Glen Cook - Passage At Arms

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 lowgrav 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 sprite 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 hi 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 SubicBay. 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 hi 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.