Mission Zero (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  Minutes passed. Alex carried on with the mound of deskwork that not even the most efficient exec could take off a skipper in the hours before a launch while Buzz Burroughs held the watch and chased up the inevitable last minute supplies that had not been delivered. A/S Thrask returned, calm again now and giving the skipper a slightly embarrassed, questioning look as he went back to his station.

  Alex gave him a confirmatory nod. Ideally, of course, a crewman should not have to excuse himself from duty because he was unable to control a fit of the giggles, but microsteps methodology worked by setting small, achievable targets on the way to that ultimate goal. For right now, Able Star Thrask’s target was to be able to recognise when his conduct was line crossing and ask for time out to compose himself. He had done that successfully, and got a little smile from the skipper acknowledging that. Everyone had settled down, now, too, with a busy, purposeful atmosphere on the ship.

  Then, from the mess deck below them, Rangi’s voice emerged again from the hubbub, explaining to their passenger that this was where the crew ate their meals and relaxed. A minute or two later, a question was audible from the inspector.

  ‘I know that port is to the left when you’re facing the front of the ship and starboard to the right,’ he said. ‘So which way am I facing now?’

  Alex looked determinedly at his desk screens, taking no notice of the laughter that erupted after a thunderstruck couple of seconds on both the mess deck, and everywhere else within earshot. It would be expecting miracles, really, to expect spacers not to crack up at that.

  ‘Please, sir?’ That was Ordinary Star Jenni Asforth at the Flight Control station, addressing the skipper in a pleading tone. ‘Can we keep him? I’ll feed him and take him for walks, honest!’

  Alex cracked, giving her a look that held far more amusement than rebuke. Jenni Asforth, at eighteen, was one of the youngest members of the crew. Also a space-brat, she had superb technical skills but an irreverence towards authority which had raised questions about her attitude even during basic training. On her first shipboard assignment, she had told a newly qualified Sub-Lt that he was an idiot. She was doing much better on Minnow, learning when to keep her opinions, however justified, to herself. Her current microstep was the use of a three-tiered warning system, giving her three chances to pull it back before any official notice would be taken of impertinence.

  ‘Manners, Asforth.’ Alex said, employing the mildest of those warnings. She grinned, well aware that he was as amused as she was, but acknowledged it with a playful salute.

  ‘I hear and obey,’ she said, which was impertinent in itself, of course, but progress. She had at least now stopped addressing officers as ‘oh great one’. For Alex, able to see beyond the impudence to the reality that she had, in fact, accepted the reminder, that was good enough. And he could hardly, after all, tell crew off for laughing when his second in command was chuckling too. Buzz had heard Rangi, after a stunned few seconds to work out that the inspector was serious, answering him with a careful, ‘Aft. That’s the back end of the ship.’

  Their voices moved on, blending into the hubbub and laughter. They were back on deck one and heading into sickbay about a quarter of an hour later, the tour of the ship evidently concluded. Shortly after that, Alex saw Buzz sign off on the log to a request for sickbay to be isolated from grav-control for medical assessment purposes. For the next ten minutes or so sickbay was highlighted on the plan of the ship, flashing yellow with a 0G warning. It was entirely obvious what was happening with that, too, as another alert suddenly flashed onto the readout, declaring a hazmat response in progress. Inspector Ireson had evidently discovered that he was, in common with about sixty per cent of the human population, freefall sick.

  Alex, mindful of the tiny implant behind his own ear, felt no kind of superiority in that. The inspector would be fine within moments of having the implant, though Rangi would probably take the opportunity to give their passenger some basic freefall safety training, too.

  He was right about that, as it was nearly an hour before Rangi brought him back to the command deck.

  ‘Mr Ireson would like to meet with you now, Skipper, if that’s convenient,’ he informed him.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Alex said, with an appraising look at the inspector. He was looking rather on his dignity, as anyone might be after having thrown up, and he could not have failed to notice the crew cracking up laughing at him, either. He was keeping it together, though, his manner still professional, and Alex gave him his slight, formal smile. He got up, closing down his desk screens as he did so. ‘Come into my cabin.’

  ____________________

  Chapter Four

  Mako followed him into his quarters and accepted the invitation to take a seat on the sofa which doubled as a bunk, glancing covertly around as if not quite able to believe that this really was the skipper’s cabin. He was obliged to pull his feet back to give Alex room to get past him and sit down at the little fold-down desk.

  ‘Can I offer you something to drink?’ Alex suggested. ‘We’re strictly non-alcoholic of course, but we can cater to most tastes otherwise.’

  ‘Dr Tekawa gave me some herbal tea,’ Mako replied, with a guarded tone that spoke volumes, ‘to, er, settle my stomach. But if that is real coffee I can smell…’

  ‘It is,’ Alex confirmed. ‘Vat beans, obviously, we don’t run to organic. But we have coffee makers in the wardroom and on the mess deck – what kind do you like, and how?’

  ‘The nearest you have to aloba, please,’ Mako said, with the voice of a true coffeeholic. ‘Strong, hot and black, please, with a touch of cindar. If you have it,’ he added, as a sudden afterthought.

  ‘If we don’t, the quartermaster will get some.’ Alex relayed the order with a touch to a companel on his desk.

  ‘Thank you, Skipper,’ the inspector said, and opened up the Fleet-issue pocket comp they’d given him to use whilst aboard the ship. He had not been allowed to bring any recording technology aboard of his own since the ship contained, as Dr Tekawa had mentioned, some of the most advanced and highly classified technology in the Fleet. ‘And thank you for the opportunity to observe the operation of your unit, which I understand is at your personal invitation.’

  ‘Well, it was the First Lord’s decision, but with my full support, yes,’ Alex replied, and explained why, making it clear that it was not just a public relations exercise but that he would welcome any observations or advice the prisons inspectorate could give. Mako listened politely, though distracted when a man brought in their coffee. He was introduced as CPO Martins, who combined the roles of quartermaster, wardroom steward and gun captain.

  It was apparent that Mako had not met many people from high grav worlds before. That wasn’t surprising since neither Dortmellers nor Chiellians tended to travel very much. Quite apart from the discomfort of feeling as if they were in near-freefall all the time, they had to endure a good deal of staring and rude comments from all too many people on more average-gravity worlds. CPO Martins was a Dortmeller, with the characteristic look of his people, broad of body and squat-legged. He had very little neck and heavy-boned, neanderthal facial features.

  ‘This is excellent,’ Mako said when the steward had gone. ‘I must admit I was rather dreading having to do without a decent cup of coffee for the next six weeks, but this is remarkably civilised.’

  ‘Normal in the Fleet,’ Alex assured him. ‘We may not have many luxuries on board but good coffee is regarded as a vital supply. I apologise in advance for the food, I doubt you’ll like that very much, but at least the coffee is some compensation.’

  ‘It certainly is.’ The inspector smiled, but having taken another drink of his coffee, set it aside and picked up his comp again. Then he looked surprised as Alex, unable to bear the sight of the mug of coffee just put down on the deck, got up and moved it onto the end table of the sofa. ‘Did I do something wrong?’

  ‘Well, we’re rather particular about liquids on warships,’ Alex explai
ned mildly. ‘We operate all the time, you see, on the basis that the ship may go into freefall at any moment, so all our working practices are geared to that. Having mugs of any liquid just sitting on a surface is a no-no, and hot coffee, well, that would get you a safety write-up if you were a member of the crew.’ He gave his slight smile. ‘If you could just try to remember to look for the green rings on surfaces and put your drinks down there – they’re grav safe cup holders, you see, which will hold the cup and contents in place even if the ship goes into freefall. Other than that you can ask for a freefall safe mug, though generally people don’t tend to enjoy drinks as much when they have to suck them through a tube.’

  ‘Ah – right, yes, I see.’ The inspector noted where Alex had his own mug in a green ring on his desk and gave him an apologetic look. ‘I’m afraid I have a lot to learn. I will try not to be a nuisance to you or take up too much of your time. So… may we discuss Jace Higgs, Skipper?’

  ‘Of course,’ Alex agreed. ‘Though if we are going to be as full and frank here as I would like to be, I would appreciate you closing that comp and agreeing to this being off the record. If you’re going to write it down and put it in a report,’ he explained, as the inspector looked startled, ‘I will be compelled to give you a ‘no comment’ response to certain questions which have been ruled not for public disclosure. So if you want honest answers, it has to be on trust that it does not get written down, all right?’

  For answer, without even needing to consider that one, Mako closed his comp.

  ‘Off the record,’ he confirmed, and picked up his coffee, looking at the skipper with an expectant air. ‘What I really want to know,’ he told him, ‘is why there is this evident and very widespread opinion in the Fleet that Jace Higgs was the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice. There’s no dispute, I take it, that he did assault Lt Simons?’

  ‘No, there’s no dispute about the fact that he thumped her.’ Alex said. ‘And though I don’t condone that kind of violence, of course, you won’t find anyone here who blames him.

  ‘She’s a horror, frankly, who should never have got a commission in the first place and certainly should never be in any position of authority. I did put in an appeal against her being posted here, but I was told to just make the best of it and see if I could exert some influence and upgrade her personnel management skills.’ He sighed speakingly.

  ‘I don’t know why people find it so hard to grasp what is, to me, the entirely obvious fact that you can not change people against their will,’ he said. ‘Lt Simons is entirely satisfied with herself just the way she is and she has no respect for me at all, so how anyone could think that I could address her abrasive personality issues is a total mystery to me. But there we are, I lost the appeal so we just had to make the best of it.

  ‘It was… well, ‘nightmare’ doesn’t go anywhere near it. I saw people who’d been making great progress backsliding because of her constant nagging at them. Over the seventeen weeks that she was with us, I had her in this office thirty two times to discuss incidents in which she had upset or offended people.

  ‘She was on Jace Higg’s case from day one. He has issues with dumb insolence, giving officers looks that make his opinion of them only too apparent, and she seemed to feel she had to defend her authority by slamming down on him at every opportunity.

  ‘On the day he hit her, she’d had a go at him for having his hands in his pockets. Fleet skippers are allowed to set standards in minor policy like that ourselves. Our shipboard policy is that we allow hands in pockets, other than for formal situations, but she was determined to impose a ‘no hands in pockets’ rule on us, no matter how many times it was pointed out to her that our shipboard policy allows it. Anyway, they had another confrontation over it and Higgs recognised himself that he was wound up, so did exactly the right thing there and took himself off to our time-out room, the number eight airlock.

  ‘Don’t be confused by the fact that that is also our designated brig. On a ship this size all spaces are multifunctional and it isn’t anything more than a place people can go to when they need some peace and quiet.

  ‘Lt Simons, however, went in after him, which she had no right to do. She accused him of skiving, threatening him with charges of being absent from his duty station. When he told her that he had permission for time out, she said he was far too fond of pulling that one.

  ‘That is not why he hit her. He did not want to tell me why he hit her. He just cried and wouldn’t say a word. But the thing is, you see, that there is blind recording in the time out room, as perhaps I should mention, is the case everywhere aboard the ship. We recognise the potential risk of there being any place aboard ship which is entirely off record in case any allegations are made, say, of inappropriate conduct from an officer. So there is no place on the ship, not even the lavatories, that does not have cameras on continuous record. I can assure you, though, that nobody can access those blind cameras in any other circumstances than a genuine need to retrieve incident footage, which in itself requires the signatures of two command rank officers, a mound of paperwork and reporting to Internal Affairs.

  ‘We had to do that, of course, with an incident in which a crewman had punched an officer. When we saw it… well, I was obliged to take a little personal time myself, frankly, just to come into my cabin and shut the door for a few minutes. I don’t know if you are aware that my three year old daughter was killed in a car crash just over a year ago?’

  He could say that now without his throat closing up, without the cold numbness engulfing his body, though it was beyond him yet to be able to discuss it in any detail.

  ‘I do know that, yes.’ Mako assumed the awkward, embarrassed sympathy of someone confronting a tragedy too awful for normal social conversation. ‘I am so sorry. As a parent myself…’ He broke off as Alex had held up a calm but compelling hand.

  ‘Please, I don’t talk about it,’ he said. ‘I only have to, for you to understand the depth of rage and hatred on this ship for what Lt Simons said, and why we feel so strongly, all of us, that her conduct constituted intolerable provocation. My daughter was killed, you see, because she was not fastened into her child safety seat, which is all I want to say about that.

  ‘Higgs’s wife was pregnant when it happened, and they had already asked me if I would stand sponsor to their child. That’s customary in the Fleet, a very usual kind of pastoral care. When Lt Simons went into the time out room, Higgs was sitting there looking at a holo that had been taken at his son’s naming ceremony, five months after my daughter died. He was obviously looking at that holo to calm himself, reminding himself of what was important.

  Then Lt Simons came in and started having another go at him. If you saw the footage, which I can not show you because it was placed under evidentiary seal by the admiral presiding at the court martial, you would see the look of utter contempt he gave her for that. He does a very good withering sneer, does Higgs. It certainly wound Lt Simons up. It is entirely obvious that she lost her temper. In my view, the things she said were grounds for charges of unprofessional conduct.

  ‘Seeing that he was looking at that holo, she told him that that kid of his did not stand a chance in life with him for a father. He still didn’t hit her, which I hold to be evidence of a very high degree of self-control in itself. But then, seeing that she wasn’t getting to him, she looked at the picture of me holding his baby and said,’ a muscle tensed in his jaw and he spoke with taut control, ‘You’re obviously battening onto the skipper for all you can get. Of course, he’ll have a lot of baby stuff going spare. You might need to wash the blood off the car-seat but I don’t suppose that would bother you.’

  As Mako’s eyes widened with shock, Alex nodded grimly. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘That’s why he hit her. Just…’ he gestured, ‘lashed out, blindly.’

  ‘But… what could she have been thinking to say something so offensive?’ The inspector wondered, looking appalled.

  ‘Oh, that’s not the first time sh
e’s made mock of somebody’s bereavement,’ said Alex, drily. ‘The incident which made her reputation in the Fleet, some years ago, was one in which a crewman who’d been demoted on disciplinary grounds received news that his father had died. Lt Simons is on record as having told him that it should be some consolation to him that his father had died before knowing what a disappointment he was.’

  ‘What?’ Mako gasped. ‘And she got away with that?’

  ‘Evidently,’ said Alex, and took another sip of his coffee. ‘She was censured for insensitivity, but it spoke volumes that she was the one who stayed on the ship and it was the crewman who was transferred. Old School Fleet, there, see, protecting the officer, which I have, if it needs to be said, major issues with myself.’

  ‘But… if that was known at the court martial, what she said, surely that should have been taken into account as mitigating circumstances?’

  ‘Absolutely, yes it should,’ Alex said. ‘And if we had had the judge we were supposed to, I have no doubt it would have been. Admiral Harper is not long retired and is one of the few Progressive admirals represented on the court martial bench. I know her at a social level of having been invited to a dinner party at her house, but we’re not personal friends. Third Lord Jennar, however, who is in charge of courts martial as part of his internal affairs remit, removed her from the rotation. He said there was too close a personal relationship between us because I had been to her house. And rather than move up to the next judge, since they organise other commitments around their scheduled rotation, he brought in a reserve.