Free Passage at Arms by Glen Cook Page B

be? We’re moving out. We’re under way already. Must have been for quite a while. That creeping arc of darkness is naked space. The mother is crawling out of TerVeen’s backassward alimentary canal. “They didn’t waste any time.”
    “Excuse me, sir?” The man on my left offers a questioning look. A Tachyon-Detection Specialist, I see.
    “Thinking out loud. Wondering what the devil I’m doing here.” I catch the strains of the horns. “Outward Bound,” I realize. I’ve never heard them sung, but I hear some idiot has put words to an ancient march, retitled it, and made it the official Climber battle hymn. Full of eagerness to be at the enemy. A nitwit’s delight.
    Someone in the inner circle reads my mind and breaks into song. “Outward Bound,” all right. I recognize the version I beard being sung by bunny hoppers in the ruins. From somewhere else an authoritative voice says, “Stow it, Rose.” This isn’t a voice I recognize. Someone I haven’t yet met.
    I close my eyes and try to imagine our departure as it would appear to an observer stationed on the wall of the great tunnel. The Climber people come hustling in, hours after the mothercrew has begun its preparations. They swarm. Soon the mother reports all Climbers manned and all hatches sealed and tested. Her people scamper over her body, releasing the holding stays, being careful not to snap them. Winches on the tunnel walls reel them in.
    Small space tugs drift out from pockets in the walls and grapple magnetically to pushing spars extending beyond the mother’s clinging children.
    Behind them, way behind them, a massive set of doors grinds closed. From the observer’s viewpoint they’re coming together like teeth in Brobdingnagian jaws. They meet with a subaudible thud that shakes the asteroid.
    Now another set of doors closes over the first. They snuggle right up tight against the others, but they’re coming in from left and right. Very little tunnel atmosphere will leak past them. Redundancy in all things is an axiom of military technology.
    There are several vessels caught in the bay with the departing mother. They have to cease outside work and button up. Their crews are cursing the departing ship for interrupting their routine. In a few days others will be cursing them.
    Now the great chamber fills with groans and whines. Huge vacuum pumps are sucking the atmosphere from the tunnel. A lot will be lost anyway, but every tonne saved is a tonne that won’t have to be lifted from Canaan.
    The noise of the compressors changes and dwindles as the gas pressure falls. Out in the middle of the tunnel, the tugs slow the evacuation process by using little puffs of compressed gas to move the mother up to final 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