Alex grinned. The please made all the difference, though Davie had a fair point, too.
‘Okay,’ he conceded. ‘We’re not friends. I find him rather elitist, and it doesn’t seem to me that he gives everything he has to Fleet service. I didn’t reach command rank in half the time it’s taken him because I’m any more able than he is, really, it’s just that I worked twice as hard. Like, he took the groundside option for command school training and went off for months here and there on various courses, while I did mine aboard ship at the same time as my shipboard assignments. He has a very active social life, too – nothing wrong with that, and as a workaholic myself I’m perhaps not the best person to judge, but it seems to me that his work-life balance leans rather more towards socialising than working.’
‘Ah.’ Davie said, with a slightly malicious enjoyment. He understood from that, Alex could see, how it might be that someone in authority felt that a tough assignment might do Alington some good. His ‘ah’ indicated that also that he would watch that situation with interest, but that his curiosity was satisfied for now. ‘These are good.’ The chef had removed the empty dish and replaced it with a fresh one, and Davie picked up one of the green speckled eggs, offering it as if he and Alex were at the same table, ‘Asparagus and stuff,’ he said. ‘Sure I can’t send you some over?’
Alex looked at him patiently. He would not accept gifts from Davie North, not even anything so trivial as gift-boxes from the Stepeasy for his crew. It was a matter of principle, and Davie knew that very well.
‘If you’re just going to be annoying ...’ he glanced at his wristcom, and Davie grinned.
‘Okay,’ he conceded. ‘You do me a favour, then – let Shion pilot again when we’re heading back through the Ridge.’
Alex realised at once that he’d assumed Shion had to be piloting when they’d come through Kennerman’s Ridge before, surfing the crests.
‘That wasn’t Shion,’ he told Davie. ‘It was Kate Naos. And no, sorry, we’re not surfing this time. I anticipate quite a few ship intercepts.’
‘Gah!’ Davie said, with eloquent disdain, obviously understanding that what Alex meant by that was ‘panicking starseekers’, but in the next moment, interested, ‘What, little Katie Naos, the maths kid?’
‘She’s a year older than you,’ Alex pointed out, amused, for which he got a hard look, Davie pausing for a moment before deliberately munching an egg. Then something caught his eye, on another screen by the way he glanced off-camera, and he grinned.
Alex could see it, too – even in his cabin, he had an echo feed of the watch screens, keeping half an eye on what was going on. They were slowing right down as they approached a massive blip on scopes. As Alex glanced at it, it resolved into the familiar pattern of a convoy, one larger ship being followed by a whole host of tiny ones.
‘All yours, captain,’ Davie said, and tossed him one of his teasing salutes, reaching for the eggs again as he ended the call.
Alex went onto the command deck, not because he anticipated any need for his involvement with the convoy, but because he could see Shion hurrying there, alight with excitement. So much for her having her sleep out, Alex thought. The medical report from Amali had noted that she sometimes slept for ten to twelve hours, sometimes much shorter, sleeping on average six hours a day, but with no particular pattern, just whenever she wanted to. Aboard ship, however, she’d adapted very quickly to the diurnal rhythm imposed by watch routines, and normally did sleep at night.
‘Morning.’ He gave a general greeting as he took his place at the command table, nodding thanks to the rigger who gave him a ‘coffee?’ gesture and enquiring look. ‘All right, Shion?’ he asked, as she swung up a hatchway and hurried over to sit back down with him.
‘Fine thank you skipper!’ she said, and gave a little crow of delight as they came close enough to the convoy to switch from heatscan to visual. There were, indeed, seventeen starseekers there, following a whalebelly. ‘It’s a Darmel convoy!’ Shion exclaimed. ‘I was hoping to see one!’
Alex gave her a mystified look. Darmel was a League wide shipping company running many hundreds of freighters like this. They offered convoy-escort to smaller craft, particularly starseekers. Any freighter would do that, in fact, with a deeply rooted culture out in space of ships looking out for each other. Darmel, however, offered the reassurance of travelling with a known, reliable company name, and the convenience, too, of being able to buy supplies from them during the trip, and of having technical help if anything went wrong.
‘Er... why?’ Alex asked, and was not the only one to be gazing at her in perplexity.
‘I’ve never seen so many ships together,’ she explained. ‘Look at them all! And so sweet, too – just like a mother duck!’ She had obviously discovered that spacers called such convoys mother ducks, and looked over at Buzz, who was holding the watch now, ‘Are you going to say ‘Quack quack’ to them?’
‘I am,’ Buzz confirmed, and did so, transmitting the traditional tease to the freighter and getting an equally informal greeting in response, with an added, ‘Breakfast for forty two, please – strawberries and champagne will be fine.’
‘Box for forty two,’ the Sub on watch-assist passed on the message to the crew organising gift-boxes, accepting without comment that the freighter clearly intended to share the gift across the convoy. Though it would not, of course, be strawberries and champagne, that was just a tease referencing the media stories about their wild champagne lifestyle.
‘Please, skipper,’ Shion looked at the preparations being made to take the gift box – boxes, in this case – over to the freighter, and looked appealingly at Alex. ‘Could I go over, too? Not to go aboard, but just to see?’
Alex smiled. She had not asked that about any of the other ships they’d encountered, because she knew there was a security issue, there. The Fourth had once had the disconcerting experience of sending a routine gift box over to a ship only to find its crew in a panic stricken state, convinced the Fourth was there to arrest them and desperate to show them where the drugs were. It had its funny side, that, but as Buzz had commented when talking to her about it, it had frightened them, too, the realisation that they’d sent a young petty officer, unarmed, without backup, into a situation that could so easily have been violent. That was why, now, even the most routine courtesy visit was carried out by a discreetly armed officer with a security team on standby.
That would not be needed for the Darmel Enterprise 32. As Shion had obviously discovered, the Fleet had a particularly warm relationship with these mother-duck freighters, not least because it was Darmel policy that all their skippers were themselves ex-Fleet.
‘All right,’ Alex nodded, ‘But Buzz will go with you on this one, okay?’
He glanced over at the Sub who would normally have made the visit, and saw a flicker of relief. It would be one heck of a responsibility, taking Shion on her first venture off the ship – too much responsibility for a junior Sub, that was for sure. Buzz smiled, too, looking genuinely pleased.
‘You can pilot, if you like,’ he told her, and at that Shion looked as if she might just hug and kiss them.
‘Thank you!’ she said, and was on her feet at once.
It was a very modest little adventure, really. Shion piloted one of their cargo shuttles over to the freighter, docked on sedately and helped Buzz to pass the gift boxes through the airlock. There was a little mild banter about the lack of champagne, but real delight at the discovery of fruit. The experimental biovats they had on the Heron weren’t working to anything like their predicted levels, which was why they’d be bringing a Second Irregulars team aboard at Karadon to have another go at getting them up to speed. They could, however, produce quantities of kona fruit, small hard berries that tasted like lemony melon. Darmel catering was almost all dehydrates, and after more than four weeks in space, both freighter and starseeker crews would relish the fresh fruit far more even than champagne.
‘Thanks, Buzz,’ said the
skipper, who’d come to the airlock, chatting to Buzz while Shion passed the boxes through to a couple of his crew. He had absolutely no idea, as he stood there catching up with Buzz, that the elegant woman passing boxes of cookies and fruit through the airlock was an alien visitor. He did, indeed, cast an appreciative glance at her, but he was still Fleet enough to keep it at that, giving her a friendly nod of acknowledgement and ‘Thanks, Sub,’ as she handed the last of the cartons through.
Shion came back to the ship, radiant with delight.
‘That was real!’ she said, her highest accolade, and Alex grinned. He could imagine Ambassador Dolan’s reaction to the report that he had allowed Shion to go to a freighter and be carrying supplies boxes – the set look, the almost imperceptible shudder – but this, after all, was why Shion had asked to come with them, for her diplomatic status to be set aside and allow her real experience.
She certainly got plenty of that, as the day went on. In the next seven and a half hours they logged a further forty two encounters, five of which were requests for assistance. All five were flashing the most urgent emergency code, all five were yachts, three of them starseekers and two larger craft. One, a kadabe class yacht at the luxury end of the family-yacht market, conformed to type by asking that the Stepeasy send an officer to check their yacht over.
The Stepeasy, not the Heron. Their reaction to the realisation that the frigate that had dropped in alongside them was the infamous Fourth’s ship was a very hurried signal telling them that they didn’t need assistance from them, thank you, it would wait. They even turned off their distress signal. When the Stepeasy came into view, however, they turned it back on again, asking them for an officer to go aboard.
‘A person could be hurt,’ said Buzz, mildly, but called his oppo on the Stepeasy and also requested their assistance. There was no indication of any kind of problem with the yacht’s systems, in fact, they were bang on course and they were reporting no problems on board. As the ex-Fleet officer now exec on the Stepeasy knew as well as Buzz, however, a certain type of luxury-yacht skipper felt that it was good practice to have a service carried out every four or five weeks, like a garage service for an aircar, and if they were in deep space they expected that to be carried out by any ship with suitably qualified personnel. ‘We’ll pay, of course’, they said, but it was clear they thought that this was a service they were entitled to.
‘Please,’ Buzz said, adding his request to that of the yacht, with a feeling, ‘We could be here all day, otherwise.’
He was right – a civilian ship, faced with a yacht that was flashing life or death emergency aboard and then told them they were fine, could just mutter imprecations and cruise off. A Fleet ship, however, had a duty to satisfy themselves that there really was no emergency. If the yacht was not cooperative, refusing to allow them permission to board, such investigation could take hours.
The Stepeasy, however, came to the rescue, sending over a couple of techs to give the yacht the once-over, confirming that it was indeed in excellent running order, no problems.
Buzz, therefore, issued the standard official warning to the yacht for misuse of the emergency distress beacon, though since it was not in fact illegal, that could only be a safety advisory.
They issued the same advisory to two of the other yachts using the emergency beacon, one for a ‘funny smell’ and the other because they’d run out of lavatory wipes. In both cases, as Buzz told them pleasantly, they should have been using the non-emergency assistance required setting on the beacon.
‘But you can’t see that from so far,’ the aggrieved skipper of the ‘funny smell’ yacht protested, after the alleged smell had been investigated and found to be pure imagination.
Buzz closed his eyes briefly as groans and guffaws broke out around the Heron. It was an absolute classic starseeker stupidity, that, the belief that the emergency beacon increased their heatscan signature so that, self evidently, must mean they could be seen from further away. It did increase their heatscan signature, that was the point, seeing a ship flashing extreme heat from a beacon stood out even when you were so far away it was a tiny fuzzy blob. But it would not increase the scanner range of the other ship by so much as a metre.
Davie, though, wasn’t amused. Clearly getting impatient with this idiotic time-wasting, he called and asked to speak to Shion.
‘Haven’t you had enough of this, yet?’ he asked, plaintively, and then, with a coaxing tone, ‘Come on – hop over to the Stepeasy and we’ll leave them to it. We can be at Karadon by morning and they can catch up with us there.’
‘Davie!’ Shion scolded, laughing. ‘Don’t be silly. You go on ahead if you want, but I’m staying right here.’
‘Ohhhh,’ Davie sighed, theatrically, and looked at Alex, then, who was also on the call, Shion sitting next to him. ‘You might at least blow something up,’ he pleaded.
‘Hmmn,’ Alex said, and went on in conversational tones, ‘Tell me, Mr North, in all the times – the twenty seven times across the last two thousand years – that the Fleet has asked for misuse of an emergency distress beacon to be made a criminal offence, and in the twenty seven times that bill has been put before the Senate and the twenty seven times it has been defeated by lobbying against the unconstitutional regulation of free space, which side has your family been on in that debate? And which side would you be on yourself if such a bill came before Senate again?’
He saw the answer in Davie’s wry grimace, and grinned. ‘Well, then,’ he pointed out, amicably, ‘stop complaining.’
Not many people, for sure, ever spoke to Davie North that way, but to his credit there was not even a fraction of a second when he took umbrage. This, after all, was what he liked about Alex, that the skipper was not the slightest bit awed either by his wealth or superhuman abilities.
‘Aye aye, captain,’ he said, with his usual teasing salute, which he turned into blowing a kiss to Shion as he ended the call.
The frigate and the superyacht continued on patrol, handling six more courtesy encounters before they met their next starseeker flashing an emergency. This one reported a ‘funny noise’, which got a very different response to the ‘funny smell’ of a few hours earlier. A funny noise on a starship could, in fact, be very serious, and if people didn’t have the technical ability to know what it was, they were doing the right thing in asking for help.
The duty Sub took a tech team aboard, unnerving the yacht owners by turning up in survival suits, but very quickly tracking the sporadic rattling noise down to a loosened rivet. It was the work of moments to replace it, with friendly reassurance from the Sub that it was no trouble at all and they really would very much rather people erred on the side of caution in things like this. They took their survival suits off, too, once assured that the ‘funny noise’ wasn’t dangerous, and accepted the offer of coffee while they worked. The starseeker was still signalling thanks and rolling in clumsy salute as they soared away, just delighted by their encounter with the Fourth.
The other starseeker was grateful, too. They admitted frankly that they’d put the beacon up to emergency setting in a panic, after two weeks of signalling non-emergency assistance required had got no response at all. They hadn’t even seen another ship, not one, in the four and a half weeks they’d been out here. There were four of them aboard, two couples who’d thought that between them they had all the necessary skills and experience to make the trip to Karadon by themselves.
‘We’re out of our depth, we know that, we should have gone with a convoy,’ the skipper admitted, almost tearful with relief at the frigate’s appearance. ‘But by the time we realised, we’d come too far to turn back. We’ve tried slowing down, honestly, we can’t go any slower, and we’ve been watching the scopes ourselves, day and night, so we wouldn’t miss anything, but there’s just been nothing!’
They were, as Sam Barlow explained to them, very slightly off route. They had done the right thing in slowing down, since that usually meant other ships catching up with
you, but since they were three and a half minutes outside the visible corridor route, none of the ships passing had seen them. There was, indeed, a freighter no more than an hour behind them, but that too would have passed them by later on with no chance of seeing them.
The Fourth followed through the panic protocol, putting an officer aboard the starseeker and bringing the starseeker’s skipper and passengers aboard. They came through the airlock on deck seven, into the secure zone. There, Rangi looked after them, taking them off to sickbay for cups of herbal tea and medical evaluations. He provided counselling, too, informally but effectively, when the inevitable backwash of relief after so much tension looked like sparking a four-way domestic. Gently diffusing the talk of what they should have done turning into a row over whose fault it was, he got them sitting in the healing space and complimented them on how strong and good their relationships were.
‘Most people would have been at each other’s throats, by now, but you’ve held together, supporting one another through it, and that’s lovely to see,’ he said, and as people so often did with Rangi, they found themselves trying to live up to his opinion of them.
There was some disappointment on the ship, though, when the couples went back to their yacht. Quite a few bets had been made there, in the hope that they might abandon it, but they were not to have the fun of blowing up a starseeker this time. Though initially distressed by Rangi telling them that there was no chance of them following the Heron to Karadon because they couldn’t keep up and the Heron could not slow down for them for that long, they had come around to the idea of being put into convoy with the nearby freighter, instead. So while they were having their tea and counselling, the Heron and Stepeasy escorted the starseeker on an intercept to find the freighter. The Sub also carried out a thorough inspection of the starseeker and fixed the autopilot – it had, as was explained to the owners, been wrongly calibrated at Telfa, so they were running five light minutes away from where they thought they were.
XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) Page 12
