Good, but bittersweet, if the base, the people and the Heron were to be taken out of his hands. But he would deal with that, of course, when he had to. And none of it would happen overnight.
Or at least, that was what he thought until they came into port.
The deceleration run was smooth, with the usual mild shock of finding yourself in a populated system again after weeks of solitary travel. There was the surprise, too, of coming home after more than a year and finding that not everything had remained exactly the same in your absence. There was a new space station, Alex saw, which they hadn’t even started building when he’d left, but which was now right there, big, new and shiny, with so much traffic going to and fro from it that they’d altered the system’s traffic lanes in order to accommodate it.
‘One of Mr Delaney’s,’ Min observed, noting the Acko Corporation logo writ large on every available surface of the station.
‘Hmmn,’ said Alex, noncommittally. He had learned not to be paranoid about the activities of Family-owned corporations. The Families rarely had much hands-on involvement with their companies, merely suggesting, through their proxies, any special projects they wanted to invest in. Davie had said that more than ninety nine per cent of what the corporations did was done without any reference whatsoever to Shareholder approval. They just did what they did. So Acko, which was after all in the business of building space stations for paying customers, had more than likely just built this one for Therik, quite probably without Andrei Delaney knowing anything about it.
Alex wasn’t interested, anyway. He was looking at the outer orbital range – at the Fleet ships, noting that two of the ships in the homeworld defence squadron had been swapped out while he was away, and looking for the Heron.
He found it, the blocky frigate riding at its usual orbit station. One glance told him that it was under port-watch protocols, almost entirely shut down and with a purely nominal watch. He couldn’t tell, from this distance, what hull systems might have been upgraded, but it was apparent that the ship had had the planned re-skim of their hull to smooth out all the dents and scratches it had acquired, with glossy new paintwork and the Fourth’s emblem bigger and brighter.
‘Oh!’ Min said, and as Alex looked up, he saw that she was looking at the outer orbital, too, only her screen was focussed on the sector where visiting Fleet ships were parked.
There were usually quite a few of these. Therik was a major base for the Fleet, with three big spacedocks here and a lot of groundside facilities, so there were ships coming and going all the time. The eight ships in the visitor sector wasn’t even busy, so it took Alex a moment to realise why Min had caught her breath at the sight of them.
Then it clicked. One of the ships there was the Eagle – like all the raptor class destroyers, its primary role had been in exodiplomacy. Since the Solarans had vanished, though, they were gradually being re-tasked. Nobody wanted to admit that they were no longer actually needed for Solaran diplomacy, but they could not be left hanging about at X-bases indefinitely. Some were being sent to Serenity. Others, like the Eagle, were being used to carry VIPs on official missions.
Alex’s first thought was that the Eagle was here to take the Samartians, and possibly the training group, back to Chartsey. He was right about that, but that was not all. There was a light, he saw. A piercing point of blue light, above and to the right of the Eagle’s ID.
This was a signal rarely seen in the Fleet, but one which would be recognised by any spacer. The blue star, added to the ship’s ID to indicate that it held flagship status, and with the position of that star announcing that the First Lord of the Admiralty was on board.
Dix Harangay had come out to Therik.
Alex felt as if he’d been thrown into freefall, with a stomach-churning jolt and a jumble of thoughts. Must be bad… not fair… worse than I thought… can’t I even have one day with my parents before… oh god no, don’t tell me that something has happened to…
A message appeared on his comm. It was from Dix, coming in on an override code which put it straight onto Alex’s comscreen. Your parents are fine and at the base.
Alex breathed again. For a moment there he had been gripped with horror, imagining all kinds of terrible scenarios which had brought Dix out here to break the dreadful news in person.
‘So much for Mandram,’ he heard someone say, and was so struck by the apparently random comment that he looked across. A discussion was taking place amongst the junior officers at the ops table. And they, too, had evidently noted the presence of the First Lord.
‘Bet you a dollar it’s Chartsey,’ one of them said, gloomily.
‘Nah – it’ll be straight to Serenity,’ a third said, with a know-it-all’s certainty. ‘You’ll see.’
Oh, of course, Alex realised. There’d been a lot of talk around the ship in recent days, as the Assegai too would be picking up orders on arrival at Therik. If all was well, they would be heading to their own base world, Mandram, for routine spacedocks work and a month of leave before heading out to their assignment at Serenity. On the whole, the consensus seemed to be that they would rather not bother with taking leave at Mandram, thanks, but would prefer to go straight to Serenity. There were spacedocks there, after all, and a month’s leave on Serenity would be compensation enough for not spending time with their families. The pessimists amongst them, however, were of the view that they would not get to go either to Mandram or Serenity but would be hauled over to Chartsey instead. For some reason, they were assuming that the First Lord’s presence here was to do with them.
He glanced sideways at Min, and saw the same opinion in her face, the resigned philosophical little sigh.
Well, he thought, maybe it is about them. Maybe the rest of the Samartian group wanted to come over to Therik, maybe Dix brought them over on the Eagle and maybe the plan is for them all to head back to Chartsey, then, on the Assegai. They would want to see what progress had been made in the practical training Jarlner and Bennet had been sent here to provide, and perhaps to enhance, that, too, on the basis of the strategy and tactics they’d been working on. Maybe Dix being here was all about that, and not about Alex at all.
And maybe, he thought, those were pigs in spacesuits, flying past the airlock.
A second message flashed onto Alex’s screen. We’ll catch up tomorrow. And then, as if an afterthought, Congratulations, Dix.
‘Lex – oh, Lex!’ to his astonishment, the signal from the First Lord converted to a live holo-call, on the same priority code, showing two people sitting very close together on a sofa – the only people in the universe who called him Lex. They had the grey hair and slight plumpness which came to many Novaterrans in their middle age, wearing obviously brand new clothes with that ‘special occasion’ discomfort he recognised, as if you couldn’t be smart without being uncomfortable too. Tight collars, stiff fabrics and high waistbands cinched till it was difficult to breathe.
‘Mum!’ he exclaimed, and a look of sheer delight broke onto his face, ‘Dad! Oh, it’s so…’
‘…good to see you!’ they finished with him, and were all laughing, though in his parents’ case, it was the kind of laughter that came close to tears.
‘Looking good, son,’ his father told him, with a slightly gruff note.
‘You looked so ill, in the pictures from Chartsey,’ his mother lamented. ‘But we’ll soon have you back to rights.’
‘Dix says you’re all ours,’ said his Dad – a statement Alex would only fully appreciate several hours later. ‘But when are you coming down, Lex? You’re coming straight down, right?’
Alex was about to apologise and explain that nobody was allowed to leave a ship within the first half hour of coming in to port, while Customs and Quarantine authorities went over their documentation. And he would have told them, too, that as the flag officer of a Fleet ship arriving in port post-mission, there would be at least a few hours of things he had to deal with before he’d be free to go back to the base. He’d have to mee
t with the port admiral, for one thing, and always got a call from the system president.
Before he could speak, though, a subscreen flashed up informing him that he was on stand-down as of now, no argument about it, that if he was not off that ship in ten minutes the messager would come and take him off it, and that if he made the messager do that, Alex would regret it.
He knew before he even got to the signature that it was from Simon Penarth. An official medical stand-down order was attached. And there was a PS, popping up as Alex was swiping the first message aside. Divorced by #13. Engaged to #14. Come to the wedding.
Further, rather more conventional messages were bobbing up on sub-screen, too, informing him that he had been given special clearance to disembark before the Assegai had secured in parking orbit, and that a shuttle was on his way to fetch him, eta four minutes. Other messages, from the port admiral and system president, read simply welcome home; enjoy your leave.
‘It seems,’ said Alex, ‘that I am coming straight down.’ He grinned at them. ‘Give me ten minutes,’ he said. ‘I will be right there.’
‘Don’t rush in the traffic,’ his father said automatically.
In fact, Alex could see, they were sending a limo for him, snaking across the system under SDF fighter escort. But before he could tell them that traffic was not going to be a problem, they were rushing on.
‘We’ll wait here for you, shall we?’ his mother was becoming anxious. ‘We could come to the bus station but there are all those people there and…’
Bus station? Oh, the base’s transit zone, with shuttle landing pads and aircar parks.
‘I think we should wait here…’ his father said, with a glance at his wife conveying that they had talked about this extensively and that he wanted to stick with the decision they had made. They were Novaterran, after all. Public displays of emotion were unacceptable to them. But it would be so, so hard when they saw their son, not to rush and hug him with cries of joy.
‘But Lex doesn’t know where we are,’ his mother said, also with the air of continuing a lengthy debate, though turning straight to Alex, ‘We’re in number 17, Oakapple Avenue. It’s the house with big windows and the rosemary bushes in green…’
‘Lex can find his way to stars nobody else has ever been to before,’ his father pointed out. ‘He can find a house on his own base.’
His mother gave his father a Look.
‘Don’t get snarky,’ she said, and to Alex, ‘Don’t pay any attention, he’s been like a frog on hot bricks for days, waiting for you to come.’
‘As if you haven’t,’ said his father, but flicked her a grin then which made his relationship to Alex startlingly apparent, reaching out to take her hand and gripping it tight. ‘He’s here, love. And he’s fine.’ He looked back at Alex. ‘You can find the house all right?’
Alex wanted to tell them that he had picked it out for them, himself. It wasn’t the biggest or grandest of the guest houses on the base, but it had lovely gardens and fabulous mountain views and he had known that they would love it. He had asked the base commander to reserve it for them, and to equip it to his specifications, too, with everything they would like.
As usual, though, his parents barely gave him a chance to answer the questions they were asking.
‘Have you had any dinner?’ His mother was asking. ‘Dix says it’s breakfast time for you but its dinner time here, and I suppose you must be hungry after coming all that way.’
‘We’ll make you dinner,’ his father decreed. ‘You must be desperate for a good home-cooked meal. And we’ve got Novaterran food!’
A good home-cooked meal, in the von Strada household, meant ready meals flash heated and dressed with sides of salads and sauces. And then dessert.
Blancmange, he knew. Blancmange was going to be perpetrated.
‘I’ve had…’ he started, and then realised that if they carried on at this rate they’d still be talking when the shuttle arrived. ‘Look – got to go now,’ he said. ‘There’s a shuttle on the way and I have to go and pack. And yes, I can find the house, don’t worry. See you soon!’
It took another half minute of waving, being told to be careful, being told that they’d be right there, being told again not to rush in the traffic and having kisses blown to him before he could break off the call.
He did not, he found, need to explain things to Min. She’d been sent copies of the authorisations to take him off the ship, and an eta for the shuttle. From the twinkle in her eyes, too, he guessed that she too had had a message from Simon.
Which she had. It would be some time before Alex would hear about the phenomenal rage Simon Penarth had got into with the authorities at Chartsey – so much so that he’d gone racing there himself from Serenity to tell them what he thought of them. By the time he got there he not only knew that Alex’s entitlement to leave had been converted into a five month assignment to the Assegai, but had seen medical records of the state he was in by the end of a month being raced about nineteen hours out of twenty five and force fed banquets seven or eight times a day.
Simon’s reaction to that had been so incandescent that Dix had had to keep apologising for more than half an hour before Simon would even stop shouting at him. And when Simon had gone storming in to tell the President what he thought of his role in the disgraceful treatment of a hero of the League, President Tyborne had had security lock his door and escaped via a side exit.
Simon had, subsequently, come over with them on the Eagle with the declared intention of grabbing Alex off that ship the moment he came into port and putting him on stand-down until he, Simon, was satisfied that he had had a proper break and was fit and ready to return to duty.
And nobody, but nobody, was arguing with that.
Alex certainly wouldn’t. So he went up to his quarters, not really to pack but to pick up the gifts he had bought for his parents at Camae.
Simmy, though, was already on it. She’d gone to his quarters straight after the deceleration run, not because she’d known that he’d be whisked straight off the ship but because she wanted to be ready to take his things groundside and unpack them ready for him in his quarters at the base. By the time Alex got there, though, she’d already been told that there was a shuttle on the way.
‘Shall I come down with you, to sort out your gear?’ she asked, folding uniforms with impressive speed and neatness and stowing them into his kitbag.
‘No,’ Alex said. ‘That’ll be fine, thanks.’
He took down his picture, and suddenly the cabin was no longer home.
Migan had surprised him with this picture – not in the fact that her parting gift had been a picture for his cabin, but in the nature of it. Few people, he felt, could have resisted the temptation to give him a picture of them as a couple, or some scene which would have been a reminder of their time together.
Migan, though, had given him a painting. It was an original art-work, though not one which would ever find room on the walls of a museum or high-priced gallery. It had been done by somebody’s Uncle Ger, Migan said, who had work exhibited sometimes in his local town hall.
It was an abstract, executed in complex folds of soft blues and shadowy greys, with odd but satisfying glints of steel here and there. Alex had exclaimed with delight when he saw it – and had laughed, too. Migan had been paying attention in their jokey profiling of pictures. Anyone who tried to profile Alex from this would gather only that he was far too clever to have pictures on his wall giving away anything he didn’t want outsiders to see. Migan had been right, though, it meant something, a little statement of my place when it was up on the wall.
‘Here.’ Alex put the picture in its transport case and handed it to Simmy, who stowed it in the bag. She was trying to be brave, to be cheerful, not to let that chin wobble. But Alex could see how she felt. He had meant to talk to her after she had been on leave, herself, feeling it only fair to give her time to take a break before she considered her options. Sub-lt Forley, he knew, was alre
ady lined up for a tour of duty on a carrier, and would be fine, going on to that with all the skills and confidence he’d gained from his time as Alex’s adjutant.
Simmy, though… yes, she had skills, now, and had gained tremendously in confidence. But Simmy, Alex felt, was still a work in progress.
‘You’ve done very well,’ he said, conscious of passing time and the other people he really ought to say goodbye to. At least he wouldn’t have to say goodbye to Silvie. As was usual for them, Shion had taken her off the ship before they’d even started their deceleration run, taking her straight down to the oceans of Therik, where she’d leap from the shuttle to swim. Doing that broke so many Customs, Quarantine and Traffic rules that even to attempt it would normally get you arrested, but Silvie had special permissions. She would be already in the ocean by now, with Shion waiting there to pick her up once she’d had her first swim.
‘If you’d like to go on being my steward after you’ve been on leave, Simmy,’ Alex said, ‘the job is…’ he broke off and laughed. ‘Flag Stewards,’ he told her, carefully holding his hands away from any contact with her and stepping back a pace, ‘do not hug their captains! Or squeal!’
‘Sorry!’ Simmy flailed her arms around briefly and then shoved them behind her. ‘That’s just so brill, ta!’
Yes, Alex thought. Still very much a work in progress. And so much fun.
He left her to finish the packing, hearing her break into song before the door had closed behind him, and made his way quickly to the training group wardroom – their station for launch and deceleration runs. They would be staying there quietly, out of the way, while the ship went through port entry formalities.
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