Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4)

by S J MacDonald

  Lt Commander Sartin was something of a disappointment. For someone who was believed to be spying for Lord Admiral Jennar, he showed a surprising lack of rabid Old School hostility. It was hard to imagine him ever being rabid about anything, really. Even when the more rambunctious amongst the crew tried to bait him, he did not betray any sign either of annoyance or anxiety, merely a hint of weary patience that made it clear he found such antics tedious. He did not challenge any aspect of Fourth’s custom and practice, either, not one word of criticism, not even so much as a challenging question. He just got on with his work, quiet and competent.

  Some of the other newbies were easier to wind up. The crew very quickly discovered their weaknesses. One of the Subs, an eager-beaver on his first shipboard posting, was run ragged.

  Angas Paytel was twenty two years old. He had graduated well but had the bad luck to end up ‘on station’, assigned to a Port Admiralty office to be posted aboard ship whenever an opening became available. He had been prioritised for assignment to the Fourth after it was discovered that his port admiral had blocked him getting shipboard opportunities because he ‘valued him too highly’ in the office, Fleet code for relying on him to do far more than his fair share of the work. Given his inexperience, he had been assigned to passenger liaison, considered the least demanding of the supernumerary roles.

  That, however, did not mean it was easy. Handling passenger liaison might not require much more than a pleasant manner and ability to explain things in civilian-friendly language, but that departmental role was only a fraction of what any Sub was expected to do. Like all of them, Angas was also a training instructor and rostered to be junior officer of the watch, besides deck-officer duties and assisting his watch commander. He was desperate to do well, at least to hold his own in comparison with the other secondees, all of them high flyers.

  It was that hint of desperation that the crew picked up on and exploited gleefully. Angas was delighted when they started coming to him with questions and problems. They asked him for guidance in technical work, for advice on what courses they should do, for help with courses they were already doing, for all manner of things. Seeing that they weren’t going to the other Subs like that, even the ones in their own watch, Angas felt a glow of achievement. He was a success, clearly respected by the crew.

  None of the other officers pointed out to him that the crew were playing him for laughs, even when they had him bustling about the ship for hours, hurrying from one request for help to another. Buzz was of the view that young officers learned more from experience than they ever did from being told things, and the rest of the wardroom took their cue from him. If there was some discreet chipping in to the shipboard sweepstake on how long it would take him to realise that the crew was taking the mick, there was no malice in that, either. It was just harmless fun, after all.

  There was, however, a rather more serious concern over one of the other Subs. Don Li was, on paper, exactly the kind of officer who should do very well in the Fourth. He was twenty four, hovering on the verge of promotion to full Lt. He was well qualified, ambitious, with three previous shipboard postings to his credit and a reputation as a decent, efficient officer. His application for secondment with the Fourth had stressed his desire to see more active service than he had so far, coming across as a man up for all the adventure that service with them offered.

  The reality, however, illustrated the difficulty of accepting officers on the basis of their personnel files and recorded applications sent by mail. He interviewed extremely well, said all the right things to tick all the right boxes, but it didn’t take the Fourth long to spot that he was not the adventurous type, at all. He might think he was, but there was something of a reality gap between his dreams of who he was and felt he could be, and his actual personality.

  That became apparent as soon as he started working on strip-down. He had talked enthusiastically about the wonderful, innovative way the Fourth did that, just amazing, he couldn’t wait to be part of it. When it actually came to it, though, the sight of crew working in such a chaotic way with such little supervision just pushed all his buttons as a control-oriented personality type. He might say that he thought it was brilliant that crew could just pick up the next job from the task list and go to it on their own initiative, but the reality of it clearly unnerved him. He kept asking people what they were doing, rather too airily, assuring them that he wasn’t checking on them, as such, just interested to learn how it all worked. When he kept on asking, though, on and on, his anxiety became apparent. The crew began exchanging looks behind his back, and doubts began to be expressed. If he couldn’t even handle the routine of strip-down, after all, how on earth would he cope with operations?

  Buzz did have a quiet word with him, and so for that matter did Alex, each of them pointing out how important it was to trust the crew, here, however difficult it might be to adjust habits and expectations from regular Fleet service. There were limits, after all, to allowing young officers to learn from making their own mistakes, and seeing that his anxieties were actually interfering with the work they were doing definitely crossed that line.

  He did try to be more relaxed, he really did. But day four saw him crash and burn.

  It was over something so apparently trivial that it would not have even been an issue on any regular Fleet ship. Sub-lt Li saw a couple of techs red-sealing an air processing unit. That meant that they were pausing strip-down checks on it, reporting the job as on hold and putting a safety seal on it so that it would be obvious the unit was off-line. Sub-lt Li could see from the report they’d just filed that they were taking a tea break. He knew that crew were allowed to do that at their own discretion. However, he also noticed that there was less than a quarter of an hour’s work still to be done on the air processor. Without thinking, without thinking at all, he pointed this out to them.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better to finish the job before you take a break?’

  It was a question he should never have asked, and certainly not with that tone of reproach. Both the question and the tone made it perfectly clear that he thought that they were slacking off.

  Their response was immediate, and fierce.

  ‘We don’t have to answer to you for taking a break, Sub,’ said the leading star, and as his able star assistant began to explain why they had had to take a break at that point, cut her off, ‘No, we don’t have to justify ourselves!’ he said, and glared at the disconcerted Sub-lt. ‘It is right out of order to come at us like that, trying to override our rest break and telling us off, too, like we’re doing something wrong. You have no right to do that, Sub, no right at all!’

  This was just the kind of space-lawyer attitude that Old School officers complained about. The leading star was not, in fact, one of the bullocks with the Fourth for rehab – a bullock being the Fleet term for potentially able but underachieving crew. He was one of the high flyers with them on the secondment scheme, posted to them for three years while he took a degree in engineering. Just as the Old School pointed out, though, even the best behaved personnel came back from serving with the Fourth with this insubordinate attitude, militant in standing up for their rights.

  If Don Li had apologised right then, it might have been okay, particularly if he’d managed to turn it into a joke against himself and raise a laugh. Unfortunately, all his training, habit and instincts combined to give an automatic, ego-asserting response. The worst possible thing he could have said at that point was anything along the lines of, ‘I don’t much care for your tone, crewman.’

  He said it. Within three minutes, the argument had become so heated that a petty officer came hurrying to intervene. Ali Jezno was one of the most popular men on the ship, unfailingly good humoured and always willing to help out. He was also regarded as the best story-teller on the ship, a role in which he had triumphed during operations at Junter’s Drift. He put his verbal agility to good use, then, managing to calm things down and hear both sides of it. Then, with the utmost tact, he
told Mr Li that the ratings were actually right, that he was himself in breach of disciplinary protocols for pulling them up like that, and breaching health and safety regulations, too, by telling them to work on past a safety-designated break.

  Buzz Burroughs confirmed that, too, arriving on the scene within minutes and taking the Sub off for a chat in the skipper’s daycabin.

  ‘If you’d checked their work logs,’ Buzz told him, quite kindly, ‘you would have seen that they had hit the five hour health and safety limit for working without a break, so they were doing absolutely the right thing by standing down at that point. Incidentally, they had both already completed the eight hours of duty required during strip-down so were already working on voluntarily in their own time. And irrespective of the fact that you were wrong to try to stop them taking a mandatory safety break and insulting them by accusing them of slacking when they were working on their own time anyway, irrespective of that, dear boy, they were absolutely right. If you pause for a moment and think, you will remember that under our regulations, crew have the right to take comfort breaks at any time, even when on watch, other than at times when the ship is on alert. So you didn’t, you know, you really didn’t, have any right to challenge them on that. And we are, here, very strong indeed on the principle that while officers are entitled to compliance and courtesy from crew, so are crew entitled to compliance with policy and regulation from officers. You may recall that I did advise you that giving undeserved reprimands to crew is not tolerated here, either by them or by us. They have logged this as a complaint against you for abuse of your authority, and I am afraid, dear boy, that I am going to have to uphold that, with a logged response that you were given a procedural advisory.’

  That was the mildest possible official response to a complaint, but it just devastated Don Li. Any kind of disciplinary in the ship’s log and his own personnel record was a disaster, as far as he was concerned. In his own eyes, he had failed. He managed not to cry – just – but there was a quiver in his voice as he admitted that he was struggling.

  ‘It’s so much harder than I thought it would be,’ he confessed, and gave Buzz an imploring look. ‘Do … do you think I can hack it, sir?’

  Buzz smiled. ‘If I did not think so,’ he told him, gently, ‘you would not still be aboard the ship. The important question here is whether you believe you can hack it. It will take a huge amount of effort, after this, to win the genuine respect of our crew, there’s no denying that. If you feel that it isn’t worthwhile to make that effort, that service with us isn’t for you after all, I will of course respect your decision. If you’re willing to dig deep and find your true grit and determination, however, I will back you all the way.’

  ‘Yes sir – thank you, sir.’ Don Li took a breath, and squared his shoulders, no question in his mind about what he wanted. ‘So, what do I do, sir?’

  Buzz gave him sensible advice, and Don went back to work. He apologised sincerely to the crew he had offended and took it with good humour when he discovered that he had a new nickname; Teabreak. Then he set to doing just as Buzz had advised, keeping his head down, getting on with his work and just trusting to time and effort to prove to the crew that he was neither a bully nor an idiot.

  He had little time to brood over it, at least. Quite apart from getting to grips with new responsibilities while the ship was being continuously taken to bits and put back together around them, they were managing, somehow, to maintain a pretty active social life. Therik had one of the biggest Fleet bases in the League, with more than thirty warships in port just then. Fourth’s personnel were in high demand during the brief period when they were back at work and still in port, whether that be invitations for the officers to dine in wardrooms or to the crew for mess-deck hospitality. They were all expected to do their share of ship visiting, a social obligation taken very seriously in the Fleet, just as they were all expected to do their part, regardless of how busy they might be, in hosting visits to their own ship.

  They could have stayed in port longer – the eight days allotted for shakedown was actually a minimum. By rights, they could have taken up to two months on training status, given the number of new officers and crew they had taken aboard. There was not one of them, though, who would have delayed launch even by an hour.

  All of this, of course – all the training and checking, the buzz of preparation – was driven by the countdown to them heading out on operations.

  There were clues, in that, which had been pored over and debated endlessly. Admiralty orders were that the ship should be supplied and prepped for a full six months, the longest it could stay out without re-supply. There had been a warning with boarding orders that the ship might be required to be operational for an extended length of time, but that was a warning always given in Fleet ops. Much more significant was the memo the First Lord had sent to Alex, requesting that he advise crew and their families that the ship might be out of communication for a period of weeks, even months, because of the nature of the operations they’d be undertaking.

  There were two lead favourites in the betting on what those operations were likely to be. It came down to whether Customs and Excise or the Diplomatic Corps had won their applications to the Senate Sub-Committee which oversaw the Fourth. Dix Harangay was on that committee and would certainly have a say, but spacer goss – gossip being the lifeblood of the spacer community – was that there’d been some kind of showdown at a Sub-Committee meeting, with Customs and Excise making their case for the Fourth to be sent to Dortmell while the Diplomats argued for them to go to Quarus.

  Both had very good cases, it had to be said. The Fourth had demonstrated very effective skills in anti-drugs operations and Dortmell was infamous as the drugs capital of the League. Nobody could deny that it would be an invaluable use of their time if they were sent on law enforcement operations there.

  At the same time, though, the Diplomats also had a very good case. Human exploration ships had first discovered Quarus more than a century before, far across the gap between two spiral arms of the galaxy, known as the Gulf. It took even the fastest of their ships a year to make that journey, there and back. Initially, things had gone very well. The quarians were genetically engineered, with several species or adapts suited for different environments within their ocean world. They did not have starship technology but they did have much more advanced bioengineering and medical technology than the League, and they were willing to share it. They were peaceful, friendly, and communication with them had initially been rated so high that it was felt that there was full mutual understanding, the golden prize of exodiplomacy.

  That had, however, turned out to be a fundamental lack of understanding in itself. Quarians were highly empathic and much of their communication was simply above the level humans could detect. It also turned out that what appeared at first to be compatible cultures were nothing of the kind. The quarians had obligingly produced a president since their visitors had asked to meet with their leader, and they had even provided a presidential office where they could meet. It had taken a while, though, for it to be understood that the humans expected them to provide the same president each time, not just anyone who happened to be available, and much longer for them to understand that the humans expected the president to be in a position to make decisions and speak for the rest of them. That was just not how quarians functioned, at all, since theirs was very much a consensus society run by a process of continuous referendum.

  Things had got worse after the diplomats had explained that the Homo Sapiens Identification Act meant that they would not be allowed to visit League worlds, or at least not openly. Discreet visits had been offered, but the quarians were not prepared to sneak around in secret visits – the friendship must be open, they said, or it was no friendship at all.

  An attempt had been made, some seventy years previously, to go public with the discovery of Quarus. Public reaction had been almost wholly negative, though, ranging from fear to revulsion, so the attempt had been h
astily backtracked. Most people in the League now, if they knew about Quarus at all, considered it a myth, or some hoax, on a par with lake monsters and fairies.

  The reality, though, was that diplomatic relations with Quarus had been going steadily downhill. The quarians understood well enough that the people of the League were not ready to welcome them as non-human visitors to their worlds. Their attitude to that, though, understandably, was that in that case they felt it to be best if the humans came back when they were ready to enter into a mature, open relationship. The Diplomatic Corps had spent decades trying to persuade them to maintain contact, but they were known to be getting increasingly concerned about it. The Fourth were the obvious people to send to do some relationship building, there – not only did they already have experience in exodiplomacy, but they had a non-human officer actually serving with them. It was arguably even more important to try to repair that relationship, with all the potential benefits for humanity, than to send the Fourth up against the drug lords of Dortmell.

  Most of the money on the Heron was on them being sent to Quarus, and if bets were taken across the Fleet, that’s what most of them would have put their dollar on, too. Exodiplomacy carried a trump-card status, always considered to be of over-riding importance. If the relationship with Quarus really was deteriorating to the point at which they were about to close their own border to humans, that would certainly have won.

  Other possibilities were also being discussed, of course. One of the rank outsiders was the possibility that they might be sent to track down the Space Monster of Sector 17, a joke amongst spacers but actually founded on real historical glimpses of something very big and fast. Similar sightings had been recorded in the Novamas sector, after all, and that had turned out to be the Gider, so it was possible that another world was scouting in their space, hovering on the brink of making contact.