The morning session was for purposeful activity. Since there was no work of any kind that they could let him do on the ship, this meant that he was taken to a seminar room under the supervision of an officer who would encourage him to work on courses and assist with them as required. After this three hour session he was returned to his cell for a break, lunch and two hours before he was brought out again and taken to the gym. There, he might make use of a suitably secured workout room or a VR treadmill to go for a walk. Then, returned to his cell, another two hours there, then dinner and another rest before he was brought out for the evening socialising session.
This was not, Mako had had to admit, ideal, since nobody on the ship wanted to talk to him and he was no more sociable towards the rest of them. But the requirements had been met by cordoning off a corner table in the refectory, securing it so that he could be taken there and at least sit in a social environment. After three hours of this, unless he asked to go back sooner, he’d be taken back to his cell, with lights out at 2400.
Not, however, today. Today he had stayed on his bunk, refusing to get up and go through to breakfast, refusing to shower, to dress, to go with the escort to the seminar room or even to have any kind of conversation with anyone. When anyone attempted to talk to him or to persuade him off the bed, his response was a snarled idiom which even people without a classical education could recognise as obscene. Quite why he’d decided to only speak to them in lareen was a mystery, but it was the only language he’d used since the incident which had put him in sickbay.
Alex stood on the outside of the doorway, considering the huddle of misery curled up on the bunk with his back to the door.
Could he still be trying to get them to treat him as a psych patient, Alex wondered. Probably. He was not a man who’d shown the flexibility of thought, or insight, to recognise when it was futile to keep up a pretence.
But it was probable, too, that those slender, padded bands around his wrists had a good deal to do with it. Alex had been a prisoner – not for long, but long enough to know how being processed into a brig stripped you of choice, both large and small. Even the tiny everyday choices as to when to have a drink or snack were snatched away, leaving you feeling incredibly helpless.
Add, to that, the forcefield mitts which those wrist-guards were generating and the situation would become intolerable. Mister would not even be able to pick up a mug, or use cutlery. In those circumstances, Alex felt, he himself might well stay on his bunk, flatly refusing to cooperate.
‘All right,’ he said, turning away and speaking to the officer who was on guard duty today. ‘Remove the mitts,’ he said, ‘at 12.25.’
This would make it 25 hours after Mister had been discharged from sickbay, justifying it as a post-op precaution, but not prolonging it beyond.
Simon was not happy, of course, but for once, it was Alex who laid the law down.
‘Stop shouting at me,’ he told the medic, with an edge of steel in his own voice. ‘And listen. I recognise your medical concerns and your intention to protect the patient. This is not, however, a medical decision. It is a disciplinary matter and as such the duty of care rests with me. I have made that decision and…’
‘Tuh!’ Simon flung up his hands, jumped up and strode to the door, turning around there for what he evidently intended as a parting riposte. ‘Tell him,’ he said, ‘that if he’s going for the eyes next time to go for the right one, it needs work anyway.’
And with that and a savage look, he went out, rather obviously wishing it was the kind of door that he could slam behind him.
‘Sandwich, skipper!’ Simmy actually dodged around him as Simon strode away in a mighty huff, appearing with a plate on which there were temptingly arranged miniature rolls. ‘You didn’t eat your breakfast,’ she reminded him, ‘so I brought you a snack.’
‘Thanks, Simmy.’ Not for the first time, it struck Alex that Simmy was amazing. He’d had a thoroughly depressing morning and Simon’s angry departure had made him feel as if his own blood pressure was rising, too. But there was Simmy, with her bright smile and ridiculous, motherly concern and suddenly Alex felt a whole lot better. He gave her a grin, picking up one of the rolls. Simmy beamed, bobbing on her toes in the way she did when she was extra-specially happy.
‘Gotta rush!’ she told him. ‘On a practical!’
She had rushed up, he realised, to bring him a snack on her tea-break from tech-training. But before he could point out to her that she really shouldn’t do that, Simmy was gone.
So he just ate the roll and went contentedly back to work.
Eighteen
Three weeks out from Lundane, they started work on what Alex persisted in calling the upgrades to the ship, even though they were actually stripping it of its combat capability.
They were not, in fact, stripping guns or missiles yet. Though they hadn’t seen any hint of Marfikian activity and Alex didn’t really expect to while they were travelling outside their borders, he would not take the chance of disarming the ship until the very last moment. There was, though, a lot of work which could be done in preparation for it, including training crew in how to strip the cannon and the missile systems out.
And there were other modifications to be accomplished, too. One of the suggestions which had come through the ops board was that they make it very clear to all observers that they had the Pirrellothian Ambassador on board by adding the floating flower as her emblem beside their own ID. Further discussion had refined this into painting a section of the ship’s hull in a different colour and adorning this with the flower-emblem to symbolise that they had the Embassy aboard. During discussion, Eldovan had suggested that this section of the hull could have its own airlock and a dedicated shuttle, also painted in the chamlorn’s choice of colours.
Two shuttles, please, said Chamlorn Lady Ursele. Two shuttles, two airlocks. She even indicated which two she would like and asked if it was possible to have them connected to her encounter zone by dedicated walkways.
It took some doing, but the Fourth liked a technical challenge. So, at the end of a solid week’s work they had shifted quantities of complex tech around, redirected five high pressure pipes and got creative with their use of a dismantled water tank to create a dual-entry, self-contained access to the Pirrellothian suite. Both the airlocks now opened into corridors, one sloping upwards and the other down, meeting in a newly created atrium. The décor was very light and felt surprisingly spacious. One of the Pirrellothian treasures was unpacked, too – a marble head said to have been one of Lady Ursele’s remote ancestors, though it was so like her it could easily have been mistaken for a contemporary portrait. It was placed on a plinth in the new atrium, strongly protected and beautifully lit.
On the outside of the ship, too, hullwalkers had been busy. A rounded panel, four decks high, had been sprayed with a dark copper paint which was the closest they’d been able to match to the surface of the airship the chamlorn and her attendants had been aboard. There was no big painted or holographic flower, though Lady Ursele had thanked them gravely for the kind thought. Instead there were clips which, once they were sublight, would enable them to display a fabric banner some fifty metres long and around twenty wide. In the meantime, since it was far too delicate to survive the micro-impacts a superlight ship was always taking to the hull, they had scanned it minutely and projected an image of it onto the copper panel with hull-mounted projectors and holo-active paint. It was a banner of rainbow colours and subtle design, the first banner hung at the entrance to a Hall of Veils, symbolising welcome. And it would be obvious, even to people who had no idea what it symbolised, that there was a special area aboard this ship, separate, with its own paintwork, banner and co-ordinated shuttles.
Whether Alex would have done that anyway, without that suggestion coming from the crew, was open to question. He might have come up with the idea if nobody else had. But for him, the important thing was that it had come from the crew, everyone an active part of the team.
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br /> There had been many suggestions, too, about how and where they were to cache their weapons, but Alex really had already got his own thoughts on that one and none of the ideas put forward by the crew had been better than his own.
They were not going to X-Base Sentinel to denude themselves of their weapons. That, Lady Ursele had decreed, would take too long. And she was not, in that, acting in any way out of impatience to reach Lundane herself – she would have been quite content, really would, even if the journey had taken years.
What concerned her was the welfare of the Fourth themselves. She knew that even the Fourth considered a year-long mission to be pushing at the limits of their operational endurance. They had already been on an intensive shakedown run, then to Cestus, then Serenity, then out to the rendezvous coordinates with all the drama of the transit and nearly a month spent out at the Library. And now there was the four month journey to Lundane. She needed them there for three months and even when released from that they would have a long three month journey home. So she would not add the extra month and a half it would take for them to go to Sentinel. If Alex preferred not to simply destroy his ship’s weapons – and Alex very definitely did prefer not to destroy his ship’s weapons – then there must be somewhere more convenient where they could be put away until the mission at Lundane was concluded.
It was never going to be as simple as that, of course, but there were undoubtedly any number of systems in the Lundane Ranges where they could cache their gear.
‘And anyone,’ said Alex, ‘who wants to get off.’
What he meant by that, as became clear as mission details were established, was that they would be setting up survival domes along with the cached weapons. Bizarre as it might seem, Alex wanted people there to protect the guns and missiles, just in case any wandering ships might come by and consider them salvage. The chances of that were extremely remote, even if every ship at Lundane set out on the hunt for the treasure-trove of finding where the Venturi had stashed their ordnance, but it was not a risk Alex was prepared to take. So the cache would be defended and the survival domes crewed by at least forty of their personnel.
He was prepared to take volunteers, so anyone really anxious about going into Lundane on an unarmed ship had a face-saving get out. Civilians, too, were to be assigned a berth at the dome and would have to satisfy Alex that they understood what remaining aboard for the Lundane phase of the mission would entail if they wanted to remain.
Nobody was keen to drop out, however. There were only two volunteers for remaining at the cache and those the Ordnance and Gunnery officers who felt it to be their duty to remain with the weaponry.
‘I don’t think so,’ Alex said. ‘There is a Samartian delegation at Lundane, isn’t there?’
Jarlner and Bennet agreed that they believed there was, yes. It was so recent that it did not yet appear on the images the Fourth had of Embassy Avenue. Indeed, Jarlner and Bennet had only heard that their world was to establish an embassy there just before they’d left Therik, themselves, so none of them knew for sure if that had actually happened yet or how big the delegation was.
‘Well, then,’ Alex observed. ‘The sudden arrival of a Pirrellothian Ambassador will throw everyone at Lundane and your delegation will need all the information and support that they can get from you. We will not need you at the cache, so don’t be concerned about that.’
There were, in fact, plenty of volunteers, not to be stuck in the no-fun-zone with the weapons cache, but for an associated mission. At the same time as they were caching their weapons, they would send off one of their long-range shuttles to X-Base Sentinel to report the situation there. This shuttle would also carry a request for the Port Admiral at Sentinel to dispatch whatever Fleet ships might be available to provide backup to the cache and its defending crew. This would mean providing a protective ship to wait at the system until the Venturi’s return. And, it was tacitly understood, to retrieve the weaponry and evacuate the crew should the Venturi not return as planned.
The cache-to-Sentinel run got fourteen officers volunteering for it immediately. It would not be a Van Damek, as every system in that region had been visited at least once and the charts were amongst the most detailed of any area in League space. Naturally so, this close to the Marfikian border. But the run would be an extended small-craft navigation and at that, off the autopilot routes of established shipping lanes. Such an accomplishment would look extremely good on any officer’s CV, in terms of both ship-handling and independent command ability.
Alex, though, already knew who he wanted for that particular task. He would not have put undue pressure on by asking, but seeing the astrogator’s name top of the list of volunteers, he smiled, thanked him and shook Lionard’s hand: ‘Lt Commander.’ The promotion was well earned, years overdue, and completed his transition from Lionard the Miserable to Lionard the Hugely Delighted.
That transformation could not have been more obvious than on the day when the Venturi moved into long-orbit outside the system Alex had selected as their cache. It was between Lundane and the rendezvous coordinates Trilopharus had given them, a brown dwarf system with nothing to recommend it but the fact that it was just like any other of the thousand or so brown dwarf systems scattered through the region.
They had, by then, performed the painful task of stripping off their cannon, packing up their missiles and dismantling their missile launch systems. The Ordnance and Gunnery sections on the command deck were deserted, Ordnance and Gunnery screens blank, nothing to report on guns and missiles beyond that they were crated up and ready to be taken groundside.
‘Hey, skip,’ Lionard reported, as the ship swung into orbit around the dim, wholly unimpressive system, ‘We’re here!’
Eldovan grinned, remembering teasing him with that when the ship had first arrived at the rendezvous coordinates to meet Trilopharus.
‘Thank you, Leo,’ she said, using the diminutive that only family and close friends would, on his homeworld. He grinned back, particularly as Eldovan herself then turned to her left and addressed Alex with extreme Old School formality, ‘Beg to report, sir, that we have arrived at ordained coordinates.’
‘Thank you,’ Alex said, with a grin, but was focussed already on screens. ‘Let’s get straight to it, then, shall we? System survey, please.’
The system survey confirmed what they’d seen with their own eyes as they arrived; what they’d already known to expect before they got here. The failed star at the heart of the system was dim and simmering, never having had sufficient mass to become a main-sequence star. It was actually right on the cusp, hovering just below the mass at which hydrogen fusion would be triggered. It had ten large rocky objects in orbit, though only two of them met the strict astronomical definition for a planet, being that they had to have sufficient mass for gravity to have drawn them into a spherical shape. The other eight sizeable objects in main-ellipse orbit could have no pretensions to planethood, really, since they were mere lumpen things. Besides these, there were in the region of eighty million small rock and ice objects, more than six million of them comets. No gas giant had formed here and what gases remained in that region of the system had formed wide, diffuse rings. These would have been pretty had the star been bright enough to shine on them, but as it was they were just dull rings of gas and dust.
‘Well, it might not be pretty,’ said Bonny Bonatti, ‘but it’s home.’
She had been chosen to command the cache team, an obvious choice, as she’d recognised herself. Typically of her, she’d accepted it with an upbeat, positive attitude, joking that it was quite something to make Port Admiral before she was thirty.
Joking aside, though, being the base commander here would be her final step into a skipper’s rank and with any justice, her own first ship command to go with it. So she had good reason to be positive as she went down to supervise the setting up of the domes which would be her base for the next three to four months.
As base construction and the weapons ca
ching got under way, so did the traditional liberty of first footing. Though there were not, here, sufficient planets and moons to make it viable for everyone to claim their own and not enough spare shuttles to allow that anyway, a bus was made available to take shoreleavers on five hour trips to the handful of sites where it was worth going.
Mister got taken on shoreleave, too, though protesting vigorously against it.
‘I will not be marooned here,’ he kept declaring, repeatedly, ‘I will not.’
Quite what he thought he would do if the Fourth had decided to leave him at the base was a mystery. He had not, even, been able to refuse to go on shoreleave.
‘Sorry,’ Mako said, ‘It is mandatory.’
If Mister had learned nothing else in his confinement, it was that when Mako Ireson said something was mandatory, there was no arguing about it. If challenged, Mako would undoubtedly explain exactly what legal requirement the Fourth was under and provide Mister himself with written copies of the relevant documentation into the bargain. Certain actions, he’d explained, were mandatory, giving the Fourth no option but to carry them out. It was mandatory that he had the right to his three out-of-cell sessions every day so, however inconvenient it might be for the Fourth, they had to keep that going. It was mandatory for them to provide Mister with a regular monthly health check, too and to monitor his dietary intake. If he refused to eat, or to cooperate with the mandatory provision the Fourth was making for him, this would trigger ‘non-compliance’ procedures of wearisome formality and sanctions removing what few little privileges he had left. An attempt on his part to refuse to go to the seminar room in the mornings had resulted in his holoscreen access during those times being suspended, leaving him sitting in his cell with absolutely nothing to do. An attempt to starve himself had resulted in a high-security IV unit being clamped to his upper arm, feeding him with nutrients. They had no choice, as Mako had explained, there were rules and procedures laid down for prisoners in custody, specific to the Fourth, agreed between the Fleet, the Fourth and the LPA.
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