alarm bells filled the wardroom, screaming off the metal walls and filling the room with their flat, metallic clang. cressey leaped up, spilling the table with its checkerboard to the floor.

running to the suitlocker, he wondered if the bells had to be loud enough to jar a man's mind. the other on-duty men in the wardroom were running with him, and the corridor outside reverberated to the sound of pounding feet on metal. as his hand automatically manipulated the zippers on his g-suit, he noticed that his heart was beating furiously. at this point, cressey had never been able to tell whether he was frightened or not. as far as he could know from what his belly told him, there was no physical difference between plain old chicken fear and the body's normal preparation for action.

the men pounded 'up' the metal stairs to the hornet's nest on the satellite's rim. the hornet's nest. cressey thought suddenly how irrational it was. when a nickname stuck, it carried its aura to everything around it. he didn't know what live-wire journalist had first used the name hornets for the primary interceptor command, but now, inevitably, the launching racks were hornet's nests and the sleek missiles stingers.

he suddenly felt slightly nauseated. he hated this light-headed, slightly sick feeling, listening to the roaring of blood in his head and the thundering of his heart. the medics had told him these physical symptoms were just nature's way of preparing the body for sudden activity. cressey didn't know. it felt like fear to him, and he was afraid now.

his ship this run was pic-503, and when he reached it the stingers were just coming up the loading elevators. long, slim, twenty-foot pencils of death, glistening in the harsh glare of the overheads. they had their own sort of lethal beauty, those stingers, and a power about them, as if they were quiescently submitting to these puny men for now, for their own mechanical reasons.

each hornet carried two stingers, slung beneath the stubby delta-wings. the stingers were twice the length of the hornet itself, projecting fore and aft of the ship for five feet in either direction. the hornet looked ungainly, riding atop those slim needles, like some grotesque parasite hitching a ride on two silver arrows.

they're—quite small. who had said that? mackley. captain mackley, the glib information officer who'd told cressey everything he was allowed to know about hornets before he saw one.

i'll be frank with you, mr. cressey. strategic command has hornets listed not as aircraft, but as portable launching racks. their job is to take stingers to the outspace ships. there's a man in them because we can't build a computer as efficient as man at such light weight. and we couldn't afford to if we had the necessary knowledge.

cressey remembered his shock at being told he was a light-weight computer, and some of the bitterness. he watched the loading crew lock the stingers into position beneath the hornet's wings and throw the hooked boarding ladder over the edge of the cockpit. cressey mounted past the red-painted no step signs on the wings and settled himself in the cramped cockpit. as the crew carried the ladder away, he flipped the switch by his left hand and listened to the hum as the canopy rolled forward and locked into place with a metallic clack. no step, he thought wearily. his own god-damned life, entrusted to a piece of equipment too delicate to step on.

he swung the fish-bowl over his head and locked it into place. he coupled the hose leading from his right hip to a similar hose which disappeared into the floor of the cockpit, and partially inflated his suit. no detectable leaks. if his check crew had done their job, he was ready.