Free Passage at Arms by Glen Cook Page A

coming, Lieutenant. Made you a place. Ship’s laundry.”
    The ship’s laundry is a sink-and-drainboard arrangement that doubles as a wash basin and sick bay operating table. Bradley has stretched an extra hammock in the clear space overhead. I up my estimate of the man. This is his first mission. He knows little more about the ship than I, yet he has identified a problem and taken corrective action.
    “I won’t get much sleep here.” Under ship’s gravity the nadir of the hammock should dip into the sink.
    “Maybe not. It’s the only basin aboard. But consider the bright side. You won’t have to share with anyone else.”
    “I’m tempted to throw a tantrum. Only I think I’d get damned unpopular damned fast, throwing my commission around.” A couple of Bradley’s men are watching me with stony faces, waiting for my reaction.
    “True.” He’s begun whispering. “The Old Man says seeing how much the new officers will take is their favorite sport.”
    “You and me against the universe, then. Thanks. If there’s a next time, I’ll know better than to play tourist.”
    “It’s your time outside the Service, I guess. Dulled your instincts. I caught on right away.”
    He’s skirting the edge of a painful subject. I beat the wolf down and reply, “The instincts better come back fast. I don’t want to be the poor relation at the feast forever.”
    The watchers are gone. I’ve passed the first test.
    “The Old Man says first impressions are critical. Half of us are outsiders.”
    “We’ll all know each other better than we want before this’s over.”
    “Hey, Lieutenant,” someone shouts through the hatch to Weapons. “The Old Man wants you on the Oh-one.”
    O-l. That’s Operations. O-2 is Weapons. And so forth.
    I dump my gear into my hammock and hand-over-hand up hooks welded to the keel. When we shift to operational mode, they will become hangers for slinging hammocks and stowing duffel bags.
    Getting through the hatches is miserable in parasite mode, even under minimal gravity. The hatches are against the hull, not near the keel. You have to monkey over on bars welded to the overhead. They’ll become a ladder to the keel when the vessel goes operational.
    Once at the hatch I have to hoist myself through, then repeat the process getting to Operations.
    “The man who designed this monster ought to be impaled.”
    “An oft-heard suggestion,” Yanevich says. “But the son of a bitch has gone over to the other firm.”
    “What?”
    He smiles at my expression. “That’s why we’re all so gung ho. Didn’t you know? We can’t lay hands on the bastard till we win the war. Only then we’ll have to fight over who gets to do what to him first. You want your shot, you’d better put in your paperwork now. Just don’t count on too much being left when your chit comes up.”
    “There’s got to be a better setup.”
    “No doubt. Actually, it’s a computer design. They say the programmers forgot to tell the idiot box there’d be people aboard.”
    “The Commander sent for me.”
    “Not a command performance. Just so you can watch departure if you want. We’re moving now.” He nods toward the cabin. “The Old Man is up there. Here. Take my screen. It’s on forward camera. This’ll do as your duty and battle station for now.”
    “Not much to see.” The bearing and tilt on the camera tell me nothing. Forward. It should be staring at the wall of the wetdock. Instead, the screen shows me an arc of darkness and only a small amount of wall. The lighting seems brilliant by contrast with the darkness.
    High on the wall, at the edge of the black arc, a tiny figure in EVA gear is semaphoring its arms. I wonder what the hell he or she is up to. I’ll probably never know. One of the mysteries of TerVeen.
    A martial salvo from French horns blares through the compartment. The Old Man shouts, “Turn that crap down!” The march dwindles till it’s barely audible.
    Damn! How imperceptive can one man