Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘I have no doubt of it,’ said Alex, and seeing that the last media ship was now turning disconsolately at the edge of their scopes, he gave them a nod. ‘Permission to detach squadron.’

  They did so, with some little ceremony – the Fleet hardly did any kind of intership exchange without some kind of ceremonial. So the Whisker moved, very correctly, over to take station on the Minnow and both ships moved aside, firing a salute to the flagship which the Heron returned before they turned in different directions and headed off their separate ways.

  ‘Coffee skipper?’ Ordinary Star Owun Glyn had already mastered the most important aspect of being duty rigger on the command deck, which was to provide the skipper with mugs of the dark, rich, marin-spiced coffee he liked. Keeping the command deck clean and tidy, clearing it for freefall as required and standing ready to pass out survival suits came a long way second, as for that matter did providing refreshments for other officers and crew on duty there. The important thing, he’d been told repeatedly, was to keep the skipper well supplied with coffee. He had gathered that it was considered vital for the smooth operation of the ship that the skipper was regularly refuelled with a mug of the good stuff, and that if he was deprived of coffee for too long the skipper would get, they said delicately, a mite irritable.

  Nobody wanted an irritable skipper, least of all the second lowest ranking rating on the ship, already on his very last chance in Fleet service and desperate to make good.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Alex, and was mildly amused to note that the rigger, having handed him the mug of freshly brewed coffee, went over to the damage control locker. There, he made sure that the suit system had cleaned and compressed all the survival suits returned to it and that they were ready for use again, before asking the other officers with distinct reserve if they would like drinks. Owun was trying to be polite, he really was, but embittered experience had taught him to classify officers either as idiots or gits, and for all he kept telling himself that things were different here, his opinion of officers was deeply ingrained and perfectly apparent.

  Alex sat back, enjoying the wonderful sense of peace and homecoming. The ship had already settled down, the watch on duty getting on with routine work while most of those off duty were gathering on the mess decks. Rangi Tekawa, their medic, was tending to a member of the crew who was trying to deny that he’d sprained his wrist slightly during the launch. On another deck, Jonas Sartin was asking a rather startled petty officer to sing back notes he was playing on his comp. Bagging her for the choir, Alex recognised, and getting in fast before any of the other clubs could sign her up for sports, crafts, music, study groups or any of the other multifarious pursuits aboard ship. In the Lab, they were having a soothing cup of tea and consoling one another for the nerve-shattering experience of the launch. The Second had managed to pack five different teams into their research lab for this trip, two of them solo projects, two duos and one four-member team, filling all ten cabins. Professor Parrot and his team, who’d been aboard so long that they’d started to feel like a permanent fixture, had been eased groundside when the ship went into spacedocks. Even they had had to recognise that they could not keep working in the lab when the ship was going to be fully powered down and depressurised. Once groundside with all their equipment, they’d settled happily into facilities created for them there and had accepted, too, that it was time for other teams to have a turn. There was some interesting research going on there too, Alex felt – three of the teams were here with prototype technology which was to be field-tested on the Heron alongside their existing systems. One of them was a new generation shipboard siliplas extrusion and recycling plant, more compact and more versatile than the units they’d acquired from the Stepeasy. If it worked. A previous attempt at field testing aboard a research vessel had had to be aborted when the unit had a kind of fit and created five hundred and seventy dinner plates before they could turn it off. The two sides of the project – hardware and programming – were both adamant that its tendency to madly produce stuff you hadn’t even asked for was a fault on the other side. As so often with such experimental tech, it did have to be tested in shipboard conditions because it worked just fine groundside. The Fourth, it was hoped, would figure out what was wrong with it and help them find a fix. They had a distinguished wave space physicist in the lab, too, one of the solo researchers. He was a dreamy-eyed, floppy-haired man with a vaguely puzzled air; he seemed quite unable to remember people’s names but was said to be one of the most advanced wave-space thinkers in the League. He was here to study data from the Naos system which enabled them to map, and therefore traverse, previously non-navigable space. His project, indeed, was to extend the range of the Naos system, which his research brief said he expected to be able to do during this trip. They would be diverting a few days from the direct route to X-Base Serenity for his research, specifically to run through an area of turbulent space at high speed. Alex was looking forward to that – it was the kind of navigation he liked.

  All in all, he thought, the eight week run to Serenity looked like being very enjoyable – a lively shakedown, interesting research and a little exploration on the way. Great fun.

  That feeling did not change one jot, either, as he saw that the Inspection Team was emerging from their Lair.

  This was unusual. The Team was keen to stress, and did so repeatedly, that they were not aboard the ship in any official capacity yet. They would make no observations, record no notes and be resolute in forming no opinions whatsoever until the point at which Captain von Strada himself decided that the ship was ready for inspection. Then they would swing into action. This was necessary because of the work they’d had done on the ship and because of the sheer numbers of new personnel they had taken aboard – before they could return to operational status they would need to pass the standard Fleet inspection, assessing their competence against a range of criteria. Normally this would happen around the home port, in a week-long trip undertaken specially for the inspection, itself following on from a series of training exercises.

  For the Heron, though, different arrangements had been made. As had become normal for them, they would undertake their shakedown while on their way to operations, and on this occasion it had been arranged for them to take the inspection team along with them. Heading up the team was a semi-retired Admiral who’d come over from Chartsey specifically for this task. Five other officers, each tasked with inspecting a different aspect of the ship’s performance, made up the rest of the team.

  They had hardly been seen, though, since coming aboard. It was important to them to maintain their distance and professional objectivity, so they had asked to be excused from such things as invitations to the wardroom and other social events. Quarters had been created for them on the interdeck – six cabins around their own lounge/dining room and another cabin set up for them to use as an office. They had gone there immediately upon coming aboard and there they had stayed. They had been in there for five days straight, food going in on a hot trolley and empty dishes coming out, not a sight of them, and not a word. The steward who’d gone in there said that they had their own running machine on which they apparently took turns taking exercise. Other than that they seemed to spend most of their time just reading stuff or watching Therik System News.

  Now though, they emerged, following Admiral Dafour out of the Lair like ducklings venturing out of the nest. Alex was pleased to see it – Admiral Dafour had assured him that they would not even know that the team was on board, but Alex had been concerned that they might intend to stay in their quarters for the five or six weeks it might be before the ship was ready for inspection. So it was good to see that they felt able to come out into the interdeck lounge, even if it was only to settle themselves down quietly at a table.

  Well, start to settle themselves down quietly at a table, anyway, which they were doing until one of them looked over at the aquarium and saw that Silvie was in there.

  The tank had been constructed on isolation gimba
ls, with shock absorbers which ensured that not so much as a tremor ran through the water even during the most violent manoeuvres. It was, the crew agreed, a great comfort to them to know, while they were being flung about like beads in maracas, that the fish were comfortable. All joking aside, though, the welfare of the fish and corals was a serious concern, not an easy thing to maintain aboard a starship. And for Silvie, their wellbeing was as important as her own. So she had, once she’d recovered from the shrieking emotion of the launch, gone to check on her pet fish and relax a little in the calm surroundings of her garden. People who’d been on the ship for a while took no more notice of Silvie in her garden than they did of her going around the ship. It was, though, admittedly an unusual sight for newcomers, and often something of a social embarrassment. Was it okay to watch her, or not?

  The answer to that was yes, it was fine. If Silvie wanted time on her own she could engage the privacy screen over the lounge side of the aquarium, either. Generally, though, she was fine with people watching, finding that people often got as much pleasure from watching her playing with her fish as she did herself from swimming with them.

  Somebody should have told Admiral Dafour that – or perhaps they had, but he was so anxious to keep their presence as near to invisible as humanly possible that he couldn’t risk even the slightest contretemps. To stand and watch her swimming seemed as rude as to sit down with their backs to her and ignore her. Silvie herself was totally absorbed in her fish. She had got into the water fully dressed in shipboard rig, as the airlock entry above it would dry her and her clothes when she got out. Her hair, with its metallic sheen, would shake dry in a moment. She was kicking lazily in the strong current which flowed across the reef, bright rainbow fish dancing around her like the ribbons wielded by artistic gymnasts. As two of the team gazed at her with expressions of astonishment and wonder, Admiral Dafour called them quietly to order. Alex did not need to listen in to see that the Admiral was suggesting that they ought to return to their quarters. And so they did, their sojourn in the lounge having lasted under two minutes. He really would, Alex recognised, have to do something about that.

  Then Shion arrived on the command deck. She had been late reporting aboard, she and Silvie only re-joining the ship that morning, and this was the first chance she’d had to have a proper look at the new workstations provided for her, Silvie and Davie.

  ‘Oh.’ She sat down, testing the comfort of the smaller, air-upholstered chairs, and beamed with pleasure as she discovered that a touch-control released a secondary panel of work-screens. It rose from the surface of the datatable, revealing other screens beneath, while the upper panel could be positioned at any angle. Shion swung it at once to a slight angle so that she could use the upper screens with her left hand and the lower ones with her right. ‘Lovely!’ she exclaimed, working eight sub-screens at once and so fast that their contents were a blur to human eyes. ‘And much sharper resolution, too – thank you, skipper.’

  ‘Least we could do,’ said Alex. It had come as a shock to him to realise that Shion and the others were actually being limited by the workspace on the datatable when they really wanted more screens and faster, sharper images too. It had been Shion herself who’d designed these new workstations and a specialist team had built them as a unique customisation. That had not been cheap, but the Diplomatic Corps had picked up the tab for that one, as exodiplomacy provision.

  ‘I like this,’ Shion surveyed the new datatable and other changes around the command deck, smiling approval, and then, seeing that the rigger was coming around with a tray of drinks, spoke to him cheerfully, ‘Gai tay, osith.’

  Owun nearly dropped his tray – actually had to steady it, and himself, and even then just stood there staring at her.

  ‘Par Camag?’ he said, without thinking, and then in the next moment realised what he’d done and shot Alex a look of dismay. ‘Oh… I’m sorry, sir, I just didn’t…’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Alex assured him. ‘We don’t have any regulation here forbidding speaking other languages aboard ship – on the contrary, we encourage people learning and practising other languages. The only stipulation we make is that we all speak Standard when the ship is on alert, for safety reasons.’ He looked curiously at the other man. ‘Surely someone has told you that?’

  Owun hardly liked to say that he had been told that, and by several people, but hadn’t believed a word of it. It seemed to him a very obvious ‘wind up the newbie’ gag and not a kind one, either, given the trouble it would get him into.

  And that kind of trouble was something Owun knew plenty about. He had been on eleven disciplinaries for wilfully and persistently speaking a foreign language in breach of regulations and to the detriment of shipboard discipline.

  Owun’s argument – a fiercely fought argument – was that it was not a foreign language. Camag was the language which had been spoken on his homeworld at the time when the League had discovered them just over a thousand years earlier. Most worlds lost their native language and much of their local customs, too, within a few centuries of League membership, but Camae had retained both language and culture with a high pride in both. Their education system meant that all their children were raised bilingual, and all official matters on his world could be conducted in either language.

  He had known, of course, when he joined the Fleet, that he would be expected to speak Standard aboard ship. But he had interpreted that as meaning while on duty. He didn’t see that there was any reason why he couldn’t speak his home language when off duty on the mess deck. It was, after all, a language used in government and courts on a League world, so hardly foreign. There’d been a couple of other people from Camae on his first ship, and they’d naturally had a chat, slipping into Camag as easily as they drew breath. When an officer had told them to stop it, as it wasn’t allowed aboard ship, Owun’s long slide from high-potential recruit to angry bullock had begun.

  It had actually made Alex quite angry himself, reading Owun’s file. His was a classic instance of the Fleet turning a really good, high-potential crewmember into a sullen, resentful failure. The matter of speaking his home language, which would not have been a problem at all if they’d just given a little leeway, had become an overriding issue, a cause, which had set him at odds with the service. And that had meant not only that he kept being hammered back down to the lowest possible rank, but that he was also denied opportunities in training and postings which could have turned things around. Reduced to grunt work and treated as a barracking space lawyer, that was what he had become. Finally, he’d been left with only two choices – to accept a discharge from the Fleet for persistent unsatisfactory conduct, or to apply for a rehab place with the Fourth.

  So here he was. And, aware of what a special opportunity this was, he had told himself that he would leave the language issue aside, put that behind him and make a fresh start here, not speaking Camag aboard ship. And now an officer was speaking it to him on the command deck, and the skipper said that was fine. It was a lot to take in, all at once.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, because that was generally safe in most circumstances. Then his eyes went back to Shion, and he really took in who she was. ‘Ohhh.’ He drew a breath, and couldn’t stop himself marvelling, ‘You speak Camag?’

  ‘I speak all human languages, ancient and modern,’ Shion said simply. ‘I’m the ship’s linguist. Sub-lt Shion…’ she introduced herself with a smile, then added, ‘I’m also going to be your mentor. That okay with you?’

  Owun nodded rapidly. Everyone in the Fourth had a mentor, regardless of whether they were here for rehab or secondment. Either way, the process was the same, to look at where you were and what you wanted to achieve, and to work out micro-steps in a reasonable timescale to achieve it. Even the captain himself, Owun had been told, had professional development goals he was working towards, with Buzz as his mentor for that. He had been told, too, that he would have Shion as his rehab officer. He hadn’t believed that, either. People had said that she d
id the same work as any other junior officer, but that had seemed quite hard to believe.

  ‘Yes ma’am,’ he said, and gazed rapturously upon the first officer he had met in years who was very definitely neither an idiot nor a git. Admiration shone in him, and delight, too, at the prospect of working with her. ‘Thank you!’

  ‘Crassa,’ said Shion, meaning ‘you’re welcome.’ Then she grinned at him again, quite mischievously. ‘Asa, gai tay, osith?’ It needed little linguistic ability to understand this as ‘So, can I have some tea, please?’

  Owun dumped the tray with everybody else’s drinks onto the edge of the datatable, leaving them to hand them round themselves while he rushed off to get Shion her tea.

  Shion looked at Alex, studying him for his reaction, and he gave her a nod of warm approval. Becoming a mentor for someone on rehab was actually a step in her own training. Shion had not, of course, graduated from any Academy and had come to the League with no qualifications they recognised. The decision to allow her to work as an honorary officer had been one taken more on diplomatic grounds than recognition of her abilities. At Alex’s suggestion, she had begun with them at the level of a cadet joining the ship for a final year placement. Since then, though, she had gained all the qualifications a Sub would be expected to have, and then some. And she was working through the same career programme as any other Sub, with all the same training and assessments. When she made Lieutenant, it would be a rank she had earned, fair and square.

  As for Owun Gwyn, Alex watched him coming back through the command deck with a huge happy grin, bearing a cup of tea made just the way Shion liked it, and he chuckled inwardly. O/S Gwyn’s last commanding officer had dropped him a private note, advising grimly You’ll have your hands full with this one, he’s the stroppiest bullock I’ve dealt with in years.