‘Last night,’ Quill confirmed. ‘She asked for supper to be sent up from the Temple, if supper’s what you call it at two in the morning. Anyway, Marto was still here, often has the kitchen open till three or four. When he was asked to make supper for Silvie he had a meltdown – panic attack, collapsing, medic sent for, the works. He recovered instantly, though, when they said they’d get someone else to cook if he wasn’t up to it, swore at them and threatened to hit the medic with a ladle if he didn’t get out of the kitchen. So anyway he cooked some things – don’t ask me what, though I gather it involved some kind of naked flame at some point which set off the fire alarms.’
This, from his tone, was evidently such a routine event in Marto’s kitchen that it had barely interrupted the proceedings. ‘Anyway, whatever it was, Silvie loved it and popped down to the kitchen after to say thanks. At which you can imagine…’ he grinned, ‘Marto shrieked his head off at the sight of her and she shrieked right back at him, like a screech monkey, eeeee!’ He attempted to convey the piercing shriek of the monkey without raising his voice, and Alex grinned.
‘You’d have thought that would stun him, right? But no, I gather that the two of them just kicked off doing all these animal howls and stuff, obviously having a great time and getting on like a house on fire. The last I heard, she was back there this morning and he was showing her how to cook omelette.’
‘Oh no,’ said Alex, with vivid memories of the only time Silvie had attempted cookery on the Heron. It would have been fine, really, if she hadn’t lost interest and decided that it would be far more entertaining to see if she could make cake mix explode. Then it occurred to him that if she did anything like that in Marto’s kitchen then that was Marto’s problem, and he smiled. ‘Well, she’s having fun,’ he said, ‘that’s good.’ And as he took in the fact that Marto was no longer obsessively devoted to him, his smile spread even broader. ‘Excellent,’ he said, and as he relaxed, actually found that he was starting to look forward to the meal. ‘Now perhaps we can just enjoy the food.’
They did that, though they were sitting there for nearly an hour before Marto deigned to produce the first course, and it was another three hours again before they were finally released. Marto did not believe in hurrying the culinary experience. But all of the ten tasting dishes were superb, every one of them well worth the wait. And in the intervals, he and Quill were able to chat as if they were enclosed in a bubble which had lifted them away from all their respective responsibilities and even outside time. They had no comms, since Marto would not allow active comms in the Temple, and they would not be disturbed for anything short of a major disaster.
‘That was a superb meal, thank you,’ Alex said, thanking Marto when he came for his due in compliments. ‘Fabulous – truly, an experience I will never forget.’
Marto beamed at him. ‘You are a good boy,’ he said, as if Alex was about ten. ‘You can come again.’
And he did, with that, seize him by the shoulders, bestowing rapid kisses on both cheeks. But this, it was apparent, was no more than a friendly benediction. He was already bustling away, tossing his parting remark over his shoulder, ‘Next time you come, don’t wear uniform!’
Alex looked at Quill, who chortled, holding up his hands in defence.
‘What can I say?’ he asked, and Alex shook his head. Marto, after all, was a law unto himself.
There were several reports awaiting Alex’s attention when he got back to the Assegai, but only one that made him catch his breath, go over it again, mutter an imprecation and send for Shion to come to his daycabin.
‘I know, skipper…’ she was already apologising as she came in. ‘I am sorry.’
Alex stared at her. The report had shown Firefly, Shion’s precious fighter, hurtling out of control in a way that had kicked off a serious panic. As the fighter had whizzed above the orbiting ships, it had been tumbling in so many directions at once that it might have gone anywhere. Half the ships in orbit had gone to alert, with four of them actually leaving their parking spots in a desperate, instinctive dive for safety. The station’s traffic control centre had gone to alert, too, with some screaming, according to the report, and two members of staff being so frightened they’d been taken to sickbay. Things had been a bit calmer on the Assegai, but not much. For 3.4 seconds there, Firefly had been piloted so dangerously that everyone watching had had their hearts in their mouths, terrified that they were watching a catastrophe unfold right there in front of them. If the fighter had crashed either into one of the orbiting ships or into the station itself… well, the devastation would have been too terrible to contemplate. So when Firefly span up and was brought back under control, the reaction was consequently very highly charged. People did not know what Shion was playing at – was that supposed to be some kind of display, or what? At the speeds the fighter was travelling, even at the distance she’d passed over the station, she had been within 0.8 of a second of impact. And that was close, too close, far too close for comfort.
The explanation, when Shion explained, had not appeased anybody. She had not, it turned out, been piloting the fighter herself, but had allowed a trainee pilot to take the controls at what she had considered to be a safe distance away from the station.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked, pointing her to a seat.
Shion sat down, grimacing as she did so. She’d been unconscious, or very near it, for the three seconds that the fighter was tumbling over the station, and had needed treatment for a whiplash injury.
‘Fine,’ she said, with a rueful rub at the back of her neck. Her neck was long, slender and elegant. It was also slightly more fragile than a human’s, something that had never been an issue until now. ‘Didn’t see it coming,’ she admitted, and with a slightly wondering note, ‘Didn’t even know Firefly could do that.’
Alex shuddered. ‘You are not,’ he said, recognising that light dawning in her eyes, ‘going to recreate that manoeuvre, Shion.’
‘No, skipper,’ she said, recognising that he had the right of that.
Slo-mo capture of Firefly had shown the manoeuvre that had knocked Shion out. The fighter had, indeed, been a good safe distance away from the station, though remaining just on the outer reaches of the Assegai’s long range scopes. That was good practice for a training flight, which was what Shion had been given permission for.
It was readily apparent at what point Shion had handed over. There’d been a series of demonstration manoeuvres, obviously showing basic controls, then a few seconds at which the fighter cruised straight, evidently while the new pilot was doing handover checks, and then…
Shion could do some amazing things with Firefly, with display moves that made spacers gasp and whoop in admiration. Even she, though, had never tried to stop the fighter dead in space, slamming it into deceleration with much the same force as if it had run headlong into a planet. Inertial dampeners had saved them from being splatted into a very nasty mess, but even they had not been able to absorb all of the impact. Shion’s neck had snapped forward, knocking her senseless, while the human pilot had a far more bullish neck and had only been jolted hard against his harness. After which, seeing that Shion was hurt, he had done his best to fly the fighter back towards the station, to get help.
‘I thought,’ Alex said, ‘that biometrics made moves like that impossible.’ He was looking closely at her as he spoke, looking for any indication that she had been making more adjustments to the fighter’s systems than she had permission for. But Shion’s response was genuinely innocent.
‘It should,’ she said. ‘But it reads pilot confidence, skipper. Trainees are so nervous, always, that it takes ages to get them relaxed and confident enough to get the biometrics to let them do advanced manoeuvres. But this guy, well – all I can think, honestly, is that he must be totally convinced that he is God’s gift to piloting, the best pilot ever, better than me, and that he believes it so completely, the biometrics bought it! It gave him absolute control, anyway, and at an interface speed
no human pilot could handle. And in the next nanosecond, wham!’
Alex looked down at the surface of his desk, keeping his expression stern. This is not funny, he told himself. Shion was hurt, people were terrified, it was a serious incident.
All the same, though, he was remembering his visit to the Herring, his encounter with the surly crewman Lagner, and Naro Arrison’s exasperated explanation. He isn’t a bullock, he just thinks he is.
The wannabe pilot who couldn’t even pass the first level of simulator training. The man convinced that he was a genius natural talent being kept down by oppressive, jealous and tyrannical officers. Naro himself had attempted a reality-check by allowing him to try piloting a shuttle. Shion, for reasons which had no doubt seemed good to her at the time, had agreed to give him a piloting lesson on Firefly. Given that he’d knocked his instructor unconscious and created a port-wide panic, he was unlikely to get a second lesson.
‘I really am very sorry,’ Shion said. ‘I should have listened to Skipper Arrison. O/S Lagner came up to me, see, when I was visiting the Herring, and told me that he wants to be a pilot but they won’t let him, and Skipper Arrison told me not to take any notice because he’s got, he said, dreams way beyond his capabilities. And I felt – oh, it was stupid of me, but I felt so sorry for him. I wanted so much to fly, for so long, and I could see how much he wanted it. And swarms, you know, they’re not like any other kind of piloting. The hardest thing for me to teach people when they’re learning to fly swarms is to forget all that rote-learning by the book stuff they teach regular pilots and get them to fly by feel and by instinct. So I thought, well, I thought that he might have a natural talent, and even if he didn’t, I could give him a shot at flying the best fighter in space, which would be something for him to remember.’ She looked suspiciously at Alex, who had made a very small noise deep in his throat, undetectable to all but superhuman hearing. ‘Are you laughing?’
‘Me?’ said Alex. ‘No. I am being absolutely professional and appropriately concerned, Lt.’
Min, in fact, had already dealt with the matter, officially – it had been nearly three hours before, after all, while Alex was just embarking on the taster menu at the Temple. Not even the screaming panic of the fighter’s near miss had been allowed to disturb the dining experience.
Min had not found any cause to make this a matter for disciplinary proceedings. Shion had asked for and got permission for the training flight, she had filed all the necessary documentation for taking out a completely unqualified pilot, including a risk assessment which had asserted that biometric limitations would not allow the pilot to conduct any manoeuvre he did not have the skill to accomplish.
That was the point of safety biometrics, after all. A child could take control of a swarm class fighter and however wildly they might swing the controls, the fighter would only travel at the lowest of speeds and make the slowest and gentlest of turns. You had to have skills, and confidence in those skills, before the controls would let you fling the fighter about in high speed acrobatics.
Or at least, that was what everyone had believed, up till today. The biometrics, it seemed, could be fooled by the combination of stupidity, zero skills and an absolute belief that you were the best pilot in space. Shion herself had been amazed, and at Min’s request, would be looking at ways to close that loophole so that could not happen again. So it had been logged as an incident of misadventure, no failure in following procedure and no causal factor that anyone could have been expected to foresee.
Shion, though, clearly felt that she should have been able to foresee it, somehow. And it was apparent too that Alex’s opinion on this was rather more important to her than Min’s. Seeing that he was laughing, despite the apparent severity on his face, she relaxed, giving an abashed little grin herself, at that.
‘I feel such a fool,’ she said.
Memories flickered through Alex’s mind, and he grimaced.
‘Happens to us all,’ he said, and saw the doubt mixed with relief on Shion’s face, as if she’d said Really?
‘I feel I misjudged the situation,’ she admitted, ‘because I misread human factors. And it only went so bad because…’ she indicated the back of her neck again, and Alex understood.
‘This did not happen,’ he said, ‘because you are Pirrellothian, Shion. It happened because you are a fanatical pilot, and because you are kind. Neither of those things is anything to…’
Silvie came in, her face brightening as she saw that Alex was comforting her foster mother.
‘Ah, good,’ she said, and continued as she came over and sat down next to Shion, ‘I saw him.’ There was merriment on her face, now. ‘You were right,’ she told Shion. ‘I haven’t met many people that utterly delusional – not outside psychiatric facilities, anyway. He reminds me of that guy, you know, the one who called himself Imperatus, Emperor of Cartasay.’
‘He actually was a descendant of… never mind.’ Shion said, and a grin came onto her face. She and Silvie were looking at one another in a way that meant communication was happening far too rapidly for a human eye to follow, with a combination of facial expressions and empathic understanding.
‘I told Naro,’ Silvie went on, resuming a conversational tone with Alex, ‘that Lagner is functionally nuts. Which ought to be obvious, even to humans – you know,’ there was incredulity in her voice as she told them, ‘he actually thought I was there to thank him,’ she looked at Shion, ‘for saving you!’
‘Sss… suh?’ Shion stammered.
‘According to him,’ Silvie said, ‘you passed out, and he performed heroic manoeuvres to get you back to safety. He’s so proud of himself he could pop!’
Mighty indignation swelled in Shion, shoving aside embarrassment, self-doubt and heavy responsibility.
‘The…’ she started, and expressed herself for a good half minute in terms which made Alex grin and Silvie giggle.
‘Oh – sorry.’ Shion said, pulling herself back together and realising she’d been using language unsuited to an officer in uniform.
‘No, that’s better,’ Silvie assured her, and got a nod of agreement from Alex. It had worried him to see Shion so hurt by the incident, not physically but in her confidence, that hard-won confidence in her ability to work on just the same basis as a human officer. Anger with the idiot who’d knocked her out and come close to causing a major disaster at Karadon was a much healthier reaction.
‘You are not,’ he told her, ‘to beat yourself up over this. You did nothing wrong, Shion. If there is any responsibility for this then it lies with me – I approved the trial flight policy and procedures, after all. But I’m not going to beat myself up over it either, because the precautions were perfectly safe and reasonable on the information that we had. And if you didn’t spot that flaw in the biometrics, nobody else was likely to, so – it was just one of those things, an unforeseen and unforeseeable combination of circumstances. So we learn from it, take the action needed to ensure it doesn’t happen again, and move on, all right?’
Shion looked grateful, but still a little anxious.
‘I will,’ she offered, ‘stop giving trial flights, of course.’
‘You will,’ Alex said, ‘do nothing of the kind. Fix the biometrics issue, then take people out again just as before. If this incident was to stop you doing that, it really would be serious.’
‘Thanks,’ Shion said, and let go of the final band of tension within. ‘Thank you, skipper.’
‘All right,’ Alex said, and shook hands with her, mock-solemnly. ‘Dismissed, Lt.’
Silvie went with her, taking her hand and telling her that they were going for a swim. They had barely gone out of the door, though, when Sub-lt Forley informed Alex that Skipper Arrison was here to see him. He hardly needed to do so, since Alex could see him there, through the open door, in the ante-room. But he thanked the adjutant anyway and beckoned in his friend.
Only Naro Arrison, it was clear, was not here as his friend. He was here as a corvette ski
pper coming to offer his apologies to a flag captain for a near-disaster he evidently felt to be his fault.
It took Alex a while to get past Naro’s ‘I should never have let her take him’ and convince him that he wasn’t to blame.
‘Shion does this.’ He said. ‘I can’t even estimate how many completely unqualified people she’s taken out in Firefly and given a go at piloting – hundreds, for sure. I gave her permission for that, under conditions which require a security evaluation and a thorough risk assessment. If anyone else had to do it, the paperwork would take at least an hour. But the fact that Shion can complete it in just a few seconds does not mean that it’s skimped, believe me, she does not ask for permission to take out a raw pilot until every professional evaluation has been carried out to the highest standard. And I gave her permission for that for good reason, you know – it isn’t a jolly, for her. That is Shion’s contribution, as an officer, to hospitality and public relations. She’s taken all sorts of people out, from system presidents to an eight year old. It’s never for more than a quarter of an hour in a limited flight zone under our scanners, but it is, obviously, infinitely more thrilling to pilot a fighter for real than it is to have a go at one locked on to an airlock and working as a simulator. Sometimes she takes people out because she recognises the same passion for piloting that she has herself. And occasionally, it does work as talent-scouting, too. There’s a former SDF pilot transferred to the Fleet to join a swarm squadron, after Shion took him out for a test-spin. So it’s all good, Naro, a positive contribution being made by an officer who is, after all, the best pilot and instructor in the Fleet.’
Naro considered that, and conceded the point with a mumble.
‘But Lagner,’ he said, ‘is my responsibility. I knew what he was like, and I should have given Shion more of a warning.’
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