twenty-five? I must have missed us going up. How high were we?
“Ship’s Services, commence dehumidification.”
The rarefied atmosphere is near saturation. The simple thermometer near the compartment clock says real temperature increase has been but 3.7 degrees. I remind myself that in battle crews routinely endure temperatures approaching eighty degrees.
The Commander eases us back into hyper, shifts to fusion power, then drops to norm. “Vent heat,” he orders.
A midnight woods-whisper trickles through the ship. Ship’s Services is circulating atmosphere through the radiator vanes. In minutes the air feels chilly.
“Mr. Westhause, return to the tender. Mr. Yanevich, rig for parasite mode. Department heads. Meeting in the wardroom as soon as the ship is secure.”
I invite myself to the conference. As far as the Commander is concerned, I have access to everything but his classified material. None of the others asks me to leave, though Piniaz obviously resents my presence.
Performance in null is the subject. Everyone agrees. The ship is ready. Crew and intangibles remain the question marks.
“I want music piped into the basement,” Lieutenant Varese says.
“We went through this last patrol,” Yanevich replies.
“We’ll keep going through it. I stick by my arguments. It’ll help morale.”
“And generate heat.”
“So secure it in Climb.”
“No point discussing it this trip,” the Old Man says. “We don’t have the tapes.”
Varese slaps the table, glares at the First Watch Officer. “Why the hell not?” His voice cracks.
“We had to reduce mass to accommodate eighty-two kilos of writer. The library had to go.”
“Everything?”
“All but the study materials. Maybe that’ll speed up the cross-rate training.”
I shrink from Varese’s venomous glare. I’m at the head of his shit list for sure.
“I’ll get something from the mother,” Yanevich offers. “We’ve used most of the personal mass.”
Varese isn’t to be mollified. He wants to fight. “No music?”
“Sorry.”
“A magnetic cannon and a goddamned useless extra body. Fucking shitheaded Command.”
“Mister Varese,” the Commander says. The Lieutenant shifts his glare to his taut, pallid hands.
“How about personnel?” I ask, shoving my fingers into the dragon’s mouth. “Fisherman . . . Junghaus looked like he might crack under pressure.”
“So did you,” Yanevich says.
Psych Bureau screens to the nth degree, but no test is perfect. People get past. They change under stress. There’s no follow-up testing of people assigned to Climber duty.
Four men make the observation list. Junghaus isn’t one of them. I am.
My ego has big bruises.
I am an unknown quantity. I haven’t had Climber training. I haven’t been through the Psych test battery. I would’ve made the list had I gone through the exercises like a rock.
Chief Nicastro makes the list because this is his last patrol, because he got married, because he’ll want so badly to make it home. The stress on him will be severe.
The others are enlisted first patrollers who showed spooky. Jon Baake and Fehrenbach Cinderella. They’re Piniaz’s men. He made his own judgments, so it’s possible they were considered by harsher standards. Piniaz is a perfectionist.
The nascent hostility between Varese and myself receives no mention. We’re like flint and steel, that man and I. He flat doesn’t like me. We’ll strike sparks no matter what I do to avoid it.
The Old Man detains me when the meeting breaks up. He stares into nothing till I grow nervous, fearing he may be worried enough to leave me aboard the mother when the ship commences her patrol. Finally, “What do you think?”
“It isn’t like the holo shows it.”
“You’ve said that before. You’ve also said there’s got to be a better way.” He smiles that pale smile.
“It’s true!”
“Nothing is like it is on holo.”
“I know that. I just didn’t expect it to be this different.”
He slides away somewhere behind his eyes. Has he returned to Canaan? What is it? Marie? Navy as a whole? Something unrelated? He isn’t the sort to lay his soul out on a dissecting table. He’s a human singularity. You have to figure him out by inference and his effect on the orbits of others.
“I’m going to put you in Weapons for a while. Don’t mind Piniaz. He’s a good man. Just playing an Old Earther role. Learn the magnetic cannon. You were good at ballistics.” He fiddles with his pipe, acting as if he wants to light up. I haven’t seen him smoke since we came aboard. In fact, this is the first I’ve seen that nasty little instrument since then. “And do some of your famous observing.”
“What am I looking for? Personal problems? Like Junghaus?”
“Don’t worry about Fisherman. He’ll be all right. He’s found his way to cope. Ito is the man worrying me. Something’s eating him. Something more than usual.”
“You just said . . . ”
“I know. It’s the Commander’s prerogative to contradict himself.”
“There’s always something eating Old Earthers. They’re born with chips on their shoulders. What about Varese? I’m scared to turn my back on him.”
“Bah! Nothing to worry about. He’s a culture nut. A pseudo. Wants to enlighten his philistines. He goes through the same routine every patrol. He’ll come out of it after we make contact.”
“And you?”
“Eh?”
“I thought maybe something was bothering you.”
“Me? No. All systems go. Raring to get into competition.” His face belies his words. I’ll watch him closer than Piniaz. He’s my friend . . . Is that why he wants me out of Ops?