Quarus

by S J MacDonald

  ‘Never mind,’ Alex said, with a consoling intent even though he couldn’t help grinning. ‘You did well. And nobody ever said that shipboard placement would be easy.’

  Twelve

  Twenty three hours and eighty seven minutes later, as the Heron ripped towards the launch tunnel at velocities approaching light speed, the word ‘easy’ was no longer in Nyge Tomaas’s vocabulary.

  He had had no sleep, and since the night before had been abbreviated it was now thirty five hours since he’d got out of bed. Rangi Tekawa had handed him an exceptional circumstance pass on workload restrictions without even being asked for one, so that, he said, Nyge could have all the benefit of getting really stuck in on the pre-launch.

  Benefit was not a word which had crossed Nyge’s mind, either. Not that he had much time to think. He had a to-do list that ten cadets would have struggled to get through and every officer on the ship appeared to believe that whatever they’d asked him to do should take priority over everything else. He’d been ping-ponging back and forth between the ship and the planet so fast and so often that at one point he found himself trotting through the spaceport with no clear idea why he’d come groundside at all. Meals were hasty, gulped on the run, and he only had to set foot in a shower for the calls to start, asking if he intended to be all day, come on, get a move on!

  Easy it was not, and the benefit might be dubious, but Nyge Tomaas was having the time of his life. That was obvious even though he was saying little more than acknowledging orders and ‘beg pardon’, even though he was red eyed from lack of sleep and was running about like a flustered hamster. There was a sense of excitement about him, and a readiness to keep doing this till he dropped. He was, members of the crew agreed, surveying him with expert eyes, made of the right stuff. A bit gormless, perhaps – okay, more than a bit gormless, falling for every snotty wind-up in the book, but with the right grit and solidly good natured even under chaotic pressure and unfair harassment. He had kept his calm, even when Mr Sartin had sent him groundside to pick up a tape from the Embassy, called him back from the spaceport because he had another tape he wanted delivered, changed his mind about the first tape, issued three contradictory instructions about the second tape and then told Nyge off for being so slow and not knowing what he was doing.

  ‘All right, Mr Tomaas?’ Alex enquired. The cadet had been invited to sit next to him on the command deck, making notes about certain technical aspects of the launch.

  ‘Oh – yes, skipper!’ Nyge beamed at him, and Alex laughed, glancing at Buzz, then, who duly reported ‘Green, all green, skipper.’

  ‘Go,’ said Alex, ‘go, go.’

  The note-making gag worked just as expected. There was a hilarious period when the cadet was still trying to write notes while screens were vibrating so badly you couldn’t even see them, until at last he was forced to abandon the attempt.

  As if in celebration of traditional cadet-baiting fun, the crew sang a particularly heartfelt rendition of the Gloriatzi in the post-launch period. For anyone with a feeling for music or even for crowd atmosphere, it was a skin-tingling performance. Part of it was the moment – they hung on the verge of making the biggest journey most of them would ever undertake, with a destination only a tiny number of humans would ever get to visit. It was a prospect worth singing the Gloriatzi for, and worth singing it with all their heart and might. No stadium crowd roaring it out as they saw their home team bringing home a cup victory could have rivalled the two hundred-odd people on that starship, giving it full choral joy. And what errors in musicality Jonas Sartin might have noticed were more than made up for in the sheer joy of it.

  ‘Gloriatzi terrae harmonis…’

  The glory of worlds at peace, Alex sang, and felt that from the heart, too. The League, not a squabbling mish-mash of barely compatible cultures rubbing along together somehow while competing over trade and grumbling about Chartsey-centrism, but a great and shining example of worlds standing together, proud and free, proud and free forever.

  ‘Liiiii-ber-taaas!’ Alex did his bit with the other light tenors, loving this bit when the sopranos kicked in like an ethereal choir. ‘Liiber-taaas eter-ur-num.’

  When the song was done they gave themselves a huge cheer, and Alex had an enormous grin on his face, too, as he gave the order for the salute.

  This took some time. They were not venturing into the Gulf alone. The Fleet had sent the Eagle to escort them and the Harmony was keeping company, too. There had been some discussion as to how they would take station. Strictly speaking, since the Eagle was their escort the destroyer should take up a subsidiary position off their starboard side and below. Diplomatic Corps ships in company with Fleet ones generally maintained an equal station with them, but in this case, since Alex had ambassadorial status, they too wanted to occupy the starboard-below station of the primary escort. Then there was the Stepeasy, too, which was nominally part of the Fourth’s squadron, as a contracted support-ship, and would normally occupy that starboard station, too, when there were no other Fourth’s ships present. Since all three of them couldn’t occupy the same station and Davie’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion that they take turns had not gone down well, an agreement had been reached that they would form the standard four-ship formation of an angled diamond. The Heron was up front, with the Eagle and Harmony to either side, behind and below, while the Stepeasy, lower again, brought up the rear. The Eagle and Harmony had settled the matter of which had the higher status starboard position by the simple method of tossing a coin.

  So this was the formation they moved into as each ship launched in their wake and slotted into place in the long, fast orbit. As each ship joined, there were salutes, given and returned. And when all four were together, a salute to the system with a distinctly competitive edge.

  The Fourth believed they had it nailed, of course, with their fighter display and a rolling broadside which their gunners pulled off flawlessly. Nobody could compete with the brilliance, agility and stunning acrobatics of their fighters, or their perfectly timed broadside. The Eagle, though, demonstrated that they too could pull off a rapid rolling broadside and had some nifty work with patterned cannon fire which scored big points. Even the Diplomatic Corps ventured a move, not wanting to be outdone with their standard single-cannon shot by way of salute. So they carried out a manoeuvre known as popping their shuttles – every shuttle they carried popped off their airlocks and flew just a hundred metres away from them while the Harmony completed its salute orbit. It was a typically quiet, elegant demonstration of skill and in any fair competition should have won a high place.

  This, though, was not a fair competition, as Davie had prepared a contest-snatching display which would knock even Shion’s pilots out of contention.

  There was no gunfire. The Stepeasy had guns, though they were concealed under hull shields, and they had missile tubes, too – Papa would not allow his son and heir to be going about in any ship which was potentially vulnerable to pirates, so the yacht had very nearly as much firepower as the Heron. Since it was a civilian craft, though, it saluted the system with the customary triple-flash of its comms arrays rather than with gunfire.

  Then, just as everyone was counting the Stepeasy out and feeling a tad disappointed that they hadn’t tried a bit harder than that, the superyacht shed its skin.

  It did look like that. There was a brief, tiny flare at the nose and then suddenly red lines started to crawl through the thick, gloomy grey paint. Within moments it was burning, flaking, flying to powder and leaving a huge sweep of flare behind it as the particles fell sublight. Even on the Heron, they stopped looking at their own fighters and gaped at the Stepeasy. There were some cries of alarm, even, from those who didn’t understand what was happening and thought that the ship was in trouble – one passenger shouted, ‘It’s on fire!’ and had to be reassured, with some difficulty, that starships did not catch fire in space, not like that, and that the dark clouds flying off the hull were burned-off paint, not smoke. But by t
hen, the pure white gleam of the real paintwork was being exposed. It had been, as every spacer realised at once, double-painted. The inner coating was the real thing, duralloy-particle paint designed to resist all the scratches and scrapes of micro-impacts and other wear and tear. That grim grey coating, on the other hand, was nothing more than the kind of cheap paint that might be used on space stations, readily burned away if you raised the hull temperature. As the grey skin burned away and the white ship emerged trailing a dazzling white tail, there were cheers and thumping applause on the Heron.

  ‘Nice one,’ Alex conceded, when they’d turned away from Serenity and Davie came over to the frigate, half an hour or so later. By then, Serenity was just one dot amongst a myriad. Ahead of them lay just three more systems which they would pass close enough by to register them as passing. After that, they would be in the Gulf.

  ‘Quite good, wasn’t it?’ Davie agreed, complacently. He had come back aboard from his three days with Papa with hair extensions which he’d promptly removed in their salon. It had taken a couple of days for his skin to lose its burnished look and his nails to lose their manicured gleam, but he was back now to his familiar scruffy look, clad in shipboard rig and eating a stack of sandwiches. He had asked for cookies, but the rigger had brought sandwiches, demonstrating that he was more inclined to go with what Rangi said than what Davie wanted. Davie hadn’t complained. He never really minded what he was fed so long as it wasn’t the high-nutrient gel his father’s chefs kept trying to slip into his food. He was looking at the four ships, holding their neat formation as they sped out into the void. ‘Odd, isn’t it,’ Davie observed, ‘that yours is the smallest ship and has the most people aboard?’

  Alex hadn’t considered it, but he did so then, contemplating the four ships on the screen. The Stepeasy was the largest, itself the size of a small liner and with a couple of decks over the next in size, the destroyer Eagle and its diplomatic sister-ship Harmony, both of which outsized the Heron by some way. Of all four ships, the Harmony was the one with the fewest people aboard. The Gulf-crossing ships were designed to operate largely on autopilot and had only a minimal crew, seventeen people including the skipper, and two of those stewards. There were almost always, as there were now, more passengers than crew aboard – twenty three passengers in this case, including the embedded journalist, Blaze Tyler. Next up in terms of numbers was the Stepeasy, with a crew of twenty eight not counting those defined as staff. They were Davie’s retinue, even though they didn’t follow him about, and included executives who managed his corporate affairs. He’d left quite a few people at Serenity to manage his affairs from there and be picked up on the way back, but he still had twenty one of his own people on the Stepeasy. The Eagle was next, with a ship’s company of two hundred and six and no passengers.

  And then there was the Heron. A Seabird-37 in regular Fleet service had a crew of eleven officers and a hundred and ninety eight crew The Heron’s normal complement had been extended to two hundred and fourteen to allow for supernumeraries. They had already been carrying a few more than that, besides the ten people in the Lab, the four Diplomatic Corps people who were based on the interdeck, Mako Ireson, who managed the interdeck, and, of course, Silvie. Now they also had an instructor and two cadets, bringing the total working population of the ship to two hundred and thirty seven. In addition to this, though, they also had passengers on the interdeck – eight of them, just pipping the Eagle in terms of numbers aboard.

  ‘Is that significant?’ Alex asked, having tried and failed to work out what Davie considered so odd about that that it was worthy of comment.

  ‘Only in the sense,’ said Davie, ‘that your ship, already operating at more than fifty per cent over design capacity, has been asked to take these passengers when there is oodles of room on all the other ships.’

  Alex detected the note of severe disapproval, and grinned.

  ‘These passengers,’ he said, ‘were invited by Silvie, which is good enough for me. And besides, they’re Excorps, they’ll very soon dig in.’

  ‘That isn’t the point,’ Davie grumbled. He’d been surprisingly irritated when he’d been told that Silvie had invited some of the Excorps guys along – people she’d met at Serenity and simply invited to come along for the trip. Excorps had released them with alacrity and Alex had just smiled and agreed. Nobody on the Heron had complained about it; on the contrary, most of them were pleased at having Excorps people as passengers. Excorps were, to spacers, the equivalent of top league players to sports fans. Most spacers could tell you what expeditions were out, who their skippers and high profile people were, and what had last been heard of them. Five of these people had been out on expeditions. Alex himself was looking forward to hearing their stories. Davie, though, was being unaccountably grumpy about it. ‘It’s just so irresponsible and inconsiderate,’ he said, ‘dumping people on you like that at the last moment, and without even asking.’

  Alex stared at him. ‘This is Silvie,’ he reminded him. ‘Bringing along eight explorers she met at a party is not even in the same league as kidnapping – how many students was it? – from a charter ship.’

  Davie gave a reluctant little grin at the memory. It had cost him rather a lot of money and some effort to fix things so that the owner of the charter ship went away satisfied.

  ‘Not exactly kidnapping,’ he said. The students concerned had been backpackers living in overcrowded, squalid conditions in a cheaply converted cargo hold. Silvie had rounded them up, brought them back to the Stepeasy and obliged Davie to house them in the superyacht’s luxurious quarters. The abducted students had barely been able to believe their luck. ‘But yes, okay, point taken, she does this sort of thing. And you don’t mind, obviously. But it just seems to me that this ship is bursting at the seams, skipper – and I know you love the Heron, but just look at that.’ ‘That’ was the Eagle, cruising to port. It was, as President Tyborne had once joked, a more noble bird altogether than the Heron, clean-lined and sleek where the Heron was a lumpy, sturdy workhorse. ‘Wouldn’t you like a destroyer?’ Davie asked.

  ‘No.’ Alex answered without hesitation. ‘Whatever ship we have,’ he pointed out, ‘will always be bursting at the airlocks because we’ll pack in as many supernumeraries, researchers and passengers as we can hold. If we are ordered to upsize then obviously, we will, but while the choice is mine we’ll stick with the frigate, thanks.’ He looked curiously at the younger man. ‘Why is that bugging you, Mr North?’

  Davie looked rueful. ‘They’ve launched the first Defenders,’ he said. ‘The first two are operational and the third is on the slips now. I can’t think of anyone who deserves them more or who’d make better use of them, but the commands are going to yes men and the ships into homeworld defence service.’ There was a tiny but detectable note of anguish, in that, which Alex understood. Every generation of the Founding Families was expected to make some contribution to funding warship development. In Davie’s case he had set up his own ship building company, hiring the best and most innovative designers in their fields, and had given them all the funding and resources needed to create a whole new generation of starship. The first prototype was his own Stepeasy, and there would be fast cargo versions, but the primary design had always been for a new class of destroyer. They were as fast as patrol ships, as agile as frigates and had more firepower than a conventional destroyer; equipped with all the very latest tech and capable of carrying either a small gunship or a flight of nine fighters in their hangar deck. They were, in biological terms, the apex predators of the starship ecosystem. That they were being assigned to nothing more demanding than sitting sublight in homeworld defence squadrons was like seeing a leopard being given a fluffy bed and little kitty toy. And when that was your leopard, which you’d put your heart and soul into since you were a kid of ten, that had to hurt.

  ‘Homeworld defence is…’ he began the automatic Fleet mantra that homeworld defence was always their highest priority and the strongest, fastest, hi
ghest prestige ships assigned to it because it was their top priority, but receiving Davie’s withering look, broke off. It was true enough in theory, but both of them knew that the chances of Marfikian or any other attack on their worlds was vanishingly small. And just as well, too, since the majority of ships in homeworld service just about ticked over on combat drills and would be completely outclassed by any sudden, sizeable attack. The primary purpose of the defence squadrons was to look impressive and reassure the population.

  ‘Well,’ Alex said, ‘They’re good ships. But I have to say, I’m not hankering after one, Mr North. Any bigger than this,’ he patted the table, ‘and you lose the intimacy, the cohesion of a small ship. Even on the Eagle, I bet you, there are people who’ve never had conversations and don’t know one another’s names. Mostly, they work in one department and live on one mess deck, and without the open comms we have here, have only a very limited view of what’s going on around the ship – and no view at all of the command deck, of course. A bigger ship, even with open comms, would have a completely different dynamic, and I don’t believe that would work nearly so well for us.’

  It occurred to him as he was speaking that Davie North was ashamed. His father, no doubt, had been belittling the Heron in all sorts of ways, comparing it unfavourably with Davie’s own ship and with the new Defender class destroyers which Davie himself had developed and funded. It had evidently left Davie feeling embarrassed, defensive… and there it was, his great big beautiful ship with only forty nine people on board, while the ugly, old fashioned little Heron was packed out.

  ‘Though I have to say, too,’ Alex went on, ‘that I don’t ‘love the Heron’ in that weird way skippers are popularly believed to bond with their ships. It is a machine, that’s all, and I could walk away from it today without a second thought. It’s the people I mean when I say that I love my ship, the way the team works and pulls together, that’s what makes me proud to be skipper. And we are, as you observed, fortunate in the numbers we’ve been able to accommodate, which I do like about this ship, the generous space. I don’t see it as ‘packed out’ in any negative way at all – we actually have capacity for another eighty people if we used the gym as emergency quarters, but as it is we’ve all got reasonable accommodation and the ship is not overcrowded. And there is not, I can tell you, one person on this ship, not one, that I’m not happy and proud to have with us.’