XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  He called up the star chart again, indicating a feature that lay right across the region. ‘Kennerman’s Ridge,’ he explained. ‘It’s not dirty space, no shipping routes go through dirty space, but it is an energetic zone, minor turbulence. Experienced spacers just accept that they’re going to have to calibrate their cores several times while crossing it – no big deal, really isn’t, cores run a bit hot, then cool, even on a starseeker the computer will handle it. But it sets off an alert, see, and having very loud alerts going off repeatedly and messages coming up they don’t understand has a tendency to freak people out.

  ‘And the reason for most ship abandonments, you see, is panic. That’s why insurance companies won’t pay out, once they’ve determined that the ship was in sound condition but that the owners abandoned it in panic. We do, of course, warn people about that. We do everything we can to help them, you know, we really do. When we come across people in a state like that, we put an officer aboard to mind their ship while we bring them aboard and calm them down. If they then say that they don’t want to go back to their ship there’s a whole series of procedures we have to go through, including medicals and legal advice, and we have to record that, too, every step of the way, it’s all very official, standard Fleet procedure, we really don’t just yank people off their ships and blow them up willy nilly. Well, you’ll see that for yourself – I’ll schedule you to shadow the watch for those three days, all right? You’ll learn more from that than any handbook, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and beamed at him. ‘I can’t wait!’

  Chapter Seven

  ‘Ohhh,’ Buzz breathed, a wondering light in his eyes, ‘Will you look at that?’

  Alex was looking at it. So was every other member of the crew. Friends had even woken up the sleeping nightwatch crew, knowing they wouldn’t want to miss this.

  What they were looking at was Shion, piloting one of their fighters. The fighters had been enabled for training flights for some time now and the first four pilots had already got their licenses, with many others working towards theirs. Lt Vergan had been working all hours, and since crew would willingly, eagerly, give up their free time for a session on a flight simulator, he was running training sessions from six in the morning till midnight, most days.

  Nobody had begrudged Shion being slotted in for priority sessions in that. She had initially been scheduled only for shuttle pilot training, but her first visit to the fighter bays had changed all that.

  Shion was in love. She’d lost her heart to a swarm-class star fighter. It had been love at first sight, or at least, love at first moment of sitting in the pilot’s seat and putting hands to the controls. The fighters could be used as simulators for training while docked onto the ship, and Very had agreed to giving her a go on one purely for interest.

  The moment she laid hands on the fighter, though, Shion knew that she had found her dream. Shuttles were fine, shuttles were great, and to pilot them would be wonderful, for sure, but the fighter was a whole different kind of animal.

  Most pilots in the Fleet would have laughed derisively at such a comment being made about a swarm fighter. The one consolation the grumblers in the Fleet had had, indeed, when griping about the Heron being allowed to carry fighters, was that they were being given swarms. In keeping with Alex’s own remit to look for ways to upgrade underperforming ships, they’d been given fighters that any carrier would be only too glad to see the back of.

  The thing was, they looked very good, both in style and in the performance you’d expect from the specs. They were, on paper, exactly what the Fourth needed, too, equipped to carry boarding parties and capable of independent flight for days at a time. At the same time, they were not much bigger than cargo shuttles so fitted neatly on the belly of the ship, three sleek triangles with flicked up wings.

  As the Fleet had discovered, however, very shortly after the Swarm class fighter had been launched in a blaze of publicity and some thousands of them commissioned for service, they were extremely difficult to fly. Test pilots had reported them as having hair-trigger handling, but that was not the half of it. They were supposed to have bio-responsive controls that adjusted to the handling ability of the pilot, but they were so hypersensitive the fighter would overreact even to the smallest movement. It was a standing joke in the Fleet that a swarm fighter would go out of control if its pilot broke wind. After some months attempting to overcome this with pilot training, the Fleet had fitted stabilising limiters to the fighters, making them easier to fly but also reducing their performance.

  Now, they saw a swarm fighter being flown as it was intended, perhaps as its designer had dreamed when drawing out those specs. It flitted and whirled like a swallow hunting insects, dancing joyfully around the ship. Shion had, with Alex’s permission, taken the stabilisers off for this, her first solo flight after getting her license. All of them knew that they were watching a pilot of extraordinary, superhuman skill, and such grace, too, it was a thing of beauty to watch.

  ‘Free spirit in flight,’ said Martine, and Alex smiled, though not taking his eyes off the screen.

  ‘It may,’ he observed, ‘be a while before we can get her to come back.’

  Six and a half hours, in fact. The crew had gone back about their normal work, by then, though with occasional glances at the monitors and laughing comment over whatever Shion was up to at the time. She was staying, as required, within their scanner range, putting the fighter through its paces. At one point she flung it into such a wild looking spin that people caught their breaths and Buzz started to exclaim, ‘She’s lost...’ before seeing that she hadn’t lost control at all, but was spinning and spiralling at the same time. It was amazing to watch, but after six and a half hours Buzz called and told her to come back aboard.

  ‘You’ve missed dinner,’ he pointed out, ‘and you’re not supposed to pilot for more than six hours without a break.’

  ‘Six hours?’ She sounded startled, but then evidently looked at the time. ‘Oh. Yes. Sorry. Heading home now.’

  She swung in and docked with the ease of someone landing an aircar, as if docking one superlight vessel onto another was something she could do with her eyes closed. Minutes later, she came striding onto the command deck, face alight, bursting with eagerness to tell Buzz and Alex all about how wonderful Firefly was.

  ‘Firefly?’ Alex queried. The Fleet did not name their fighters, and in accordance with standard policy the fighters were known as F-Alpha, F-Beta and F-Gamma. Shion, evidently, had her own ideas about that.

  ‘I’ve named it Firefly,’ she said, ‘you can’t call something so beautiful F-Beta, that’s just cold.’

  Alex let that go, and knew his crew well enough to recognise that the fighter would be Firefly from now on, with the others, no doubt, rapidly acquiring similar monikers. In any case, it would have been difficult to stem the flow of Shion’s enthusiasm. She was talking nonstop for the next twenty minutes, telling them how wonderful Firefly was.

  ‘Please, please can I go on the rota?’ she asked, looking yearningly at Alex.

  He looked back, sympathetic but doubtful. One of the conditions of them being allowed to carry fighters was that they were operated in just the same way as shuttles. Carriers might have the luxury of having dedicated flight and support crews for their fighters, but they just didn’t have the space for that on the Heron. There were always duty pilots on call for all the frigate’s shuttles, and it was just luck, then, who was on call at any time when shuttles were needed.

  They would work it just the same way with the fighters, which was why they needed to have at least nine people qualified to pilot them before they could become operational. Alex had allowed Shion to take the fighter pilot training on the understanding that she would only be flying it for fun. If she was on the rota, for real, that would mean she might be called upon to pilot that fighter into combat. He didn’t think somehow that the Diplomatic Corps would consider it appropriate to be letting the first-contact am
bassador go into front line combat.

  Shion didn’t see herself that way, of course, and nor for that matter did the Heron’s crew. They no longer thought of her as an alien, really. She was just Shion, warm and funny, and shaping up to be a decent officer, too.

  What the crew meant by that, as Alex understood, was that she was shaping up to be an excellent officer. She had impressed them with her knowledge of the ship and of Fleet routines and procedures, but admitted frankly to having no real hands-on experience. She had taken Alex’s advice and asked the crew to teach her things, particularly practical tasks, and within a few days they were already treating her as if she really was a cadet on shipboard placement with them. One of the tech teams had even tried a joke traditionally played on such cadets, asking her to tell the skipper that deck strut A1A was warped and could they have permission to replace it.

  Shion, however, had demonstrated her knowledge of ship’s specs by cracking up laughing at that, responding, ‘Don’t be silly, you’d have to take the ship apart!’ There was no getting anything like that past her, the crew agreed, with approval. And it was apparent, too, for all her easy, friendly manner, that she was accustomed to being in a position of authority. When officers asked her to pass on orders for work to be done, she asked the crew to do it almost casually, but with that subtle manner that conveyed expectation that they would get on and do that without any problem. By now, nearly three weeks into having her aboard with them, there was little doubt that she could, indeed, take on the role of an officer and be a real serving member of the crew.

  Alex, however, never entirely forgot that she was a first-contact visitor from the Veiled World, because he wasn’t allowed to forget. He was responsible both in care and provision for her and in furthering that diplomatic relationship. The fact that she did not intend to go home was a bit of a stumbler, diplomatically – clearly, developing diplomatic relationships between worlds did entail the first contact ambassador going home and passing on what they had learned about you, so that the relationship might then move forward into second-phase contact.

  Alex had discovered, however, that Shion could still communicate with her homeworld if she wanted to. It would be a convoluted kind of contact. Solarans, as she’d explained, were never allowed to come to Pirrell if they had been to the League first, since that would obviously breach their quarantine. Come to that, she’d said, they never went back to Solarus Perth, either, or at least, not back to their home planet. Solarus Perth had a second world within their system which was effectively a quarantine zone, and all those who went out on exodiplomacy missions through the Firewall did so in the knowledge that they would live on the second world when they returned, with no transit permitted between them. This was not considered to be any hardship, no difference living in one place or the other, but it did mean that Solarans tended to make a circular trip of it, visiting Pirrell first to see their gardens and artwork and pay their respects to the karlane, then going on into the League to enjoy their visits there before heading home. Any of the ambassadors visiting the League would, Shion said, take a message for her, handing that on to others who were going to Pirrell, and might carry messages from her family, too. It wasn’t something they would do casually, but she said she’d told them she’d write in a year or two and let them know how she was getting on, so the potential for developing some furtherance of relationship was there, however tentatively. Alex had always to be mindful of his responsibility here in representing the League.

  He had to say no, he knew that, there was just no way he could allow her to risk herself in combat, the diplomats would have a fit. Looking at her right then, though, he also knew that to deny her the chance to fly because of her diplomatic status would really upset her, and that wouldn’t be right, either.

  ‘Not for combat,’ he said, making his decision, and smiling, then, as he knew that it was the best he could do, a compromise that would need some rule-bending, but a truly diplomatic solution. ‘I’ll authorise you piloting for non-combat ops, okay, and you can be on the rota for that. But if there’s any chance of gunfire, an alternate pilot will step in. Fair enough?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ she agreed, with a look of relief and delight, ‘Thank you, skipper!’

  ‘My pleasure,’ Alex replied, and nodded a friendly dismissal, ‘You’d better go and eat,’ he pointed out, ‘before Rangi comes after you.’

  She gave a gurgle of mirth, at that. Unlike Davie North, she did not need to eat phenomenal amounts of food for her superhuman metabolism. In fact, since her metabolism was significantly slower than human, she had to eat considerably less. Rangi, however, was meticulous in monitoring her diet. People missing meals and fuelling on snacks was a particular bugbear of his anyway. He was quite often on Alex’s case for that, apparently of the view that without someone keeping an eye on him the skipper would live on hot beef rolls and coffee. Rangi had groaned with dismay when he’d seen Shion being introduced to the traditional late-night watchkeeping fare of hot roll and soup, known to the Fleet as soppo and a dog, and had rationed her to two cookies a day, too, finding that she really would skip meals and eat cookies instead.

  ‘Cookie time!’ she said, gleefully, and went off to have her treat and find someone else to tell about Firefly.

  She’d evidently inspired Kate Naos, anyway. The two of them had become friends, their mutual passion for all things engineering overcoming all other differences between them. Alex had seen them, once, sitting at a mess deck table, having a conversation that would only have been comprehensible to a handful of the most brilliant astrophysicists in the League. Kate Naos had lost all her awkwardness, alight with enthusiasm, gesticulating rapidly, she and Shion both talking, though it was more math than language. At one point they’d said, ‘D9!’ in unison and slapped hands triumphantly.

  It was one of the weird phenomena of twenty four dimensional space that all the dimensions were said to loop through the ninth. Wave space physicists found this endlessly fascinating and figuring out the D9 Loop was the biggest question in theoretical physics.

  Alex had pondered and chatted about it himself – spacers did, it was part of their world, like talking about the weather, groundside – but he knew he would never understand it in the way Kate Naos did. And she was all about the physics, was Kate – so totally focussed on it, indeed, that she seemed to have very little room in her head for anything else. So when she came onto the command deck and asked if she might take the helm through Kennerman’s Ridge, Alex knew that that was no casual enquiry.

  They were going to be passing through the Ridge twice, in fact, at different points. They’d be heading through it later in the evening and would clear it in the early hours of the morning, continuing then till they joined the shipping lane the following day. At that point they would swing around, making much slower progress on patrol and passing through the Ridge again on their way to Karadon.

  Alex smiled. Kate had come a long way from the awkward kid who’d scuttled past him and hidden behind her liaison officer, that day in engineering. She’d come out of her shell as she’d got to know people, and had even managed to exchange some small talk with the skipper. She was still excruciatingly shy in formal situations like a wardroom dinner, but it was a mark of how far she had come that she was there on the command deck making that request herself, not feeling the need to have her minder with her.

  ‘By all means,’ he said. Nearly all passengers wanted to have a go at steering the ship and there was a well-established protocol for that even on Fleet ships. It involved a very much simplified flight screen running tandem to the real helm and an officer or petty officer standing right behind the passenger’s chair, guiding them in poking at buttons that made the ship turn slowly left or right.

  That, Alex understood, was not what Kate meant, at all.

  ‘Contour surfing?’ he queried, and she nodded, with the look of quick gratitude she tended to give people when they understood things without her needing to explain. ‘No problem,
’ Alex said, ‘What do you need?’

  A headset linked to engineering, as it turned out, and full control of the ship. Alex didn’t even blink at that. He held the conn himself, purely as a matter of good practice when doing anything unusual, but it was clear that he had no concerns about allowing the civilian to take the helm.

  Nor did he. For one thing, he knew that Kate Naos could pilot the ship because her research was all about using the telemetry between the engines and the helm to map the space they were travelling through. She’d had intensive discussions with their telemetry officer, who’d commented that she knew more about the ship’s systems than he did himself. Contour surfing wasn’t the slightest bit dangerous, either, rated an ordinary manoeuvre for any ship.

  So Kate took the helm, Alex releasing flight authority to her so that she could pilot the ship manually. She looked perfectly at home there. The Fourth always provided their passengers with shipboard rig. Kate had taken to wearing it, and but for the absence of insignia might have been a member of the crew.