Mission Zero (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘But…’ her husband protested feebly, ‘we can’t just abandon the yacht, love…’

  She gave him a Look, making it very clear what he could do with the yacht, and he winced.

  ‘All right, I’ll go back by liner,’ she said, with a steely note. ‘And you bring your precious yacht if you want. But you’re never getting me on it again.’

  ‘Actually, you were perfectly safe.’ It was the skipper, surprisingly, who stepped in there, with a little timely marital intervention. ‘It is quite common for people to get a little anxious on intersystem runs if they’re not seeing other ships. Your best bet,’ he told them both, ‘if you’re a little nervous about making the return trip by yourselves, is to hook up either with a yacht club convoy or a freighter to travel in company with them or even, if you want someone on board, hire a deckhand. There are hundreds of spacers who’d pick up a berth to Sharfur, no problem, and it would cost you less than liner tickets.’

  ‘Oh!’ The pilot looked at his wife, who gave a noncommittal hunch of her shoulders. ‘Well, we’ll, er, think about it, thank you,’ he said.

  Buzz took them back to their yacht and stayed with them until the freighter caught them up. Then, having seen them settled in company, Minnow signalled best wishes to both ships and resumed their patrol.

  ‘And this is just routine, for you?’ Mako asked, amazed by the speed with which they set that incident behind them and turned their attention to looking ahead.

  ‘Yes, absolutely – this is why we came out this way,’ Alex confirmed, placidly, ‘because it’s always like this.’

  ‘Always?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ he said. ‘I certainly can’t think of any time we’ve been on this route for as long as an hour without having to do incident response.’

  ‘But…’ Mako struggled to get his head around that, ‘is Minnow the only ship patrolling this route, then?’

  Alex looked amused. ‘No – our sister ship, Krill, on the Sharfur station, routinely patrols back and forth and here are a couple of gunboats which sometimes rip through. But you’ve seen the traffic stream, Inspector – it would need more than a hundred ships to patrol this route thoroughly. And this is just one very short local lane, one of the shortest shipping runs in the League. It is just not physically possible to have more than tiny flitting presence in any area and it is, if you’ll forgive me saying so, very much groundsider thinking even to ask why we can’t. I understand, you’re used to being in an environment where authorities are always to hand, emergency services on call, traffic lanes being monitored and cruised by police patrols, all that. But this is space, it is vast and wild and free. Out here, the only help you have is other ships. And when ships can pass within minutes of each other, without registering on one another’s scopes, that means most of the time you are out on your own.

  ‘People should know that when they leave port. Spacers do, of course. This is our home, this is where we live. But nobody, nobody, not even the dumbest starseeker owner, can say they weren’t warned. Everybody tells them, from port authorities to yacht clubs and Fleet advisories galore, once you leave system limits, you are on your own. There is nobody to call and nobody is responsible for you, but you. We are not legally obliged to patrol this space lane, nor are we under orders to do so. I’m just bringing us out this way because I do know that it is a high incidence route. The very fact that it is so short and busy, see, leads people who aren’t sufficiently qualified or experienced to feel that it’s okay. And even a few minor assists in passing makes it worthwhile, I feel, to swing out this way rather than going on the quieter Karadon route. It is routine, though, and we will be at this till around midnight, with every likelihood of incidents like these going on all evening. So do, you know, feel free to go and get some dinner and turn in whenever you like.’

  ‘Oh – I’d rather stay if that’s all right,’ said Mako, feeling that he’d never felt less tired, though he was, admittedly, starting to feel hungry. The skipper smiled agreement, but before he could say anything, another blip was appearing on their scopes, and this one too was flashing red.

  It was another starseeker, this one very clearly in some difficulties because it was spinning like a bullet as it travelled. For reasons incomprehensible to Mako, the Minnow’s crew found this hilarious. Lt Fishe was obliged to call for quiet as gales of mirth erupted on the command deck.

  ‘Starseekers!’ The Lt said, feelingly, but spoke to the rating at the helm with decisive professionalism. ‘Match velocity for comms.’

  ‘Aye ma’am,’ the helm acknowledged, grinning broadly. A moment later Mako was obliged to look away from the visual screen he’d been watching as the stars appeared to go into a dizzying blur.

  ‘We’re spinning around them to engage with their comms arrays.’ Buzz informed him, showing him on another schematic readout that Minnow was now whipping around the spinning yacht at such a speed even the schematic was blurring. It was taking a few moments to establish a comms link but nobody, Mako noticed, seemed concerned, even when a terrified wail came over the signalling system.

  ‘I’m out of control! Can you get me off? Please, get me off!’

  ‘Stay calm, pilot,’ Lt Fishe told her. ‘This is the Fleet corvette Minnow responding to your distress call. We will give you whatever assistance you need but we need, first, to establish the nature of the emergency. You have an ‘Uncontrolled Rotation’ error reading on your autopilot, yes? Are there any other error readings or alerts?’

  ‘I don’t know!!!’ The pilot yelled back, as if feeling that the gulf of space between them could only be bridged by verbal volume. ‘I’m in the survival pod! Please get me off! Shall I fire the pod?’

  ‘No, no, repeat, no, pilot, do not, repeat, not, disengage survival pod.’ Martine Fishe said, firmly. ‘I need you to go to the flight console, all right? Just please go to the console, sit down there and tell me if there are any other error readings or alerts. Don’t worry, I don’t believe that you are in any danger, we just need to be sure we know what’s happening, all right?’

  ‘Not in any danger?’ The pilot shrieked. ‘The effing ship is totally out of control!’

  ‘No, no, honestly it’s not, you’re maintaining course and speed is stable.’ Martine said, soothingly. ‘You’re just spinning, okay, which I understand is alarming, but it’s not actually dangerous. So we just need to check that there’s nothing more serious going on, then I’ll talk you through bringing the spin under control. Don’t worry, we won’t leave you. My name is Martine, okay? And it’s Agnetha, right?’

  ‘Aggie,’ the other woman corrected, sounding a little more together, now, though still very frightened as she reported, ‘I’m at the console. It keeps flashing ‘Uncontrolled Rotation’ on the screen, and it says ‘engage port thruster’, but when I tried it just went Blaaaaaaaa!’

  ‘Yes, starseekers do that.’ Martine said. ‘But are there any other red lights or error messages, Aggie?’

  ‘No… no, I can’t see any.’

  ‘All right. Good. Take your hands right off the controls and just listen first, okay? Don’t touch anything yet. In a minute, I’m going to ask you to open up the manual override screen. We’re going to change the setting on the thruster controls. What’s happened, see, is that your controls are set to ‘safety off’ , which has turned off the automatic compensating system and allowed the ship to go into a spin, which I guess happened after you used the lavatory, right?’

  ‘Yes! Yes, it did!’ The woman sounded amazed. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘It’s a design issue on starseekers,’ said Martine, with a reproving glance at a rating who was guffawing. ‘What happens is that their lavatories fire out waste with an explosive decompression which puts a spinning force on the ship. If it isn’t compensated for automatically by thrusters, you get this fast rotation. It’s not dangerous in itself, but it does knock out your comms unless another ship gets into synchronised spin with you as we have. So, just stay with me here, do exactl
y as I tell you and we’ll have you stabilised again in less than a minute, all right?’

  She talked the pilot through a straightforward series of commands and sure enough, when she told her to engage the ‘safety on’ control, the little starseeker stabilised itself at once, firing thrusters and settling onto an even keel. Minnow immediately took station alongside, and what Mako was already recognising as routine proceeded as before. Permission was requested and granted for an officer to go aboard on ‘safety advisory’ and Martine reported, ‘snatch team away’. This time, however, Buzz reported a few minutes later that the pilot had declared the ship as salvage, which did cause some surprise on the command deck.

  ‘Sorry, Mr Burroughs, please confirm, did you say it has been declared salvage?’ Lt Fishe queried.

  ‘Affirmative. Pilot is requesting emergency passage on first available vessel returning to Chartsey, and is adamant in refusing all other options. She insists on declaring the ship salvage and voiding all rights of ownership over it.’

  Martine looked at the skipper, who had raised his eyebrows slightly.

  ‘You’d best bring her aboard,’ he said, which Buzz acknowledged. There was some delay, however, which Buzz informed them was due to the pilot insisting on packing her personal belongings and bringing them with her.

  She came aboard, in fact, with three suitcases, and was revealed to be a very glamorous middle-aged lady who did not seem the type to be on a solo intersystem trip on a small yacht. The situation, however, became clear after she was brought to the command deck. Embracing Martine Fishe with fervour and telling her ‘Thank you! Thank you! You saved my life!’, she became rather more coherent when introduced to the skipper, who asked her if she really understood what she was doing in declaring the yacht salvage.

  ‘You do know that the insurance won’t pay out on that?’ he clarified. ‘As a voluntary abandonment of a spaceworthy ship, with no medical grounds, no insurance would pay out on it.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she said, and indeed, the costliness of her clothing, jewellery and luggage made it apparent that she was someone who might dispose of a forty thousand dollar yacht without financial hardship. The fireheart diamond on her finger was undoubtedly worth more than that just in itself. ‘I got it in the divorce,’ she explained, adding with a vicious undertone, ‘I should have sent it for scrap then, but I thought I might as well get some use from it. I’ve been out to Capital Gate any number of times on it, without any problems, but he did it, didn’t he? He rigged it, changed the controls, so that would happen! He could have killed me!’

  ‘Safety controls can be reset by all kinds of procedures,’ the skipper told her. ‘And I’m afraid that even if it could be proven that your ex-husband had changed the setting on that one, it might be malicious but it was not life threatening. And ultimately, of course, you, as the registered pilot, are responsible for checking all such settings both prior to launch and in flight.’

  ‘I had a club pilot for the launch,’ she told him indignantly, as if he should have known that. ‘So that makes her responsible, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Did she give you a handover report?’ Alex queried, at which Buzz cut in, gently.

  ‘The report showed safety on for thruster compensation at launch,’ he informed the skipper. ‘It was changed three hours and forty seven minutes post-launch.’

  ‘But I didn’t…’ The starseeker owner started to protest and then stopped, eyes widening. ‘There was a thing that came up,’ she recalled, ‘wanting to do diagnostics, and I clicked the ‘fix all’ when it was done. But that was yesterday.’

  ‘Yes, that would have been it.’ Alex said blandly. ‘You have been running without thruster stabilisation since then, till, how can I put this, the lavatorial waste system fired out solid matter.’

  From the mess deck came the sound of heroically stifled laughter. Even Mako, as he understood what had happened, was obliged to look down in order to maintain composure. He couldn’t help but feel some sympathy for her as a fellow civilian. It could only be humiliating to be told that your ship had gone into a spin because you’d turned off the compensating thrusters and had a poo. But at the same time, he felt amazed that anyone so very obviously incompetent to operate a starship could have headed off out into space in one.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and then, armoured with the massive arrogance of the truly stupid, dismissed that impatiently. ‘Well, I don’t care why it happened! I never want to set foot on that stinking rotten little tug ever again! And if that’s supposed to be ‘finding yourself’ then I have done all the finding I intend to, thanks! I don’t want any more to do with it! Just get me on a civilised ship heading back to Chartsey. Do whatever you want with it! Keep it, sell it, blow it up if you want, I don’t care! I waive all rights to it and I’ll sign whatever you want.’

  The skipper, however, was still not prepared to allow her to just do that and insisted on having Dr Tekawa ensure that she was unharmed by her experience and in a frame of mind to be making legally important decisions. She wasn’t happy about it but Alex von Strada made it clear that that was how it had to be, so she went off to sickbay. Everyone was watching the skipper. The corvette’s most junior officer, indeed, came up onto the command deck. Sub-Lt Dan Tarrance was also on the tagged and flagged programme. Minnow was his first shipboard assignment since graduating. He was in the third month of a five month assignment to the ship to see best practice in the highest rated ship of its class. He also had connections in the Second Fleet Irregulars R&D Division and had called in favours to get them the new computer hardware that was the envy of the Fleet.

  ‘Permission to ready a missile, sir?’ he asked the skipper, as hopeful as a puppy that had scented treats.

  ‘No, Mr Tarrance,’ the skipper said, though tolerantly, and explained, ‘having a live missile locked onto it might be construed, if there are legal disputes later, as intimidating pressure. So all due process, Sub-Lt. And rest assured, if she does let us have it, you may scuttle it.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, sir!’ The young officer bounced off joyfully and everyone else grinned, too, with happy anticipation. All except Mako, who was staring at the skipper in astonishment.

  ‘You’re serious, Skipper?’

  ‘Certainly.’ Alex said, with a twinkle in his eyes. ‘We can’t leave an abandoned ship superlight in a shipping lane,’ he pointed out. ‘It would constitute a shipping hazard. If we were heading in from patrol and it wasn’t going to slow us down too much, I might put a salvage crew aboard, maybe, but I am not going to send any of my crew back to Chartsey, that just isn’t an option. We might conceivably be able to find a civilian ship prepared to put a salvage crew aboard it, but there’s a ton of paperwork if you do that. Taking it out of space lanes and scuttling it – blowing it up – is the quickest, safest way to deal with it. And it’s one less starseeker out here, which is a result in my book.’

  Mako found himself laughing, though he was astounded, too. ‘You can do that, though? Just use missiles and blow up a ship?’

  ‘Oh, we’ll only need one, unless Mr Tarrance is really off his game,’ said the skipper, to much mirth from the crew. ‘But yes, I have the authority to fire live missiles and guns, Inspector. This is a warship, after all, and safe disposal of an abandoned ship is well within my right to authorise live fire. If we had more time, we might rig it to the best evasive manoeuvres it can do to give our gun crews some target practice. But I really can’t justify that when there are bound to be other ships on this route needing help. So we’ll just have to settle, providing the lady does sign the salvage papers, for a quick missile. Laser cannon could destroy it easily enough but that’s messy, you see, always leaves a scatter of debris that is a navigation hazard in itself. So we’ll use a superlight missile, which reduces it to tachyons.’

  The yacht’s owner did sign the salvage papers, which the skipper accepted on official confirmation from the ship’s medic that she was in a fit condition, legally, to do so, and the missile was rema
rkably quick. The relief crew they’d had aboard set the starseeker on the course ordered by the skipper to take it out of space lanes. By the time they had their crew back and Sub-Lt Tarrance confirmed missile ready to fire, they were already some minutes out of the traffic flow.

  ‘Missile authorised for fire,’ Alex said.

  Seconds later the starseeker flared into just the same kind of silent puff of bright light that Mako remembered from the news when a yacht had collided with a tug some years before. Everyone on the Minnow cheered, even the former owner of the yacht crowing with satisfaction at seeing it destroyed.

  ‘Thank you!’ she said, and added, again with that underlying vindictive note. ‘I wish I could see his face when he finds out!’

  ‘Our pleasure, ma’am,’ said the skipper, pleasantly, and then, with a touch to a companel, ‘Good job, Mr Tarrance.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ the Sub responded, still laughing.

  ‘And Lt Fishe,’ the skipper’s smile commended her, too, for a job well done. ‘Perhaps you’d offer Ms Armingham the hospitality of the wardroom till we can get her aboard a liner.’ As the Lt smiled agreement, the skipper informed the now ship-less passenger, ‘We’ll try to get you aboard the Ruby Star, which should be a couple of hours up-route, all right?’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and went off happily enough, then, with Lt Fishe, the skipper relieving her of the watch so that she could look after their guest.

  Mako, feeling less inclined than ever to go to the wardroom for dinner, was glad to accept the offer of a ‘bite’ on the command deck. This, he discovered, was traditional watch fare, a hot baguette and a mug of soup served in freefall safe containers. They went down very well indeed, with a pleasant feeling of being part of things, as Alex and Buzz had the same. They did, as Buzz confirmed, normally have a proper wardroom dinner in the evenings but hot rolls and soup were always an option.

  ‘Fair warning, though,’ said Buzz, with a twinkle. ‘If you miss more proper meals than Dr Tekawa feels is justified, he will come and look reproachfully at you and give you leaflets about stress, digestion, and unbalanced chi.’