Captain Alladyce, at least, was doing his best to redress it. The SDF and other system authorities were getting increasingly irate by that point, as the Fourth was totally ignoring all the signals that they were sending them. It was Captain Alladyce who intervened, informing them that the Heron would not, very properly, respond to any signals until their salute had been returned. Several minutes later, the SDF capitulated. A sullen, weakest-possible flash of fire came from the defence arrays, finally acknowledging their arrival.
Alex, without any comment, gave the order for comms to resume with the system. They would be spending the next several hours at least fielding calls from irate people. Much of that would land on Buzz and the other senior officers. Not one of them would have changed places with Alex, though, as he got up from the command table. He, after all, was on his way to see Admiral Vickers in person.
Alex left Buzz dealing with the most urgent matter on their list, that of disembarking the passengers they’d brought in from the convoy. The authorities were already being just as obstructive as they could be over that. As was usual for any port, there was a space station which processed passengers through customs and quarantine. Alex had already asked ahead of their arrival whether the Fourth’s own security checks and medical certificates could be accepted as meeting port entry requirements, but the authorities had turned that down flat.
Novamas port clearance was notoriously slow even at the best of times. It was as if, having so few ships to process, all the authorities involved felt that they had to justify their funding by processing every ship as thoroughly as possible, taking hours to complete procedures that would be carried out in minutes anywhere else. Now, they were deliberately going just as slowly as they could, in protest at the mutinous behaviour of the freighters. They were even treating the incoming passengers as if they had been rescued out in deep space. This would mean that they’d all have to be interviewed as to the circumstances under which they’d arrived in port aboard the frigate, with additional health checks and rafts of paperwork before they’d be allowed to go on their way.
They weren’t any more enthusiastic about allowing Alex aboard the Gateway station. This was quite a new port station, less than twenty years old, but it was very small by system station standards. The Novamasians had bought it to celebrate the six hundredth anniversary of their having become a fully fledged League member world. Clearly, it wasn’t something they’d been all that excited about.
The station did, however, have a section that belonged to the Fleet, and it was here that the Port Admiral’s office was located. They had a groundside base, too, where Admiral Vickers also had quarters and an office, but the Novamasians had rather pointedly provided a grander apartment and office out here on the station, along with other facilities clearly provided in the hope of keeping the offworlders as much off the planet as possible.
Even getting onto the station was problematical. The Fleet did have their own dedicated airlocks and entry gates, but they were alongside the civilian ones. The only thing that separated the Fleet entry area from the reception concourse used for arriving civilians, in fact, was a distinctly low-security queue-control barrier. It was disconcertingly empty, the other side of the barrier. Alex had expected the usual mobs of demonstrators and journalists to be waiting for him there, but the concourse was deserted, but for some station staff and a number of security teams standing about looking purposeful.
The Novamasians maintained a high degree of control, too, in passing even Fleet personnel through their own security and quarantine check before they were allowed to move on to the entrance to the Fleet’s own part of the station, a reception and elevator area some twenty metres away.
Alex’s ID and medical certificates were scrutinised at length by quarantine before they’d let him pass. And he didn’t get more than a few metres, either, before the final security gate stopped him dead.
The way they reacted when he told them that he was armed was really quite astonishing. They surely, Alex thought, could not be unfamiliar with the concept of military personnel carrying small arms, and should be totally at ease with the routine procedure for that even at civilian spaceport entry gates. Alex certainly was. He told them that he was carrying a sidearm and produced the necessary authorisations, waiting, then, for them to tell him to put the gun into a security box for passing through scanners while he stepped through the scanner gate. No box, however, was forthcoming, as urgent calls were made to people higher up and even more security people appeared.
Alex did not take the gun from its pocket holster. Pulling out a weapon before those in authority had told you to do so could lead to potentially fatal misunderstandings, after all. So he just stood there and waited patiently until they found someone who knew what ought to be done, found a security box, and told him to put the gun into it. He was told to do so without putting his hand on or near the trigger, so handled it with his fingertips under the close, tense scrutiny of the security teams. It felt ludicrous, like being in a bad movie, but Alex maintained his stony composure.
Eventually, they let him through, giving him his gun back with a warning that they really did not like Fleet people going armed on their world. Even their own police were not routinely armed, they said, and that was something they were very proud of.
Alex made no response. Given the choice, he would prefer not to go routinely armed when out in public, too. Admiral Mackada had had to make that a direct order before he’d agree to it, and even then he’d appealed to the First Lord, hoping Dix Harangay would overrule Therik’s port admiral on that. Dix, however, had told Alex that Jen Mackada was absolutely right about this, Alex’s security-risk evaluation being what it was. He could either, Dix had confirmed, carry a sidearm himself, or would have to submit to being escorted everywhere he went in public by an armed bodyguard. Alex had accepted carrying the gun as the least humiliating option, and it was the smallest, lightest stun-gun Jen Mackada would let him get away with, too.
They made less fuss about it, fortunately, at the Fleet security gate, and Alex was passed through into the familiar world of Fleet premises. It didn’t matter where they were, on planets or stations, Fleet premises always had exactly the same feel about them; official blah decor, official pictures, even the same smell of disinfectant polish. A nervous petty officer escorted him, and within moments Alex was whisked up to the top floor of the Fleet’s wing of the station. Here, an even more nervous adjutant muttered a greeting and showed him straight into the Port Admiral’s office.
‘Skipper von Strada, sir,’ he said, and fled, almost running from the room.
Alex and Alford Vickers looked at one another as Alex snapped off the required salute and the admiral, with more sarcasm than courtesy, returned it.
Alford Vickers was sixty two years old. He had been fifty four when the newly appointed First Lord had pushed the Senate into passing new rules forbidding serving officers from having paid consultancies with intersystem corporations. At the time Alford Vickers had been intending to retire at the age of fifty six, having served a full forty years in the Fleet.
It had become apparent to him, though, that retiring just wasn’t a realistic option. Companies that had competed to have him on their staff as a consultant when he’d worked in the Supplies division of the Admiralty had turned cautious on him when he’d suggested that the time might be right for him to accept a suitable boardroom level offer. He did not, clearly, have the same market value as a retired admiral, and with all the fuss being made about corporate consultancies, the corporations were keen to distance themselves from any allegations of improper conduct, too. He could, at a push, get some job with a much smaller firm happy to have a retired admiral bringing kudos to the board. They would not, however, pay anything like what the corporations did, and would expect him to put in solid work.
Alford Vickers, therefore, had signed up for another ten years with the Fleet in order to qualify for the significantly increased pension he’d be entitled to after fifty
years service. This had not saved his marriage, as Alex was aware that the admiral’s wife had left him when he got the posting to Novamas. There was certainly more going on with that than a mere mercenary abandonment of him once he could no longer provide the high income country-club lifestyle they’d enjoyed. It was understandable, though, that such a series of humiliations had embittered Alford Vickers to the point where he lived in a state of constantly simmering rage.
Alex saw a man who looked physically and emotionally unhealthy. Clearly, neither the local high-fat diet nor the local climate agreed with the admiral, since he was both flabby and pasty. Equally clearly, he was in a state of high emotion, mottled colour on his face, hands actually trembling with the fury he was fighting to contain. His voice, when he spoke, was a bark like that of an angry sea-lion.
‘Finally!’ he said.
He had a lot more words to say after that. They came bursting out of him so fast that Alex would have struggled to get a word in edgeways even if he had been trying to. As it was, he simply complied with the admiral’s demands to show him his orders – the port admiral had the right to ask that, though he’d certainly already been provided with copies of those orders to the Fourth that he was entitled to see. He was just checking, as Alex understood, that the Fourth wasn’t acting on some orders he hadn’t had sight of yet. One of the documents Alex handed over to him was, indeed, a highly classified confirmation that the Fourth was under exodiplomacy orders, XD-317, requiring all Fleet personnel to provide Skipper von Strada with full cooperation while not requiring any detail of his mission.
‘Absolute nonsense!’ the admiral fulminated. ‘There’s never been any alien activity here unless you count a few ludicrous drunken reports from spacers with more imagination than sense. There are no more aliens here than there are expletive pirates!’
It was, Alex was discovering, a personal quirk of the admiral’s to pepper his angry utterances with the use of the word ‘expletive’, as if he was acting as his own personal bleep machine. Fleet officers were not allowed to swear while in uniform, of course, and the ‘expletive’ thing was as close as he could get to expressing what he really wanted to say.
Alex kept himself mildly amused over the next three quarters of an hour by keeping count of how many times the admiral used the word ‘expletive’. He was up to forty eight by the time Admiral Vickers started to run out of rant.
Alex just stood there – he certainly had not been invited to sit – remaining placidly at attention with the neutral gaze he’d learned in his first week of cadet training. It wasn’t that he switched off. Admiral Vickers would have been shocked, in fact, by how accurately Alex could have repeated exactly what he’d said and the tone he’d used to say it. It was simply that he listened to the ranting with the same kind of calm analytical attention as he had when Roby was sounding off at him at Tolmer’s Drift. He was not unaware of the very personal malevolence spitting through the attack, framed though it was as professional criticism. It just didn’t reach him personally.
Eventually, even Alford Vickers ran out of things he had to say about Alex’s decision to go to Tolmer’s Drift, his outrageous conduct in bringing the freighters here and encouraging, even leading their anti-authority defiance, the absolute stupidity of pandering to their belief in ghosts and jinxes, the stupidity of sending the Fourth here at all, the stupidity of the Fourth’s very existence as a unit, Admiral Vickers’ full and frank opinion of the Fourth and their operations, and the total idiocy of giving them expletive exodiplomacy orders. He had also, in passing, commented wrathfully on the extravagance with which the skipper had flung Fleet supplies about amongst the freighters, as if he was handing out expletive lollipops. He could not, Admiral Vickers warned, expect to indent for replacement supplies from the very limited stocks available at Novamas – if he wanted to restock his tech stores, the admiral told him, he could go and get them back from the freighters. He had also demanded that Alex hand over his gun, commenting on that being unnecessary and downright expletive offensive, coming armed to a meeting with a superior officer.
Alex handed the gun over without argument and resumed his tranquil, neutral-gaze standing there until at length the admiral began to run out of steam. Ranting at Alex was indeed very much like ranting at a brick wall, since you got no discernible response whatsoever. After more than three quarters of an hour of non-stop angry declaiming, too, the admiral was starting to get a sore throat.
‘Well?’ he barked, a little hoarsely so sounding even more like a sea-lion, now. ‘What have you got to say for yourself?’
Alex considered.
‘Your views,’ he said, ‘are duly noted, sir.’
Then, as the admiral drew breath to launch into yet more vitriolic opinion of the skipper’s disrespect, Alex gestured, quietly, putting one finger to his wristcom. ‘And are a matter of record.’
There was a moment. Time seemed to freeze, as Alex looked directly into the admiral’s eyes for the first time and Alford Vickers saw the cool command in Alex’s gaze. This was not, as he’d imagined, a bumptious young officer he could take down a peg or two. This was not even an arrogant young snot who’d stood there ignoring him. This was a man with rather more natural authority than Alford Vickers had, himself, and considerably more intelligence, too.
Crimson rose in the admiral’s already flushed face. Alex was not breaking any regulation by recording the meeting himself. All meetings in Fleet offices were routinely recorded anyway, and the only regulation Alex would have been breaking was if he released his own recording of that meeting to someone who did not have the proper clearance for it. It certainly wasn’t usual in the Fleet, though, for officers to make their own recordings of meetings. The only time that tended to happen was when officers felt the need for an additional record, anticipating some kind of trouble arising from a meeting.
It had just not occurred to Alford Vickers that Alex would do that. It did, however, occur to him then, very forcibly, that an audio recording of this meeting would not sound well if it was played back in the First Lord’s office. He could, he felt, justify each and every criticism and opinion he had given, point by point, but even he was aware that he had allowed his feelings to get the better of him and that it might, might just come across as more of a personal rant than a considered professional critique.
‘You could at least have had the courtesy to tell me that you were making a personal recording,’ he snapped.
Alex looked directly at him again.
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he said, with freezing courtesy. ‘I merely wished to save your office the trouble of providing a copy of the official recording for our log.’
Alford Vickers glared at him. Alex was perfectly entitled to request a copy of the recorded meeting and whatever minutes were produced from it. He was entitled to include them in his official operational log, too. Doing so, however, would mean that he was effectively reporting the incident to the First Lord. It would not be if the meeting was reviewed by Dix Harangay, but when.
‘Well just ask next time!’ the admiral snapped, rattled into trying to re-assert control in the only way he could think of at the time. ‘There is absolutely no need for you to be making sneaky recordings – I am not saying anything here that I would not say if the First Lord himself was in the room.’
That was certainly not true, but Alex didn’t challenge it.
‘Sir,’ he said, in a neutral tone, and then went on with the same lack of emotion, ‘Might I request, then, sir, a copy of the report you’ll be filing, regarding the incident of our salute not being returned?’
He spoke as if it was inconceivable that the admiral would not be treating that as such a serious matter that it merited investigation and formal report to the admiralty. There was no hint in his manner that he already knew that that order had come from Admiral Vickers himself.
Colour rose in the older man’s face again. It had seemed like something he could get away with at the time. The idea had come from
the SDF, first of all querying whether the Fourth was entitled to the same salute as the Fleet because of their irregular status, and grumbling, later, that they didn’t see why they should be. The Fourth had their own emblem alongside the Fleet one, and wore a different coloured uniform. It stood to reason, the colonel had said, that they shouldn’t be treated the same as real Fleet ships.
Alford Vickers knew differently, but in his rage at what Alex was doing he’d felt that he could justify at least a slight delay in responding to their salute. But Captain Alladyce had not been the slightest bit happy about going along with that. Heated words had been spoken, even, about unprofessional conduct and bringing the Fleet into disrepute. Even Skipper Bast had called, requesting written orders detailing precisely on what basis they were being told not to return the Fourth’s salute. It had been a mistake, and he’d known that even at the point where he told them to fire the expletive salute, then.
‘Hardly an incident,’ he said, glowering. ‘A slight delay – a minute or two at the most.’
‘Four minutes and eighty two seconds, sir,’ Alex informed him.
Alford Vickers winced inwardly. He had not realised, himself, how long the delay was going on. It was their fault, he fumed, Alladyce and Bast, distracting him with their infernal expletive insubordination. Such a delay would, indeed, require an official report being appended to the log entry recording it, explaining what had happened. And the news that the Novamasian squadron had failed to return the frigate’s salute for nearly five minutes would tear through the Fleet as a very hot piece of gossip indeed. There would be many heads shaken, breaths hissed, and dubious comment made about Old Knickers losing his grip. Even Old School officers would not be supportive, since whatever their own views of von Strada and the Fourth might be, they were wholly dedicated to the principles of upholding the honour and fine old traditions of Fleet service. He’d been like that himself, once, before he’d ended up at Novamas.
XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) Page 59
