She pulled herself together, at that, with a visible effort.
‘Yes,’ she said, and more definitely then, ‘Yes. Sorry, skipper. It’s just, you know...’ her voice trailed off, with a helpless look.
‘I know,’ he said, with a compassionate look. ‘And I am, I know, laying a totally unfair burden on you, there, asking for your help like this. But I know you can handle it, or I wouldn’t have asked. So what I need you to do right now is take a breath, try to clear your mind, and then go through those calculations again, all right? Take your time, think it through from every angle, double check, okay?’
‘Okay,’ she said, and some colour returned to her face, then, as she nodded, purposeful again. It was ten minutes or so before she told him that she’d confirmed her findings and just couldn’t get it any more accurate than that.
‘There are so many unknown variables, I’m having to use chaos equations, and it wouldn’t matter if I did them a thousand times over, I’m still going to get the same result. If my understanding of the topography is correct, they will be somewhere in this sphere. If it isn’t, I wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘You can’t say fairer than that,’ Alex said. She looked cold, he noticed, though that was more due to tension than temperature. They had more than an hour before they’d reach the point she’d indicated, and that hour, he knew, would drag interminably for all of them. ‘Let’s have some coffees, please,’ he asked the rigger, ‘and some bacon rolls.’
Kate made as if to protest that she couldn’t possibly sit there eating bacon rolls when people were out there dying, but caught his eye, remembered, and composed herself again. She was even calm enough to say, when Gunny Norsten called to ask if she’d like him to come and sit with her, that she was fine, thanks. The scared girl who’d ducked behind her minder when people tried to talk to her was a long way behind her now, and it was evident that she was determined to cope with this like a grown-up.
Alex and Buzz seemed to be quite relaxed, at least, chatting amicably on the command deck and even doing some paperwork. The rest of them watched screens and talked sporadically. The one thing nobody talked about was the slow horror of what was happening to the couple in the lifepod, trapped and helpless in an immensity of icy vacuum, knowing they had only hours to live. The coffee did help, as Alex had known it would, though Kate couldn’t swallow much of her roll and looked gratefully at the rigger when he came and took it away. Minutes dragged. Crew sat about, talking quietly or just watching the scopes. Nobody looked hopeful. This was the wildest of long shots, and they knew it.
They reached the sphere Kate had indicated at 1789, with less than half an hour to go now before the minimum amount of time Starseeker guaranteed the lifepod to survive ran out. It would take them thirty two minutes to search the sphere. If the lifepod wasn’t there, then that really would be the end.
Just eight minutes later, though, the Stepeasy’s tender gave the emergency flash that signalled a sighting, spinning about so fast that they lost it off their own scopes for a few seconds. By the time they’d turned, themselves, and caught up, they could see that their fighters were flashing hot as well and converging rapidly on something that was still beyond the Heron’s own field of view. Someone on the command deck shouted, ‘Yes! Thank you, God!’ and it was only later that Kate realised that it had been her.
They were coming to full alert now. Sirens were blaring, lights turning red, freefall warning pulsing through the deck. Kate was so used to this by now that she could have responded in her sleep, though she was so dazed that the rigger had to push a suit into her hands before she scrambled into it. The Heron carried out a lot of drills, which even passengers soon got so used to it became automatic. Such drills never lasted for long, it was just a case of putting on a survival suit and carrying on with whatever you were doing while the ship was in freefall for a few minutes.
It went into freefall now, as fire suppressant gas was released into the atmosphere and all non-essential equipment deactivated. Gravity was one of the most system-hungry things on the ship, and turning it off diverted capacity to be used in manoeuvring and weapons. The crew could move around far more quickly with the ship in freefall, too, hurtling about with acrobatic skill. It was just seconds before the last hatch seal slammed and Buzz reported, ‘Action stations secured, sir.’
‘Thank you,’ Alex said, without looking at him. All his attention was on the scopes, and now, for the first time, a flicker of hope crossed his face.
The lifepod came into view, beacon flashing. It was, as Kate had predicted, both spinning in the horizontal plane and rolling in the vertical, like a billiard ball rolling with side-spin. It was not travelling straight but curving, also exactly as Kate had predicted, being pushed into a snaking path by the steep contours of Kennerman’s Ridge.
Alex laid in a course which would take them in an arc around the lifepod, signalling the Stepeasy and its tender to pull back. Then he gave the order for the fighters to move in. They were the most agile, and would be quickest – one of them would have to go in close, matching the lifepod’s spin and roll exactly, before they could carry out the very delicate docking-on to get it on an airlock.
Or you could do it like that, Alex thought, as he saw Firefly just swoop forward and grab the lifepod. They would have to watch it in slow motion to be able to see what Shion did; the flick, the somersault, the grapnels fired and the roll to bring the lifepod steady in her grasp. It was just so fast. One moment the lifepod was tumbling out of control, the next it was steady on a grapnel tow underneath the fighter. After that it was child’s play for Very to take his own fighter up to it and for Shion to drop the lifepod onto Wasp’s airlock. All three fighters had boarding parties including crew with rescue and paramedic training. Everyone was holding their breath as the lifepod was snared onto Wasp’s airlock, Shion releasing her grapnels and curving away. They had the pod, and that was a miracle in itself, but had the people survived? They should have, if the pod had functioned properly, but starseekers were not known for their high quality workmanship and nobody was cheering, not yet, not until they knew for sure.
Then Wasp signalled ‘Got them!’ and everyone just went berserk. Kate Naos was sobbing and laughing at the same time, there were wild cheers and applause, a thundering of hands and feet on anything that made a noise, while Buzz just kept saying, ‘Oh ... oh!’ in wondering delight. In the midst of it all, Alex sat, grinning happily, accepting his exec’s handshake with a little laugh, but saying nothing. Truth to tell, he wasn’t entirely sure that his voice would be steady. Then Davie North called. He’d set the call so that they could hear the cheers and applause on his own ship, and he looked at Alex with frank admiration.
‘Sir,’ he said, and it was not a joke. That one word and the look that went with it carried a wealth of meaning – I was wrong, I was so wrong, and I’ve no idea how you did that but you are utterly amazing.
‘Thank you,’ Alex said, and did not mean for the compliment. The Stepeasy and its tender had nearly doubled their visual range and thereby nearly halved the search time. If Davie hadn’t helped, those people would not have survived. Wasp was already heading back to the ship, flight control directing them to the airlock on deck seven, where Rangi was waiting. It wasn’t over yet – even when they’d got the survivors aboard, they would have to dispose of the lifepod, then make their way back to the Benefite and deal with the starseeker. But for right now, all that any of them wanted was to see Roger and Jayanne Levet brought aboard the ship.
All eyes were on the monitor, then, as Wasp came in to dock, though noise levels dropped away to almost nothing. New members of the crew who didn’t know Alex’s habits in this were quickly hushed. Alex had only needed to ask his crew to be quiet once, the first time they’d brought distressed people aboard, pointing out that it would not help them to come aboard a noisy yelling ship. Now, even when hatches were closed and the people couldn’t hear them anyway, the crew went quiet, just as the right thing to do,
normal for the ship.
It came as a little shock to see Roger and Jayanne Levet walk aboard the ship, though. They had come so very near death that people expected to see them brought aboard on stretchers, injured, traumatised into collapse. Instead they walked through the airlock, looking dazed and a bit jelly-legged after twelve hours in freefall, but otherwise fine. Roger Levet had a sticking plaster on the side of his forehead, other than that they weren’t even dishevelled. Both were wearing matching outfits of soft pants, deck shoes and t-shirts with ‘Jolly Roger’ as a little logo. They were holding hands, too, which caused a murmur of awww and some grins around the ship.
The grins increased as Rangi met them with his own idea of correct behaviour for a Fleet medic taking patients aboard. As they looked about them with fearful expressions, clearly finding the bright lights and military environment rather overwhelming, Rangi embraced them both, warm hugs, pats and hugs again.
‘It’s all right, you’re safe now,’ he told them. ‘We’ve got you, you’re okay.’
He ushered them off towards sickbay, promising them nice cups of tea, and the crew relaxed, grinning and telling one another how amazing that was.
‘Stand down,’ Alex said, giving the order that would put the ship back to normal footing, and then, with a heartfelt note, ‘Good job, everyone.’
He meant that, they knew. ‘Every member of the team counts’ was a much-repeated creed in the Fleet, but for Alex, that was fundamental to how he ran his ship. Not all of them would have an immediate, hands-on involvement in any mission that they carried out, of course, but as he made sure they understood, even one of them failing in their duty, acting out, disrupting, could impact a mission negatively. He needed them all totally on side, giving of their best, for the ship to function at its best, and when he said ‘Good job, everyone,’ he didn’t just mean for those who’d been on active duty, but all those who’d held it together and kept the atmosphere calm and focussed.
They didn’t cheer at that, just gave grins and pleased looks, as they took off survival suits and got the ship back to normal running,
They did, however, cheer a couple of minutes later when Alex blew up the lifepod. Wasp had cast it adrift again before returning to their own airlock. It would blow up within half an hour, anyway, and they were well off shipping lanes so could easily have just abandoned it. Alex, however, knew that it would be far more satisfying to blast it themselves, and he could justify it as an opportunity for live-fire exercise, too. So gun crews were called to posts, the frigate made a high speed rolling pass at maximum firing range from the lifepod, and all the guns took a shot at it.
They would work out from high speed recording that it had been the third shot that took out the superlight capacitor, triggering instantaneous detonation. To the human eye, it just looked like every gun fired simultaneously and the lifepod flared into a miniature supernova. As the blinding blue-white light faded, the debris cloud vanished, too, visible now only to radioactivity and particle sensors.
The Heron curved about, cheers turning to chatter as the crew settled back to normal routines. The Stepeasy, its tender now restored to the hangar compartment, swung back in alongside them companionably.
Alex was still busy, though. Even a normal search and rescue mission generated depressing quantities of paperwork, with all the reports and forms required not only by the Fleet but by civil authorities like the Space Safety Board, and by insurance companies, too. Doing anything other than the standard protocol search manoeuvres, however, also required an extra batch of forms and reports, not just from him but from his senior officers, for review by Internal Affairs. Alex would be an hour or so, at least, doing the paperwork for this, even working through it as briskly as he did.
He set that aside, though, of course, to thank both Shion and Kate, particularly, for their part in the rescue. He’d intended to offer Kate the opportunity to give the ‘fire’ order at the lifepod, in fact, but she’d bolted from the command deck as soon as the hatchways were opened. This wasn’t shyness, but the embarrassing discovery of just how icky it could get in a survival suit if you were laughing and crying and needing to blow your nose. She’d fled back to quarters, hands over her helmet, and Alex had left her to the care of her friends, knowing she’d need a little time to calm down.
Shion, however, came onto the command deck without the happy bounce that might have been expected. She looked fine, perfectly happy, but more serene than excited. Very Vergan was with her, looking a bit uneasy.
Alex knew why. Very had not filed a report against Shion and Alex knew he wouldn’t, either, but the fact of it was that he’d been telling her to hold back, giving her a direct order to do so, at the point when she’d spun forward and grabbed the lifepod. She hadn’t argued with him about it, she’d just gone ahead and done it. It was the first time since she’d come aboard that Alex had seen any sign of the stubborn qualities Froggy Croker had mentioned. He’d even been starting to wonder, in fact, whether Froggy had been having him on, since Shion was always so cheerfully compliant with authority. Now, he began to understand why Froggy had said We’ve just had to get used to her doing whatever she wants, basically.
He could see that in her, now – the serene, utterly certain knowledge that she had done the right thing. He could see that from her point of view, too. She was, logically, the best person to have snared the lifepod, far more quickly than the other pilots could have done it, and at less risk, too, with her faster reflexes and exceptional piloting skill. In Very’s place, in fact, Alex would have given her the go-ahead, though he also understood Very’s position in that, his sense of responsibility both as the senior officer and being mindful of her diplomatic importance.
They would, Alex knew, have to have a serious conversation about chain of command, and having to be able to trust her to comply with that in future if she was to take an active part in operations. But now was not the time for that.
‘I’m not allowed to say ‘well done’’, he told her. ‘The manoeuvre you carried out was unauthorised and contrary to protocol, so I have no option but to issue a reprimand.’ He was grinning, with that, and handed her a packet of cookies he’d had the rigger bring, giving her a nod, ‘Consider yourself duly reprimanded.’
Shion burst out laughing, giving an equally mock-formal salute.
‘Thank you, skipper!’ she said, and went off then, delighted with her prize, to share it with the fighter crews. Alex shook hands with Very, too, telling him, ‘Good job,’ and exchanging looks of much communication. Very relaxed, seeing that the skipper really didn’t hold him responsible for Shion’s terrifying manoeuvre, and he too went off happily.
It was Kate, though, who’d have won any ‘proudest and happiest’ contest on the Heron, that evening. Once she’d had time to shower and calm down, Alex called her back to the command deck to be thanked, formally, for her part in the rescue.
‘By rights, I should be putting you forward for official recognition,’ he told her. ‘Though the Humane Society might struggle to understand the extraordinary nature of the calculations you made, there’s no doubt in any of our minds that we could not have saved those people without your guidance. Of course, since you’re here on classified ops we can’t publicise your heroism as we’d like to, and as you deserve, but we wanted to give you something here and now to recognise your role in saving lives. So we have...’ the ‘we’ there included Buzz and Martine, standing smiling alongside him, ‘decided to award you the right to wear our ship’s insignia, as an honorary member of the Fourth.’
He made a little ceremony of it, pinning the insignia to her collar, and Kate, pink face and orange-red hair clashing horribly, stammered thanks as she managed to shake hands with all three of them in turn. Then she turned scarlet as the crew responded with deafening enthusiasm to a request from the skipper to give her three cheers. She bolted off the command deck again as soon as the ceremony was over, racing back to the lab, to Gunny, just bursting with pride and joy.
/> The other members of the Second were almost as delighted. They’d been helpless observers of the rescue operation themselves, able to make no more contribution than to keep quiet and out of the way, letting the professionals do their work. That the couple had survived and been rescued was a joy in itself. That it was one of their own who’d enabled that rescue had them just glowing with pride, too, shining in her reflected glory. They admired her insignia, shook her hand repeatedly and just could not tell her often enough how brilliant she was. Even Candra’s flat, cold handshake and sour congratulations couldn’t dampen the mood.
Candra, in fact, was seething. She had been openly derogatory about Kate during the first weeks aboard ship. She did not consider any other research as being anywhere near as important as her own, of course – what could possibly be more important than protecting the League from Marfikian invasion, after all? – but she’d poured particular scorn on the cartographic project. If it needed to be done, she said, with the obvious belief that space had already been perfectly well mapped, then it could just as easily, and more appropriately, have been done aboard either a scientific research ship or even a liner. She did not see the need, she’d said, for a map-drawing device to be a military secret. She had patronised Kate herself, too, treating her like a child. She had done more to benefit the League with her work, she’d said, many times, than hothouse flowers like Kate Naos would ever do.
Nobody had ever even suggested that Candra should get any kind of humanitarian award, though. On the contrary, she knew very well that she was hated for what she did. The students at her university might not know what projects she was working on, but they passed on, year to year, by word of mouth, the knowledge that she worked for an arms manufacturer. There had not yet been a semester without some incident of pacifist students confronting her about that, targeting her lectures to hand out anti-weapons leaflets, calling her Doctor Death. There’d even been a demonstration outside her faculty building, the year before, a hard core of anti-weapons activists swelled by hundreds of students in vague agreement with the principle and keen to get off classes.
XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) Page 15
