By the time that she had convinced him that the gym was also in use for training and that his only options were the lab, his cabin or a study booth, the Sub had thoroughly earned the excellent rating she would get for using a calm defusing strategy. She got a bonus, too, as his raised voice and the name he called her when she told him that he could not eat his meals in a study booth but must eat either in the lab or the interdeck lounge fully justified a tick to dealing with aggressive behaviour, too.
‘Well done, dear girl,’ Buzz told her, later, and she went around beaming for the rest of the day.
Before then, though, it was Alex who was making people happy. No sooner had Barney stalked off to the interdeck with his breakfast tray than Alex called the ship to action stations. It was not quite a full-ship drill since both the lab and the interdeck were exempted, but everywhere else came briskly to stations. It was a lot quieter by then, with the few who’d struggled in high speed freefall having been given some training sessions while others had adapted to the Fourth’s near-silent way of doing things. Many Fleet ships used the priority-yelp system in which people with higher priority cried out ‘Tech’ or ‘Gunner’ so that others would make way for them. The Fourth did not do that; the only time such a call was heard on their ships was during an emergency when the cry of ‘Medic!’ would get everyone flattening themselves out of the way. They were a little slower this morning, at ninety six seconds, but Alex was more pleased by the quiet competence of it than he had been by the quicker, noisy, frantic dash of the first couple of days.
‘All hands,’ he spoke over the PA. ‘Thank you for your patience over the last few days.’ Someone started an ironic cheer, but the skipper kept speaking and the lone cheer died of embarrassment. ‘As a reward,’ Alex told them, ‘we will be running an extended suit drill.’
Now they cheered. The extended suit drill was a required element in shakedown training and was never attempted until the crew had already achieved a satisfactory rating in other drills and assessments. It was a major milestone in their shakedown and the crew were justifiably pleased with themselves.
‘All right…’ Alex turned to the officers waiting at the command table and spoke to them with cool formality belied by the sparkle in his eyes. ‘Please remember,’ he reminded them, ‘that we are not yet operational, so no more than LG 4.8.’
‘Skipper,’ three voices acknowledged in unison – Lt Weir, their new astrogator, and two of the watch commanders. Alex had arranged a training exercise for them, too. All three were to take turns navigating the ship at high speed through turbulent space. Lt Weir, however, would only be allowed to do so for six hours, while the watch commanders were embarking on a twenty-five hour stint on duty. Only Bonny actually had to do that as part of her command school training, but their new third lieutenant had stepped up to it as well. It also meant that Alex himself was going to have to sit through it with them, evaluating their performance through a range of tasks in addition to the already pretty challenging navigation.
Six hours later, Lt Weir had to be told to leave the command deck, having made an unsuccessful plea for exceptional circumstance permission to stay and keep going.
‘I never had so much fun in my life,’ he observed, getting up a little reluctantly when Alex told him that he had to go and take a break.
Alex grinned. He was enjoying it too. This was the kind of navigation he enjoyed, ducking and diving through turbulent space. They were smooth-running now, after all those days of battering through the worst space Barney could find. As energy waves appeared ahead on their scopes, the officer holding the conn had to read the contours and lay in a course which would minimise impact to the ship whilst still keeping them as near to on-course as possible, and as fast as possible, too, whilst keeping the impact on the ship at less than the 4.8 on the Leaman Gemilli scale as specified by Alex. The LG scale was a simple register of vibratory force, and at 4.8 the ship would be juddering even more forcefully than it had over the previous week. At 4.8 an open mug of coffee would be splashing liquid out and would be moving slowly across low-friction surfaces like table tops.
That they never got anywhere near that was due to the skill both of the officers at the conn and the crew at the helm who carried those directions out. The helm was being relieved every hour, partly so that no-one had to do the extremely high concentration work for long at a time but mostly to give as many people as possible the experience of piloting the ship like this.
You could tell a lot about people, Alex felt, from the way they tackled a challenge like this. Bonny was, as he’d have expected, confident and extrovert in her style of navigation, swinging the ship through big, bold curves and keeping speed high. Their new third officer, Urlat Singh, was very different. He’d only been promoted to Lt Commander very recently and was still finding his feet in the echelons of command rank. His style was conservative, slowing the ship frequently then speeding it up again, taking more angular routes. And Lt Weir was clearly a natural pilot, snaking the ship through turbulence faster than even Alex himself would have pushed it in this kind of space, finding the smoothest route with hardly more, it seemed, than a writhe here and a wriggle there.
This was not as surprising as it might have been. Lt Weir had been with them a couple of years before as one of their supernumerary Subs, and had been one of the first to take advanced piloting lessons from Shion.
By breakfast time next morning Urlat Singh’s technique had improved considerably, too, as he’d gained in confidence and ventured a rather more sinuous style than the straight-line thinking with which he’d started out. Both he and Bonny were red eyed and a little more haggard than they had been at the start, but both were still cheerful and performing well. They and Alex were the only people on the ship who had not been able to go to sickbay for scheduled comfort breaks – a short but welcome chance every six hours to get out of your suit, grab a quick shower and a bite to eat and scratch whatever itch had been driving you mad.
Alex had an itch, too. It was psychological. Being in a survival suit and knowing that you couldn’t scratch, you tried not to think about getting an itch and therefore, inevitably, got one. Alex’s was on his right elbow, which he often rested on the arm of his chair. He was uncomfortable in other ways, too. The suit’s urinal facility drew away urine into a pee bag on the inside of your leg, but the diaper pants could only dry excrement. Like any experienced spacer Alex had long ago mastered the technique of reducing the dried lumps to powder, but it was still uncomfortable and unpleasant – not for nothing did spacers call having to poo in your suit ‘making a crusty’. He felt dirty, too – he was used to taking a bidet shower every time he went to the lavatory, as well as two or three full showers a day in which his clothes were freshened as well. The suit’s air processing system dealt competently with odours but he knew that he was stinking and his mouth tasted foul. He had not been able to have a decent mug of coffee, only the revolting brew available in a clip-pack which attached to the side of the helmet and allowed you to drink through a sip-straw. He had had no solid food, either, only the soups and gel-nutrient also sucked through a tube. He was stiff and physically weary from having been on duty all day and all night, and almost all of it sitting in the same chair. So there he was, filthy, hungry and aching, with a maddening itch on his elbow and a crust of powdered poo in his pants. Being a starship captain could be a great deal less than glamorous at times. But like the others, Alex was enjoying himself tremendously. He had the same kind of satisfaction that a runner has, pushing themselves up a steep hill. Except that in this case the hill was not particularly steep and certainly not very long as far as Alex was concerned. By the final stages of command school, trainees were expected to work for three days and nights straight on no more than cat-naps and no time allowed for showering or meals. During the most demanding phase of the Carrearranis operation he had worked two hundred and forty two hours over eleven days with only thirty three hours of sleep, averaging three hours sleep a night but never act
ually managing more than one hour at a time. He’d lost weight and had been close to exhaustion by the end of that mission, but two days on leave had been enough for him to be wanting to go back to work. So pulling an all-nighter, really, even in a suit, was no more than a leg-stretching jog.
‘Well done, both of you.’ Alex commended the other two, then addressed the ship’s company as he stood them all down from stations. ‘Thank you, everyone – good exercise.’
There was a cheer – they had been able to eat in their breaks and to sleep normally, too, albeit in suits, but it had still been enough of a challenge to merit a cheer at the end – a cheer which turned into laughter as the SEP chose that moment to start producing floral print vases, almost as if it was joining in the celebrations.
Five days after that, having continued to slip-slide through the turbulence with both speed and grace, the Heron arrived at the system Alex had chosen for their system based exercises. If they had been going through shakedown the normal way then this would have been one of the exercises for which they’d have launched the ship, carrying out the required drills in proximity to their home port. There was no requirement for the system to be an inhabited one, though, and an uninhabited system actually offered more scope for the kind of training Alex liked to do.
It did not take them long to nip through the Fleet-required shakedown exercises, establishing long orbit around the system, saluting a non-existent port authority and ensuring that they had all their certification in order. Then they did some near-system combat manoeuvres which morphed into a full ship combat exercise using the fighters and blank fire from the cannon. Even this, though, was routine. What they were waiting for, hoping for, watching the command deck for, was a nod from the skipper to say that they could first-foot the system.
First, though, they had to survey it, confirming that there was no sign of life on any of its planets.
There was none. The two planets which had once been in the sweet zone for life had long ago been burned to cinders by the star in its red-giant expansion phase, and of the remaining rocky objects in the system, all were either too hot or too cold to sustain the liquid water essential for even the most exotic extremophiles. Conditions were so extreme that no known form of life could exist there, and sure enough an hour later bio-scans confirmed that there was not a hint of any life process going on anywhere in the system.
That was as expected. Whoever it was who’d passed through this part of the galaxy some billions of years before scattering seeding bacteria onto thousands upon thousands of planets, they had evidently not considered this cluster of elderly stars to be worth the trouble. It was possible that a detailed study of the cluster might find a fossil record of life which had evolved spontaneously – if you had a hundred ships and a couple of hundred years with nothing better to do – but this was an old and dying region.
Still, they investigated carefully, just in case, before Alex certified that the system had no life and sent Bonny off to claim it on behalf of the League. Both he and Buzz had done this now, more than once, but Bonny had never been lucky enough even to be part of a first-footing expedition, so it was a very special experience for her.
The ceremony was a pure technicality, of course. It was one of the multitude of systems which lay within League borders but had not yet been specifically claimed as belonging to them. It was not as if anyone was likely to turn up to dispute territorial rights over them anyway, the ceremony and flag-planting being little more than honouring the ancient traditions of space exploration.
Still, they did it with a certain style, choosing the landing place for its scenic value as well as for safety. The chosen landing site on this occasion was on one of the moons of a gas giant; the most volcanically active body in the system with a surface which was a patchwork of largely yellow and green sulphurous lava. One particular volcano was currently venting a plume of sulphur dioxide more than four hundred kilometres high. Having chosen a safe landing space on stable ground within picture-perfect sight of this plume, the next task was to find a safe way through to it. This was not a wild young system of the type so beloved by system divers, but it still had an extensive comet cloud and several million small objects moving around within it. It was possible to blast a path through the swirl of planetismals and dust which made up the comet cloud, but Alex had found it useful in the past to be able to slip into a system without leaving any trace that they’d done so, so asked Bonny to plan a covert entry.
She did so, and duly carried out the convoluted system-entry with a neat slingshot deceleration of her shuttle, putting them precisely in orbit over the landing site.
‘Final scans complete,’ Bonny stated, for the log. ‘Green, all green – clear to land.’
It was ‘green, all green’ when they landed, too. The surface of the lava plain on which they landed was a green-yellow allotrope of sulphur and rendered even greener by the light from the predominantly blue gas giant filling half the sky. Against that backdrop the silhouetted volcanic plume looked black, billowing so high on the horizon that the people stepping out of the shuttle looked no bigger than ants.
Bonny, the first human being ever to set foot on any world in this solar system, just stood there for some time gazing at it all, quite lost for words. Such scenic spots could be found in most solar systems – in an inhabited system, this place would certainly be a sightseeing destination with pressure domes, restaurants and gift shops. It was a view of which most bus-trip visitors would take a few pictures with themselves in the foreground and then toddle off to get a cup of tea. Being the first person ever to stand in such a place, though, was a qualitatively different experience, a moment of true wonder even for the most experienced of spacers. It was a moment, for sure, that Bonny herself would never forget. She sounded a little choked, even, as she pulled herself together enough to make the ceremonial declaration and plant a nominal little flag, which she and the rest of the first-footing party saluted. Then they ran around like idiots for ten minutes, leaping like frogs and yelling their heads off, before setting off on a rather more sedate loping hike to the top of a nearby rise.
By the end of the following day, all of them had had the experience of first-footing somewhere in the system. Every party which went down landed on a different body. There were plenty to choose from, after all, with upwards of eight hundred planetoids and moons. Some of them were too dangerous to land on – too hot or too acidic even for their shuttles and survival suits – but that still left plenty of choice. Every party which went down came back with unique holos, some memories and the right to say that they had been the first people to set foot on that particular planetoid or moon.
It was not a surprise – everyone knew that Alex always took his ship to a previously unclaimed system at some point in shakedown or operational training. It was a very expensive thing to do in terms of time and resources, but he justified it as providing a broad range of training opportunities from surveys to in-system combat. It was also, for him, an important part of the process of bringing his people together into a firmly bonded crew, as that shared, thrilling experience was unique to this crew, and this mission. It was an important psychological break, too; refreshing to get off the ship even for a couple of hours and a mind-expanding change of perspective from the familiar duralloy walls.
Alex himself went down to an icy planetoid with Silvie. It was the smallest of planetoids, with a radius of only around four hundred and fifty kilometres. That still gave it a surface area of more than two million square kilometres, though, so plenty of options for a landing site.
‘I get to choose this time,’ Silvie insisted, ‘You’re not going to make me land in the middle of the biggest flattest plain you can find.’
Alex grinned. He did rather tend to find the safest place possible to let Silvie first-foot, but the whole of this planetoid was safe in that regard – no volcanoes, no oceans, just craters and dust.
So they landed, at Silvie’s choice, near the rim of one of the larger c
raters.
‘Skipper…’ Silvie looked patiently at him as Alex did a final check of her suit and gear before allowing the outer airlock to be opened, and he chuckled. He knew that he was being unnecessarily parental, that she was in fact considerably more intelligent and a great deal physically stronger than he was himself. All the same, he was responsible for her and did not have a hundred per cent faith in her ability to keep herself safe in unfamiliar environments. ‘There are no sharks here,’ Silvie pointed out. ‘You really don’t need to worry.’
‘I’m not worrying, just being careful,’ Alex finished testing her wrist jets. Gravity here was less than 0.03% of shipboard standard, as near to being in freefall as made no difference. They had clump-boots, with grav-soles which would enable them to clump about so long as they kept one foot on the surface, but one big bouncing jump and without wrist-jets you’d be hanging in the tenuous atmosphere for hours before the gravity brought you back to ground.
‘Escape velocity is 483 metres a second, right?’ said Silvie, and gave a little crow of glee as Alex looked appalled. ‘Okay okay okay,’ she promised. ‘I won’t even try. But I am going for a run, all right?’
It wasn’t really a question. It was why he had brought her down here, just the two of them. Spending so much time in such confined conditions with so many humans was stressful for Silvie, and though she coped with it very well it was good for her to go off and spend a little time alone whenever that was possible. They had already agreed that Alex would stay close to the shuttle – just in case he had to go to the rescue – while Silvie could roam freely over the surface.
All the same, he hadn’t anticipated that she would roam quite as freely or as fast as she did. They stepped out of the airlock together, making satisfying footprints in the dusty regolith. Alex meant to take a few steps, to find his feet and take a look around, but before he’d taken his second step, Silvie was off.
Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6) Page 16