Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6)

by S J MacDonald

  It would be another four weeks before the nanoscopes found the trail which would solve the mystery, and in the meantime, there was nothing they could do but wait.

  There were plenty of other things to do, though, including an experiment so radical that even Alex had needed some persuading to allow it. It was Buzz who was conducting this particular piece of research – socio psychology research, of course, since that was his academic field.

  ‘This is quite probably the most frightening thing I’ve ever done in my career,’ Commander Leavam observed, in the final senior-officer meeting being held in the daycabin. ‘No. I take that back. It is without doubt the most frightening thing I have ever done in my career.’

  She looked accusingly at Buzz, who returned her gaze with an innocent smile.

  ‘I have every confidence in our ship’s company,’ he said. ‘And any one of us…’ he gestured around the table, ‘can call a halt to it at any time.’

  If Hetty Leavam’s expression was anything to go by, the life expectancy of the experiment might be measured in seconds. Still, she conceded the point with a slight grimace, turning then to Alex. ‘With reservations duly noted,’ she said. ‘I am willing to proceed with this as a participatory social-psychology experiment.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Alex looked around the rest of the senior officers. Then he looked at the wall screen which showed similar groups on the Harmony and on the Eagle. Skippers Thurgood and Stuart had been surprisingly easy to convince about this, once they had been assured that Alex had approved it and that they could terminate the exercise at any time for any reason. Both had their own reasons for believing that their crews would perform admirably under the experimental conditions. Both, secretly, were hoping to show the Fourth a thing or two.

  ‘So – everyone?’ Alex queried.

  There was agreement, none of it very enthusiastic from the Heron’s officers, but Buzz’s smile was serene. He was about to pull off an experiment which he had been wondering about for years, but could never have got even Alex to consent to, till now. If they were ever going to do this, it had to be now, out here in the Gulf and on their way to Quarus.

  ‘All right,’ said Alex, and got up purposefully. ‘Let’s do it, then.’

  They went to the command deck and took their places there. Alex was aware that most of the crew was keeping half an eye anyway, alert to the fact that something was going on – Alex didn’t normally hold senior officer briefings in private.

  ‘Attention on deck.’ Alex waited a moment to be sure that everyone was listening. ‘As you are aware, Mr Burroughs sent a memo round yesterday asking for volunteers to take part in a research exercise. Thank you all for agreeing to take part. I can now tell you what the exercise will be. As of now, and for the next twenty five hours, the watch and quarter bill is suspended. What this means is that no watches will be set, no duties assigned and…’ he had to take a breath for this one, ‘no officers will give any work-directive orders.’ He heard the gasp which ran round the ship. ‘This is not a free for all.’ He said. ‘We all know which stations must be manned at all times and what work should be completed during this time. I expect all duties to be carried out to the same high standard as always, and nobody must attempt to undertake work for which they are not qualified. If you are holding a station then you are responsible for it and must stay at your post until you are relieved. Normal health and safety regulations will still apply. I or any of the commanders will terminate the exercise at once if any vital station is left unmanned or if there are concerns about inappropriate conduct. There will be no ship visiting or intership comms for the duration of the exercise. So, there you are. You are all now working on your own recognisance. Over to you, ladies and gentlemen.’

  It took the Heron’s crew about half an hour to decide how to play this, with debates which met and merged, bounced off again and finally came together in agreement. In this, it was Ali Jezno and Jen Jennet’s voices which were decisive.

  ‘Look, there’s no point to this if all we do is carry on as we would have anyway,’ said Ali. ‘Any idiots could do that. This is obviously an exercise in working the way quarians do, isn’t it?’

  Three decks away, Jen nodded agreement, chiming into the debate which was taking place mostly over open comms. ‘Obviously,’ she confirmed, and there were general noises of consensus. Jen was on the command deck, on duty at the comms console, and had cast an eye over the officers, particularly Hetty Leavam, before joining in the discussion. ‘We could,’ she suggested, ‘handle it the same way as a strip-down – put all the jobs on the board and people just pick them up.’

  ‘Good idea - that way we make sure everything’s covered.’ A nearby CPO said.

  ‘I still want to do my gunnery training.’ Ab had been making some progress in gunnery, thanks to assiduous playing of Cosmos Warfare and some friendly coaching from shipmates. He was unlikely to reach advanced level in the foreseeable future but he wanted his speed and accuracy to be the best they could be, and his scheduled gunnery training was important to him.

  ‘We’ll put the training slots on the board, too,’ another petty officer assured him, and with something of a babble of suggestions and ideas, a task board was set up.

  ‘All right,’ said Bonny. ‘Let’s go for it.’ And she added in the duties reserved to officers, too, from watchkeeping to supervising Kate’s cadet classes. ‘Bags I the watch,’ she said, and took the conn, grinning at those officers who seemed at something of a loss. ‘Well? What are you guys going to do?’

  It took a little time, but by the afternoon a sense of organisation was starting to emerge. All the work that needed doing was on the board, just as it would have been in a pre-launch strip down, and with everyone taking on a fair share, all the work which would have got done normally was being ticked off the list.

  By the evening, it was apparent that watch routines were going by the board. Those who were holding stations on the command deck were being changed far more often than normal watch routines, and as it settled down it seemed to be established by some tacit agreement that command deck stints should last about an hour. This was not because nobody wanted to do them; quite the opposite, it was clearly something they did because everyone wanted a command deck slot so it was fair to share them as widely as possible. The least popular jobs also had more people on them than usual as it seemed to be agreed that it was fair to pitch in and not leave the grotty jobs to just a few people. The middle kind of duty, though – departmental watchkeeping and the like – tended to be more erratic, with some people staying on duty longer than they would have normally because they had things to do or were just enjoying it, while others blitzed at non-watchkeeping tasks like maintenance and, when they were done, took themselves off duty. Only two people on the ship stuck rigidly to what their normal schedule would have been – Kate, bound by her promise to stick to cadet schedules, and Hetty Leavam, holding herself aloof from the general disorder.

  Chaos, however, entirely failed to happen. The closest they came to that was when it was realised with just minutes to spare that nobody had signed up for the chore of delivering hot trolleys, at which three people jumped in and dinner was saved. When Alex went for his usual evening stroll around the ship, he found people in a happy buzz, thoroughly enjoying the holiday from normal routines.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ Silvie enthused, meeting Alex as she was going about the ship too, drinking in the atmosphere. ‘Nobody is bored!’ she told him. ‘Not one. Even if what they’re doing is boring, they’re doing it because they want to, such a different feeling, social generosity, doing it for the ship, not because it says on some timetable that that’s what they have to be doing right now.’ She laughed as he gave a polite but noncommittal smile. ‘You’re not enjoying it?’

  ‘Oh, it’s great to see everyone having some fun,’ Alex said frankly, ‘and it’s working just fine as a break from routine, and in these circumstances, too, when we’re so far out from everything else that there are no ex
ternal demands on us, just us in a little isolation bubble. But I don’t know how it would work out, you know, once the novelty wore off, and I’m very sure I’d have concerns if we were in a situation like a busy shipping lane where we might have to deal with emergency calls at any moment. Anyway,’ he grinned, ‘it’s certainly very interesting.’

  Just how interesting became apparent after the twenty five hours were over. None of the three crews had been told that the other ships were taking part, so each had acted in the belief that theirs was the only ship doing this bizarre ‘Gulf Experiment’.

  Predictably, each ship had reacted in line with their organisational culture. Three ships of similar status within their organisations – the Fourth’s flagship, the elite destroyer and the high-prestige Harmony, had epitomised those organisations in the way that they reacted to the sudden removal of their daily structure and directive authority.

  It had made no difference on the Eagle at all. As Bull had said, if you took all the officers off his ship completely, it would continue to run with the same quiet efficiency as before, watch succeeding watch, lower ranks assuming the duties of the seniors and maintaining that calm, orderly conduct all the way to their destination.

  The Harmony, on the other hand, had displayed considerable stress. They too had maintained their watch schedules but with deep anxiety, repeatedly asking their officers to confirm that what they were doing was right.

  ‘Interesting, of course,’ said Alex, ‘but if you’ll forgive me saying so, Buzz, hardly any great surprise. The Diplomatic Corps people got stressed when they were asked to deal with sudden and hierarchy-challenging change, the traditional Fleet ship maintained their routines and discipline and the Fourth tried out new ideas. Not exactly unexpected.’

  Buzz grinned broadly.

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t watching them,’ he said. ‘Not how the crews reacted – as you say, quite predictable. I was watching…’ he looked across the command table to where Hetty Leavam was sitting, ‘Internal Affairs.’

  ‘What?’ Hetty’s head snapped up, startled and indignant.

  ‘Well, strictly speaking, I was looking for the significant tone-setting leadership,’ Buzz said. ‘The key individual. And on all three ships, that was the watchdog. IA, on our ships and P&P – Personnel and Policy – on Diplomatic Corps ships, are the watchdogs responsible for ensuring that normal operating policies are adhered to. They are the ones who will be most challenged by a situation of this kind, undermining of their function and to a large extent, their core beliefs, so I knew that their reactions would be powerful and significant, but even so, I didn’t expect them to come out as the key factor, and on every ship. It will take me some time to analyse in detail, of course, but my initial observations show that the reaction of the IA or P&P officer was far more significant in this than the conduct of the skipper. Really, yes. Skipper Thurgood was extremely positive about the experiment – saw it, I believe, as an opportunity to demonstrate that the Diplomatic Corps can cope well with the kind of unexpected challenge thrown up by exodiplomacy. He really wanted, and expected, his crew to shine in this, and went to considerable effort throughout the experiment, too, to encourage and bolster morale. Their P&P officer, on the other hand, was very anxious and almost terminated the exercise on three occasions, dissuaded from doing so only by the skipper’s assurances that it would be all right. It was the P&P officer who set the tone for the crew, there, not the skipper. On the Eagle, Captain Stuart was entirely hands off, spent almost all of the exercise in his quarters. Their IA officer, on the other hand, walked around quietly ensuring that everything continued to tick over exactly as normal. And here, too…’ he grinned mischievously from Hetty to Alex and back. ‘The skipper,’ he pointed out, ‘was openly dubious about the value of the exercise and did nothing at all to promote the breakdown of the watch and quarter bill. It was you, dear girl, who set the tone of the exercise and encouraged people to ditch routines and try new ways of doing things.’

  ‘I did nothing of the sort!’ Hetty protested, and then remembered that she was talking to a socio-psychologist with something of a reputation in his admittedly narrow field, that of studying group behaviour in conditions of isolation. ‘Did I?’ she asked, more doubtfully, and Buzz laughed.

  ‘You did, dear girl,’ he assured her. ‘I’ll go through the data with you whenever you like, but what it will show you are multiple, significant, guiding interactions in which you signalled your feelings and expectations to members of the crew and how that impacted on their confidence in breaking down routines. And you, for all that you said that this was the most frightening thing you’d done in your career, loved it, you were having a great time, amazed and fascinated by what was going on and really quite sorry when it stopped.’

  ‘Oh.’ Hetty stared at him, glanced around at the skipper and the other officers, and gave a wry little strangled-chicken snort. ‘Got me,’ she admitted, though the look she gave Buzz then was reproachful. ‘And these observations, I hope, have some purpose?’

  Buzz smiled. ‘Well, it indicates something I’ve suspected for a long time,’ he said. ‘That if you want to manage how well a crew handles a structural breakdown, it isn’t the skipper you need to look at, it’s the IA officer.’

  ‘And this will help us at Quarus…?’

  ‘And this will help us at Quarus.’ Buzz confirmed. ‘Structural breakdown will be an inevitable part of our operations there and now we have a clearer picture of our group dynamics we will be able to manage that more effectively.’

  ‘Ah.’ Hetty relented at that. ‘Fair enough.’ She glanced around at them again, and focussed back on Alex. ‘I used to have a reputation,’ she said.

  Alex recognised that this was what passed for a joke with Hetty, and chuckled. He understood what she meant. Her passionate dedication to the cause of justice and fairness through the rigid enforcement of rules had been legendary. Generations of Fleet officers had passed through her hands at the Academy, formed, in part, by her duralloy certainty that strict adherence to regulation and policy was professionalism, and essential, too, for the Fleet to function.

  Now, that reputation would be shattered by the revelation that she had actually enjoyed an exercise in which all normal structure was ripped away and in which crew just organised work for themselves. She should have been appalled, not enjoying seeing how well they worked as a team. She should have been shocked by the speed with which watch and quarter routines had been abandoned, not proud of the way they’d pulled together to ensure that all the work got done. She ought to have been using words like ‘shambolic’ and ‘anarchic’ but instead she had been making notes about consensus and functional cooperation.

  ‘And just how bonkers is it,’ Alex observed, ‘that where this exercise was concerned, you were more radical and maverick than me?’

  There was an awed silence while the other officers gazed at Hetty, who opened and closed her mouth once or twice, struggling to find something to say. Finally, she managed it.

  ‘I think,’ she said, ‘I’d like a cup of tea.’

  Over the next couple of weeks, Hetty and Buzz worked together closely, developing a new kind of watch and quarter bill specific for the Quarus operation. It had more structure than the ‘over to you, ladies and gentlemen’ of the Gulf exercise, but no actual watch schedules. Instead, it broke work down into team responsibilities in which each watch was responsible for a fair mixture of popular tasks, routine work and the unpopular stuff that nevertheless had to get done. Operational rules were worked out, too, ensuring that everyone got regulation breaks and sleep-time. Other than that, though, it was down to individuals to pick up the tasks from their team board.

  Alex having approved this, they began a phased introduction – another twenty five hour exercise, to start with, and when that went well, a two day session the following week.

  Before they got to that, though, there was an unexpected diversion.

  ‘The Excorps guys,’ Silvie told Alex, ‘are pre
tty sure that there is an old space station out that way,’ she indicated to port. ‘So can we go look for it?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Alex. It would mean pausing the Geminax experiment, which he could not do without good cause, but this carried the dual weight of a request from the quarian ambassador and his own priority, which was to care for Silvie. She was coping well with the crossing, but boredom was always a problem for her on long runs without a great deal going on, so he was happy to provide any amusement he could.

  In the event, he and the rest of the squadron got just as much interest out of it as Silvie, if not more so.

  ‘The trouble is, we don’t have many records from back then.’ The most senior of the Excorps guys was a skipper herself, an explorer who had crossed the Gulf many times and mapped more systems than Alex had had hot dinners. The most advanced living biosphere she’d discovered was dominated by reptiles and amphibians, of which the apex species were hunter snakes and a remarkable frog. Her descriptions and pictures of the wildlife there, and particularly the Flying Frog, had entertained Silvie so much that Alex would have been happy to bring her along for no other purpose. As it was, though, he was as big a fan of Excorps as any other spacer and had considerable admiration for Skipper Farah, too… at least, when she wasn’t dressing him up as a sea god or making comment on his lavatory skills. She was in her eighties, gruff and grizzle-haired, restricted to base duties these days as she trained younger explorers for the great work still going on on the far side of the Gulf. ‘We know that there were two pump stations in the early days – our ships couldn’t cross the Gulf in one leap back then so we had to establish supply posts, stocking the first, using that to stock the second, and so on. We still do that now, same principle, though the pump stations are a lot further out. Anyway we know that back in the day, the first Gulf crossings here did use two pump stations, a third and two thirds across, because that was the longest range our ships had at the time. And we were eyes on the prize, of course, for centuries before we actually made it over.’