Passage At Arms

He vanishes with the down-pop of a fast prairie dog. Yanevich follows him.

"Your turn."

I take one look and say, "Not even without gravity."

The Commander grins. It's the nastiest damned grin I've ever seen. He sticks me with a straightarm.

"Grab the cable."

I stop flailing and grab. The cable jerks me down the narrow, polished tube. There isn't enough light to see much but an oily sheen as the walls speed by. The cable itself has optical fiber wound in. That sheds what little light there is.

This is a claustrophobic setting. The shaft is only slightly more than a meter in diameter.

I can just make out Yanevich below me. If I look up I can see the Commander's grin coming after me. He has rolled so he's coming along facedown. He's laughing at some hilarious joke, and I'm afraid the joke is me. He shouts, "You puke in here and I'll make you walk home from three lights out. Get ready to change cables. Damn it! Don't look at me. Watch where you're going."

I look down as Yanevich begins heaving himself along. He pumps the cable, falls free, pumps the cable again, gaining speed. He seizes the faster cable and pulls away into the darkness.

I survive the exchange through the intercession of a tapered idiot fitting. It strips my death grip from the slow cable and transfers it to the faster one. The faster cable gives me a big yank and nearly turns me facedown. Now I know why Yanevich speeded himself up.

"Damned dangerous," I shout up the shaft. The Commander grins.

From below, the First Watch Officer shouts, "Grab your balls. We'll be hauling ass in a couple minutes."

I picture myself hurtling down this tube like a too-small ball in an ancient muzzle-loader, rickety-rackety from wall to wall. I feel an intense urge to scream, but I'm not going to satisfy their sadism. I have a suspicion that's what they're waiting for. It would make their day.

I suddenly realize that getting tangled in the cable is the real danger here. Envisioning that peril helps silence the howling ape's instinctive fear of falling.

"Shift coming up."

I try to imitate Yanevich this time. My effort earns its inevitable reward: I manage to get myself turned sideways. I can't find the cable again.

"Whoa!" the Commander shouts. "Don't flail around." He shoves down on the top of my head, mashing my cap. Yanevich slides up out of the darkness and snags my right ankle. They turn me. "Get a hold. Carefully."

The real trick is to avoid getting excited. I feel cocky when we hit bottom. I've figured it out.

I can keep up with die best of them. "There must be a better way."

The Commander's grin is bigger than ever. "There is. But it's no fun. All you do is climb onto a bus and ride down. And I that's so boring." He indicated cars unloading passengers along a wall a hundred meters away. People and bags are floating around like drunken pigeons. Some are our men, some the women who shared our lifter.

"You prime son of a bitch."

"Now, now. You said you wanted to see it all." He's still gri

I can't pop a superior in the snot locker, so I try stomping angrily instead. The result is predictable. There is no gravity. Of course. I flail around for a handhold, which only makes matters worse. In seconds I put on an admirable combination of pitch, roll, and yaw.

"Thought you said he was a veteran," Yanevich observes laconically. Embarrassed, I get hold of myself.

"See, you haven't forgotten everything," the Commander says.

"I'll get it back. Am I in for the whole new-fish routine?" "Not after we're aboard. There's no horseplay aboard a Climber." He's dreadfully serious. Almost comically so.

There'll be no chance to get even. Grimacing, I let him tug me down so we can begin the next phase of our odyssey.

Westhause continues to explain. "What they did was drill the tu

In Navy parlance a wetdock is any place where a ship can be taken out of vacuum and surrounded by atmosphere so repair people don't have to work in suits. A wetdock allows faster, more efficient, and more reliable repairwork.

"Uhm." I'm more interested in looking than listening.

"Takes a month to run a Climber through the inspections and preventive maintenance. These guys do a right job."

Which is why the crews get so much leave between missions. They aren't permitted to make their own repairs, even when so inclined.

Westhause divines my thoughts. "We can stretch a leave if we work it right. Command always deploys the whole squadron at once. But we can come in as soon as we've used our missiles, if we have the fuel. So we get our month plus however long it takes the last ship to get home."

Within limits, I'm sure. Command wouldn't keep eleven ships out of action waiting for a twelfth making a prolonged patrol. "Incentive?"

"It helps."

The Old Man says, 'Too much incentive, sometimes." For a minute it seems he's finished. Then he decides to go ahead. 'Take Talmidge's Climber. Gone now. Tried to fight the hunter-killers so he could use his missiles and be first ship back. No law against it, of course." He falls silent again. Yanevich picks up the thread when it becomes obvious he'll say nothing more.

"Good encounter, too. He got three confirmed. But the rest crawled all over him. Kept him up so long half his people came back with baked brains. They set the record for staying up."

The story sounds exaggerated. I don't pursue it. They don't want to talk about it. Even Westhause observes a moment of silence.

We climb aboard an electric bus. It takes its power from a whip ru

"Only the finest for the heroes of the Climber Fleet," the Old Man says, taking the control seat.

The bus surges forward. I try to watch the work going on out in the big tu

Most of them are not Climbers at all. Half the defense force seems to be in for repairs. A hundred workers on tethers float around every vessel. No lie-in-the-comer refugees up here. Everybody works. And the Pits keep firing away, sending up the supplies.

I think of the Lilliputians binding Gulliver, looking at all those people on lines. And of baby Krohler's spiders playing at little trial flights around Mom. Said creature is a vaguely arachnidian beast native to New Earth. It nests and nurses its young on its back. It's warmblooded, endoskeletal, and mammalian—a pseudo-marsupial, really—but it has a lot of legs and a magnificently extrudable whip of a tail, so the spider image sticks.

Sparks fly in mayfly swarms as people cut and weld and rivet. Machines pound out a thunderous industrial symphony. Several vessels are so far dismantled that they scarcely resemble ships. One has its belly laid open and half its skin gone. A carcass about ready for the retail butcher. What sort of creature feeds on roasts off the flanks of attack destroyers?

Gnatlike clouds of little gas-jet tugs nudge machinery and hull sections here and there. How the devil do they keep track of what they're doing? Why don't they get mixed up and start shoving destroyer parts into Climbers?