Free Passage at Arms by Glen Cook Page B

departure position.
    Now a pair of big doors in front of the mother begins sliding away into the rock of the asteroid.
    These are the inner doors, the redundant doors, and they are much thicker that those that have closed behind her. Great titanium slabs, they're fifty meters thick. The doors they back up are even thicker. They're supposed to withstand the worst that can be thrown against them during a surprise attack. If they were breached, the air pressure in the 280 klicks of tunnel would blow ships and people out like pellets out of a scattergun.
    The inner doors are open. The outer jaws follow. The observer can peer down a kilometer of tunnel at a round black disk in which diamonds sparkle. Some seem to be winking and moving around, like fireflies. The tugs puff in earnest. The mother's motion becomes perceptible.
    A great long beast with donuts stuck to her flanks, moving slowly, slowly, while "Outward Bound" rings in the observer's ears. Great stuff. Dramatic stuff. The opening shots for a holo-show about the deathless heroes of Climber Fleet One. The mother's norm-thrusters begin to glow. Just warming up. She won't light off till there's no chance her nasty wake will blast back at her tunnelmates.
    The tugs are puffing furiously now. If the observer were to step aboard one, he would hear a constant roar, feel the rumble coming right up through the deckplates into his body. Mother ship's velocity is up to thirty centimeters per second.
    Thirty cps? Why, that's hardly a kilometer per hour. This ship can race from star to star in a few hundred thousand blinks of an eye.
    The tugs stop thrusting except when the mother's main astrogational computers signal that she's drifting off the cen-terline of the tunnel. A little puff here, a little one there, and she keeps sliding along, very, very slowly. They'll play "Outward Bound" a dozen times before her nose breaks the final ragged circle and peeps cautiously into her native element. Groundhog coming up for a look around.
    The tugs let go. They have thrusters on both ends. They simply throw it into reverse and scamper back up the tunnel like a pack of fugitive mice. The big doors begin to close.
    The mother slides on into the night, like an infant entering the world. She hasn't actually put weigh on but has taken it off. She's coming out the rear end of TerVeen, relative to the asteroid's orbit around Canaan. The difference in orbital velocities is small, but soon she'll drift off the line of TerVeen's orbit.
    Before she does, word will come from Control telling her the great doors are sealed. Her thrusters will come to life, burning against the night, blazing off the dull, knobby surface of TerVeen.
    She'll gain velocity. And up along her flanks will gather the lean black shapes of her friends, the attack destroyers. The French horns may toot a final hurrah for those who'll never return.
    Outward bound.
    What am I doing here? The arc of darkness has devoured the last of the light. And there're creatures hidden in it, somewhere, eager to end my tale.
    "No sweat, sir," my neighbor informs me. "Getting to the patrol zone is a milk run. They haven't hit a mother yet."
    That record doesn't impress me. There's a first time for everything, and my luck hasn't been hot for several years. The butterflies stampeding in my stomach are trying to tell me something.
    "The Lord is with us, sir. Recall the psalm, if you will. 'Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.'"
    At the moment I could use a comforting rod and staff. Anything. A little superstition doesn't hurt once in a while does it? "Huh?"
    "Meow?"
    Something is rubbing against my shins. I push back from the console..."Oh, shit. What the fuck? A
    goddamned cat?"
    I'm surprised at myself. I must be more on edge than I'm willing to admit. I don't usually have a garbage mouth.
    "That's Fleet Admiral Minh-Tannian," my neighbor says. "Pure-blood, registered alley cat. A
    pedigree a millimeter long." He