Lady Ursele was pleased by that. She’d been told that Alex had closed his heart to any romantic life after the death of his child and a bitter divorce and that other than an obviously casual fling with an old friend, Migan had been his only romantic relationship. She could see the warmth in him when he talked about her, the frankness with which he shared his feelings. By the time he’d finished telling her about Migan, she knew beyond doubt that this was a man she could trust.
So she turned, then, to the topic of their arrival at Lundane.
Alex had never been able to master speaking Pirrellothian, at least not to any standard which made Shion do anything but giggle and beg him not to try. There were subtleties of intonation which made nonsense of words if slightly the wrong stress or tonal shift was used and his accent, she told him, was abominable.
He had, however, learned to understand it pretty well when it was spoken slowly. So he understood what the chamlorn said and stared at her dumbfounded even before the interpreter came out calmly with the translation.
‘Her grace wishes to proceed directly to Lundane.’
‘Uh…’ Alex took a moment before responding, calmly, ‘I regret that that will not be possible, your grace. We must proceed to X-Base Sentinel in order to obtain a suitable civilian vessel for onward transit to Lundane.’
‘Her grace,’ the interpreter said, ‘wishes to proceed directly to Lundane, aboard this vessel.’
‘I regret,’ said Alex, ‘that that will not be possible, your grace. For a League warship to appear at Lundane would be perceived as highly provocative behaviour even by the delegations from worlds such as Prisos and Arak. And were the Marfikians to become aware of it, as we have to assume that they would, the reprisals against Lundane and our border at Cherque would be dreadful. It is too great a risk to take with the lives and safety of the people of Lundane, your grace.’
‘Her grace observes,’ said the interpreter, though Alex’s jaw had already dropped as he heard what the chamlorn said for himself and he was staring, utterly lost for words, ‘that there will be no risk, as you will remove all the weapons from your ship.’
Sixteen
‘I’m sorry, skipper.’ Eldovan was visibly shaken at the private meeting Alex was holding with her and with Buzz, three hours later. ‘I’m going to have to ask for a medical evaluation.’
Alex nodded, not at all surprised. If he’d been in her place as the skipper of a warship and the flag officer in command of the mission had told her that he wanted every bit of weaponry to be stripped off it before they went into Lundane, he’d have been asking for a medical evaluation, too.
‘No problem,’ he agreed and kept to himself the thought that he’d quite like to see the results of that as well. He was not, even now, entirely clear on how Chamlorn Lady Ursele had moved him from a position of ‘no, absolutely not, never, no way, over my dead body’ determination into ‘yes, your grace.’ She hadn’t argued him into it or even reasoned with him to express her point of view. She’d simply heard out all his objections, quietly attentive but in some way so sure that things were going to happen just the way she wanted them that she didn’t even need to make a case.
She had, Alex knew, extraordinary abilities even amongst Pirrellothians. Shion had spoken of her as the most revered of the chamlorn, the one they themselves turned to for guidance and advice. And she had said, too, that her aunt could get a stadium full of angry, quarrelling people to sit down quietly and listen to her.
And she could, evidently, turn around one of the most stubborn-minded officers in the Fleet over such a vital point that he’d have sworn there was nothing in the galaxy could make him do this.
‘She is right, of course.’ Buzz said, startling both of them into staring at him. ‘In terms of not being perceived as a threat or provocation by the Marfikians, if we go in completely unarmed. When they go into port, it is the defences and the weaponised ships they take out, unarmed ships and infrastructure are undamaged.’
‘Yes,’ Alex said. ‘So Lady Ursele… well, no, she didn’t say it. She just sat there listening until I said it myself.’ He shook his head. ‘I have the oddest feeling that I’ve talked myself into this,’ he admitted. ‘Which is insane. But I do seem to have been having an argument with myself, there,and lost.’
‘Some might say that means you also won,’ said Buzz, but Alex just looked at him in a way which made it apparent he really wasn’t in the mood to discuss philosophy.
‘But the thing is, I have said that I will do it,’ he said. ‘And I only meant to say, at that stage, that I would give it some thought and discuss it with my senior team. But somehow it just felt like the decision had been made, that what she was asking was all to the good and it would all be fine. And the really scary thing is, I still feel that!’
Buzz nodded. ‘It is a breathtaking proposition,’ he allowed. ‘But if you can look at it from a detached perspective, it would be a brilliant diplomatic coup.’
‘Would it?’ Eldovan said, unable to get past the horror of removing every gun and missile from the League’s best warship and taking it, utterly defenceless, into a port full of hostile ships and which they had to assume was under constant Marfikian observation. ‘The only words I can think right now are suicide mission,’ she confessed. ‘Skipper! If the Marfikians didn’t take us out then the Prisosans and Araki certainly would!’
‘They don’t have armed ships at Lundane, either,’ Buzz pointed out. ‘The Lundanians won’t allow it – unarmed vessels only, strictly neutral port.’
‘Oh come on,’ Eldovan said. ‘There’s always ways around that. Even garbage can be an effective missile if you fire it fast enough.’
Buzz conceded the point – he’d come close once to being killed by a cargo container flung at his shuttle by a pirate ship they were pursuing, so he was in no position to deny that.
‘It is a neutral port, though,’ he said. ‘The only neutral port and far too valuable as such for everybody for anyone to break the Accord.’
It was, indeed, the only diplomatic achievement which had held through the Marfikian era, the Lundane Accord, by which all other worlds swore commitment to never sending armed ships there. Lundane itself was completely undefended and all of them knew what kind of terrible tyranny they’d be unleashing on them if the presence of their armed ships in the system brought the Marfikians there. So it was an accord, primarily, sworn to protect Lundane and secondarily to provide them all with the only neutral ground where they might meet and trade.
‘And the point is,’ Buzz said, ‘that if we turn up there with the finest destroyer in the Fleet stripped of its weapons, that’s one hell of a gesture, not only in the lengths we are prepared to go to in honouring the Accord ourselves, but of our trust in it, our trust that it will protect us from any attacks by other shipping in the system. And as the introductory move for Lady Ursele’s arrival… wow,’ he grinned. ‘What an entrance!’
‘It will be that all right,’ Alex said.
Eldovan shuddered. ‘The shame of it!’ she implored. ‘A warship with no guns? Alex!’
‘It will be,’ Alex said, ‘an act of humility, no getting away from that. But since one of the biggest diplomatic issues we have with the Prisosans and Araki is that both regard us as arrogant condescending imperialistic swine, an act of humility may score us vital points, there. Us, I mean, the Fourth – the regular Fleet could never even consider doing this, not for a moment. But we are an irregular unit and we are so for a reason. We can do the unorthodox, we can find the creative solution. And if we can step aside from the mass of ‘The League’ and introduce ourselves as a unit prepared to approach those at Lundane in a spirit of humility, we may be in a position to engage with them at a more productive level.’
‘If we survive it,’ Eldovan said grimly, ‘If they don’t seize the ship and take us off for what our LIA friend calls ‘hot questioning’, if we make it out of there at all, Alex, we will never, ever, live it down. We will go down in Fleet history
as the destroyer which turned itself into a yacht.’
‘I can live with that,’ Alex said. ‘If it means we also go down in history as the ship which brought the Prisosan and Araki ambassadors into the same room. Her grace,’ he explained, ‘is intending to keep her embassy here aboard ship for the first three months of our stay, while the Lundanians build her an embassy groundside. So we will be, you see, an integral part of her mission. And the potential benefit, there, of improving our own relationships with those worlds, outweighs the risk. Or at least, I believe it does. But before we go any further in discussing this, of course, we should make absolutely clear, for the record, that I am in my right mind, fully lucid and not in any way under any undue influence.’ He smiled briefly at Eldovan. ‘So, let’s ask Hetty to come in.’
Commander Hetty Leavam was the ship’s full time Internal Affairs officer, a lady of unimpeachable rectitude. She was also a recruiting officer for Fleet Intelligence, though this did not appear on her CV.
Called into the commodore’s daycabin, she listened without evident reaction as the flag officer explained that he was volunteering for a full command-fitness work up on a point in which his judgement would be called into question.
‘Skip Eldovan,’ he said, ‘has recommended that I undertake such evaluation and I want it on record that I concur with her reasons entirely and that whatever the outcome there is no question here of command challenge or insubordination.’
‘Understood, sir,’ said Hetty, flicking a glance at Eldovan and then bringing her hard, quelling stare back to Alex. ‘And the point on which your judgement may be called into question?’
‘I propose,’ said Alex, ‘to adapt the ship for diplomatic purpose as an Embassy vessel. And as Embassy vessels are unarmed, that will entail removing our weaponry. And once unarmed, we will be deployed at Lundane.’
Hetty stared at him for five seconds without moving. Then, without saying a word, she opened up a file and started on the command fitness paperwork.
Alex passed, though Simon was mystified as to why he should suddenly want to be checked out for command fitness and not inclined at first to take the matter seriously.
‘I mean it,’ Alex insisted. ‘I need a full work up, Simon. I’m about to make a decision which people out there will not believe I could have made in my right mind, not unless there is a complete work-up completed by someone of such status there won’t be any argument about it. So I need the lot, all right? Psych and physical. I need it to be absolutely clear that I am not delusional, that I’m not under the influence of any kind of drugs, that I haven’t been hypnotised… everything you can think of, all right?’
Simon was thorough. It was six hours before Alex was released from sickbay with the most comprehensive command-fitness evaluation ever filed to Admiralty records.
By then, of course, everyone knew. Not about the decision itself, but that the skipper wanted to do something that was so out there Skip Eldovan had called in IA to have him evaluated.
That was so shocking, in the Fleet, that it had the whole ship in turmoil. And very few of them, Eldovan noted, were on her side.
‘Good job I’m thick skinned,’ she observed, as crew avoided her as if she had developed a stomach-churningly disgusting body odour. She had challenged the fitness of her CO to do his job, an extreme event on any ship, but this was the skipper, the man the Fourth regarded as only a couple of steps down the pecking order from God Almighty. Nobody, but nobody, had a go at their skipper without the Fourth uniting in his defence. But that was just too horribly confusing when the person doing it was their own Skip Eldovan, a lady they also had the highest respect for and liked, too. No assurances from Eldovan, or from Hetty Leavam, or from anyone else, convinced them that Alex really was happy to undergo the tests and had volunteered to do so. Only seeing them together afterwards would really convince them that there hadn’t been a massive falling out between the commodore and skipper.
It didn’t take them long, though, to be satisfied of that. When Alex went onto the command deck it was to be met with the frankest of grins from Eldovan, which he returned with a chuckle.
‘Simon,’ he observed, ‘had way too much fun with that. But, anyway, all good.’ He smiled at her. ‘So, we’ll talk tomorrow, yes?’
Eldovan nodded, glad of the time to get her head around the idea and sleep on it at least before they had to start discussing it in detail, as something that was actually going to happen.
Then Silvie appeared, coming to check up on them as she too had picked up on the goss that Alex and Eldovan were at loggerheads. She knew it wasn’t true, of course, she’d seen them both in the interval, but she also knew that her observation of the two of them together would settle the matter once and for all.
‘People seem to think you two are butting heads,’ she said, with a shake of her head and a grin. ‘Don’t they get some daft ideas?’
‘You’d think they’d know us better than that,’ Eldovan agreed, scoring the only point she felt she had to in embarrassing the crew who’d doubted her.
‘You would,’ Alex affirmed. ‘But kids worry when they think Mum and Dad might be fighting.’
Eldovan stared at him for a moment and then gave a whoop of hilarity. If there was one aspect of her relationship with Alex which was completely clear and simple, it was that the two of them could never be in any kind of romantic entanglement. Eldovan might look superficially like Alex’s preferred type of intelligent, vivacious, socially confident ladies, but Eldovan had no romantic interest in men whatsoever. The only chemistry there was, or could ever be between them, was that of mates in the meaning of friends.
‘Bagsy I’m Dad, then,’ she said and Alex guffawed too, at the thought of himself as Mummy to his crew.
Tensions eased, the crew began to focus their attention on just what on earth it could be that the skipper wanted to do, which he’d gone to such lengths to ensure that nobody could say he was crazy. Ideas ranged as far and wide as imagination could roam, but the few who actually suggested that the skipper might be planning to take them straight into Lundane were cried down at once – come on, don’t be dumb, that really would be insane.
They had to wait until the next day, after a lengthy meeting between Alex, Eldovan, Hetty Leavam and Buzz, to be told what the score was.
‘I intend,’ Alex said, ‘to take a suitable unarmed vessel into port at Lundane, where Chamlorn Lady Ursele will maintain her embassy for three months aboard ship, using that as her base while groundside facilities are built for her at Embassy Avenue.’
He paused and there was a slightly baffled silence. This was news? This was what they’d been expecting to happen anyway, other than for the fact that the chamlorn would be using the transit ship as her embassy rather than moving into other accommodation groundside.
‘I’m sure that all of you are familiar,’ said Alex, ‘with the Embassy ships deployed on exodiplomacy missions…’ he put up an image of one on a subscreen, as if to remind them. They were deity-class carriers in design, but had never been fitted with weapons. Instead they’d been discreetly fitted out as mobile Embassies, accommodating the hundreds of office and other personnel employed by any embassy groundside. They were crewed by the Fleet, but only with a tiny, skeleton crew whose only role was to get the ship where the Diplomatic Corps wanted it to be and to keep it operating safely for the many years it might be on station. There had been such an Embassy ship at Quarus for the longest time. And there was one at Carrearranis now too, as well as the one out at the border with Gide. ‘They are,’ Alex pointed out, ‘converted warships. They were chosen because the Diplomatic Corps wanted the speed and strength of warships, adapted for diplomatic purpose.’ He could see, on the reciprocal feed showing people watching from around the ship, that those quickest on the uptake had already realised where he was going with this. ‘And we have,’ he said, ‘the great honour of stepping up to such a role, ourselves.’
It was no good. There was just no way to frame the n
ews for a warship’s crew that all their weapons were going to be removed and make them see that as an honour. Alex tried, because both Eldovan and Buzz had felt that it was worth a shot, trying to pitch the thing so that people would perceive it as a stepping up rather than a stripping down, but it was clear from their reactions that they were never going to buy that line.
‘All right,’ Alex said, interpreting the buzz and the appalled expressions correctly, ‘it is a great honour,’ he insisted, ‘but like many great honours in exodiplomacy, not without its embarrassment…’ He grinned, giving them a moment to think about the more embarrassing incidents. ‘And we are,’ he said, with absolute certainty, ‘strong enough to rise to this, just as we do to any other challenge.’
Most of them would take a lot more convincing than that, though Simmy, for one, was immediately supportive.
‘Whatever the skipper says,’ she declared, staunchly, ‘that’s what we do and no messing!’
That they would do what the skipper said went without saying. But the Fourth expected to be able to have their say, both officially and amongst themselves, during the planning phase of any mission. And this, Alex made no attempt to prevent. Just as with any other mission, he put the mission outline on the ops board, giving a week for people to consider and discuss it before he made the board open for suggestions. A week, he felt, would be enough time for them to move from reacting emotively into a more analytical perspective.
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