A Climber appears. It looks clean. Very little micrometeor-ite 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 ship always has an apprentice aboard."

"The more I hear, the more I wish I'd kept my mouth shut. This looks bleaker all the time."

"One mission? With the Old Man? With CliRon Six? Shit. A cakewalk." He's whispering. The Commander isn't supposed to hear. The set of the Old Man's shoulders says he has. "You can do it standing on your head. You're in the ace survivor squadron. We graduate more people than anybody. Hell, we'll be back groundside before the end of the month."

"Graduate?"

"Make ten. Guys make their ten with us. Hell, we're at the bay already. There she is. In the nine spot."

A whole, combat-ready Climber looks like an antique spoked automobile wheel and tire with a tenliter cylindrical canister where the hub belongs. Its exterior is fletched with antennae, humps, bumps, tubes, turrets, and one huge globe riding high on a tall, leaning vane reminiscent of the vertical stabilizer on supersonic atmosphere craft. Every surface is anodized a Stygian black.

There are twelve Climbers in the squadron. They cling to a larger vessel like a bunch of ticks.

The larger vessel looks like the frame and plumbing of a skyscraper after the walls and floors are removed. This is the mother, the command and control ship. She'll carry her chicks into the patrol sector and scatter them, then pick up any patrolling vessels that have expended their missiles and need rides home.

Though a Climber can space for half a year and few patrols last longer than a month, Command wants no range sacrificed getting to the zone, nor any stores expended. Stores are a Climber's biggest headache, her Achilles' heel. By their nature the vessels pack a lot of hardware into tightly limited space. There's little room left for crew or consumables.

"Awful lot of ornamentation," I say.

The Commander snorts. "And most of it useless. They're always tinkering. Always adding something.

Always upping our dead mass and cutting our comforts. Patrols are getting shorter and shorter, aren't they? This time it's a goddamned magnetic cannon that shoots ball bearings. Just a test run, they say. Shit. Six months from now every ship in the Fleet will have one. Can't think of a damned thing more useless, can you?"

He's steamed. He hasn't said this much, in one lump, since I arrived. I'd better prod while the prodding is good. "Maybe there's a use. Might find it in the mission orders. Something new to try."

"Shit." He folds up again. I know better than to go after him. That just makes him stay closed longer.

I study the mother and Climbers. Nine slot. That one will be my home.... For how long? Quick patrol? I hope so. These men would be hard to endure over a prolonged mission.

I stepped off the courier ship, dropped my gear, looked around. "This is a world at war?"

The courier had dropped us in the middle of a grassy plain that stretched unbroken to every horizon. That vista would have scared the shit out of someone less accustomed to open spaces. I confess to mild wobblies of my own. Service people don't spend much time out of doors.

In the near distance, a vast herd of beef cattle decided we f were harmless and resumed grazing.

Shadowing them were a few outriders. Kick out cattle and horsemen and there'd have been no evidence that this was an inhabited world.

"Cowboys? For Christ's sake." They weren't Wild West cowboys, but not that different, either. The nature of a profession often defines its garb and gear.

The courier joined me. "Picturesque, isn't it?"

"After that ride coming in... What the hell was all the jumping about?" A courier boat has no room for observers on its bridge. I'd gone through the approach blind.

"Destroyer. Old scow." He snapped his fingers and grinned. "Shook her like that."

"How come you're such a pale shade, then?" My shipmate of the past few weeks was a black subLieutenant whose main pleasure was the witty ethnic insult. He didn't argue that one. It'd been a tight squeeze.

"They'll be along any minute. Said they were sending somebody."

"Why out here? Why not straight into Turbeyville?" He hadn't revealed his landing plan beforehand.