Assegai

by S J MacDonald

  This took him to the training deck, where he found his new quarters.

  Any animus he’d felt towards Buzz over the sneaking in of Simmy Semach evaporated the moment he stepped into that cabin.

  The cabin was small, square, with standard Fleet décor, grey walls, plain furniture. One corner held a shower, another was the usual deck-to-ceiling locker unit. Between them was a sofa with Fleet blue upholstery and two squared-away cushions. This would flip into a bunk, just as the desk on the other side of the cabin would flick over into a dining table. The window-holo on the wall facing the door was set to show a real-time view of the space they were traversing, while the screen above the desk was set with the combination of watch and comm screens any skipper would have in their daycabin. The only thing missing was the open-comm screens he was used to from the Heron – the open-comm system which allowed anyone to see anywhere around the ship, even to live broadcast of the holy command deck. That would not happen here, as it was one of the irregular innovations the Fleet had absolutely refused to allow, regardless of all the benefits Alex had argued and proven. That, even Dix Harangay had agreed, was a step too far, just too radical a move for the regular Fleet to embrace.

  Simmy, he saw, had already transferred his belongings, including the single personal item which was out on display. Even that was a holo-frame which was set only to activate at certain times of the day, and at that only if he was alone in the cabin. It was his holo-album of his daughter, set to activate when he was getting up and when he was going to bed. He always said good morning and goodnight to her. Simmy had set it carefully on his bunk-side shelf, and Alex, seeing it in these compact, cosy environs, knew that he would be at home here.

  Though there was, he found, no shortage of other options. The trainee group had evidently heard that he was moving in to his office – heard, discussed, and decided to offer him the hospitality of their wardroom.

  ‘There is a spare cabin,’ Skipper Hevine pointed out, ‘till we reach Karadon, and no doubt other arrangements could be made, then.’ He glanced, as he said that, at the most junior officer in the group, who by Fleet tradition would be bumped out to find a bunk elsewhere if Alex made the eleventh in a ten-cabin wardroom.

  Dan looked amused. He was very much aware that Skipper Hevine was using this as an opportunity to remind him of his lowly place in this cohort. And he wasn’t, at any level, in the slightest upset by it. He had never lacked for confidence.

  ‘That’s considerate.’ It interested Alex to see that Skipper Hevine had already assumed the mantle of President of the Mess. He had an arguable right to do so, perhaps, as the most senior of the officers assigned to these quarters, but this was not a conventional wardroom. In terms of protocol, it was more akin to a residential course, groundside, where none of the group would be expected to assume an authority over the others.

  Perhaps, though, it had felt natural to all of them for him to do so, since they were after all aboard ship and this certainly looked like a conventional wardroom. It was a long, narrow room with a long narrow dining table. Three of the walls were dotted with sliding cabin doors. Each of them, Alex knew, was a cabin identical to the one he’d just moved into himself, compact but comfortable – command rank quarters, as befitted the fact that every member of the group was of senior rank. ‘But I am,’ Alex said, ‘happy with my quarters, thank you.’

  There was a reason, after all, for the separation of skipper from wardroom, beyond the usual reason of it being ancient Fleet tradition and so to be continued without question. Alex was going to be in charge of this group, training them, pushing them to their limits. It was only fair that they should be able to get away from him, to relax, even to have a grumble. And only fair too that he should be able to get some respite from them. He could sense some relief, at that, from those who really hadn’t wanted to have to face The Captain over the breakfast table.

  ‘So,’ he said, after Hevine had given a courteous assurance that he would be welcome any time should he change his mind, ‘shall we look at the schedule?’

  This took some time – much longer than he had expected, in fact, since it was so simple.

  Too simple, perhaps, for Hevine at least. He seemed determined not only to complicate it but to impose a degree of structure and supervision Alex felt to be unnecessary. What he wanted, in fact, were directed study sessions, set times when all the officers would work on their courses with set targets for each session, with progress to be monitored by Hevine himself.

  ‘I really do not think,’ said Alex, ‘that that is needed.’ He was intrigued to see that although there were give-aways all around the table of a definite lack of support for Hevine in this, not one of the others was prepared to take a stand against him on this issue. ‘You are all,’ Alex pointed out, ‘command rank officers, not cadets. I expect you all to be able to work on your own initiative and manage your own time. And I will be monitoring your progress.’ He looked at Hevine with that, and the older man gave way at once.

  ‘As you wish, Captain,’ he said, and with a very slightly defensive note, ‘I was only trying to keep the burden on you to a minimum.’

  Alex gave a slight smile. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and the words but back off, you are being presumptuous did not need to be spoken aloud. ‘I’d suggest,’ said Alex, ‘that we have a quick daily briefing – just a few minutes to touch base. 0800 in the seminar room, all right?’

  It wasn’t really a suggestion and they of course recognised that and assented at once.

  ‘Very well,’ Alex got to his feet. ‘Then I’ll leave you to get settled into your studies. 0800 tomorrow.’

  He left them with that sense of things to do and a time by which he expected some progress, and went off himself, then, with every intention of spending the rest of the day relaxing.

  It didn’t quite work out like that, as Dr Payling asked to see him later that morning.

  ‘I have,’ he informed Alex, ‘completed the Samartian officers’ medicals.’

  Alex nodded. His meeting with Jarlner and Bennet that morning had lasted under two minutes, needing no more than confirmation that they had been given the proposed schedule by Skipper Taylar, that they were entirely happy with it and ready to get started as soon as Alex gave it the nod. He’d done so, and knew that they would have been spending this morning doing safety training and having ship-joining medicals just as he had had himself.

  ‘And?’ Alex queried, seeing from Dr Payling’s worried expression that things were not as they should be.

  ‘Well, it’s rather awkward, Captain.’ Alex had come to meet him in the flag suite daycabin, feeling that it would be rude not to make at least some nominal use of the place. He felt reduced, though, sitting in the big chair behind the big desk, while Dr Payling, in a visitor’s chair opposite, felt just a little too far away for natural conversation. ‘Because I have, I’m afraid, found evidence of… well, I can only call it malnutrition.’

  Alex sat up, leaning forward a little as he took that in.

  ‘Malnutrition?’ he echoed, and then, as an explanation occurred, ‘From Samart?’

  One of the hardest things for the Fourth to deal with in first contact with Samart had been the discovery of what they ate. Food was rationed there, staples distributed equally from the highest to the lowest rank. But there was a strong culture there both of ‘grow your own’, even if that was no more than salad stuff growing in a kitchen tub, and of hunter-gathering. Foraging for wild foods in the countryside was a normal part of most Samartians’ lives, an outing to be enjoyed by all the family. Even children went fishing in rivers and streams, while shooting game was as normal for their parents as picking up meals from a convenience outlet was for people in the League. Most households kept a cage suspended outside their kitchen windows, too, in which they housed a pigeon-like species for its eggs and for meat. A recipe for one of their most popular dishes, Bird and Greens, began First kill and skin your bird. Rangi had been physically sick when he heard about tha
t. And the Samartians, for their part, had been equally revolted when told about the vat-grown nutrients the people of the League consumed.

  ‘No, no…’ Dr Payling looked regretful. He had studied Samartian physiology and culture long before he’d known that he’d be medically responsible for two of their officers, and was emphatically of the view that the sooner the League persuaded them into civilised vat-grown food, the better. ‘No,’ he said. ‘As appalling as their diet may be, there is no indication of deficiency either in childhood or adult nutrition. This is recent.’ He paused, hesitating, and then got out the awful truth. ‘This is in the last four months, sir.’

  The last four months. During which time the Samartians had been the guests of and under the care of the Diplomatic Corps.

  ‘It is slight,’ Dr Payling stressed. ‘Not yet symptomatic and no long term damage done. But it is detectable and I will have to… have had to… include it in my report. It is evident that their diet over the last few months has been deficient in proteins.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Alex. ‘Did you ask them about it?’

  ‘I must confess, I didn’t, sir,’ said Dr Payling. ‘The results only showed up in post-medical analysis, you see. I did ask them diet and lifestyle questions as part of the medical, obviously, and they both said that they were eating and exercising as advised by the Diplomatics’ own medical corps. And I have that information, of course, full information from the Corps and direct briefings, too, before the patients were handed into my care. But – to put it bluntly, sir – the record of what it says they have eaten in those files doesn’t correspond with analysis of their cell chemistry. I have checked, and double checked, and there’s no mistake on my side. They are protein deficient – not seriously, yet, but heading that way, and something will have to be done to correct it.’

  ‘May I see the files?’

  Dr Payling showed them, and Alex was soon able to find the information that he wanted.

  The Samartians, it turned out, had made the decision to eat League food from the outset of their journey. Previously, they’d brought along sufficient supplies of their own foods to provide for their visits to Chartsey, but that was not practicable when they were going to be here for a whole year, plus the journeys back and forth. So those chosen had had to be prepared for this to be a full immersion experience, vat-grown food and all. They had, the records said, taken to it very well, considering, and had eaten every meal the dieticians had provided for them. If that was true, as the medic said, then they should not be protein deficient. Which they evidently were, as Dr Payling was keen to show him.

  Alex would not have said he had any medical expertise, but he’d picked up more from Rangi’s lectures on nutrition than he’d realised… enough, at least, to recognise that the tests Dr Payling had run were not the standard cell-analysis carried out in shipboard medicals.

  ‘Tell me,’ he asked, ‘is this something that you would expect to have been picked up in routine monitoring?’

  ‘No… no,’ said the medic. ‘I only found it myself because we do what we call deep tests, here, analysis over and above the regulation basics. We do that for everyone, though of course where exo-patients are concerned I do need the fullest, most detailed picture possible in order to plan for whatever treatments might be needed.’

  Ah, thought Alex, and the mystery of why this pompous little man had got this assignment was solved. He’d got it because behind all that strutting and posturing he was actually a brilliant, meticulous and tremendously dedicated medical officer. First impressions, Alex mused, could be so misleading. Particularly, he had to admit, being honest with himself, when they were tangled up with the kind of prejudice he had against the country-club type.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that is excellent work, Dr Payling. Good catch, well done.’

  ‘Uh – thank you, Captain.’ The medic seemed astonished, evidently having expected a very different reaction. ‘But – what are we going to do?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh – I’ll have a word with them,’ Alex said, ‘And find out what’s been going on. Though there is an obvious solution… if the records say they’ve eaten X amount of protein and the tests are only showing up as Y, then given that we take both the records and the tests as accurate, the only logical explanation is that there has been a failure between consumption and absorption. My guess,’ he said, as the medic stared at him in bewilderment, ‘is that they have been vomiting.’

  Dr Payling was horrified. ‘On purpose?’

  ‘No, of course not – my guess is that they have simply found some of the food served to them so unpalatable that they’ve not been able to keep it down.’

  ‘But – wouldn’t they have said…?’

  Alex smiled patiently. ‘Samartians,’ he said, ‘do not complain. They would consider it extremely bad manners to tell us that the food we’re giving them is so nauseating it’s making them sick. And this, really, is why they need a liaison who understands that and can establish a relationship with them in which such matters can come to light before they develop into problems. You did well to spot this, and you’ve done the right thing bringing it to me. I’ll find out what’s been going on and we’ll figure something out about their diet, all right?’

  ‘Oh – very well, I mean, yes, of course.’ Dr Payling was still looking anxious, though. ‘But my report, sir… it will go to the Diplomatic Corps.’

  ‘Obviously,’ Alex agreed, since all such records would be sent back to Chartsey when they touched at Karadon. ‘They will need to know, to check that the same thing hasn’t happened with the others and make whatever dietary adjustments are necessary.’ It dawned on him as he spoke why the medic was still looking so worried, and why he’d said that the situation was awkward. ‘Oh, I see – yes, there will be a certain amount of embarrassment over the discovery that they’ve been making VIP guests sick and handed them over with protein deficiency. There’ll be an internal enquiry, no doubt, and a flurry of memos.’

  Dr Payling nodded miserably. He was very proud of his relationship with the Diplomatic Corps; he was a frequent guest at the Embassy and a good friend of one of their attachés, who belonged to the same country club. It felt almost like a betrayal, exposing such an embarrassing failure on their part.

  ‘But they will, no doubt, eventually conclude that exodiplomacy is a very wobbly learning curve,’ said Alex, with a philosophic note. ‘Mistakes are inevitable, and a vital part of how we make progress. You caught this one by going over and above professional expectations, Dr, and that’s something you should be proud of. You certainly don’t need to apologise to the Corps for bringing this to their attention. In fact, you’d be well within your rights to adopt Professor Penarth’s attitude when dealing with medics who are not coming up to his standards, and write to tell them what blithering incompetents they are not to have spotted this themselves.’

  That shocked the medic into a nervous giggle, as Alex had intended it should.

  ‘Oh, I would never…’ Dr Payling began, then broke off as he realised that Alex was pulling his leg. A quick, shy grin crossed his face at that, and he gave the captain an acknowledging nod. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘I’ll just stick with a standard report.’

  ‘Probably for the best,’ Alex agreed, and they parted on that note, on better terms than Alex had imagined that they could be.

  As it turned out, Alex was right in his surmise about the Samartians vomiting after meals. Not all of them, as Bennet was keen to assure him.

  ‘We do try,’ she said. ‘But the ones with…’ a slight hesitation before she could even say it, ‘red meat…’

  That was rich, coming from someone who’d caught, killed, skinned and eaten wild animals, but Alex understood. For all their technological sophistication, Samartians lived as closely with nature as any Dark Age society. And food, especially protein, held a very high status. It was a sin, almost a crime, to waste even a scrap of available protein. Which meant that they had an odd but deep respect for the life that they
took in order to sustain their own.

  Vat-grown meat, on the other hand, was an abomination in their eyes, something that had never been alive, an artificially created corpse. It was like eating something out of a horror movie. And the more it looked like the kind of meat they considered real food, the more revolting it seemed. And they had, ironically, been served with rather more than the normal amount of steaks and the like because of their VIP status.

  How reasonable or otherwise their taboo was, however, really wasn’t the issue. The important thing was to provide food which they would be able to eat.

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ said Alex. ‘I think we should try you on a Cestarian menu – vat grown, of course, but vegetarian and far more to your taste, I should think, than Chartseyan.’

  Both officers stiffened at that, looking at him with guarded suspicion.

  ‘We are entirely willing,’ Jarlner declared, ‘to eat whatever is provided for us.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know.’ Alex’s tone was soothing. ‘Nobody is suggesting for one moment that you have failed in your duty, in any way. It is simply a concern that you are unable to digest certain dishes and because of that may end up with a protein deficiency. So we can either continue to give you food that makes you vomit and provide protein supplements to make up for it, or simply provide a healthy protein-rich diet you can digest. So, which do you think we ought to do?’

  They stared at him for a moment, then the angry-cat shoulders relaxed and Bennet even conceded a little grin.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Whatever you think best.’

  Alex had lunch with them and was able to tell Dr Payling that the Cestarian cuisine had gone down very well… and stayed down, too.

  It was a minor matter as far as Alex was concerned, but as word got around that their medic had found the Samartians to be malnourished, the Assegai was electrified. It was, Alex recognised, in super-goss mode, passing the news, exclaiming, huddles in shocked tones breaking apart only to hurry off and spread the news even further. Had there been an open-comms system here he could have tracked its progress through the ship. Even as it was, he knew that it was the hot topic this afternoon.