Passage at Arms Read Online Free PDF Page A

carcass about ready for the retail butcher. What sort of creature feeds on roasts off the flanks of attack destroyers?
    Gnatlike clouds of little gas-jet tugs nudge machinery and hull sections here and there. How the devil do they keep track of what they’re doing? Why don’t they get mixed up and start shoving destroyer parts into Climbers?
    A Climber appears. It looks clean. Very little micrometeorite scoring, even. “Doesn’t look like there’s anything wrong with that one.”
    “Those are the tricky bastards,” the Old Man muses. I assume he’ll award me another cautionary tale. Instead, he resumes staring straight ahead, playing the vehicle’s controls, leaving the talking to Westhause.
    “The critical heat-sensitive stuff gets replaced after every patrol. The laser weaponry, too. Takes too long to break it down and scan each part. Somebody back down the 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