ROUTINE for a HORNET

BY DON BERRY

Hurtling through space to meet the enemy in equipment too delicate to step on, without enough fuel to get back, and knowing you're completely expendable is just——

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, December 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

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 

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