XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  Mutual thanks and compliments were exchanged, without, it had to be said, warmth or sincerity on either side. Even the regular Fleet had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with Customs and Excise, and their attitude towards the Fourth was one of forced smiles, at best.

  ‘Look,’ said Davie, again, seeing the stubborn set of Alex’s jaw, but looking at him just as severely in return, ‘You should have told me about this from the start,’ he accused. ‘I could have sorted it weeks ago. And don’t tell me it’s none of my business – I’m the goodwill ambassador here, you’re supposed to involve me in any issues of concern about Shion.’

  That was not how the Diplomatic Corps had put it, but Alex did not argue the point.

  ‘It was a minor incident; Shion was not upset by it,’ he said. ‘And it was, and is, an internal matter, my responsibility.’

  ‘Okay okay okay!’ The reply was exasperated, Davie flinging up his hands in a gesture to ward off Alex’s lecture on command responsibilities. ‘Spare me!’ Davie begged, and went on immediately, ‘The point is that I can save us all time and inconvenience by getting that wretched woman off the ship, and without anyone figuring out, either, that you deviated from normal approach.’

  He had a point, Alex had to grant that. It would only need ships coming in to Karadon saying when and where they’d seen the Heron for any spacer to work out that they’d taken longer to get here than they should have. Even clued-up journalists might work that one out, and given how avid the media was for any hint of secret operations being undertaken by the Fourth, it would indeed be much more discreet to allow the Stepeasy to handle taking Candra Pattello to rendezvous with the liner.

  Or at least, the Stepeasy’s tender, which was what Davie had offered, to take her there.

  ‘So this is nothing to do,’ Alex asked, watching him closely, ‘with your impatience to get to Karadon, yourself?’

  Davie gave him a Look, and Alex found himself breaking into a grin. Not many people spoke to him like this, either, and the last person to give him that kind of authoritative stare-down had been a senior port admiral. He couldn’t help but be amused getting that kind of reprimand from a fifteen year old, but he accepted it, too.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ he said, unconsciously echoing Davie’s own words. ‘Fair enough. You’re right, I’m being unnecessarily territorial about this. So I will accept your very kind offer to give our passenger a ride to the Tela, thank you, Mr North.’

  Davie looked surprised. ‘I won?’ he queried, as if not quite able to believe it. ‘I actually won an argument with you?’

  He was being sarcastic, of course, which Alex acknowledged with a grin.

  ‘Pax!’ he requested, and as Davie gave an answering grin that agreed to that ceasefire, went on, ‘It may need some explaining to the Tela’s captain, though.’

  He did not need to explain why that was to Davie. It would already have been a startling situation for the frigate to come up alongside a liner that had just departed Karadon, asking them to take a passenger aboard. The fact that she would be travelling on a Fleet-issued travel warrant would guarantee that they’d find her accommodation aboard even if the passenger list was technically full. For the luxury yacht to be bringing them a passenger on a Fleet issued travel warrant, however, would require some explanation.

  It would have to be an explanation that Candra was prepared to go along with, too. It had been made clear to her that Alex had no intention of even attempting to override Mack and Perry having fired her. As he’d told her in a meeting the following day, he had neither the authority to override Devast Industries terminating her contract, nor any basis to attempt to interfere on her behalf. This had obviously confirmed her in her belief that the firing had been at his own instigation, even some kind of conspiracy with the Devast team. She’d become so intemperate in her threats about what she was going to do about that that Alex had been forced to remind her of the binding confidentiality agreement she had signed, not to mention the Official Secrets Act.

  She had recognised, with that, that she had no choice, but that cooperation was forced at best. It would be difficult to persuade her to agree to a cover story.

  ‘We’ll code-Shareholder that,’ Davie said casually, in a don’t worry about it tone. Then, seeing the alert flick of question on Alex’s face, explained patiently, ‘My father owns White Star. There’s a code we use to tell the captains that the Shareholder would appreciate special and discreet care being taken of a passenger, so you needn’t worry about that.’

  ‘Ah,’ Alex said, and after a moment or two to consider any potential ethical concerns about that, nodded. ‘Fair enough,’ he said, again.

  He had a personal benchmark when evaluating ethical matters. He would imagine himself in the First Lord’s office, explaining to Dix Harangay what he’d done. If it was something he knew that he could make a full report about without the need for apology, fair enough. In this case, he knew, if he’d turned that offer down and then had to explain to Dix that he’d felt ‘sensitive’ about the idea of using Davie’s relationship with the owner of the White Star line to facilitate discreet handling of the problem with Candra, Dix would look at him as if he’d gone mad. Words would be spoken, too, on the subject of employing common sense and recognising that accepting legitimate offers of professional assistance from the owners of liner companies was no different, no different at all, from accepting the same offers from the captains themselves. ‘Thank you, Mr North,’ Alex said, formally, and Davie gave a mock-formal bow in return.

  ‘You are very welcome, captain,’ he said. ‘So, tell the lady to pack her bags, I’ll have the tender ready in four minutes.’

  He didn’t actually say ‘lady’, but Alex did not pick him up on the term he chose to describe Candra Pattello. Truth to tell, he could not have said, hand on heart, that he disagreed with it.

  And so, with that, mightily indignant about being told to leave the ship some hours before she’d expected to, even though she was already fully packed and doing nothing more than sitting in her cabin, Candra Pattello departed the ship. Some fools amongst the crew started up a derisory cheer as she left, but a frown from Alex and quick intervention from the nearest responsible crew members stifled that quickly. Alex might have his own opinion of her, and accept that the crew had every reason to dislike her, too, but no guest was going to be booed off his ship. It would be beneath their dignity, that.

  Spirits rose, though, as the tender sped off, and not just because the departure of Candra Pattello removed a little cloud of angry misery. They were within striking distance of Karadon, now, and with nothing to delay them, accelerated up to best cruising pace, Stepeasy spinning playfully around them like an oversized excited puppy.

  ‘Pack it in,’ Alex commanded, as Davie rolled his ship underneath the Heron, not dangerously close but skimming their exclusion zone.

  ‘Aye aye, captain,’ Davie chuckled, returning the superyacht to a demure escort formation. Alex grinned, with a sense of balance restored, and recognised, too, that Davie had done that deliberately, putting them back on their usual play-tussle footing.

  When they arrived at Karadon, however, the Stepeasy was a model of decorum. Falling back modestly to allow the Fleet ship to precede them, they moved into the parking orbit signalled by the station, making no attempt to stay by the Heron. The warship was in the outermost of the eight orbital rings around Karadon, the ring Fleet and Customs ships were always parked at, only used for liners and large freighters if the station was extraordinarily busy.

  They certainly were busy today. Shion had seen any number of pictures and holos of Karadon but her eyes were bright with excitement as she saw it then, for real. The first four orbital rings were given over to small craft. Last time the Fourth had been here there’d been less than forty such vessels at the station, and only eleven of those starseekers. Now, there were more than two hundred of them. Freighters and a few larger yachts proliferated in rings five and six, with the biggest freighters and lin
ers in ring seven. There were thirteen liners in port at the moment, including the Empress of Telathor, now in final preparations for departure.

  There was also, Alex noted, a Customs and Excise vessel in port. It was parked on an orbit that kept it permanently obscured from their own orbit, the station lying between them, but he’d seen it as they rose into the parking zones. Like most Customs ships, it was hardly larger than a Fleet patrol craft, fast but not up to much operationally.

  For Alex, anyway, there was only one ship of any importance at the station, and that was the Minnow. He knew from their most recent passing encounter that the corvette was still there, but no more detailed news than that. The first thing he looked for, as his own ship slid into assigned parking orbit in the node two places ahead of the Minnow, was to evaluate the condition of his old ship.

  If there was a little sigh within him at the sight of the tank valves, he kept it to himself. It had nothing to do, that, with any proprietorial or sentimental feeling about the corvette, it was a purely professional evaluation. The ship might look, to untutored eyes, exactly as it had when Alex had handed it back to regular service, but there were any number of subtle ways a skipper could assert their own style on their ship. It would have been difficult to explain to a civilian the significance of those tank valves, the normal corvette sort that Harlon Alington had obviously put back instead of the frigate ones Alex had installed. It would make no real difference to the ship’s performance, other than to add a few minutes to the process of tank filling and venting, but it was indicative of Harlon Alington’s mentality. Working with him, Alex knew, was not going to be easy.

  The corvette saluted them, though, briskly enough to show that they were awake over there, as a storm of excited signals began amongst the merchant shipping.

  The Heron was flashing out a lot of signals, too. One of them was a command, though politely phrased as a request, for Harlon Alington to report aboard the Heron in half an hour. Other signals went to the station, placing orders for all manner of supplies that they wanted. They might well be under orders to stay here for seventeen days, but that could change very rapidly so Alex wanted supplies sorted as quickly as possible.

  Alex himself sat with Shion, enjoying her excitement at seeing the station and all the ships around it, though busily reading through the most urgent mail, too. Hundreds of mail messages had been transmitted from the station, many of them personal mail for the crew, but the usual depressing quantities of mail that would need some official response, too. For now, Alex set aside his personal mail. The first thing he read was a note from Dix Harangay, the First Lord of the Admiralty. This turned out to contain a copy of his orders to remain at Karadon between the dates specified. Dix had written beneath that, himself, ‘Do not go off on other ops. Possible VIP visit.’

  That was all the information there was, though Alex guessed that it would probably be a government representative coming out to meet Shion. Please, not Senator Machet, he prayed, silently. Senator Machet was one of the politicians who sat on the special operations sub-committee overseeing Fourth’s affairs. She had already tried, twice, to arrange to be able to come and spend some time with them. She had a reputation for being something of a busybody. Dix had said once that if there was one question you really did not want to be asked in committee, Senator Machet would be the one who asked it. Please, no, Alex thought, but since there was nothing he could do about it either way, set that aside to scan through the next most urgent mail.

  A few minutes later, he had to set that aside too, taking a call from Karadon’s Executive Director, Leisure Division. He was currently, in fact, the acting Director of the entire Karadon station, as its actual director was away at head office.

  ‘Hey, Quill,’ Alex greeted his old friend with warm pleasure. They’d been cadets together, members of the elite class of the Sixty Four, room-mates at the Academy, and though Jon Quilleran had lurked at the bottom of the class and soon decided that his future lay with White Star rather than the Fleet, they’d formed a lasting friendship.

  ‘Alex!’ Quill greeted him with pleasure, too, though no surprise. ‘We’ve been expecting you anytime the last month,’ he told him, with a chuckle, and Alex laughed too. The last time the Heron had come here, they’d left Therik under the pretext of going out on a routine training flight from which they were expected to return to port, only to head straight to Karadon for operations there. As soon as word reached them that the Heron had left Therik on shakedown flight, people would have been looking for them to turn up at Karadon.

  ‘No, no, we really were on shakedown flight, this time,’ he told him, which wasn’t actually true but then, he could hardly tell him where they’d really been. Having to lie, even to your friends, went with the territory on classified ops. Quill wouldn’t question it, anyway. He’d stayed in the Fleet long enough to know the score on that. ‘How are things, here?’ Alex asked, and Quill beamed.

  ‘As you see...’ he gestured to indicate the busy parking orbits, ‘business is booming. No problems, Alex – not of your kind, anyway.’

  He’d been eloquent, in his letters, about the ‘corporate zombies’ who were the only down-side of his dream job at Karadon. Lawyers, accountants and other company executives had come out to the station in swarms, remaining after the official investigation to hold what they described as a watching brief and Quill described as getting up his nose. They were always asking him why he was doing things, telling him when something he intended was contrary to some aspect of company policy, and talking corporate jargon at him. ‘We’ve still got Marto,’ he added, with cheerful triumph. The celebrity chef was famously volatile and Davie had promised Quill another hundred thousand dollar bonus if he could persuade Marto to stay at the station and keep him there for at least a year. ‘He’s looking forward to cooking for you, and has made me promise to bring you to the Temple,’ Quill said, referring to Marto’s restaurant. It was so exclusive that you could only get a table there if Marto decided that he liked you, and as a disconcerted Vice President had once discovered, no consideration of status would weigh with him in that.

  Alex looked appalled. The last and only time he’d met Marto had been aboard a liner. The chef had wept and hugged him, an experience Alex was in no hurry to repeat.

  ‘And don’t tell me you won’t have time,’ Quill added, before Alex could speak, ‘Or give me any guff about your security – we handle high security visits all the time. You’re here on a courtesy visit, right? So be courteous and come aboard and be sociable.’ As Alex looked at him with mingled horror and appeal, Quill relented, grinning, ‘Have dinner with me and Maxi, at least.’

  ‘All right,’ Alex agreed, relieved. Maxi was Quill’s partner – husband, now, since the two of them had married a few months before. ‘On condition,’ Alex warned, with a lifted finger, ‘that you do not try to make it a foursome with some nice single lady you ‘happen to know’.’

  ‘Okay,’ Quill agreed, with a tolerant grin. ‘Tomorrow, then? We’ll have the ceremony at 1100, if that’s okay with you, and the lunch thing, then we can have dinner privately in the evening.’

  Alex raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Ceremony?’ he queried.

  ‘Yes,’ Quill said, with a curious look at him, as if not sure if Alex was joking, with that, ‘you know. The ceremony to give you the freedom of the station.’

  Alex closed his eyes briefly, mentally rehearsing what he would like to say to Davie North right now.

  ‘You didn’t know,’ Quill observed, quite taken aback. ‘But it’s been arranged for ages, you know, we got word about it weeks ago. It isn’t in your orders?’

  ‘No,’ said Alex, with admirable self restraint. ‘It isn’t in my orders. Word from who, might I ask? No, don’t tell me. ISiS Corps.’

  ‘Direct from the Board, yes,’ Quill said, and betrayed his slow absorption into that world, with that, speaking of the Board with the same tone as a Fleet officer used when speaking of the Admiralty. ‘Special polic
y, unique relationship, expression of gratitude, yada, official granting of the freedom of this and all ISiS stations to you and the Fourth.’

  ‘Ohhhh.’ Alex said, and could just hear Davie sniggering.

  ‘Is it a problem?’ Quill asked, with a little concern.

  ‘No, no, it isn’t a problem,’ Alex said, and had the grace to grin, then, shaking his head, acknowledging a master stroke there from a genius player. The higher politics of this went way over Alex’s head and he knew that, but he was astute enough to recognise that Davie North was playing a two-level hand, here. At one level it was a political compromise, allowing League authorities the toehold onto ISiS that they were pushing for so hard, and yet restricting that official right of boarding to just one ship, the Fourth’s. At the other, personal level, however, it would be amusing Davie no end to put Alex into this position. ‘Please, tell me what’s involved, and what you need from us,’ he requested.

  Quill was still doing so when Alex was informed that Skipper Alington was boarding the ship, a quarter of an hour early. He would wait, of course – Buzz would whisk him off to offer drinks in the wardroom until such time as the skipper was ready to see him – but for Alex to keep him waiting when that relationship was already so sensitive might be perceived as arrogant.

  ‘I’ll have to call you back in the morning, all right?’ Alex said, and at Quill’s smile of agreement, ended the call.

  Quill was already at the airlock when Alex went through on his way to his cabin, so Alex greeted him there, returning his salute and inviting him to come through to his quarters.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Harlon Alington. He was a tall, slender man, delicate of feature and with mild blue eyes. His tone was perhaps just a little too self consciously cultured, a little precious, a man who looked as if he’d be mortified if someone broke wind. This was not entirely a fair impression; you didn’t rise to command rank in the Fleet, still less graduate top of the Sixty Four, unless you were intelligent, capable and decisive.