It was quite discreet – Dix never sent him any private mail, as such, everything always on Admiralty letterhead and filed on record, so his remarks about Admiralty colleagues were phrased so as not to breach standards of professional decorum. Someone who knew Dix, though, could read between the lines to what he really meant. And what he was actually saying, under the apparently bland remarks, was that Third Lord Admiral Cerdan Jennar was drowning in his own bile.
Alex already knew that, really. Admiral Jennar had been forced to smile, and smile, and smile, while Alex was being feted as the hero of the hour. He’d even been obliged to shake his hand, in front of cameras, and respond positively to malicious journalists asking him whether he felt that Captain von Strada was a credit to the Fleet. And he had, on top of all that, had to swallow the outrage of Alex being posted to the Assegai, his Assegai, the project he’d been fighting for for years. If a training ship on task-force service was necessary, he said – and was by no means convinced that it was, but if it was deemed to be necessary then it should be a regular Fleet ship, with no concessions to the badly behaved bullocks the Fourth admitted, but reserved for those who’d earned their places through impeccable conduct.
And for once, to his immense satisfaction, he’d found growing support as the Senate, Admiralty and Diplomatic Corps had all seen the advantage to be gained from such a scheme. So there was the Assegai, the highest prestige ship in the Fleet other than, of course, the mighty Deity class carriers. And it was Cerdan Jennar’s baby, pushed for and supported by him with the very obvious intention of proving that anything the Fourth could do, the regular Fleet could do better. Alex being posted to the Assegai, even on a consultancy basis, would have outraged him to the point of incoherent spluttering.
And he was, evidently, still raging. Concerns had been expressed about his wellbeing, Dix said, after an incident in which Cerdan had walked off a golf course, abandoning a game, the people he was playing with and even his clubs.
The golf course, naturally, was not on Chartsey itself. There wasn’t enough ground space available there, anywhere on the planet, even to consider it. But there were country-club courses on other worlds within the system and Cerdan Jennar, of course, belonged to the most exclusive of them. The kind of people he’d have been playing a round with in the air-domed course would be wealthy, important – not the kind of people to take kindly to someone storming off the course in temper.
It seems, Dix told him, that he took exception to remarks being passed complimentary to you, perceiving these to be derogatory to himself. And in the next sentence, Regrettably, the club has suspended his membership pending an enquiry.
Even Alex, who loathed that kind of club, understood that that would hit Cerdan Jennar almost harder than a court martial. Because that, after all, that milieu, that was where he lived.
It would have repercussions in the Fleet, too. If Dix had been made aware – professionally aware – of the incident, and if the Third Lord was asked to resign from his club as a result of it, that would be cause for proceedings within the Fleet. He could not, of course be court martialled or even pressured to take early retirement on those grounds, but it would be sufficient for Dix to have an official word with him about his conduct in private life reflecting poorly on the Admiralty.
‘Tuh,’ said Alex, and it said a great deal that there was not one iota of exulting, in that. There wasn’t, admittedly, any sympathy either, but even with everything that had happened between them, Alex did not have it in him to gloat at the other man’s humiliation. If he’d put his thoughts and feelings into rather more eloquent form than that tuh, in fact, it would have been along the lines of an exasperated, ‘The idiot – the only person he’s hurting with all this bile and fury is himself.’
As it was, he expressed his feelings with a monosyllable and read on, finding a rather more pleasing paragraph about how well the rest of the Samartian delegates were getting on. They were referred to merely as ‘our friends’ and there was no mention of the think-tank set up to work with them on ship design and combat skills. There was enough information there, though, to tell Alex that there had been an exercise – a combat scenario in which a Fleet team had had their backsides thoroughly kicked by the Samartians.
Good, Alex thought, as pleased by that as Dix himself clearly was. There had been a tendency in high places to down-play the Samartians’ skills in combat. Yes, true, undeniably, they had fought off Marfikian invasion many times and were constantly skirmishing Marfikian attack craft testing their defences. But that, at least in the opinion of some in high places, was due to the sheer mass of their near-system defences. Impressive, to be sure, but not much in the way of things that they could teach the Fleet.
The exercise, pitting identical ships against one another, had made it clear that taking technology out of the equation, the Samartians could run rings around the Fleet in terms of combat strategy, ship handling and gunnery. That might be painful for some in the Fleet to accept, but it would certainly put a stop to that patronising attitude and get the think-tank to listen and learn.
Signing off with a hope that Alex was fully recovered and enjoying his ‘break’ on the Assegai, Dix’s letter left him with a chuckle.
And he could then read at least some of his personal mail. He didn’t have to contend with any of the admin that a skipper had to deal with on arriving at a port, even a deep space port like this, and with none of the diplomatic mail to deal with, either, he could sit back and relax.
The letter from his parents was unexpectedly sad – not because they were unhappy, quite the opposite. It had obviously been written before they’d been told that Alex wasn’t going to Therik after all, and was full of their excited plans for the journey there. His father was a little concerned that they might not be able to bring enough food with them for such a long stay – was Alex really sure that they could get Novaterran food on Therik? His mother was prepared to take his word for it that they’d like Therikian food, at least if she could bring along sufficient of her favourite brand of tea capsules, but his father was worried in case they didn’t like what he rather obviously considered to be ‘foreign muck’.
Alex felt a surge of love for both of them, dear funnies that they were, with their fussy little suburban home and its neat little garden. They considered themselves to be quite sophisticated intersystem travellers, now, having been taken to Chartsey on a charter yacht and eased through a visit by a small army of Diplomatic Corps personnel. But they were so, so excited about making the trip to Therik, and thrilled even by the prospect of staying on a military base. They didn’t, they told him, want to be any kind of nuisance, and would happily stay at a hotel till they found a nice self-catering holiday apartment, but if it really was all right for them to stop ‘in barracks’ then that would be lovely, an adventure in itself.
What did they imagine, Alex wondered. That the Fourth’s base was like some army boot camp, with rows of barracks and squaddies yomping about going hut, hut, hut? He had, in fact, sent them pictures of the base, of his own quarters there, and of the kind of house in family quarters which would be available to them for a visit. Evidently, though, they had formed their own ideas.
Alex wrote back straight away – a follow up to the letter he’d already sent from Chartsey, explaining that he wouldn’t be able to go to Therik as planned. In the light of President Tyborne’s intervention, he addressed the letter to them both at Novaterre and Chartsey, though he knew, really, that they would already be on their way to Chartsey by the time this letter arrived at their home. There was no way his parents would refuse a presidential invitation, however alarming a prospect it might be.
Having assured them that they would be well looked after on Chartsey and being as enthusiastic as he could manage about how much fun they’d have there, Alex told them far more truthfully how much he was looking forward to seeing them at Therik in just a few months. Even though the time they would have together was postponed and likely to be curtailed to no
more than two or three weeks, it would be lovely to see them. And they would, he added, be very comfortable at the base, with a nice house in landscaped gardens and no need at all to worry about food.
They cater for people from all over the League, he wrote, and as he did so, remembered how impressed he had been, himself, by a family picnic at the base. All members of the Fourth were entitled to have their families brought to Therik and provided with accommodation at the base, not just for while they were on leave but for as long as they were serving with them. Many families, indeed, came for visits and stayed, finding life at the base more attractive than heading back home. Alex had not realised, himself, how cosmopolitan a group this had brought together until the picnic, a kind of mini-festival with a buffet of foods from the homeworlds of everyone attending. They would certainly not, Alex knew, have any difficulty catering for the very simple tastes of his parents.
In fact, Joe from the Embassy had already resolved that even before Alex had got his letter. Finding that the von Stradas were stressing about how much food they could get into a suitcase, he’d simply ordered a crate of everything they liked to be shipped to Therik at Embassy expense. That crate, indeed, was aboard a freighter on its way to Karadon right then, full of tea capsules, ready meals and quantities of blancmange.
Unaware of this, Alex signed off his letter to them with further reassurances and his love, then turned next to the letter from Yula Cavell.
Ah. He realised at once what it was, from the tone of the first sentence. It wasn’t a Dear John and she wasn’t breaking up with him because they were not together in that sense. They had said goodbye more than a year ago at Therik, no commitment, no expectations. But she had written to tell him that she was involved with someone else, evidently feeling that she owed him that, and that he should hear it from her.
He would have been lying if he’d said that he didn’t feel a sense of regret, even of loss, seeing that it really was over between them. But it was no kind of heartbreak, either. Realistically, both of them had known that this was how it would end, that what they’d had could only be holiday romance. And after that one sharp pang, reading her letter, he found that he was happy for her, even laughing by the end of it. She was marrying, she told him, an army intelligence officer, and a moot point, there, whether it was the Fleet or Army intel who were the more disconcerted by that.
Alex could imagine, and chuckled at the thought. Officially, and for public consumption, space and groundside services had nothing but the highest respect for one another. In reality, the relationship was one of rivalry, resentment and mutual scorn. Nowhere was that stronger than between their respective intelligence services, with the corny old joke in the Fleet that army intelligence was a contradiction in terms, and the army for their part regarding Fleet Intel as airy-fairy amateurs. A marriage between two of their top agents would make for a very interesting wedding reception, that was for sure.
Alex wrote back to her, too, with his very best wishes, taking care not to make any army jokes or say anything which might come across as sour grapes.
It left him feeling rather flat, though, so rather than brood on it he looked at the rest of his mail to choose a letter he could be sure would cheer him up.
And it did. The letter was from Arak, the President of Carrearranis. Arak’s letter was full of news from the League Protectorate, ranging from the arrival of the first ocean-cruise liner which had been carried all the way out there by starship, to the outcome of a recent cotton harvest. He was pleased with the liner, which was just as they’d been told it would be. Anchoring had been agreed at the islands which had volunteered to have cruises calling by, too, and the ship was on sea-trials, making its way around what would be its cruising route. People liked it, Arak said, and were already making things ready to sell to the tourists.
Alex laughed at that. The Carrearranians had no trading economy, as such, since they simply shared whatever was surplus to their own requirements with any island which had need of it. Anyone who’d thought that this would make them vulnerable to economic exploitation, however, had been underestimating them. Carrearranians were very quick learners, and had invested the very first money they’d earned from their contact with the League in an offworld shares portfolio. They had an Economic Elder on every island now, too, responsible for developing trade, with Elder Elders at the regional level and an Elder Elder Elder functioning as de-facto Minister for the Economy. And they would, Alex had no doubt, very soon be making a fortune.
As for the cotton harvest, he laughed so much at that he had to stop reading. The Carrearranian cotton plant only grew on the highest slopes of the islands, and mostly on uninhabited islands at that. Several islands shared the harvest, each of them sending boats when the cotton was ripe for plucking, and traditionally, they sent only the young, single members of their village communities, with no supervising parents or elders.
The result, predictably, was a great deal of fun. There would not, however, be a secondary crop of babies – the population on Carrearranis was carefully managed to be sustainable on the resources they had, and youngsters were not allowed to go harvesting unless they could be relied upon to have sex for fun, not sex for making babies.
Arak told Alex that the introduction of high-speed boats between the islands had had an unexpected impact, in that instead of the usual forty or fifty youngsters gathered at an atoll for a couple of weeks’ harvesting, more than three hundred had got there. It was, said Arak, the most sex on one island that had ever happened in the whole history of the planet. Many people did not feel that this was how they wanted modernising development to go, though, and they all seemed to expect him to do something about it.
Being President, he observed, is not all joy.
Being Captain wasn’t, either, especially when it meant attending drinks receptions where the best he could hope for was to be bored and uncomfortable.
And he was, indeed, both, that evening. No fault of Quill’s, that – if he had been able to gather a congenial party then he certainly would have done, but he had no more choice in the matter than Alex himself. Instructions from head office specified not only that a reception must be held, but where, and who must be invited to it, too. So there was the usual mix of station personnel and VIP passengers, along with a leavening of officers from ships in port.
There were more VIPs than Alex had been hoping. There always were VIPs on Karadon, most of them in transit between worlds though a few might be there on holiday. Karadon was, after all, a holiday destination in its own right, with decks of luxury hotels, more decks full of leisure facilities and the famous, enormous duty free shopping atrium. Right then, it turned out, they had twenty eight people at the station with official VIP status, and every one of them had accepted an invitation to the reception.
None of the spacers there got a look in. Even the skipper of the Customs ship was only allowed fourteen seconds to shake Alex’s hand and say what a pleasure it was to meet him before she was elbowed aside by a VIP booming at him like a foghorn. By the end of the hour, Alex had been boomed at a lot. Also twittered at, squeaked at and solemnly intoned at by a man who appeared to be practising for a Most Boring Man in the Cosmos competition.
The hundred and two minutes he was there felt like a very, very long time to Alex, and it was a great relief to head back to the ship, shed his dress uniform and get back into shipboard rig. Quill had changed out of his tuxedo, too, when he came over to join him for supper, but was still wearing an elegant suit.
Supper was served, not by Simmy who was by then over on the station herself enjoying a five hour pass, but by a rigger who brought them a trolley and left it for them. By the time they’d helped themselves they were talking without reserve, so much to catch up on, even with the letters they’d been exchanging sporadically. Letters could only convey so much, after all, and a lot had happened to them both since they’d last met. Quill’s marriage had ended, for one – not, as he said himself, with a bang, but with a whimper.
He and his partner been married on a very common type of contract by which they renewed their marriage every three years. And as the time for renewal had come around this time, Quill had been willing to commit to another three years but his husband, it had turned out, was not. He was bored with life on the station, wanted to travel, and it had ended up as an ultimatum – me or the job. The fact that Quill was still Director here made it obvious which he had chosen, but the breakup had been painful.
Alex sympathised, confided that Yula had ended it with him, and got Quill laughing at the news that she was marrying an army intel officer.
‘Well, never mind,’ said Alex, and raised a glass which held non-alcoholic beer. ‘To our exes!’
Quill winced at the toast. He covered it quickly, but there was a fraction of a second there where he was looking at Alex with an expression of pure horror. Then he got control of his face and managed a laugh.
‘Sorry,’ said Alex, confused and concerned. Quill had talked frankly about his marriage ending, with no indication he would be so shocked, appalled, even, by a friendly toast to his ex. ‘I didn’t mean to…’
‘No, no, it’s…’ Quill seemed confused, himself, and somewhat embarrassed. ‘It’s fine,’ he said, though it clearly wasn’t, and after an awkward second or two, drew a go no further line with an emphatic change of subject.
Alex figured it out, though. He didn’t want to figure it out. In fact as suspicion started to rise in him he did his level best not to think about it at all. But there was only one explanation which made sense, and as much as he tried to ignore it, awareness filtered through his mind.
There was no reason, as far as he could see, for Quill to react with such shock at a toast to his ex-husband. Nor was he likely to react like that to Alex toasting Yula.
Which left only one ‘ex’ who might have been in his mind, with a momentary misunderstanding as he’d thought Alex was referring to her.
His ex-wife; a topic which no friend of Alex’s would ever raise with him. She had been off the scene, out of his life, effectively vanished, for almost ten years now. So why would Quill, even for a moment, think that Alex was talking about her?
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