‘Good – thank you.’
There was no admin department on the Heron – admin was done by just about everyone in the normal course of their duties, though they had eventually recognised that they needed a full time Finance officer. Here, though, there was a department to cope with all the documentation generated by the ship for Admiralty records. AI systems could have generated such records and reports independently, of course, but the Admiralty would never allow that. Data might be collated by ship’s systems but official records had to be compiled by people, named people taking responsibility for their contents. The admin department was tiny – just four desks crammed into a space which might otherwise have been used for storage – but they evidently regarded their role as important.
‘Ah.’ Alex smiled when he was introduced to the Admin officer, shaking hands as he did with anyone that he was introduced to. ‘I’ve been wanting to meet you,’ he said, ‘And to thank you for all the support you’ve been giving Mr Forley. Much appreciated.’
The Sub-lt went pink around the ears, but grinned back cheerfully.
‘Pleasure, Captain,’ she said, as if having the anxious adjutant call her several times a day asking her to tell him how to do his job was really good fun and not in any way an irritating waste of her time.
‘You have an exceptional ship’s company,’ Alex observed, when he and Min went to her quarters for a chat.
‘I do.’ Min agreed, and laughed. ‘I must admit – I saw a quote of something you’d said, oh, must have been four or five years ago, in a write-up of the Fourth’s rehab methods, I think. You said something to the effect that there was no command challenge on the Heron because the company managed themselves. And I have to be honest, I thought at the time, oh, yeah?’ She grinned. ‘A crew of stroppy bullocks and high flyers with all their ego and ambition. I figured you had to be firefighting, there, pretty much all the time, keeping them together. But the Assegai…’ she shook her head. ‘They are so able, and so motivated, I actually have to hold them back, at times, steady things so they don’t burn themselves out. And they are so, so sensitive to any criticism from me, however mildly I might mention that I’m not entirely happy with something, it’s as if the wrath of God has fallen from on high. And the smallest word of praise, it’s like you’ve given them a medal. They do manage themselves, there’s no command challenge at all – which leaves me free to focus on their training and development, just like you said. Icefruit?’
‘Thanks.’ Alex sat down and Min got drinks for them both from her daycabin dispenser. He was, by then, allowed two mugs of coffee a day, but had those with breakfast and dinner. He still had to drink rather more water than he cared for, but he was at least allowed some fruit juice, too. Icefruit was his favourite, light and refreshing with a taste like melon dashed with a hint of citrus.
Min got the same for herself and sat down with him in the daycabin’s lounge area, actually just a tiny corner sofa stuck in like an afterthought. There was room for the two of them to sit at right angles with their feet tucked under the low coffee table. And there they stayed for more than an hour, sharing skipper talk which ranged through the minutiae of starship command. It turned into a debate, eventually, on the pros and cons of having an open comms system throughout the ship. Alex, of course, was all for it, pointing out all the advantages of creating a shipwide community, a fully informed crew and a culture of inclusion which was so invaluable operationally.
Min, however, was not convinced.
‘Even if the Admiralty gave me permission for it tomorrow, I wouldn’t.’ She said. ‘An open comms system can be very positive, for sure, but it can also be a problem when things happen which cause alarm or anxiety – an incident on open comms can be seen directly by everyone on the ship and that involves the whole ship, immediately. That may be manageable on a frigate but on a ship of this size, with so much going on, it would just be confusing, distracting. I do post a briefing from the command deck which includes navigation feeds and all logged orders, so people can see what’s going on, the useful parts of what’s going on. But I wouldn’t use open comms, frankly, even on a frigate. I think it makes things too immediate, too emotionally reactive, an over-engaged, potentially volatile atmosphere. I like things to be calm, things going along smoothly with people just doing their jobs.’
Alex laughed. ‘I guess I do like things lively,’ he admitted. ‘I like the buzz, the immediacy, the emotional reactions as we experience things together, as a group. But I do agree, it wouldn’t work on a ship of this size. I would struggle, I know, to engage with a crew on this scale. And I’d be very concerned, too, about clique issues – how do you tackle that?’
Min told him. The problem was indeed that on a ship of this size, the skipper could have only the most superficial relationship with the crew as individuals – they might see her once a week, with an occasional word of praise, whereas Alex saw most of his crew every day and was able to take the time to discuss their training and progress with them in detail, giving advice and encouragement. Clique issues would arise inevitably, too, on a ship so big that crew were unlikely to meet many people beyond those on their own mess deck and their own department.
Min had addressed that through a range of strategies, all of them conventional because she wasn’t allowed to do anything that wasn’t approved regular Fleet practice, but combining them in ways that were very effective.
‘The mess deck rotation means we shuffle twenty per cent of our crew around every month,’ she pointed out. ‘And the three-department watch roster means that nobody, other than specialists of course, gets to identify too closely with a particular department. Training pulls together people from around the ship who might not otherwise work together, too, because we make that a criteria for organising courses. Then there’s the GD seminars, of course – that’s a powerhouse for clique busting, people coming in to work together on the GD, and that’s a shared, high status shipwide project. With that and a strong ship-wide social programme, we don’t see any compartmentalising or clique issues. That is just our own observation, of course – there hasn’t been an in-depth analysis.’
She pitched it well, making it sound quite natural, just a casual observation. But the pause after it was just a fraction too long, a hairsbreadth too deliberate.
‘Hah!’ Alex laughed, and then, with mock-revelation, ‘Hey! I could offer to do an operational analysis.’
Min gave a guilty chuckle.
‘I don’t like to ask,’ she admitted. ‘But if you have the time and it’s something you’d find interesting, Alex, I would love to see what you make of us.’
What she was suggesting was the kind of analysis carried out during inspections as a survey of ‘Three Days Normal’, observing the ship under normal operations for three days and analysing all manner of criteria to form judgements on how well the ship functioned overall, the ‘shipboard ethos’ which was more about the atmosphere and relationships than operational efficiency. The Assegai had passed inspection just three months ago, with the highest possible rating of ‘highly commended’. Alex, though, would look at the ship under operational conditions, and from his own unique perspective.
‘I could do that,’ he said, and a happy light came into his eyes at the thought. It would take him all over the ship, watching people at work, talking to them… just the kind of interaction he enjoyed so much on the Heron and was starting to miss, here. ‘Yes – thanks, Min. I’ll enjoy that.’
So, the second week of the run to Karadon wasn’t boring, after all.
Nine
One of the things which occupied Alex during the run to Karadon was the conduct of the training group.
On the surface, there was nothing to worry about whatsoever. They were focussed at morning briefings, worked hard during the day and made great effort in the daily language seminar. They were, Alex knew, joining in the social life on the main part of the ship, all apparently happy, settled, and doing very well.
Only, Alex could se
e that things were not as they should be. This should be a super-group, full of lively personalities fizzing with enthusiasm, bouncing off one another in that high energy way a good research team did on the Heron.
Instead, they were muted; a quiet, conventional, distinctly low-energy class.
Skipper Hevine, as Alex had spotted in the first few seconds of meeting the group, was responsible for that. If they were subdued, it was because he was subduing them. And nothing Alex did, none of the hints or little tricks by which he tried to wrest control of the group from its self-appointed leader, had any effect. He might score the odd point, as with refusing to allow Skipper Hevine to supervise the others’ progress, but day after day, it was Hevine who set the tone of the group, repressing any spark of vivacity or humour in the others.
What mystified Alex was why they put up with it. Skipper Hevine was senior ranking, to be sure, but he was not in any position of authority over the others. Any one of them could have taken a stand against him, refusing to be cowed. Alex would have expected Dan Tarrance, for one, to tell Skipper Hevine pretty directly that he had no right to boss them like this and to stop being so much up his own backside.
Dan, however, was as meek as the rest. And when Alex found out why, the behaviour of the group began to make a lot more sense.
The penny dropped in a language seminar, three days out from Karadon. The class had been asked to prepare a one minute presentation each on some aspect of the Samartian environment. At one minute long they were obviously not intended to be in-depth, and for some of the beginners even that was a challenge, putting together enough simple sentences on a topic to fill a hundred seconds.
Dan, though, could have talked for an hour in Samartian, and would have, given the chance. So Alex had given him a more advanced exercise, still a minute long, but not allowed to speak below a given speed, to hesitate or to repeat any word. He would, Alex had told him, lose a grade for every repetition, hesitation or um.
Dan was having fun with that – too much fun in Skipper Hevine’s opinion. His chosen topic was Samartian Sea Life. That was a joke in itself. Samartian oceans were virtually dead, almost all anoxic and so laden with salts and minerals that only the most tenacious extremophile micro-organisms could survive. Dan, therefore, spent much of his minute listing all the kinds of life you wouldn’t find in a Samartian ocean, a long list which he’d obviously got from an index of common sea creatures. He had, though, been pretty creative in coming up with Samartian terms for creatures which didn’t exist there. ‘Wibble-arms’, for instance, was a squid, while a mollusc was translated as ‘Shell-mouth.’
The others were enjoying this harmless daftness – and incidentally learning, too, as they had to back-translate and figure out what creatures he meant.
Skipper Hevine, however, wasn’t amused. And as the others gave Dan a little discreet clap for his efforts, Hevine suppressed him with a joy-sucking glare.
‘I do not believe,’ he said, in sententious Samartian, ‘that Skipper Eldovan would be impressed.’
Dan grimaced, as the mood in the group was slapped flatter than a pancake squashed with twenty gee. For a moment, Alex thought he was actually going to apologise.
Ah, he thought. Of course. He should have realised before… he’d been looking at this as an incomplete equation. He had been failing to take into account the zero, the empty cabin, the vacant chair. Skipper Eldovan, evidently here in spirit long before her physical arrival.
Alex knew her reputation, of course. Who in the Fleet did not? Some considered her a mini-me of the great Terrible Tennet, and it was true that Eldovan had been under Terrible’s training as a Sub, a formative time in any officer’s career. And there were always, in every generation of officers, one or two who picked up the age-old role of the Fleet’s notoriously Hard Horse officers.
Eldovan, however, was beyond hard. Eldovan was harsh. The Fleet was littered with stories of people whose careers had crumbled under her merciless criticism, not the smallest mistake or failing ever overlooked. It was said that she could drop the temperature of any ship five degrees simply by stepping through the airlock.
Alex knew that, of course, and he expected her to have quite an impact on the group when she joined them at Karadon. But it was only now that he realised she was already dominating the class, via the proxy of Skipper Hevine, with the sheer terrifying prospect of her disapproval.
‘I was not aware,’ said Alex, ‘that the objective of this seminar was to impress Skipper Eldovan.’
There was a silence, and some awed looks directed his way, as perhaps there might be at a champion stepping forth to declare that he was not afraid of the dragon.
‘Uh… well, no, um, no, sir,’ Skipper Hevine was ominous, like the town mayor pointing out that the dragon had very big teeth. ‘But – Skipper Eldovan will be coming in as the senior, sir, and I, uh, have no doubt that she will… that she will arrive with expectations of the highest standards.’
‘Skipper Eldovan will not be ‘coming in as the senior’,’ said Alex. ‘She will be a member of this class on the same basis as the rest of you.’
The rest of them stared at him as if the champion had declared that he could take the dragon armed with a toothpick.
‘Um…’ said three of them, together, and the rest looked profoundly dubious.
‘Have, you, uh, met Skipper Eldovan, sir?’ Skipper Hevine asked, with a note of uncertainty.
‘No,’ said Alex, with an air of sunny confidence which caused the rest of him to look at him with the dismay of townsfolk realising that their champion was going to end up as the dragon’s lunch.
‘Well, I have served with her, sir,’ Hevine said. ‘As have several of the group…’ he looked around for confirmation and there were some gloomy assents, a few raised hands. Dan’s was one of them, lifted with a rueful look.
‘She gave me a D,’ he said. That must have struck him like a thunderbolt, Alex knew. Dan had escaped being whisked off to a Gifted and Talented Institute by a few points on his IQ, so was not officially a genius, but he had been top at everything his whole life, top cadet of his graduating year, rocketing through the accelerated career path of the Tagged and Flagged scheme, a man who went through life blithely assured of getting an A.
If he was expecting shock and sympathy from Alex, though, he was looking in the wrong direction.
‘Was it justified?’ he asked, with an air of mild interest.
Dan scowled, just for a moment. He would have liked to have been able to declare that it had not been justified, that it had been an unfair and even malicious down-grading. Honesty, though, compelled a different answer.
‘Well, yeah.’ The biggest part of the shock had come in having to accept that on that occasion he had, indeed, skimped a task with such inattention that it merited a D. He could have argued that it had been a trap, a task which looked routine but which had a barb hidden away. But he wouldn’t have a leg to stand on there, as such challenge exercises were a normal part of tagged and flagged training.
‘Well, then,’ said Alex, in a tone which disposed of that, making it clear not only that Dan had nothing to complain about but that in the same situation, he’d have given him the D as well. ‘I will not have,’ Alex said, quite pleasantly, but looking around to make sure they knew he was speaking to all of them, ‘Skipper Eldovan treated as some kind of bogey. That is neither fair to her, nor courteous. She will join the class as a student, in no position of authority, and if she has any concerns over any aspect of the conduct of the class or of the mission generally then she will raise them with me. So we will continue the seminar, if you please, without any further reference as to what Skipper Eldovan may or may not be impressed by.’ Then, making the point that he was the one who gave out grades here, he looked at Dan. ‘Task rating,’ he said, ‘A.’
Dan said thanks, but it was clear from the mood of the group that they were all expecting battle royal to commence when Eldovan arrived. And clear, too, from the anxious glances
cast at him, that they wouldn’t have put money on Alex to win.
Alex said nothing, keeping his amusement to himself.
He had, he knew, several advantages they were not taking into account. The first was his experience in working with the Merciless Martinet type of officer – rather more than his fair share of experience, in fact, as Dix had a tendency to keep firing them at Alex whenever he needed to refute allegations being made against the Fourth with an investigator of such rectitude that not even Cerdan Jennar could quibble over the findings. And while Alex had never met Skipper Eldovan in person, they had friends in common – well, perhaps, not friends exactly, as people like Terrible Tennet, Jonas Sartin and Hetty Leavam didn’t approve of personal friendships at work, but people with whom Alex himself had relationships of trust and respect. They had given Eldovan what was known in the Fleet as ‘the good word’, and Alex was assured, from their opinions, that he would get along just fine with her. She was, he knew, a rigid by-the-book authoritarian, but was so both by professional dedication and personal upbringing. She was not the kind of bully using authority as a weapon to belittle others and compensate for their own insecurities. Alex had met more than his fair share of them, too. She was the real deal, true blue, an officer who held herself to even higher standards than she expected of others. And that being the case, Alex knew, she would be no trouble at all… and she would, too, get on extremely well with the Samartians.
And there was, beyond all that, a simple factor the others didn’t seem to have recognised. However terrifying Eldovan might be to her subordinates, Alex outranked her. So he smiled inwardly, anticipating no difficulties there, whatsoever.
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