But with that, the Stepeasy moved in, too. The yacht had followed them round, dutiful as an escort, though it was bigger and a lot more impressive than they were. Alex couldn’t help but grin, as the superyacht dropped in neatly on the freighter’s other side. The container ship had taken the sudden appearance of the Fourth’s ship in their stride, even greeting them with pleasure. Spacers, at least, knew better than to believe the stupid stuff they saw on the media – they believed, as always, each other, word of mouth passed along through every ship encounter and shared in every port. The crew of the container ship knew they had nothing to fear from the Fourth, since they were neither pirates nor drug smugglers. There’d be a friendly greeting, the same kind of courtesy gift you’d get from any Fleet ship, and a story to tell of having met them. Their skipper, indeed, was chatting very happily to Martine, at the point where the Stepeasy cruised in. Alex heard her break off, with a gasp and a wow, a hubbub of astonishment audible in the background.
‘You’ll get that a lot, when people see the Stepeasy,’ he told Shion, as she looked surprised by that reaction. ‘It is, frankly, one of the most impressive ships in space; one of the fastest, too, a ship that makes spacers just stare in admiration.’
‘Oh.’ Shion considered this, mildly surprised. ‘I think it’s a bit kitsch, myself. The Heron is far more elegant.’
Everyone in earshot beamed at her for that, and Alex grinned too. The Seabird frigates were many things – sturdy, roomy, tough workhorses, with many good qualities, to be sure, but only someone with a very partisan eye would describe them as elegant. The Stepeasy, on the other hand, was a great sleek barracuda of a ship. Shion might have had a point about the kitsch, though, Alex conceded, with the Stepeasy’s hull so richly adorned with silver trimmings and twinkling lights. The superyacht was sparkling even more than usual right now as they rippled lights and flashed a greeting to the freighter, and after a stunned few seconds, the freighter returned it.
The Heron sent over a shuttle, handing over a gift box at the port entry airlock.
The Stepeasy sent over a shuttle, handing over a gift box at the starboard entry airlock.
The Heron signalled courteous wishes for a good journey, and curved away.
The Stepeasy signalled courteous wishes for a good journey, and followed, dropping back into escort-position with them.
Alex called, using the code Davie North had given him to get past the ‘my people calling your people’ routine. He was not surprised to see that Davie was on his own flight deck, in the skipper’s place – that, at least, had been totally obvious, that this was Davie winding him up.
‘You’re going to do that all the way to Karadon, aren’t you?’ he said, which was also obvious to him the moment the comlink came on and he could see the look of happy anticipation on Davie’s face.
‘Come on, you can’t begrudge me a little bit of fun,’ Davie replied. The Stepeasy had kept their distance as the Heron responded to the other freighter signalling request for assistance, but it was apparent from this that Davie felt that courtesy encounters were fair game. It was pure mischief, too, mimicking the frigate.
‘Fine,’ Alex said, imperturbably, ‘just so long as I know.’ It would be mildly annoying, having the Stepeasy swoop in and hijack all their courtesy encounters, and would undoubtedly cause a good deal of surprise and bewilderment aboard the ships they met, but they could work with it.
Davie sniggered. He was, Alex noticed, wearing a shower robe of brilliant hummingbird colours, open over a flickball team t-shirt. A middle aged man in immaculate chef’s whites was quietly setting dishes onto a table beside his command chair, and Davie reached out without looking, snared a slice of pie and saluted Alex with it. Then he took a bite. He was evidently going to say something else, but was distracted by the taste of the pie, and not happily, either, as his expression changed to one of revulsion. He turned his head, giving the chef a look of deeply hurt reproach.
‘Sorry, sir,’ said the chef, with an answering look of just as heartfelt appeal, at which Davie sighed, dropping the pie back onto the plate and waving it to be taken away.
‘Seriously, come on,’ he said, but without any rancour, turning back to Alex then and explaining, ‘High energy nutrient, disgusting stuff. They’re always trying to sneak it into my food.’ He looked hopefully at Alex. ‘Have you got any soppo and dogs you could send over?’
The chef visibly flinched, and Alex laughed. He’d sent over a mug of soup and hot beef roll for Davie to try one night as they were playing triplink. It had caused, he knew, considerable consternation on the Stepeasy. They’d reacted to the mug and packaged roll as if the Fourth was trying to hand them biological waste, and there’d been some delay while they carried out sterilisation and medical tests on the food, too, to ensure that it was safe for Davie to eat.
‘I’m sure one of your chefs can make that for you,’ Alex recognised that Davie was getting his revenge on the chef who’d tried to feed him the nutrient, with that, and it wasn’t a serious request. ‘We’re busy,’ he pointed out, and that was true, too, as they’d hardly swung back round before the next faint blip was flickering at the edge of their scopes.
‘Well, you called me,’ Davie retorted, unarguably, and with that, perhaps having heard Shion laughing off camera, waved a hand, ‘Hey, Shion. Having fun?’
She leaned into the camera range at Alex’s inviting nod, and gave him an answering wave.
‘Hey, Davie. Yes, thanks!’ She was alight with enthusiasm. ‘It’s wonderful – oh, look, there’s another ship!’
‘Bless you, my child,’ said Davie, indulgently, and with a parting shot at Alex, then, of a parental, ‘Don’t let her stay up too late,’ he broke off the call before Alex could retaliate.
They were still on the command deck as two in the morning came and went. Alex had no need to be here and would normally have gone to bed a couple of hours ago, once he’d seen the nightwatch settled, but Shion was indeed as excited as a child and showing no signs of tiring. Alex didn’t mind, even if she wanted to stay up all night. She could sleep in next day, after all, and he would take working through a nightwatch in his stride.
They were working busily, too. They had the usual watchkeepers at the command deck consoles – helm, engineering, life support, all the stations that were manned around the clock. What was different, here, with the ship on a patrol standing, was how many other crew were on duty, too. Normally they dipped into a skeleton watch for the hours between midnight and 0600, with no maintenance or other routine work scheduled for then, and even the pilots on the duty rota able to go to bed since the chances of them being called upon were so remote.
Here, though, all the shuttles were prepped, the pilots awake and ready, and two security teams on standby, too, just in case. Lights had not been dimmed on the mess decks or in other working areas of the ship, and it still had a busy hum, voices, people at work.
They had, by then, logged seventeen courtesy encounters. Most such encounters were brisk – with yachts, no more than a passing timecheck and enquiry as to whether they stood in need of any assistance. Even with freighters where they sent gift boxes over, that generally took no more than three to five minutes.
They were busy aboard ship, too. Several officers and some petty officers, in fact, were working in the wardroom on data analysis, pulling out the information useful to them from the overwhelming mass of news they’d picked up. The first ship they encountered that was on its way from Karadon signalled them a highly compressed datafile containing tens of thousands of hours of news broadcasts, not just from Karadon but from all the worlds that used Karadon as a transit hub. This was a benefit to coming in this way, giving them the opportunity to see what was going on there before they arrived. Every ship they encountered coming out from Karadon now would flash them an update, so the closer they got, the more recent the news would become.
All, it seemed, was going well at Karadon. Some pundits had said that it might be ten or twenty yea
rs before the station got back on its feet after the ‘catastrophic’ Fourth’s operations there, but less than eight months later it was thriving again. A massive League wide ‘Under New Management’ campaign had brought the liner passengers back, and there’d been a tremendously successful marketing campaign aimed at small leisure craft. Spacers were using it again, too, more happily and confidently than they had for years.
That was down, Alex knew, not only to the efforts being made by ISiS Corps as a company, but to Davie North himself hiring new directors for the leisure and cargo divisions. His choice of Jon Quilleran, in particular, had been inspired. It might have looked like an impulse decision at the time, but it was doubtful, really, if he’d be able to find a better candidate scouring every world in the League. Jon Quilleran was ex-Fleet, a friend of Alex’s who’d switched careers and become an officer on a White Star liner. Davie had offered him a million dollar golden handshake. Looking at the news footage of the station now, swarming with visitors, Alex felt that it had been money well spent.
The more important news as far as they were concerned, however, was the presence of a Fleet corvette at the station. This got a big reaction on the frigate, not least because it was the Fourth’s old ship, there, the Minnow.
That surprised everyone, because the Minnow had been taken back to Chartsey to resume service in the Zeus squadron. They were aware that ISiS Corps had agreed in principle to cooperating with Fleet ships sent out to the station, but the actual details of a working agreement on that were taking lengthy negotiation. Clearly, some agreement had been reached, though, since the corvette had arrived a couple of weeks before.
The Minnow had been sent to support the Customs and Excise ships that were now patrolling out to Karadon from every world in the region. The Minnow’s role was nominally to provide technical support in the use of the scanner that was used for clearing crates, though it was obvious that their primary role was actually to gather intelligence from the spacer community.
Karadon was evidently supportive of that, too. They were offering reduced cargo-handling fees for any crates with a ‘Customs scanned’ stamp. They had also agreed, breaking an embargo that had been in place for more than a century, that members of the Fleet could go aboard the station for shoreleave so long as they were out of uniform. History had been made as the Minnow’s skipper and some of his crew had gone aboard the station, in civilian clothes, being met there with some ceremony and cordiality all round.
‘Interesting choice,’ Davie commented, calling Alex later that morning. He’d evidently just got up, himself, calling from a sumptuously fitted cabin. He was wearing a sarong, presumably sleeping attire, and working his way through a breakfast that even the finest hotels in the League would have been proud of. ‘The Minnow,’ he explained, seeing Alex’s look of enquiry. Alex too had not long got up, having eventually gone to bed after Shion decided, at nearly four in the morning, that she’d seen enough for one night. He’d had three hours sleep and a stinging hot shower, setting him up for what he knew would be a long demanding day.
‘That wasn’t at your request?’ he queried, having considered it quite likely that Davie had asked for the former Fourth’s ship, himself.
Davie, however, gave him a look of shocked rebuke.
‘Captain!’ he scolded, as if Alex had just made a very unpleasant smell. ‘What do you take me for?’ he wondered. ‘There is this concept we have in the League, you know, I don’t know if you’ve ever come across it at all. It’s called government by elected representatives – not a perfect system, I’ll allow, and the people do frequently seem to elect some pretty lamentable specimens, but it is the system we established in the constitution and we generally feel that’s a pretty good thing to uphold.’
Even as he was speaking, he had casually consumed enough food to feed a hungry weightlifter. Also while he was speaking, a stunningly gorgeous young woman walked past the table, taking a little triangle of something from a plate and nibbling it as she strolled away, taking no notice of Alex. Davie exchanged caresses with her in passing, a casual trail of fingers along one another’s arms. If he’d been rather better informed about celebrities, Alex would have recognised her as an intersystem famous supermodel. He would certainly recognise her again, though. Quite apart from anything else, she was wearing a bikini that appeared to be made out of cobweb and diamonds.
Davie certainly did not miss the startled look that flashed across Alex’s face, or the way he obviously and very quickly reminded himself he was a gentleman, and managed not to stare. Davie didn’t comment, though. It was apparent that the woman was as unimportant to him as the chef in silent attendance at the table, or the rest of his retinue who’d undoubtedly be standing nearby. Privacy was just not a concept in Davie’s world.
‘Sorry,’ Alex said, focussing his own attention on Davie himself, and recognising that he really had insulted him, however unintentionally, ‘I have, obviously, a flawed impression of how business and government interact – a world entirely outside my experience, that.’
‘All right,’ Davie forgave him, graciously, and grinned, then. ‘I’ll teach you about it someday, when we’ve nothing better to do. But no, captain, I did not ask for the Minnow. I did not know the Minnow was there myself, till I saw it on the news. And, as I said,’ he popped a pale green egg into his mouth, bit and swallowed it, ‘interesting choice.’
Alex nodded. The Fleet, or perhaps the Senate, was obviously trying to cash in on the relationship the Fourth had built there with ISiS Corp and the merchant spacer community, by sending a ship so closely associated with them. The choice of its skipper was significant, too, as the media at the station had reported on in very excited detail.
When those reports reached the broadcasting stations on other worlds, editors would clip them down to whatever they felt that their viewers would consider of interest, and the finished item might only be a few seconds, with a brief side screen biography of Shipmaster Alington’s career, noting that he’d graduated from the Chartsey Academy the year before von Strada.
News crews based at ISiS, however, were of the view that it was better to report everything they could think of in their dispatches, rather than risk an editor finding that an item flared into a hot story and screaming at them for not having provided backup reportage. Several news channels maintained tiny broadcast units at Karadon, too, not missing the opportunity to broadcast even to the smallest audience. Since that had local immediacy, the full versions of the reports went out there, and were carried on by ships as they left the station. Alex had already seen, himself, a bullet point analysis of that coverage as it related to Harlon Alington, focussing on issues of professional concern. Davie North, however, might well have watched the entire output of the media, fast forward, many screens at once. Alex found himself wondering how much Davie knew, and smiled ruefully.
‘Operationally brilliant,’ he said, meaning the deployment of the Fourth’s former ship, making such good strategic use of that association. ‘But a difficult posting.’
‘I’d call it cruel, myself,’ said Davie, watching him, then flaring up an eyebrow at Alex’s involuntary reaction to that, ‘You don’t think so?’
‘The Admiralty isn’t really in the habit of being cruel to its officers,’ Alex told him, grinning. ‘I’m sure whoever made the decision to give him the Minnow and send him here did so on wholly professional grounds, and if it’s difficult and embarrassing for him, I have no doubt he’ll handle that professionally too.’
‘Come off it,’ said Davie, amused but scathing. ‘Look me in the eye,’ he challenged, ‘and tell me that you didn’t wonder, when you saw he was there, who he’d peed off to get that assignment.’
He had Alex bang to rights on that one, as Alex acknowledged with a grin.
‘Well, I won’t deny that that’s a question being asked around the ship, this morning,’ he admitted. ‘But it is, in fairness, far more likely that someone at the Admiralty feels that it would be good professiona
l development experience for him, coping with a difficult situation like that.’
Davie gave a derisory snort as he finished the dish of eggs.
Harlon Alington was, indeed, in an excruciatingly embarrassing situation. He had been the top cadet graduate the year before Alex. Alex, however, had made skipper at twenty four, at a time when Harlon Alington was still a Lt Commander. His career had fallen into Alex’s shadow, something already much commented on in Fleet wardrooms. There was a sense that he had failed, somehow, at least in comparison with Alex’s meteoric rise. And now, at the age of twenty nine, Alington was taking up his first command, and it was Alex’s old ship. And just to twist the knife, Alington’s first command assignment was to follow up on Alex’s success at Karadon, and Alex himself, now with four years command seniority over him and skippering a frigate, was about to arrive. The media had made much of the ‘rivalry’ between them, and some reports had even conveyed the impression that Alex had done Alington down, somehow, climbing to his own achievements at Alington’s expense.
Since the media regarded Alex himself as a psychopath commanding a dirty ops unit, this would logically have put Alington into the role of good guy in their coverage. For reasons best known to themselves, however, the media had decided that graduating top of the elite class on Chartsey made Alington himself a ruthless scheming power-hungry bully. They had said all that, and more. Anyone who knew Harlon Alington would know how that must be flaying him. There’d be as much sniggering over it in the Fleet as sympathy, too.
‘What do you think of him?’ Davie asked, and forestalled Alex’s automatic answer with a lifted finger, ‘Don’t give me the Fleet line, honestly, now.’
Alex considered.
‘Orthodox,’ he said. ‘Competent.’
‘But?’ Davie challenged, and as Alex hesitated, pointed out, ‘It’s my station. I would like to know what my people there are dealing with.’ He smiled winningly. ‘Please.’
XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) Page 11
