Кристофер Банч - Fleet of the Damned

But of all the test methods he hated, a centrifuge was the worst. His brain knew that there was no way his body could tell it was being spun in a circle to produce gravitic acceleration. But his body said "bet me" and heaved.

Of course Phase One used a centrifuge.

Sten curled a lip at the stainless steel machinery craning above him in the huge room.

"You look worried, Candidate Sten." It was Mason.

Sten hit the exaggerated position that the IPs called attention. "Nossir. Not worried, sir."

"Are you scared, Candidate?"

Great roaring clichés. Sten wished that Alex was with him. He knew the chubby heavy-worlder would have found a response—probably smacking Mason.

Sten remembered, however, that Kilgour had already gone through flight school. Since Sten hadn't heard anything, he assumed that Alex had graduated—without killing Mason.

Sten decided that Kilgour must have been sent to another Phase One than this one, made a noncommittal reply to Mason, and clambered up the steps into one of the centrifuge's capsules.

Later that night, Sten's stomach had reseated itself enough to feel mild hunger.

He left his room, still feeling most tottery, and went for the rec room. One of the food machines would, no doubt, have something resembling thin gruel.

Sh'aarl't, Bishop, and Lotor sat at one of the game tables in complete silence. Sten took his full cup from the slot and sat down beside them. Lotor gave him the news.

"They washed Victoria today."

Sten jumped, and the soup splashed, unheeded, in his lap.

Bishop answered the unasked question. "She failed the gee-test."

"No way," Sten said. "She was a clotting gymnast. A dancer."

"Evidently," Sh'aarl't said, "vertigo is not uncommon—even in athletes."

"How many gees?"

"Twelve point something," Bishop said.

"Clot," Sten swore. Even mild combat maneuvers in a ship with the McLean generators shut down could pull more than that.

He realized that all of them spoke of Victoria in the past tense. Phase One may have been sadistic in some ways, but when a candidate was disqualified, he was immediately removed. Sten was a little surprised that the three had any idea at all on what had flunked the woman.

He also realized that with Victoria, their talisman for possible graduation to the next phase, gone, none of them felt any hope of making it.

The bulletin display in the barracks' lobby was known, not inappropriately, as "The Tablet of Doom." Sten read the latest directive as it flashed for his attention: 1600 hours, this day, all candidates were directed to assemble in the central quadrangle. He wondered what new form of mass torment the IPs had devised. There were, after all, only a few days left in Phase One, and there were still survivors in the program, including Sh'aarl't, Bishop, and Lotor. Then he caught the kicker.

DRESS UNIFORM.

Sten was in a world of trouble. He had been quite correct hiding his ribbons upon entering the school. He noticed that those with more decorations or rank than the IPs felt appropriate seemed to get far more than their share of attention and harassment. Thus far, in spite of Mason's evident personal hatred, Sten had managed to run somewhat silent and somewhat deep.

Oh, well. All good things seize their bearings eventually.

"My, don't we look pretty, Candidate," Mason crooned. "All those ribbons and bows."

Sten had considered not putting the medals on. But he knew that under the current circumstances it was an offense of basic regulations for a soldier not to wear the decorations to which he was entitled. It would be just like the IPs to look up everyone's record jacket, then check chests or sashes for exactitude and use any difference to bust another candidate out.

Sten yessired Mason while marveling at Chief Instructor Pilot Ferrari. So much for the theory that fat slobs only get promoted to warrant officer. That might be his current serving rank, but Ferrari was now wearing the stars of a fleet admiral, with decorations banked almost to his epaulettes.

Sten noticed, in spite of his awe, that there appeared to be a soup stain just above Ferrari's belt line.

"If I'd known you had all those hero buttons, Candidate," Mason went on, "I would have given you more attention. But we still have time."

Fine. Sten was doomed. He wondered how Mason would nuke him.

Minutes later, he found out.

Ferrari had called the class to attention and congratulated them. The formal testing was complete. Any of them still standing was successful. All that remained was the final test.

"Do not bother," Ferrari said, "going through your notes and memories in preparation. The end test we are quite proud of, not the least because it has everything yet nothing to do with what has gone before. You have twenty-four hours to consider what such an examination might be. We find that suspense is good for the soul. The test, by the way, will be administered singly. Each instructor pilot will choose candidates, and it is his responsibility at that point."

And now Sten knew how Mason was going to get him.

The aircraft—at least Sten guessed it was an aircraft—was the most clotting impossible collection of scrap metal he had ever seen. It consisted of a flat metal platform about two meters in diameter, with two seats, two sets of what Sten thought to be controls, and a windscreen. The platform sat atop two metal skids. Behind it was some sort of power plant and then a long spidered-metal girder that ended in a side-facing fan blade. Above the platform was another fan, horizontal to the ground, with twin blades each about six meters long. The device sat in the middle of a wide, completely flat landing ground. Two hundred meters in front of the aircraft, a series of pylons sprouted.

Sten and Mason were the only two beings on the landing field. Sten turned a blank but—he hoped—enthusiastic face toward Mason.

"We got a theory here in flight school," Mason said. "We know there are natural pilots—none of you clowns qualify, of course—and also a lot of people have flown a lot of things.

"No sense testing someone for basic ability if we put them on their favorite toy, is there? So what we came up with is something that, as far as we know, nobody has flown for a thousand years or so. This pile of drakh was called a helicopter. Since it killed a whole group of pilots in its day, when antigrav came around they couldn't scrap-heap these guys fast enough.

"You're gonna fly it, Candidate. Or else you're gonna look for a new job category. I hear they're recruiting planetary meteorologists for the Pioneer Sectors."

"Yes, sir."

"Not that we're unfair. We're gonna give you some help. First you get two facts: Fact number one is that this helicopter, unlike anything else I've ever heard of, really doesn't want to fly at all. It won't lift without bitching, it glides like a rock, and it lands about the same if you don't know what you're doing. Fact number two is it's easy to fly if you're the kind of person who can pat his head and rub his stomach at the same time."

Sten wondered if Mason was making his notion of a joke. Impossible—the man was humorless.

"Next, you and me are gonna strap in, and I'm gonna show you how the controls work. Then you'll take over, and follow my instructions. I'll start simple."

Right, simple. Ostensibly, the few controls were easy. The stick in front controlled the angle of the individual fan blades—the airfoil surface—as they rotated. This stick could be moved to any side and, Mason explained, could make the helicopter maneuver. A second lever, to the side, moved up and down, and, with a twist grip, rotated to give engine speed and, therefore, rotor speed. Two rudder pedals controlled the tiny fan at the ship's rear, which kept the helicopter from following the natural torque reaction of the blades and spinning wildly.