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.
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.