Assegai

by S J MacDonald

  It was possible that some of the crew might have preferred the kind of misfire they’d heard about on the first test of the new class of missile. That had been truly spectacular, firing just a fraction of a second early and so biting a chunk out of the target planet rather than annihilating it. The force of the impact had, however, ripped the rest of the planet into fragments, streaming across the system in a great streak of tumbling debris.

  That, the Assegai’s crew agreed, would have been something to see. And there was nothing to see after this test-fire. Nothing, that was, other than a blank space where a planet had been moments before, and, on scopes, a stupendous surge of superlight energies blasting out into the cosmos. All the same, they had seen it, been there, when the Assegai blew up a planet, and their pride and joy in that was immeasurable.

  ‘I am not at all sure,’ said Min, having breakfast with Alex not long after they’d moved back into charted space and resumed a rather more sedate progress towards Camae, ‘that we still meet the criteria of an entirely regular ship’s company.’

  Alex grinned. He had deliberately given the Assegai’s people just the same experiences as he provided the Fourth when they were working up skills, confidence and team-work on their way to a mission. And they had responded, unsurprisingly, by becoming skilled, confident and a firmly bonded team. Min herself had gained more extreme ship-handling experience over the last few weeks than throughout her previous career, and had become an accomplished exo-diplomat into the bargain. Her relationship with the Samartians could not have been better, as Alex had already seen the trust developing between them. And her relationship with Silvie, too, always good, had developed in ways which made Alex feel very optimistic about the Assegai’s future role in going to Quarus.

  ‘Min,’ he pointed out, ‘they take their tone from you, as skipper. And you are, now, someone who has blown up a planet. And who hangs out with aliens, naked.’

  Min spluttered. She had stood out against using quarian bathrooms, vehemently, right up till the previous week.

  Little by little, though, her resistance had been crumbling. That had started when Dr Payling, of all people, had requested permission to enter the aquadeck bathrooms for research purposes.

  He was, as Alex had suggested, writing up the captain’s extraordinarily rapid recovery with an analysis of the various factors which might – or might not – have contributed to it. One of the things Alex had mentioned in that had been the relaxation and massage he’d been having on the aquadeck, which Dr Payling felt essential to evaluate not merely from data but from observation and personal experience.

  Permission had been granted, setting a precedent. And then both Jarlner and Bennet had been persuaded to visit the quarian bathrooms. Nudity was not an issue for them in itself – privacy of any kind was a rarity on Samart, and as military personnel they would routinely strip off for medicals and decontamination sprays. They were apprehensive about how uncomfortable it might be, with unfamiliar tech and skin-conditioning chemicals. Once they had experienced it, though, they were perfectly at ease, there. They preferred it, in fact, to showers – quarians didn’t use water for hygiene, either, and the cleansing air-sprays were far more to Samartian tastes.

  Min had folded in the end when Silvie insisted that she at least try going into a bathroom by herself, just to see what it was like. She would, as Silvie pointed out, have to get over her shyness if she was going to make a go of things at Quarus, so she might as well start now. And if Alex could use those facilities, and the Samartians, officers from the proudest of military cultures, then there was no reason Min could not.

  It was all undeniably true, so Min had bitten the bullet and gone to use a quarian lavatory. And, within a couple of days, had been able to share a spa there with Silvie, Shion and the Samartians. Though not, as yet, with Alex. That would be just too, too hideously embarrassing, as Alex understood.

  ‘Exodiplomacy!’ she said, which was after all the only defence a Fleet officer could have for hanging out naked in a mixed-rank, mixed-gender spa facility.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Alex, and seeing that she was not following him, ‘It isn’t possible for any crew to remain regular-Fleet conventional when engaging in exodiplomacy. That was true to a degree even on raptors carrying Solarans, wasn’t it? Very different protocols, accepted as appropriate for exodiplomacy service.’

  Min nodded, with the look of sorrow that crossed so many people’s faces these days when Solarans were mentioned. Min had met Solarans, and had been as awed by them as she was enthralled. She, like Alex, had served for a while aboard the raptor-class destroyers which the Fleet used for transporting Solarans. So she knew exactly what he meant about the hush-protocols, the silent shoes, slow movement round the ship, no conversation louder than a whisper.

  ‘The same is true at Gider,’ Alex observed. ‘Fleet people working on the Embassy have to cope with Gider turning up there at all hours of the day and night, asking them all kinds of bewildering and even very personal questions and expecting them to dance.’ He grinned. ‘I would love to see the reaction, on any regular ship, to an officer doing the Dance of the Open Wing Beetle on the command deck.’

  Min guffawed happily. Footage had sneaked out from the Gide mission of a particularly portly, dignified Admiral being taught that dance by a couple of visiting Gider. It was, the dance cognoscenti declared, even funnier and more flat-footed than that of Alex doing the Dance of the Lizard.

  ‘Yes, okay, good point,’ she conceded, ‘And yes, okay, we knew that being assigned to Quarus would mean going above and beyond and into some pretty controversial territory. But I thought we’d start that, gradually, when we got to Serenity. And I thought this, having the Samartians aboard, would be tight, formal – rigid discipline, you know.’

  Alex nodded. ‘An unexpected outcome,’ he observed, ‘of bringing Samartians and a quarian together. And impressive to see, isn’t it, how well Jarlner and Bennet have been able to adapt in meeting a culture so very different from their own.’

  ‘It is,’ Min agreed. At first sight, no two cultures could have been much different – the highly militarised, hierarchical Samartians and the pacifist, anarchic quarians. But they had found common ground in their fundamental commitment of the individual to the community, their high moral code and their revulsion for all forms of lying and deception. ‘Amazing, really. And I’m learning a lot, in all sorts of ways, not just the combat skills. Though that’s pretty impressive in itself.’ She saluted him with a piece of croissant. ‘Hot entry, in-system combat,’ she said, with deep satisfaction. ‘Not skills I ever imagined I’d see in the Fleet playbook. And I’m not complaining, Alex, really not, far from it. All I’m saying is that the crew I saw when I walked around the ship last night is not the crew I had when we left Chartsey. I thought they were phenomenal then; so able, so committed, a joy to command. But now, the way they are with one another, with the officers, even with me. It’s beyond confidence, it’s a kind of independent spirit. They’re more like – well, they’re more like I’d expect from people serving in the Fourth than in the regular Fleet. And as much as I value the skills and the spirit they’ve developed, I do just wonder how that’s going to play when we get back into regular Fleet company.’

  As always in his discussions with Min, Alex realised she had a point. He had never tried very hard to manage the relationship between the Fourth and the regular Fleet. He’d taken it for granted that there would be a degree of hostility towards them, if only for the massively greater funding they received and the liberties they were allowed. When he did find they were being greeted as friends, that was something to be valued, not a given.

  ‘I just don’t want them to be… well, I don’t want to say arrogant,’ she told him. ‘But above themselves, you know – what we used to call swanking, when I was a kid.’

  Alex didn’t recognise the word, but he understood. It was the kind of boastful pride which would make his mother warn, ‘Don’t get too big for your boots’.r />
  Alex was of the opinion that, with everything his crew had to put up with, they were entitled to a bit of swanking when they got into port. But Min, evidently, did not want her ship to be set at odds with the rest of the regular Fleet.

  ‘I’m mindful,’ she said, ‘of how sensitive that will be, too, with the squadron at Camae.’

  Squadron, Alex thought, was throwing roses at it. The Fleet allocated a Homeworld Defence Squadron on the basis of each world’s population, but it was not merely a matter of the numbers and size of ships which would be posted. There was a hierarchy to it, with Chartsey nearly always getting the newest ships for their first tour of duty, after which they would spend many years at one or more of the Central Worlds before eventually being moved out to assignment at less prestigious postings. Camae had five Fleet ships on homeworld defence posting – one frigate, one corvette and three patrol ships. None of them was less than forty years old. As for their skippers, and crew… Camae was one of the worlds where it was said that Fleet careers went to die. It wasn’t a sin-bin assignment like Korvold or Carpania, just a pleasant enough but dead end assignment from which few people seemed to return. The squadron there, Alex understood, would be more than usually sensitive to the bright, shiny, brand new Assegai swinging in, even without their crew swanking about the place.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘good point. And you don’t, I take it, want to go down the route of just breezing into port with ‘Move over, boys, the professionals have arrived’.’

  That was a joke, and she laughed, but shook her head.

  ‘Definitely not,’ she said, and teased back, ‘Leave that to you!’ As he signalled a hit, saluting with his fork, Min spoke more seriously. ‘I know you sometimes use a reality-check drill when your crew is getting over-confident, but this is a social issue, I think, rather than operational. So I wondered if we could just check any tendency towards swanking with a timely reminder that they are not, as they now seem to think they are, ‘every bit as good as the Fourth’.’

  Alex smiled. ‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked, since it was obvious Min had already thought this through before she raised it with him.

  ‘Well – think of something,’ she requested, ‘a way in which the Fourth would knock spots off us; something which we, as a regular ship, could never match up to.’

  Alex raised his eyebrows.

  ‘And what makes you think…’

  ‘Come on,’ she interrupted. ‘You’ve been very diplomatic about it, Alex – no comparisons, ever! But there have to be things you believe, yourself, the Fourth does way better than we do, better than we can do on regular terms, or why is the Fourth on the terms you use? You’ve developed those protocols because you believe they are better than anything the regular Fleet can do, so come on, please, tell me one way in which the Fourth beats us into flinders.’

  ‘All right,’ Alex said, ‘There is something we do, which you can’t, and I do believe it is a vital factor in our success. It developed out of our open-comms policy, the ops board through which all our crew, of any rank, can contribute their ideas and operational suggestions. And I do believe,’ he grinned, ‘that a cold chill just ran down your spine.’

  Min laughed, admitting it with an exaggerated little shiver.

  ‘I consider myself to be at the progressive end of Fleet practice, obviously,’ she said, ‘but the very idea of that terrifies me, Alex – everything I know, everything I’ve been trained for, tells me that ought to result in the breakdown of authority, the collapse of the chain of command, even to a high risk of mutiny. I know you make it work, in the Fourth, somehow, but I’m moggered if I can figure out how!’

  ‘It wouldn’t work here,’ Alex said, at once. ‘Even if you weren’t on regular terms, the ops board only works because of the open comms system, full disclosure and detailed knowledge founded in being able to see and hear everything that goes on on the command deck. And that only works because we’re a small enough company to function as a single unit and not break down into sub-groups and cliques. You go to great lengths to prevent cliquing here and it works very well, but as my analysis showed, throwing open comms into that would be extremely difficult to manage; so much so that it would outweigh its potential advantage.’

  Min nodded. Alex had, as she’d suggested, carried out an inspection-level review of the Assegai’s anti-clique policies and practice, and had concluded, somewhat to her relief, that open comms would not be practicable here.

  ‘But if you want something we do, I believe, better than any regular ship ever could, it’s that,’ Alex said. ‘Some of our best ideas have come from members of the crew, and that active participation in planning isn’t something that could work on a regular ship, or even be allowed.’

  ‘Okay.’ Min said. ‘So, we’ll set up a little scenario, then, where I ask you on the command deck how close you think we’ve come to the Fourth in terms of operational efficiency. And you give us – what, seventy per cent?’

  ‘Sixty five,’ said Alex.

  ‘Ouch.’ She winced, but took that on the chin. ‘Okay, sixty five. And when I say why, you lay it out how the Fourth is way better at us in contributory planning, your guys with an active voice, mine pretty much cogs in the machine.’

  ‘That’s a bit harsh,’ Alex said, but when she looked at him, capitulated. ‘All right,’ he said. It might be harsh, but it was true, after all.

  Before they could get down to discussing when would be the most effective time to administer this swank-depressant put-down, however, they were interrupted by one of Min’s officers, tapping on the door and looking in.

  ‘Sorry to intrude,’ he said, coming in at Min’s inviting look, ‘But I have a bit of a situation, skipper…’

  He was speaking very steadily, but both of them could see his heightened colour, and Alex at least could see that he was as bewildered as he was upset. He was Lt Transon, one of the mass of polite, cheerful officers in the Assegai’s wardroom. They were in Min’s quarters, and Alex would have got up and left, but Lt Transon spoke to him, too. ‘You might be able to advise, sir.’

  Min managed to convey, with great economy of movement, that she wished Alex to stay, and that she wanted the officer to sit down at the table with them.

  ‘Something to do with Silvie?’ Min hazarded, as the Lt sat down in the chair indicated.

  ‘No – oh, no, ma’am!’ He looked shocked at the suggestion. ‘It’s Cadet Naos.’ He gave them an appealing look, drawing in a breath to compose himself.

  There were no spare cups on the table, but Min had not yet touched her glass of fruit juice, so handed him that.

  ‘Thank you.’ He took an abstracted sip of it, and then as they were looking at him expectantly, launched into his explanation. ‘I’m duty instructor this morning,’ he explained.

  This, they both understood. The terms under which Kate was allowed to work aboard required that she follow the same routines as if she’d been at the Chartsey Academy, both in classes and in pastoral supervision. The Assegai’s officers all helped out with that – leading, as Kate herself had joked, to the highest instructor-cadet ratio in the Fleet’s history. Lt Transon’s role, this morning, would be the ritual of morning parade, inspecting Kate as she stood to attention in a solitary parade of one cadet, supervising her breakfast in the wardroom and then inspecting her quarters for neatness while Kate stood by her bunk. After that, she’d have half an hour free before her first class, which another officer would supervise in the cabin set aside as a classroom.

  ‘She wasn’t in her quarters when I went to do reveille,’ Lt Transon said. Reveille meant only a tap on the door at 0650, advising Kate that she had a quarter of an hour to report for parade. ‘I found she’d gone to engineering,’ he said, ‘so I called, but her comm was switched off.’ Set, he meant, to block incoming calls with a message that she was not available to take them. ‘So I left her a message, reminding her about parade. But she didn’t come. So I thought, well, she’s probably into something,
hardly liked to disturb her, but there is breakfast, so I went down to engineering. She was at her workstation but when I spoke to her she didn’t seem to hear me, didn’t even seem to realise I was there, and she was…’ he shook his head, at a loss to describe the strange condition Kate was in – almost, he thought, as if she was on drugs, though he hardly liked to say it. ‘But Mr Onwudiwe came up,’ he said, ‘and told me I wasn’t to distract her. And when I said about breakfast he told me… well, he told me to go away.’ This was obviously a euphemism. ‘But I am,’ a plaintive note, ‘duty instructor. So what do I do? Do I put her down as absent without leave, or withdrawn from Academy on Mr Onwudiwe’s authority, or what?’

  Min looked at Alex, not for instructions but for any enlightenment he might have to offer.

  ‘Is she,’ Alex asked, ‘in a fugue state? Looking at a whole other universe?’ he clarified, seeing that Lt Transon didn’t understand. ‘And doing this…’ he began making strange little motions in the air with his hands, describing arcs and pushing movements.

  ‘Yes!’ Lt Transon almost yelped with recognition. ‘That’s it, that’s it exactly!’

  ‘Leave her alone then, please,’ Alex said, and was already getting to his feet. ‘I’ll go.’

  ‘We’ll go,’ said Min, making the point that Kate was under her authority, not Alex’s, but allowing him to take the lead since he evidently understood what was going on. ‘This fugue…’ she asked, as they made their way down through the ship together, followed by an unhappy Lt Transon.