He was also the crewman who had broken his finger in the border crossing rumpus. It was a minor injury, brought about by an over-enthusiastic dive for a ball that was being hurled around the ship.
‘O/S Delaver has asked if he can apologise to you, skipper,’ Buzz told him, passing a file to his desk. Alex could see at once that Buzz had already dealt with the formal disciplinary procedures. That was extraordinary dispatch in the Fleet, even given that Tammo Delaver had been identified as the source of the leak while Alex was still delivering his speech aboard the station. Buzz and Alex were at one on this, though, that dragging such matters out only bred resentment, particularly amongst the bullock breed of crew.
Tammo had pleaded guilty to a breach of security. Charges had been mitigated in that because he’d come forward voluntarily. Buzz had asked any officers or crew who felt there was any possibility that anything they might have said could have been understood as telling about the rumpus to come and speak with him informally, and Tammo, already distressed, had done so. It had taken very little investigation to confirm that he was, indeed, the one responsible for that information leaking out. Buzz had put him on twenty hours of PD. That meant he’d have to spend twenty hours on top of normal watch duties, during the next month, doing the grottiest make-work chores reserved for punishment duty. Most Fleet officers, Alex was aware, would consider that outrageously lenient given the seriousness of the security breach.
Alex, however, was entirely of one mind with Buzz in this, too. There was clearly no need to slam down on the unfortunate Tammo like a ton of duralloy. He was so upset already that he was almost shaking. A glance over the file also made it clear how unintentional the security breach had been. Tammo had done no more than mention to his cousin that he’d bust his finger in a ball game. To his astonishment, his cousin had recognised even from that that the Heron had been outside League borders, asking him straight off if that was in a rumpus. Tammo had told him no, of course not, they’d been on routine training flight. He’d also asked his cousin to keep everything they’d talked about just between the two of them. ‘I thought I could trust him,’ he’d said, in his statement, and Alex could hear the grief, too, in his explanation, ‘He’s family!’
There were many things Alex could have said to the young crewman – things about judgement and discretion, things about how embarrassing it was for all of them to have to admit that one of their own crew had leaked such sensitive information, things about how that would come back against Alex himself. He said none of it, though. Tammo had asked to see him, to apologise, because he already felt so awful over what he’d done. Making him feel even worse about it wouldn’t help the situation, after all.
Alex, therefore, accepted the teenager’s barely audible apology, then gave a few words of kindly advice.
‘I daresay quite a few of your shipmates will have things to say to you over the next few days,’ he told him. ‘Not all of them supportive. If you can manage to be calm and dignified in the way you deal with that, neither falling apart over it or getting into arguments, I see no reason why this should affect your promotion.’
Tammo mumbled thanks. He wasn’t quite out of the door before he drew a sleeve quickly across his eyes, then pulled himself upright with a mighty effort at dignity. Buzz, following, cast a look at the skipper which held sympathy for him. He knew very well what kind of hassle Alex was liable to get over this.
And did, too, immediately. Buzz had not even closed the door behind him when Alex saw that one of the ‘immediate attention’ files flashing red on his desk was from Harry Alington. Opening it, he saw that the corvette skipper had conducted his own investigation into the rumours that the Heron had crossed League borders and that he, too, had tracked it to gossip originating from the engine room of the White Star liner Queen of Telfa. Finding that one of the engineering hands there was a cousin of one of Alex’s crew, he’d sent Alex a report. The LIA had sent the same information, too, in a rather more curt report advising him to ask O/S Delaver if he wanted to know how their security had been breached.
Alex sighed a little as he sent answers thanking both Harry and the LIA for their information, adding that they had made the same discovery independently and that the matter had now been dealt with.
He was not surprised, though, to get a call from Harry Alington. The Minnow’s skipper was highly indignant, with a ‘told you so’ manner.
‘Laxity in what you consider the minor discipline always leads to laxity in the greater, too,’ he said, a maxim popular amongst the Old School Fleet. Then, with a stern note, ‘I suppose you’re sending him to Therik for court martial.’
‘We have,’ said Alex, with a freezing note, ‘dealt with the matter internally.’
Harry, however, took no notice of the freezing note. He was feeling comfortably superior, in fact, having spent two and half hours watching Alex on holovision. The media had dropped their attack on Harry and the Sixty Four, with Alex coming within range of their cameras. Harry had had a lovely quiet day, alternately sniggering and lamenting over Alex’s appalling performance at the speech and reception. And now, too, he had been proven right in his assertion that Alex’s policy of allowing his crew such license in their private calls was fundamentally flawed. Smugness oozed from him like pungent aftershave.
‘You can’t be serious!’ he said, with shocked tones. Skippers and execs were only allowed to deal with minor disciplinary matters aboard ship. Anything that was rated serious by the rule book meant a groundside court martial held by a flag rank officer. Clearly, in Harry’s opinion, the fact that classified information had been leaked into the spacer community was sufficient to justify court martial charges.
Alex could have pointed out that no reasonable person could interpret Tammo’s accidental slip of the fact that he’d broken his finger in a ball game as being in any way a deliberate breach of confidentiality. It would have been different, of course, if he’d told his cousin that they’d been across League borders, but he obviously hadn’t intended to do that. They could be sure of that, too, with no issue of taking Tammo’s word for it. Like most spacers, he’d recorded his conversation, not to cover himself if things went wrong but merely to watch again, as spacers read and re-read personal mail during long trips. He had given that recording to Buzz, so there was no doubt that his version of events was true. And he could not have been expected to realise, given his age and experience, that his cousin would know that the only time ball games like that were allowed on Fleet ships was during a rumpus. It had been an innocent mistake, and certainly did not merit a court martial.
Alex, however, did not even attempt to explain that to Harry Alington. He’d been doing his best to establish a good working relationship between the two of them, even tolerating comments from Harry that he’d felt himself were on the edge of allowable even if they really were on good terms. Now, though, he drew the line.
‘I’m sorry?’ he said, deploying the psycho stare, gaze fixed at Harry’s supercilious face, ‘But on what basis are you presuming that I am in any way accountable to you?’
There was a moment in which shock, indignation and resentment chased each other over Harry’s face, before a cold formality obscured them.
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he said, aiming for the same degree of chill with which Alex had addressed him, and adding, with a biting edge, ‘I believed we were on such terms as to make frank discussion permissible.’
‘Not to the point,’ Alex replied, ‘of you challenging my authority.’
‘Sir,’ Harry said tersely, and gave him a look. It was a very carefully controlled look, nothing that could have laid him open to charges of dumb insolence, but it was also quite remarkably expressive. It conveyed to Alex that while Alex might well, yes, have become a skipper four years ahead of him, Harry had no doubt in his own mind which of them was going to make admiral first.
He was probably right, too. Alex knew that he would be promoted to captain the moment that Fleet regulations allowed,
because it was a real and serious issue for the Fleet that he was holding far more responsibility than was right for his rank. Promotion to admiral, however, was as much a matter of playing the political game within and around the Fleet as it was about success in command postings. Harry would serve his due time aboard ships, but everyone knew that he would, then, glide effortlessly through groundside managerial roles, rising rapidly into the Admiralty itself. The look he gave Alex made it clear that he was looking forward to the day when Alex would have to call him ‘sir’, and would have to sit there and take it when Harry told him what he thought of him and his progressive policies.
Alex, however, gave him a look in return that conveyed just as effectively that he didn’t give a flying flatus for Harry Alington’s opinion now and never would, either. He had done his best, he felt, to establish cordial relations with the other skipper, but it was obvious by now that that was never going to work. On the contrary, his efforts to be friendly towards Alington were being mistaken by him as conciliatory to the point where Alington felt he could criticise and even rebuke him. Alex von Strada was not a man who kept on with a plan when it was clearly not working, even being counterproductive. Time, he decided, for a new approach.
‘So,’ he said, moderating his manner into one of cool, impersonal business, ‘what are your thoughts on the intel I gave you?’
Another flicker of indignation crossed Harry’s face.
‘I haven’t,’ he said, greatly on his dignity, ‘reflected on it sufficiently, as yet, to give you a considered response, sir.’
Alex allowed silence to continue past the point of comfort. He knew that what Harry Alington meant by that was that he had not yet, in fact, even finished reading through the reports Alex had handed on to him. As Alex had suspected, Harry had viewed the arrival of the Heron as lifting all such responsibilities from him. He had probably spent the day relaxing. Even if he’d undertaken the investigation into the rumours that the Fourth had crossed League borders personally, that would not have occupied him for more than a few minutes. It was, as the LIA had readily discovered, common knowledge amongst the spacers and the media that that story had come from the Queen of Telfa’s engine room.
‘Getting to grips with intel should be your top priority,’ Alex said, after that deliberate pause to emphasise his disapproval. ‘That is, after all, what you’re here for. So get on top of it, please, and call me back when you have a considered professional response.’
‘Sir,’ said Harry Alington, with punctilious respect in his tone and hatred in his eyes.
Alex broke off the call with a curt nod, turning straight away to the other files demanding his immediate attention. Eight of them, he noted, were from Exodiplomacy Attaché Carvor Djenbo. Attaché Djenbo would certainly be of the view that Alex himself was failing to prioritise his most important mission, here, even in taking time out to deal with anti-drugs intelligence and talking to Harry Alington. Alex, on the other hand, knew that he had to maintain their cover, here, since for him to leave everything to Harry Alington and take no part in anti-drugs efforts at the station would have been just weird.
He had not, however, forgotten about Shion – how could he? She was aboard the station right now, spending the day there with Davie and the exodiplomatic team. She’d been taken over to the Shareholder Penthouse that morning, ferried discreetly on a shuttle that had gone to the station to pick up supplies. Shion had agreed to this with pleasure, keen to see aboard the station and cheerfully willing to meet with Attaché Djenbo and his team.
Alex was keenly aware that one of Attaché Djenbo’s tasks here was to attempt to persuade Shion to leave the Heron and accept the hospitality of the Diplomatic Corps. It was, after all, quite shocking that she should even be travelling aboard a common frigate, let alone working passage and being treated like a cadet on shipboard assignment.
‘I know that you are doing your best, you and all your ship’s company,’ the attaché said, ‘but...’
The list of ‘buts’ had gone on for some time, including the attaché’s shock at Candra Pattello’s insult to their first contact ambassador, Alex’s decision to allow her to pilot a fighter on a rescue operation, Alex’s decision to allow her to pilot a fighter at all, the shocking informality with which she was being treated by officers and crew, the inadvisability of allowing her to eat cookies and the hopeless lack of structure in their questioning about her homeworld. The word amateur had been employed at one point, to which Alex had held his hands up, freely admitting that his exodiplomacy training and experience in no way qualified him to be undertaking such important first-contact responsibilities.
If Attaché Djenbo was successful, therefore, Alex knew that he and his crew would have to say goodbye to Shion with good grace, handing her on to people who were far more qualified than they were both to care for her properly and to further the diplomatic relationship.
On the other hand, Alex felt in his gut that he and the Herons, however amateur and flawed their diplomatic handling might be, had been getting this right. Shion was happy with them, she was getting the real experience she wanted, and all of them were learning about one another in a far more natural, genuine way than the carefully structured interviews of the diplomatic approach.
The sequence of immediate-attention messages told their own story of how Attaché Djenbo was getting on with Shion. Alex knew, of course, that such messages were not of the utmost urgency - Attaché Djenbo could have called him directly at any time and asked him to step aside into somewhere private so that they could talk, if it really was that urgent. These were merely rated for immediate attention because any file carrying XD code went straight to the top of any priority list.
Alex couldn’t help grinning a little, as he read between the lines of the carefully phrased communiqués.
It started out so well. Attaché Djenbo reported that Ambassador Shionolethe had been escorted safely to the Shareholder Penthouse, where she had enjoyed refreshments provided by Mr North. Less than half an hour later, however, there was the first inkling of trouble, as Attaché Djenbo fired off the first of three communiqués relating to the news story over the alleged riot and mutiny aboard the Fourth’s ship. This, as he pointed out, was a serious breach of their security since spacers would certainly work out for themselves from that that the Fourth had been out to an X-base.
Some few minutes later, a further communiqué informed Alex that the attaché had decided to micro-leak a diffuser amongst the spacer community, to the effect that the Fourth had indeed been out to an X-base, but only to take them out routine supplies.
Alex had got to grips with diplomatic jargon by then, and understood that ‘micro-leak a diffuser’ meant spreading word-of-mouth amongst the spacers in the hope of preventing wilder flights of speculation.
Shortly after that, the diplomatic team had also found out the source of the leak. There was a stiff note from the attaché, informing Alex of this and pointing out, at length, his responsibilities in keeping Ambassador Shionolethe’s visit absolutely secret. He had also sent them a media handling advisory that made Alex do a double-take, having to read that one twice before he’d got to grips with it.
Then there’d been an issue over lunch, and something of a power tussle between the attaché and Davie North. Attaché Djenbo had prepared a meal for Shion that was intended to show her how very much more comfortable she would be if she accepted the Diplomatic Corps’ hospitality. It had been crafted at great expense by chefs creating dishes specifically designed to appeal to her, as well as being as near to perfectly nutritionally balanced for her biology as they could get.
Shion, however, had said that she would like to have the lunch that Marto was making for the Fourth’s reception lunch. It was clear from the communiqué, though it didn’t say so directly, that Davie had taken that in hand. While Attaché Djenbo had still been attempting to persuade Shion to try the meal specially prepared for her, Davie had sent some of his people down to the reception venue kitchens. Howe
ver they had managed it, they’d returned with laden trays. Attaché Djenbo was evidently not impressed with this, making a stern comment on the role of the ‘civilian goodwill ambassador’.
Attaché Djenbo had, however, won the dispute over Shion asking if she could go down into the leisure decks of the station. She wanted to see the Grand Atrium, she said, and go shopping. Attaché Djenbo had told her that just wasn’t possible right now, with security on such high status even though the demonstrations had been handled by then. Davie was not allowed down there himself – even though he owned the station, his father’s edict ruled, where his safety was concerned. Attaché Djenbo was, therefore, able to inform Alex with a faint trace of smugness that he had pointed out that if it was considered too dangerous for Davie, then Ambassador Shionolethe could not go down there either.
About a quarter of an hour after that, however, he reported that Ambassador Shionolethe had asked if she could go back to the ship. When told that it would not be convenient for the Heron to take her aboard right then, she had accepted that but said that in that case she would take a nap.
Alex frowned at that. He understood the attaché’s priority, here, in attempting to get Shion back into diplomatic hands, but telling her that it was not convenient for her to come back to the ship was, Alex felt, taking that too far. He could see that from Attaché Djenbo’s point of view this was a legitimate strategy, attempting to ease her out of any sense of dependency she might have acquired in her time aboard the Heron. At the same time, though, there was a strong sense on the frigate that Shion was one of their own, now, and that being the case she had a right to come back to the ship whenever she chose.
The fact that she’d gone to have a nap was telling in itself of how bored she was, restricted to the Shareholder Penthouse. She was probably more bored by the attaché than anything, Alex realised, with his slow pedantic manner and exaggerated deference.
XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) Page 26
