Glen Cook - Passage At Arms

Shit. Almost time. God, get me through this one and I'll...

I'll what?

"Five. Four. Three. Two. One..."

My targeting screen comes to life. The cracking tower lies dead center amid the aiming rings.

Sunlight washes a typical lunar landscape, all black and white and sharp-edged shadows on the bones of a world that died young.

"Away One," Piniaz sings. "Away Two."

A missile's exhaust scars the view on my screen. I hit my triggering key.

A lance of emerald hell, startling against the monochromatic background, slices a corner from the screen. It sweeps on continuous discharge, vaporizing rock and exposed plant. There's chatter in Engineering as they compensate for the surge of power being drained from the accumulator banks.

"Christ!" comes through from Ops at the same instant. "The bastard is right on top of us!"

"What?"

"Away Three," Piniaz chants. "Away Four. Klarich, what the hell is wrong here?"

A sewing machine stitches a line of black holes up the cracking tower an instant before my screen goes white with the violence of the first missile. It blanks. The bulkheads ghost.

Four seconds. It seemed much longer. Everything happened so slowly—

"Twelve minutes," Nicastro intones. "Commence target evaluation and selection."

We're safe now. Outside, lunar rock is boiling and fusing into man-made obsidian.

The Commander says, "Mr. Piniaz, reprogram one missile for above-surface pursuit. Berberian will give you the data. We had an incoming destroyer at eight o'clock."

Piniaz has problems of his own. "Commander, we've got a jam in the elevator on Launch Three. Looks like the lead dolly kicked back and knocked the mid dolly out of line. The Seven missile is against the well wall. Programming and command circuits have safety-locked."

"Can you clear it?"

"Not remote. I'll have to send some people out. Which target do you want dropped?"

"Forget the destroyer. We'll take our chances."

I slam my fist against my board. If we survive two more passes, we'll still have two missiles aboard.

The screen starts sending up target data. I sigh. Things look a little better. Indications are we got Rathgeber's comm center. They can't call for help. And the destroyer, which may have been crippled, was the only warship around.

I'm obsessed with going home. Home? Canaan isn't home. My personal universe has shrunk to the hell of the Climber and the promised land of Canaan. Canaan. What a choice of names. Whoever selected it must have been prescient. Odd. I consider myself a rational man. How can I make of the baseworld a near-deity?

Does this happen to all Climber people?

I think so. My shipmates seldom speak of other worlds. They don't mention Canaan that much, and then only hi a New Jerusalem context. The quirks of the human mind are fascinating.

I see why they go crazy planetside. That business at the Pregnant Dragon wasn't for tomorrow we die. People were proving they were alive, that they had survived a brush with an incredibly hostile environment.

So. I'll have to adapt my behavioral models. I'll have to see where and how each man fits this new scheme. And the Commander? Is he a man for whom no proofs carry sufficient conviction? Is he a prisoner in a solipsistic universe?

"Sixty seconds," the good Chief says. Christ, twelve minutes go fast. I'm not ready for another plunge into the hex-enkessel.

Alarm! I start, scattering notes.

"Away Five."

I begin shooting immediately. I can't see the purpose, but any action holds the fear at bay. The movement of a finger makes work for body and brain for a fractional slice of time.

"Away Eight."

Climb alarm. "Thirty minutes. Commence target evaluation and selection."

"Magic numbers," I murmur. Seven and Eleven are the missiles that can't be launched.

"Eh?" My nearest neighbor gives me a puzzled look and headshake. The men think my brain was pickled by civilian life.

The bugs don't give me a thing. Engineering is a graveyard peopled by specters reciting rosaries to Fusion and Annihilation. In Ops, Yanevich observes that the destroyer weathered the first pass and was trying to run. The Commander's silence says this is no news to him. Nicastro ticks time in colorless tones.

Tension mounts faster than the temperature. Third time counts for all.

I amuse myself by nibbling tidbits of target evaluation data. Seven fusion warheads can do a hell of a lot of damage.

Molten rock and metal and people are quickening into concave black glass lenses. A billion days hence, perhaps, some eldritch descendant of a creature now wallowing mindlessly in a swamp will gaze on that lunar acne and wonder what the hell it means.

I wonder myself. What's the point?

Well, we can honestly say we didn't start this one.

Right now, with death a-stalk, the only question that matters is, How do we stay alive? The rest is foam on the beer.

The universe is very narrow, here in Rathgeber's shadow. It's a long, lonely hallway through which even close friends can do little to ease one another's passage.

Again the ship lies panting in the embrace of that cold-hearted mistress of Climber warfare, Waiting. Months of waiting. Climaxed by what? Eight scattered seconds of action. Damned minuscule flecks of meat in a huge, hard sandwich of time.

Almost indigestible.

My butt is driving me crazy. I can't count the times I've stayed seated longer, but those times I had the option of moving. Getting up could become an obsession. Got to move. Got to do something.

Anything...

Nicastro's countdown grows louder and louder. The ass-agony vanishes. Death is a bigger pain. I have a sudden, absolute conviction of my own mortality.

The orbitals will have their guns out. That hunter-killer will be ready. She'll be laying back, a big iron bushwacker eager for a dry-gulching.

Unless we were damned lucky and skragged her instel wave guides, she'll have howled for her packmates. They'll come whooping to avenge the base. We'll pull pressure off the squadrons stalking the convoy. I should be pleased with such success. But I can't get excited about the gospel according to St. Tan-nian.

The destroyers will be hours getting here. They'll be way too late to help Rathgeber. But I know they'll catch our trail. The way my life goes, it can't happen any other way.

Must be getting old. They say pessimism is a disease of the aged.

Here we go!

Missiles away. Energy weapons blazing. My little cannon sowing its seeds. There isn't much to see.

The same old bleached bones of an aborted worldlet acned by ground zeros. The silhouettes of startled beings in spacesuits. They'll remain forever in my memory, taking one futile step toward cover.

Ghostdom returns with a ship-wide shudder.

"Commander." Varese is speaking. Softly, metallically. "A low-intensity beam brushed us on the upper torus, at plates twenty-four and twenty-five. Damage appears minimal."

"Very well. Keep an eye on it."

Damned well better. Let's not buy any trouble we could avoid with a little attention to detail.

I secure the cannon board, then bestow a negative blessing on our illustrious Admiral. His madman's game put us in this predicament. Being a pawn on a galactic chessboard wasn't what I had in mind when I asked on. The rewards are too small, except in pain and doubt.

"Secure from general quarters," the Commander orders. "One hour, gentlemen."

I exchange glances with Piniaz. This is an unprecedented breach of Climb procedure. The crew is supposed to remain at battle stations any time the ship is in Climb.

No one argues. We all need to move around, to interrupt tension with frivolous activity.

Yet work goes on. I'm the one man free to stray far from my station. I duck into Ops when the hatches open.