Passage at Arms Read Online Free PDF Page A

tube will get ours.
    We'll get something that belonged to somebody who's on patrol already."
    "Pass them around like the clap," Yanevich says.
    The Old Man snorts. He doesn't approve of officers' displaying crudity in public.
    Westhause says, "Everything has to be perfect."
    I reflect on what I've seen of Climber people and ask myself, What about the crew? It looks like Command's attitude toward personnel is the opposite of its attitude toward ships. If they can still say their names and crawl, and don't scream too much going through the hatch, send them out again.
    The bus suddenly wrenches itself off the main track. The passengers howl. The Old Man ignores them. He wants to see something. For several minutes we study a Climber with the hull number 8.
    The Commander stares as if trying to divine some critical secret.
    Hull number 8. Eight without an alphabetical suffix, meaning she's the original Climber Number 8, not a replacement for a ship lost in action. The Eight Ball. I've heard some of the legends. Lucky Eight. Over forty missions. Nearly two hundred confirmed kills, mainly back at the beginning.
    Never lost a man. Any spacer in the Climbers will sell his soul to get on her crew. She's had a good run of Commanders.
    Westhause whispers, "She was his first duty assignment in Climbers."
    I wonder if he's trying to steal her luck.
    "Living on borrowed time," the Old Man declares, and slams the bus into movement. Full speed ahead now, and pedestrians be ready to jump.
    The odds against a Climber's surviving forty patrols are astronomical. No pun intended. There are just too many things that can go wrong. Most don't survive a quarter that many. Only a few Climber people make their ten-mission limit. They drift from ship to ship, in accordance with billet requirements, and hope the big computer is shuffling them along a magical pathway. I think the odds would improve if the crews stayed together.
    Climber duty is a guaranteed path to advancement. Survivors move up fast. There're always ships to be replaced, and new vessels need cadres.
    "Isn't there a morale problem, the way people get shuffled?"
    Westhause has to think about that one, as though he's familiar with emotion and morale only from textbook examples. "Some. The jobs are the same in every ship, though."
    "I wouldn't like getting moved every time I made new friends."
    "I suppose. It's not so bad for officers. Especially Engineers. But they only take people who can handle it. Loners."
    "Sociopaths," the Commander says softly. Only I hear him. He makes a habit of commenting without elucidating.
    "You're a call-up, aren't you?"
    "Only to the Fleet. I volunteered for Climbers."
    "How are Engineers different?" Navy is a conservative organization. Engineers don't do much engineering. They don't have engines to tinker with. Aboard line ships they still have boatswains.
    There's no logical continuity from old-time surface navies.
    "They stay with one ship after three apprentice missions. They're all physicists. A ship always has an apprentice aboard."
    "The more I hear, the more I wish I'd kept my mouth shut. This looks bleaker all the time."
    "One mission? With the Old Man? With CliRon Six? Shit. A cakewalk." He's whispering. The Commander isn't supposed to hear. The set of the Old Man's shoulders says he has. "You can do it standing on your head. You're in the ace survivor squadron. We graduate more people than anybody. Hell, we'll be back groundside before the end of the month."
    "Graduate?"
    "Make ten. Guys make their ten with us. Hell, we're at the bay already. There she is. In the nine spot."
    A whole, combat-ready Climber looks like an antique spoked automobile wheel and tire with a tenliter cylindrical canister where the hub belongs. Its exterior is fletched with antennae, humps, bumps, tubes, turrets, and one huge globe riding high on a tall, leaning vane reminiscent of the vertical stabilizer on supersonic atmosphere craft. Every surface is anodized a Stygian