Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6)

by S J MacDonald

  So the inspection team vanished into their Lair again – like caterpillars, Silvie said, wrapping into their cocoon until such time as the moment came to burst forth in all their newly transformed winged glory. To most of the Fourth, they were more like a pack of bears, hibernating until the moment came for them to emerge and start hunting for prey.

  Either way, they were gone again, and it would be at least another week before the skipper could even think about offering the ship for inspection, which just then seemed a comfortably long way off.

  There were, after all, more immediate things to occupy their attention. They’d been carrying out piloting and other training exercises while the first-footing was going on, and by the time everyone had had their leg-stretching visits groundside they’d completed all but one of the list of things to do while they were here. The remaining one was, as Alex had promised, an opportunity for live firing for those who were looking to upgrade their gunnery qualifications.

  And that, just as he had feared, meant every single member of the crew who did not yet hold an advanced gunnery certificate. He had been assured that no pressure of any kind had been applied, that it was in every case an individual decision, but it was entirely obvious that they were all in it for the honour of the ship, to restore that spectacular hundred per cent advanced status which had rocked the Fleet when news of it had first got out. There were many who considered that it didn’t or shouldn’t count, since the advanced qualification was supposed to be a high prestige matter and not something granted en masse to gunners allowed to blast away for hours at rocks.

  The Admiralty, though, had confirmed Alex’s granting of that qualification to everyone who’d successfully completed the training and live-firing requirement. This meant achieving a 96% accuracy over a minimum of a thousand live shots at hard targets while the ship was superlight.

  ‘We’ll start live gunnery at 0600 tomorrow,’ Alex told the Ordnance officer on the command deck, and without pausing for the cheer which went up at that, ‘I can allow you two days, Mr Allison.’

  ‘Excellent, skipper, thank you,’ said the Lt, who already had his schedule ready, giving every applicant a slot. ‘And our target?’

  They were not allowed to just fire randomly at any rock that happened to take their fancy – the nature of the target, a specified zone, had to be precise enough to meet advanced-gunner requirements.

  ‘Ah.’ Alex smiled, and passed a file from one of his own screens to the ordnance officer’s. ‘There you are.’

  A huge cheer went up when they saw the target. Alex had defined a zone within the comet cloud, targeting all the thousands of rock and ice bodies moving in their differing orbits at different speeds. The target zone would punch through gigantic letters in the diffuse cloud – from just the right distance and angle, it would be possible to make out FFI Heron.

  It wouldn’t last for long. The cloud was in constant movement and cometary bodies would start to move into the voids they’d created almost as soon as they stopped firing. The letters would be blurred within a matter of months and completely undetectable within a decade or so. But right then and there, they were writing the name of their ship in letters a million kilometres high, and that very definitely got people cheering.

  Alex was happy, even though in the event they failed to get their hundred per cent status. He was actually happier that they hadn’t succeeded – it wasn’t as if the hundred per cent bragging right was of any operational importance, after all, and he was far more impressed by the way they reacted to the three members of the crew who’d flunked the exercise.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, mate,’ was the universal response, with lots of back slapping comfort for the mortified ones, and later, once they were up for it, some remedial teasing, too, getting them to laugh at what had seemed such a humiliating disaster. In two cases, it was sheer nerves which had got the better of them, as they kept saying themselves, they’d done it easily in simulation, it was just that their hands had been shaking under the pressure. In the third case it was frankly lack of skill, as the crewman concerned had only just managed to scrape through standard gunnery in basic training and had very slow hand-eye coordination.

  This was Ab – Ordinary Star Abnedido, only the second recruit to make it through to the ship on the controversial civilian prisoner-rehab scheme.

  It was not a scheme Alex himself had ever wanted, and he was in two minds even now about it. On the one hand it was an extremely expensive failure in terms of the amount of money spent on a scheme with an outrageously high drop-out rate. The Fleet’s own recruitment programme anticipated a drop-out rate of between one and three per cent between initial sign-up and the end of basic training. The prisoner rehab scheme, so far, had delivered just two recruits to the ship from an initial sign-up of thirty eight people, a 95% drop-out. Some of them never even made it off their homeworlds onto the ship which was going to take them to Therik. Media pressure was the usual reason given for that. If they did get to Therik then another tranche of them dropped out very quickly in the base environment, deciding that military service was not to their liking after all. Of those who persisted, many more would drop out when it became clear that if they didn’t, the basic training unit at the base would drop them from the programme anyway for failing to achieve required standards in tests and assessments. On the first intake, Banno Triesse had been the last man standing. On the second, they had failed to get anyone to graduation at all. Of this, the third attempt, only Ab who’d made it to the ship. It was, by any standards, a very costly process just to get two people, particularly when they had hundreds of existing Fleet applicants on the waiting list for those places. Alex expected that the scheme would be withdrawn on that basis, and he would not be sorry about that in principle.

  In practice, though, it was hard to put a price on what the scheme had done for both Banno and for Ab. Banno Triesse’s space career had been trashed by a decision made, at the time, in all innocence. He had signed up aboard a ship which he had believed to be engaged in the kind of moderate smuggling activity spacers at least considered okay, and had discovered too late that it was actually running guns. Having served a prison sentence for gun running he could get no berth on any decent ship and would have struggled to find employment even groundside. He would not have been allowed to join the regular Fleet, either, with a criminal conviction. But the rehab scheme had enabled him to join the Fleet via the Fourth, with the same basic training provided for all Fleet recruits and the same career opportunities, too, once he’d completed an agreed rehab period with the Fourth.

  Banno was a success, in the Fourth. He had been so determined to make a success of his time with them that he’d engaged in a battle of wills with Alex himself, and won. Alex’s determination not to have a personal steward had not been greater than Banno’s determination that he was going to be the captain’s steward, the highest responsibility he could achieve at the time. Now, with the departure of CPO Martins, Leading Star Triesse had been made chief steward, with trainees under him.

  Ab was desperate for that kind of turnaround, too. He was also a spacer – the scheme was for spacers who had served a prison sentence and were looking to join the Fleet but had been barred from doing so because of that criminal conviction. They were not, as some activists claimed, ‘Taken from prison’. Though some applicants were still on parole at the time when they applied, they had to already be discharged or on parole before they were eligible to apply.

  In Ab’s case, he was still on parole. His parole officer on Mandram had had to approve his signing up for Fleet training and the parole office on Therik was keeping a monitoring eye, too, ready to step in if he dropped out or was dropped from the programme. His was not a single episode of law breaking, nor could he claim that it had been a relatively innocent misjudgement which had got him into trouble. He’d run away to space at the age of fourteen and had been arrested on three planets since then. He had served two terms in prison, too, but had managed to get a berth on
some kind of ship every time he was released.

  ‘I’m so sorry, skipper,’ Ab was a small, rat-like individual with an air of never having enjoyed a really solid meal his whole life. He was facing up to an encounter with the skipper with all the courage he could muster, glancing awkwardly at him and grimacing with shame. ‘I did try, honest!’

  Alex smiled. He had gone for a walk around the ship, in part, to have a passing word with the three who’d failed the gunnery exercise, ensuring that they knew he wasn’t disappointed in them. One of the others had asked if his session could be written off as a ‘practice’ so he could have another go, but had accepted it when Alex pointed out that Fleet regs did not allow him to attempt the advanced gunnery certificate for at least another five months, precisely so that people did not just keep hammering at it until they got lucky. Ab, though, was acutely aware that he was one third of the reason why the ship had not achieved that magical hundred per cent qualification. And unlike the others, he had no confidence that he’d be able to do better when he was allowed to re-do it in a few months’ time.

  ‘You have nothing to apologise for,’ Alex told him. ‘It was a completely unreasonable thing even to attempt straight out of basic training. And while I admire your ambition, of course, I wouldn’t like to think that you were setting impossible targets for yourself and then beating yourself up for failing to achieve them. It’s your probationary targets which are important, remember, and in those, you are exceeding expectations.’

  Ab breathed more easily. ‘I really really wanted to be as good as the rest of them,’ he admitted, with a forlorn look, now.

  ‘There is no ‘you’ and ‘them’,’ Alex said, and could not have meant that more. As he’d come to understand with Banno, the fact that someone had come to the Fourth via a particular recruitment scheme really didn’t matter at all once they stepped aboard the ship. Both Banno and Ab had completed basic training just like any other Fleet recruits, had sworn the same oath of service, were in every respect the same as any other member of the crew. One of the other criteria for recruitment was a potential for high achievement in Fleet service. They weren’t going to go to all that trouble just to acquire grunts, after all. Ab had no formal qualifications, having truanted from high school and failed to turn up for any exams, but his IQ and his technical ability were both above average. He had an affinity for starship engines, too, and had served as engineer on ships which did not require certificates. Their own engineer, Morry Morelle, had confirmed that Ab had a ‘natural ear’, a talent no amount of training could match. He could hear, almost sense, discord in the engine noise and respond to it instinctively, tuning the cores. He had suffered rather more than the rest of them during the incessant chittachitta of the turbulence and the corresponding jangles in the engines. ‘I would hate to think that you still don’t feel that you’re as much a full part of this crew as anyone else,’ Alex said, and Ab hastened to reassure him.

  ‘No, no, skipper, didn’t mean it like that…’ a quick, wry grin appeared, only to vanish again as if snatched off his face. ‘I know – no difference. It’s just that everyone else is so good at the gunnery and I’m not, never fired a cannon in my life till basic training and even then, you know, could just about hit a target the size of a planet if it stays still long enough. I don’t think I’ll ever be good enough to get the advanced thing and it’ll be just me, you know, the only one, the only reason the ship loses its hundred per cent. They’re being real nice about it, keep saying that me being okay is more important than the gunnery thing, but it’s awful to feel that I’m letting them down, you know? So if there’s anything I can do, anything, to get the gunnery sorted out – they say it’s my hand-eye coordination so maybe Dr Tekawa could give me a better telemetry link, kind of thing.’ He gestured from his eyes to his hands and Alex stared at him, quite flabbergasted.

  ‘Are you seriously suggesting,’ he queried, ‘that you have neurosurgery to improve your gunnery skills?’

  ‘Um.’ Ab admitted.

  ‘No, Mr Abdnedido,’ Alex said firmly. ‘No, no, a thousand times no. And I believe you will find,’ he added, conscious of the horrified expressions of the people around them, ‘that your shipmates will not be at all happy to realise that you feel under so much pressure to succeed in this that you’re asking for brain surgery. That is way beyond appropriate, believe me, for an achievement which should not be regarded as anything more important than holding a sports trophy. And if it’s going to make anyone feel bad or unworthy then I will impose a ninety-five per cent maximum on advanced qualification. Nobody should have to deal with this kind of pressure at all, let alone during probation, it just isn’t fair.’

  He glanced around and saw that his point had been made, that they would be falling over themselves to apologise to and reassure Ab the moment he was gone, and that he would be left in no doubt that it was not him who’d let them down, but them who’d let him down by encouraging him to go for a goal he had no earthly chance of achieving. That was a cardinal sin on the Heron, setting someone up to fail. There would be no more talk of getting the ship back to a hundred per cent advanced gunnery. Though Ab would, for his own benefit, be advised to start playing Cosmos Warfare, a game which developed the same hand-eye coordination and targeting skills as gunnery training but which did not count as training under workload regs.

  They left the system happy, anyway, firing a salute to the FFI Heron they had carved into the comet cloud, and with that, set course for X-Base Serenity. There would be one further diversion before they got there – inspection, too, required them to complete certain port-related tasks under assessment, but Admiral Dafour would select the system for that when the time came. For now, they were heading back into mapped space, their Van Damek behind them as the chart screen flickered back into life and Data Unavailable became charts with marked shipping routes. Slipping onto one of these by the following day, they were able to make up speed with the ship at maximum cruise velocity and on autopilot.

  ‘I love this part of a shakedown,’ Silvie observed, coming to the command deck for a coffee when she could see that Alex wasn’t too busy there. ‘It’s like everyone’s been running around in a hundred directions but now they’re all coming together the same way – great focus, lovely energy.’

  Alex smiled agreement. He didn’t have her empathic awareness but he didn’t need it. He could hear the difference in the ship, the buzz which was the everyday sound of the crew at work and on the mess decks. It was subtle, but to a highly attuned ear the difference was there. It was a change in the proportion of instructional tone, fewer people telling one another what to do or how to do it, more of a sense of purposeful understanding. They were working on the details, now, figuring out the little glitches which impacted performance. They were, by then, on their second round of crisis response training; having all had one experience of every kind of emergency the Fleet trained for, they were having another go, more confidently now and having learned from previous mistakes.

  And they were, too, thoroughly enjoying Bonny’s more unorthodox contributions to the crisis response lexicon. Every day a different department came in for their ‘unexpected incident’ training, and since no two were ever the same they had always to figure out their own solution. The one launched at the command deck was a swarm of holographic mosquitoes, whilst at the same time all the senior officers were declared hors de combat. The footage of that made it straight to the mission-moments section of the notice board, as the rating on comms turned out to be insect-phobic and fled the command deck screaming while one of the Subs attempted to tackle the bugs by unleashing a fire extinguisher before another had the bright idea of whacking the gravity up high and splatting them all at once. The image of Alex sitting with his head in his hands while Bonny was crying with laughter was one which would stay on the notice board for a very long time.

  There was, indeed, a lot of laughter on the ship, at least until the evening before P-Day, at which things became very quiet. Ever
yone knew that it was not possible to fail probation, that the first month aboard ship was only called that because it was a period of induction with training and evaluations. Everyone knew, too, that if there had been any cause for concern their mentors would have raised it with them long before now, and there should really be no surprises at the final probationary sign-off.

  Even so, it was a big day for all of them. They had each come aboard with a provisional, probationary rank and it was possible for that either to be confirmed or adjusted depending on the outcome of assessments. If they had been found to be incompetent at the level they were supposed to hold then they could be demoted, albeit through a fearsome set of official procedures. If on the other hand they already had all the qualifications necessary for a higher rank and were deemed to be working at that level, it was possible that the Fourth could award that higher rank. This was what many of them were hoping for – one of the reasons they had come to the Fourth being that even though they had the necessary qualifications, restrictions on the numbers of each rank aboard ship meant that promotion didn’t happen. Here, there were no limits to the numbers of each rank so it was allocated entirely on merit. This meant that the crew rapidly became overqualified for much of the routine work aboard ship, but a willingness to pitch in with all duties on a fair-share rota compensated for that. Third Lord Jennar was of the view that von Strada was attempting to get his ship crewed entirely by petty officers, and regularly raised the biggest flap and stink he could over statistics of ratings performing duties below that commensurate with their rank.

  For the crew, though, none of that mattered. All that mattered was either being confirmed in their current rank or getting the promotion they were hoping for. And as the big day arrived, things did go very quiet. A lot of people were reading their training files and either thinking about the forthcoming interview obsessively or trying anxiously not to think about it at all. Few people were talking very much, even the old hands in sympathy with their shipmates.