‘Oh my days!’ the professor lamented – his customary exclamation for all occasions. ‘Captain!’ he gave Alex a look of profound reproach, and Alex gave him a quizzical look in return.
‘Professor,’ he said, ‘please evaluate the likelihood of my allowing anyone without the necessary security clearance to see any classified material aboard this ship, let alone bringing them in here. And allow me to introduce…’ he gestured from Yula, generally, to the research team, ‘Skipper Yula Cavell, First Fleet Irregulars.’
‘First?’ Professor Parrot looked bewildered, and then remembered. ‘Oh! Intelligence!’
Yula gave a mischievous bow at the susurration which ran through the team – the quick breaths and excited murmurs as they realised that they were in the presence of an intelligence officer. Three of the younger ones looked as if they rather wished they had autograph albums handy.
‘As you see,’ said Alex, ‘they’re a bit busy…’
That got a laugh from the research team, as it had become something of an in-joke during the trip from Therik. It was difficult to find a time when they were not ‘a bit busy’ in the lab. Even at four in the morning you were liable to find that there were people still working from the night before while others had already got up early to get started on something. There were only ten of them in the team, but it often seemed a lot more.
The Sub who’d drawn the Passenger Liaison role laughed too, but ruefully. The Fourth carried up to ten supernumerary officers, mostly Subs, both for operations and to help with the enormous amount of training going on aboard ship. Each of them was given a departmental role – the most coveted, and glamorous, were things like Comms and Gunnery. Getting stuck either with Housekeeping or Passenger Liaison was generally considered a bum deal.
Not in this case, though. Sub-lt Travers had been recruited for the Passenger Liaison role. He had done a tour of duty with the Second, himself, but wasn’t willing to give up on shipboard service. This was the ideal compromise for him, and gave the Fourth a young officer with a foot on the main decks and in the lab, too. Looking after the passengers, doing regular duties and assisting with research had kept Kit Travers so busy that he’d acquired four over-work interventions from the ship’s medic. Kit was well aware that another twenty three minutes in the lab would push him over that limit again, and this time Rangi Tekawa would make him sit through the Health and Safety lecture on workload limitations.
That really was a fate to be dreaded on the Heron, as it had been recorded especially for them by Professor Simon Penarth. When he’d been aboard the ship he’d been in the habit of delivering the lecture personally, following the offender around and going into graphic detail about all the short and long term effects to their health from persistent over-working. The recorded version might not have the ear-drilling intensity of having Simon right there going on and on at you for hours, but it was still something Kit would rather avoid. He’d been just starting to hope that he was getting the researchers to understand that it was not physically possible to fit the three extra crates in there, and now there was this, the skipper with a visitor, eating into the precious remaining minutes and losing him all the impetus of argument he had gained.
‘This is Professor Par-roh, chief researcher,’ said Alex, demonstrating that he knew Second Irregulars etiquette by introducing the lead scientist first, and then the Fleet officer who was nominally in charge – nominally because the Second was run to accommodate civilian researchers, so casual clothes and first names were the norm even for Fleet personnel currently on secondment to them. A couple of the team had worn the Second’s optional rig of chinos and a yellow t-shirt when they’d first come aboard, which was a dead giveaway in itself that this was their first time working with the Second, but by now they’d all reverted to shipboard-scruffy.
Alex introduced them all, and Yula said hello, aware that she was looking at some of the League’s most talented people in the field of nanotech. The Second had actually recruited several of these people for this, making them offers they just had not been able to refuse. That was never about money. But every one of these people had been told, after they’d signed the necessary paperwork, that the Fourth had obtained samples of very advanced nanotech, and a great deal of data about it, too. Hundreds of researchers were being told that, across the League, and being offered the opportunity to work on the nanotech at a Second Irregulars lab, but these people had been offered the opportunity to come out to the Heron and work with them directly. This was not just cutting edge research; it was about helping the Fourth to develop the new tech in ways they could actually use on operations. Right now, that meant that they were working flat out on developing a nano-sensor by reverse-engineering one the Fourth had provided. They had various prototypes at different stages of construction and testing – Professor Parrot had been working on one right then, in fact, oblivious to the debate going on around him.
‘Oh, that’s some piece of kit!’ Yula observed, going over to see what he was doing.
‘Quite good, isn’t it?’ Professor Parrot agreed, complacently. ‘We suspect that it was supposed to be delivered to Therik University Nanophysics department but that somebody…’ he gave Kit Travers a roguish look, ‘borrowed it without asking.’
Kit grinned innocently. ‘You wouldn’t expect academics to use that kind of language, really,’ he observed.
Yula laughed. She knew enough about lab tech to recognise that this was not the kind of thing you could buy from a catalogue; it had been made to order by a specialist firm and would certainly have been a major acquisition for the university department. She knew enough, too, to recognise it as a nano-waldo, equipped with a VR interface so you could carry out the most delicate operations at a sub-atomic level, using holo-models generated over the screens. The tech being worked on right then was shown as nearly half a metre across, but the scale indicated that in reality it was as tiny as a virus.
‘Oh, that is beautiful,’ said Yula, seeing the elegance of the engineering, and the astonishing power of the nano-scanner, too. ‘How in heaven do you get that range?’
Seeing that Yula was going to be chatting with the scientists for a while, Alex smiled over at Kit Travers. He knew, too, that the minutes were ticking away for him. His crew liked to foster the myth that the skipper was omniscient, but in fact there was an automatic alert to his wristcom whenever someone came within a quarter of an hour of busting workload regs.
‘Just put the crates in the Vault,’ he said. ‘And sort it out tomorrow, Mr Travers.’
‘Okay, skipper – will do.’ Kit had been hoping to avoid having to do that. Checking the crates into the high security hold would be easy enough, but he had learned from experience that allowing the research team time to think about things, especially overnight, would generate fifty more ideas they would want to discuss in detail before any decisions were made. By tomorrow morning they might well have decided that they didn’t need their sleeping cabins, either, if that was what it would need to fit the additional equipment in.
Kit went off, though, with a cheerful goodnight, and after a few minutes Alex took Yula away, too, knowing that she could easily have spent the rest of the evening there talking to them, but not wanting to impose on them too much. As they left, Yula sighed with frank envy.
‘Please tell me that we can have some of those as soon as you’ve got a working version.’
‘If it was my decision, you could be in on the trials,’ Alex said. ‘But you know how it is with the Second.’
Yula did know. The Fleet’s R&D division was notoriously reluctant to let the Fleet actually have any of their hottest tech.
‘Would you ask if we could help with the trials?’ Yula asked.
‘I’ll try,’ Alex promised, and they continued the tour, chatting and laughing as he took her to see the ‘amazing biovat.’ Alex told her that it was amazing when it worked, but was still very far from being reliable.
‘Trust me, you don’t want this on your s
hip till the glitches have been worked out,’ he told her, with considerable feeling. ‘This is actually the most difficult R&D project we’re undertaking, in sheer terms of the amount of time and effort that’s gone into it. We are seeing progress. In the early days, we were lucky if one batch in a hundred produced anything edible. These days, we can produce a range of small fruits and salad stuff with fairly consistent results, though for some reason an attempt to grow a crop of peas on the way out here produced peas the size of watermelons. That’s the problem, see – everything says it ought to work, and the version they have tested in groundside conditions works perfectly, but out here, wave space conditions can glitch it up. That’s something we have established, a clear correlation between wave space turbulence and abnormal growth. Which, given the conditions we’re going to be working in, could mean some very unusual crops being produced.’ He gave her a teasing grin. ‘Of course, if you’d like to volunteer to take part in this trial as well…’
‘Thanks, I’ll pass,’ Yula said, and they both laughed.
She met Shion, too, later on the tour. Alex knew that Shion was holding a pilot-training class in the ready room, and timed their visit for when he knew the class would be finishing.
The ready room itself was an extraordinary thing to find on a frigate. When the airlocks had been fitted on their belly to carry the fighters, a small corridor-area had been formed above them to provide access. Very Vergan had acquired fittings from mates in Supplies and transformed the corridor into a tiny but functional ready room with tables and chairs, notice boards and the all-important coffee machine. Anyone taking pilot training knew that Shion would be in the ready room between 2100 and 2200 most evenings, available to help people with courses. There were six people there when Alex took Yula in, with the work on the lecture-board indicating that she’d been helping a couple of them with Pilot Astrogation Unit 12, manual plotting of position using precise fixes on known stars.
Alex introduced Yula to everyone there – the students included another of their supernumerary Subs and other newcomers to the ship taking advantage of the opportunity to qualify as pilots.
‘And Mr Jezno,’ Alex said.
He did not need to explain. Ali Jezno was wearing petty officer’s insignia but had probationer’s stars, too, a bizarre combination to Fleet eyes and one which marked his unique status. His injuries and memory loss meant that he had to re-sit every exam in order to re-acquire his qualifications. He was also in long-term medical rehab. The regular Fleet would not have allowed him aboard ship. The regular Fleet, in fact, would have discharged him on medical grounds, throwing him back into civilian life.
Alex, however, had made a commitment, promising Ali that he could stay and that he wouldn’t lose his hard-earned rank while he was in re-training and rehab, either. So here he was, helping out now at the level of qualifications he’d already re-acquired and working hard on getting back the rest.
‘Hello,’ said Yula, with the same friendly smile she’d given to the others. There was nothing at all zombie-like about Ali. He was bright eyed, alert, a good looking young man with a ready grin. The grin appeared the moment he saw that Yula was not going to stare at him or be in any way uncomfortable around him.
‘Ma’am,’ he acknowledged. She might be wearing casual civilian gear but the Heron’s crew all knew who she was.
And Yula, in fact, was not really interested in Ali, right then, or in any of the other people Alex introduced. The one she really wanted to meet, of course, was Shion.
Shion knew that, seeing from the amazed look in Yula’s eyes that she already knew who Shion was. If she was just introduced as a Sub-lt Pilot Instructor people rarely even gave her a second glance. She was attractive, but not remarkably so, her dark hair cut into a fashionable geometric crop, loose-limbed physique and aquiline, high-cheekbone features. Her skin was a rich black and her dark eyes just looked friendly and intelligent.
People who’d been told that Shion wasn’t human had flatly refused to believe it. One, on a memorable occasion, had fainted from shock when she was eventually convinced that Shion was of alien genome, actually feeling the slow triple thump of Shion’s heart, which was where the liver would be in a human. Even here aboard ship, she rarely demonstrated the multi-cognitive intelligence and superhuman speed she was capable of. Amongst her people, it was considered courteous to function at the speed of the team.
‘Do you really swing on chandeliers?’ She asked Yula, with keen interest.
‘Er…’ Yula boggled a bit at that, and Alex laughed.
‘That’s a metaphor,’ he told her. ‘Fleet Intel jargon. When people say that an intel agent ‘swings on chandeliers’ it means that they’re involved in the kind of covert operations where they may be involved in breaking into buildings, high speed chases, high adrenalin ops.’
Shion looked at Yula. Yula looked at Shion. Alex glanced from one to the other and laughed again. The expressions of wondering, amazed curiosity were identical. They could have formed a mutual admiration society right there.
They realised that themselves in the same moment, and started laughing too.
‘Trade you,’ Yula offered. ‘Question for question.’
‘Deal!’ Shion agreed at once, though glancing at her wristcom, ‘I can’t now, though – pilot training in two minutes.’ Even as she was speaking, a young woman with leading star insignia had come into the ready room, hesitating as she saw that the skipper was there. ‘Hey, Jenni.’ Shion greeted her, waving her towards the central of the three airlock hatchways. ‘Pre-flight. Go to.’ Then as she followed the woman onto the fighter, she flashed a grin to Yula. ‘Catch you later!’
‘Bye,’ said Yula, and looked at Alex with sparkling eyes. ‘Oh, she’s lovely. Not at all what I expected.’
Alex grinned agreement. If you had only seen Shion when she was doing what she referred to as ‘the alien princess thing’, robed and made up and gliding with ethereal grace, it was hard to imagine that she could be this cheerful young woman. At the same time, if you’d only got to know her as the pilot instructor, seeing her in ceremonial role could come as a tremendous shock.
Much the same might be said about Alex himself, really – he understood entirely, after all, how it was to have a wide gulf between how you behaved in formal situations, in public, and how you were in private, amongst friends.
‘And this is just cute,’ Yula added, glancing around at the miniature ready room now that Shion was not grabbing all her attention. ‘You really are going for the micro-carrier thing, huh?’
Alex chuckled as he led her out. ‘Not intentionally!’ he assured her. Recent Fleet goss had been describing the Heron as more of a micro-carrier these days than a frigate, not just because they carried fighters but because of the interdeck upgrades. They had acquired all sorts of facilities, unimportant in themselves, which were normally only to be found aboard carriers. Hostile commentators described the Heron as a frigate with ideas way above its station. ‘We just develop things as we need them for operations,’ Alex told her. ‘But we’re not able to explain, obviously, why we need things like an exosuite with a conference facility, so people just make their own minds up about what we’re doing.’
‘I know,’ she said, with an understanding smile. Word had emerged that the Fourth had refitted their interdeck as many as seventeen times during their most recent operations, and even people in the Fleet who didn’t know where they’d really been or what they’d been doing considered that excessive. It only made sense if you knew that they’d had to equip an exosuite with full quarantine facilities, adapting it for different purposes as first contact had progressed.
They concluded the tour on the interdeck, Alex having a coffee with her in the lounge. They were talking and laughing for another quarter of an hour before Alex saw Yula off the ship. The grins people gave him as he went back to the command deck made it clear that his crew were assuming that they were rather more than friends, and Alex’s air of dignified reserve only
made them even more convinced of that.
The skipper, though, turned his thoughts back to other work, interrupted a few minutes later when he congratulated Martine Fishe on her return from the media call. She was justifiably pleased with herself, grinning broadly as she accepted the skipper’s handshake and warm commendation. She cracked up laughing, though, when he warned her that Fleet Intel was expressing an interest in recruiting her.
‘I’m serious,’ he assured her, seeing that she really thought he was joking. ‘Skipper Cavell was impressed by your performance at the media call and she will certainly, for sure, be attempting to make you a pitch for a tour of duty with the First. I won’t stand in your way, of course, if that is what you want…’
Martine understood the question he was very carefully not asking, there, and laughed again, shaking her head.
‘Flattering, if true!’ she acknowledged. ‘But no, skipper, no interest.’
Alex smiled, not attempting to conceal his relief. He had had to spread his experienced officers across all three ships, and it would have been problematical to have to replace Martine at any time.
‘Well, Skipper Cavell can be very persuasive,’ he observed. Then he remembered how forthright Martine had been when the First Lord had attempted to promote her into being Harry Alington’s executive officer, and his smile became mischievous. ‘Still, I daresay you’ll handle that. And – once again, my thanks for an excellent job with the media, Ms Fishe.’
He gave her, with some ceremony, a packet of cookies, which she accepted with laughing appreciation. Treats were a custom-and-practice reward in the Fourth. Any member of the crew could, in fact, get exactly this kind of cookie from the galley at any time, but to be given cookies by the skipper was recognised as rewarding particular effort.
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