Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘Superb,’ said the admiral. ‘But people can read the articles here without joining the Society?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course, talks are on the notice board, same as any other recorded entertainment,’ Alex confirmed. ‘But if you’re a member of the Society your name is on their membership list, which people seem to like. It was never intended to be anything this big, of course. It was just the usual kind of academic club on the Minnow, a handful of people who took turns giving talks, mostly about articles they wanted to share from other journals. Then as we became more involved with the Second some of them would guest-lecture and then people started to share their own areas of expertise, you know, personal interests, and it just grew from there.’

  ‘But it is entangled with the working life of the ship,’ the Admiral observed. ‘As with the research that Dr Tekawa is doing – a study that he’s doing in sickbay, asking for crew participation, although it was described as a study for a Mindful talk on a leisure basis.’

  ‘Yes, because it is,’ Alex said. ‘Dr Tekawa’s talks for Mindful are generally spiritual in nature, not medical. And we’re pitching in with the study, myself included, because it’s shipboard custom to take part in these two-minute studies when we’re asked. There are rules about it – such research has to be under two minutes for participants and it must comply with strict conditions as to methodology and ethics, nobody is pressured to take part and it must not be in any way disruptive to the working of the ship. People take part on their own time, while off duty or perhaps on a tea break. Some of us take part because we feel it to be important on principle to support the academic life of the ship, some because we’re interested in the research and some – most, I’d have to say – because we’re a nosy bunch and always want to know what’s going on.’

  ‘I must confess,’ Admiral Dafour admitted, ‘that I was curious myself – if time and circumstance had permitted, I would have gone into the habitat just to see if I could distinguish living animal from robo-sim, so I do see that people would be interested, yes. But it is fair to say, isn’t it, that there is an extraordinary level of academic activity aboard the ship – involvement with the Second’s projects, study for professional purposes, courses being taken for personal interest, the Mindful Society and research going on for talks, and the refectory, too. How did that come about? The refectory?’

  Alex had to cast his mind back. ‘Oh – it began life as a kind of informal gathering at one of the tables on mess deck four – nothing like a seminar, just as it is now, basically just a chat-space for people who wanted to talk about academic matters. It was just the usual kind of shipboard culture. If you wanted to watch sport and talk teams you’d hang out on mess deck two, if you wanted to talk academia you’d find the guys at the back table on mess deck four. It became a space where members of the Second and our crew got together, and officers, too. That became an issue when officers spending time there was being defined as ‘pastoral care’ under workload regulations, as there is no provision under regs for officers spending time on a mess deck as personal social time. But they were there for personal social time, no element of pastoral care about it, they just wanted to join in the academic chat over coffee and doughnuts. So the suggestion was made that we find them somewhere else to meet on the interdeck, neutral ground. It’s been popular ever since – quite surprisingly so, really. Though I believe that someone once said that the only thing academics enjoy more than what they do is talking about what they do, and a good many of our people are academically inclined. It is just a chat-space, though, very much like a university refectory full of students sharing their views on life, the cosmos and the courses that they’re doing.’

  Admiral Dafour looked a little relieved.

  ‘When one of my team popped in there, just out of interest,’ he confided, ‘They were discussing stellar engineering – methods of shifting the orbits of planets. I, uh, believe that there was some concern that this might be something you’re actually planning to try.’

  Alex laughed. ‘Oh, the stellar engineering thing is a hardy perennial,’ he said. ‘We did a couple of things in that line during the first Ignite test. At the request of the Devast geologist, we targeted the missile so that if it failed to destroy the target planet entirely, as it was supposed to, the debris would move into the habitable zone where it might, eventually, form another planet. After the missile went off too soon and there were gigatonnes of debris hurtling through the system she asked us to prevent the destruction of a second planet which was in the firing line. It took a few days of live-fire exercise but we were able to do that. And since we’ve learned that the Olaret apparently had the ability to move stars around, discussion of how they might have done that and how we might shift planets about has become a staple in the Refectory. But no, sir, I am not planning to embark on any stellar engineering projects.’

  Admiral Dafour regarded him with the thoughtful moment due to someone who blew up planets, and who talked so casually about it afterwards. It was well known that Alex von Strada had a penchant for blowing stuff up, of course, but planets…

  Admiral Dafour drew a breath and brought himself firmly back into line.

  ‘So – you said there that many of your people are academically minded,’ he observed. ‘What proportion of them, would you say, are undertaking academic work beyond professional role? And by that I mean engaging in remote-learning courses provided by universities, on topics which are not recognised by the Fleet for professional development.’

  Alex did not need to guess. ‘Ninety six per cent,’ he said. ‘Including myself. It’s something which we encourage people to do – to have a personal interest course tucked into their standby bundle, to work on at their own pace as and when time and inclination come together. Therik SU’s open learning hub is excellent, with a very wide range of courses from the ten-hour tasters to post-graduate degrees, and they’re very well presented, too.’

  ‘And you fund that,’ Admiral Dafour observed.

  ‘Free access to the TSU’s open learning hub is part of both our rehab and secondment policies,’ Alex confirmed. ‘On the ship and at the base. People who join us primarily for the opportunity to take higher level courses while still in Fleet service stay at the base. It’s secondary for those who come to the ship, as I said, a personal interest. Though there can also be operational crossover. We lost our geologist, for instance, when CPO Martins retired. Though geology was never more than a personal interest for him and studied at undergraduate level, we’ve found his expertise useful on more than one mission. And you never can tell what knowledge or skills may be useful in exodiplomacy, of course, so the widest possible base of academic, creative and sporting ability is a benefit, operationally. Even if it wasn’t, though, even if we never found any operational benefit to any of these personal-interest studies, I would still consider them to be a vital element in the rehab and secondment aspect of our work. Which is, after all, a key aspect of our remit.’

  ‘The positive feedback nexus,’ Admiral Dafour murmured, indicating that he was familiar with Alex’s own explanation for the Fourth’s phenomenal success. His report to the Senate Sub-Committee on that subject had been circulated at flag-rank level – you would have to be quite cynical to imagine that the First Lord had done that in order to thumb his nose at Third Lord Jennar, but it had certainly thrown a bucket of cats into an already very fluttery aviary.

  According to Alex, the reason for the Fourth’s success was a nexus between recruitment, training opportunities and operational challenge. At its simplest, only very able and ambitious personnel served in the Fourth so they had an advantage to start with. Then there were the training opportunities including Fleet and civilian courses, involvement with Second Irregulars projects and the Mindful Society, which turbo-charged their qualifications and skills. This, in turn, gave them a major advantage going into operations, particularly with the open team-contributing methods they used. But the challenge of operations itself fed back into recruiti
ng very able people to serve with them and to motivate them in their training. The triad, he said, functioned as a positive feedback nexus, reinforcing one another.

  Finding that they could gain no ground in combating either the rehab or high flyer secondment schemes, or with decisions about which operations they would undertake, the Fourth’s opponents had settled to chipping away at the training aspect of that triad. It was unreasonable, they asserted, to expect the Fourth to cope with a constantly changing population of Second Irregulars people on board, so disruptive and pulling people away from focus on their own duties. It was outrageous, the amount of money which the Fourth was spending on providing free university courses of no conceivable benefit to them or to the Fleet. The academically weighted culture of which the Mindful Society was part was disruptive, too, and inappropriate for a warship. And their training regime, the relatively small numbers of drills they recorded, was dubious in the light of the outstanding results they then claimed to achieve.

  Admiral Dafour did not believe any of this, but he was very much aware that his inspection report would be seized upon and scrutinized for even the tiniest scrap of material which might be used as ammunition – even an unanswered question would do that, as Cerdan Jennar and his cronies would certainly seize any opportunity to put their own interpretation onto what the Fourth was doing. They would not, however, be able to give more than a disparaging sniff to statements which the admiral had made in his report based on direct questions and answers from Alex himself.

  ‘Yes, absolutely,’ Alex agreed. ‘And I see it as part of my wider duty of care, too – we are expected, after all, to have a mind to the general wellbeing of our people and I believe that it is concomitant with that to encourage a broad life-balance between professional and personal development. It is also part of our remit to give people back to the regular Fleet with increased skills and I regard independent study skills at academic level to be a useful skill in itself, irrespective of what subjects have been studied.’

  Admiral Dafour smiled slightly. ‘You yourself are studying Classics, I understand.’

  ‘Not as such – I mean, I’m not doing a Classics degree or anything like that,’ Alex said. ‘Just a course on Lareen Language and Literature. I’m not working on it currently but I anticipate having quite a lot of free time during our Gulf crossing so I’ve brought it along for then.’

  ‘And that is something you feel may be of operational benefit?’

  ‘Oh, I doubt it,’ Alex said frankly. ‘The ability to read ancient lareen in the original isn’t likely to come into play operationally. There are far more talented and knowledgeable linguists than me on the ship, after all, besides translation systems. It is just a personal interest, part of my interest in history.’

  Admiral Dafour gave a sudden crack of laughter.

  ‘Oh – pardon me,’ he said, seeing Alex’s startled look. ‘It’s just that the Fourth’s operational briefings have a rather breath-taking habit of starting ten thousand years ago, which is rather unusual for Fleet briefings, you’ll allow.’

  Alex laughed too. ‘Yes, that’s just become routine now,’ he said. ‘Framing the mission in the context of what we know about the history of the situation, which is operationally significant. Knowing that Quarus is an Olaret colony like many of our own worlds, for instance, leads us to approach it in quite a different mind-set from a straight ‘us and them’. Knowing that we share ancestral roots is important. Whether it will help us to establish a relationship with them remains to be seen, but at least it gives us a place to start.’

  ‘Well, all our hopes go with you on that score,’ Admiral Dafour commented. ‘In the light of which, I should say, I have never encountered any ship’s company more confident under inspection. They have been very keen to show us their skills and abilities, but it is apparent that the inspection is perceived as an easy hurdle to jump in relation to the challenges which lie ahead. Which feeling is, I should say, originating from you.’

  ‘Yes, mission training is a lot more demanding than routine operational drills,’ Alex agreed. ‘I do expect that people will slam-dunk things like action stations response times with no great effort. They are all, after all, premier league performers so basic skills like that should be in the bag already and just need a little fine tuning – sorry, a mixed metaphor there but I think it expresses what I mean.’

  ‘Understood,’ said Admiral Dafour, with a twitching lip. Alex was being mischievous, there. Knowing very well that Admiral Jennar would be watching this interview, he was indulging in what some of his colleagues referred to as a ‘Jennarism’, mixed metaphors of which the best known was ‘Letting the tiger out of the bag when the hole is two under par.’ Alex was showing that he too was aware that the real purpose of this interview, these questions, was to lay down statements which left no room for doubt. That would not, of course, prevent Admiral Jennar and others like him from objecting to the decisions Alex had made, but at least they would be obliged to confine themselves to arguing against his decisions on the real rationale behind them and not on some idea of their own about what he was doing and why. ‘And thank you, Captain. Just one last question, if you will – and I freely admit that it is as much a matter of personal curiosity as professional interest, so do by all means decline to answer if you feel it to be inappropriate. It is well known, of course, that you prefer to be addressed as ‘skipper’, which you have justified as ‘more comfortable’ for yourself and your ship’s company. Frankly, rumour within the Admiralty walls, in fact, is that your real reason for that is that you yourself have issues with flag authority – I’ve even heard it said that you would rather not be a flag officer and only agreed to it because Admiral Harangay insisted.’

  ‘Um,’ said Alex, with a careful lack of expression. ‘Well, it is true to say that at the time of my promotion I regarded that as a technicality forced on all concerned by the need to provide us with a secure groundside base. I really have almost zero involvement with the base but since it is nominally under my command as well as the ship I have to hold a captaincy – and we have the little squadron, too, though senior skipper would be far more appropriate for a frigate, corvette and patrol ship command than captain. That – senior skipper – is where I see myself in terms of experience and command responsibilities, so I did, I admit, express some reluctance to accept a promotion which I considered to be more forced by circumstance than truly merited. I complied with it as an order, though, of course, and I have since accepted that the nature of our operations does mean that I am functioning at the level of a task-force captain even if our task force is smaller than the usual carrier-and-three. Day to day, though, my duties are still very much those of a frigate skipper and that is primarily how I see myself, actively involved in all aspects of shipboard command rather than that step removed from it which is usual for captains.’

  Admiral Dafour nodded – captain was the lowest flag rank in the Fleet but it was a flag rank. Captains were expected to leave everyday shipboard command to subordinates while they occupied themselves with more important duties. The natural habitat of a captain was their daycabin, not the command deck.

  ‘So, no truth to the rumour that you share with your ship’s company the view that most flag officers are pompous farts,’ said the Admiral, ‘and that you would rather not be identified with them.’

  Alex was genuinely shocked.

  ‘No sir!’ he exclaimed. ‘I wouldn’t put it like that!’

  ‘No, of course you wouldn’t,’ Admiral Dafour was amused. ‘You hedge it about with all kinds of euphemisms and jargon – no, no, don’t apologise. It is a very difficult thing to say and I credit you for the integrity of trying to say it in a respectful and sensitive manner, but the fact is that you yourself have a history of butting heads with senior officers and that many of your personnel have some issues with that level of authority, too, which we might term the Establishment. And that, of course, does put you in a compromised position with them if you yourself a
re part of the Establishment. And it is true, too, that your natural role in the scheme of things is one of challenge to the Establishment, not in any defiant or confrontational way but simply in the nature of who you are and what you do, exploring new ways for the Fleet to operate. I appreciate that you are always respectful towards, and about, superior officers. I won’t do anything so inappropriate, of course, as asking for your private opinion on what proportion of our flag officers you consider to be pompous farts – or as you tend to put it, ‘somewhat removed from the concerns and priorities of active serving personnel’. I will only comment that it has been my own view, throughout my own career, that the Fleet would benefit significantly if all flag officers were required to spend one month a year aboard ships. Having the Fleet run by people who have not set foot aboard a starship in years – other than for dinners – leads to a culture of elitism, poorly informed decisions and alienating attitudes which I believe is detrimental to the service.’

  He smiled at Alex’s slightly stunned expression. ‘I was a young firebrand myself, once,’ he observed, reminiscently. ‘And I did get in trouble, as a Sub, for referring to a port admiral as ‘that old fart’, so I do appreciate the frustrations that many of your officers and high-ability people will have experienced in their dealings with officers who’ve long ago lost touch with the realities of shipboard service. So it does, I understand, make sense that you yourself prefer to be identified primarily as a shipboard commander, and that you and your people feel more comfortable with ‘skipper’. You are aware, I am sure, that many in the upper echelons of the Service do consider that to be inappropriate and somewhat offensive, so you may wish to know that I will be recording in my report that I consider it to be permissible under Irregular terms of service, appropriate in the context of the rehabilitation work you undertake and in no way used to denigrate or disrespect other flag rank officers.’