XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  So that, they had decided, was that. Mako had accepted the offer to become the LPA’s full time liaison with the Fourth, and he and his family were already on their way to Therik. If the Heron had stayed at Karadon for another couple of weeks, indeed, they would have met them there, as they’d be spending a few days on the station in transit.

  Alex grinned a little to himself as he read between the lines of Mako explaining that the Fleet had offered them the courtesy of transport aboard one of their own ships, one going directly between Chartsey and Therik, but that ‘the ladies’ had felt that it would be more fun to travel on a liner and enjoy the duty-free shopping at Karadon. As he was reading, someone put a mug down on the grav-safe ring beside him. Mid-watch refreshments – in his case, a mug of dark, slightly spiced coffee, just the way he liked it.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said absently, and carried on reading for several seconds before it dawned on him that there was a certain amusement on the command deck, poorly suppressed glee that he sensed had something to do with him.

  He looked up, and saw why. The woman wearing shipboard rig and carrying a tray of refreshments around was their VIP passenger, Senator Machet.

  Alex’s jaw dropped slightly and the crew burst out laughing, Terese Machet giving him a friendly grin, too.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ she said, and as he continued to stare at her in disbelief, ‘I am qualified – stage three rigger’s certs, acquired on the Buzzard.’ Her smile became one of satisfaction. ‘You know, it is really impressive how quiet they’ve kept about that – I did ask, and do ask, that my time aboard Fleet ships be kept entirely confidential, but some degree of inter-ship gossip would have been understandable, really. But, no, they’ve never breathed a word, clearly, or you would not be so astounded.’ She grinned at him again. ‘I like to work passage,’ she told him, quite kindly. ‘And to set aside all formalities, too – you’ve no idea how wonderful it is to spend even a few weeks with people treating you like a normal human being and not being bashed with ‘Madam Senator’ a thousand times a day. So please, call me Terese.’

  She held out her hand to him and he shook it, not quite yet able to grin back, since he didn’t know her well enough for that, but with a smile in his eyes, at least.

  ‘Alex,’ he reciprocated, as courtesy required.

  ‘Alex,’ she confirmed, and gave him a hopeful look. ‘So, do I have to stay in that horrible VIP suite, or is there a bunk on a mess deck I can have? And no, please, don’t offer me a cabin in the wardroom. I know the officers would make me very welcome but I prefer to be with the crew.’

  ‘As you wish, of course,’ he said. ‘Hali Burdon will organise a bunk for you, no problem. But ... can I ask what’s horrible about the VIP suite?’

  She gave him a look. ‘Alex,’ she said, ‘it might as well be on a liner.’

  It was apparent from that that she really was a spacer, and Alex did break into a fleeting little grin, fully appreciative of how any spacer would feel about that. Such a suite might well be far more spacious and luxuriously appointed than even a captain’s quarters in the Fleet, but to occupy such accommodation was to be reduced to the status of human cargo.

  ‘Fair point,’ Alex conceded, and gestured hospitably, indicating the ship, ‘Well, make yourself at home.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, and went on her way happily, distributing drinks. Alex exchanged grins with Very Vergan, who was holding the watch, then went back to reading his letter. Mako’s son was staying on Chartsey – he had another year of university and was already living in student halls, there. He would be coming over to Therik after graduation, though, for a visit and to check out job opportunities there. Alex could read the anxiety between Mako’s words, the concern for his son’s welfare without his parents around, and the unspoken fear, too, that he would not come to Therik after all, or not stay there, and they might not see him again for years.

  Mako finished on an optimistic note, though. They’d just received details of the accommodation being provided for them at the base, at the time he was writing, and his wife and daughter were ecstatic. They could hardly believe that they were going to have a house, a real house, with a garden of their own. Alex understood that. The teeming population of Chartsey meant that someone on Mako’s salary couldn’t afford more than a modest apartment in an above-ground high rise, and at that was far better off than the millions forced to live in tiny underground sub-levels. An actual house, even a tiny suburban-style dwelling with a car pad and scrap of garden, would only be within the reach of millionaires. They couldn’t believe how clean and beautiful Therik was, either, Mako wrote – clean air and open skies, with cities that had parks in them. It was, he said, going to be a whole new life.

  Alex wrote a long answer, expressing sympathy, reassurance and encouragement, then went on to read, and answer, other mail from friends far and wide, most of them in the Fleet, many of them making him grin. One of those was from Quill, informing him that Harry Alington appeared to be acquiring some stones. He had taken one of the ‘garbage pile’ starseekers Quill was offering, piloted it a safe distance from the station and used it for live target practice.

  Alex had advised him to do that. It would, as he’d pointed out, amuse the spacers and warm them to him, whilst at the same time making the point that he had teeth, should he need to use them. It would also put him into the highly controversial zone of the media believing that he, like Alex, ‘blew up starseekers for fun’. As Alex had observed, though, and the First Lord had told him far more bluntly, Harry could not both get positive publicity for himself and succeed in the job that he was here to do. He had to make a choice.

  The blowing up of that starseeker, filmed by the media ships which had of course followed the Minnow, made it clear that he had made that choice.

  ‘Well done, Mr Barlow,’ Alex commented, knowing very well what was behind this sudden stiffening of resolve in the corvette skipper. Then he picked up his pen to write back, a gleam of amusement in his eyes.

  Those letters, together with a final burst of official mail, were transmitted to the courier that passed them four days later. In return, they got one last burst of mail brought from Karadon. Amongst that was a memo from Dix Harangay, replying to Alex’s request for resources to be provided at Novamas. He had scrawled a question mark next to the item A cooperative historian and had then added the datacode that signified laughter. He had also, though, written ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  Alex waited to brief his crew about XD-317 until they had turned off the shipping lane and were heading out off-route. This was not because he had any concern about any member of the crew saying anything to any ship they might encounter, but simply because he knew it was going to take several hours to explain and discuss in detail, and he didn’t want that being interrupted by the need to deal with routine encounters and courtesy visits.

  So, once they were established on their course to Ignition One, he called the officers to the command deck for an open briefing, and told them about their orders.

  That caused, as expected, huge excitement, and as much amongst the officers as the crew and passengers. Buzz just couldn’t stop laughing, crew kept punching each other’s shoulders in their exuberance and Tass Curlow was actually in tears.

  This was, firstly, because Alex played the recording of the meeting with the Solaran ambassadors on the command deck, so everyone could see it.

  ‘They’re real. They’re real,’ Tass wept, and touched the screen as if trying to reach out through it to the alien ambassadors. Then, a bit later, when she realised that she would have left the ship before it got to Novamas, she cried again, this time with disappointment.

  ‘Please can I come too?’ she begged, during a break Alex had called for everyone to calm down a bit. ‘I’ll do anything! Scrub decks! Wash dishes! Anything. Just please let me come!’

  Alex had to say no. All the Seconds’ teams were scheduled to leave the ship at ISiS Penrys, and it was now apparent why. The original inten
tion, clearly, had been to brief them on the Gide operation when they met up with the presidential party there, with the Second’s teams removed so that the Heron could focus entirely on the task ahead of them.

  ‘I’m only bringing you in on knowing about the Gide operation,’ Alex explained, ‘because it would be a nightmare trying to keep that from you, nobody able to discuss it at any time when you, any member of the Second, is out of the lab. So you’re being brought in on the briefing but no, I’m sorry, there is no possibility of you coming on the mission with us.’

  Tass looked at him with tear-drenched eyes.

  ‘Can I join?’ she begged. ‘Please, can I join as a member of the crew?’

  Alex didn’t smile. ‘We don’t take recruits directly,’ he pointed out. ‘Only transfers from within the Fleet.’

  ‘But you’ve got those people joining you at Therik,’ Tass argued. ‘And they’re coming from prison, so why can’t you let me join, too?’

  ‘Those people joining us at Therik are doing so as part of a scheme set up by the Senate,’ Alex told her. ‘I have no say in that, at all, myself. But they’re not, in fact, ‘joining the Fourth’, as such. Even though we’re on irregular terms of service, we are still part of the Fleet, very much still part of the Fleet, and all our recruits will be full serving members of the Fleet, too. We’re providing exactly the same basic training as any other Fleet base does, their qualifications will be regular Fleet ones, and they will, after their first year of service with us, be entitled to transfer to any other regular Fleet ship or groundside service.’

  Tass did not want to hear that. She was a student and an activist and the concept of just accepting the decision of authority was not in her mindset. In the end, Chantal Jeol had to come to the command deck and tell her to stop arguing with the skipper.

  ‘There is no way he could let you join, even if he wanted to,’ she told Tass. ‘And anyway, what happened to all the ‘brutal oppression’ stuff? Why would you even want to be a member of the crew on a ship where the officers bully and tyrannise subordinates?’

  Tass gave her one of her finest withering looks. Truth to tell, her certainty that the crew was being brutally oppressed by the officers had already started to wobble during their stay at Karadon. Liberty League, however, firmly believed that even the Fourth was not stupid enough to commit abuses while the ship was in port, so the real brutality would start once they were out of the public eye.

  That belief had melted away under real experience. In reality, as Tass had discovered, things were very much more relaxed aboard the ship when they were out of the public eye. Officers had time to chat, and time to spend with the crew, too, picking up on all the activities they’d had to set aside while the ship was in port.

  There had been several revelatory moments in that, for Tass. One of the most significant had been when it finally sank in on her that officers holding training sessions outside normal duty hours were not doing so in order to oppress the crew, but were giving up their own time, at the request of those crew, to provide additional training opportunities. Training, indeed, was very obviously the prime focus of the crew while the ship was on a run, making the most of every chance they had to work towards qualifications and promotions.

  Another moment of revelation had come when Tass had seen one of their Subs sitting at a study-table on mess deck four, along with a leading star rating. They were working on a course, holding a seminar to go over a written assignment. It was only after she’d been eavesdropping for some time that Tass had realised, to her astonishment, that the Sub was the student in that and the leading star rating was acting as his tutor.

  That would not, to be fair, be something she would see on any other Fleet ship, as the crew had explained to her. Alex’s policies were considered radical even by other progressive skippers, and the idea of having an officer being tutored by a member of the crew would cause sharp intakes of breath on many ships. Not on the Heron, though, where it was recognised that L/S Jok Dorlan had extraordinary computer skills. Anyone wanting to learn the highly complex skills of by-lining and cascade programming could do no better than ask for Jok as their tutor.

  These, and many other experiences, had changed Tass’s view. She had also, after a great deal of hilarious dashing around the ship in attempts to catch them out, accepted that the open comms monitors were for real, and actually were showing what was going on around the ship.

  Faced with this challenge from Chantal, however, Tass certainly wasn’t going to admit that she’d been wrong.

  ‘You don’t understand anything,’ she told the professor, which made Chantal grin.

  ‘Of course not,’ she agreed, equably. ‘Nobody over forty understands anything at all, obviously. But come along, please, Tass - these people have important things to discuss.’

  Tass went off with her, though still attempting to make her case, as if convincing the professor would achieve anything at all. And Alex, grinning a little, called his officers back to go over his plan with them and get their first reactions.

  They were with him right up to the point at which it came to deploying the cooperative historian. There was so much blank bewilderment at that that Alex couldn’t help but grin.

  ‘I want to go public with the discovery that Novamas was once the home of the Alari,’ he pointed out. ‘We can’t, obviously, announce that we were told that by someone from Pirrell, so we have to produce some kind of credible academic source. The Diplomatic Corps has, in similar circumstances in the past, arranged for the discovery of suitably informative artefacts by historians prepared to cooperate with them. Obviously the historian themselves will advise us on the best way to proceed, in that, but I thought perhaps some kind of stone tablet or piece of pottery with sufficient information on it to justify publication of an article announcing the discovery of ancient Alar.’

  ‘A fake artefact?’ Buzz queried. ‘Won’t that be rather difficult if other academics want to examine it?’

  ‘I believe there are ways and means around that,’ Alex said. ‘And yes, I know, there are obviously ethical issues in forging historical artefacts, but I see that as a small deception in the greater cause of publishing an important truth. And it will, of course, be fully disclosed on as a forged artefact at whatever point the files are declassified. If anyone has issues with that or any alternative means you can think of to get that information out there, credibly, please do feel free to say so either now or at any time during the planning phases.’

  Nobody objected, and they moved on to consider other aspects of the plan. The only question that was raised, other than to clarify a point, was from Martine.

  ‘It looks like you’re intending to go ahead with the Tolmer’s Drift plans, even if – touch wood – the exodiplomacy solution comes off, sir.’

  ‘Yes – I consider that important, anyway, even in the best case scenario where we are able to make first contact and either establish that our shipping isn’t causing a nuisance or negotiate some reset of their security systems. Even with that settled, we would still have the very long standing problem of shipping going to Tolmer’s Drift instead of Novamas. And that is a serious problem, too, not just in loss of revenue for Novamas but in limiting trade, holding back their economy and their development, keeping them isolated from the rest of the League. If we can resolve that by persuading spacers that it’s okay to go there, that’s a win in itself. I do also feel that we need to get to the bottom of this piracy business.’

  He grinned at their immediate reaction. ‘Yes, I know, exasperating, that we, the Fleet, have been telling them for centuries that they do not have a piracy problem there, but the Novamasian authorities remain absolutely adamant that they have. So it seems to me, in the interests of completing even our cover mission as fully as possible, that we should see if there is anything that we can do to address that. I do also feel that the fate of the Tangleweb merits as thorough an investigation as we can manage. Obviously, with all this going on it’s going to get ve
ry hectic, particularly at Novamas, so we will need to assign responsibilities.’

  He spent some time telling each of the senior officers what responsibilities he wanted them to undertake, with no surprises there till he came to the investigation of the disappearance of the eight ships they’d been specifically asked to find out about.

  These, to their delight, he gave to the junior officers. Subs never got to head up their own mission tasks, normally.

  ‘I want the fullest, most detailed reports you can compile about each disappearance,’ he said. ‘And I don’t just mean rehashing the official enquiry mixed up with spacer goss. I want you to find out everything you can, treat every case as separate and compile evidence from as many sources as you can. For one thing, we do need a real and very meaty set of reports to maintain the cover that this is in fact our primary mission.

  ‘Even more importantly, though, the families of the people on those ships deserve proper answers, which they haven’t had because the Novamasian Senate refuses to accept Fleet findings on the causes of those disappearances. If at any time the research and investigation you are doing seems like pointless labour because we all know perfectly well what actually happened to seven of the eight, put yourself into the position of a family member, being told by the Fleet that your brother, sister, wife, husband or child has died in an accident or vanished in the course of insurance fraud, but seeing on the news that the Novamasian government has said it was an act of piracy the Fleet has failed to investigate. These people need full, clear information, clear and definite answers as to what happened to their loved ones, yes?’

  The Subs nodded soberly and gave a ragged chorus of ‘yes sir’.