Later that morning, a deputation from the crew came to ask Alex if shipboard gravity could be hiked to 1.3 gees in order to facilitate their return to fitness, and to request, too, that desserts, cakes and cookies be taken off the menu in order to remove temptation.
If Alex himself had attempted to impose those measures there would have been uproar at such tyranny, and rightly so. But upon assurance that the crew were unanimous in this request, Alex agreed to it. So it was to rather heavier gravity than usual that Silvie came aboard the ship, having spent the launch and the first night of the trip aboard the Stepeasy.
Davie had had some work done to his ship while the squadron was in port. Specifically, he had had the swimming tank he’d created for Silvie converted into a rather larger aquarium complete with a real, living coral reef and a population of fish. Greenstar, had they known about it, would have gone berserk.
Silvie, though, had been delighted with her surprise. She had spent the launch in the tank, keeping the fish calm as the vibration would have been alarming for them. She’d been swimming that morning, too, feeding the corals little pinches of nutrient and tickling the sand crab. As much as she liked it there, though, and the new living quarters Davie had also had fitted out for her, she was keen to come back to the Heron.
‘If it’s uncomfortable for you,’ Alex told her, when she commented on the heavier gravity, ‘I’ll have it set so that it kicks back to one gee in any sector you’re in.’
‘No, it’s fine,’ said Silvie, who was so much stronger than humans anyway that it was hardly going to cause her any problems. ‘It’s just the odd feeling…’ she turned to Shion, who’d come over with her from the Stepeasy, asking, ‘What is that?’
They exchanged a few words in that rapid meta-talk unique to them, and then Shion grinned.
‘Conscious virtue,’ she said, and Silvie laughed.
‘Oh yes!’ she said, making sense then of the weird vibe she was getting from all the people around her. ‘Like, aren’t we being good!’ She giggled as she looked at Alex, who grinned back and held a finger to his lips.
It worked. She could see very well that Alex was feeling more than a bit smug about the way he’d handled the problem of his crew’s poor performance. Not only had he managed to get them working hard to get back up to speed, but he’d managed to make them feel good about themselves for doing it. Silvie might well have commented about how clever he’d been and how pleased he was with himself, but she had learned a lot in recent weeks. So instead she put a finger to her own lips and gave him a conspiratorial wink which was if anything more blatant than a comment would have been. Everyone laughed, though, with a burst of pleasure at having her back aboard the ship.
Things were not nearly so happy over on the Minnow. Alex had not attempted to tell the other skippers how they should address the equally poor performance of their crews in that morning’s drill, as that was their responsibility as skippers. He had merely requested that they have their ships at optimum performance by the time they reached the League border.
Harry Alington, adopting a far more authoritarian approach than Alex’s, had lectured his crew at length and told them how disappointed he was. Then he had outlined the measures he intended to take – intensive and high gravity drills and the withdrawal of privileges until they’d earned them again. The mood on the corvette was reported to be grim. On the Whisker, Dan Tarrance had got his point across during the immediate post-drill period by putting his head into his hands and then going for a whole half hour without smiling. His crew, if anything, were working even harder than the Heron’s to regain their skipper’s good opinion.
Whatever their motivation, though, they were all working hard and Alex was confident that they would be back up to full rating before they reached the border. Meanwhile, he was regathering focus by reminding everyone what they were actually here to achieve, through refresher briefings and rekindling debate on the ops board.
For Alex himself, it was an opportunity to catch up with things that had been happening while he was spending so much of his time off the ship. Prime amongst those was the progress which had been made by Professor Parrot and the Second Irregulars team.
They, at least, had not been overindulging while at Telathor. They had made no public appearances at all, spending much of the visit at the island which had been given over to the Fourth for shoreleave. Anyone who imagined that this meant they’d been enjoying the climate and luxurious surroundings just had no idea… in fact, they’d headed groundside in order to escape what they considered to be the unreasonable restrictions placed on them by Dr Tekawa. Various bits of tech had been smuggled groundside in personal bags and a clandestine laboratory had been set up in a beautiful lodge overlooking a lagoon. There, they had enjoyed themselves tremendously in a blaze of creative research, eating only when they remembered to and sleeping only when they were on the verge of collapse. For once, they had managed to slip under Rangi Tekawa’s radar and even Sub-lt Kit Travers, their liaison, had been so busy elsewhere that he’d had to just accept their assurances that they were eating well and getting plenty of rest.
The truth was out now, of course – Rangi had slapped a twenty five hour stand-down on all of them, post launch, finding that they were showing all the signs of overwork and poor nutrition. He was on their case, big time, supervising meals and appearing in the lab at night to chivvy them off to their cabins. Even so, they were back at work by day two and still riding a massive adrenalin high.
‘We’ve got the reflux problem solved,’ Professor Parrot told Alex, and as he said it, took him by the wrist and led him over to the nano-waldo where they were working on the latest prototype. ‘This is the one,’ he told the skipper, ‘It is going to work.’
Alex had been told things like that by Second Irregulars teams before, so didn’t allow himself to get too carried away by excitement.
‘Excellent work,’ he told them all, seeing the expectation on the eager faces gathered around, watching for his reaction. ‘When do you think you might have a working prototype for testing?’
‘We should have it test-ready by next week,’ said the professor. ‘Sooner, if you can stop that irritating young man from coming in here every ten minutes telling us to go to bed.’
Alex overlooked the gross exaggeration there and just smiled.
‘Sorry – Dr Tekawa has to do his job, which is to look after your health. And as delighted as I am by your tremendous progress, I do have to ask that you recognise his responsibility and authority in that.’ He grinned around at them all before focusing in again on the elderly professor, ‘Please regard his orders as if they come from me, all right?’
‘All right,’ the professor dismissed that impatiently, being far more interested in showing the captain what developments they’d made. ‘But look…’
It was two and a half hours before Alex came out of the lab, well informed and feeling confident, too, that it might actually only be a week or two before they had something the Fourth might begin to test.
Whether the nanotech was ready or not, though, they would have to get out there and do their best with what they had. And there was plenty to keep them occupied in the meantime. They were, to Alex’s relief, regaining their focus. It would take them some time to shift their Telathor Tums but they were working hard on regaining their fitness and freefall agility. They were starting to talk about the mission in hand, rather than the delights of Telathor. They were picking up training, too, studies and courses which had been laid aside while they were in port, so it was a busy time.
Alex, too, had time to catch up with at least some of the non-urgent reports which had now achieved titanic proportions in his in-tray.
Amongst them were reports relating to PO Denman. The captain of the Anubis had readily agreed to accept him on transfer, sending over instead a leading star who was already on the waiting list for a secondment place.
Things had not gone well, though. The Anubis’ crew did not know that the Four
th had brought exo-visitors, but they did know that there had to be something seriously wrong for such a transfer to occur, mid-mission. They weren’t buying the ‘without prejudice’ and ‘through no fault of his own’ line, either, recognising that that only meant that there was insufficient evidence to bring official proceedings. Someone, somewhere, remembered the gossip there had once been on the Zeus. Soon, people were speculating as to what might actually have happened on the Minnow. The Minnow’s crew themselves refused to gossip about it, stating revealingly that they had been asked not to discuss that situation even in private with mates. And as that got about, people started to look at PO Denman with wary suspicion.
That such suspicion was not and never had been justified was evidenced by the LIA file which had been sent to the captain of the Anubis and copied to Alex for his information. There was, the LIA reported, no evidence whatsoever that PO Denman had been involved in any wrongdoing. They had, however, unearthed what they believed to be the real reason why he had been so desperate to avoid contact with Silvie.
PO Denman had been the victim of abuse. Alex was appalled. It had never even occurred to him to consider that possibility. He would have considered kids or obviously vulnerable people as potential victims, not a strong, authoritative man like Mr Denman.
Harry, of course, was stricken with guilt at having nursed and even shared such suspicions of a man he’d known for years, and all the more so because he knew that Den Denman was having just as tough a time of it on the Anubis.
‘He was the victim of malicious and unfounded gossip on the Zeus,’ Harry said in his own memo to the captain, ‘and while I recognise that we made the best decision that we could, operationally, with the information that was available to us, I regret very much not giving more effort to finding out the true state of affairs and giving Mr Denman the support he needed. And he is, now, in an intolerable position and will remain so until his name is conclusively exonerated.’
Had it not been for the importance and urgency of their mission, in fact, Alex felt that Harry would have been tempted to head straight back to Telathor right now to sort things out. As it was, they would just have to leave it till they got back, and in the meantime, trust that Captain Jite would make things right for the petty officer and even, hopefully, persuade him to get some professional help.
Not all the reports were so depressing, though. There was a memo from Fleet Intel, for one, which made Alex laugh out loud as he was reading it. They had investigated gossip in the merchant service that the Fourth had an alien serving with them, finding a widespread and rather startling belief.
‘Me?’ Jonas Sartin stared at him, hardly able to believe that the skipper could be serious when he told him that the merchant service had made up their minds that he was the alien.
‘Well, it makes sense, in a way,’ said Alex, having had time to come to an understanding of what was going on there. ‘There have been rumours for some time that we have a non-human officer serving aboard with us. And people do comment, amongst ourselves and no doubt to other friends, how amazing you are. You do, after all, hold down what would normally be regarded as three separate posts aboard a frigate, and find time to direct the choir, which verges on superhuman achievement.’
He was teasing, with that, but he wasn’t far wrong.
‘But…’ Jonas was flabbergasted, and Alex laughed. There were indeed holes in that theory you could pilot a carrier through, not the least of which was that hundreds of people in the Fleet had known Jonas Sartin throughout his career. But this, clearly, had been dismissed by a majority of spacers as ‘cover’, and however daft it might seem to the Fourth, they really had come to believe that the Second Lieutenant was an alien. Then Jonas himself started to laugh too. ‘Oh, well!’ he said fatalistically, recognising that there was no point at all in attempting to convince the spacer community that their beliefs weren’t true. By now it was a Yarn, a story told in spacer bars, and denial would serve no purpose but to make it even more widely believed. ‘I don’t mind, really,’ he said, displaying the qualities which did make him one of the most highly respected officers in the Fourth, ‘if it means they’re not homing in on Shion. Just don’t…’ he turned suddenly and addressed the crew through the open comms cameras, ‘don’t go stirring things up making up alien yarns about me.’ He clearly knew the crew very well. ‘And stop,’ he pleaded, ‘telling people that I’m superhuman.’
The Heron flew on with its crew in an uproar of laughter and jokes which sparked off more hilarity like crackerjacks popping around the ship. And Alex, feeling that buzz, knew that he had got his crew back.
Then, after two days of steady cruising, Alex received confirmation that the refit work on the Excorps ship had now been completed, at which they went through an intensive round of training exercises. Throughout all this the Comrade Foretold lurked behind them, almost out of scanner range. They couldn’t shake it off, they knew, even if they tried. The LIA ship had the same engine configuration as a patrol ship and could certainly keep up with them even at maximum speed.
Nothing had been said. No request had been made for the Comrade Foretold to join the squadron. Alex, though, made the decision just to leave them alone.
‘The ways of the security services,’ he observed, ‘are beyond understanding. And anyway, they’re not doing any harm.’
So they sped on, the three Fourth’s ships, Excorps and the Stepeasy heading for the border with the LIA ship following along.
All they had to do now was head out into uncharted space and find a lost civilisation.
Nineteen
The heading out into uncharted space part was, in fact, almost routine. They had one final action-stations drill as they approached the League border, which all three ships passed, if not with flying colours, at least creditably. Then they simply cruised through the plane marked on charts as the edge of Fleet territory.
As they crossed the border, the Comrade Foretold followed them doggedly.
‘What are they doing?’ Martine Fishe wondered, watching the little blip on their scopes. ‘They can’t actually believe that we can’t see them… can they?’
Actually, that was exactly what Alex thought. If the Fourth had been equipped with the kind of scanners that the LIA knew about then they certainly wouldn’t be able to see the Comrade Foretold at that range. It was only because they were trialling scanners even the LIA didn’t know about yet that they were able to see the ship.
Right then, though, before Alex could answer, a group of ratings appeared on the command deck, led by the youngest member of the crew.
Riot and rumpus ensued. There was an ancient tradition in the Fleet that whenever one of their ships crossed League borders there would be a mock-mutiny amongst the crew and one mad hour of horseplay in which the officers would retreat to the wardroom and the crew would play games never allowed at any other time. Watch stations during this time would be held by qualified petty officers with the senior CPO holding the conn.
Silvie, for one, thoroughly enjoyed the bacchanalia. She had naturally been invited to join the officers for their customary tea party in the wardroom during the Rumpus, but had just as naturally said that she would rather take part in the games. She was slightly bruised by the end of it and somewhat splattered with custard, but assured Alex that she’d had a lovely time.
Alex, having reclaimed his ship, grinned at her with deep affection. Silvie had enjoyed herself on Telathor but there had never been any question of her wanting to stay there or to go off to Canelon or anywhere else. She was happy with the Fourth, felt safe with them and, most importantly of all, knew herself to be loved. She was also, she said, fulfilling her mission with them by learning to communicate more effectively with humans and even to begin to understand them. She was not, however, particularly enthusiastic about their own mission. She was perfectly happy to take part and agreed that it was an interesting mystery, but her people had never been explorers or adventurers and she didn’t see anything enthrallin
g about going where no other ships had ever been able to go.
For Excorps, however, that was their reason for being, not just as an organisation but as the drive which motivated all their individuals. The Fourth had set a course just across the border but running parallel to it during their Rumpus hour, and Excorps was fretting to be on their way. They did not have the tradition of the Rumpus when crossing borders, and had borne with it in poorly concealed impatience.
Now, the moment that the designated hour was up, they were on comms.
‘Excorps requesting a vector, dear boy,’ Buzz pointed out, seeing that Alex hadn’t noticed that on the comm screen. Alex grinned tolerantly, recognising that Excorps were just about going nuts with impatience over there.
‘Signal them to take point,’ he said, and added, as there was some surprise on the command deck, ‘They’ve earned it.’
Their response to being given point, though, was surprising. There was no whoop of joy and immediate turning off to cross the ridge which lay just beyond the border.
Instead, their skipper signalled a request for a holo link to speak to Alex.
‘Are you sure, Captain?’ Skipper Tori Florez was a barrel chested man with a deep voice and an air of quiet, methodical efficiency. It was only when you were able to get him to talk about the expeditions he’d been part of that you’d see the gleam in his eyes of the true, driven explorer. ‘Only,’ he pointed out, ‘we were anticipating running tandem with the Naos system for some time before we expected to rely on it for real.’
Alex smiled. You did not survive Excorps missions unless you took great care, planned exhaustively and proceeded with the utmost caution, so he was not surprised to find the Excorps skipper questioning his order.
‘Perfectly sure, yes,’ he said. He felt it was important that Excorps learn to trust the navigation system as quickly as possible. What he said, though, was, ‘Don’t worry – if you’re leading us down a blind alley, we’ll be sure to let you know.’
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