‘Geminax is still recording 100% accuracy.’ Bonny had taken on monitoring of the experiment, reporting progress at each morning briefing. A test signal was being transmitted through the ever-lengthening stream of nano-bods between the ship and Serenity. At some point, they knew, the signal would start to degrade and would ultimately become unusable. The point of this experiment was to determine exactly when it started to degrade, and how fast it deteriorated after that. They had already passed the most pessimistic estimates of data corruption, and were now far beyond the realms of any previous record for direct data transmission.
‘Thank you,’ Alex acknowledged. He was delighted with the progress of the experiment, of course, and would not have complained. All the same, it did mean that the ship had to maintain a dead straight course on autopilot, with none of the fun and games they would normally enjoy.
There was, though, one point of interest along the route – the leviathan, which they overtook a few days later.
‘It’s so ugly,’ Silvie decreed, surveying it as they cruised past, slowed as much as Alex could while still laying Geminax.
Nobody protested at her derogatory comment. Leviathans were not much used in the League, though there were some in use carrying food to Chartsey. They were so slow that a decent sized container ship could transport the same quantity of cargo in two thirds of the time, even if that took five trips. Experience had shown that they were vulnerable, too, either to faults beyond the ability of the automated systems to repair, or to unscrupulous spacers helping themselves to free cargo by swiping as many containers as they could carry.
‘Well, they’re not designed for beauty,’ Alex observed. The leviathan was basically a truck-haul, a powerful tug hauling bundles of containers on duralloy links. ‘Or speed. Or manoeuvrability. Or anything, really, other than the ability to haul large quantities of cargo cheaply over long distances.’
‘And it never stops.’ Silvie was gazing at it, fascinated.
‘No, never – it follows a pre-set route, an ellipse which takes it looping out past Quarus at the one end and Serenity at the other. There are three or four days either end when it’s in cargo-shuttle range of the system, so they have to send shuttles out to grab all the containers off it during that time. It works the same the other way – cargo shuttles pull the containers up superlight and hook them on while the leviathan is in range. If they miss anything, once it’s out of shuttle range, you’d have to send a ship after it.’
‘Epic fail,’ Silvie observed, detecting that from his manner as he made the remark, and Alex grinned agreement.
‘Bit of a facer. Spacers don’t like leviathans, for obvious reasons, they do freighters out of work. So any incident where they make a muck of things will get every starship around signalling rude remarks and hooting noises.’
Silvie turned her head and stared at him. ‘You want to blow it up!’
‘No, no…’ he started to protest but then held up his hands, conceding that she had him bang to rights on that one. ‘I wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘Obviously, of course not. I don’t blow stuff up just because I feel like it, Silvie.’
‘I know that,’ she said patiently, ‘but you want to.’ She gave a little crowing noise. ‘You hate them!’
‘That’s a strong word,’ Alex said. ‘Dislike, yes, I’d accept ‘dislike’. I think it would be a very sad day for the League if things like this became the norm for transporting the bulk of intersystem cargo. Ships – real ships – carry more than cargo. They bring ideas, gossip, stories… a pulse of life between our worlds. That may be a romantic view; I daresay there are sound economic arguments for using drones like this. But spacers really do not like them, no, and it is surprising how many of them suffer mysterious failures and are never seen again.’
‘Maybe the Shadow Raider gets them,’ Silvie said mischievously. ‘Is there chocolate in those containers?’
Alex laughed. ‘There is,’ he confirmed. ‘But we’re well out of the Shadow Cube, so no worries on that score.’
Nyge Tomaas looked up, remembered that he was not supposed to be listening to the captain’s conversation and ducked his head again quickly. Alex had noticed, though.
‘Mr Tomaas?’
‘Oh – beg pardon, sir.’ Nyge said, but seeing Alex’s friendly expression, ‘It’s just that you sounded like you meant that,’ he gave an uncertain laugh. ‘And the Shadow Raider, it’s a joke, right?’ He looked around the command table as he spoke – most of the senior officers were there, drawn by the event of passing the leviathan.
‘Actually…’ several people said simultaneously, and then broke off into laughter.
‘Shion analysed what data is available,’ Alex said. ‘And there does seem to be some historical basis to it. Which isn’t that much of a surprise, really – we’ve found that these really strong persistent legends do usually have a factual basis somewhere at the bottom of them. The belief that Korvold is a jinxed world, for instance, has been around for centuries, with stories of ships experiencing launch-style judders while in orbit. Scientists have investigated such claims every which way and dismissed it as a form of mass hysteria, hoax, or just spacers with too much imagination. But it is a fact, on record, that starships experience strange juddering in certain orbits in the Korvold system, and with Shion’s help we were able to figure out why. There’s the remnant of ancient tech in the system, beyond our ability to reach or to deactivate, but still attempting to signal a plague warning at ships it detects in what’s left of its range. That’s why we reorganised the parking zones, there.
‘And the Shadow Raider, well, that too has been around for ever, stories of incidents in which everyone aboard a ship comes around to realise that they’ve been asleep or unconscious, with no memory of what happened, nothing on the record of their scopes, but some of their cargo missing. You can write much of it off as insurance fraud or hoaxing but there are credible incidents. And though the chocolate thing is a joke, the weird chocolate-stealing aliens, when people have looked for commonality in the incidents, chocolate in the cargo has come up enough times to make spacers reluctant to carry it in that region. Though most of it, of course, is beyond our borders anyway so our information is only patchy, it seems possible that there is, or has been, some kind of exo-activity in that area.’
Nyge sighed blissfully. ‘I knew it was all going on out here,’ he said, and admitted, ‘I’ve always wanted to meet aliens.’
‘Er – hello?’ Silvie gave him a wave, which made him chortle.
‘Weird aliens, I mean,’ he said, before he’d realised what he was saying, and at that, the command deck erupted with laughter at Silvie’s disconcerted expression. She joined in the laughter, too, though shaking her head at him, and forestalled his blushing apology.
‘I will take it as a compliment,’ she said, and he grinned back bashfully, adoration in his eyes.
They moved on, leaving the leviathan to trundle on its way, and the ship settled back into normal routines. Which meant, later, Kate Naos reporting for prep and Commander Leavam arriving to supervise.
Kate had, by then, acquired quite a range of instructors. Though Tina was responsible for her pastoral care and ensuring that she attended all the same classes as she would on Chartsey, she wasn’t required to teach all those classes herself. It was better not, in fact, as the Academy had different instructors for each course and a busy programme of guest lecturers, too, which Tina did not want Kate to miss out on. So an agreement was reached by which if an officer gave up their time to teach one of Kate’s classes, Tina would do an equivalent amount of their work, which was not only fair exchange but also gave her a wide experience valuable for her own training record. Commander Leavam was the exception – she was more than happy to undertake Kate’s training in Internal Affairs classes, which she would in fact have been doing if still working at the Academy herself, and she was happy to take on the task of supervising prep, too, but she would not allow Tina to undertake any of her own work in return.
Tina, therefore, was freed up during that period and was currently in the computer room, teaching Ab Abnedido how to hack classified files. Silvie was there, too, making helpful remarks, so there was more laughter than progress, but that too was normal, an easy, cheerful atmosphere around the ship.
It was quiet on the command deck. Few people were working there and those who were kept it reasonably quiet out of consideration for Kate – unnecessarily, since she had already demonstrated her ability to work through any amount of distraction.
Today, she was beetling through work, so busy and focussed that she was asking for extension assignments with more than half an hour to go. Hetty Leavam provided them without comment, grading the work which Kate had already done.
Then Kate paused. Stopped. It was quite comical to see, beavering and writing busily one moment and then frozen still the next, as if she was playing a solitary game of musical statues. Seconds passed, and she continued to gaze across at the astrogation screen with an expression Alex recognised. Even he could almost sense the whirr, tick, click and buzz as all the gears in her mind engaged into one powerful driving machine. She was utterly oblivious to where she was or what was going on around her. Then she made one small sound. ‘Ah.’ And in the next moment, switched back to awareness of her surroundings, just in time as Commander Leavam had been on the verge of calling her to order for inattention to her work.
‘Permission for a thinking break, ma’am?’ Kate asked, a request unique to her across every Academy in the League.
‘Denied,’ said Hetty, not harsh, but firm. ‘Cadets thinking? What is the Fleet coming to?’
Kate gave a little gurgle of mirth – this was, in fact, an in-joke, the Commander quoting one of her fellow instructors from the Academy. It had always been one of his favourite put-downs when cadets, called to order for daydreaming, tried to claim that they’d been ‘thinking, sir’. He had been most disconcerted by the edict from the commandant that Cadet Naos, by special agreement with the Second Irregulars, might be allowed brief ‘thinking break’ time, subject to satisfactory completion of her other work.
Hetty was not entirely joking, though, as she tapped the end of her pen on the table. ‘Focus on the task in hand, Ms Naos.’
‘Ma’am.’ Kate knew she was right. Tempting as it was to abandon herself to the intellectual flights of discovery, she had chosen the path to becoming an engineer, a Fleet officer, and that meant that she had to learn to prioritise duty. So she gathered her thoughts again and went back to work, analysing a case study for Leadership.
‘Well done, Ms Naos,’ said Hetty, at the end of the session, with Kate having completed an impressive amount of work to high standards. ‘Dismissed.’
‘Thank you, ma’am,’ said Kate, and stayed right where she was, looking over at the watch officer. ‘Permission to access astrogation, sir?’
‘Granted,’ said Urlat Singh, and watched with keen interest as she accessed the Naos system. She had pulled up the programming screen, duplicated it, and was making swift amendments to the copy, coding in a subroutine. ‘Perhaps you might like to…’ Urlat was about to suggest that Kate should take a break, as she was supposed to between prep and dinner. He never even got to finish the sentence, though. The subroutine was evidently quite short, and having completed and inserted it, she ran a software diagnostic and gave a nod of satisfaction. Then she looked at Alex.
‘Astrogation upgrade, skipper.’
Alex gazed at her. ‘Done?’
Kate nodded. ‘It will increase range by between two and four per cent – obvious, once I realised what Barney’s data was showing. You can calculate further, and just as accurately, if you just look at the reciprocity between D6, D14 and D9. That cuts down on the amount of data you need to collect and process, too, so it’s more efficient.’ She gave a little click of her tongue. ‘Wish I’d realised that before, but it’s a learning curve. Anyway, I’ll run it by Morry and set up a three week eval, okay? Oh.’ She remembered all at once that she was still in cadet uniform. ‘I mean,’ she corrected herself, ‘that I’ll discuss it with Commander Morelle and commence a three week evaluation trial, sir, with your permission.’
‘Granted, Ms Naos,’ Alex said, amused. ‘And well done, excellent work.’
The upgraded system went on line later that evening, running alongside the old one in the usual way they tried out new systems. It didn’t actually make any practical difference – space out here was so flat anyway that it hardly mattered how far you could predict it. But it was good to see the trialled system giving them a longer chart of the space ahead, an obvious advantage for when they were navigating complex space.
When Kate had gone, Alex looked across at Commander Leavam. She was, he could tell, quite shaken. He could tell that because she wasn’t giving anything away, her manner as stony as his own was when he didn’t want people to know how he felt. It wasn’t difficult to understand, though, how she was feeling. It was one thing to know that a cadet you were teaching had developed a revolutionary new astrogation system. It was something else again to see her go straight from writing second year assignments to upgrading that system in less time than a coffee break.
‘Thank you, Ms Leavam,’ Alex said, with a smile. ‘I am so glad that Ms Naos has instructors who can see past the genius and teach the cadet.’
Hetty worked out first that he was serious, and second what he meant, and he saw the tension in her shoulders ease.
‘I won’t deny,’ she admitted, ‘that it was something of an issue at the Academy. Not for me – I’ve taught her several times and found no problem. But it can’t be denied that it is challenging for instructors to have a cadet in the class who knows more about their subject than they do. And to see her doing something so… remarkable… might lead one to treat her as exceptional.’
‘Oh, I believe that Ms Naos has enough experience in her life of being treated as exceptional,’ said Alex. ‘What she wants is the experience of being treated the same as anyone else. And what she needs, if she is to make a success of combining academic role with Fleet service, is just the kind of guidance and professional role model which you provide. So, thank you, Ms Leavam.’
Hetty smiled – thinly and briefly, but still, she smiled. She had half expected Alex to tell her that she should not have prevented Kate from working on something so important when she had, after all, already finished her prep and was only doing extension exercises anyway. She would have defended that decision if she had to, but it was pleasant to be thanked for it, instead.
So the ship cruised on, with a longer chart now of the nothing ahead of them and an ever widening distance between them and the League.
Another week went by – steady routine, training, the upgrades on the Harmony finished, other work in hand, busy research in the lab and continuing mystification as to the malfunctioning SEP. They knew what was causing it, now, but not how it was causing it. And while they had a pragmatic solution – keep it in a soundproof case – that was not good enough, not nearly good enough, to get it into production.
‘We’ll never get a licence for it,’ Oti said, despondently. ‘You can just imagine it, can’t you? Specs to the tech licensing board, they send them back, why is it in a sound-shield? Answer, if it isn’t, the combination of the D17 sound and human voices laughing or cheering makes it go off randomly. Why? We dunno. Response, are you people serious?’
‘Well, we’ve made progress,’ Alex pointed out.
‘Yes, true, sorry – don’t mean to be a misery,’ Oti gave him an apologetic look. ‘You’ve worked miracles, really, your people, figuring it out the way you have – we would never, ever have got that in a hundred years. It’s selfish and ungrateful of me to feel that it’s stalled, I know that – obviously you all have a lot more important things going on and the last thing I want is to be a nuisance to you. It’s just that interest and work on it does seem to have petered out so I was wondering – hoping – if you could possibly…’
‘You can’t
have Kate,’ said Alex, seeing that one coming. ‘She’s fully occupied with her own research and training, fully occupied and then some. I know that she – and many other people, too – are giving thought to the SEP. Don’t think for a moment that we’ve forgotten it, Oti, we certainly haven’t. It’s simply that we’re in another data-gathering phase, which is, again, perfectly normal for us when theory hits a brick wall.’
‘Yes, and I have to thank you for the wall of tech you’ve assembled around it – still not quite sure what some of it is. But I have to say that I’m not entirely clear what the pulse diagnostics are meant to achieve. We’ve tested every single part of that SEP in isolation and in situ and none of it reacts physically – it is, surely, a software problem.’
‘Well, we’re testing that too,’ Alex observed. ‘And we’re running a very precise series of tests with the most sensitive apparatus in space. Frankly, I’m not supposed to tell even you what some of it is, even though you have the nine ack alpha clearance there’s a ‘need to know’ aspect to some of the tech which is a condition of us being allowed to use it. I can tell you that we are looking at the SEP functioning down to the tiniest, tiniest level – with pulse observations comparing what is going on without the trigger sound, and with it.’
‘Oh, my,’ her eyes widened. ‘When you say tiny, you mean nano…?
‘Let’s just say that there is nothing going on in that casing which we won’t be able to see, up close and in detail,’ Alex said. ‘But it is a big chunk of tech and it will take us some time to scan every part of it, so do, please, bear with us – as soon as we have any findings, of course, you will be the first to know.’
Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6) Page 46