Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4)

by S J MacDonald

  As it was, he not only stepped aside with very good grace, but helped out cheerfully in the only way he was allowed to. He was actually working as Mako Ireson’s assistant, making notes and ticking checklists as the LPA inspector supervised the disassembling of the brig. Mako himself had no idea about the technical work involved. He was merely seeing all the brig’s facilities packed up and put into storage, starting with the toiletries in the showers and moving on to the bunks, lockers and showers themselves. Before long the techs were removing doors, stripping out lights and security systems. Within hours, the place was a shell, doorless empty cabins surrounding an echoing space. They would take down the walls and begin the rather longer process of refitting it to Davie’s specifications the following day, but for today, as Davie said, they were just de-brigging it.

  Mako duly signed confirmation that he was happy with that, relinquishing all the LPA’s rights over the space that had been theirs. There would be a great deal of argument and even more paperwork about that when they got back to port, but Mako was more than happy to leave that problem till then.

  Alex met with Professor Penarth later that day. There was some surprise amongst the crew when he came aboard; Rangi had been talking very enthusiastically about his genius, the number of doctorates he held, his prestige in both academic and medical communities, the surgeries he’d pioneered and his many publications. The one thing he hadn’t thought to mention was that Simon was only twenty seven years old.

  He was, of course, the product of a Gifted Child Institute, identified as having genius IQ by the age of two and spending the rest of his childhood in the care of a GCI. Like Kate Naos and any other Gifted Child, he had been attending university by the time he was ten. He looked rather like a student, even now, coming aboard for his meeting with the captain in baggy kneed jeans and a sloppy sweatshirt with a cartoon dog motif. His hair was shaggy, too, obviously not cut for months and even then in no more sophisticated style than ‘lop it off so it’s not in my eyes.’ He was carrying a cake container, which aroused some interest.

  ‘Hey, Simon,’ Davie came up the ladderway as the medic was being escorted onto the command deck, hijacking the introductions as he presented him to Alex. ‘Simon Penarth, Captain von Strada.’

  ‘Evenin’’,’ Simon said, giving Alex an interested, evaluating look, and with that, an equally casual, ‘Hey, Davie,’ in response to his employer.

  ‘Professor Penarth,’ Alex greeted him courteously, and got up. It was apparent from his manner that Davie was assuming that he would be part of this meeting. ‘Please – come through to the daycabin,’ Alex invited, and with a cool look at Davie, added an obvious dismissal, ‘Thank you, Mr North.’

  ‘Hah!’ Davie took no offence, but answered, startlingly, stabbing an accusing finger at the captain, ‘Just don’t get any ideas about headhunting him.’ Then he looked at the medic and spoke sternly to him, too. ‘And don’t you forget who you work for.’

  ‘On your airbike,’ said Simon, grinning as he evidently recognised this as a joke. ‘You pay me, you don’t own me.’

  ‘Well,’ Davie persisted, ‘at least if he makes you an offer, promise you’ll give me the chance to better it.’

  ‘Get stuffed,’ said the League’s most highly qualified neurosurgeon. ‘I will consider any offers I like, whenever I like, without reference to you or anybody else.’ His tone was good humoured, even amused, but it was clear that he meant it.

  Davie grinned at Alex.

  ‘I can’t imagine why people think he’s a difficult employee, can you?’

  Alex grinned too, understanding that Davie had triggered that exchange deliberately, making a point. Alex’s first concern, here, as Davie knew very well, would be to ensure that Simon really was genuinely volunteering to come with them and not agreeing to do so merely because his employer told him to or because he’d been offered stonking amounts of cash. That, of course, was why Alex wanted to talk to the medic without Davie present.

  He still did so, naturally, and was careful to ensure that Simon understood not just the risks he would be taking in coming with them now, but the long term consequences there might be if it came out that he had worked with them.

  ‘We had to admit to having Kate Naos aboard, at Karadon,’ he explained. ‘We had a kids’ event aboard and one of them recognised her. You can’t ask kids to keep secrets like that, it’s not fair, so we did have to make a statement to the media confirming that she was with us, working on a classified research project. She took some stick for it at the time, with the media at Karadon, but she walked right into it when she got back to Chartsey.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Simon told him. ‘Katie and I have been mates for years – hothouse kids usually are, you know? So yes, I know, they did the Maths Kid thing at her again, and she had some hassle from nutters.’

  Kate had been targeted by student activists, outraged by her association with the infamous Fourth. They had staged a student demo, occupying the astrophysics building where she worked, protesting against faculty involvement with a military unit which had such a record for ‘evil human rights abuse’.

  ‘She’s told me she’s joining the Fleet, too,’ Simon went on. ‘They’ve accepted her for the next Academy entry, you know.’

  ‘I do know, yes,’ Alex said. He had given Kate a letter of recommendation; not that she’d needed it, given her academic standing. He hadn’t been surprised to get a letter from her confirming that the Fleet had given her an immediate acceptance. They had offered to waive her through first year training on the grounds of her existing qualifications, but Kate had declined. As she’d said to Alex herself, she had a lot to learn about the interpersonal skills of becoming an officer. The biggest criticism levelled at GCI’s was the very narrow lives the kids led, nothing like a normal childhood and often very poor social skills as a result.

  ‘I didn’t headhunt her, you know,’ Alex assured Simon. ‘It wouldn’t have occurred to me to do so, and I wouldn’t, anyway – it would be just totally out of order, that, unethical, to be pressuring a passenger. And she’s not, obviously, coming to serve with us, she’ll be transferred to the Second as soon as she graduates. But you can rest assured, professor, you certainly won’t come under any pressure here to join the Fleet yourself.’

  Simon grinned. ‘I’d like to see you try,’ he observed. ‘Military, not my thing. But I’m happy to sign the passenger thing, civilian consultant, no problem with that. The only thing I might have a problem with is your nix-frat rule – no girlfriends,’ he clarified. ‘Months without a girlfriend, that’s harsh. How do you guys cope with that?’

  Alex laughed. ‘I’m probably not the best person to ask,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t date, anyway. But you’ll find that spacers generally are very self-controlled in that regard. There are exceptions, obviously, and it’s quite common for married people to serve on freighters together, but on the whole it’s understood, deeply rooted in spacer culture, that you don’t get romantically involved with shipmates. There is nothing more destructive to the camaraderie aboard a ship than firing up those kinds of feelings – dating, breaking up, being stuck on a ship with your ex... trust me on this, the intensifying effect of being on a tiny ship out in deep space makes for domestics that nobody would want to live with. So we keep it cool aboard ship, keep it to shipmates and friends. Of course, even in the Fleet everyone knows when members of the crew have a thing for each other, and whatever they may get up to on shoreleave is entirely their affair. But that is discreet, okay, off the ship, and we do ask passengers to comply with that while they are with us. If that really is going to be an issue for you, though...’

  ‘Oh, I’ll cope,’ said Simon. ‘It’ll be an interesting experience, being celibate for a while.’ He grinned. ‘One of the up-sides to being a genius,’ he observed, ‘is that it is a total babe-magnet. I’ve been married a few times, too, but it didn’t work out. I mean, so many gorgeous, admiring women – who could resist? But I will, I promise,’ he put
his hand on his heart, ‘behave like a monk while I’m here.’ He was clearly taking it for granted that Alex would allow him to stay. ‘Just two conditions there, on my side – one, call me Simon, two, let me bake.’ He opened the container he’d brought, and offered it to Alex, encouragingly. ‘Go on, try one – they’re fondant fancies.’

  They looked pretty; lemon fondant drizzled with white icing, but no fancier than the kinds of dehydrate cake they already had in the hold.

  ‘Oh, I don’t need to...’ Alex demurred, feeling that it would be rather discourteous to be testing the very highly qualified medic on his prowess as a cake-maker.

  ‘Go on!’ Simon insisted, and since it was clear that it mattered to him, Alex took a fancy, gave a polite smile and bit into it.

  His expression changed at once, and Simon crowed with triumph.

  ‘Oh, that’s good!’ Alex exclaimed, once he’d swallowed. ‘That’s amazing!’ He surveyed the really very ordinary looking cake, which tasted so sensational. ‘What’s in that?’

  ‘Real vanilla,’ Simon told him, proudly. ‘I have to use dehydrates for main ingredients, of course, but I use organic for flavourings.’

  Alex didn’t splutter, but he did give Simon an expressive look.

  ‘Fine by me, but you should tell people before you give them organic,’ he pointed out. Some people would throw up, told they’d eaten something that had grown in dirt, in open air, that insects had walked on. ‘Spacers are usually more open to it, adventurous, but you shouldn’t assume.’

  ‘Okay, fine, I’ll put an organics warning on the packaging,’ Simon conceded. ‘Though I generally find that if you tell people they’re eating organic, many won’t try it at all. Which is dumb – where do they think the nutrients used in vats come from?’

  Alex grinned – he too had noticed a bizarre assumption amongst groundsiders, particularly on Chartsey, that nutrients used for food production were made ‘in factories’, with no understanding of the fact that the raw products those factories were processing were crops. Agricultural worlds might have millions of kilometres of crops under cultivation, whole continents golden with ripening wheat or the vivid green of prota-beans. There were no farms on Chartsey, though, only a continuous influx of nutrient-filled tankers, keeping the capital world fed.

  ‘Well, dumb or not, you have to respect people’s right to decide for themselves whether to eat organic or not,’ he said. ‘Though I don’t think you’ll have many refusing, here. And yes, Simon, you may certainly bake.’

  He held out his hand and Simon shook it, looking pleased.

  ‘Thanks, Alex,’ he said.

  Alex didn’t react – he actually didn’t mind at all if passengers called him by his first name. Some of them did, for a while, as if feeling the need to assert their civilian status. Before long, though, they’d slip into shipboard ways and slide into calling him ‘skipper’.

  Simon, though, remained rock solid in his own identity as a civilian, first naming everyone and continuing to dress in his sloppy groundsider gear. He was cheerful and friendly with everyone, equally at home in the Second’s lab, the wardroom and the mess decks. He was quick to take the tests he needed to, as well, to enable him to work aboard the ship both as a chef and as an artificer tech. It was in both capacities that he supervised the installation of the fittings that would create the exo-suite galley. It was tiny, only just room in there for him to work, but Simon expressed himself as delighted with it, calling it his own little kingdom.

  And he was, to Alex’s relief, not the least temperamental. Even when Alex called a combat drill ten minutes after Simon had put cakes in the oven there was no complaint from him, still less the hysteria that would certainly have erupted from the likes of Marto and his Army. Simon merely dealt with it capably as the oven and other unnecessary tech shut down and the galley went into freefall. It was members of the crew who made dismayed noises, realising that the cakes would be ruined. One taste of the fondant fancies that were his first offering had got Simon quite a fan club on the Heron – by agreement, he would only bake if Alex or one of the command team asked him to, making that a treat for the crew. Within a week, the news that he was baking would get a happy buzz going through the ship.

  He was, however, far more than just a talented chef. He was soon a familiar face in the artificer workshop, machining parts and equipment Davie wanted for the exosuite. And he was, obviously, also a medic. Rangi Tekawa, with superhuman effort, managed not to follow him around like an eager puppy asking him a thousand questions a day. Instead, he managed to do the mature, professional thing and not try to monopolise his hero’s time. It was obvious to everyone, though, that Simon was his hero. That didn’t take a knock, even on Simon’s frankly expressed opinion of spiritual healing.

  ‘It’s okay as welfare provision,’ he said, with lordly tolerance, ‘no issue with that – as I’ve said many times in the literature, anything that makes the patient feel more comfortable and confident in their treatment is valid medical technique. But let’s not have any cack about ‘natural healing’, Rangi. Patients are sick because nature has gone wrong. They get better because we fix them, scientifically. Science rules.’

  Rangi, devoutly spiritual himself, just laughed. If anything, he seemed pleased by Simon’s blunt, dismissive attitude. Simon, it seemed, was well known in medical circles for his forthright views, often expressed in letters which the recipients tended to splutter with fury about even years later. One of the issues he’d had with the faculty at Chartsey SU, indeed, was a request from the Dean that he tone down such unsolicited advice to fellow medics.

  ‘But what’s the point of being Professor of Neurosurgery at Chartsey Med if you can’t light a rocket under some dumbo consultant?’ was Simon’s entirely typical response.

  The relationship with senior faculty had clearly been somewhat strained, even before the situation with the hotel job had brought things to breaking point. Simon had persuaded one of Chartsey’s leading hotels to allow him to bake in their kitchens, after telling them that he could do better than the delicacies they were offering as part of their famous afternoon tea. Having proved that he could, they’d come to an arrangement by which he could turn up there whenever he liked and bake chef’s specials. Since they had rules about amateurs working in their kitchens, though, they employed him as a visiting chef. When the Dean had objected to this as a faculty member taking a second job without the consent of the university, Simon had said he’d donate his earnings from the hotel to whatever charity the Dean wanted. The Dean, however, had not been appeased. Things had been said about appropriate professional image, of the loss of respect amongst students for a professor who had a weekend job baking fairy cakes, of the way that reflected embarrassingly on the faculty as a whole, verging on the unforgivable sin of bringing the university into disrepute.

  Simon had resigned, after that, with a letter so blistering that the Dean had refused to enter it into faculty meeting minutes, merely recording that Professor Penarth’s resignation had been accepted due to his desire to explore wider avenues. The rest of the faculty had voted him ‘Emeritus’ status, though, something that was usually only conferred when a professor retired after long and distinguished service, so it was apparent that the Dean had not had things all his own way.

  Alex was not surprised, as he got to know Simon better, that Davie had offered him a job. Quite apart from his obvious talents, Davie and Simon had a lot in common. Simon didn’t have Davie’s multicognitive intelligence, of course, but he was the nearest thing humanity came to that without genetic enhancement. He, too, had grown up in a strange, isolated world, surrounded by teams of people monitoring his every waking moment. Most importantly, he was a free spirit, unconstrained by other people’s small-minded views of what he should be. Davie would admire that, Alex knew. And he would like it, too, that Simon was not impressed either by his genetic enhancements or his wealth. It had not been any offer of money that had overcome all the universities and companies
scrabbling to make Simon the best offer they could get on the table. It had been, quite simply, the offer to let him do whatever he wanted. The one proviso Davie had made was that Simon would not be his doctor – he had enough medics on his case, he said, more than enough, so Simon could treat anyone else as patients if he liked, but must leave him be.

  So, Simon did his own thing, and was very soon so much at home on the Heron that it felt as if he had been with them all along. Their other passengers were just as well integrated, helping out in whatever ways they could and merging comfortably with the crew. The one tension was the Devast team’s doubt over the Fourth’s ability to fix the Ignite missile.

  The Devast team had that doubt clear on their faces when they met with Alex and the Ordnance team in the missile room for the inspection and sign-off of the upgraded missile. The only thing Micky Efalto had actually done had been to replace the nano-gyro, a regulating device on the chronometer. It was a remarkably low tech bit of gear, no more than a nano-metronome which oscillated around a thousand times a second. Exactly how many times it oscillated was one of the controls adjusted by engineers to calibrate superlight cores for local wave-space conditions.

  ‘But it just can’t be that simple,’ said Jate, the Devast team’s superlight propulsion engineer. She must have said ‘it can’t be that simple’ at least fifty times over the last week, but still evidently felt that it needed saying again. They were standing around the Ignite, two metres of boxy octagonal casing with a plain grey finish. ‘The gyro we used is the diamond standard for missile design.’

  ‘Ours is better,’ Micky said, with the air of someone prepared to have this conversation as many times as it took for the poor fools to understand it. ‘Morry’s gyro self-calibrates for all but the most extreme conditions, using a gee-balance to stabilise...’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Efalto,’ Alex interposed, knowing that once he got started on that lecture, Leading Star Efalto would just keep talking till somebody stopped him.