"Wonder if they'll ever get her back up." The First Watch! Officer commiserates with fellow professionals.

I stumble several times clambering through the ruins. The boom must have scrambled my equilibrium.

The entrance to the Pits is well hidden. It's just another shadow among the piles, a man-sized hole leading into one of war's middens. The rubble isn't camouflage. Guards in full combat gear loaf inside, waiting to clear new debris when the last dropship finishes her run, hoping there'll be no work to do.

We trudge through the poorly lit halls of a deep subbase-j ment. Below them lie the Pits, a mix of limestone cavern and wartime construction far beneath the old city. We have to walk down four long, dead escalators before we find one still working. The constant pounding takes its toll. A series of escalators carries us another three hundred meters into Canaan's skin.

My duffel, all my worldly possessions, is stuffed into one canvas bag. It masses exactly twenty- five kilos. I had to moan and whine and beg to get the extra ten for cameras and notebooks. The crew-including the Old Man-are allowed only fifteen.

The last escalator dumps us on a catwalk overlooking a cavern vaster than any dozen stadia.

"This is chamber six," Westhause says. "They call it the I Big House. There are ten all told, and two more being excavated."

The place is as warm with frenetic activity. There are people everywhere, although most of them are doing nothing. The majority are sleeping, despite the industrial din. Housing remains a low priority in the war effort.

"I thought Luna Command was crowded."

"Almost a million people down here. They can't get them to move to the country."

Half a hundred production and packaging lines chug along below us. Their operators work on a dozen tiers of steel grate. The cavern is one vast, insanely huge jungle gym, or perhaps the nest of a species of technological ant. The rattle, clatter, and clang are as dense as the ringing round the anvils of hell. Maybe it was in a place like this that the dwarfs of Norse mythology hammered out their magical weapons and armor.

Jury-rigged from salvaged machinery, ages obsolete, the plant is the least sophisticated one I've ever seen. Canaan became a fortress world by circumstance, not design. It suffered from a malady known as strategic location. It still hasn't gotten the hang of the stronghold business.

"They make small metal and plastic parts here," Westhause explains. "Machinedparts, extrusion moldings, castings. Some microchip assemblies. Stuff that can't be manufactured on TerVeen."

"This way," the Commander says. "We're running late. No time for sight-seeing."

The balcony enters a tunnel. The tunnel leads toward the sea, if I have my bearings. It debouches in a smaller, quieter cavern. "Red tape city," Westhause says. The natives apparently don't mind the epithet. There's a big new sign proclaiming:

WELCOME TO.

RED TAPE CITY.

PLEASE DO NOT.

EAT THE NATIVES.

There's a list of department titles, each with its pointing arrow. The Commander heads toward Outbound Personnel Processing.

Westhause says, "The caverns you didn't see are mainly warehouses, or lifter repair and assembly, or loading facilities. Have to replace our losses." He grins. Why do I get the feeling he's setting me up? "The next phase is the dangerous one. No defenses on a lifter but energy screens.

Can't even dodge. Shoots out of the silo like a bullet, right to TerVeen. The other firm always takes a couple potshots."

"Then why have planetside leave? Why not stay on TerVeen?" The shuttling to and fro claims lives.

It makes no military sense.

"Remember how crazy the Pregnant Dragon was? And that place was just for officers. TerVeen isn't big enough to take that from three or four squadrons. It's psychological. After a patrol people need room to wind down."

'To get rid of soul pollution?"

"You religious? You'll get along with Fisherman, sure."

"No, I'm not." Who is, these days?

The check-in procedure is pleasantly abbreviated. The woman in charge is puzzled by me. She putzes through my orders, points with her pen. I follow the others toward our launch silo where a crowd of men and women are waiting to board the lifter. The presence of officers does nothing to soften the exchange of insults and frank propositions.

The lifter is a dismal thing. One of the old, small ones. The Citron Four type Westhause wants scrubbed. The passenger compartment is starkly functional. It contains nothing but a bio-support system and a hundred acceleration cocoons, each hanging like a sausage in some weird smoking frame, or a new variety of banana that loops between stalks. I prefer couches myself, but that luxury is not to be found aboard a troop transport.

"Go-powered coffin," the Commander says. "That's what ground people call the Citron Four."

"Shitron Four," Yanevich says.

Westhause explains. Explaining seems to be his purpose in life. Or maybe I'm the only man he knows who listens, and he's cashing in while his chips are hot. "Planetary Defense gives all the cover they can, but losses still run one percent. They get their share of personnel lifters. Some months we lose more people here than on patrol."

I consider the obsolete bio-support system, glance at the fitting they implanted in my forearm back in Academy, a thousand years ago. Can this antique really keep my system cleansed and healthy?

"You and the support system make prayer look attractive."

The Commander chuckles. "The Big Man wouldn't be listening. Why should he worry about a gimp- legged war correspondent making a scat fly from one pimple on the universe's ass to another? He's got a big crapshoot going on over in the Sombrero."

"Thanks."

"You asked for it."

"One of these days I'll learn to keep my balls from overloading my brain."

For the others the launch is routine. Even the first mission people have been up this ladder before, during training. They jack in and turn off. I live out several little eternities. It doesn't get any easier when our pilot says, "We punched up through a dropship pair, boys and girls. Should have seen them tap dancing to get out of the way."

My laugh must sound crazy. A dozen nearby cocoons twist. Disembodied faces give me strange, almost compassionate looks. Then their eyes begin closing. What's happening?

The bio-support system, into which we have jacked for the journey, is slipping us mickeys.

Curious. Coming in to Canaan I didn't need a thing.

My lights go out.

I have trouble understanding these people. They've reduced their language to euphemism and their lives to ritual. Their superstitions are marvelous. Their cant is unique. They are so silent and unresponsive that at first glance they appear insensitive.

The opposite is true. The peculiar nature of their service oversensitizes them. They refuse to show it. They are afraid to do so because caring opens chinks in the armor they have forged so their selves can survive.

The boomer drop was rough for me. I could see and hear Death on my backtrail. It was personal.

Those droppers were after me.

Navy people seldom see the whites of enemy eyes. Line ships are toe to toe at 100,000 klicks.

These men are extending the psychology of distancing.

Climbers sometimes do go in to hand-to-hand range. Close enough to blaze away with small arms if anyone wanted to step outside.

The Climber lexicon is adapted to depersonification, and to de-emotionalizing contact with the enemy. Language often substitutes for physical distance.

These people never fight the enemy. Instead, they compete with the other firm, or any of several similar euphemisms. Common euphemisms for enemy are the boys upstairs (when on Canaan), the gentlemen of the other firm, the traveling salesmen (I suppose because they're going from world to world knocking on our doors), and a family of related notions. Nobody gets killed here. They leave the company, do any number of variations on a theme of early retirement, or borrow Hecate's Horse.