‘But – you said – the Heron?’
‘Yes, the Heron is being decommissioned,’ Dix said, and seeing that Alex still did not know, was thunderstruck. ‘Good lord! You have no idea, do you? Hell, Alex, I am sorry! This is so wrong! This has been all over the news for weeks! And you must be the last person on this planet, if not across half the League, to hear about it! Damn Marc Tyborne and his big flapping mouth! I told him – you give mission orders to the officer first, then tell the media. But you know what he’s like!’
‘Dix,’ said Alex, ‘please.’
‘Oh. Yes, sorry.’ Dix gathered himself again. ‘Alex, the Fourth is being upgraded to a Defender class destroyer.’ And as Alex’s eyes widened in shock, ‘I thought you knew – you said you were expecting it, that you wouldn’t kick off. So what did you think was happening?’
‘I thought,’ Alex admitted, ‘that you were going to put me in an Admiralty office.’
Dix reared back in his seat, looking appalled.
‘Who in their right minds,’ he asked, ‘would cage you in an office?’ And as a thought struck him, ‘Who in their right minds would cage you in an office in the same building?’ He shuddered. ‘Good lord. What a horrible thought, having you working down the corridor!’
‘Thanks,’ said Alex, breaking into a grin at that.
‘Oh, come on, you’d be a nightmare, and you know it.’ Dix said. ‘And the Fourth needs you, you know that too.’ He was putting two and two together now. ‘Oh, that’s why you snarled at me over looking after your people? You thought the Fourth was being disbanded?’
‘I thought perhaps…’ Alex said, and looked round at a more insistent tap on the kitchen door.
‘Boys…’ his father looked in again, with an apologetic but determined look.
‘Two more minutes, Dad,’ said Alex, in a tone which would have made any member of his crew obey at once.
‘Please,’ Dix added, with all the courteous authority of the First Lord of the Admiralty.
‘Well…’ Alex’s father sighed, and withdrew, reluctantly.
‘Alex,’ said Dix, ‘I do appreciate that you may be tired, even perhaps thinking that you’ve given all you have to give. But you can’t rest on your laurels – innovation doesn’t stop, either in tech advancement or figuring out ways for us, the Fleet, to do things better. You – the Fourth with you in command, that’s a powerhouse. You take people in, you train them up and fire them out again like a vortex spinning energy and skills and ideas and aspiration right through the Fleet. We need that. And the Fourth needs you. But the days when you could work from the Heron are gone, sorry, the pressure to give you a ship worthy of our premier taskforce has gone public, and with Terrible backing that too, the Senate has made the call. You have to upgrade, and command at flag level.’
Alex understood, then, what Dix had meant by the Assegai being a ‘test run’.
It wasn’t what he wanted, of course. He had been resisting it for years. The bigger ship, not being able to be directly involved with his crew, not even able to use the open-comms system that had been so successful on the Heron. But that just meant he was going to have to figure something else out that would bind the crew together… take some tips from Min, perhaps, and work up some ideas of his own.
It would be hard, and it wasn’t what he wanted. But compared to being sent to labour in an Admiralty office, it was paradise.
‘Which ship?’ he asked, and with that, Dix could see from the light in his eyes that Alex was already looking to the future, making plans.
Dix took a standard Fleet-issue comp from his pocket with a furtive movement. Alex’s mum had asked for his wristcom at the door – Simon’s orders, she’d explained, so Alex wouldn’t be naughty, calling people about work when he was supposed to be resting. Dix had handed over his wristcom without argument, but had not mentioned his pocket comp.
Now, keeping half an eye on the kitchen door, he punched up an image screen and turned it so that Alex could see.
It was an image of spacedocks at Mandram – the Vetris shipyard, in fact. They had two Defender class destroyers there under construction. One was still at the skeletal phase, atomic-bonding robots crawling all over it. The other was evidently nearing completion, with a hull and airlocks indicating that it had reached the stage of being pressurised.
Footsteps were coming towards the door – deliberately loud, Alex’s dad wanting them to hear him approach.
Alex took the comp, and it was apparent to Dix that he was not getting it back. It would vanish into Alex’s pocket, his lifeline to the outside world. And fair enough too, Dix certainly wasn’t going to dob him in. So he just grinned, seeing the way that Alex was looking at that image with a look of possessive interest… his ship. It was his ship, already.
‘The next one off the slips,’ said Dix, ‘is yours.
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Assegai Page 53
