It passes the time. It keeps me going.
Skulking on the borderlands of lunacy, I find myself victimized by one of time's relativistic pranks. Before it seems possible, another two hours have fled.
"Hey down there. Stand by. Going down in five." West-hause. He sounds choky.
I glance at the time. A new endurance record, no doubt about it. Hurray.
"Uhn." The Commander. "Damn it, Waldo. Not now. Wake up. We're almost there. Shit." He sounds as if speech is pure torment.
Reluctance to leave the ghost world inundates me. Even hell gives one a sense of security, I suppose.
What happens if the whole crew passes out before a Climber goes down? I guess she'd keep heating till her superconductors failed, her magnetics went, and she destroyed herself in a sudden annihilation.
Why do I feel less uncomfortable now than I did two hours ago? Internal temperature is higher than ever before. Literally, we're cooking.
Haltingly, the Commander says, "All I want is for you to be faster on the trigger than anybody waiting for us. Quick enough to keep them from getting out an instel."
"I'll try."
"Ten seconds. Nine... Eight..."
It's a savage plunge to zero Bev. The concretization of my surroundings stuns my conscious mind.
The frightened old tree ape in the back of my mind is on survival watch. I finish the launch sequence'before the venting machinery begins humming. In fact, I start before the ship is all the way down, and launch before any instrument has anything to say about targets.
The way Tannian fusses about wasting missiles, this could earn me a Board of Inquiry...
Except there is a target. The Old Man and Mr. Westhause made an astute guess.
We break cover less than ten thousand kilometers from the bones of the murdered moon. Fate does us a favor. She puts the watcher in the gap, not a hundred kilometers from our drop point. I can see her on gun camera. So. They thought we were gone, but left somebody just in case. They always do.
"About damned time it went our way," I mutter.
The missile is on its way. The Fire Control system barely has time to lock it on target.
The Commander holds norm for just four seconds. Hardly long enough to make a microdegree's difference in internal temperature. We run.
The missile, accelerating at one hundred gravities, strikes home before the gentlemen of the other firm get their thumbs out of their ears.
In essence, a classic Climber strike. With a lot of luck thrown in.
The Commander goes down again five light-seconds away. He vents heat and watches.
The destroyer dies. And neither the radio nor tachyon detectors react with anything but blast noise. No messages out. The Commander played the right card. He outwaited the hunt. The Executioner has gone looking elsewhere.
The glare of the fireball fades. I check the temperature. It's falling slowly. Maybe a degree a minute. The minutes tramp away on the feet of snails.
The destroyer got no message out, but that treacherous probe remains.
The first hunter hypers in an hour later.
A dozen men have recovered sufficiently to resume work.
Several more are gone forever.... The Commander commences a new ploy. He calls me, says, "Program the Eleven bird for maximum straight-line hyper fly." Piniaz hasn't recovered. For the moment I'm in charge.
The new arrival is moving away from us, into the nether reaches of the system. Westhause hits hyper and runs.
Five minutes pass. Fisherman reports, "She's turning, Commander."
"Very well. Weapons, stand by to launch. Mr. Westhause, stand by to Climb."
The minutes roll away. The hunter gains slowly. "She's close enough, Commander," Canzoneri says.
"Thank you. Weapons? Ready?"
"Aye, Commander." I quickly hammer orders to the missile. The destroyer will recognize the fake if the weapon tears away too fast.
"Ready, Mr. Westhause? Go, then."
I launch. My surroundings ghost. The Commander directs Westhause onto a new course. This should work. It's a new trick.
The missiles can run for hours in hyper. I programmed its translation ratio high. Hopefully, we'll get a good start before the destroyer gets close enough to unravel the deception.
Fearless Fred will roar like a wounded bull when he hears about this.
The Commander no longer gives a damn what Command thinks. He wants to bring his people home alive.
We drop back to norm as soon as the destroyer has time to pass the limits of detection. We drift for hours, on minimum power, still venting heat. That's a laborious process. We can't use the energy weapons for fear of giving ourselves away. The hunt should be gathering again.
Normal cruising temperature feels incredibly cold. I'm in pain when it hits a pre-Climb level.
We have twenty-three men effective when, after three hours, the Commander takes us up again.
We leave three men behind, buried in space, eulogized and mourned only after the vessel is safely in Climb. Picraux and Brown from Ops, and Alewel. They were luckier down below.
"It's criminal," Fisherman mutters. "Out the garbage lock. It's criminal."
"You maybe want to keep them aboard?" Yanevich demands.
Fisherman doesn't answer. Heat and bacteria would work horrors during an extended Climb. The bodies got a gross enough start as it was.
I remember that story about the Commander who insisted on coming home with his dead.
Funny. My threshold for smell seems to adjust as the ship grows more fetid. Our atmosphere is only mildly annoying, though it would gag somebody plucked off a ranch on Canaan.
Lieutenant Diekereide has been running Engineering while his boss is indisposed. Varese recovers suddenly. With a howl. "Get out of the fucking way, Diekereide. Goddamnit, Commander, what the fuck did you do to my CT stores? You jackass..."
"Shut your mouth, Varese. Thank me for the chance to bitch."
Varese succumbed early. The more thoughtful Diekereide kept himself in action by donning our one remaining suit and using its cooling capability.
The squabble goes on. Pure stress talking. Will the Old Man press it? He'll have the evidence on the Mission Recorder. Varese is insubordinate. I take no notes, wanting nothing on paper that might be subpoenaed.
"We're down to a cunt hair over four hours of Climb time," Varese rages. "With that and some luck, we'll only get our asses blown off, not baked."
Yanevich takes over for the Old Man. "Be glad you're alive. Now tend to your knitting. Don't give me any of your shit. Understood, mister?" - Varese has sense enough to shut his mouth. He sulks instead.
Time to get some sleep.
I waken with a heightened sense of fatalism. I'm not alone. The CT is practically gone. The missiles have flown. The graser could be one shot from failing. The other energy weapons are unreliable. Only the magnetic cannon can be used for any length of time. We won't show much in a fight.
I paid my dues. I hung in there. I did my job while the others fell. I can be proud of myself.
Maybe they'll give me a medal.
We're still a long way from home. It'll be a tough, hungry trip. Then we'll have to run the steel curtain around Canaan. Do we have enough CT?
In Weapons everyone is at war with the mold. "Looks like a victory for mold," I say to a slightly shy Kuyrath.
"Got a good hold this time, sir. The paint's ruined. Some of the plastic, too." He tears the protective wrapping off a roll of electrician's tape. Two empty cores lie beside him already. "Had to let it ride, though."
"Yeah. What can you do?"
"Wouldn't it be the shits if this crap did us in? I mean, they gave it their best shot. The Executioner. But the Old Man pulled us through. So we got mold. What do you do about fucking mold?
You can't outthink it."
"It would be an ironic end," I agree. And don't count the other team out. They're still looking, my friend.