"No hand weapons," he said at last, reluctantly. "But I hope that we shall be able to capture a few, and that we shall be able to duplicate them in the ship’s workshop. Meanwhile, I’d like your Marines to be experts in unarmed combat—both suited and unsuited."
"And expert knife fighters," added Sonya.
"Boarding axes and cutlasses," contributed the Admiral, not without relish.
"Yes, sir," agreed Grimes. "Boarding axes and cutlasses."
"I suggest, Commodore," said Hennessey, "that you do a course at the Personal Combat Center at Lorn Base."
"I don’t think there will be time, sir," said Grimes hopefully.
"There will be, Commodore. The lead sheathing and the anti-matter sphere cannot be installed in five minutes. And there are weapons to be repaired and renewed."
"There will be time," said Sonya.
Grimes sighed. He had been in one or two minor actions in his youth, but they had been so… impersonal. It was the enemy ship that you were out to get, and the fact that a large proportion of her crew was liable to die with her was something that you glossed over. You did not see the dreadful damage that your missiles and beams did to the fragile flesh and blood mechanisms that were human beings. Or if you did see it—a hard frozen corpse is not the same as one still warm, still pumping blood from severed arteries, still twitching in a ghastly semblance to life.
"There will be time, Commodore," repeated the Admiral.
"There will be time," repeated Sonya.
"And what about you, Mrs. Grimes?" asked Hennessey unkindly.
"You forget, sir, that in my branch of the Federation’s service we are taught how to kill or maim with whatever is to hand any and every life form with which we may come into contact."
"Then I will arrange for the Commodore’s course," Hennessey told her.
It was, for Grimes, a grueling three weeks. He was fit enough, but he was not as hard as he might have been. Even wearing protective armor he emerged from every bout with the Sergeant Instructor badly bruised and battered. And he did not like knives, although he attained fair skill with them as a throwing weapon. He disliked cutlasses even more. And the boarding axes, with their pike heads, he detested.
And then, quite suddenly, it came to him. The Instructor had given him a bad time, as usual, and had then called a break. Grimes stood there, sagging in his armor, using the shaft of his axe as a staff upon which to lean. He was aching and he was itching inside his protective clothing, and his copious perspiration was making every abrasion on his skin smart painfully.
Without warning the Instructor kicked Grimes' support away with a booted foot and then, as the Commodore sprawled on the hard ground, raised his own axe for the simulated kill. Although a red haze clouded his vision, Grimes rolled out of the path of the descending blade, heard the blunted edge thud into the dirt a fraction of an inch from his helmeted head. He was on his feet then, moving with an agility that he had never dreamed that he possessed, he was on his feet, crouching and his pike head thrusting viciously at the Instructor’s crotch. The man squealed as the blow connected; even the heavy cod piece could not save him from severe pain. He squealed, but brought his own axe around in a sweeping, deadly arc. Grimes parried, blade edge to shaft, to such good effect that the lethal head of the other’s weapon was broken off, clattering to the ground many feet away. He parried and followed through, his blade clanging on the Instructor’s shoulder armor. Yet another blow, this time to the man’s broad back, and he was down like a felled ox.
Slowly the red haze cleared from the commodore’s vision as he stood there. Slowly he lowered his axe, and as he did so he realized that the Instructor had rolled over, was lying there, laughing up at him, was saying, "Easy, sir. Easy. You’re not supposed to kill me, sir. Or to ruin my matrimonial prospects."
"I’m sorry, Sergeant," Grimes said stiffly. "But that was a dirty trick you played."
"It was meant to be dirty, sir. Never trust nobody—that’s Lesson One."
"And Lesson Two, Sergeant?"
"You’ve learned that too, sir. You gotta hate. You officers are all the same—you don’t really hate the poor cows at the other end of the trajectory when you press a firing button. But in this sort of fighting you gotta hate."
"I think I see, Sergeant," said Grimes.
But he was not sorry when he was able to return to his real business—to see Freedom (or Destroyer) readied for her expedition into the Unknown.
XI
Freedom was commissioned as a cruiser of the Navy of the Rim Worlds Confederacy, but the winged wheel of the Rim Worlds had not replaced the embossed lettering of her original name or the crude, black-painted characters that had partially obscured it. Freedom was manned by spacemen and spacewomen of the Reserve and a company of Marines. But there was no display of gold braid and brass buttons—marks of rank and departmental insignia had been daubed on the bare skin of wrists and upper arms and shoulders in an indelible vegetable dye. Apart from this crude attempt at uniform, the ship’s complement was attired in scanty, none too clean rags. The men were shaggily bearded, the roughly hacked hair of the women was unkempt. All of them bore unsightly cicatrices on their bodies—but these were the result of plastic surgery, not of ill-treatment.
Outwardly, Freedom was just as she had been when she suddenly materialized in her suicidal orbit off Lorn. Internally, however, there had been changes made. On the side that had been scarred by the blast, the weapons—the laser projectors and the missile launchers—had been repaired, although this had been done so as not to be apparent to an external observer. In a hitherto empty storeroom just forward of the enginerooms the sphere of anti-matter had been installed—the big ball of anti-iron, and the powerful magnets that held it in place inside its neutronium casing. And within the shell plating was the thick lead sheathing that would protect the ship’s personnel from lethal radiation when the nuclear device was exploded, the bomb that, Grimes hoped, would blow the vessel back to where she had come from. (The physicists had assured him that the odds on this happening were seven to five, and that the odds on the ship’s finding herself in a habitable universe were almost astronomical.)
There was one more change insofar as the internal fittings were concerned, and it was a very important one. The tissue culture vats now contained pork, and not human flesh. "After all," Grimes had said to a Biologist who was insisting upon absolute verisimilitude, "there’s not all that much difference between pig and long pig…"
The man had gone all technical on him, and the Commodore had snapped, "Pirates we may have to become, but not cannibals!"
But even pirates, thought Grimes, surveying the officers in his control room, would be dressier than this mob. He was glad that he had insisted upon the painted badges of rank—the beards made his male officers hard to recognize. With the female ones it was not so bad, although other features (like the men, the women wore only breech clouts) tended to distract attention from their faces.
Clothes certainly make the man, the Commodore admitted wryly to himself And the women—although this very undress uniform suits Sonya well enough, even though her hair-do does look as though she’s been dragged through a hedge backwards. And it felt all wrong for him to be sitting in the chair of command, the seat of the mighty, without the broad gold stripes on his epaulettes (and without the epaulettes themselves, and without a shirt to mount them on) and without the golden comets encrusting the peak of his cap. But the ragged, indigo band encircling each hairy wrist would have to do, just as the coarse, burlap kilt would have to substitute for the tailored, sharply creased shorts that were his normal shipboard wear.