She could dismiss such protests and opinions as ridiculous, the naievety of children who had no understanding of the threat posed by the Marfikians. She would, she said, hold her head up, proud to be serving the League in such vital defence work, and no idiotic adolescents were going to make her feel any differently.
It was so unfair, she thought, so bitterly unfair, that she had to live with such stupid uninformed hatred while if the rights of it were known, she’d be celebrated as a hero, helping to protect their worlds. And it was just rubbing her nose in it, too, that a hothouse brat like Kate was so acclaimed, called a hero, for nothing more than making calculations.
When dinner arrived at the usual time of 1925, she sat down to table with them in a mood of silent chagrin, heavily leavened with envy and resentment. Outwardly, however, she forced herself to the standard of cold politeness she’d decided upon after that humiliating reprimand from Alex.
‘Thank you, steward,’ she said, to the rigger who brought their dinner. She did this every day, at every mealtime. It was one of the things that had started to grate even on her own team, as they themselves had integrated into shipboard life, and that she persisted in it even now was very obviously deliberate, passive-aggressive hostility.
There were no stewards on the Heron, and wouldn’t be on any frigate. Flag rank officers were entitled to a personal steward as part of their staff, but there was no culture of skippers or officers being waited on, at least not in the way that stewards waited on people aboard liners. On the Heron, as on any other Fleet ship, stewarding duties were a chore undertaken by the lowest ranking members of crew on the usual kind of watch rotation. That meant that whoever was on steward duty this watch would help out in the galley and take out hot-trolleys to the lab and wardroom routinely, and to sickbay and the brig if they had passengers there. There was no kind of first-class service about that – though the Fleet could put on a show when needed and the quartermaster did have a white jacket, that was only for formal events, when the silver came out. For ordinary usage people ordered what food they wanted from the menu, it was delivered in a hot trolley and left there for them to help themselves. They were also expected to put their used dishes and cutlery back in the trolley, which the steward would pick up in half an hour or so.
‘Thank you, Marty,’ Perry Soames said, and they all made a point of thanking the steward by name, too. It might indeed be any one of twenty or so members of crew who turned up with their meals, but it was inexcusable, by now, not to at least know most of them by name.
Candra clenched her teeth, recognising that as directed against her, seeing it as snide sarcasm. It was a passing, habitual conflict, however, a bickering exchange repeated three times a day every day, and they were in far too elevated a mood even for Candra’s set-jaw glare to make them uncomfortable. They were exclaiming with pleasure as they unloaded the trolley, commenting laughingly on how hungry they were, that being on ops like that certainly gave you an appetite. They were laying the table, too, warmed plates and cutlery with serving dishes set in the middle, family style.
The catering aboard the Heron was actually very good, for all the jokes about Fleet food. It was prepacks, to be sure, but a long cut above the kind of cheap supermarket dinners that most people would think of as prepack meals. The Fleet knew the value of good catering for their crews, both physically and psychologically, and did their best to keep it interesting, too, varying daily menus and providing choice. Dinner was distinguished by having starter options, three mains with choice of sides, and four desserts. You could have your choice served on an individual tray, but since the Fleet also recognised the psychological benefits of sharing food, two or more could order together with the shared-dish option.
They’d been doing that in the lab, from the start. It was one of the things that had assumed tremendous significance as time had gone on, demarcating cliques and territory. For the first few weeks, Candra and her team had sat at one end of the table, sharing service for four, while Gunny Norsten and Kate had sat at the other end sharing service for two. Now, though they were all still sitting in the same places, it was service for five for the others, and an individual tray for Candra. They would have included her at any time, but her response after her team had started eating with the others had been so freezing that they hadn’t offered again.
There was the usual ‘who’s having what’ as they gave out the starters, and tonight, at least, no lapse into awkward moments as Candra subjected them to her silent oppression. Kate had said once that she put out misery like a radioactive isotope sprayed out ionising particles, and they’d joked amongst themselves about calling them miserons. Tonight, though, she fired off her miserons in vain, no amount of icy disapproval dampening their spirits.
Main courses were served. Most of them had gone for the spicy option this evening and the lab’s dining area was soon rich with fragrant aromas. It annoyed Candra to see them sharing side dishes around. She didn’t like to see that even in restaurants, being firmly of the view that each diner should have their own individual serving dishes, to be fair, so you got what you paid for. Even here, where that was irrelevant, she considered it just wrong for people to share their sides around, bad table etiquette. That was the kind of thing that would have got on her nerves even in normal life aboard ship. With the pressure-cooker intensity of the atmosphere in the lab, every shared dish, every handed plate, was like a little needle jab.
And then, of course, there was dessert. Candra didn’t eat dessert. She considered it an unhealthy indulgence, and if you asked, or even if you didn’t, would tell you why, at length. Her team members had been subjected to her opinions on dessert at every dinner since they’d come aboard, with the others forced to listen to it too. Even when she didn’t say anything, her censure was obvious, with looks and an occasional little tut when someone had something particularly rich and creamy.
Tonight, most of them were having the honey meringue, a particular favourite when it came up on the menu. Like almost all the food served aboard ship, it was dehydrated and compressed to minimise the space it took up in the hold. Galley systems rehydrated, warmed and puffed them into edible meringues, the same process producing all the other cooked food aboard. Perry Soames had been responsible for reconstituting the meringues, today, during his stint helping in the galley, and there was some friendly teasing over what a good cook he was, along with the spoon-licking pleasure they were taking in the dessert. It was genuine, that – food did indeed assume far greater importance aboard ship, a big event in the day, than it did groundside. There was no sending out for pizza out here, after all, and the knowledge that the nearest alternative meal was literally light years away really made you appreciate your dinner.
To Candra, though, it was as if every licked spoon and mmmn of appreciation was directed at her, just as the pointed use of the steward’s name had been. She sat stone faced, hating them, and any miseron detector would have been clicking like a Geiger counter in a uranium mine.
Oblivious to this, the others enjoyed their dessert and laughing conversation, breaking into cheers and whoops of delight when Denni took the lid off the mint dish. This too was a feature of the evening meal. You got handwipes at the end of every meal but at dinner these were in a little dish along with hard little after-dinner mints to have with your coffee. They usually went back to the galley still in their individual wrappers, since only Gunny liked them.
This evening, however, there were no little bullets of mint – instead, there was a dish of assorted miniature chocolate bars.
That cheering really showed how deeply they’d integrated into shipboard life. In their first few days aboard they’d have accepted something like that without even thinking about it. Now, they understood that these were a very special treat. Officers paid into a mess fund to buy treats for the wardroom over and above Fleet catering, and there was a fund for that for the crew, too. More importantly than the money, however, was the amount of space available for such supplies.
Alex gave his crew far more than the basic entitlement, which was the origin of the ‘champagne lifestyle’ myth, misunderstood comment about how cushy the Fourth’s crew had it, with real coffee machines and generous treat supplies, known in the Fleet as crateage. Alex had attempted to explain at one of his ill-fated press conferences that this was no more than a very old tradition in the Fleet, in which ships that scored very highly in performance evaluations were allowed extra crateage, but even those who’d understood had not been convinced.
This, however, was the reality of the champagne lifestyle so howled against by right wing campaigners – a dish of miniature candies, served in celebration of a successful rescue.
‘Real chocolate!’ Denni crowed, amidst the cheering. There were chocolate and candy bars available from the galley hatch, half a dozen kinds, but they too were dehydrates, highly processed imitations of popular brands. These were real, quality chocolate, brought with them all the way from Therik.
They gave the dish to Kate, first, telling her to take her pick. That was a trivial thing in itself but again, a needle into Candra’s nerves, seeing them make so much of the girl, treating her like a hero, and Kate so modest, too, blushing pink even at the triviality of being given first choice of the candies. Once persuaded, though, she took one and the dish was handed round the table, as courteously and ceremoniously as a liqueur, nobody grabbing even if they did have their eye on a particular favourite.
Mack, the systems engineer who had the misfortune to be seated next to Candra, took a chocolate lime bar himself, and held the dish on towards her. Normally – in what had become normal for mealtimes in the lab – that would have been an awkward moment, self-conscious on Mack’s part, a stony burst of miserons on hers. Tonight, however, he merely passed the dish on with a casual glance, still talking to Perry as he did so. It was evident that he was not pretending to be oblivious to her hostility, but genuinely so, as were the rest of them. She had, she could see, become so unimportant in their eyes that she might as well have been invisible. Even when she snapped, ‘No, thank you!’ in a tone that suggested he’d offered her arsenic, none of them paid her any heed. Mack merely reached past her without comment and passed the dish to Perry.
Candra stood up, standing there in a way that commanded attention, then strode away from the table.
None of them, though, took any notice of Candra’s abrupt departure. That was, after all, typical of her, to take herself off and sit in the lounge area while the rest of them had coffee at the table.
That would not take her very far. The Fourth had made every possible provision for them but the old wardroom had only been intended for up to ten officers and space was limited. The lounge area consisted of a space formed by the removal of two of the sleeping cabins, with three sofas, a coffee table and a wall-mounted entertainment unit tucked into an alcove. The dining table was next to that, just a couple of metres between the table and the seating area. The rest of their quarters were taken up with the L-shaped block of sleeping cabins and the working area of the lab, a workbench along one wall, various lab tech and a central datatable. It was also full of storage boxes stacked wherever there was deck space for them, and all manner of gear stuffed into freefall nets on the walls and ceiling. There were active screens on the datatable, running continuous analysis of the data Kate’s wave-space monitor was recording. There was also, today, a white noise generator operating.
That had been installed in the lab so that ship noise wouldn’t interfere with sound-sensitive experiments, but it could also be used, as it was being today, for comfort. They were still in Kennerman’s Ridge, and travelling at such speed that even those with normal hearing range found the engine noise a little irritating. For Kate, it was really uncomfortable. She’d put her earplugs back in for some time, when on the command deck, at Alex’s suggestion, only removing them when the sense of isolation turned out to be worse than the engine noise.
Here, at least, that wasn’t a problem. The white noise generator countered every sound from outside the lab, creating a little island of peace on the ship. It did admittedly have a strange, dead acoustic in there, with the generator on, no resonance to voices, but nobody objected to that. If the engine noise was irritating to them, they knew, that was nothing to how uncomfortable, even painful, it was to Kate.
Candra, finding that even her attempt to make a dramatic, pointed departure from the table did not get her so much as a glance, lost her temper. Part of her knew that she was behaving badly, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She would not shout, or swear, or say anything that might get her thrown off the ship, she determined, but she could not stand this intolerable disrespect from them one moment longer.
She walked across into the lab and turned off the white-noise generator. Engine noise invaded the lab immediately, a grumbling chutter as if the grumpy old ladies were being played on fast forward. Kate winced, taken unawares, and the rest of them turned to Candra in swift indignation.
‘Turn that back on!’ That was Gunny, speaking with the authority of his rank both as Lt Commander and as Kate’s liaison officer, responsible for her wellbeing. Her university had only been prepared to allow her to come on this trip with the assurance that she would have someone looking after her, and the Second had felt that was advisable, too, given her youth and social inexperience. Gunny had had his leg pulled about being the Maths Kid’s babysitter, but he was proud to be so. He’d been stepping back as Kate gained confidence, not wanting to mother-hen her, but he was always watchful of her welfare and this was deliberate, very obviously targeting Kate, subjecting her to noise that Candra knew very well was physically distressing to the sixteen year old. That was bullying, no two ways about it, and Gunny was not about to see his charge being bullied.
‘No,’ Candra said, and declared, coldly, ‘It’s getting on my nerves.’
The row that erupted then was four against one, since Kate herself took no part in it. Mortified by being the subject of such conflict and entirely out of her depth in such emotional territory, she did as Gunny asked and went into her cabin. There, she put her earplugs in and did sub-quantum field calculations to stay calm.
Outside in the lab, there was something of a competition for priority in telling Candra what they thought of such behaviour. Gunny obviously thought it should be him taking the leading role, as Kate’s minder, while Perry pointed out that he represented Devast so was responsible for Candra herself, a statement that got instant argument not only from Candra but from his fellow Devast employees.
‘You’re not any more responsible for her than I am,’ Mack objected, since he too was on the inner circle in the corporate structure diagram.
‘And I work for them, too, what she does reflects on me as well,’ Denni said.
‘Well, we’re all entitled to have our say,’ Gunny said. ‘But one way or another, Professor,’ he turned back to Candra, ‘that generator is going back on. Majority rules, the rest of us want it on, end of argument.’
He was right, in fact. The Second had produced a set of house rules for their research teams while on the Heron, most of them to do with cooperating with the Fourth and doing their best not to disrupt the normal working of the ship. Anticipating the need for some kind of structure within their own unit, however, they’d laid down a requirement for any disputes there might be to be resolved internally, by discussion and vote.
It was not the ‘end of argument’, though, of course, not by a long way. As tempers flared, indeed, there was one point at which it became in danger of becoming a physical tussle. Candra was standing in front of the white noise generator so that none of them could turn it back on, and when Denni declared fiercely that she was going to do so and Candra hadn’t better try to stop her, only Mack’s hand on her arm pulled her back from shoving the professor out of the way.
‘That isn’t the way,’ he told her, at which she turned on him a look of angry frustration, demanding, ‘Well, what is ‘the way’, then?’
Mack lo
oked at her, and suddenly knew. They had been so helpless, for so long, trapped in a maze of restrictions and difficulties. In that moment, though, he knew, with wonderful clarity, exactly what they could do, and should do.
In that, he had been more inspired by Alex than he realised, himself. He’d already had a high opinion of the skipper, but watching him today, the decisions that he made without so much as looking at anyone else for their reassurance, had left him with a sense of profound admiration. When the odds were against him, even at millions to one, with lives at stake, he had stepped up to the challenge and he’d won. It seemed utterly pathetic in comparison that he, Mack, couldn’t resolve a workplace managerial issue.
So, he stepped up, and once the others understood what his intentions were, they stepped up right alongside him.
Which, an hour or so later, took the Devast team to the skipper’s cabin. They had asked to meet with him privately at his convenience, but Alex had little to do at that point so called them in within a few minutes. They were still on their way back to the Benefite, and wouldn’t get there for another half an hour or so, so he had time for them right now. He was curious, too – the three of them were so self-effacing that you really would hardly know they were aboard the ship. The only other time they’d asked to meet with him had been after the incident with Shion, to apologise on Candra’s behalf.
‘We are officially informing you that Professor Pattello’s association with the project has been terminated by Devast Industries,’ Perry said, having won the debate over which of them should be spokesperson. ‘We have held a management meeting, discussed and voted on it, and are agreed, unanimously, that this is the right and necessary course of action. There is a letter, to that effect, signed by Mr Macilvoy and myself, and a copy of the letter we’ve given to Professor Pattello, too.’
XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) Page 16
