Quarus

by S J MacDonald

  ‘Comms down,’ he said, as they approached the point where they shut down all unnecessary systems, keeping only one thread of communication between themselves and launch control. ‘Final checks…’

  Two minutes of chanting responses from officers around the command table and from various departments around the ship confirmed that everything was shut down and that they were ready to go.

  ‘Green, all green, skipper.’ Buzz reported, with that happy gleam in his eyes he always got during launch.

  Alex gave him a sidelong grin. The Fleet had made pretty determined attempts to make Buzz take retirement during this leave. He was already nine years over the maximum age at which officers were normally permitted to serve aboard starships, as the Fleet had been trying to phase him into groundside duties preparatory to retirement at the time Alex had asked for him to be his Executive Officer on his first command. Extensive physical and psychological testing at Therik, though, had confirmed that Buzz was remarkably fit, full of energy and enthusiasm and more than up to the challenge of being Flag Exec on the Heron.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Burroughs.’ There was just the same gleam in Alex’s eyes, the thrill of the launch ahead and all that lay beyond it. He was having to make an effort not to laugh out loud with sheer happiness in the moment.

  The ship tore on, starting to shake now as acceleration pushed them closer to light speed. Within moments, they would run through the first of the booster rings which would hurtle them into the mayhem of launch. Alex sat with his hand on the abort control, watching all the readings.

  ‘Go or abort, skipper?’ Buzz asked, as regulations required.

  ‘Go,’ said Alex, also as per regulations. ‘Go, go.’

  Then both of them started yelling, as did just about everyone else on the ship, as launch mayhem erupted around them. It felt as if the ship was spinning madly, though readouts said it was doing nothing of the sort. It certainly was shaking so violently that it felt as if it might come to bits. Teeth-jarring jolts threw them out of their chairs and lurched them sideways, hang on as they might.

  Alex, strapped into his chair with his feet wedged under a freefall safety bar, yelled with delight. His right hand remained flat on the datatable, feeling every tremor and leap of the ship. There was absolutely nothing they could do during this part of the launch but hang on. The launch could not be aborted mid-way, they were committed and they had no control. It was very much like riding a roller coaster – if the roller coaster concerned was also shaking to its rivets, screeching metal and popping electronics, with the cars bouncing along on one wheel. It seemed to go on for ever – thirty nine seconds according to the chronometer, if anyone had been able to see straight enough to keep track of the time. Then there was the inevitable moment of complete disorientation, almost like greying out under high gee. It was the moment at which first-voyagers tended to think this is it, I’m going to die. It was also the moment in which bets were won or lost on whether first voyagers would need to change their underwear.

  For Alex, it was a moment of exhilaration. If he’d been able to form words at that point he might well have yelled Freedom! As it was he could only shout aloud his sense of joy and liberation along with all the other voices yelling with the clamour of the ship.

  And then, as miraculous as it always was, they were still yelling but the ship was calm. All the shrieking of metal grinding against metal, all the nauseating spin and heave, all the bone-jolting vibration, stopped as instantly as if someone had flicked off a switch. The Heron was superlight.

  Yells turned to cheers, and then into song as the rating at the helm exercised her prerogative to choose the traditional post-launch music. Passengers were often startled to find that this was not one of the Fourth’s progressive innovations but had been the custom in the Fleet for centuries, and so hallowed by that tradition that not even the most hidebound Old School officer would cavil at it.

  On this occasion, the music chosen was not the Gloriatzi, which had become the Fourth’s unofficial anthem. Jonas Sartin, their choirmaster, had asked that they didn’t attempt the Gloriatzi today as the new members of crew did not yet know their parts. And it was one of the odder aspects of serving in the Fourth that newcomers were expected to cooperate with Mr Sartin assessing their voice range and handing them singing parts for the Gloriatzi.

  Today, though, the choice was rather less grandiose. The song, a very old novelty hit on Telathor, had been performed at an open-mic night at the base, and had proven to be a very popular sing-along.

  ‘Can we go to the beach, Daddy, can we go to the sea…’

  Alex joined in with the singing, as the skipper was expected to, though he didn’t have much of a voice and his contribution was more of a modified hum. He was busy with post-launch screens as he sang, though they were still under launch control and there was nothing they could do at this stage but look to see how the ship had come through. Despite all the horrible noises, it had come through just fine – a few fuse boards would have to be replaced and a laundry machine in one of the showers had burst a chemical pod, which was now reading as a biohazard. These were trivial matters, though, which the duty riggers in those sections were already dealing with.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Alex, as the song came to an end, the ship swung into superlight orbit and he stood them down from launch stations all in the same moment. ‘Thank you, everyone.’

  He looked around the newly refitted command deck. It had been refitted to his own specifications and he was pleased with the result. The bulky datatable which had occupied much of the available space had been replaced with a slim-line geometric shape like a stretched four-point star with blunted corners. Alex himself had the seat at the top of the table, giving him a view of the entire command deck with its screen-lined walls and workstation consoles. The seat on the angle to his right belonged to Buzz. The one on the left was for visitors and was currently unoccupied. The longer trapezoid beyond Buzz had seats for the watch officers. On the left were three stations designed for Silvie, Shion and Davie North, with a second bank of screens so that they could multi-task more easily. None of them were occupied at the moment. Shion was supporting Silvie through the emotional impact of the launch and Davie had gone home for a visit. They would meet him and his ship the Stepeasy at X-Base Serenity, where they’d be spending a few days before continuing to Quarus.

  At the far end of the table was an elongated arm finishing at a rounded end too small for a seat. With four seats either side of it, it was technically the astrogation table but could be used by any officers. During launch, as with action stations, there were several officers there including their astrogator, a second watch commander supervising flight control and comms, an ordnance officer supervising missiles and gunnery, and a deck officer, supervising technicians and riggers.

  Alex did not know any of the people at that end of the table. He had only met some of them five days before when they’d reclaimed their ship from the spacedocks and the remaining crew and new intake had reported aboard. He knew something about them from reading their files and he had formed his first opinion of them from the way they had handled the manic activity of the last few days. All the same, they were largely an unknown quantity – too fresh on the job, really, too keen to make a good impression to reveal very much about themselves.

  None of them had blinked, though, when Alex had told them that they were launching the ship after just five days in parking orbit. The Fleet would expect a ship of this size, with so many new officers and crew, to spend at least a month in preliminary shakedown, doing training and drills to ensure that everyone knew their way around the ship before the skipper would certify them as ready for launch.

  That was not, though, how the Fourth did things. Alex had given everyone an hour and a half to get settled, with the walk-round orientation for the newbies and the old hands having a look at what work had been done. Then, as soon as the orientations were done, he’d given his usual shakedown order for all hands to set to work o
n a full pre-launch strip down.

  He was right, there was no better way for a crew to familiarise themselves with their ship than to effectively take it to bits and put it back together again. And it was an excellent team bonding exercise, too – old and new hands flung in together, tech buddies working all over the ship as each team picked up the next task from the to-do list as they finished one. Normal watch routines went by the board, and a serving out of the soup and hot rolls which the Fleet called soppo and dogs brought everyone together in a comforting tradition. Alex himself was everywhere, watching how the new crew members handled the ship and how the new officers handled the crew. Both had been satisfactory – they wouldn’t be launching now if they weren’t – and after two days of solid work Alex had certified the ship in perfect condition and the ship’s company competent to take it through launch.

  Even so, he hadn’t been prepared to let them rest on their laurels; far from it. The morning after they’d completed the strip down he’d asked them to do it all again, and this time to be prepared for random drills. These, as anyone who knew him would have expected, went far beyond the minimum drills required by the Fleet in preliminary shakedown. They’d had fire, explosions, blowout, environmental and biohazard alerts, total shutdown of life support and a dephasing engine. It had been a busy couple of days.

  It had been fun, too, Alex thought, and was not being ironic. Everyone who served with the Fourth, whether they came in on a rehab ticket or on the able and talented secondment scheme, was here because they were bored or frustrated in regular Fleet service. They wanted opportunity for training and for operational experience, they wanted challenge. So faced with a request to dismantle and reassemble the frigate’s technical systems bit by bit for the second time in a week whilst at the same time handling every crisis response drill the skipper could fling at them really had been fun for this crew. If it hadn’t been fun for any of them, Alex would have been having a quiet word and offering to send that person groundside for base duties. If they couldn’t cope with busy work and drills in port, after all, there was no way they’d handle real operations. As it was, the ship had been abuzz with lively conversation, tech-chants and laughter.

  And now they were out in space – real space, not the cluttered regulated space inside a system but the wild free space beyond it. They were not yet alone. As always when they launched at their base world, upwards of a hundred small craft had either preceded or chased them out and were now mobbing after them as close as they could get. Alex, though, took no notice of them. The SDF had that in hand, the System Defence Force fighters shepherding the chase group and keeping them well back from the warship’s security exclusion zone. It actually made for quite a pretty effect from a distance, a hundred and fourteen small craft all flashing their comms arrays. It could almost be taken for an honour escort, if you didn’t look at what they were actually signalling. Some of them were camera ships belonging to media stations. Others were old friends, like the Greenstar ship trailing a garish green light-tail and signalling Stop the Vivisection! There were four little starseeker yachts, too, evidently representing the militant arm of starseeker ownership – they were signalling Constitution Three, a protest against what they considered to be the Fourth’s unconstitutional interference with the rights of League citizens to the unrestricted use of intersystem space. Alex did, admittedly, have something of a reputation for blowing starseekers up. He had caused further outrage to the starseeker community, too, by declaring the route to Carrearranis far too dangerous for small ships and unqualified pilots. Insurance companies across the League had promptly told their starseeker and other small ship customers that their insurance would be invalid if they attempted that route, generating widespread protests against the Fourth for effectively preventing them from going to the newly discovered world. Hence these particular starseekers, making a protest which they hoped would be picked up by the media and get them interviews too. It might have been a bit more impressive if they’d been a little more skilful in their piloting, as their attempt to hold an arrow formation involved a lot of signalling and fidgeting and was never solid for more than a few seconds. It might have helped, too, if they’d synchronised their protest broadcast more effectively, as it was flickering between them like a faulty arc-light. Probably, though, it wouldn’t have made any difference. The media was as familiar with such protests as the Fourth themselves, and it would have to be a very slow news day indeed for the mass pursuit to get more than a few seconds coverage as part of the footage of the Fourth’s unexpected departure.

  What the media was hoping for was one of their more spectacular displays. It was a routine courtesy for a departing warship to cast a long orbit around the system and fire a salute before they curved away. On special occasions, this might be accompanied by fighter acrobatics. On very special occasions, the ship itself would sparkle all its lights and undertake ceremonial rolls.

  The Fourth, though, liked to jazz things up a bit. Their fighter displays were amazing, and they would often throw their ships into the mix as well, spinning and weaving in complex patterns.

  Not today, though. For one thing, the ship was not yet operational, authorised for launch only for training purposes. For another, Shion was currently busy looking after Silvie and two of their best pilots had been taken away to become pilot instructors themselves. It was doubtful, even, whether the Heron could pull off its trademark 360 spin with rolling broadside, since that required precise coordination between helm and gunners and wasn’t something that could be achieved without practice. Alex was not going to take the risk of his ship looking sloppy, so the system – and the media – got only the Fleet basic circuit, a courtesy roll and a simultaneous broadside fired by all the cannon facing away from the system. They did not even launch their fighters, just fired their salute and turned away.

  They had the Minnow and the Whisker with them for just eight minutes, which was the time it took for even the most determined chase ship to accept that they were not going to be able to keep up. The squadron was heading out on an obviously random course – not on any shipping lane and not in any direction which would take them anywhere, either, just heading out into deep space for as long as it took to shake off any observers.

  While they were waiting, Alex talked to the skippers of both ships. Milli Walensa had managed to keep most of the Minnow’s crew, as they would need to be operational a lot sooner than the Heron. She seemed very happy, too, genuinely enthusiastic about the mission she’d be heading up.

  ‘Can’t wait,’ she said. ‘The chance to prevent drugs reaching our worlds, to kick some righteous backside and fight the good fight, that’s what I joined the Fleet for in the first place. And we get to blow a lot of expensive stuff up, which is what I was hoping for when I came to serve with the Fourth, too.’

  Alex laughed. He knew that she’d had to put some work in to getting her crew motivated for the Dortmell mission when they were naturally disappointed at not being allowed to go to Quarus. And he knew, too, that they had come around to seeing their own mission as even more important and exciting because Milli herself really did feel that way. Sure, it would have been fun to go to Quarus, fascinating to see Silvie’s homeworld, but blowing stuff up at Dortmell was where the real action was.

  ‘I won’t wish you luck,’ he said, and included the young skipper of the patrol ship in his smile, ‘I don’t believe in luck. But my best wishes – all our best wishes – go with you all. And just, please – stay safe, and try not to blow anything up that we will have to pay for.’

  Milli chuckled at that, and gave him a salute – a playful one, though the patrol ship skipper evidently didn’t realise that. He snapped off an elbow-quivering salute of his own and blurted, ‘Sir! We’ll try to make you proud, sir!’

  Alex smiled at him, quite kindly. The Whisker had become a first-command posting for officers on the Fleet’s ‘tagged and flagged’ accelerated promotion scheme. It wasn’t actually a skipper’s command – though call
ed skipper as a courtesy, Mr Bentham was actually a Lt Commander and would not reach full shipmaster rank for at least three or four years. Patrol ships always operated under the orders of a qualified skipper, too, with little more independence than the head of department on a larger ship. Still, it was a first taste of command and the placement on the Whisker had been hotly contested. The First Lord himself had made the final selection between the three top candidates, and Mr Bentham considered himself to be the luckiest and happiest officer in the entire Fleet. Unfortunately, this delight did tend to express itself in just that kind of embarrassing statement, as if he still hadn’t quite shaken off the Academy Yap. He certainly seemed to Alex more like a newly qualified Sub than a senior officer. Milli, though, assured him that that was just nerves, meeting the captain who was his professional role-model and personal hero. Anyway, he was Milli’s responsibility now.