‘Okay,’ said Simon, in a tone that made it clear he would hold him to that. ‘And you’ll do it, then – open up the lounge and make use of it yourself.’ It wasn’t a question, and as Alex went to give an automatic response, Simon flung up a hand. ‘Don’t,’ he commanded, ‘try to fob me off with protocols or budgeting. This is well within your authority as captain to decide. I’m telling you that it is essential for the long term wellbeing of your crew and therefore the performance of your ship, so just do it, don’t dither about.’
‘I will make,’ Alex said, ‘a considered decision. Put your concerns, and your recommendation, in writing, officially, for the log. I will then have a cost-benefit analysis carried out, along with an Internal Affairs review to establish that such a proposal falls within regulation and policy. Then I will make the decision, properly, on a considered and fully informed basis.’
‘And how long is that going to take?’ Simon demanded, with some dismay, clearly having had some experience of university authorities fobbing him off with protracted bureaucratic process.
‘That depends on how long it takes you to get your report in,’ Alex answered. ‘If you can get that to me by breakfast, I’ll be able to give you a decision before lunch. Okay?’
‘Oh-kay!’ Simon agreed, breaking into a grin of relief. ‘I thought you meant weeks. Sorry. Just – I’m used to having to bulldoze faculty and hospital management off their big fat bums. You have to be pushy with them to get anything done. But I’ve got the thing in writing for you, sure – thought you might ask for that,’ he said, complacently, and passed a file from his wristcom to Alex’s inbox, clicking off the stopwatch as he did so. ‘Two minutes eighty seven.’ He gave skipper a bright smile. ‘Shall I buzz off, now? Or would this be a good time for a chat?’
Alex stared at him for a moment and then laughed, helplessly. He was wide awake, no chance now of going back to bed.
‘A chat?’ He queried.
‘Well, counselling, really,’ Simon said, ‘but people respond better when you call it a chat.’
Alex’s eyebrows shot up. ‘And you consider that I am in need of counselling?’
‘See? Instant defensiveness,’ Simon observed. ‘So much better if it’s defined as a chat, off the record, just two guys talking about stuff over a coffee.’
Alex shook his head. ‘You are...’ he started, but couldn’t find the words, at least not ones that senior officers were supposed to use. ‘I just know I am going to regret this,’ he said, resignedly.
Simon, recognising this as an agreement to hear what he had to say, gave a little crow of victory.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘So, please, bear with me, don’t punch me in the face, at least until you’ve heard me out.’
‘I would never punch you, in the face or otherwise,’ Alex said, rather on his dignity.
‘Yes, well, people say that,’ said Simon, and left that hanging, with a rueful grin.
Alex cracked into laughter again. He just couldn’t help it. Simon had jack-hammered through all his usual defences. The very fact that he’d accepted Simon sitting here in his sleeping quarters cut through both professional protocols and his Novaterran heritage of reserve in public and formal situations.
‘No punching,’ he promised. Then, as a thought occurred that wiped the amusement off his face in a moment, he went on, guardedly, ‘Though I won’t, I tell you now, talk about my daughter, and I don’t want you talking about that either.’
‘Understood,’ Simon assured him, which Alex reflected afterwards was not at all the same thing as ‘okay, then, I won’t.’ ‘I daresay you’ve had way too many people giving you their opinions, huh, and their advice. Friends, no doubt, trying to set you up with dates, that kind of thing.’
Alex nodded, with a little grimace as recent memories flared.
He had gone to dinner at his friend’s house on Therik, having been assured that it would just be his friend and his wife, there. Inevitably, his friend had ‘surprised’ him by introducing another friend who had ‘dropped in unexpectedly’. She was twenty five, an engineering officer on a Red Line ship. She was intelligent, attractive, amusing, everything Alex might have wished for in a date.
Alex had left early, and had left alone. Quite apart from the very real security issues involved in anyone who dated, him, he recognised that he had emotional trust issues, carrying so much baggage from his divorce that he would bring major trust and intimacy issues to any future relationship.
He picked up his coffee, sipped, and looked back at Simon. And with that, he knew, just knew, that Simon had understood everything about how he felt, just from that quick grimace and the way he’d reached for his coffee. Simon was looking sympathetic, but amused, too.
‘Showing no understanding of you at all,’ Simon observed. ‘You’re absolutely fine as you are.’
He was evidently sincere, and Alex looked surprised. He was more used to medics talking about him in terms of emotional dysfunction and the grieving process. None of them had ever said, ‘you’re fine as you are.’
Simon laughed.
‘I know. Most medics don’t get you, either – most medics are pretty dim bulbs anyway, they don’t see what you’re like on the ship and of course you never open up to them, so they can only diagnose from assumptions. And Rangi, well, he’s a good kid and a decent surgeon, but he’s got his own preconceptions, with that spiritual healing riff, just can’t get past seeing you as an eagle-spirit with a broken wing.’ He spoke with tolerant scorn.
‘In reality, you are coping as well as anyone could,’ he told the captain. ‘Grief is not an overwhelming or unhealthy part of your emotional life, and your primary reason for not wanting to talk about it, these days, is because other people’s pity and patronising advice is just so infuriating. But relax, Alex, you won’t get any special voice or ‘the talk’ on closure and putting your life back together from me. Your life is together, I get that. And I don’t subscribe, either, to the mythology about you. A lot of people believe that you ‘threw yourself into your work’ after Etta was killed, that your command became the only thing that mattered to you and that that’s why you ended up founding the Fourth. There may be some element of truth to that emotionally – most myths have a grain of truth somewhere, after all – but me, I check facts.
‘The fact is that you have always prioritised your work. People talk about you becoming ‘driven’ after Etta’s death, but all the evidence I’ve seen is that you always have been, that that is a natural, normal characteristic of who you are. Fact is, Alex, you were back on duty within days of Etta being born, and happy in a posting that frequently took your ship out on patrol for weeks at a time. I know that you loved Etta very much, she was your world, groundside, and much in your thoughts out on patrol, too, for sure. But you are a spacer, Alex, and spacers really are a breed apart, psychologically, you have to be. It needs a particular kind of person to live and work out here – brave, of course, adventurous, all that, but also, fundamentally, someone who is prepared to head off into space leaving family and home, able to compartmentalise ‘family and home’ as ‘part of my life when I’m in port’. You couldn’t function as a spacer any other way. And I’m not criticising, here, honestly, I’m not. I’m just pointing out that this myth that you only became this work-focussed and driven because of Etta’s death is just that, a myth. You had the rehab and the R&D thing going on from before she was even born, didn’t you?’
‘Well, yes,’ Alex agreed. He’d looked very guarded as Simon was talking about his daughter, but was ready enough to discuss professional issues. ‘Though that just happened, really, it wasn’t planned. You have to meet certain requirements on the tagged and flagged programme, see, and amongst them are postings which involve dealing with underachieving crew, and a technical challenge. When it came time for me to have my own command, it was felt that I’d already met the requirement for motivating underachieving crew, so I was given the Minnow as a technical challenge, looking at ways to upgrade s
hips of that class to keep them competitive with more modern vessels. Only, it had been laid up in reserve for a year, un-crewed, and as word got around that I’d got the command and would be putting a crew together, a lot of other skippers sent me underachieving crew on special request for transfer. There were so many, in fact, that it was obvious I wouldn’t be able to handle that as a regular command, so it was agreed that I could use microsteps and rewards, with a rehab aspect to the command, too.’
‘Yes, that’s the authorised version,’ Simon observed. ‘But come off it, Alex. You had a choice. There had to have been a moment, somewhere in that process, where someone in authority said, ‘It’s unfair to expect you to do this,’ and you said, ‘It’s okay, I want to, bring it on.’’
He had him bang to rights on that, as Alex admitted with a wry look and a sip of his coffee. First Lord Dix Harangay had used exactly those words, indeed, and Alex’s answer, though more formal, had been, essentially, just that.
‘Well, you know,’ he said. ‘I’ve always had strong views myself about the reason bullocks become bullocks. I mean, these are by definition very high potential people who join the Fleet full of optimism, ambition and enthusiasm, and then within a few years or even months are kicking off, miserable, frustrated, insubordinate and causing problems. It seems entirely obvious to me that that is the Fleet’s fault for not giving them the opportunities they need to succeed. And just, please, do not even get me started on the absolute idiocy of imposing quotas on the numbers of particular qualifications a ship is allowed. I mean, just take pilots. Fleet regs for a frigate of this class are that they are allowed just eighteen designated pilots. If any other crew want to take pilot training, even if the ship has not already spent its woefully inadequate training allowance, if the rating does qualify as a pilot they will be rated ‘excessively qualified’ for that ship and actually taken off it, posted groundside until there may be a posting available to a ship that doesn’t have full complement of qualified pilots. That goes for engineers, higher grade techs and other restricted skills, too. I find it absolutely mind numbingly stupidly obvious that that is a ridiculous and destructive system. The theory may be that it prevents some ships having more than their fair share of highly skilled crew while others are under-skilled, but the reality is that it’s positively deterring skippers from training up crew they know will then be taken off them, more often than not to kick their heels groundside. And that is doubly so where bullocks are concerned. Their most frequent cause for grievance by far is applications for courses being refused, because training is so restricted anyway and other crew have to have the same chance of access, so once they’ve done one course they’re often told they can’t apply for any more because it’s not fair to the others. Me, I’ve always said, loud and strong, that I consider that unfair to the crew being denied the opportunity to excel, and worse, the whole stupid policy being damaging to the Fleet as a whole. So when I got the chance to put my money where my mouth was, as it were, and give those bullocks a shot at succeeding, there was no way I was going to turn it down. I had a point to make, politically, and I don’t deny that was a big factor, showing just what those ‘failing’ crew could achieve if they were given the opportunity. And that did dovetail with the challenge of improving the Minnow’s technical performance, too, so the rehab and the R&D have always gone hand in hand. And you’re right, yes, that has always been my highest priority, in terms of time commitment. I will admit that I decided to get married and start a family because it was a good time in my career to do so, convenient, and I never did pretend that it was any great romance – it was one of those agency matches, a marriage that gave us both what we wanted from it. Etta, though – yes, she was my world, it felt like everything I did, I did for her. Her death was devastating. It’s probably true that for a while, staying focussed on my work was the only thing that kept me going. But I came through that – I won’t say got over it, but I’m good now, I’m okay, my life is together. The only difficulty I have is getting other people to accept that. Try as I might, people just can’t seem to get past this assumption that I’m a tormented soul in need of salvation, and you’re right, far too many friends keep trying to set me up with dates. I try to be understanding about it, but it is annoying.’
‘Maddening, I’m sure,’ Simon agreed, and took a drink of his own coffee. ‘I get, I know, you’re someone who doesn’t really need intimate relationships, you get all the emotional involvement you need from your work and from casual friendship, not because of what happened to Etta but because that’s just who you are and always have been.
‘The only thing you do have an issue with, as far as I can see, is this thing about taking shoreleave,’ he observed. ‘I do get that. Obviously, in the immediate aftermath at Chartsey you wouldn’t have wanted to go anywhere, much, and by the time you were at the point where you might have started going on holidays again, the Fourth’s thing had kicked off. By the time you’d transferred to Therik there were all the security issues going on, too, and with medical and security on your case about it, taking leave became this issue of control over your private life, yes? Like, ‘If I can’t have a private life on my own terms, I don’t want one at all.’’
‘You make it sound rather childish,’ Alex said, which was a tacit admission in itself that Simon had got to the heart of his feelings on that, too. Then, with a suspicious look, ‘Did Buzz tell you that?’
‘Come on,’ Simon reproved. ‘You’ve got to know Buzz better than that. When I tried to talk to him about you he told me to take a running jump – well, not literally, he’s very good at making ‘Go boil your head in a bucket’ sound like ‘please don’t do that, dear boy’, but he was pretty fierce about it, lots of things about respecting your right to privacy and how inappropriate it would be to be discussing you with subordinates. Which I haven’t done, only tried to talk to Buzz because I know he’s your ‘significant other’, emotionally. And before you ask, no, I haven’t talked to Davie about you, either. But I am, myself, you know, a qualified and practising psychiatrist – not something I admit to at parties, it tends to make people either flee the scene or start telling you about their potty training. But it hardly, after all, takes any kind of genius to work out that the kind of shoreleave they are trying to make you take would be slow torture to anyone of your personality type, and that the more people try to tell you to do something you don’t feel they have a right to boss you on, the less likely you are to do it.’
‘Yes, okay, you’ve got me there,’ Alex admitted, laughing a little and relaxing again. ‘Work related orders, of course, obviously, I’m committed to obey those whether I like them or not. But when they start on telling me that they’ve organised a lovely retreat house for my shoreleave so I can get right away from all the stress and pressure, it does get my hackles up. That is supposed to be my private life, freedom for me to go and do whatever I want. Of course I accept that security issues mean I can’t do that, responsibly, but the whole shoreleave thing has, admittedly, become something of a bugbear.’ He gave the medic a philosophical look. ‘And you’re going to tell me I need to overcome that, I suppose.’
‘No, I’m going to tell you that you need to tell them to go boil their heads in a bucket,’ Simon told him. ‘Too right, they’re interfering in your private life – with the best of intentions, no doubt, on the assumptions that you are, A, so pressured in your work life that you need total rest on retreat to recharge your batteries, B, so driven that you won’t take any leave unless you’re forced to do so, and C, emotionally damaged and therefore in need of friends organising your private life for you. None of those assumptions are true. You thrive on pressure, and you do, despite appearances, have your workload very well controlled. You have never had an issue with taking leave, either, till recently – according to the record, you’ve always taken your entitlement of leave, both on short and long leave passes. So, what did you used to do, before? Before you got married, I mean.’
‘Oh – nothing ve
ry much,’ Alex said, a little surprised. ‘I’ve been very lucky – many Fleet officers spend years on the same station, but being on tagged and flagged means I’ve bounced around quite a bit, sometimes only in port for a few days. So when I’ve got leave, I’ve done the usual things, gone sightseeing, tried the local food, bought souvenirs.’
Simon did a theatrical double-take, looking around at the cabin which was so emphatically devoid of anything like souvenirs or personal bric-a-brac.
‘Not for myself,’ Alex clarified. ‘I usually send my parents something from any world I visit – nothing much, just ornaments. They have a cabinet in the dining room,’ he grinned, ‘which visitors get shown.’
‘Let me guess,’ Simon said. ‘The cabinet also has every prize you won at school, a holo of you in your graduation uniform and no pictures of you since.’
‘Have you seen pictures of my parents’ house?’ Alex asked, half laughing, but just a little uneasy, too, wondering what kind of information Simon might have had access to, and from where.
‘No, not at all – just showing off, there,’ Simon told him, laughing. ‘It’s a party trick, you know, psych profiling. I know you’re not close to your parents. They love you to bits and are hugely proud of you, but they can’t even begin to cope with what’s happening in your life, now, couldn’t even really understand your life before the Fourth thing happened. So now you and they have a tacit collusion that you all just pretend the Fourth’s thing isn’t happening. They’ll have stopped watching anything other than the local news, and you just don’t tell them anything you know would upset them. They didn’t come to spend your leave with you on Therik, either, huh.’
Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) Page 23
