His Majesty's Starship

by Ben Jeapes

  *

  With thrusters nudging gently into space and Adrian Nichol at the helm, Ark Royal docked for the first time at its home port of UK-1.

  “Repair teams requesting permission to come on board, sir,” Hannah said.

  “Granted.” Gilmore was hit by a sudden flash of very vivid déjà vu and it took him a moment to place it. Yes: the last time he had docked at UK-1 it had been when he brought Australasia home, fresh from its encounter with a scuttler and a nuclear explosion. Then, too, UK-1’s first act had been to send shoreside specialists on board to check the ship out. This time, though, they were needed.

  The Rusties maintained that because UK-1 was not one of the delegation ships, neither it nor any of its personnel should have contact with the ground until the Convocation was over. The Convocation rules were that the delegates should make their decisions in isolation from their own governments. However, they had granted Ark Royal permission to dock for repairs: Prince James was not on board and the ship’s need was obvious.

  “See to their needs, Number One,” Gilmore said. “You know where I’ll be.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Hannah said. She managed to suppress the look of sympathy that Gilmore guessed was struggling to get out.

  *

  “We were just passing,” said King Richard once formal greetings were over, as though he hadn’t just unexpectedly bridged a gap of a thousand lightyears. “We thought we would drop in. Tea, Captain?”

  It was just the same as Gilmore’s first visit to ‘F’ wheel. He had been left in the king’s book-lined study; the king appeared and took him to the v-room where they could sit in the middle of the cut-away simulation of UK-1. The sheer familiarity of it added to Gilmore’s overall sense of disorientation. No doubt the king was aware his arrival was having this effect on everyone, human and Rustie alike: if the Rusties weren’t the only ones with step-through anymore, could anything else be taken for granted? The king was loving it.

  To add to the disorientation, here it was morning. The delegation fleet had adjusted itself to Capital time during the journey from home: UK-1 had not. To Gilmore it was just after 22:00, but when you get a personal and immediate summons from a king who is under the impression it’s 09:00, he thought, you can’t really decline because it’s inconvenient and ask if he would mind calling back later?

  “Just passing, sir?” Gilmore said with frank disbelief.

  “Well, we were testing the step-through and so we came to the only coordinates in space where we knew there would be a friendly welcome.”

  “I didn’t think the Rusties gave us the coordinates of this solar system.”

  An expansive shrug. “I’m not a navigator. Anyway, we’re here.”

  “But how did you manage it, sir?” Gilmore said.

  “By inventing step-through, of course.” The king smiled at Gilmore’s deliberate attempt not to look irritated. “Actually, Captain, we’ve been working on it for a long time.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Of course not. I didn’t want the Fleet involved. Too many people coming and going, too many loose tongues, however well intentioned. No, all the research was done under a separate company. I confined ’em to UK-1 and paid them huge great salaries to make up for it. They’ve been at it for about three years now.”

  “A mere three years?”

  “Oh, the principles have been known since the twentieth century. The trick lies in detecting a wormhole going in the right direction and then expanding it. Then the Rusties turned up and clues from them formed the missing link.”

  “But-” Gilmore said.

  “But?” the king said innocently.

  “All this has been a waste of time! You didn’t need to send Ark Royal, you could have gone on your own, you could-”

  “We could,” the king said. “I decided against it. For a start, would the seven thousand people on board want to go on the trip? That’s a lot of uprooting.”

  “You came anyway.”

  “We were just passing,” the king said again. “We’ll be on our way back home in a day or two. And if you recall, the Rustie invitation said that each nation should send a delegate. They said nothing about the whole nation sending itself. I asked our visiting Rusties tangential questions and I don’t believe they would have allowed it.”

  “You came anyway,” Gilmore said again.

  “Think of this as the icing on the cake. If our performance so far hasn’t shown the Rusties who the deserving winners are, our appearance should tip the balance.”

  “Then you’re confident of winning, sir?” Gilmore said. He wondered what the king would say when he heard of the prince’s hashed presentation. Even knowing UK-1 would be arriving shouldn’t have excused James’s complacency.

  Then, for a moment, Gilmore wondered if the UK now needed or wanted the Roving, with the rest of the galaxy at its disposal ... but of course it did. A friendly world there for the asking, with thousands of square miles of open land available, and above all the sheer thrill of possession.

  “Just say that I live in hope.” The king sat back in his chair. “Now, tell me everything. What’s been going on since you left? I gather you’ve had some trouble?”

  Gilmore gave his account of the battle as succinctly as he could, doing his best to minimise his own part.

  “You did extremely well,” the king said.

  “The crew did their bit too, sir,” Gilmore said.

  “And how many were on board with you?”

  “One, sir,” Gilmore was forced to admit.

  “So you made the decisions?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake, man!” the king snapped, suddenly angry. “Don’t be so ashamed of being a hero. And think what it means for your ship, hey? Face it, we don’t need her anymore. Whatever the outcome of the Convocation, I was going to scrap her when she got back home, but now ... well, it would be like breaking up the Victory for firewood, hey?”

  Gilmore nodded slowly. He had only seen Nelson’s venerable flagship once, secure in her bubble in Portsmouth, but still it had inspired him at the age of 10. So, the ship would be the hero, get all the adulation. He smiled. “Absolutely, sir.”

  “That’s better.” They chatted some more, all quite informal; the king asking about the Rusties, about the Roving, about the mission. “You’ve got a son,” the king said suddenly. “Father to father, how has James done?”

  Gilmore felt the king was big enough to take it. “I’ve had to question his conduct on a number of occasions, sir,” he said. He started at the beginning, careful not to let this turn into a protracted whinge. From right back at the start of the mission, when James had suddenly appeared on the flight deck prior to boosting, through the affair with Plantagenet, right up to James’s speech at the Convocation. The king only nodded at that.

  And it was only then that Gilmore remembered he was meant to be angry with the king, too. He had got so used to lumping all the ills of the world on James’s shoulders, he had forgotten that the king shared at least some of the blame for at least one thing.

  “This will be in my formal report to the Admiralty, sir,” he said. “I bitterly resent the duplicitous tactics used to equip Ark Royal with torpedoes, without my knowing.”

  The king smiled and nodded again. “I know you do. I knew you would. The problem was, I had to have you, and you would have refused to captain an armed ship. Correct?”

  “You know it is, sir.”

  “Then I had no choice. I do apologise, Captain, I apologise a thousand times, but I needed you.”

  “There are other captains,” Gilmore said.

  “Yes, but you were so clearly the man for the job. No, that’s not flattery. I don’t flatter, I don’t butter up and I don’t care whose feathers I ruffle. That’s the fun of being king, you see. You were the man for the job and I would have had no other.”

  Gilmore almost said “But-” and let loose a string of reasons as to why he would not have a
greed, but then, he thought, why bother? He would only be repeating himself and his point had been made.

  The king seemed to read his mind. “Besides, you didn’t need to use them, did you?” he said. “But I had to cover all contingencies.” He shook his head with a fond smile that was almost bashful. “By George, I wish I could have seen it, though. Would you ... would you mind if I had a look round her? I’ve only ever looked at the plans – I’ve never actually seen the ship.”

  “By all means.” Gilmore was delighted the king felt he had to ask permission, contrasting it with a mental image of the future King James (he shuddered at the thought) just turning up, banging on the airlock and demanding to be given a tour. “Any time, sir, just let us know when.”

  The king beamed like a small child. “That’s splendid. Thank you very much.” He took a final swig of tea, stood up and held out his hand. “I’m glad we could have this chat, Captain. One of my AIs will be in touch to discuss a time. Now, do excuse me, but I have other things to be getting on with and I know the Admiralty is just dying to hear your report.”

  *

  He came into the Captain’s Club slowly, nervously, peering from side to side and awed by the cumulative seniority of the clientele. Gilmore waved from his cubicle and Joel’s face lit up. Midshipman Gilmore came hurrying over.

  Joel had arrived on UK-1 after Gilmore left to join Ark Royal and they hadn’t seen each other in the flesh for years. There had been frequent holos but even they had only just prepared Gilmore for the sight of the slim young man in the midshipman’s uniform. It seemed quite absurd that in a mere six years, Joel had gone from 12 to 18. Gilmore wondered if all parents of teenagers had this feeling.

  He had a sudden pang of panic that he might have forgotten Joel’s 19th birthday. No, that was next month and he had already left a present in case the fleet didn’t get back home in time. He could still manage some of his paternal duties.

  “Hello, Dad.”

  “Hello, Joel. Grab a seat. What’ll you have?” He didn’t even know his son’s favourite drink, he thought as he placed the order. Well, there would be time for all that.

  The drinks came immediately out of the cubicle dispenser, with a bite to eat for Joel. As far as he was concerned, it was now lunch time. To Gilmore it was now after midnight, and after a long day repairing the ship he just wanted to crawl into his bunk and go to sleep. He nursed his cup of cocoa carefully.

  Despite the physical separation, they hadn’t been completely out of touch and there wasn’t a lot of catching up to do. “So, what the hell has been happening here?” Gilmore said. “How much warning did you get? And how did you get here so quickly? It took us a month.”

  “Yeah, but you had to get back across the solar system for a step-through alignment,” Joel said with a grin. “We were there already. And we got the standard 48 hours notice of manoeuvre.” For something the size of UK-1, with so many people affected, 48 hours was needed for everything to be secured. “Then they told us where we were manoeuvring to, and a bloody difficult manoeuvre it was, I might add.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well,” Joel said, “first we had to get further downhill, nearer the sun. You can only step-through between equal gravity potentials, so if we wanted to come out near the Roving-”

  “-you had to leave from the same position near our own sun.”

  “Right, give or take. And then, the step-through alignment is right out of the plane of the system, so we had to boost ourselves up there-”

  “We did the same thing when we came here, Joel.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Right. Well, you know what it was like for a small ship, so can you imagine doing it for UK-1?”

  “Difficult,” Gilmore agreed.

  “Right! And then there’s the step-through itself. We used up every erg we had in opening the point up. Opening one up for a normal ship would be hard enough but-”

  “-not for something as big as UK-1.”

  “Right! You’re getting it, Dad.” Joel took a sip from his drink and didn’t see the grin on the face of his father, who was wondering if he had ever felt the need to spell out things to Joel’s grandfather in such a way.

  “And then there were the controls,” said Joel. “It was weird, Dad! I’m working in flight control and I got a look at the navigation displays. Couldn’t touch ’em, it was being handled by Super-els-”

  “Who?”

  “Oh, um, Superluminary. It’s the company that the king put in charge of the step-through. Anyway, it takes really strange mathematics to make it work. The generator, the thing that opens up the step-through point – well, the first bit’s easy. It’s kept astern somewhere, but to open the step-through they attach it to a maintenance bot and fly it out ahead of UK-1. Easy. But when they turn it on ... well, they must have invented a whole new language for it – I couldn’t make head or tail of what was on the displays. I don’t know how the computers handled it. They even made up their own characters – all these weird squiggles and shapes.” Gilmore smiled to himself again at the unspoken assumption that, if it could be shown on a display, Joel could understand it. He had been through that stage once.

  “As simple as that?” Gilmore said. “No bugs, glitches, gremlins?”

  “Well ...” Joel looked around. “There was a rumour, that’s all, so don’t repeat it.”

  “As if.” Gilmore leaned forward, mimicking Joel’s wide eyed look of conspiracy. It was lost on the boy. “Go on.”

  “There was a rumour that the step-through generator, um, did something, had some kind of side effect, but no one’s sure what.”

  “That’s informative.”

  “Yeah, but it’s just a rumour and we’re still here, aren’t we? So, how about you, Dad? How’s the ship? How’s the Roving? Have you been down there? Have you-”

  He stopped as Gilmore suddenly burst into a mighty yawn.

  “Not interesting enough for you, Dad?”

  “Sorry, Joel, but I’m knackered,” Gilmore said. “It’s been a long, long day. Look, it’s great to see you, it really is. I’ve made my report to the Admiralty and I can’t comment on anything until they make their official announcement. But when they have, make an appointment with Number One – you remember Hannah? Yes, of course – and I’ll show you over every inch of the ship. How’s that?”

  Joel’s face split into an enormous grin. “That’s great!”

  *

  The orbiting fleet was set to Capital time, which meant that for Prince James it was also past midnight. He hadn’t expected to be able to sleep but he had retired to his room on the off chance that he might.

  And then the light was on. He squinted at the clock by his bed: quarter to three. He was sure he had turned the light off. He stretched and rolled over-

  “Arm Wild?” he said. The Rustie stood there with two others of his kind just visible outside the door. James glanced at the clock.

  “I apologise for disturbing you at this hour,” said Arm Wild, “but we did not desire the other delegates to see. I must ask you to accompany us.”

  James sat up and stretched. “Where to?”

  “Please, accompany us,” Arm Wild said.

  If they had been human, nightmare images of legalised abduction would have been going through James’s mind. Even so, he was uneasy but he had no choice.

  “If you insist. Let me get dressed.”

  They took him to a groundcar waiting outside the Dome and drove him through an empty, dark Capital. Whether through having good night vision or a low crime rate, the Rusties didn’t run to street lighting. The only illumination was from the stars and the moons, and the shapes of the pridehalls around him seemed even more alien than usual. James swallowed. Now, despite knowing UK-1 was in orbit and was big enough to cause a lot of unpleasantness if anything happened to him, he was feeling actively nervous and he didn’t want to show it.

  They stopped by a pridehall. The entrance flared with artificial light and one glance in that direction ruined Jam
es’s chances of seeing anything more in the dark outside.

  “This way, please,” said Arm Wild. James took a deep breath and followed the small group into the building.

  - 22 -

  23 May 2149

  “It’s ridiculous,” said Samad. He had his feet up on the watch desk on the flight deck – a meaningless pose in free fall, which was why he did it – and was sucking a bulb of breakfast coffee. He wasn’t on watch but Hannah was.

  “Do tell,” she said.

  “‘We were just passing.’” Samad could do a good King Richard. “Did he really tell the captain that? ‘A shaking down cruise.’ They just happened to have invented step-through, while everyone was looking the other way, and no sooner have they made the breakthrough than they’ve perfected it and they set off on a journey of a thousand lightyears. What happened to research? What happened to testing? Not even a quick trip round the solar system to shake the bugs out first? No.” He took another suck at the coffee. “If, and it’s a big if, if that’s the truth, and UK-1’s engineers did that, then the whole lot of them deserve to be thrown out of the nearest airlock, for the sake of the gene pool-”

  Samad was a morning person and could talk more in the first hour out of bed than for the rest of the day. Hannah, who had spent most of the night on the flight deck, felt it easiest to let him babble while she studied the report of the repairs foreman.

  The repair teams had worked through Ark Royal’s night while her crew slept, and it looked like most of the work had been done. She made a list in her head. Next step: disengage from UK-1, do a test firing of the thrusters, the auxiliary engines, the main engine ...

  A priority signal was flashing and she took the call. “Ark Royal here.”

  It was a grumpy, greying man who looked vaguely familiar to Hannah.

  “I want to talk to the senior officer on board,” he said.

  “Dereshev, first officer,” she said. “The captain is occupied at the moment.” The captain had melted into his bunk and hadn’t yet emerged, and Hannah felt he deserved the rest.