Passage at Arms by Glen Cook

of knuckles now. A barbarous custom that’s scrupulously observed. One of the superstitions.
    Half the crew is under twenty. They’re the influx from Canaan. The older men are Regulars from the Fleet.
    The Old Man calls this the Children’s War. He seems to have forgotten his history. Most of them are.
    Fisherman thinks it over and shrugs. “We lost hull integrity in Engineering. We weren’t even in action. Just running a routine drill. Lost everybody in the compartment. Couldn’t get through to seal the breach. All the suits were stored there. Regulations. The rest of us had to gut out twenty-two days before we were picked up. The first two weeks weren’t that bad. Then the stored power started to go...”
    A shadow crosses his almost cherubic face. He doesn’t want to remember, and can’t help it. His effort to stay here with me produces a visible strain.
    “Engineering supposedly has better protection. Guess that’s where you can get killed the quickest.”
    He startles me, using the word killed. He looks calm enough, but that betrays his turmoil. He’s talking about the traumatic experience of his life.
    I try to envision the terror, inexorably fading into hopeless resignation, aboard a vessel that’s lost power and drives. Those who survived the initial disaster would depend entirely on outside intervention. And Climber paths seldom cross.
    Give Command this: They try to find out why when a vessel stops reporting.
    “You didn’t blow the bolts?” I’m curious about those bolts. They’re a facet of the ship wholly new to me, a nifty little surprise that must have all its secrets exposed.
    “Blow them? Out there? Why? They can find a ship. They usually know where to look. But a section... They almost never find them. You don’t break up unless the ship is going to blow.” His final sentence has the ring of an Eleventh Commandment.
    “But with the power dwindling and all that unmonitored CT hanging there...”
    “The E-system functioned. We made it. Don’t think we didn’t argue about separating.” He’s becoming defensive. I’d better change my style. You can’t grill them. You have to get them to volunteer. “Really, you can’t separate unless you know they’ll pick you up right away. Only Ship’s Services can last more than a few days after separation.”
    “That’s what I call gutting it out.” How did they take the pressure? With nothing to do but watch the power levels fall and bet on when the magnetics would go. “I don’t think I could handle it.”
    “Acceleration in ten seconds,” the relay speaker tells us. “Nine. Eight...”
    The acceleration alarm yammers. Everything is supposed to be secure. Don’t want anything rocketing around, smacking people. The hatch to Weapons clunks shut. Yanevich gets down on his stomach to examine the seal.
    The Old Man glares at the compartment clock. It says we’re nineteen hours and forty-seven minutes into Mission Day One. Down on Canaan, at the Pits, it’s the heart of night again. I search with my camera, and there’s the world, immense and glorious, and very much like every other human world. Lots of blue and lots of cloud, with the boundaries between land and sea hard to discern from here. How high is TerVeen? Not so high the planet has stopped being down. I could ask, but I really don’t care. I’m headed the other way, and an unpleasant little voice keeps reminding me that a third of all missions end in the patrol zone.
    “Where’re the plug-ups?” the Commander demands. “Damn it, where the hell are the plug-ups?”
    “Oh.” The man doing the relay talking hits a switch. Little gas-filled plastic balls swarm into the compartment. They range from golf-ball to tennis-ball size.
    “Enough. Enough,” Nicastro growls. “We’ve got to be able to see.”
    A new man, I decide. He’s heard about the Commander. He’s too anxious to look good. He’s concentrating too much. Doing his job one part at a time, with such