Mission Zero (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘It’s a pity we can’t paint the suits black,’ he observed, after an exercise in which the snatch team had overcome such resistance as the crew had been able to put up against them by throwing foam balls and shouting ‘bang!’.

  ‘We could polish them up,’ Buzz Burroughs suggested thoughtfully. Having considered for a moment, the skipper nodded agreement.

  ‘Good idea,’ he approved. Then, seeing Mako’s incredulous expression, he gave the inspector a little smile. ‘Skipper Moffat painted his hullwalker suits black,’ he explained, ‘to confuse the other ship. We don’t have any black paint on the ship, otherwise I’d do the same. We’re all hoping that it won’t come to boarding operations but if it does, anything which gives us even a momentary edge in surprising, disconcerting and discouraging any opposition is valid and justified, Mr Ireson.’

  ‘Ah,’ Mako said, and made no further comment, though he couldn’t help looking at Buzz Burroughs.

  Everyone seemed to be taking it entirely for granted that if it did come to boarding ops, Mr Burroughs was absolutely the right man to be leading them in that. Mako seemed to be the only one wondering whether the Exec was really up to it. Had he been asked, he would have had to say that he’d feel it to be more appropriate, really, for the young skipper to be the one leading such a boarding party.

  He understood now that that was not possible. If Alex von Strada left his ship during operations, he would lose his command and very probably his commission as well. Mako had learned enough about Fleet culture to recognise that if the skipper did supersede Buzz Burroughs’s right and duty to lead such a boarding party, Buzz Burroughs would resign his commission immediately. His position, as even Mako understood now, would be intolerable, clearly not having the confidence of his skipper to carry out what were, after all, the duties of an exec.

  It did not even seem to be an issue for anyone else, though, with no hint of anyone even suggesting that Buzz Burroughs was too old to be leading such an operation. If the skipper had any concerns at all about sending his friend and crew off on such perilous operations, he certainly wasn’t showing it.

  In fact, Alex was not stressed. He had known when he accepted command that this would be the price of it, having to make decisions and give orders that put other people into dangerous situations while he remained in relative safety on the ship. He would not have been human if he had not felt any concern about that in a situation where his boarding party might be facing heavy odds, and he wouldn’t have been much of a skipper either to be making such a decision without care.

  He was not tormenting himself with ‘what ifs’, however, merely waiting to see what happened. If a ship did arrive, he would make a decision based on the best information that he had at the time. Until then, he could only prepare for as many contingencies as they could think of, be patient, and keep his crew occupied so that morale would stay high.

  In that, in fact, his biggest concern was how Mako himself was holding up, something that would have mortified Mako had he been aware of it. But he was of course a civilian, without either the training or the experience to cope with this kind of situation. With very little to do on the ship he had far too much time on his hands, time he spent worrying about what might happen.

  The crew did their best to distract him. They taught him to play triplink and were always ready to chat to him on the mess deck. They whiled away many an hour telling him tales of ghosts, space monsters and alien encounters. Mako didn’t believe any of it but he was glad to have something else to think about as the days dragged on with nothing to do but wait.

  Late one evening, unable to sleep, Mako came to the mess deck looking for a mug of chocomalt and some company. Hali Burdon was there working on some paperwork which she set aside readily to have a drink and a chat with him. Before long, the conversation had turned to the skipper, with Hali explaining that she’d known him since before he’d got the Minnow command.

  ‘I was watch CPO on the Apollo, on the Therik station,’ she told Mako. ‘That was the last posting the skipper had before he got the Minnow. He asked me if I’d like to go with him as deck CPO and when I said yes, he called in some favours to make it happen. He’s the best skipper I’ve ever worked with. Brilliant, of course, and tremendously efficient, runs a tight ship and won’t settle for anything less than excellence. But more than that, you know, there is always this sense with him that he’d go to the wall for any one of us, step in and take a bullet for us if need be. Well, just look at the lengths he went to for Jace.’ She smiled and Mako nodded agreement.

  Alex von Strada’s loyalty to his crew was fierce. Mako, indeed, had come to the opinion that it was that loyalty to them which was key in getting the best out of his maverick crew. That, and his willingness to allow rather more individuality than was normally tolerated in the Fleet.

  ‘I don’t think many other Fleet skippers would have put their careers on the line for a crewman like that,’ he observed.

  ‘None,’ said Hali, with a note of certainty, and then grimaced a little as she sipped her coffee. ‘It’s just so unfair. Nobody deserves what happened to him, but it just seems doubly awful somehow because he is such a great guy.’

  Mako nodded again. It was obvious that they were talking about the death of the skipper’s daughter. All Mako knew about that was that she’d been three years old and killed in a vehicle accident because she hadn’t been in her safety seat.

  ‘He doesn’t talk about it.’ Mako commented. The two of them looked at one another. Mako was trying to convey that he did not want to ask Hali anything that would be inappropriate either in terms of violating the skipper’s right to privacy or gossiping with a member of the crew about their CO. At the same time, though, he was making it apparent that he was open to being told about it if Hali was willing. For her part, Hali snugged her elbows onto the table and leaned forward a little, her manner making it clear that this was to be a private conversation between them and respected as such.

  ‘Nobody talks about it much,’ she confided. ‘Not on the ship, anyway. But these are things that everybody knows here, so I’m not breaking any trust in sharing them with you. The thing is, you see, what happened was this.

  ‘The skipper was happily married. It was an agency marriage. Spacers tend to go for those,’ she explained, as Mako looked a little surprised. ‘It’s theoretically possible for a spacer to meet someone on shoreleave and form a lasting relationship, but in practice those relationships don’t usually last long or end well. Agency marriages can seem a little clinical, I suppose, hooking you up with someone compatible, but they can work very well. I mean, look at Mr Burroughs. He’s in a group marriage based on Flancer, and that’s a very happy marriage. He celebrated his thirty fifth anniversary with them not long back. He doesn’t get to see them very often, but they write and get together when they can, and that’s as good as it gets in spacer marriages, really.

  ‘Anyway, the skipper was being fired off all over the place on short assignments. I guess at some point he felt he was missing out on relationships so he went to an agency and they hooked him up with a woman called Elouise Sayle. They seemed very happy, you know? Not that the skipper’s ever been inclined to talk about his private life, but there’s no such thing as privacy in the Fleet and it was pretty well known that they were happy. She was a lawyer but her real interests were social, you know, being somebody on the social scene. Marrying a Fleet officer, obviously destined to rocket through the ranks, gave her entry to the levels of society she wanted to get into, financial security and status, and on his side of it, he got a home and an affectionate wife to come home to.

  ‘Like I said,’ she shrugged, ‘a bit clinical, but it seemed to be working for them. They both wanted a family and had only been married a year or so when they had Etta. The year after that, the skipper was made – that’s what we call it in the Fleet when an officer is given their first command. For a while there, he had everything, you know? Loving wife, a kid he adored, brilliant career. In
eight months, he’d taken the Minnow from being a hundred and sixty eighth ranking in Fleet performance tables into being twenty seventh.

  ‘Then…’ she shook her head a little, her face clouding as she remembered. ‘We were on our way back from the Pagolis. We’d been out on patrol testing and working up the new thrusters the skipper had got for us. It had all gone well and we knew that our next assessment would see us top of our class. Everyone was happy, looking forward to some shoreleave. We were still a couple of weeks out when we crossed paths with a liner, the Empress of Canelon, and they signalled a request to send a welfare officer aboard.’

  Seeing that that meant nothing to the civilian, she gave him a wry look and explained.

  ‘That’s something liners do if they’re carrying mail about a bereavement.’ She told him. ‘It’s felt to be better for news of that kind to be given to you by a real person than just to be handed it in a letter. I dunno myself. I mean, obviously it’s a terrible shock to get mail from home and find out that somebody’s died, but I’m not sure its any better to do the welfare officer thing. I mean, as soon as they signal that request, it’s obvious that they’ve got bad news for someone on the ship. Everyone on the ship knows that within seconds, and the whole ship goes very quiet. Everyone is praying that it isn’t going to be them and at the same time feeling guilty at wishing it on someone else.

  ‘The way it works is that an officer comes over from the liner. They see the skipper first and then someone comes to get the person they want to speak to and the news is broken to them in the skipper’s cabin. So we all waited with our nerves all on edge while the officer went to talk to the skipper and then Mr Burroughs went in. They were in there for a long time and we were all, like, walking on our eyebrows, waiting. Then Mr Burroughs came out.’

  She shook her head again, remembering. ‘He told us that the skipper had suffered a bereavement, that his little girl had been killed in an accident. He’d relieved him of command on compassionate grounds, and asked us all to show our respect by just carrying on quietly with our work. The skipper didn’t even come out of his cabin all the way back to Chartsey. He barely ate anything. The medic we had back then was in his cabin two or three times a day, checking on him. He was taken off the ship as soon as we were back in port. He was like a blind, stricken ghost, just awful to see.

  ‘We found out then what had happened. His wife had been taking Etta to nursery. It was less than a klick away so she was driving at ground level. She couldn’t have been doing more than 20 kph. Probably less. But there was an incident in the skylane just above them. A speeding car caused an inexperienced driver to swerve and lose control. He tried to come down to an emergency landing and hit the von Strada car on the side. It flipped and rolled twice before it hit a safety barrier.

  ‘His wife was completely unhurt. She was wearing her seat harness of course and got out without a mark on her. Etta would have too if she’d been in her safety seat. But she was riding unrestrained. They raced her to hospital but there was never any hope. The impact had thrown her around inside the car like a rag doll. Catastrophic brain injuries, they said. No hope of survival. But that, you see, was not the worst of it.’

  Mako’s eyes widened. He couldn’t imagine how it could get any worse than that.

  ‘The thing was,’ Hali told him, ‘that by the time we got back there, Etta had been dead a month. An inquest had already ruled that it was death by misadventure and the LPS had decided that it was not in the public interest to prosecute her mother for not having had her in the safety seat. Her body had been released to her mother and they’d already had the funeral. Her mother had chosen her final resting place, a children’s cinerarium. I went there myself to leave flowers and I have to say it gave me the horrors, all the teddy bears and holos of dead kids. But can you imagine? She hadn’t even waited for the skipper to get back, just held the funeral without him.’

  Mako tried to be understanding about that. ‘People deal with grief in different ways,’ he commented.

  ‘Yes, but she knew he’d be back,’ Hali argued. ‘And to go ahead and hold the funeral without him took that away from him, too, not even giving him any say in it and depriving him of that opportunity to say goodbye. I thought it was heartless, myself, even before I found out the real story of the accident.

  ‘The skipper wouldn’t even see her. He filed for divorce as soon as we got into port, and took out injunctions preventing her from even trying to contact him. He went to the police, too, and the LPS. It turned out, you see, that he’d found out in our last shoreleave that she was letting Etta ride in the car without putting her in her safety seat. Etta used to play her up over it, see, and when the skipper went to put her in her seat, she said that Mummy let her ride in the front. They had a big row about it and he made her promise, absolutely swear on her honour that she would never do that again but always make sure Etta was in her seat.

  ‘She didn’t keep that promise, obviously. If she had, Etta would have had nothing worse than a fright. The skipper tried to get the police and LPS to prosecute her for manslaughter. They’d thought it was just a tragic accident, you see, that Etta’s harness had somehow not been fastened correctly and her mother had made the decision to carry on to the nursery rather than to try to stop in traffic when she realised that Etta was out of her seat. That’s a different thing entirely to her habitually letting Etta ride unrestrained, knowing the dangers. They wouldn’t reopen the inquest or prosecute her, though. Prosecuting the mother when a kid has died in an accident is always sensitive and they said they didn’t feel they had sufficient evidence of deliberate recklessness on her part for it to be in the public interest to prosecute her. I think they felt that it was just a father’s rage, too, lashing out in his grief and needing someone to blame.

  ‘He did go to court and got custody of Etta’s remains. His wife didn’t oppose that. Then he hired a yacht and headed out into space with his daughter’s ashes. He was gone for three weeks. There were people who were worried that he might just not come back, that he might just stay out there with her. I wasn’t one of them. I knew he’d come back. I knew he just needed to be able to say goodbye to her properly, to give her a spacer funeral and take some time by himself to get his head together. And sure enough, he came back and reported straight back for duty. They gave him an evaluation to make sure he was okay, which he is, obviously.

  ‘We did lose our medic at that time, which I’ll mention because it’s a sensitive subject with the skipper, okay? He found out after we got into port that the medic we had back then, Doc Allantyne, had been sedating him without his knowledge. The skipper asked for him to be removed from the ship and the Admiralty agreed because the essential trust between a skipper and the ship’s medic had obviously broken down.

  ‘In fact, it all got very hairy there for a bit. Has anyone mentioned the reason that the ship was laid up for a year before the skipper got the command?’

  ‘He said it was laid up waiting for him, as a technical challenge.’ Mako recalled a conversation with Alex von Strada in which he’d explained that the reason he’d been given this ship was that the silverfish class corvettes were ageing, slow and underperforming relative to more modern vessels. It had been part of his tagged and flagged programme to look into ways to improve their performance and extend their effective operational life.

  ‘True,’ Hali confirmed. ‘But that’s not the whole story. The background to this is, see, that people started to think that the Minnow was jinxed. The last skipper but one had held the command for fourteen years and had a very solidly established set of officers and crew. Some would say too solidly established. It isn’t a good idea for a ship’s company to become too set in their ways. Anyway, Skipper Barnes had to retire on health grounds as he was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Normally in those circumstances, a ship’s company will be dispersed, but Skipper Barnes asked particularly that his crew be kept together and the Admiralty decided to honour his request. So they sent in a tagged an
d flagged skipper on his first command – Skipper Vasquez, that was. He came in, as we say in the Fleet, like God the Father, wanting to change everything overnight.’ She grimaced and shook her head.

  ‘You can imagine the reaction, the resistance, the constant, ‘Skipper Barnes always did it this way.’ Things got worse when he tried transferring some officers and crew out and bringing his own choice of people in. Matters came to a head with a blazing row on the command deck in which two officers were supported by the majority of the crew in refusing to obey Skipper Vasquez’s order to remove a plaque that Skipper Barnes had put on the airlock wall. The only reason the word ‘mutiny’ wasn’t used at the court martials was that the Fleet doesn’t like to admit that mutiny is even a possibility on our ships. It was the end of Skipper Vasquez, though. His own insensitivity in command style was identified as one of the factors causing the incident and he was dropped from the tagged and flagged programme, which is effectively the end of any officer’s career. He resigned from the Fleet not long after.

  ‘So, you see, the Minnow had had one skipper die and the next one crash and burn with a humiliating mutiny. Even officers who’d swear they’re not the least bit superstitious wouldn’t want to be the third skipper in that sequence. The Admiralty would never admit it, but it’s common knowledge that that was one of the reasons they made the decision not just to disperse the crew but to lay the ship up for a year till Skipper von Strada would be ready for a command. They had it laid up with the airlocks open for a year and a day, which is believed to let the jinx go out of a ship.

  ‘Everyone thought that it had worked, too, with the huge success he was making of it. Then that happened with his little girl and you can imagine what people thought. I know that the First Lord offered him another command, was actually going to terminate Minnow and lay the ship into the reserve until another ship was built to replace it. The skipper wouldn’t hear of it, though. He said it was an insult to his grief for anyone to suggest that his daughter’s death had been down to any jinx on the ship. When he came back aboard, he told us all that the only way we were going to put such ludicrous and offensive rumours to rest would be to make this ship the finest in the Fleet. I wouldn’t like to speak for everyone on the ship, but I think it’s fair to say that even those who do believe the ship was jinxed feel that the skipper has faced it down and beaten it.