XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  Alex had had a rather longer conversation with Captain Alladyce, now the acting Port Admiral.

  Alex had been told that Alford Vickers had ‘stepped down from his post on medical grounds’. Buzz had told him that, in his first rapid briefing to bring Alex up to speed on what had been happening while he was sitting in that cell.

  A lot had been happening, and it would be some time before Alex knew about all of it. He did, however, understand the bare bones of it. Buzz had acted as soon as he was informed that Alex had been relieved of command and was under arrest on the station. He did not wait for Alex to tell him whether or not he felt that this was an emergency that merited the opening of the sealed file. With Alex removed from command, Buzz became the acting skipper, with Martine Fishe stepping up in turn to become the exec. The two of them had agreed at once that this constituted grounds to open that file, and they’d done so, signing as skipper and exec to break the confidentiality seal.

  Once Buzz saw the letter of accreditation and realised that it was far beyond his own experience to deal with something like that, he’d called Ambassador Snowden at once. She had, by then, already been informed that Alex was under arrest, and was attempting to mediate both by sending her legal attaché to his aid and trying to talk to Admiral Vickers herself. He, however, was refusing to take her call, that refusal offensive and unprofessional in itself.

  Even when she had eventually got through to him, he would not accept what she told him. He could not, would not, believe that the letters of accreditation were genuine. If they were, as he pointed out, he should have received a copy of them from the presidential office, too. This, he claimed, was just something the Fourth had knocked up themselves, faked up to get their skipper out of prison. Everyone knew they did that kind of thing, hacking computers and running covert intelligence ops, and he wouldn’t put this past them, not for one minute.

  He had flatly refused to believe it even when Tari Snowden told him that there was a code embedded at the bottom of the letter which matched a highly classified one in the Embassy. This was a procedure implemented after an extremely clever, cheeky conman had presented himself to a remote world as a presidential envoy and enjoyed a free VIP holiday while ripping them off for more than a million dollars.

  This, Admiral Vickers had insisted, was also a con. If he’d accepted the validation, after all, that would not just mean accepting that Alex von Strada had diplomatic immunity and could not be arrested, but that his current appointment gave him seniority even over the port admiral himself. If it were true, Admiral Vickers would have to address him either as ‘your Excellency’ or ‘sir’ and comply with his orders as if they came from the League President himself. He could not believe for one moment that Alex had had that kind of power and hadn’t used it till now, even with the hard time and reprimands that the admiral had been giving him. It had to be a fake, he swore, it just expletive had to be.

  Seeing that even her own validation of the letter would not convince him, Tari had turned to Captain Alladyce. She had put it on record, clear and strong, that she did not consider Admiral Vickers was demonstrating the degree of professional judgement necessary for him to carry out his duties.

  Callan Alladyce had acted on that. Any loyalty he might have felt to Admiral Vickers had been eroded over the last two weeks as the port admiral subjected him to insult heaped upon cringe-making embarrassment. The salute incident alone, as Call Alladyce commented to Alex, was sufficient grounds for Admiral Vickers to resign his post. The petty malevolence with which he’d refused to allow the Fourth to indenture for stores had been horribly embarrassing, too, as had that farce about ‘overhauling’ the fuel store. There had been many heated discussions between the admiral and the captain in recent days. Captain Alladyce had already filed his own full report into the salute incident, putting the blame for that squarely where it belonged. He had put it on record, too, that he believed the admiral was in breach of orders, as he was demonstrably not giving the Fourth the assistance and support he had been ordered to.

  This, now, actually relieving Alex of command and arresting him on charges that any fool could see would not stand up to first enquiry, was indeed such a monumental error of judgement that there were only two possible explanations. Either Admiral Vickers had allowed his hatred of Alex von Strada to cloud his judgement to the point where he was committing acts of gross unprofessionalism, or he was suffering from some kind of breakdown.

  Captain Alladyce, supported by his own exec and Skipper Jeline Bast as the required third command-rank officer, had relieved the port admiral of his post on grounds of clear incompetence to carry out his duties, along with a requirement for him to undergo full psychiatric evaluation. That had, for sure, been a difficult and painful meeting. The fact that the admiral had become so overwrought that Call Alladyce had called in a medic to evaluate him spoke for itself. Admiral Vickers was now in the Fleet’s sickbay at their base on Novamas itself, where he’d remain for three days doing psych assessments.

  Regardless of the outcome of those assessments, however, Admiral Vickers would not be resuming his post. It would be months before due process was complete, but one way or another, Alford Vickers would be leaving the Fleet.

  In the meantime, until a replacement came out, Call Alladyce was acting port admiral. Jeline Bast had stepped up to become senior skipper, commanding the Braveheart, and her own exec was acting skipper on the Albatross.

  They would all cope, Alex knew. Tari Snowden and President Tanaya, indeed, made no secret of the fact that they considered they’d get on a lot better with the calm, team-player Captain Alladyce in post than they had with the irascible Admiral Vickers.

  Alex had no sympathy for the admiral, himself. If it was true that he was suffering from some kind of stress-induced breakdown, and that his own presence and behaviour had contributed to that, of course, then Alex would feel some regret. Without pre-empting the full and proper medical evaluation by qualified psychs, though, he was of the opinion, himself, that this was no mental breakdown. Just a professional one, as a man so embittered and blinded by hatred had allowed that to overwhelm his professional judgement.

  What Alex didn’t understand, though, was how a very obviously ludicrous allegation against him had ended up such a powerful weapon in Alford Vickers’ hands. He and Buzz were looking, then, at the document that the port admiral had used to relieve Alex of command and put him under arrest. Alex, still struggling to come to terms with the fact that he was currently holding one of the most important posts in the League, was finding it hard to make sense of this, too.

  ‘I just don’t get it,’ he repeated, and looked at Buzz with an obvious hope that his exec would have more of a clue about it than he did himself.

  ‘Don’t you?’ Buzz looked kindly at him. Alex was holding it together, just as strong as he always was under pressure. Buzz, though, could see how deeply shaken he was by all this, behind the facade of professionalism. ‘Look at the dates, dear boy,’ he told him. ‘And the addressee list.’

  Alex looked at the dates. There were three of them, each component part of the document separately dated. The oldest was Tass Curlow’s statement, dated from within a couple of days of her coming aboard the ship at Karadon. It was a bizarre statement. Reading it, Alex was reminded vividly of how Tass had been in her first few days aboard the frigate, so convinced that officers were bullying and even brutalising the crew. She had, Alex remembered, dashed around the ship quite frequently, trying to catch them out by finding what was really going on. The crew had found that highly entertaining. It had been quite a game, too, for a while, to see how much rubbish they could get Tass to swallow before she realised they were having her on. Buzz had put a stop to that, pointing out that it really wasn’t fair, or courteous, to treat a colleague from the Second that way. Tass herself had, of course, eventually come to recognise that the crew were not being bullied and had been winding her up with stories of being starved, kept at work for three or four days and nig
hts straight and shut up in coffin-sized holes between decks if they dared to complain. Even at the time, Alex thought, she’d realised that the ‘buried alive’ thing was a gag, as the crew trying to convince her of it had given the game away by cracking up laughing at her wide-eyed horror.

  Here it was, though, along with many other equally fantastic allegations which were, themselves, entirely undermining of the credibility of the main allegation. She had, she said, personally witnessed Crewman Tonos Trevaga showing such fear of Skipper von Strada that he’d hidden in an airlock to avoid him. She had been greatly concerned and distressed, she said, to see Skipper von Strada force him out of there and speak to him so harshly that the crewman had been in tears. Senior Chief Petty Officer Hali Burdon, when Tass had raised this concern with her, had told her that the skipper had just been ‘having a word’, and had added that Trevaga had too much mouth for his own good.

  This, Alex understood, was a comment Hali might well have made, referring to the media story that was going out at the time. Tass herself would have realised, before long, that the skipper had in fact displayed remarkable forbearance, given that the crewman had got so carried away story-telling in a spacer bar that he’d said that Alex had thumped him round the head.

  By the time she realised that, though, they would already have left Karadon, and whoever Tass had given this report to must already have mailed it on to somebody at Chartsey.

  The second date, on Candra Pattello’s statement, was more than a month later, evidently a statement obtained at Chartsey in support of Tass Curlow’s allegation. In it, Candra Pattello was surprisingly focussed. There was no ranting about the way she had been treated, and no other allegations made at all beyond her statement that she had witnessed ‘numerous incidents’ of crew, specifically Crewman Tonos Trevaga, displaying fear of Shipmaster von Strada,. She had been told by many people, including Senior Chief Petty Officer Hali Burdon, that Trevaga was a bullock with them for rehab and that he was ‘mouthy’. There had been references to an incident before Professor Pattello herself had joined the ship, in which Crewman Trevaga was said to have spoken impertinently to the skipper and had been ‘given a slap’. When she had expressed concern about this, however, an officer, specifically Sub-lt Arie McKenna, had intervened, telling her that it was just minor horseplay amongst the crew themselves. Feeling herself to be in a vulnerable position at the time, Professor Pattello had not felt it to be advisable to take that matter further.

  The third, most recently dated part of the document was the covering letter, the briefest of paragraphs asking that the matter in the enclosed statements be thoroughly investigated as, ‘we feel certain that the Fourth is covering up an incident of physical abuse in which Shipmaster von Strada struck Crewman Trevaga.’

  The addressee – the only addressee, as Alex noticed when Buzz drew his attention to it – was Port Admiral Vickers.

  As the significance of that began to dawn on Alex, Buzz gave him an approving look.

  ‘Now you’re getting it,’ he said.

  This was a set up. Someone – and Alex was prepared to bet that he knew who – had advised Candra Pattello that firing off her complaints about the Fourth to the huge list of people she’d copied her other allegations to just would not even get to them. Alex could practically hear Third Lord Admiral Cerdan Jennar advising her on this, telling her that her complaints would end up, eventually, being investigated by someone in the First Lord’s office, and she shouldn’t waste her time expecting any kind of impartial findings there. Nor should she waste her time trying to get the Senate Sub-Committee to overrule the First Lord and order a full independent investigation into the professor’s allegations. She had been fired by Devast Industries, the Second Irregulars wasn’t supporting her, and her complaints would indeed be dismissed, discredited as the angry ranting of a disgruntled, fired employee.

  If she really wanted to get to the Fourth, Cerdan Jennar or someone of similar ilk would have told her, then her best bet was to file a separate incident report, mailed only to Admiral Vickers, on some allegation so serious that it would merit him removing von Strada from command immediately. Allegations that he’d physically assaulted a member of his crew would do that, providing they were ‘sufficient grounds’, meaning either some kind of hard evidence or at least two independent witness statements.

  And there it was, Candra Pattello and Tass Curlow’s statements, constituting ‘sufficient grounds’ at least superficially, since they were both highly credible witnesses at least on paper. Professor Pattello was a high status academic. Tass Curlow was a respected post-graduate student already working for the Second Irregulars with the highest possible security classification – classification which Alex himself, ironically enough, had given her. Both had been working aboard the Heron for weeks, separately. Candra Pattello’s statement even said, specifically, that she had not met Ms Curlow at the time, at Karadon, had not even been aware of her presence or identity, and had not conferred with her in any way over the writing of her own statement.

  That was, indeed, sufficient grounds for a port admiral to have to ask questions, even if they’d been Alex’s best mate. That should, though, have been handled sensitively, with a preliminary enquiry asking for copies of monitoring footage from the Heron’s logs, discreetly conducted interviews, and a considered decision arrived at as to whether the allegations were credible and if so, whether they justified Alex being removed from command or whether they should be referred back to the Admiralty under the special operations rules for complaints made about the Fourth.

  Someone had known, though, that sending those allegations to Admiral Vickers, and only to Admiral Vickers, would put a weapon in his hands that he would not hesitate to use against von Strada, doing as much damage with it as he could. Alex would have put a thousand dollars on there having been a personal letter from Cerdan Jennar to his old friend Alford Vickers on the same courier that brought that document. It would not have said anything so incriminating as ‘Go to my son, get him!’ because Cerdan Jennar was far too clever for that. Alex could sense his presence in the background, though, the puppet-master pulling strings.

  ‘I am such a fool,’ Alex said, and looked more weary, with that, than he ever did from merely not having slept for two or three days. ‘Everyone was trying to tell me, but I just wouldn’t listen.’ He looked again at the statement made by Tass Curlow, and felt a twinge of pain at how badly he’d misjudged that, in making the decision to allow her aboard. ‘Harry Alington was right.’

  ‘Alex!’ Buzz was quite shocked by this betrayal of just how depressed Alex was feeling right now. ‘The words ‘Harry Alington’ and ‘was right’ do not belong in the same sentence,’ he scolded, and told the young skipper, pretty firmly, ‘You need a cookie.’

  He held out the plate, and Alex managed a grin, though holding up a hand to refuse. Buzz had ordered tea and cookies for them both, an order Alex had changed at once to coffee. He’d drunk some of the coffee but hadn’t touched the cookies. He knew he’d be fine, later, but for right now, he felt sick.

  ‘No, seriously, come on,’ Buzz insisted. ‘You barely had breakfast, you’ve had a shock and you’re dealing with a lot, you need to boost your blood sugar levels. So,’ he waggled the plate, ‘cookie, or medical check. Your choice.’

  Alex took a cookie, and as Buzz looked at him in a way that said don’t just hold it, eat it, took a bite and forced himself to crunch and swallow.

  ‘Good boy,’ said Buzz, making Alex grin again, and feel really comforted, too. He heaved a sigh, and finished the rest of the cookie under Buzz’s fatherly eye. Buzz just smiled, giving him a moment to collect his thoughts.

  ‘I’ve made some really bad decisions though, Buzz,’ Alex told him, regretfully. ‘And giving clearance to Tass Curlow was obviously one of them.’ He looked at the statement with a little grimace. ‘I thought better of her than that, I really did.’

  ‘And rightly so, I’m sure,’ Buzz said, and as Alex gave him an
enquiring look, ‘Two things strike me, dear boy. Well, three. First, this statement was very clearly made during her first couple of days with us when these were, indeed, the views we know she held. She undoubtedly passed this to a friend on the station, and on balance of probability I’d say that that was someone from the Liberty League contingent there, yes?’

  Alex nodded, but made no comment, just looking at him.

  ‘She isn’t breaching security with this,’ Buzz pointed out. ‘It may breach the spirit of the confidentiality agreement but it falls within the limits of legally allowable disclosure in personal correspondence.

  ‘Secondly, I note that there are no signatures on the covering letter part of this; the only signatures are on the statements themselves. The covering letter implies that it is from the two of them, jointly, with that use of ‘we’, but if you look at the sender ID it is only that of Candra Pattello. Thirdly, dear boy, just consider for a moment the way that covering paragraph is written, and ask yourself how likely it would be that Tass Curlow, by the time she left us, would be to make such basic civilian errors as referring to you as ‘Shipmaster’, Hali as ‘Senior Chief Petty Officer’ and Tonno as ‘Crewman Trevaga’.’

  Alex did consider, and saw his point at once. Way before the point at which she’d left them, Tass had embraced shipboard culture with such fervour that she’d used more Fleet jargon even than the crew did themselves. She would certainly have known that correct usage, even in a formal document, was ‘Skipper’, ‘CPO’ and ‘A/S’. Candra Pattello, on the other hand, had persistently addressed ratings as ‘Crewman’ throughout her entire stay, and was indeed just the kind of groundhog who’d confuse job titles with ranks.