“Yeah, but I gotta carry this damn thing, and it’s ’cause a you.” Toby twisted his neck uncomfortably at the cowling that wrapped around his shoulders, snug against his helmet ring.
“You’ll carry your designated ’quipment into battle,” Killeen said stiffly.
“This’ll just slow me down!”
“It will give us a good view of all the action around and in front of you. Someone has to carry the area-survey eye.” Killeen used the connective words of and to, which were absent in ordinary Family speech, to lend distance and Cap’nly reserve.
It failed to work with Toby. “You got me saddled with this, right?”
“Lieutenant Cermo chooses gear.”
Toby sneered. “He knew just what you wanted.”
“Cermo assigns jobs, picks the most able,” Killeen said tightly. “I’m proud that he deemed my son capable of such an important job.”
“Dad, I’ll be a slow target with this rig on, crawlin’ ’round down there. I’ll get pushed back to the second skirmish line.”
“Damn right. I’ll want views from the second line, not the first.”
“That’s not fair! I want—”
“You’ll get back in rank or else you won’t set boot outside,” Killeen said sharply.
Toby opened his mouth to protest and the Cap’n spat back, “Now!”
Toby shrugged elaborately and marched stiffly back to his position in the third left-flank squad. He stood beside Besen, the dark-eyed young woman; Killeen often saw them together these days. True, they served in the same squad, but that probably concealed more than it explained.
Killeen hoped the Family had not overheard them and thought they were just bantering casually. Somehow, given his inability to conceal his emotions where his son was concerned, he doubted that. As if to confirm this, Besen cocked an eyebrow at Toby. Killeen realized that he and Toby must have been quite obvious to everyone in the large room.
He suppressed an irritated grimace and nodded curtly to Cermo. The inspection began. Killeen walked down the ranks, Lieutenants Cermo, Jocelyn, and Shibo at one pace behind. He scanned each crewmember closely. Faces well remembered, faces which had grown healthier with rest and better food. But also faces that had time to see that the old ways of Family fidelity and organization did not suit well the running of a true starship. Faces that doubtless hatched half-thought-through plans to better themselves by bending Family and crew discipline.
With the press of deadly necessity gone, the sprouts of individual ambition grew in fertile soil. Would they fare well in battle after such indolence? A host of tiny impressions collected in Killeen’s mind. He would digest them later, during his solitary walks on the hull, to form the raw and instinctive material for furthering the efficiency of the ship—if they ever again flew the Argo. Yet the ritual was worthy in and of itself.
The Family had added thirty-two newborn on the voyage. Mothers tended the young at the rear of the domed assembly room. Killeen wondered if those children would ever stride the soil of the world far below, proud and free. Or, indeed, of any world at all.
It was time. Before the action to come, it would be best to remind them of who they were. He began to read the ancient Family Rites.
His Ling Aspect had provided the text from ancient times. The planet-bound Citadels of Snowglade had neglected the spacefaring rites. But here they fitted perfectly.
It was a code black and stern, full of duty and tradition and larded throughout with dire warnings of the punishment which would befall any Family member who transgressed it.
Many of the arcane passages made no sense to Killeen at all. He read one such without letting the slightest suggestion of a frown of incomprehension cross his brow. “No Family shall countertack or polyintegrate more than two separable genetic indices in any one birthing, using artificial means. Penalty for this is expulsion of both parents and child for the lifetime of the engendered child.”
Now what did polyintegrate mean? And how could anyone tinker with the traits of his or her children-to-be? True, Killeen had heard whispered tales of ancient crafts like that. They were buried in the mists of mankind’s origins in the Great Times. This passage indirectly vouched for the ancient origin of the Families, which was, he supposed, reassuring. The human vector had been set long ago, and its opposition to the mechs was a truth which emerged from time immemorial.
Something about the droning passages, saddled with legalisms and prickly with techtenns, caught and held their attention. The Family stood stiffly with solemn, set faces. As Killeen launched into the long, rolling sentences detailing the depredations of the mechs, and the valiant efforts every Family member was expected to take to oppose them, they stirred. A boy in the front row, Loren, had eyes that seemed to fill his face. Tears welled in those eyes and trickled down, unnoticed by the boy. He had a faraway look, perhaps dreaming of classic battles and brave victories that were to be his.
In a sudden bitter gust Killeen wondered if these old, lofty sentiments would armor Loren against mech shots. He had seen more than one boy blown to red jelly—or worse, his mind sucked of self, the once-vivid eyes blank and empty.
This sudden lurch of emotion did not make him miss a syllable of the reciting. He went on to the finish, projecting the stern moral tones that were right and effective, even though within him doubts fought and sputtered.
Now for the added touch:
“In furtherance of these high aims I have a new name to bestow. Tradition grants Cap’ns the right to name a fresh-found star system. I have already seized this right. The blazing opportunity before us is Abraham’s Star.”
They cheered. Abraham’s legend endured still.
“To the crew of a ship falls the time-honored right to name a discovered world. Your council has picked one hallowed and vibrant—New Bishop.”
He finished and, following tradition, the Family shouted “Yeasay! Yeasay! Yeasay!” and broke into a raucous symphony of howls and calls. A few, thinking of the battle ahead, indulged in rude obscenities. Some were ingeniously impossible, describing acts of unlikely sexual passion between mechs of astounding geometries.
Killeen stepped back, his mind coolly distant from the effect he had sought. Humans could not press the attack without heightened adrenaline and hormone-driven zest. Mechs could simply switch on, but humans who would risk their lives needed a powerful cocktail lacing their veins.
Killeen realized now that in these last years he had come to think of the Cap’ncy as a welter of endless detail. To be a good shipman meant mastering the countless minute but important elements of lifezone regulation, of pressures and flows, servos and engines. Only the memories of the Aspects had gotten him and his crew through the blizzard of petty mysteries that allowed life to survive this harshest of all realms.
But now he felt returning his older, original sense of what a Cap’n needed. Bold initiative, laced with sober calculation. Ingenuity and quickness. Moral and physical courage, both. Tactful handling of Family who were in ship’s terms underlings, but in the full compass of life were the dearest people he would ever know.
Those were the crucial qualities. He only hoped he had some of them. So much depended on him, and he had only his memories of Fanny and of Abraham—whose wind-worn face swam before him now, split by a fatherly grin—to guide him.
His personal sensory net resounded with pinpricks. Timing was essential now, and he wanted the mech acoustic bugs—if any—to register human zest and celebration, and so be unprepared for what came next.
“Cap’n!” Cermo called.
As the Family dissolved into chattering knots, Killeen turned to Cermo and from the corner of his eye caught a hint of movement upon the immense perspectives outside.
They were moving swift and sure toward the central axis. Fresh energies surged on the intricate disk floor below them. It was as though the activity he glimpsed took place beneath a tossing ocean, and he could catch only a flickering of a vastly larger plan beneath the waves. Oblong forms shot swiftly among bulky pods. Machines whirled on rails, angularities moved like schools of darting fish—yet it all had the appearance of orderly iabor, carried out beneath the surging bands of luminescence.
Bass notes rolled through the deck. Metal rang.
