She remained at the helm for six hours, the maximum permitted by safety regulations. At no time did she fling the ship into any vehement manoeuvres, or even take them far off course. It was more a matter of orienting the ship through gentle curves, dips and rises. Her manner was quiet and professional throughout, absorbed in what she was doing, but as calmly as if it were a perfectly routine watch at the helm.
You had to be a spacer to recognise the genius of what she was doing, though even the other passengers could hear the different sound the engines made while she was piloting. They’d been told to expect some noise while they were passing through Kennerman’s Ridge, with a heavier thudding sound from the engines than usual, perhaps some vibration, even the possibility of alerts. Instead, the frigate cruised serenely, the engines purring like harmonic cats. Morry was enraptured, as he and his watch team sat on the gantries, nothing to do but drink tea and listen to the sweet sound of engines in perfect phase.
It happened on all starships occasionally, almost always by accident. The constant shift and phase of mix core energies was caused by the ship running through the instabilities of wave space, not unlike an ocean ship ploughing up and down over waves. Just sometimes, though, the ship would be running directly along a wave space contour, like surfing along the crest, keeping the engines in perfect balance. A really good pilot with the most advanced and up to date charts might sustain that for several minutes at a time. A really brilliant pilot might keep it going for an hour. Kate, six hours later, looked as if she could have kept going like that, effortlessly, all night.
‘Thank you, skipper,’ she came over to the command deck, having handed back to the duty helm, and winced a little as the engines began to give the usual staccato thump you got when passing through a ridge. It wasn’t dangerous, at least not by the standards of what spacers considered dangerous, but it wasn’t a good sound. Every ship had its own characteristics when passing through such features, too. The Heron grumbled, as if the engines were grumpy old women chattering crossly about the lack of respect in young people today. Alex suspected that Kate’s request to pilot the ship through the Ridge was as much to do with her own desire to avoid spending hours listening to that as it was to collect data for her mapping research. But she had spared the rest of them six hours of engine-grumble too, and his smile was warm.
‘Thank you,’ he said, and as he saw her wince again at some discord only she could hear, suggested sympathetically, ‘I’d recommend earplugs.’
She grinned back at that, nodding acknowledgement, but just then, a call came through from the Stepeasy. The yacht had remained on station alongside them, throughout, following their every manoeuvre, and in doing so, they too had been riding the crest. There were, indeed, two calls flashing over to them – one from Davie, which just said, ‘Smooooooth!’ in frank admiration, and the other, rather more formal, from their watch officer, requesting that they convey his compliments to their helm.
Alex played both calls so that Kate could hear them, and saw the rosy blush rising, the bashful grin that made her look too young even to be driving an aircar.
‘Very well done,’ he commended, sincerely.
‘Thanks, skipper,’ she said again, and then, with a general goodnight, left the command deck and headed for the lab.
Alex saw her brace herself as she approached the door, and felt a further twinge of sympathy. Candra Pattello had barely come out of the lab since Alex had pulled her up for her behaviour. That had certainly had the desired effect at least in that she had stopped complaining and being rude to people. Superficially, in fact, her behaviour could not now be faulted, since she was quiet, punctiliously polite and making no demands on them at all. She emerged every morning to go for a workout, responding ‘Good morning’ to greetings and ‘Very well, thank you,’ to enquiries about her welfare. She spent the rest of the time in the lab, working and having her meals in the communal space, watching holovision and sleeping in her cabin. She had declined an invitation to dinner in the wardroom, but with faultless courtesy.
Tension, however, practically crackled in the air around her. There’d been a major falling out between her and her team. They were all employees of Devast Industries, the company behind the Ignite project. There was a systems engineer, Mack, who’d supervised the building of the missile, a geophysicist called Denni who’d be carrying out the survey of the system before and after the test fire, and a project manager, always known as Mr Soames, who was representing company interests and doing all the paperwork. Part of the problem was that there was no direct hierarchy amongst them. Devast Industries had adopted the trendy new business-structure model of ‘round table management’. There were no old fashioned managerial structure diagrams for them, with its outdated top-down thinking – their managerial structure diagram had all of their directors and senior personnel standing in a circle with successive waves of staff behind. Which was fine, to be fair, in the culture of Devast’s offices where decisions had to be reached on multi-department consensus anyway, and where project team meetings routinely went on for days.
Here on the ship, though, their trendy circular diagram was proving inadequate to the purpose. Since none of them was officially in charge, each responsible for their own aspects of the project, de facto leadership fell, inevitably, to the strongest personality. That was, obviously, Candra Pattello, and the others had accepted that, mostly for the sake of a quiet life.
They had already been verging on rebellion, however, by the time they’d reached Amali. She was laying the law down with them, telling them that they were not allowed to work in the galley, insisting on them spending hours in the lab with her going over the plans for the test even though there really was nothing more to be said. She was even controlling their social lives, telling them not to get too familiar with the officers and crew because that would compromise the integrity of the project.
The others hadn’t seen how, and though they had capitulated, resentment had been building up a powerful head of steam in all of them. To their credit, they had contained it, all of them doing their best to rise above and maintain professionalism, telling themselves that it was just cabin fever, getting on each other’s nerves.
Amali had been a blessed relief. For six wonderful hours they’d been able to get off the ship. It said a good deal in that that even splashing through stinking slime had seemed a breath of fresh air compared to the atmosphere in the lab. They’d had time to relax, to collect their thoughts, and each of them had privately resolved, as they came back aboard, not to let Candra push them around any more.
And then she’d insulted Shionolethe. All three of the others had shared the delight of the crew when they were told they were taking an alien ambassador aboard. They were if anything even more conscious of the honour of being involved in that than the crew themselves. They were, indeed, extraordinarily privileged, people who would never normally have been cleared even to be told that aliens were visiting human worlds. They were thrilled beyond measure to actually be able to meet someone from the legendary Veiled World, and their only regret was that they would never be able to tell anyone about it.
Their shock when Candra had snapped at Rangi that Shionolethe wasn’t to come in, that she wasn’t allowed in there, had very rapidly surged into fury. They had been waiting in there, on tenterhooks, watching the shipboard feed and hoping that she would come into the lab so they could be introduced, and Candra had not only ruined that but embarrassed them too. When Candra came back from her meeting with the skipper and told them that he’d threatened to put her off the ship, the unanimous reaction had been that he was well within his rights and that she’d have no-one to blame but herself.
The final breach, however, had come when Candra had realised that the others would not support her, would not leave the ship with her if she was put off at Karadon, and yes, absolutely, would work with the Fourth to continue the test. Her presence was not essential for that, as Mack had pointed out, and she could not ‘take the proje
ct with her’ since the missile was the property of Devast Industries and not something she could walk off with.
She had called them traitors, and worse things, and they in turn had told her what they thought of her. They were now in that icy state of Not Speaking where such conversation as was necessary between them was conducted in clipped, forced tones with no eye contact.
Outside the lab, at least, the rest of the team were all much happier. All three had volunteered to do whatever work they could. Mack, the systems engineer, had been allowed to help out in the tech store. Denni had surprised everyone by turning out to be a spacer. They’d all assumed that the geophysicist was a groundhog, but as it turned out she’d travelled on starships before. And not liners, either, but the grit and graft of a mining survey ship, prospecting for the company she’d worked for before getting the job with Devast. She had no formal starship crew qualifications, but had been rated competent deckhand by the mining ship skipper, and a few days training and testing saw her allowed to work as a rigger on the Heron, too.
It was Perry Soames, though, who was the real surprise. They’d thought him as grey and boring as his suit, a corporate nonentity, but as he emerged from Candra’s shadow he was revealed as a man of both intelligence and humour. When Buzz asked him if he had any skills that they might be able to make use of on the ship, he answered, ‘None at all,’ adding, with an apologetic note, ‘I’m an accountant.’
The Heron’s crew warmed to him, with that, and it was Perry Soames, in the end, who became their pet civilian. The crew looked after him, kindly, teaching him things and taking pride in his achievements. When he passed the basic safety training and began helping out in the galley, he got pats and congratulations all round, the crew as pleased with him as with a child who’d learned a clever trick. He didn’t seem to mind being patronised like that – it was good humoured and he was smart enough to know that he was, indeed, perfectly clueless where life aboard a starship was concerned.
All the passengers other than Candra Pattello, the crew felt, were earning their keep, which was not about working to pay for their accommodation, at all, but far more of a social evaluation, that they were part of the shipboard community, making what contribution they could. As generally did happen when members of the Second gelled in with them, indeed, lines between passengers and crew were blurring as the journey progressed. Nobody, for instance, thought it at all remarkable when Kate Naos was left minding the engine room for half an hour, though Alex did privately ask the engineer not to make a habit of leaving the sixteen year old civilian on watch.
Candra Pattello, though, stood out, cold and hard as a dressing on a broken thumb. Within the confines of the lab, it was rather like sharing quarters with a venomous snake. It was just not possible to relax in there. They made heroic efforts to chat cheerfully amongst themselves but it always fell flat, an artificial breeziness punctuated by awkward silences.
Alex knew how uncomfortable things were in the lab, and sympathised. Martine had suggested giving Candra alternative quarters, seeing how unpleasant she was making life for the others, but Alex had told her he wouldn’t even consider it. There had already been high level debate over the potential usage of the accommodation on deck four. Dix Harangay had had to fight Alex’s side there, tooth and nail, insisting that they retain their purpose as detention and emergency quarters. Alex, knowing very well that one of the suggestions being made was that the Senate committee might send a working party aboard to observe Fourth’s operations, had breathed a sigh of relief when he’d got the letter from Dix telling him that he’d won that one, and had written back with heartfelt thanks. If he once allowed those quarters to be used as regular accommodation, there would be no stopping them being filled up with a gaggle of politicians.
As he was musing on Professor Pattello, however, the ship gave a particularly irritable grumble, a tremor running through the decks. The rating at the helm patted the console and murmured soothingly, then looked over, catching Alex’s eye and asking ‘Can I put some music on, skipper?’
It was a widespread but wholly irrational belief amongst spacers that you could steady a moody ship by playing soft music. Alex didn’t allow music on the command deck during the day, but they were well into the nightwatch by then, the ship darkened and most of the crew asleep. Alex liked to hold the watch on nights like this, and by ‘nights like this’ he meant at the end of a long run of solitary flight, before they plunged back into the hubbub of patrol.
‘All right,’ he agreed, and left the choice to the helmsman. It didn’t do anything for the ship, of course, that was pure superstition, but as mellow music floated about them they weren’t quite so aware of the irritated chatter from the engines, and the atmosphere, at least, seemed more relaxed.
Another hour or so, anyway, and they were out of the Ridge, the engines settling down to their usual busy humming and the engineer giving all the cores a pat before he went off to bed.
The ship was certainly very different by the following nightwatch. They’d been on the shipping lane for about four hours by then and had already responded to their first request for assistance. It hadn’t been anything all dramatic, just a freighter signalling ‘non-emergency assistance required’, which had turned out to be a request for the use of their atomic bonding gear to fix a weakened airlock. A hullwalker team went over with the heavy duty gear and did the work for them in less than half an hour. As Alex told Shion, it was a minor issue, which they could have fixed at Karadon anyway.
‘It’s an inconvenience, more than anything – no pun intended,’ Alex said, with a grin as several of the people on the command deck groaned at that. Then as Shion looked enquiringly at him, he explained, ‘Showers and lavatories are located in the airlocks on whalebelly freighters, see, and with that airlock unsafe for pressurisation they wouldn’t have been able to use the starboard ones. Lavatories are sometimes known as ‘conveniences’, hence the unintentional pun. With eight people on the ship and only one working lavatory, things could be a little uncomfortable, but they’d have made it to Karadon, no problem.’
Shion smiled politely – lavatories were not funny in her culture. ‘How did the airlock get damaged, then?’ she asked, curiously.
‘Oh, that kind of warping can happen on whalebellies sometimes,’ Alex told her, ‘if they take a hit around the nose.’
Shion looked intrigued. She knew about micro-impacts, of course. Even the tiniest particle of matter could have quite an impact when a ship ran into it at superlight speeds, and though hulls were naturally designed to take that, it could still do some damage.
‘The stresses would converge at the airlock,’ she observed, looking at the whalebelly specs Alex had called up for her, with the eye of both a pilot and an engineer. ‘That’s really bad design,’ she added, with a pained note, and looked surprised again then as quite a few people laughed.
‘You are not the first person to say so,’ Alex agreed. ‘But every starship has its weak point, Shion, usually some aspect that was forced on the designer by higher priority considerations. In this case, the entry airlocks of this class of whalebelly are too far for’ard because of the cargo derricks and nets that make it so popular. It can haul more cargo, for its size, than any other kind of freighter, and that’s hugely important when your business is moving stuff from one world to another. The known design flaw of airlocks that may warp if you take a hit in the wrong place is just accepted as something you have to put up with.’
They were passing another ship even as he spoke – this one was heading in the opposite direction, only just on their scanners. The Heron was cruising directly along the notional line that defined the route. It was like invisible thread, stretched out across light years, a network of threads linking worlds and deep space stations. If you navigated by shipping lanes even the smallest ship could complete such a journey on autopilot. Even on a busy shipping lane like this, though, freighters and yachts might go for days without seeing another ship. The Heron was cruisi
ng between two and three times the speed of the average freighter, so would be overtaking ships constantly, but for most of the ships in the flow of traffic, they could not see the ship either ahead of them or behind. The Heron also had the very latest, most powerful scanners around – such hot tech, indeed, that they were one of only three Fleet ships to have them, yet. They could see ships that other vessels would pass by without even knowing they were there.
To Alex, the encounter that followed was so routine that if he’d been here doing paperwork he would barely even have glanced up. He was not holding the watch, after all. He rarely did, when the ship was on patrol, though he would spend most of his time now on the command deck. Right now, the ship was in the hands of Martine Fishe, being assisted by one of their supernumerary officers, Arie McKenna. She’d been with them for eight months now and was long past feeling any thrill at routine patrols, her manner capable but matter of fact as she called for the next duty pilot to stand by with a gift box.
For Shion, though, these were her first encounters with other ships, all of it new and exciting. She watched with fascination as the Heron swung around and dropped in at a courteous distance alongside the other ship, slowing right down to keep pace with them. This was a container ship, dwarfing the frigate, its fifty four carrier arms loaded with massive freight containers. The haul section was like an insectoid head stuck on the front, most of it taken up with the fifty eight mix cores it took to move this monster along even at a stately L7. Amazingly to Shion at least, for all its vast size, it had a crew of only sixteen, though in this case, as they signalled, they had five passengers aboard as well. Most freighters would carry passengers, if they had the room – some people preferred to travel that way, and though the container ship would take nearly twice as long to make a journey than a liner, it was considerably cheaper.
‘Box for twenty one,’ Arie had only been waiting for that signal confirming how many people were aboard the ship, speaking through her headset comlink with the waiting pilot, and got a laconic, ‘Okay,’ in reply.
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