The only notable ‘penguin incident’ for them, and that minor, was early on in their shoreleave, as they left the cafe where they’d had breakfast. A bunch of around ten people was heading towards them with obviously aggressive intent. These were instantly recognisable as members of the Global Welfare Party. Despite the liberal sounding name, they were actually extremist right wing. They campaigned against uncontrolled space travel, inter-world immigration and even tourism. Their primary concern, or at least the one they made the most public noise about, was the risk of diseases being spread world to world. They also had rather darker opinions, though, about the importance of preserving the ‘purity’ of homeworld genomes by not allowing dirty filthy disgusting foreigners onto their world.
It had caused Shion some embarrassment when she realised that the Diplomatic Corps believed her world to share such views, given their isolationism and reverence for the purity of the ancient bloodlines. Isolationism, yes, she’d clarified, and reverence for an ancient genome, yes, but hatred and contempt for other peoples of any kind, no. Her people were entirely non-violent, too, unlike the GWP which tended to attract thugs looking for an excuse to beat someone up.
The GWP, instantly recognisable because they always wore bio-hazard paper suits and masks whenever they came to Penrys or demonstrated at spaceports, did not get anywhere near the Fourth’s party, though. As they were seen approaching, teams of Penrys security materialised as if from nowhere, blocking their path. They were put under arrest, too, and deported forthwith, since Penrys had long since banned the GWP from demonstrating aboard the station.
For the Fourth’s party, though, that was no more than a fuss going on a couple of hundred metres away, and they took no notice of it even at the time. It was forgotten entirely by the time they came back aboard ship. They were still chatting and laughing, greeting Buzz and Rangi who were there to see them back aboard. Rangi was supervising the entirely routine breath-check that was carried out automatically by the airlock on anyone boarding the ship. The system was able to identify pathogens or intoxicants in the breath of people coming through the airlock screens. If that happened it would trigger either biohazard or safety response, with Rangi carrying out more detailed tests.
When the airlock panels flashed red, announcing that one or more of the party had alcohol on their breath, everyone was shocked.
‘No way!’ said Jace.
‘I expect it’s a mis-trigger,’ Rangi said, seeing the levels of alcohol being picked up by the airlock systems. At that level either they’d all had a stiff double or one of them should be falling down drunk. It was possible for the airlock systems to be confused by such things as alcohol-based aftershave or other products, though. ‘Just,’ he gave them an apologetic smile as he got a testing kit out of his bag, ‘do the huff.’
Very Vergan went first, breathing onto the sensor. He was looking troubled as he did so, but only because he was wondering whether one or more of the party had snared a drink without him noticing. When the sensor went red and bleeped at him, he just didn’t believe it.
‘Sir, honestly, no!’ he told Buzz, turning flame red with distress. It would be bad for any member of the crew to be on a charge of coming aboard a superlight ship intoxicated. For an officer, such an incident could end a career. ‘I didn’t, we didn’t, we’ve been together the whole time, and I just wouldn’t, ever!’
Buzz calmed this incoherent appeal, and soothed the rest of them, too, when it was found, to their horror, that five of the six of them had positive readings, all at levels indicating that they’d had at least a couple of drinks.
‘I know you better than that,’ he assured them, as Ali, for one, was near to tears, though his was the only reading that came back clear. ‘Just stop for a moment, calm down, breathe, think. You’ve been together all morning, eating and drinking the same things. So what did the five of you have,’ he looked around at them, ‘that Ali didn’t?’
‘The readings indicate that you ingested the intoxicants around three to four hours ago,’ Rangi added, helpfully.
It didn’t take long for them to narrow that down to breakfast, and to identify the only thing, in that, that the other five had had and Ali Jezno had not. They’d had a jug of fruit juice, made with fresh organic fruit from Canelon, which Ali had declined. He’d gone along with the rest of them wanting to have a meal at Nature’s Garden, a restaurant specialising in organic food from Canelon, but he’d stuck to items with a discreet v on the menu, indicating that they were vat produced. Ali was not someone who liked the idea of eating food that had been grown in actual dirt, which insects might even have walked on. The fruit juice had been brought in a jug, which the rest of them had shared.
‘Someone spiked our juice?’ Very was still struggling to come to terms with the fact that they did actually have alcohol in their systems. ‘We’re drunk?’
‘Mildly intoxicated,’ Rangi amended. ‘Luckily, you drank it with a heavy meal. I’ll give you some sober-up and you’ll be fine in half an hour.’
Very, however, was looking at Buzz, his expression both mortified and deeply concerned.
‘Don’t worry,’ Buzz told him and the others. ‘Leave it with me. I’ll get to the bottom of it.’
In fact, it was the LIA who investigated it for them, as Alex felt that they were in the best position to do so, discreetly. He was right about that, too, as the LIA reported back within an hour. It was, they had discovered, a member of staff at the Nature’s Garden restaurant who’d spiked their juice. He was a moody and not very intelligent youth, already disgruntled over some issue of working conditions. He’d been approached that morning by ‘a bloke’ who’d offered him a hundred dollars to slip the Fourth’s party a micky, providing a bottle of Crystal Storm for him to do it with.
Crystal Storm was infamous for that – powerful and yet tasteless, it was the hooch of choice for slipping into high school dance punch bowls and the like. He was supposed, the waiter had admitted, to use the whole bottle, spiking all their drinks and coffees, but in the event he’d only put some into the juice. This was more about a fear of getting caught if they were obviously rolling drunk by the time they got up from the table than about any sense of responsibility, but it had, at least, meant that they got only got a tolerable amount. The LIA had also identified ‘the bloke’, from the waiter’s description, as a known member of the GWP.
‘If you need the dots joining up,’ said the written report, with typical LIA attitude, ‘what this means is that the GWP thugs here to make trouble bribed this bozo to slip your guys a micky, hoping that this would, in their vernacular, ‘get them up for it’ or in other words, increase the likelihood of them engaging in an alcohol-fuelled fight. The combination of said bozo’s light hand with the hooch and the prompt intervention of station security meant this plan came to nothing.
‘We strongly recommend that you take no further action in this matter. Doing so would have to involve ISiS Corps and Canelonian authorities in lengthy process to which the outcome, at best, would be trivial sentences for the bozo and the thug who paid him, at the cost of considerable nuisance and embarrassment to yourselves and particularly to the personnel involved, not to mention the ‘Fourth’s party in drunken rampage at Penrys’ reportage. The GWP would certainly welcome the opportunity to work that publicity every way they could. Their thugs are already being deported and the bozo can be quietly terminated. For clarity, just in case you people have been watching too many movies, this does not mean blowing the sucker away, but having him fired from his job on grounds that do not expose what he did, and sent back to Canelon. If this is acceptable to you, please confirm.’
Alex, after a brief discussion with the people involved, sent that confirmation, with thanks to the LIA for their investigation and assistance. He asked merely that it might be noted that ‘bozo’s light hand with the hooch and the prompt intervention of station security’ were not the only factors in the plan coming to nothing, as even given intoxicants, the Fourth’s pa
rty had continued to conduct themselves with the discipline expected of Fleet personnel.
For response, the LIA sent him a ten second clip of surveillance footage. It was of Very and the others fooling around, cheerleading Ali at the archery sideshow. They were jumping up and down with the kids, whooping and making lasso movements with their hands in the air, shouting ‘Go Al-i! Go Al-i!’
Alex considered this, and decided against arguing that this hardly constituted any kind of ‘drunken rampage’. The LIA agents knew that as well as he did, after all, and were just teasing, pulling their legs. So he sent back a good humoured acknowledgement. That was not quite the end of the matter, though. Later that day they had another LIA report, this one informing them succinctly ‘Bozo has been terminated’, though a PS added that the LIA had ensured that he fully understood the seriousness of the offence he had committed, potentially endangering a warship by intoxicating officers and crew, and regardless of that, committing criminal assault. ‘And be assured,’ the note concluded, ‘that I personally saw to it that he needed to go change his underwear.’
Alex put that on the notice board, knowing how much the crew would appreciate it. There’d been huge indignation over what had been done to Very and the others, with career-damaging consequences if they were even suspected of having knowingly drunk alcohol on a dry-leave pass. Unless it was proved that someone had given it to them without their knowledge, that suspicion would always hang over them. That would not be a problem here, with neither the skipper or exec the type to have a down on a man without solid proof, but it would certainly be an issue for them if they transferred back into the regular Fleet. Now, at least, the matter could be closed with no adverse entry in their records.
That was, though, a relatively minor matter in the scheme of things. It did not stop the following shoreleave parties from having a good time, though they all avoided going to Nature’s Garden and were careful about what they ordered to drink. And for the crew who stayed aboard ship there was plenty of work to keep them busy. Not the least of that was the need to keep the ship fully sparkled at all times, since the president’s ship might turn up at any time and they did not want to be caught out again as they’d been at Karadon.
In the event, Fleet Alpha didn’t arrive at the station till the afternoon of their sixth day at Penrys, swinging into orbit with the Eagle and patrol ship escort. And this time, after all their hard work, the president did not come aboard the Heron at all. Instead, Alex and Shion were invited to an informal meeting over tea in the presidential quarters.
It was, to Alex’s relief, far more successful than previous encounters. The very nature of the setting showed that the president had obviously been taking advice from his staff, significantly from Bull Stuart. There was no crass attempt at reproducing Pirrellothian culture, today, and no patronising, manipulative agenda. Instead there was tea, with little cakes and fancies, served in the president’s private lounge with friendly, cheerful conversation. Shion reduced the president to honest guffaws of laughter, too, as she told him about the Ignite missile test.
‘I just love the totally bonkers illogic,’ she told him, frankly. ‘It’s okay to blow a planet up on purpose, but not okay if another one gets damaged by mistake. Where’s the sense in that? Humans are mad. But very, very sweet.’
Marc Tyborne, in return, made her laugh with an account of his visit to Canelon.
‘It really is an astonishingly beautiful world,’ he told her. ‘Everywhere you look is like a scene from a tourist brochure; PPP, as they say there, meaning ‘Picture-Postcard Perfect’. It is an example to us all, I’m sure, in environmental management – all polluting industries are sited offworld at lunar bases, and anything the least bit unsightly is either underground or concealed behind decorative walls and trees. They use an underground transit system, too, minimising air traffic, and they have the tightest noise pollution controls of any world in the League. By law, on Canelon, ambient outdoor noise has to be kept so low that you can hear birdsong. It is all, undeniably, marvellous. And I’m sure it’s quite reprehensible of me to feel, after a week of it, that I’m smothering in the cuteness of it all. I’m really looking forward to getting back to the noise and smells and gridlocked skies of Chartsey.’
Nothing was said at all about Gide, right up to the point at which they were taking their leave, at which point the president, shaking hands with Shion and then with Alex, wished them the best of luck with their mission. There was no more to be said than that, after all, and no more than any advisor would want the president to say than that, given that the whole point of assigning the Fourth to this was to preserve diplomatic relationship-rescue and political deniability.
Dix Harangay was keeping his distance, too. Alex had a private meeting with the First Lord after tea with the president, but nothing new was discussed in that. Dix just wanted to hear from Alex himself how the Ignite test had gone and to gauge how confident he was feeling about the XD-317 mission. He didn’t ask Alex about his plans in any detail, beyond asking whether the historian the Diplomats had sent had been of any use. When Alex said yes, he was excellent, Dix left it at that.
Alex accepted that without resentment. This was, after all, in the nature of a pawn sacrifice manoeuvre, for those in high authority to be able to say, hand on heart, that they had not known what the middle-ranking authority was doing, or at least not in any detail. Accepting full responsibility for the decisions that he made meant exactly that, too. Dix would have been there for him if Alex had needed help or support, Alex knew that. But seeing that he had a plan and was confident about it, Dix would not become involved.
The Fleet Alpha did not remain at the station for more than a couple of hours, anyway. It was announced that they had only called in at the station to rendezvous with the Fourth’s ship in order to pick up Senator Terese Machet. The media had of course noticed her absence from the presidential party by the time they’d reached Canelon, and it had already been officially confirmed that the Senator was travelling with the Fourth on a fact-finding visit.
That put the focus of the media, and of the activists who were never very far behind the cameras, firmly on Terese. She gave a press conference aboard the Fleet Alpha, too, to the press-pack that accompanied the president everywhere.
‘I am in very good health, thank you,’ she said, in response to the first question about how she’d survived her stay with the Fourth. ‘Skipper von Strada, his officers and crew were most hospitable, I was well accommodated and they could not have done more to make me comfortable.’ Further questions elicited answers confirming that she could not say exactly where the Heron had been, nor could she disclose what systems they had been testing. Nor would she go into detail about what facts her fact-finding had discovered.
‘Warship operations, of any kind, are not subject to public discussion,’ she pointed out. ‘I will report back, properly, to the Senate’s Fourth Fleet Irregulars Sub-Committee, and it will be for them to determine what aspects of that report are appropriate for public release. I can, however, tell you that I saw nothing on my visit to give me any cause for concern, but on the contrary, the very highest levels of professionalism and public service.’
The journalists were disappointed, having hoped for rather more newsworthy stuff than that. They kept filming, though, because they knew there’d be some market for the inevitable backlash of activist and political groups reacting to that statement, either accusing Terese of being an apologist for the Fourth or calling her an idiot for being so easily fooled by them. That might be minority-interest reportage on many worlds, particularly worlds where a political scandal would only get truly global viewage if it involved a sex scandal too. Even minority viewage on a low-interest world like Canelon, though, would amount to tens of millions of viewers, and on Chartsey, that would be billions.
The Fleet Alpha was sent off, again in some style, with a display by the Heron’s fighters. That was at the request, unofficially, of the president himself, who asked Shion
with a hopeful note whether she intended doing that for them again. So, they obliged – a new routine this time, one of many that Shion had been developing during training flights over the last couple of months. It still came within Alex’s restriction of not performing any manoeuvres in public view that would betray her superhuman abilities, but it was spectacularly good. The Fleet Alpha went off in a blaze of salutes and flashing lights, anyway, and as the fighters returned to their docking bays, things settled down again. Only, about half an hour later, they had an unscheduled delivery.
That caused some problems. Security was so tight that even the most casual purchase of personal goods to be sent aboard the station needed logged documentation aboard ship and close liaison between the ship and station. No goods were just sent aboard. The station assembled any supplies for the Heron in a secure zone, thoroughly checked by their own security people and certified as such. Then a Fourth’s shuttle went over, with a team who’d do their own security scans before loading the crates and boxes onto the cargo shuttle themselves. Being told that they had crates there which were not on the Heron’s schedule, therefore, did trigger a security alert at the station’s side, till it had been confirmed that the documents and security clearance accompanying the crates were, indeed, genuine.
Alex, having checked the documents, accepted delivery, and smiled as he put the delivery note onto the notice board. It was for two full crates of cookies, and not rehydrate cookies, either, but the real thing, a personal gift from Senator Machet. The thank-you card that came with them was signed merely ‘T’.
XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) Page 51