XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  Some recriminations were breaking out as they resumed possession of their yacht, with an audible, ‘I told you we should have got that serviced at Starseeker but oh no, you had to be the one to save a few dollars!’ as the airlock closed behind the departing rescue-crew. But they were, clearly, going to be fine, now, tucked into convoy with the accommodating freighter.

  The next emergency beacon they came upon was a party yacht that had run out of beer. It wasn’t a starseeker, but an eight berth yacht, the Sunbird, of a type popular with party trips. There was initially no response to the frigate’s approach and signal to know the nature of their emergency, and there were concerned looks on the command deck, a building tension as they signalled repeatedly but got no reply. Then expressions cleared with relieved understanding as an answering signal came in. The first signal was that of several voices, some yelling at others to wake up, they’d got company, while others joined a chant of, ‘Beer, beer, glorious beer!’ The voice addressing them directly started to tell them that they were lifesavers and that they’d love them forever if they had a crate or two of tinnies they could spare, but the transmission was interrupted. The Heron waited patiently for the rest of it. This time, they heard a voice in the background shouting urgently, ‘It’s the Fourth!’ and after some hubbub of drunken confusion, ‘It’s the Fourth, I’m telling you, that’s their ship!’

  There was some sniggering aboard the Heron as they awaited the arrival of the next blip of transmission, which exploded into gales of laughter at the point where the emergency beacon was turned off and the yacht party began gabbling frantic apologies.

  Buzz, however, was far more concerned by a discrepancy he’d noticed in the information that flashed as part of the automatic time-check. The Sunbird had left Amali nearly three months ago. That meant that they’d either been making one of the slowest trips on record, or that they had deviated from the shipping route.

  ‘Tell me, lads,’ asked Buzz, having noted that there were seven young men aboard the ship, ‘have you by any chance been system diving?’

  There was an immediate gabble of protest, two or three of them attempting to tell him that of course they hadn’t, while another voice gave the game away with a mutinous, ‘It’s not illegal, is it?’

  ‘It isn’t illegal, but it is insane,’ Buzz said, and seeing that Alex wanted a word, passed the comm screen to him.

  ‘This is Skipper von Strada,’ Alex said, at his coldest and most intimidating. ‘Listen to me. If you want to pilot a ship drunk, fine, so long as you’re on autopilot there’s nothing I can do about that. If you want to system dive there’s nothing I can do about that, either, since suicide isn’t illegal. But you have to know that system diving is the most insanely, stupidly dangerous thing you can do. It isn’t a sport. It isn’t even an extreme sport. It’s just adrenaline-junkie...’

  He broke off because it was apparent that they were not listening. The initial shock and fear of discovering the Fourth looming at their airlock had given way to their usual reaction to this lecture from authority. The signal they flashed back was full of noise rather than words; gurrrr and yarrr and a couple of fat raspberries.

  ‘Very well,’ said Alex, recognising that there was no point in even attempting to talk sense into this lot. ‘We have your details, so we can notify your next of kin when you’ve blown yourselves up.’ As even that failed to make the slightest impression on them, he handed the comm screen back to his exec. Buzz duly issued the standard safety advisories for misuse of the beacon and operating a starship whilst intoxicated, his tone sternly official and taking no notice of the drunken stupidities being signalled back.

  ‘What’s system diving?’ Shion asked, curiously.

  ‘Idiots,’ Alex informed her, with a wry look, ‘hurling their ships vertically through wild systems at high speed. That’s one of the reasons we’re having to go out so far, to an uncharted system, for the Ignite Test. No matter how remote a system may seem to be, and how unlikely it might seem that any ship would go there in a thousand years, idiots like this do go out to any system that takes their fancy, diving through them on routes that skim past planets and jink through asteroid belts. They are relying entirely, in that, on the charts of those systems, so it would be criminally irresponsible of us to change the geography of a system in such a major way as removing a planet. We’d have to issue an immediate update to the chart, just in case idiots like this turned up to system dive it, and that would, obviously, be a bit of a give-away about what we’d been doing.’

  The Stepeasy swung back into place alongside them as they accelerated away. They had stayed outside the yacht’s scanner range and hadn’t therefore been seen by them at all, cruising back in to join them when they could see the frigate moving away. There were no complaints from Davie, this time, perhaps mindful of the number of times bills to make being drunk in charge of a starship a criminal matter had been defeated in the Senate, too.

  They went on, speeding past another eighteen ships, pausing alongside seven of them to deliver gift-boxes, before coming up on the next yacht signalling emergency distress.

  This, it emerged, was because they wanted a pilot to take them through Kennerman’s Ridge. Required a pilot, in fact, as the owner was in no way pleading, with that, but ordering a pilot in much the same way as she might have ordered a taxi. Investigation having confirmed that there was no fault with the ship and that they only wanted a pilot ‘as a precaution’, Buzz explained patiently that the Fourth could not do that for them.

  ‘Kennerman’s Ridge is not a navigation hazard, it’s an area of mild turbulence which has been classified as safe for all vessels to traverse. Your ship is fully functional and there are no grounds for us to put a pilot aboard. Nor can we stay with you to escort you through it, no – we are on operations and can’t stay at this speed any longer than it takes for us to establish that you are not at any risk. We can certainly put an officer aboard to pilot your ship while you come aboard for a welfare assessment, but the options we can offer you are limited. We can, if you wish, escort you into convoy with another yacht or freighter, or, if you decide you do not feel yourselves to be capable of making the Kennerman’s Ridge traverse, we can assist with supplies for you to return to Telfa.’

  This did not go down well. A flurry of protest and complaint came back at them, including the indignant statement that they were going to Karadon on business, and an embittered declaration, too, that they were attempting to do the safe, responsible thing, here, in asking for a qualified pilot, and it was downright dereliction of duty on their part not helping them. They had already been passed by two freighters that day who’d come over in response to their emergency signal and both of their skippers had been extremely, extremely rude when asked for a pilot, and that was bad enough, but the Fleet was an emergency service, wasn’t it, so it was their job to assist.

  ‘What do we pay our taxes for?’ the owner demanded, oblivious to the groans and cheers that went up on the frigate as a score was added to one of the many sweepstakes running aboard ship. ‘I suppose you think you can treat people like this because you’re not regular Fleet, but I will be putting in complaints about this at the highest level, and I know some very senior officers in the Fleet, too – the Port Captain’s husband comes to our gym, you know! And don’t think I don’t know my rights, because I do! If we’re not safe to carry on by ourselves, you have to assist us.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Buzz responded, calm and courteous as always, ‘if you were deemed to be not in a fit condition to continue your journey, we would certainly take you aboard and either take you to Karadon ourselves or transfer you to another ship with suitable passenger facilities. We are not, however, in a position to take your ship under tow so if you were either medically unfit to continue or made the decision yourself to abandon it, we would have to take it out of the shipping lane and destroy it as a navigation hazard. But if you feel that you may not be in a fit condition to continue with your journey then you should certainly co
me aboard for a thorough medical assessment.’

  There were still some chuckles on the Heron as they left the yacht with its owner declaring that she was going to report them to the Admiralty, even more aggrieved by Buzz issuing the usual safety advisory on misuse of the emergency beacon.

  ‘It isn’t stupidity, really,’ Alex told Shion, as they accelerated away and the Stepeasy swung back in beside them. ‘It’s just a fundamentally different psychology. Groundsiders, see, live in an environment where they’re relying on other people to fix things for them, all the time. The average groundsider calls on some kind of assistance at least once a week. It might be for domestic appliance repair, medical help or just calling for a delivery service to bring them something they want, but it’s built in at the bone, with all their life experience, to expect to get whatever kind of help they want. They also take it entirely for granted that emergency services are there for them, anytime, anywhere. They know that’s not the case in space, of course, with the mandatory safety course on registering ownership, and there’s a constant bombardment of safety warnings at them, too. But somehow, at some level, they expect to be able to rely on other people to help them when things go wrong. So as soon as something happens they can’t fix themselves or they don’t know what to do, they start shouting for help. Spacers don’t do that. We live in an environment where we take it for granted that if anything goes wrong we are on our own, so even if something is beyond our ability to fix, like the guys with the bent airlock, we just cope as best we can and see that as an inconvenience, not an emergency.’

  She saw what he meant a little later when they met a freighter heading out of Karadon. It turned on a ‘non emergency assistance required’ beacon as it saw them appear on their scopes, recognising at once from their size and speed that they had to be a warship and would, therefore, have a doctor on board. They were a bit startled to find that the frigate responding was the Fourth’s, and assured them that it wasn’t urgent. One of their crew had picked up a bug at Karadon, spiking a fever. He’d responded well to antivirals and was already recovering, but now the engineer had symptoms, too. They had plenty of antivirals and no real concern about it, but would rather not, as their skipper observed, be treated as a plague ship when they got into port.

  The Fourth responded sympathetically. All starships were required to certify, on entry to port, that nobody aboard it had been ill during the voyage. If it was just one person who had had a fever more than two weeks before port entry then they’d get through with no more than a medical check of that individual, but if the illness had been transmitted to others aboard ship they would be put straight into quarantine measures.

  The Fourth handled it with quarantine measures, too. Rangi and two crewmembers went over wearing survival suits, with full decontamination protocols aboard the shuttle that took them there.

  ‘Tenshorn measles,’ Rangi reported, once the shuttle, he and his team had been thoroughly decontaminated and they were allowed back aboard. ‘Nothing for the book.’ The book, in this context, was the Unknown Pathogens record all Fleet sickbays carried, alert to any new strains of virus they might encounter. Deep space stations were a particular risk for that. They took as many precautions as they could, with such measures as constant anti-viral air filtering and fanatical hygiene, but the very nature of such stations was that they drew people from many different worlds, some of them inevitably breathing out or contact-transferring pathogens to others. Sometimes they mutated in unexpected ways through interaction with each other.

  There was relief at Rangi’s confirmation that this was a known strain, for which he’d given the freighter crew rather more effective medication than the broad-spectrum antivirals they had. Since he was able to issue them with a known-strain certificate to give the authorities at their next port of call, that would at least mean they wouldn’t have to go into full plague-ship quarantine. It was mild relief, however, and they parted cheerfully, the incident clearly considered routine by all concerned.

  When they did meet a freighter that was signalling a full-on emergency, therefore, even Shion understood why the Heron went to alert.

  The ship flashing emergency distress call was a behemoth class cargo-haul, so huge that it could not, in fact, manoeuvre on its own. Such ships did not even decelerate when they reached port. Pilot tugs would help them into a superlight orbit outside the system, and other cargo-tugs would take off their containers then load them up again for the pilot tugs to haul them onto their outward route. Once they were set on their course, that was pretty much it. Starships were rated for performance on their turning circle, how quickly they could turn around and reverse their course. The Heron could spin about in an agile 8.3 seconds. With a behemoth, you’d be talking about days.

  Understanding that, and spotting the tiny starseeker they had towing on a grapnel line, it was apparent that they had not been able to do much more than grab it in passing. They had shuttles, including two beefy tugs that would help to keep them on course, but all their shuttles were docked on. The combination of that with the gaping hole in the yacht where its lifepod had been told its own story. The behemoth did not have shuttles out looking for the lifepod, and that had to mean either that they already had it aboard or that they had already stopped looking.

  It was the latter, as the behemoth’s skipper told them in a rapid signal, carrying with it datafiles of all the information that they had.

  ‘We did look,’ he said, with a note of despair. ‘But you know the odds.’

  Alex did. He’d taken the conn as the ship came to alert, and having cast an eye over the data that the behemoth had sent them, knew they could have done no more.

  ‘Thank you, Benefite,’ he replied, his manner formal as it always was with outsiders. ‘We’ll take it from here.’ Then, knowing that the disposal of the starseeker would be a matter of some anxiety to them, added, ‘We’ll come back for the yacht.’

  The Benefite signalled ‘God speed’, but the Heron was already accelerating, powering up to top speed on the course Alex laid in. They were deep in Kennerman’s Ridge by then and the increased speed made the engines start chittering crossly, but nobody took any notice of that. All other activity around the ship had stopped, all eyes on the skipper as they waited for the briefing.

  ‘Attention on deck,’ he said, though he knew that they were all watching anyway, it was a protocol that would be comforting in its familiarity. ‘We’re engaged on search and rescue operations. The Benefite found the starseeker Jolly Roger six hours ago, flashing distress but unmanned, its lifepod already ejected. The owners, a Roger and Jayanne Levet, appear, from the log, to have ejected in the belief that their engines were dephasing. They ejected here,’ he’d called up a starchart and highlighted a point on the route, ‘eight hours and forty three minutes ago. The Benefite’s shuttles found the ejecta, so we know the search cone is here, but their shuttles were unable to locate the pod at the PDR.’

  A ripple of regret passed through the ship; sorry looks, little head shakes, some sighs. The Heron’s crew were clearly not optimistic.

  ‘We all know the odds,’ Alex said, ‘but I know I can rely on you all to give your very best effort to this, so long as there is even the slightest possible hope.’ There were nods, at that, and some murmurs of ‘aye, skipper’ here and there, a subtle sense of resolve firming up. ‘All right,’ Alex said, and ended the address through the PA, though they could still see and hear him on the command deck feed. He was looking at Shion, then, and his expression saddened as he saw that she understood.

  He did not need to explain to her that lifepods had no engines. They had superlight capacitors, like super-powerful batteries, that were charged up in the moment before they were fired, and would only remain superlight until that charge depleted. How long that would be depended on the type of lifepod, though by law it had to last for at least ten hours. Starseekers guaranteed their lifepods for at least twelve hours. With luck, it might last perhaps another half an hour beyond
that. After that, once the charge failed, the lifepod would crash sublight. It took tremendous power to slow superlight matter safely back down through the barrier into normal space. That was what launch and deceleration tunnels were for. Without them, as the ship fell out of its protective superlight forcefield, it would be ripped apart by forces so powerful that not a single atom of it would remain. The only debris left after a dephase crash would be a cloud of highly energised sub-atomic particles expanding from the site of detonation.

  That meant they had about four hours, tops, to find the lifepod. The Benefite had already looked at the PDR, the Point of Dead Reckoning that astrogation computers said should be where the lifepod was given where it had been fired, the direction of the launch ejecta and the time elapsed. The chances of finding them alive at the PDR had already been slim. With it not found there, the chances against finding it had become, indeed, truly astronomical. The ‘cone’ Alex had referred to was a search area around the line of flight from the point of ejection, widening out with increasing likelihood of the pod having drifted off course.

  Shion composed herself, blinking back the tears that had welled up in her eyes, and giving him a determined little nod.

  ‘What can I do, skipper?’ she asked, and got a look of warm approval from him, for that.

  ‘I’m about to ask for volunteers to pilot the fighters,’ he said, and looked over at Martine as her head snapped up and she looked at him in surprise. ‘Yes, I know. Log the advisory, I’ll sign.’

  Martine gave a nod of acknowledgement and filed, without comment, an advisory notice on behalf of Internal Affairs, logging that she had informed the skipper that his intention to launch fighters on operations breached regulations since they were not yet authorised for anything more than training flights. Alex signed it to acknowledge that and take full responsibility for it, nodding thanks to her that held some sympathy for her own feelings in that. Being the shipboard IA officer was a miserable job, especially when you had to officially protest things you agreed with wholeheartedly yourself.