XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  The real fun, however, came later. Alex had made the invitation on his own account, but had readily agreed to both he and the professor being guests in the wardroom instead. It was here that Professor Garaghty met Shion for the first time. He had no idea who she was, but gazed at her in obvious astonishment even as they were introduced.

  ‘Please, forgive me,’ he said, recovering himself, as Shion gave him an enquiring look. ‘It’s just that... may I ask where you’re from?’

  ‘Altarb,’ said Shion, since that was what it said on her ID.

  ‘Really?’ The professor looked surprised again. ‘Quite a different genome. But I daresay if your family tree was traced back, there’d be some...’ he broke off to look at her, peering at her face. ‘You know, it really is quite remarkable,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose that anyone’s ever told you, but you are the living image of a figure painted on an Altorian pot – fourth period, dated to around eight thousand years ago. It’s said to represent a goddess, though no other image of her appears in contemporary art and her genome is entirely unlike that of the Altori. Honestly, the resemblance is remarkable, even down to the narrow septum and elongated fingers. It’s as if she just stepped out of the image and is standing right in front of me.’ He laughed, and Shion did, too.

  ‘I’ve seen that picture,’ she told him, startling him again. ‘Someone showed me, once,’ she explained. The ‘someone’ had been the diplomats at the Amali base, going through what records they had of her people, with her. ‘She’s got her heart where her stomach ought to be, yes?’

  ‘Yes – there are conflicting theories as to why,’ the professor enthused, delighted at finding someone who knew what he was talking about. ‘I personally believe that showing her internal organs in that stylized way, and the heart being where it is, are symbolic of her role as a fertility goddess.’ He blinked around at them as several of the younger officers were adopting desperate interest in the ceiling or their fingernails, turning red with the effort of not laughing. Even as he gave them a puzzled look, though, Arie gave a strangled little choking noise, and that set Shion off, too.

  All of them just laughed, or grinned tolerantly, as she went off into one of her bursts of uncontrollable hilarity.

  ‘What have I said?’ the professor wondered, provoking fresh gales of glee around the table.

  ‘Fertility goddess!’ Shion whooped, and off they all went again, though Buzz did try to restore some order.

  ‘I do apologise, Jayforth,’ he said, though he was grinning a little, himself. ‘It’s just a silly joke, and up to Shion, really, whether she wants to explain it or not.’

  He meant that, too. They’d discussed whether to tell the professor her true identity – he certainly had the necessary clearance, and was working very closely with them, too, so there was some feeling that it would be right to tell him. On the other hand, they were also aware that introducing an ancient-history anthropologist to a visitor from an almost unknown world who had extensive knowledge of ancient peoples would inevitably lead to Shion spending the rest of the evening being bombarded with questions. It had, therefore, been left to her whether she felt comfortable with telling the professor who she was.

  ‘Ohhh,’ she dried her eyes and managed to get her laughter pretty much under control, though her eyes were still bright as she looked at him, ‘Promise me,’ she said, ‘please, that you won’t pass out, scream, or have a heart attack.’ She looked across at Alex without waiting for a reply, ‘It’s okay to go straight in at level ten?’

  Alex nodded. There could be few people around who rated higher on the ‘already fully exo-aware’ scale they’d come up with for the big picture briefing.

  ‘All right, then.’ Shion grinned at the professor. ‘Please don’t faint,’ she asked again, as if it was something he would have any control over, anyway. ‘But the reason that I look like that woman on that pot is that I am from the same genome, the same family, even. And she wasn’t, I promise you, any kind of ...’ a giggle escaped her, but she got it back under control, ‘fertility goddess. She was a memory, drawn as a copy perhaps from some much older image, from a time when her people – my people – visited Altor. And the reason they took such interest in her physiology and drew it so was simply because it was interesting, different from their own.’ She looked at him with dark, amused eyes. ‘Just as mine is different from yours.’ She took his hand, just as she had once taken Chantal Jeol’s, and put it lightly against the bottom of her ribs. ‘See?’

  He didn’t faint. He did scream a bit, but only with pure joy, as he felt the slow triple-thump of her heart under his hand, and knew. And as he laughed with delight, then, they all laughed again too.

  There was a lot more laughter, too, before they eventually saw him off the ship at past two in the morning. He hadn’t had all his questions answered, of course – as he said himself, he could have stayed there for a year doing nothing more than ask Shion questions, and still not get even a fraction into all the things he wanted to ask her. Shion didn’t mind chatting to him. He was, as she said, clever and funny, and had helped them a lot, so she didn’t mind giving him a few hours of her time. She was glad, though, that it wouldn’t be any longer.

  ‘Being an oracle of ancient knowledge is okay to visit,’ she observed, ‘but you wouldn’t want to live there.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Alex was summoned to the port admiral’s office shortly after seven the following morning. If the admiral thought that Alex would find it annoying to have to attend such a meeting at that hour when he was known to have been entertaining the professor till nearly half past two in the morning, though, he was wrong. Alex had already been up when the summons was sent, and responded at once, pausing only to change into groundside uniform.

  This did not prevent the admiral from greeting him with a sour, ‘You took your time.’ Alex didn’t respond, just gave the required salute and adopted the quiet stance, neutral gaze which he could keep up for as many hours as the admiral cared to rant.

  On this occasion, though, Admiral Vickers got straight to the point. He could not accuse Alex of having undermined him with the Novamasians or schemed to have him thrown off his posting. To do so without any evidence, on record, would be professional misconduct in itself.

  Instead, the admiral deployed the only means he’d been able to come up with to get his revenge.

  ‘I have a personnel transfer order, here,’ he barked. ‘I’m exchanging six of your superfluous officers with officers on station.’

  The word was ‘supernumerary’, officers carried in addition to the normal complement for a frigate, not ‘superfluous.’ Alex knew, however, that the admiral was being deliberately provocative with that, hoping to goad Alex into correcting him so that he could reprimand him for impertinence. He was obviously hoping to shock him, too, with that blunt announcement. Alex, however, gave no reaction.

  A port admiral could, in fact, exchange officers serving aboard ships which came into port with others who were, as he said, ‘on station’, assigned to duties at the port office or base but on the understanding that they were available for shipboard posting as and when the need might arise. Really good, deserving officers could end up spending years kicking their heels in port, that way. When it came to remote and unpopular postings like Novamas, however, the Fleet was not usually inclined to send their brightest and best. Alex already knew what kind of officers were on station here. He’d met some of them at social events arranged for him and his officers aboard the Braveheart and the Albatross. Some of them were decent and hard working officers, but a bit dim, people who’d cope with routine duties well enough but would struggle to cope with anything out of the ordinary. Others had been sent here, quietly, to get rid of them. Up until a couple of years ago, it had been considered fine to dump totally useless idiots into public relations offices, feeling that they could do little harm going around to do talks for schools and the like. That custom had been reviewed very rapidly after the disastrous mish
andling of the Fourth’s press release by the now infamous Sub-lt Hollis. Now, the Fleet sent its brainless wonders to the back of beyond.

  Alex had no doubt at all that the admiral would have carefully picked out the worst officers he had on station, proposing to exchange them for the high-flying officers on the exceptional ability secondment scheme.

  Whether he had the right to do that was debatable. It was a scheme set up particularly for the Fourth, with the First Lord’s signature on it, and the officers concerned were all on special secondment, most of them from other ships whose skippers had made it very clear they did expect them back. He was probably hoping, Alex thought, to provoke an unwise, angry response from him.

  ‘Sir.’ Alex took out a pocket comp and stood holding it, clearly expecting the admiral to pass the relevant paperwork to him. Admiral Vickers did so, with a vicious stab of his finger at his own desk controls. Alex took his time, studying the document as it appeared on his comp. It was, indeed, an official personnel transfer order, naming six officers the admiral was removing from their posts aboard the Heron, effective immediately, and six replacements who would report aboard that afternoon.

  ‘I regret, sir,’ Alex said, his tone entirely emotionless, ‘that I am obliged to decline the order, on special operations imperative, as these officers are not competent to carry out the duties for which ...’

  He got no further. Admiral Vickers was on his feet, purple faced, overriding him with a raging outburst.

  Alex just stood quietly, letting it wash over him. He would have done exactly the same, even if Shion’s name hadn’t been one of those on the list. As it was, he had no choice but to refuse the order, and genuinely could not have told the port admiral why, even if he’d wanted to.

  Eventually – and it was a long and noisy time till ‘eventually’ – Admiral Vickers calmed down enough to demand, again, what von Strada expletive thought gave him the expletive right to turn down an expletive order from an expletive flag officer, and this time actually gave him time to answer.

  Alex quoted, calmly, the exact Fleet regulations that gave him the right and indeed the responsibility to do so, as any skipper had the right and duty to refuse any officer or crew being posted to their ship they felt to be incompetent to carry out their duties.

  After several more minutes of the Admiral telling him how outrageously offensive this was to the fine, hard working, highly qualified and experienced officers that he was posting to the Heron, Admiral Vickers demanded on what possible grounds von Strada could claim they were incompetent.

  ‘On the grounds, sir, that all the officers named on this list have received extensive special operations training,’ Alex said, ‘all of them with vital roles to play in the XD-317 orders. With no disrespect to the abilities, qualifications, experience or competence of the officers you propose, it would simply not be possible to provide them with the same level of operational training. The need to do so would impact so heavily on our ability to carry out our mission that we would need to postpone it for at least three months. My orders carry the highest possible priority. I cannot, therefore, accept these officers as competent to carry out the duties for which they would be posted.’

  ‘XD-317!’ The admiral snarled it like an obscenity. ‘And you, I suppose, cannot produce any evidence for this so-called special operations training because it’s...’ his tone became heavily sarcastic, ‘secret!’

  Alex considered for a moment, then accessed his comp with a courteous, ‘Excuse me a moment, sir.’ Then, having compiled a report, he passed it to the admiral’s desk. It detailed, without giving any information as to the nature of the training, special operations briefings, training and drills for each of the officers the admiral had named. These were obviously logged, official training sessions, recorded as such, routinely, in the ship’s activity log. Alex had dated that right back to the day they’d left Therik – justified, he felt, since everything from that first briefing about Shion had contributed to their learning about exodiplomacy and working up to be ready for this mission. Since the officers had all spent on average between ten and fifteen hours a week on special ops training and they’d been out for thirty six weeks, now, it was indeed immediately apparent that they could not possibly provide the same training for newly posted officers in anything under three months.

  Admiral Vickers was beaten, and knew it. The one thing he’d thought he’d be able to get von Strada with, and von Strada had just slapped it right back in his face. And oh, so respectfully, too, not a look or a word or even a tone of voice that could be used to pull him up for any misconduct.

  ‘Get out,’ the admiral said, his voice so harsh it barely sounded human. ‘Get out.’

  Alex saluted, turned, and walked himself out of the office without another word. He showed no emotion at all, even then, till he got back aboard his ship. Buzz was there to welcome him at the airlock, giving him a questioning look. Alex gave him a speaking look and a phew! in return, and Buzz looked concerned.

  He joined Alex in his daycabin, after the skipper had had a few minutes to shower and change, and Alex told him what had happened.

  ‘I don’t like this, Alex,’ Buzz said. ‘I don’t like it at all. He was actually trying to sabotage us with that, taking our officers and giving us the worst he could dredge up to replace them. This has gone far beyond just being annoying, now, this is operational sabotage.’

  ‘I don’t think it is,’ Alex said, having come to that conclusion while having his shower. ‘I really don’t think he has a clue, you know, no idea how important our mission really is. He certainly doesn’t think that our supernumerary officers are important. That’s very clear, and not just from him constantly referring to them as ‘superfluous’ Subs, either. I mean, to him, they’re Subs, the lowest form of life in the wardroom. I don’t suppose he can even entertain the concept of an ‘important Sub’, for him, it’s a contradiction in terms. So yes, of course, completely out of order, trying to switch our Subs out with some he undoubtedly feels are more at our level anyway, the dregs of Fleet service, but not, I think, a deliberate attempt to sabotage our operations. And anyway, I’ve dealt with it.’

  Buzz looked dubious. ‘Well, I suppose if it comes to it, you’ve always got The Ace,’ he said, referring to the sealed tape that the First Lord had given Alex, to be used only if Admiral Vickers was making it impossible for them to continue with their mission. Then, as Alex looked a little surprised, Buzz grinned. ‘You didn’t even think about it, did you?’

  ‘Well, no,’ Alex admitted. ‘It’s for emergencies only, and I don’t regard him trying to switch our Subs out as an emergency. I handled it, properly, with regulation and procedure.’

  ‘Well, I for one will be glad to get away from here,’ Buzz admitted. ‘The planet may not be cursed any more, but there’s certainly an evil eye glaring at us from that station.’

  Alex cracked up laughing, giving his exec a look of affectionate amusement.

  ‘Four more days,’ he told him. They were waiting for a courier to come in from Canelon. It would bring any last-minute information that might have been obtained from the Solarans, and the final ‘go’ for them to head out for the border. ‘Four more days, Buzz.’ And with that he spread out his hands, laughing, confident. ‘What’s he going to do? Shoot me?’

  He found out, four days later.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Things were busy and happy, aboard the Heron. They were making preparations for departure, with strip-down launch prep going on throughout the ship. The lively, holiday mood was not dampened even by the ever-dwindling store of coffee. The Herons had not stinted their guests, with that – they would have been ashamed to do so, and in any case had decided to rise above the coffee disaster and just accept it philosophically.

  It helped, in that, that Shiny Sugorne had come through for them in obtaining other treats. It had taken considerable effort, ingenuity and downright bribery, but he had managed to persuade a food vat company to produce flour and
sugar to given specifications, and had then found a chef prepared to bake cakes and cookies for them. That, in fact, had been the hardest part, since there was no hotel or restaurant culture on Novamas and very few chefs trained to work with raw ingredients. The few who could do it were not inclined to spend days producing what one described as ‘foreign muck’ and another, disgustedly, as ‘baby food’. Shiny had persisted, though, and had managed to get a food factory to handle the packaging for them, too, freeze-drying and fresh-packing the cookies and cakes with all the necessary documentation. Crates of them had been coming aboard that morning, to the crew’s delight. They’d come up with a new nickname for the Housekeeping Sub – not many officers would have thought that ‘Sugar’ was much of an improvement on ‘Shiny’, really, but he was happy with it. He’d done well, and not just the crew but the skipper had said so, with a commendation and handshake that meant more to the Sub than a medal.

  Alex was happy too, going about the ship, doing a check here and there, supervising and just enjoying the buzz that they always got when they were prepping for launch.

  He went back to the command deck, though, when he was told that the courier had arrived. It had flashed over mail for them even before he got there – both the official mail files and a stack of personal letters. There were exclamations of pleasure from all over the ship, too, as many of the crew had mail from home or from friends. Alex saw that he had mail from his parents, but one glance into the letter saw the first line Both well with which they always reassured him, so he left that to read later and turned at once to the official stack.

  First and foremost in that was the expected message from Dix Harangay, which read simply, ‘XD-317 active. Best of luck.’