Mission Zero (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘But aren’t they going to be prosecuted, then?’ Mako asked, feeling that if it was his decision, they certainly would be, and the owner too for being so crazy-stupid as to allow this.

  ‘No.’ Martine grinned, at that. ‘The hassle of trying to prosecute minor offences is just beyond belief. We can not, you see, arrest them, or take them back to Chartsey. All we could do would be to insert a notification into their log, detailing the offence for the authorities at their next port of call. We also have to send a prosecution file to that port ourselves, as well as file reports with the Chartsey authorities.

  ‘Any half baked no-win no-fee lawyer knows how to work that system, disputing trivialities so the correspondence on it drags on past the point at which statute of limitations kicks in and it gets thrown out of court anyway. I made the mistake, as a Sub-Lt, of allowing a particularly annoying yacht skipper to get up my nose. I slapped a prosecution notice for dangerous piloting on him, for which the maximum sentence is a fine of up to ten thousand dollars, though it’s rarely more than a fraction of that. I am still getting mail about it six years later and unless it comes to court within the next few months, it will all have been a waste of time anyway. So no, Mr Ireson, we are not going to file prosecution papers on them. This will be handled as a safety advisory.’

  Whatever Buzz said, it was evidently effective. When the boarding party returned a few minutes later, Buzz told the skipper that the yacht had agreed to join the two freighters they’d passed a few minutes previously. This was accomplished with a long cast out from the starseeker’s original line of flight, looping around to come in alongside the freighters.

  ‘Permission to join starseeker to convoy?’ Martine Fishe signalled to the two freighters and got back obviously automatic agreement, one of them sounding resigned while the other seemed quite relieved.

  ‘Good catch, Minnow,’ their skipper commented, evidently having been concerned herself by the reckless speed at which the starseeker had ripped by them. ‘And our respects to Skipper von Strada, too. Not enough like him in the Fleet.’

  ‘Respects noted, thank you, Trademaster 369,’ Martine responded, tactfully not noticing the less than complimentary remark about the rest of the Fleet. ‘And our best wishes to you for your run.’

  Buzz Burroughs returned to the command deck as the corvette sped away again, accelerating up to L25.

  ‘Bang on right, skipper,’ he told Alex, as he sat down. ‘His father had told him he could take the yacht to Sharfur as a graduation present. The fifth passenger was added at the last moment, and without his father’s knowledge, but at least he had the sense not to let his mates bring toxies aboard. They’ve promised to keep company with the Trademasters all the way.’

  ‘Thank you, Buzz.’ Alex said, with a warm look. ‘And my compliments to your team.’

  Buzz nodded acknowledgement and conveyed the skipper’s compliments to the snatch team, which evidently pleased them, though it was clearly a routine matter as far as they were concerned.

  Not so to Mako, however. He was deep in thought and contemplating the officers with an evaluating manner that caused the skipper to give him an enquiring look in return.

  ‘Problem, Inspector?’

  ‘No, no,’ Mako said, though there was, really. ‘It’s just that it’s just coming home to me how very different it is, out here. I mean no kind of criticism, believe me, but I think I am beginning to get an inkling as to why people say ‘the lawless wilds of space’. I mean, if I had come across an aircar speeding dangerously and with more people in it than it was safety-rated for, back when I was a copper, and all of them teenagers, at that, there would have been no question of that being handled as an advisory matter. I’d have grounded them at once. Even if the driver passed sobriety tests, I’d have suspended his license, as unfit to drive pending court proceedings, and I would have expected him to lose his license, and to have a fine or community service, too. But out here, obviously, the rules are very different.’

  They were looking at him with interest and some surprise on Martine Fishe’s face.

  ‘I wouldn’t have taken you for a cop,’ she commented, and then hastily caught herself up, ‘Sorry, didn’t mean that to be offensive.’

  ‘No offence taken,’ Mako assured her, and gave her a quick grin. ‘You’re right, my face did not fit at all, as I realised myself after a couple of years and switched career paths into the prison service. You didn’t know that?’ he queried, seeing that even the skipper wasn’t giving any look of recognition. ‘It was all on the form I filled in for the Fleet,’ he assured them, which made them all smile.

  ‘That was for the positive vetting,’ Alex informed him. ‘They didn’t send us a copy of that, just confirmation of your ID and security clearance. It isn’t a problem, really not – the Fleet has, generally, a very good relationship with the police, and we’ve no issue with you whatsoever. We’re just interested, that’s all. Frankly, it isn’t the first thing I’d have thought of, if I’d been asked to guess what other careers you’d had before this.’

  ‘Careers advice.’ Mako explained. ‘The combination of my socially responsible personality and satisfaction in orderly, methodical process apparently made me a good fit, on paper at least, for law enforcement. But it was never really satisfactory from either perspective. I found it frustrating not to be able to help people more and I got constant criticism from colleagues and superiors reminding me that I was a copper, not a social worker.

  ‘I did look into social work, but that looked, to me, like just another kind of form-filling exercise, processing people rather than really getting to grips with helping them. But a friend suggested the prison service, and when I looked at the role of rehab and welfare officers, I realised that was absolutely me. So I did that, then, for thirteen years, before being asked by an LPA inspector whether I’d considered becoming an inspector myself. She sold me on it as even more rewarding than what I was doing. I’ve been with the LPA now, for eleven years. I made senior inspector four years ago. I don’t want to go any higher because once you’re in directorship, it takes you out of the field and I wouldn’t want to give that up.

  ‘Other than that, I’m married, with a son at uni and a daughter in high school. I’ve no particular hobbies or interests beyond spending time with my family. I really don’t mind at all giving you a copy of that form, or telling you anything else you want to know about me.’

  ‘That isn’t necessary, Inspector, really.’ Alex told him, with a smile. ‘This is just friendly conversation, I assure you, getting to know a new shipmate. And in answer to your question, there, yes, you’re right, the rules are very different out in space.

  ‘For a start, you don’t need a license to be piloting a starship out here. It isn’t, in fact, entirely lawless – operating a starship in such a manner as to cause danger to other shipping is an offence under space law. But as with all law enforcement out here, it’s complicated. As you may have noticed, Lt Fishe requested permission to send an officer on board, which we had to have, legally, because we have no power or rights of stop and search, the way that police do groundside. We have no right to board any ship without the consent of its skipper unless we have ‘burden of proof’ evidence, either that their lives are in immediate danger or that they have category D seizable goods – drugs or weapons – aboard.

  ‘In that respect, starships enjoy the same kind of rights as a private home, groundside. The police can’t just come in and search your apartment because some guy in a bar said he thought you were dealing drugs, could they? They would have to gather sufficient credible evidence to satisfy a judge of the justification for issuing a warrant. Out here, of course, there are no courts for us to apply to for a warrant, so we have to make a decision ourselves on whether we believe a judge would confirm a warrant as justified. So unless you have the kind of evidence that you know, for sure, will stand up in court, if they refuse you permission to go aboard that’s it, you’re scuppered. So unless you have rock sol
id evidence, even when you know, as sure as you can be, that a ship is up to no good, there’s nothing you can do about it.

  ‘Fleet officers are trained to deal with that kind of frustration, otherwise it would drive us nuts. We see ourselves more in an educative role, here, than in police-style law enforcement. It is, we feel, infinitely better to educate and train people to be out here safely than to merely slap tickets on them which are unlikely to achieve successful prosecution anyway. That young man and his friends have been brought to an understanding of how irresponsible they were being, he’s now travelling safely and will certainly be more careful in future, and that’s a good result as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘Oh – yes, of course, absolutely.’ Mako agreed. ‘A great result, really, since it just doesn’t bear thinking about what might have happened there. I think what surprised me, though, was how little official process there was. Thinking back to my days as a PC, you know, even a routine traffic stop would have taken a quarter to half an hour to process, even just to do the sobriety tests.’

  Buzz looked amused. ‘We didn’t do sobriety tests,’ he said. ‘Because it is not, in fact, illegal to be intoxicated in charge of a starship outside system limits. Seriously, not,’ he grinned at Mako’s incredulous reaction. ‘Though all responsible freighters run dry-ish, it’s common, for instance, for there to be a stash of beer aboard which the skipper will allow the crew to have on shoreleave stopovers. Yachts often carry wine, beer and spirits, too. But that is not an offence, anyway, even if they are completely gonzoed, so long as the ship is on autopilot and not on a course that is liable to cause hazard to other shipping.

  ‘In fact, I believed them when they said they’re running dry. The pilot told me that his father had made it conditional on him being allowed to use the yacht that neither he nor his friends would have so much as a can of beer aboard and had sworn him to that – he said his Dad would skin him alive and never let him use the yacht again if he broke his word. But if you would like to see the ‘due process’ generated by an incident like that…’

  The next ten minutes were spent with Mako getting to grips with the way in which reports were generated on starships. It was very different from the way he was used to doing things, with all the relevant reports being filed in and generated by the ship’s log. Buzz Burroughs, it transpired, had filed a recording of the entire boarding operation into the ship’s log, routinely, and Martine Fishe had signed off on a recording of the incident in her role as watchkeeper, too. Automated processing had then generated command reports that Alex von Strada had also signed. His signature, itself, generated copies to files that would be passed routinely to all the authorities and organisations entitled to reporting on such incidents. Just because due process and bureaucratic record keeping had been handled low key, Mako realised, did not mean it wasn’t being done.

  He soon understood the need for that rapid and automated generation of files and reports, too. As a police officer, he’d been allowed time to process the paperwork, but Buzz was still showing him the reports they’d done from that incident when the next one came up. This time it was a yacht going the other way. It was rather larger than a starseeker, the first ship they’d seen for about fifteen minutes. It was evidently in some difficulties since it too was flashing red on heatscan.

  Minnow span around with no more than a word of command from Martine Fishe, and the now familiar whine of the stand-by alert. Buzz and the snatch team suited up again and mustered at the airlock as the corvette glided in to match speed with the yacht. Hailing them and requesting the nature of the emergency got no response at first and Mako sensed something of an increase in tension. The skipper was watching closely and everyone went quiet as the watch officer repeated the hail. There was relief when a voice broke in, shouting.

  ‘Oh, thank God! We haven’t seen a ship for days!’ A female voice could be heard in the background, asking agitatedly if it was a ship, and what kind was it, at which the first voice told her, ‘Does it matter? But please, please!’ He was clearly addressing them again, now. ‘We’re so lost! Please help!’

  ‘We will give you whatever assistance you need, pilot,’ Martine said, with patient authority. ‘I repeat, this is the Fleet corvette Minnow responding to your distress call. Please observe comms protocols. Do not transmit until our signal has concluded and please try to stay calm. We can’t help you until we understand the nature of the emergency. So can you please state as calmly and clearly as you can what the problem is?’

  ‘I told you, we’re lost!’ The voice responded, after the usual four second delay. ‘It’s been five days since we saw another ship! We must be way off course! There’s some problem with the autopilot and I can’t fix our position! Please, you’ve got to help us! It’s just me and Ema, here, and we’re on our honeymoon!’

  ‘All right.’ Martine grinned a bit at that, but spoke reassuringly. ‘Do we have your permission to send an officer aboard to do a safety advisory?’

  ‘Yes! YES!’ Two frantic voices came back, at that, with a tearful-sounding female one imploring, ‘Please come now!’

  ‘Uncle Buzz to the rescue,’ said Alex von Strada, and Martine grinned, touching a panel.

  ‘Snatch team away,’ she said, and then, re-engaging with the yacht, ‘We are closing with you now and our team will be with you in fifty seconds.’

  They were, too, with Buzz reporting over the comlink a few minutes later.

  ‘No tech or navigation problems,’ he said. ‘The ship is on programmed course for Chartsey and position fix is confirmed. Pilot and passenger are, however, shaken and anxious and would welcome a social assist.’

  Martine looked at the skipper, who glanced at screens, considering.

  ‘We can give them half an hour,’ he decided. ‘Bring them into central line and drop to L4, we’ll scout for a mother duck for them.’

  ‘Understood, thank you, sir,’ Buzz replied. After a brief delay while he explained this to the pilot and his bride, the Minnow’s shuttle returned to the ship. Rangi Tekawa was at the airlock to meet the young couple, ushering them straight into sickbay with soothing promises of a nice cup of tea. Only two of the five crew who’d gone with Buzz, Mako noted, had returned with him. As Minnow turned on a tight arc and accelerated away leaving the yacht behind, the skipper explained that they had left a relief crew aboard to mind the yacht while they looked for a ship further back which would take them into convoy for the rest of the journey.

  ‘They’re only seven hours away from Chartsey at their best speed,’ he observed. ‘But that’s a long time if you’re panicking.’

  ‘I don’t understand, though – how did they think they were lost?’ Mako asked, mystified.

  ‘Panic,’ Alex said simply, but seeing that more explanation was necessary than that, drew his attention to astrogation screens. ‘See this line? That’s the central line for the route between Chartsey and Sharfur. Most ships get as close to this line as they can when going intersystem, even though that does mean, yes, that you have ships running along it in opposite directions. That really isn’t a problem in space. Even if ships are only one second apart, we’re talking tens of thousands of kilometres, so the chances of them being on a collision course are, literally, astronomically remote. But even if they were on a direct collision course with everyone aboard either asleep or drunk, even starseekers have autopilots with anti-collision software. The moment the ship with the most powerful scanners sees the other coming, they will take evasive action far more quickly and safely than a human pilot could. It sets off navigation hazard alerts, but as long as the ships are on autopilot, it’s okay. Collisions,’ he explained, ‘only happen when pilots, for reasons which no doubt seem good to them at the time, are not only piloting under manual control but have disengaged automatic anti-collision systems.

  ‘But what’s happened here is that the pilot of the yacht has set a course which is twelve minutes away from the central line, and their scanners can only see around four minutes.
There have, in fact, been any number of ships passing them by. At least a hundred ships must have gone right past them, both ways, over the last few days, but they were just that bit too far away either for the yacht to see them, or for their distress signal to register. It’s perfectly possible to go for weeks in space without seeing another ship, even on busy routes. But they obviously started to panic, thinking they should be seeing other ships, and decided, for whatever reason, that this must mean that they were off course. Frantic efforts to work out their position using triangulation on stars would only have confused and panicked them more, and the more scared they got, the more convinced they became that they were lost. All they needed to do was alter course to bring them closer in to the central line, and if they wanted to pick up with another ship in convoy, drop their speed so any ships behind would catch them up.

  ‘So yes, a clearly inexperienced pilot getting into a panic, there. But you can’t just tell people not to be silly and leave them in that state. Dr Tekawa will calm them down and we may, hopefully, be able to find them an escort.’

  They did, too, quite easily, discovering a container ship that was cruising at L6 just eleven minutes behind the yacht. The situation being briefly explained to them, their skipper laughed, but readily agreed to take the yacht into company. A rendezvous having been agreed, the Minnow returned to the yacht, Buzz going to tell the couple what arrangements had been made.

  ‘I’m very sorry to have been such a nuisance.’ They had asked if they could thank the skipper personally and so were brought onto the command deck, revealed to be a fresh-faced, freckled young man in his early twenties and a young woman with a wifely look of ‘This is all your fault!’ ‘I’ve done lots of trips around Sharfur,’ the pilot explained, ‘but this is the first time I’ve gone intersystem.’

  ‘And the last,’ said his wife. ‘We are going back by liner.’