Chief Nicastro may be our coward, simply by circumstance. He's scared to death of this mission. I suspect it would be that way for any man making his final patrol. I have a touch of it myself.

When there's nothing but another mission ahead, a man can look forward to nothing but another mission. He knows better than to plan the rest of his life. The short-time shakes set in during the magical final run. There's a chance there might be a tomorrow. You don't want to jinx it by thinking about it. And you can't help thinking.

There are seven more men in Ops: Laramie, Berberian, Brown, Scarlatella, Canzoneri, Picraux, and Zia. They're less obvious, less flamboyant, less loud, either by nature or because this is their first patrol aboard the Climber.

"Got to piss, better do it now," Yanevich says. "Compartment hatches seal at GQ."

The hatches are massive, one on each side of the double intercompartmental bulkhead. They'll keep a breach from claiming the entire ship. Each compartment is its own lifeboat. The Can is held together by explosive bolts. We can blow the four sections out of the hole in the donut if we have to.

I want to ask about that. Has anyone ever actually tried it? Is there any point? I can't see it.

Again the First Watch Officer has disappeared before I can formulate my questions.

How do they cut the keel? The keel is a single piece of steel running the height of the Can. Some way has to exist to sever it between compartments. And how do we drift apart? There has to be a thruster to drive the compartments away from the doomed donut.

I can see that, I think. There's a big, wide lump around the keel in the bulkhead facing Weapons.

A lot of tubing runs into it from small tanks slung around the compartment. Conduit too. Must be a small chemical thruster, just enough to kick the compartment away. Five or ten seconds of burn time, just a pittance of delta-v...

The Tachyon-Detection Technician volunteers, "I was in Sixty-seven Dee." His attitude says that means something. Maybe it does to veteran Climber people. It rings no bells with me. Maybe if he told me her Commander's name-----A few successful patrols can make a Commander famous. The Old Man is one of the current crop. No one knows from hull numbers. A ship has to be big and have a name before it becomes famous. I'd barely heard of the Eight Ball before reaching TerVeen. But I know Carolingian and Marseilles and Honan well, and all they ever did was get skragged. Dramatically, of course. Very damned dramatically, with the holonets beating the drums all the while.

Fisherman wants priming. He's like a brand-new acquaintance who hands you a holo of the kids, then, embarrassed by his own temerity, bites his lips and awaits your comment. "What happened?"

"Not that great a story, I guess." He manages to look both sorry he's spoken and mildly disappointed in me. Sixty-seven Dee must be one of the legends of the Fleet.

"I don't know. I haven't heard it."

Junghaus doesn't look old enough to be a veteran. He can't be more than nineteen. Just a pimply- faced, confused kid who looks two sizes too small for his uniform. Yet he has four little red mission stars tattooed on the back of his left hand, over the knuckles at the roots of each finger. "Catch a fistful of stars..." They'll creep along the next rank 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 hi 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 hi 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 thoroughness that he muffs the whole.

The plug-ups will drift aimlessly throughout the patrol, and will soon fade into the background environment. No one will think about them unless the hull is breached. Then our lives could depend on them. They'll rush to the hole, carried by the escaping atmosphere. If the breach is small, they'll break trying to get through. A quick-setting, oxygen-sensitive goo coats their insides.

The cat scrambles after the nearest ball. He bats it around. It survives his attentions. He pretends a towering indifference.

He's a master of that talent of the feline breed, of adopting a regal dignity in the face of failure, just in case somebody is watching.

Breaches too big for the plug-ups probably wouldn't matter. We would be dead before we noticed them.

Satisfied with the hatch, Yanevich rises and leans past me to thumb a switch. "Ship's Services, First Watch Officer. Commence conversion to patrol atmosphere."

The ship is filled with the TerVeen mixture, which is nominal planetary. Ship's atmosphere will be pure oxygen at twenty percent of normal pressure. That reduces hull stress and potential leakage and eliminates useless mass. Low-pressure oxygen is standard Fleet atmosphere.

The convenience has its drawbacks. Care to avoid fires is needed.

That madman, the Commander, brought a pipe and tobacco. Will he actually smoke? That's against regs. But so is a ship's cat.

"Radar, you have anyone from the other firm?"

"Nothing immediate, sir."

That's a relief. I won't get my head kicked hi during the next five minutes.

Why does Yanevich bother? In parasite mode the vessel's only usable weapon is mat silly magnetic cannon.

Out of nowhere, Junghaus says, "The Lord carried us through. He stands by the Faithful." It takes me a moment to realize that he's returned to our earlier conversation.

A trial shot, I suppose. To see how I react. It'll build to full-scale proselytization if I don't stop it now. "Maybe. But it seems to be he spends a lot of time buddying up with the other team."