Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘Yes, it’s fine,’ Alex assured her. ‘We have it in hand, Oti, you don’t need to do anything and you certainly don’t need to worry about it.’

  Oti Zandro gave him a look of quite pathetic gratitude.

  ‘Thank you, Alex,’ she said, being the type of civilian who felt awkward using ranks and had rapidly got on first name terms with everyone.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Alex smiled at her. He liked Oti Zandro – she was a groundhog to the core but had worked very hard in pre-boarding training to learn basic skills like handling freefall and recognising alerts. She was modest, too, and had won the crew’s good opinion by equating herself with crew rather than with the officers. She was, she said, more at home in the staff canteen than she would be in the executive dining room. She was easy to like, and Alex was not the only one who felt sympathy for her, either, for the tremendous pressure she was under. ‘So, how are things going with your own project?’ Alex enquired, partly out of genuine interest but mostly to steer her away from the emotive topic of Barney’s behaviour.

  ‘Oh, don’t ask,’ Oti groaned. ‘We had random extrusion events three times, yesterday. Which I guess you know.’

  ‘I didn’t really pay much attention,’ Alex admitted. ‘Though I gather there was something about flippers…?’

  ‘A hundred and seventy three left foot swimming flippers, yes,’ Oti said, and seeing a gleam of amusement at the absurdity of that, she focussed a searching look on him. ‘Alex, I hate to ask this but are you sure that leaving it turned on all the time is really the best way to go?’

  Alex nodded. They had rigged up a return unit so that anything produced by the SEP was immediately put back into it for recycling back to liquid siliplas. It was switched on but on standby mode, so should not produce anything spontaneously. Periodically, though, it would set itself to produce quantities of apparently random items from its extensive catalogue. Analysis had shown that the command to make the items apparently materialised out of thin air, with no discernible tech or software origin.

  ‘We’ve learned this with randomising tech,’ he told her. ‘You have to give it a good long run in a variety of space conditions to collect enough data to figure out what’s going on with it. And we aren’t, I promise you, putting that data on the notice board for our own amusement – people may well have a chuckle at some of the mad stuff it chucks out but the reality is that there are a lot of people watching it, thinking about it from their own perspective and expertise, talking about it, trying to figure it out. It’s a puzzle, see, and we love puzzles.’

  ‘But … no ideas yet,’ Oti pointed out.

  ‘We don’t have enough data yet,’ Alex said. ‘We spent months collecting data from the biovat before we figured that out, and since the solution we found for that doesn’t work for the SEP we have to gather enough data to see what’s going on. I know it is a stressful and frustrating time, but please try not to worry too much about it. We will do our utmost to figure out what’s going on with it, and if we can’t, I promise you will go back to Filarnex with a shed load of files explaining, in detail, all the factors which have been explored and excluded, so it will still have been a worthwhile test.’

  She gave him a slightly startled look and then laughed, at herself rather than at him.

  ‘I forget,’ she admitted, ‘that you’ve done so much of this kind of thing it just seems routine to you.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Alex. ‘I managed to get my first command, the Minnow, on the Second’s field-testing list, so we had hot tech there on field test right from the start. Sometimes it worked perfectly first time out, but those were the exceptions. The whole point of a field test, after all, is to iron out the glitches. And the more of that you do, the more of a feel you get for what is likely to go wrong, and why, and how best to fix it. Your SEP is unusual because it isn’t any of the things we’ve identified as a cause of malfunctioning tech before, but that just makes it interesting, a challenge, and there’s nothing we like more than a challenge. Trust me on this, Oti, it may not look like much is going on but there are a lot of people trying to figure this out, and once we have enough data, the ideas will start flowing.’

  ‘Well, I’m completely out of them, myself,’ Oti confessed. ‘I’ve analysed every factor I can think of, tested every individual part every way possible, all the data says it should work – the only thing left, the only thing I can think, is that it’s a software problem, but our computer guys and yours both swear it isn’t.’

  ‘No, the software checked out glitch-free,’ Alex agreed. ‘And we know it isn’t wave-space responsive – the biovat has been producing some anomalous output because of the turbulence, and if the SEP was kicking off in synch with that it would obviously be the same cause, but it isn’t.’

  Even in her anxiety, Oti couldn’t help but grin a little. The previous evening’s dinner had been enlivened by the serving of a very odd fruit, the size and colour of a strawberry but with the texture of apple and the flavour of icefruit. The biovat, it appeared, had become a little confused. The nameless fruit had been certified as safe to eat and had then been brought to Alex for taste test, as he would not allow any of the biovat’s odder products to be inflicted on his crew unless he’d tested them first. It was reassuring to know that the biovat – one of the Fourth’s R&D triumphs in getting it to work at all – still had its problems.

  ‘I was so hoping it would be wave space,’ Oti commented, just a little wistfully, as this would not only explain her team’s inability to find and fix the problem before now, but was in itself an impressively complex, high-science issue. That had been eliminated early on, though, when the SEP had started firing out inflatable cushions at a time when the ship was in a calm and stable zone. ‘I’ve even found myself thinking, at times, that maybe there isn’t anything wrong with it, nothing we can find or fix, maybe the thing is just jinxed.’

  ‘Oh, please don’t say that,’ Alex implored, looking suddenly concerned. ‘You’ve no idea how superstitious spacers are and if they once get the idea that your SEP is jinxed then every stubbed toe and spilt coffee from now on will be ‘the jinx’ at work. And that can, seriously, become a self-fulfilling prophecy when people get so anxious about a jinx that they lose their focus and make mistakes.’

  ‘Okay – sorry,’ Oti was a little taken aback. She had seen that the crew took part in rituals for things like ridding the ship of ghosts, but had thought that just a bit of fun, nothing they could really take seriously. ‘I won’t say it again,’ she promised, and Alex relaxed.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, seeing that his reaction had been a little strong. ‘It’s a bit of a bugbear,’ he admitted. ‘People think oh, spacer superstitions, they’re just harmless fun, some lucky charms, a few quaint old traditions, but I don’t like it at all. If people want to have a bit of fun with irrational nonsense, fine, but it can so easily get out of hand, reducing a good crew to a nervous mess. And where we’re going, across the Gulf, is such a challenging place to be anyway, the last thing we need is to be taking any idea of jinxed tech out there with us. And I refuse to believe that the problem with the SEP is anything beyond our ability to diagnose – it’s obviously a very unusual problem because we’ve run through all the usual suspects and it isn’t one of them, but there is a rational explanation and I am confident that we will find it.’

  Oti left his cabin feeling heartened by that, though she was slightly less so a couple of hours later when the SEP went through a series of hiccups and produced a set of cutlery, fourteen sports bras, three decorative posters and a plastic pigeon. Since there was some question amongst the crew as to what possible use anyone could have for a plastic pigeon, Oti explained that it had been included in the test-catalogue as an extrusion challenge, since creating an object with so many complex feathers was an advanced task.

  It was, though, just that series of hiccups which provided the first clue as to what was actually going on with the SEP, though it would be some time yet before the piece
s came together. For today, it was just yet more baffling data that didn’t seem to correlate with anything at all.

  And for today, too, they had more immediate concerns, as the ship spent most of the day shuddering and chittering through the most violent turbulence experienced yet. There was widespread suspicion that Barney Barnholdt was doing that on purpose, particularly when it was noted that the ship was now heading almost directly away from the direction he knew that they wanted to go. There was a row, too, when Barney tried to ‘send for the steward’ from the eminence of the captain’s daycabin.

  This achieved nothing. There were no stewards in that sense aboard the frigate. Riggers in various departments were expected to fetch drinks for people while they were working, and certain areas, like the wardroom and the lab, had hot trolleys delivered for meals. The captain, and the captain alone, had a personal steward who brought drinks and meals on request to his quarters. Other than that, catering was largely self-service. There was certainly no provision for steward service in the daycabin and no need for any either. The cabin was equipped with the same kind of drinks-maker that they had around the ship, capable of producing all the popular beverages including fresh brewed coffee. There was even a small but well stocked snacks locker with a cookie tin, so no need for anyone to ‘buzz for a steward’.

  Barney, though, liked a particular and obscure brand of tea which was not available from the drinks machines. He had brought aboard a supply of tea-jellies which he kept in his cabin. It hadn’t taken him long to teach the other members of the Second to make his tea exactly as he liked it, and they had continued to do that for him even after he was exposed as playing helpless to get them doing his chores. It just seemed too petty to refuse to make his tea when they were getting drinks for themselves and for others, and in the interests of lab harmony they had refrained from pointing out that it somehow never seemed to be Barney’s turn to get drinks for anyone else.

  Now, though, even Barney recognised that calling the lab and asking them to bring him down a mug of tea would get a very short answer. So he called the galley instead, telling them where they could find the tea jellies and how to make the tea and if they could bring it within the next few minutes that would be lovely.

  The leading star in charge in the galley that morning told him no, and continued to tell him no against all Barney’s protests. The petty officer in overall charge of catering that watch also told him no, as did the Sub-lt with responsibility for housekeeping. Ultimately, it ended up on the command deck with a tedious row about his rights, the duties of the captain’s steward and the command deck rigger, the lack of any liner-type service drones aboard the frigate, his inability to work under these conditions and how mean and horrible they all were.

  He didn’t win, though. Everyone involved just kept pointing out to him calmly that he could make the tea himself just as they did in the lab, using the drinks-maker’s hot-water function, so all he had to do was fetch his tea jellies for himself. Clearly, this was not about tea, it was about status, as he evidently felt that the privileges of the flag-rank officer should go with the use of the captain’s cabin. Nobody would give way, though, so in the end he stormed off to drink coffee instead, as if they were depriving him of his much-prized tea, declaring that it would all be their fault if his research went wrong because they were treating him so badly.

  Alex remained unruffled. He knew that however emotionally immature Barney might be, he would not sabotage his own work to get back at them. He bore with all the acting-out behaviour tolerantly, and seemed content to let the physicist direct the ship as he would, so the rest of them put up with it with no more than a sigh or muttered grumble here and there.

  It was annoying, though, when it went on for most of the night, too.

  Two more days, people told themselves. Just two more days.

  Six

  It seemed a lot longer than two days, but it did come to an end eventually. Precisely at midnight on the end of day eight, Alex took back control of his ship. This was not accomplished without argument, since Barney claimed that he was following a very important wave and would need ‘a few more hours’ to map it properly. Alex took no more notice of this than a parent did of pleas for ‘five more minutes’. For one thing, he suspected – correctly – that Barney had acquired enough data for his purposes in the first couple of days, and for another, he was not inclined to extend Barney’s control over the Heron for one more minute than he was obliged to.

  So at midnight, the ship turned back onto a calm course and Barney stalked off to his cabin to sulk.

  Everyone else turned in for the first uninterrupted night’s sleep they had had for a week. Inevitably, they did not rise from this like giants refreshed. Instead there was a heavy-eyed, grumbly feel about the ship next morning. This was not alleviated by an incident in which Barney attempted to take his breakfast to the captain’s daycabin. He had been taking all his meals there for the past three days, making a big deal of it every time and pointing out loudly, though not addressing anyone directly, that it was ridiculous and spiteful of them to take his meals from the galley to the lab, practically passing the daycabin, and then oblige him to fetch them from the lab himself.

  Now, here he was again, carrying his freefall-safe tray as if it was both very heavy and uncomfortable, complaining as he brought it down a ladderway with as much fuss as if it had been a radioactive hedgehog.

  ‘I’m sorry…’ The Sub on duty as deck officer that morning had seen what was happening and moved quickly through the ship, arriving outside the captain’s daycabin just before Barney himself, ‘but you haven’t got the use of the daycabin today – you have to book it, you see, and it has already been booked for this morning.’

  Barney had genuinely assumed that when Alex had given him the use of the daycabin that had been for the remaining duration of the run to Serenity. Data collection was only the start of his work, after all, and it went without saying that he could not possibly work in the lab or on the command deck, where the atmosphere was so uncongenial.

  There was, therefore, some argument, which intensified when Barney accessed the booking system and saw that the person who had booked that slot right now was Jonas Sartin, for the purpose of conducting financial reviews.

  Jonas was in fact working his way methodically through all of the new crew intake. There was nothing particularly unusual about this. All Fleet ships had an officer responsible for financial management and they were required to give financial advice to any member of the ship’s company who asked for it. On most ships it was commonplace for the finance officer to offer annual financial reviews to everyone who wanted them, on a rolling programme through the year. Jonas was no different in that regard, only his advice was held in such high esteem that it was very unusual for anyone to turn down the offer of a personal financial advisory session with him. He was currently setting aside an hour every day for such sessions, and had two meetings booked for that morning.

  Barney, for some reason, seemed to feel that this was piling insult onto grievous injury.

  ‘There’s a hundred places round the ship where this can be done, if it needs doing at all,’ he protested. ‘I need the cabin for my work.’ Clearly, nothing in the universe was more important than what Barney wanted.

  ‘You have three options for where you want to work, Barney,’ the Sub was a good deal more cheerful about this than she might have been otherwise. Her own training required her to record and analyse an incident of authority-challenging behaviour and the crew were just not providing any opportunities for that. So behind her calm friendly manner she was mentally ticking off items in her training log and thinking Score! ‘You can work in the lab, or in your own cabin…’

  ‘Impossible!’ Barney interrupted. The cabins in the lab were similar in size to those allocated to Subs, though Subs’ cabins generally shared a shower unit between them and the Second had asked that their people be provided with a shower unit of their own. That just left room for a dr
op-down desk and fold-out chair, though the bunk, as always on starships, could flip over into sofa mode. The space was cramped, but it was thoughtfully furnished and provided with holographic window screens to make them seem bigger. Many people found them cosy and comfortable to work in, but Barney did not attempt to explain his assertion that working in them was impossible, anyway. ‘And don’t tell me I can work on the command deck,’ he scolded. ‘Because I can’t work there either, with all those people coming and going and glowering at me.’

  ‘Actually,’ the Sub smiled pleasantly, ‘the command deck workstation was only available to you while you were engaging with astrogation and the helm – members of the Second aren’t normally allowed to work there, you know. But you have free use of any of the quiet study booths around the ship and on the interdeck.’

  Barney was outraged. The study booths were no bigger than the drop-down desk in his cabin, though they had curved screens reaching as far as the back of the chair. A privacy field enabled a sound-baffle to be engaged, blocking out all sound from outside other than for alerts. You really were in your own quiet little cocoon. Spacers generally didn’t need that, even in environments which were very busy and noisy. On a starship, you just learned to zone out what was going on around you when you needed to concentrate. But all the mess decks had a study booth or two for those who did like working in quiet, and there were several tucked around the interdeck, mostly used by passengers.

  ‘You couldn’t swing a cat in there!’ Barney flailed the arm around which was not currently holding his breakfast tray, as if the ability to fling his arms around was somehow essential to his research. He was, in fact, in the habit of appropriating a lecture theatre when in the throes of an intellectual marathon. It wasn’t that he needed the space, but it gave him a buzz to fill the walls with math, the most important bits writ large. He was well aware that students dared one another to creep up to the doors and peep in at him at work. To go from that to the kind of study booth which students themselves might use in the library seemed far beneath his dignity. ‘If this room isn’t available,’ he indicated the cabin, ‘I want the gym!’