Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘Hah!’ Andrei saw at once that what Alex was saying was that he had respect for the office, not necessarily for the people who occupied them. Alex’s attention, though, was being claimed by a young man who’d come up to the command deck and was hovering with a noteboard in his hand.

  ‘Excuse me a moment,’ Alex said, and looked at the very large, very earnest youth, ‘Yes, Mr Tomaas?’

  ‘QM’s compliments, skipper,’ Nyge said, proffering the noteboard. ‘And would you sign this, please?’

  Alex took the board, glanced at it and looked back at Nyge.

  ‘Did you read this, Mr Tomaas?’

  ‘No sir!’ Nyge said, as if hurt that the skipper would think him guilty of such impropriety.

  Alex handed back the board.

  ‘Always read things, Mr Tomaas.’

  Nyge read it. It was from the CPO Quartermaster, whom Nyge had been told was always known aboard ship as ‘QM’, just as other offices were known here by initials. The memorandum requested an ad hoc purchase of supplies, for the benefit of the bearer – a half crate of Nous and a quarter crate of Senz.

  ‘Beg pardon, skipper,’ said Nyge, and retired, to the faint accompaniment of sniggering.

  Alex grinned. ‘People have been pulling that one on snotties,’ he observed, ‘since the dawn of time.’ He indicated the memo, which had now gone on the notice board, and Andrei looked at it with some interest.

  ‘What’s nous?’

  ‘Intelligence,’ Alex and Davie spoke together again, as if both had thought that the question was addressed to them, and Davie grinned at the skipper, tapping a finger to the side of his own head and then pointing it at Alex in a gesture which conveyed that their brains were working in synch.

  ‘Do you do that a lot?’ Andrei asked, really intrigued because none of his observers had mentioned this habit of synchronicity between his son and the Fourth’s commander.

  ‘Not normally, no,’ Davie said, as Alex tacitly conceded the ground. ‘But thinking the same, understanding what the other is thinking, yes, all the time. Silvie says it’s because I’m so loud that even non-empaths can pick up how I feel and that me and the captain…’ he grinned again at Alex and gestured back and forth, ‘are in harmonic resonance.’

  ‘Interesting…’ Andrei said, but he was distracted, then, by the arrival of someone at the main airlock. They had to use the secondary, port airlock since his own bus-sized shuttle was still docked at the primary, but it accessed the same area just aft of the command deck. ‘Hello, who’s this?’ Andrei was alert. He was way out of his comfort zone being here without his people, without even a prep team having got things ready for him, and the arrival of a stranger was alarming.

  ‘Only Byl,’ Davie spoke first, and with calming reassurance. ‘Hi Byl.’

  The Second’s administrative officer had seen the Acko shuttle at the Heron’s airlock, and seeing the very expensively dressed man sitting next to Davie, he put two and two together very fast.

  ‘Oh – I’m sorry,’ he hadn’t expected to find Andrei Delaney here, since the ship had been broadcasting a no visitors status during his previous visit. ‘I didn’t know…’ he smiled uncertainly at Andrei and then looked at Alex. ‘Permission to visit the lab?’

  ‘Is not required,’ said Alex, though he knew he was fighting a losing battle with that one. Byl Fox was hypersensitive to causing the slightest offence just now, and was following the strictest code of etiquette. And since Alex had seen that Byl had really come aboard wanting a word with him, he gave him a smile, ‘I’ll see you later.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Byl said, and departed in a bustle.

  ‘How do you ever get anything done,’ Andrei commented, with a slightly complaining note, ‘when people are always interrupting you?’

  ‘They’re not interrupting, sir,’ Alex said, surprised. ‘That is the work of the ship – paperwork is something I do when nobody wants me for anything else.’

  ‘Hmmn,’ Andrei looked at the work screens in front of the skipper, but they were blurred so that only someone sitting exactly where he was could read them. ‘Am I allowed to ask what you’re doing, or is it secret?’

  ‘Confidential,’ Alex amended. ‘I’m signing off personnel files – I wouldn’t normally do them till next week, but since we’ll be out in the Gulf by then I’m getting all the important reports up to date before we leave. But if you would like to see me at work…’ he saw assent on the other man’s face and went straight on, putting his hand on a comm panel and instituting a priority-override call. ‘Mr Abnedido,’ he said, pleasantly, ‘You are going on shoreleave. Hiding in the shower and refusing to answer your comm is not going to help one little bit.’

  ‘Aww, skipper!’ The protest was anguished. ‘Please don’t make me! You don’t know what it’s like…’

  ‘Deep breath, Mr Abnedido,’ Alex said, with kind but bracing authority. ‘I have absolute confidence in you. You can do this. Now be a good lad and come out of the shower, all right?’

  He was watching a screen on the wall beside him, and as Andrei followed the direction of his gaze he saw that a little scene was being played out in some remote corner of the ship. A shower unit had been tucked in between a tank and some bulky tech, for the comfort of people working in that sector. Standing outside it was a worried Ali Jezno and a staunchly patient Bonny. As they watched, the shower door opened tentatively and a shamefaced man emerged.

  ‘There you go. Well done,’ said Alex, and ended the call, leaving Ali and Bonny to take the crewman in hand.

  ‘That’s him,’ Andrei looked alarmed, himself. The reason he had not allowed Davie to go aboard the Heron for so long was because they had people on their ship with criminal convictions. Security had gone pale even at the idea of allowing any contact with such people, and it had been a major issue for them in Andrei himself coming aboard, even when they were preparing the way and escorting him in person. Today, with no prep and no escort, it was something they were genuinely terrified about. And in no case was that more true than that of Ordinary Star Ab Abnedido, who had been convicted of crimes of violence. Multiple crimes of violence. Davie had said that Ab would be on shoreleave during their visit, but there he was, evidently, still aboard ship.

  ‘You have no cause for alarm, I assure you,’ Alex said. ‘Mr Abdnedido presents no danger to you or to anyone else here. He’s just needing a little rehab support to help him through his spaceport phobia.’

  ‘His, uh…?’

  ‘Fear of spaceports,’ Alex clarified.

  Andrei stared at him, but he could see that Alex was serious – and he could see, too, on the screen, that Ali was now leading the scared-looking man away with an arm around him, while Bonny escorted them, talking soothingly.

  ‘How can a spacer,’ Andrei marvelled, ‘be afraid of spaceports?’

  ‘Oh well, you know,’ Alex said, deliberately vague. ‘Circumstances.’ Then he looked back at Andrei, all innocence. ‘How can a strong, powerfully healthy man,’ he asked, ‘be so phobic about germs that he won’t go anywhere unless the place has been decontaminated first?’

  ‘Hah!’ Andrei shouted with delight at this needle-sharp dig. ‘But I’ll call you on that,’ he retorted, ‘because I am here, aren’t I?’

  ‘Yes, and very welcome, too,’ Alex said. ‘My respects, sir – it cannot have been easy for you to step through that airlock.’

  Andrei did not attempt to claim that it had been nothing at all. It had felt like jumping off a cliff into a pit of seething infection populated by strange and possibly predatory creatures. Only Davie’s arm tucked through his had helped him through those first terrifying steps.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, and glanced back at the screen, seeing just that same kind of support for the crewman who was as reluctant to go out through the airlock as he himself had been to come in. ‘Fear of infection, though, is rational and functional, keeping us safe,’ he observed. ‘Fear of spaceports, for a spacer, is the opposite of that, irrational and crippli
ng. But then, I suppose, that’s why he’s in rehab. Will he be all right?’ He had become aware, to his horror, that the crewman was crying, wiping his eyes as he stepped back from Bonny, who’d been giving him a hug. People in Andrei’s world did not cry. The people around him were extremely well trained, smoothly unobtrusive, never venturing unasked-for opinions or inflicting their own emotions on Mr Delaney.

  ‘He’ll be fine,’ Alex said, with calm certainty. ‘I was only asked to intervene because he’d locked out his comms and it takes the watch officer to override that. That isn’t the sort of thing we have to deal with every day, of course, but rehab and pastoral care is a big part of my and every other officer’s time. And I would say the most important, too – you’ve got to get that right, both individual welfare and shipboard morale, before you can get any benefit from training. So looking after people isn’t a nuisance or an interruption, sir, it is what we do.’

  Andrei had been told that about Alex, that he was all about the welfare of his people, but it was different, hearing it from him. It wasn’t, Andrei saw, that he was dedicated to that nurturing role or committed to it as a principle. It was simply who he was. Observers had said that it was as if all the parental care he’d lavished on his daughter had been transferred into looking after his crew. Whether that was true or not – and other people said he’d been like that long before his daughter was even born – it was clear that he did have very strong nurturing, parental instincts. And Andrei, a two hundred per cent parent himself, could recognise that kinship between them. It was just that where Alex devoted his care to the people under his command, Andrei gave all his to his adored Davie-Boy. And he had to be a two hundred per cent Papa, he had always said, because there was no Mama in Davie-Boy’s life, his mother an anonymous egg donor whose DNA had been stripped out of the egg during bio-engineering anyway.

  ‘I hope he will be all right,’ said Andrei, his attitude towards the violent criminal having been totally transformed by seeing him so frightened and upset. ‘It seems rather cruel,’ he added, with a fixed look at Alex, ‘to make him go to a spaceport when he’s so phobic.’

  ‘He joined us on the understanding that we would support him through overcoming that,’ Alex said. ‘And if he couldn’t get through it and take the shoreleave which is mandatory for all personnel, we would have to leave him here. Which would, I assure you, be a lot crueller. But it won’t come to that – he was just having a bit of a wobbly moment. See, they’re going on the shuttle now. Give it ten minutes and he’ll be having a coffee in the spaceport lounge and wondering what on earth he was so worried about.’

  It was actually eight minutes later that they had a message from the spaceport, but Andrei had left the ship by then. He’d stayed for a while talking to Alex about how he spent his time on a normal day, but had been keeping an eye on the time, himself, and when he’d been aboard the ship for half an hour, got to his feet.

  ‘Fifty one minutes,’ he stated, and looked challengingly at Davie. ‘You owe…’

  Davie laughed and got up himself. Papa was holding out a hand towards him, palm uppermost, and Davie slapped his own down onto it in a pay you gesture.

  ‘Dues,’ he acknowledged, and told Alex, ‘I will be on Papa’s ship for the next three days.’ And, as Papa bore off his prize in triumph, Davie commented drily, ‘There may be ringlets.’

  Alex chuckled. Davie was spending most of his time with his father anyway, but coming over to the Heron at times when he needed a break from Papa’s overwhelming parenting. Obviously, some kind of deal had been struck that if Papa would brave the frigate for half an hour, unprepared and unescorted, Davie would give him three full days and even allow Papa to direct his valets.

  When they’d gone, Alex settled back down to work – which included, within a couple of minutes, Byl Fox reappearing and asking if he might have a word.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Alex indicated the seat beside him and Byl sat down with thanks.

  ‘Two things,’ he said, keeping it brief and brisk as if he felt that the captain must be extremely busy and not wanting to take up any more of his time than he had to. ‘Both very cheeky, I’m afraid. First, since Kate is not going to be living or even working in the lab, would you have any objection to me sliding someone into the empty cabin?’

  That was cheeky. The Fourth was contracted to provide accommodation and facilities for up to ten members of the Second, with ten little cabins available for them in the Lab. On the odd occasions when they didn’t have ten people aboard the spare cabins were either used for storage or dismantled to make more space in the lab itself. It was true that Kate would not be using a cabin – the conditions of her being allowed to come here were that she continued normal cadet training as far as that was possible aboard ship, which meant she would be accommodated in the wardroom under Tina’s supervision. She wouldn’t need to work in the lab, either, as the research she was here to do required her to work in engineering, where they had, as Andrei had seen the day before, constructed a high platform work station especially for her. Even so, she was part of the Second’s contingent even if on a part time basis, and bringing in another researcher would take them over their ten-person limit.

  ‘Well, that depends,’ said Alex, cautiously. ‘Who do you have in mind?’

  ‘Oh, an absolute honey,’ Byl assured him, ‘He won’t be any kind of trouble to you, Alex, I can promise you that. He’s a post-grad student at the campus here – on the approved list and already trained. He’s an ichthyologist, okay?’

  He passed over a file. Alex realised that he had actually seen this young man already during his tour of EEDU. He was working in the fish lab, though such a lowly bod that the Director hadn’t introduced him. The only kind of students at the Serenity campus were post-grads, here to do research for doctorates. In the academic hierarchy, though, they had assumed the role normally occupied by the grubbiest of first years. It wasn’t the nature of his research which caught Alex’s eye – that was, predictably, bioengineering a new species of shellfish – but the fact that he was already on the waiting list for a research place at Quarus. The Embassy ship there also had facilities for academics involved in Quarus-related research, but these were not extensive and tended to be claimed by people who had already achieved some standing in their fields. A post-grad stood very little chance of getting in there. There was even less chance of getting in to the Heron’s lab, of course, but he’d applied to Byl for Second Irregulars funding and a placement here, on the basis of, as he said frankly, ‘Don’t ask, don’t get.’

  ‘All right,’ Alex said. ‘I’ll allow him to use the spare cabin on the understanding that this does not set a precedent for expanding capacity and subject, of course, to Silvie’s approval.’

  ‘Thanks, Alex!’ Byl beamed at him. ‘That’s a given, for sure, he and Silvie have already met and got on very well, which is why, to be honest, I thought it was worth a punt trying to get him in here. But anyway, sure you must be busy, so – second thing.’ He looked embarrassed now. ‘As much as I hate to raise the subject of Barney Barnardt… I’ve had some people take a look at his data and their opinion is that working it up into any kind of practical application will be a major undertaking… I’m so sorry, Alex, I know you were as good as promised that he’d extend your Naos scanner range, but without Kate herself getting involved I don’t see that as being probable any time soon.’

  Alex nodded. He had thought, when he’d seen that Kate had come aboard, that she had been sent here to take on the upgrade of her scanner system. He had suspected, even, that the Second had known all along that Barney would flunk that and had lined Kate up to take over once he’d got the necessary data.

  He had been wrong, though. Kate was here because she’d had an idea for a new engine calibration system. If there’d been any thought at all of her linking up with Barney’s research it had been just that, a possible collaboration fine-tuning the work they expected that Barney would already have done, and that, of course, seco
ndary to her own research and subject to the restrictions of her cadet training.

  ‘I won’t have pressure put on Ms Naos,’ he said. ‘It isn’t fair to ask or even to allow her to work on Dr Barnardt’s research in addition to her own.’

  ‘No, indeed – totally unfair,’ Byl agreed feelingly. ‘She should not have to pick up his mess, and the last thing I would want to do is to put pressure on her, or to compromise the higher priority research she is here to undertake.’

  ‘But…’ Alex said.

  ‘But,’ Byl admitted, ‘being very cheeky again, I have to ask if, as and when Kate feels she has the time and wants to do it, and subject of course to your permission, she might be allowed to, say, give some thought to the data? She has already seen it, you see. Since her memory is eidetic she couldn’t forget it even if she wanted to, and asking her not to think about it is, I gather, rather like telling someone not to think about pink elephants, virtually impossible then not to think ‘pink elephant’. I know that Kate is concerned that if she comes up with a solution she may be in trouble for ‘working on a project’ when she’s been told not to, so I was wondering if you would be so very kind as to allow her some leeway in thinking about it, even if she then passes her ideas to others for practical development.’

  Alex considered, then touched a screen.

  ‘Cadet Officer Naos to the command deck,’ he said.

  Moments later, Kate arrived. She had only been in the daycabin, the other side of the airlock. This had now been pre-booked, set aside for four hours every day as an Academy classroom. This was not random, either. The classes held in the daycabin were exactly the same as those being held in the academy on Chartsey, and at exactly the same time, too. On this day, at this time, the second year cadets on Chartsey were taking a Computer class – module Y2/46G, Principles of Optic Telemetry.

  As with so many of her classes, Kate did not need to take that module. She understood all forms of starship telemetry to a level far more advanced than cadets were required to study, and frequently knew more about the subject than her instructors. The instructors at her academy, indeed, had made a rather desperate attempt to have her exempted from attending Astrogation classes. It made them feel so silly, teaching such basic stuff with a cadet in the room who’d developed the most advanced astrogation system there was. Even more disconcertingly, she sometimes made notes. The Academy commandant, however, had stood firm. She had been exempted from engineering classes because she was already over-qualified for a Fleet engineer. But she must, the commandant had insisted, take all other courses. If cadet training was anything at all for Kate, it was learning the discipline of working within the system, in which learning to cope with being bored and frustrated would stand her in very good stead for the realities of shipboard service.