XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  Alex gave him a shrewd look. ‘Not what you were expecting?’ he queried.

  ‘I didn’t quite know what to expect, to be honest, sir,’ Very admitted. ‘You hear such very different things, from different people. I’ve read your policies, of course, sir,’ he hastened to assure him, ‘but I must admit I didn’t really expect things to be so ... well, so cheerful and enthusiastic.’

  Alex smiled tolerantly.

  ‘People nearly always get that wrong,’ he observed. ‘It doesn’t matter how clear we are about it in the policies, people hear ‘rehab unit’ and at some level they expect us to be sorting people out with tough discipline, army bootcamp style. The reality is that everyone aboard this ship has fought for the opportunity to serve here, and that they are, regardless of what it may say on their records, all high achievers. The definition of a bullock, after all, is someone of high potential who for one reason or another is failing to achieve that, often with poor morale and associated acting-out behaviour. I consider that to be both a systemic fault in the Fleet as a whole, in failing to provide motivating challenge for these very able personnel, and, all too often, specific failure on the part of the officers who’ve had care of them, either failing to recognise their abilities or trying to grind them down into what they consider to be ‘normal’. All we do here is to recognise talent and provide opportunity for people to achieve their full potential.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ Very agreed. ‘I think it’s...’ he broke off, feeling that even to express his admiration might seem impertinent, ‘I’m finding it very motivating, sir,’ he amended, and Alex smiled again.

  ‘Good,’ he said, and feeling sure that Very Vergan wouldn’t waste a moment of his opportunities here, gave him another nod. ‘Enjoy your time with us.’

  He went on his way, working his way up through the decks. He had no particular route for his walkabouts, though almost always ended up in engineering. Passing through mess deck four, he spent a few minutes talking to the crew who were off duty there. As pleased as they were to see him, nobody suggested that he sit down or offered him a coffee. As radical as Alex was, there were lines even he would not cross – he was ‘skipper’ to his crew, never ‘Alex’, and while they might joke with him, there was always that underlying authority.

  Of course, there were always some pushing at that line. It was an understood role aboard any ship, the cheeky one, testing officers. Today, Able Star Trevaga was going to cross that line. He was a bullock in the early phase of rehab, one of those who’d joined the Fourth at Therik. He was, indeed, absolutely typical of the kind of crew the Fleet called ‘bullocks’. He’d been in the Fleet for nearly six years now and his file was a trail of disciplinary incidents; insubordination, absence without leave, drunk aboard ship, more insubordination. He had been promoted to Able Star three times on the strength of his skill in electronics, only to be busted back to Ordinary because of his behaviour. Alex had put him on the books as Able and Buzz had told him that they expected him to make Leading grade within five months.

  Conversation had turned to how good it was to be back aboard ship. Many of the crew had been sorry to part from families, but as so often happened with spacers, those feelings faded as quickly as the star system you’d left dwindled back into the star field. For spacers, this was their true home.

  ‘Not that I didn’t enjoy spending time with the family,’ one of the crew said, hastily, obviously feeling a twinge of guilt at saying how happy he was to be heading away from them. ‘But you know how it is, skipper.’

  Alex did know. Life on a planet was like being in an anthill, teeming with people. For any member of the Fourth, too, it involved being subjected to a constant battering from the media and all the many protest groups campaigning against them. Even at launch, they’d been hounded out of the system by more than a hundred small craft. Media, protest groups and the merely thrill-seeking had crowded around them as closely as they dared, flashing signals as fast as their arrays could transmit them. It might look like an honour escort, if you couldn’t read what was being said. It had felt good, so good, to break free of all that and cruise out into the serenity of deep space.

  ‘Good shoreleave yourself, sir?’ Trevaga asked, which in itself was perfectly okay, though asked with a sly undertone that made it apparent he was teasing. Then he crossed the line with a dirty laugh. ‘That Cassie was a bit of all right, eh, sir?’

  He made a crude gesture, and there was a shocked recoil amongst the rest of the crew, though one of the younger ones laughed nervously.

  Alex didn’t react. Finding it impossible to contact or get any information about him while he was on leave, the less reputable end of the media had resorted to making stuff up. One of the more salacious stations had produced a young woman who claimed to have been Alex’s lover, giving details of her nights with him at the Fourth’s base. Alex himself had hardly noticed. They were saying much worse things than that about him, after all.

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ he replied, mildly. ‘Since I never met the lady.’

  He could see the outrage on many of the faces around, and knew that A/S Trevaga would be told in no uncertain terms that you did not speak to the skipper like that on this ship as soon as he was gone. Trevaga knew it, too, as the joke had clearly fallen flat as a deck plate.

  As he left them, Alex heard the rebukes break out, punctuated by a highly unofficial slap round the head from a shipmate. He grinned a little at that. It was a mystery to him why other skippers assumed his crew must be extraordinarily difficult to manage. As far as he was concerned, they pretty much managed themselves.

  Civilians, however, were another matter. He spent a tedious fifteen minutes in the lab, patiently reassuring Candra and her team that he would not let them down.

  ‘No matter what happens,’ he promised, ‘I will make sure that you get your opportunity to test the Ignite before we go back to port.’

  Candra didn’t look entirely convinced. She recognised, however, that she had no choice here. So she contented herself with a grumbled ‘I’ll hold you to that,’ and let him go.

  Alex moved on, calling in at sickbay. Rangi was expecting him, beaming with pleasure as he offered him a seat and a cup of herbal tea. Alex declined both. Actually he rather liked it in sickbay. He had no objection to his ship’s medic turning sickbay into a virtual reality grotto, with holographic scenery, waterfalls and nature sounds. The was also a real tree, much prized by the crew, that grew in a pot. Floor cushions were scattered on artificial grass in what Rangi called his healing space, where he also held counselling and meditation sessions. Alex quite liked to sit there himself, occasionally. He didn’t even mind, really, the presence of the gecko in its specially built habitat, though as usual he pretended not to even be aware that it was there. He didn’t want Rangi to get the idea that he was a soft touch, so maintained the fiction that he only tolerated the lizard so long as it was kept out of his way.

  ‘You’re looking well,’ Rangi observed, and there was a definite note of satisfaction in his voice, more than a hint of told you so, told you that you needed a proper holiday.

  Alex did not waste his time trying to get the medic to understand that he was looking so well, happy and full of energy because he was back at work. He’d spent his enforced leave at a beach house, forcing himself to walk on the beach and read and ‘relax’ whilst he was conscious all the time of the thousand things he would much rather be doing.

  ‘Never better,’ he said. ‘But I was sorry to see you had a bad time of it, Rangi.’

  Rangi grimaced, giving a shrug. He had gone off with a spiritual group for a healing retreat in a forest. Security had approved it, with the usual precautions in transit from the base so that nobody would follow them. Unfortunately, one of the group had turned out to be rather more materialist than spiritual after all, calling a holo-station to ask how much it would be worth to them to know where the Fourth’s notorious medic was, right now. The first news crew had been there within minutes, and where one
went, others followed. Rangi, shaken and distressed by the shouting mob gathering about him, had had to be pulled out by a security team.

  ‘Goes with the territory,’ he observed, philosophically, though his tone became a little plaintive, then, ‘I just wish, you know, that they could see what we’re really like, and what we actually do.’

  Alex nodded, with some sympathy and even a little guilt. He was well aware that his own mishandling of the media and public had been a major factor in the PR disaster they had to live with now.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Rangi, ‘we could have a journalist or two aboard, to travel with us, you know, and show what we’re really like.’

  Alex was still laughing at that as he went on his way. Civilians, okay – he had no problem with civilian consultants working with the Second, and had even had a League Prisons Inspector aboard to see what they were really doing. No journalist would come through the airlock, however, unless over Alex’s dead body. Not that they would be allowed to anyway, even under the most stringent security conditions. They even had to have a special airlock on deck seven with a security-sealed area and meeting room for those visitors coming aboard without sufficient clearance to be allowed to walk through the main part of the ship. There was classified tech here everywhere you looked, including some still under development. Their missions, too, though far from the wild illegal stunts imagined by the public, often did have classified aspects which would make it impossible to report on them honestly.

  Irrespective of all that, as Alex had come to understand, it wouldn’t matter even if they did have a film crew aboard. You only had to look at the damage to the career and reputation of Inspector Mako Ireson to understand that anyone who came off the Fourth’s ship with any kind of positive report would be howled down immediately.

  And few people would have believed the reality anyway, even if they’d been there in person. Even Alex could be surprised sometimes by the weirdness of life aboard a starship. People behaved differently out here, under the combined influence of the cocoon of the ship and the sense of yawning immensity outside it. Inhibitions fell away, relationships intensified and the custom and practice of ‘normal for the ship’ could veer off in some very strange directions indeed. It was part of the skipper’s job to ensure that that didn’t happen, and like any responsible officer Alex always had half an eye to the possibility of social closure, as well as odd behaviour in individuals that might signal stress.

  When he went into engineering and discovered one of their passengers cuddling an engine and singing to it, therefore, he paused for a moment, evaluating the situation with a professional eye.

  It was abnormally quiet in engineering. Morry Morrelle, the chief engineer, was leaning on the metal railing around the control centre, along with Lt Commander Guntur Norsten of the League Cartographic Service. Both of them had mugs in their hands and expressions of quiet pleasure on their faces. Two ratings were on duty at the consoles behind them. Two others were moving around the banks of mix cores, taking readings and making an occasional adjustment. None of them were speaking, the riggers taking care not even to clatter their tools.

  The reason for that was evidently the girl who was snuggled up to number sixteen core, the most easily accessible from the gantries that snaked throughout engineering. She had her arms around the core, her face resting against it, eyes closed, singing.

  He knew who she was, of course. Katrin Naos, a post graduate student in wave space physics. She was a genius – the product of one of the League’s institutes for gifted children, she’d got her first degree at the age of eleven and was now working on her second doctorate. The Second had asked for a place for her and Gunny Norsten for this project some months before, but they had had to wait till Katrin Naos turned sixteen. Though the age of legal adulthood in the League was fourteen, you had to be sixteen to join military service, and Alex had not been willing to bend the rules even for a fifteen year old genius.

  They’d met, briefly, when he’d welcomed the Second’s team aboard, though he hadn’t formed much of an impression of her. She was small, lightly built, with scruffy red hair and a nervous manner. She’d shaken hands with him awkwardly, as if unused to the courtesy, then ducked away behind the others.

  Now, it became apparent that she had a beautiful voice – professionally trained, Alex guessed, with the control of an operatic soprano. She was singing wordlessly, a high floating aria that made all the hairs rise on his arm and a little shiver run through his skin. And she was, he realised a moment later, singing in harmony with the engines.

  It was a special sound, the noise that superlight mix cores made. Some engineers claimed that they could hear actual music in it, subtle harmonies as the twenty-four dimensional forcefields fluxed and phased. Buy an engineer enough drinks and some of them would start talking about the music of the universe. Alex loved the sound, himself, with the deep throbbing that pulsed through your bones and the constantly shifting harmonics. It was the audible equivalent, Alex felt, of gazing into the shift and flicker of flames. He came down here most days, even if just to spend a few minutes sitting on the gantry with a mug of tea, listening to the engines. Even on an ordinary Fleet ship, it was recognised that engineering was a place of refuge for the skipper, a place where they could set aside formalities and just have a cuppa.

  Now, he heard the engines given human voice. And it was as if the core had found another voice to sing with, almost as if that song had been there all the time but they just hadn’t been able to hear it until Katrin Naos shared it with them. It was mesmerising. Alex would not have interrupted her for worlds, himself, and moved very quietly to the gantry. There, a crewman held up a tin mug with a questioning look, and at Alex’s nod of thanks, set about making him tea, soundlessly. By some tradition so ancient its roots were lost in Fleet history, they made tea in engineering using tin mugs and a steam valve. There seemed a certain rightness to that, somehow – surrounded by the most advanced technology known to man, there was a kind of satisfaction in brewing tea by such primitive means, a small defiant human act.

  Alex exchanged nods and smiles with the two officers who were leaning on the gantry rail, but sat down in his usual place on the steps.

  Minutes passed. Alex sipped his tea and drifted into a reverie that became timeless. None of the hours he’d spent dutifully walking on the beach and listening to the sound of waves breaking had achieved this. He felt utterly at peace, aware of his ship soaring through space just as the girl’s voice soared through notes of crystalline purity.

  Then, quite suddenly, it was over. The song came to an end on a final haunting note that faded into the sound of the engines. Alex felt that he could still hear that note, even though she’d stopped singing. As she moved back onto the gantry, opening her eyes now and grinning happily, there was a burst of applause, cheering, even a whistle from one of the riggers. They all knew, really, that she hadn’t been singing for them, had been oblivious to their presence, but it seemed right to thank her anyway. Alex joined in the applause and smiled as she noticed him there and looked suddenly embarrassed.

  ‘Beautiful,’ he commended.

  ‘Ta.’ She looked as gawky as a shy child, fidgeting one foot behind the other and hunching her shoulders. Her face flamed with colour as she corrected herself, hastily, ‘I mean, thank you, skipper.’ The pink of her face clashed horribly with the orangey red of her hair, and Alex wondered if she really was old enough, even now, to be aboard a warship. If he hadn’t known better, he would have guessed that she couldn’t be more than twelve. But that was, he realised, due to her upbringing. It was a common criticism of Gifted Institutes, that they focussed so intensely on developing intellect that the kids had virtually no experience of the real world.

  ‘Kate doesn’t often sing in front of other people.’ The way that Gunny Norsten stepped in then was very protective, almost parental, drawing the skipper’s attention away from the embarrassed girl. He was, in fact, here as her assistant, not the other way ar
ound. His role was that of liaison, making arrangements on her behalf so that she could carry out her research. Alex suspected that the Second had sent him with her because they’d found that people just couldn’t take such an awkward little girl seriously as a scientist. It was clear that she relied on him a good deal, too. Alex smiled back, understanding, leaving the kid alone.

  He had, in fact, a high degree of respect for her intellect. He had read her research intention during his enforced leave. Rangi might have quibbled at that as work, but Alex had justified it to himself as holiday reading for personal interest. He had very soon found himself having to refer to advanced level engineering and wave space physics textbooks even to figure out what she was talking about. Put simply, her project was to install a monitor with a programme that would use the output of the engines to create detailed topographic maps of the wave space they were travelling through. He would have liked to chat to her about that, really, but it was clear that she found him an intimidating figure. So he chatted with Norsten and Morry instead, just general Fleet shop talk as he finished his tea.

  Before he left, though, he noticed an intriguing little incident. Without saying anything, Katrin Naos moved over to one of the consoles and adjusted one of the controls there very slightly. The rating working there just gave her a grin for that, which startled Alex in itself. The usual reaction of any Fleet crew to a civilian messing with controls would have been to yelp and push them away, but it was clear that she had authorisation to do that.

  ‘Kate has very sensitive hearing,’ Morry informed him, seeing the skipper’s surprise. ‘She can hear when cores are running out of phase even before it shows up on monitors, and since it affects her like nails on slate, I’ve given her permission to adjust the mix.’

  That ability was not unknown amongst spacers. Alex had once known a crewman who’d claimed to be able to hear a scratching discordance when cores were running hot. His shipmates had tested him, and sure enough there was a line of jagged discord in the graphic readout whenever he said he could hear the noise. He’d had to leave the ship in the end, however, because the engineer had refused to believe him and was of the breed that habitually ran his engines hot, too, grating on the poor man’s nerves till he just couldn’t take it any more. Alex, therefore, smiled understanding and gave a nod of agreement. ‘I think we should make her an honorary member of the crew,’ Morry continued, in an avuncular tone.