Fleet of the Damned (Sten #4). Allan Cole

him. “What the clot are you doing?”

      “I’m sending kisses to the clotting Emperor,” Sten grunted. “Gimme a hand.”

      “Come on, Sten! You’re wasting time.”

      “One time. Listen up, Grunt. We’re gonna block and tackle this cable and yank that beam out.”

      “Sten, I’m not sure that is going to work. Why don’t we talk about it?”

      “Because we got five minutes.”

      “Right! We don’t want to do anything wrong, do we?”

      And Sten got it.

      “Nope.”

      His hand knifed out, palm up. Sten’s hands could kill, maim, or coldcock any being known to the Imperial martial arts.

      The knife hand sliced against Bishop’s neck, just below his ear. Bishop dropped like a sack of sand. “Shaddup,” Sten commanded against the shout of surprise. “Get this clottin’ cable back around and then we have to pull like hell. Bishop was a sabotage factor. I saw Mason give him orders. Come on, people. We got to get out of this place!”

      The block-and-tackled pulley yanked the beam free, and the team had its supplies out of the storage room and were clear of the “ship” a good minute before time ran out.

      Bishop, after recovering consciousness, told Sten he was right—Mason had told him to be a saboteur.

      Ferrari grudged that they were one of the few teams to successfully complete the test in five years.

      GRADE: OUTSTANDING.

      CHAPTER NINE

      STEN WAS HAVING problems. It wasn’t that he was quite a mathematical idiot—no one in the Imperial Forces above spear-carrier second class was—but he did not have the instinctive understanding of numbers that he did, for example, of objects. Nor could he, in the navigational basic courses Phase One shoved at them, translate numbers into the reality of ships or planets.

      And so he got coaching.

      From Victoria, there was no problem, since everyone knew that she was the only guaranteed graduate.

      But Bishop?

      Math geniuses are supposed to be short and skinny, talk in high voices, and have surgically corrected optics.

      So much for stereotypes, Sten thought glumly as Bishop’s thick fingers tabbed at computer keys, touched numbers on the screen, and, with the precision and patience of a pedant, tried to help Sten realize that pure numbers more exactly described a universe than even a picture or words, no matter how poetically or oddly chosen.

      Sten looked at the screen again and found no translation.”Clottin’ hell,” Bishop grunted to Victoria. “Get the fire ax. Something’s got to get through to him.”Victoria found the solution. It took less than one evening to crosspatch Sten’s mini-holoprocessor into the computer. When he input numbers, the holoprocessor produced a tiny three-dimensional star-map.

      Eventually, after many many problems, Sten glimmered toward an understanding.

      His grade:

      MATHEMATICAL PERCEPTIONS: NEED IMPROVEMENT.

      * * * *

      For some unknown reason, almost every school Sten had been punted into tested for gravitation sensitivity. Sten could understand why it would be necessary to know how many gees someone could withstand or how many times one could alter the direction of a field before the subject threw up—but once that was found out, why was retesting necessary?

      Sten knew that he personally could function as a soldier, without benefit of a gravsuit, at up to 3.6 E-gravs. He could work, seated, under a continuous 11.6 E-gravs. He would black out under a brief force of 76.1 E-gravs or a nearly instantaneous shock of 103 E-gravs.

      All this was in his medfiche.

      So why retest?

      Sten decided that it was just part of the applied sadism that every school he had attended, back to the factory world of Vulcan, had put him through.

      But of all the test methods he hated, a centrifuge was the worst. His brain knew that there was no way his body could tell it was being spun in a circle to produce gravitic acceleration. But his body said “bet me” and heaved.

      Of course Phase One used a centrifuge.

      Sten curled a lip at the stainless steel machinery craning above him in the huge room.

      “You look worried, Candidate Sten.” It was Mason.

      Sten hit the exaggerated position that the IPs called attention. “Nossir. Not worried, sir.”

      “Are you scared, Candidate?”

      Great roaring clichés. Sten wished that Alex was with him. He knew the chubby heavy-worlder would have found a response—probably smacking Mason.

      Sten remembered, however, that Kilgour had already gone through flight school. Since Sten hadn’t heard anything, he assumed that Alex had graduated—without killing Mason.

      Sten decided that Kilgour must have been sent to another Phase One than this one, made a noncommittal reply to Mason, and clambered up the steps into one of the centrifuge’s capsules.

      * * * *

      Later that night, Sten’s stomach had reseated itself enough to feel mild hunger.

      He left his room, still feeling most tottery, and went for the rec room. One of the food machines would, no doubt, have something resembling thin gruel.

      Sh’aarl’t, Bishop, and Lotor sat at one of the game tables in complete silence. Sten took his full cup from the slot and sat down beside them. Lotor gave him the news.

      “They washed Victoria today.”

      Sten jumped, and the soup splashed, unheeded, in his lap.

      Bishop answered the unasked question. “She failed the gee-test.”

      “No way,” Sten said. “She was a clotting gymnast. A dancer.”

      “Evidently,” Sh’aarl’t said, “vertigo is not uncommon—even in athletes.”

      “How many gees?”

      “Twelve point something,” Bishop said.

      “Clot,” Sten swore. Even mild combat maneuvers in a ship with the McLean generators shut down could pull more than that.

      He realized that all of them spoke of Victoria in the past tense. Phase One may have been sadistic in some ways, but when a candidate was disqualified, he was immediately removed. Sten was a little surprised that the three had any idea at all on what had flunked the woman.

      He also realized that with Victoria, their talisman for possible graduation to the next phase, gone, none of them felt any hope of making it.

      CHAPTER TEN

      THE BULLETIN DISPLAY in the barracks’ lobby was known, not inappropriately, as “The Tablet of Doom.” Sten read the latest directive as it flashed for his attention: 1600 hours, this day, all candidates were directed to assemble in the central quadrangle. He wondered what new form of mass torment the IPs had devised. There were, after all, only a few days left in Phase One, and there were still survivors in the program, including Sh’aarl’t, Bishop, and Lotor. Then he caught the kicker.

      DRESS UNIFORM.

      Sten was in a world of trouble. He had been quite correct hiding his ribbons upon entering the school. He noticed that those with more decorations or rank than the IPs felt appropriate seemed to get far more than their share of attention and harassment. Thus far, in spite of Mason’s evident personal hatred, Sten had managed to run somewhat silent and somewhat deep.

      Oh, well. All good things seize their bearings eventually.

      “My, don’t