Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘I didn’t expect them to,’ Alex said, at once. ‘They didn’t come to my graduation, either – graduating from the Sixty Four means your parents are sent travel warrants so they can come to Chartsey for the parade and dinner and all that. I never really expected them to come. You have to understand, these are people who start to pack for a trip at least four days before they’re due to leave, keep packing and unpacking the car to check that they haven’t forgotten anything, and worry about taking the right clothes with them for the weather, and this is when they are only going to a holiday resort an hour away from home. Travelling intersystem is just way beyond their comfort zone. And socially, too – they’re good people, and I would introduce them in the highest social circles myself, with no kind of embarrassment, but they are convinced that they would not know how to talk to people and would embarrass themselves, or me. I was impatient with them over it, once – there was a parents’ lunch at the Academy, first year, and they were making such a huge fuss about it, not knowing what to wear, saying they wouldn’t know what cutlery to use or what to talk about, I did lose patience with it and told them to just come in their gardening clothes, eat with their fingers and tell people who looked down their noses to get stuffed.’

  Simon guffawed, made a pistol with his fingers and mimed shooting himself in the head. ‘K’pah!’

  ‘No, it didn’t go down well,’ Alex confessed, chuckling again at the memory. ‘But no, they didn’t come to Therik – I invited them, of course, but I knew that even the idea of having to get on a starship and leave their world, everything they know, would terrify them. And you’re not saying I’m wrong, are you?’

  ‘No, I think you’re all making the best decisions that you can, there,’ Simon assured him. ‘Of course, it would be nice if they were able to understand your world and support you in coping with it, but that’s like saying it would be nice if they were different people. They are who they are, and it’s good that you’re able to maintain even a low level of contact. I have no contact with my own parents at all – I frightened them even before the hothouse took me off and turned me into something they had no hope of understanding. The last time we met was just painfully awkward, nothing to say to each other. I decided that it wasn’t worth the effort. So well done you, all of you, for hanging in there with some kind of working relationship. I just meant, really, that them not coming to Therik when so many other families did must have been quite isolating, in itself, not in any major way but just leaving you feeling a bit at a loose end. So I’m wondering, you know, what you would have done with those ten weeks leave, if the security thing wasn’t an issue and you could just have done as you liked.’

  ‘Oh.’ Alex was startled. ‘Do you know, I never even thought about it?’ He came to a realisation, himself, even as he said that. ‘I suppose I just didn’t want to make it worse, thinking of what might have been. You just have to make the best of it, really.’

  ‘You mean ‘put up with it’,’ Simon amended. ‘Which isn’t you, Alex, not at all. In every other aspect of your life you’re a take-charge problem solver, so why are you being so passive about letting people restrict and organise your private life? The correct response to, ‘We’ve organised a lovely quiet house for you to spend a few weeks right away from it all,’ is ‘Go boil your head, it’s my shoreleave, I’ll go where I want.’’

  ‘Not so easily said,’ Alex pointed out, ‘when the people organising the shoreleave are friends doing so in care and concern for you. I do try, of course, to tell them that I really hate that kind of leave, but they’re just so convinced I need a ‘proper break’ and ‘need looking after’, I end up doing what they want just to make them happy. It’s not as if I have a lot of options, after all – thinking about what I might do if it wasn’t for the security issues is just pointless. The fact is that my every movement is monitored by the media and by activists. They can get me off the base to a safe house, okay, but it’s considered unsafe for me to go about in public, even disguised.’

  ‘And you’d hate that, anyway,’ Simon observed. ‘Sneaking about in disguise, really not in your comfort zone. But the thought occurs, Alex, why don’t you buy yourself a yacht?’ As the skipper stared at him, Simon smiled. ‘The idiot who tried to give you the V-2-8 obviously had no idea about military propriety, but he did spot something, there, in your enthusiasm for that yacht, your joy in it. So what’s stopping you buying yourself one, perhaps an old one that needs doing up, and keeping it at Therik to work on, on leave? I’m not being insensitive here, am I? You could afford it?’

  Alex gave a very slight, almost unconscious nod of assent. The Fleet paid well, and he had never had much in the way of expenses. His only major purchase had been an executive-status apartment on Chartsey, bought when he’d got married. After the divorce was all over, he had sold the apartment and all its contents, giving every cent of it to a children’s charity in his daughter’s name. Even that had left him with significant savings, though, which had increased rapidly in the three years since. He could certainly afford a V-2-8 if he wanted one. It had just not occurred to him that he could buy one for himself. And even as he thought it, he laughed, shaking his head.

  ‘A V-2-8 needs constant full time attention,’ he said. ‘And even if I could get one as a restoration job, it would be an enormous, impossible job to take on as a shoreleave project.’

  ‘Well, something else, then, smaller and achievable,’ Simon suggested. ‘But some classic you’ve got a thing for, that you’ll get totally into and love.’

  Alex opened his mouth to raise all the objections that were rising, but as he did so, counter-arguments were forming themselves too.

  ‘You know,’ he said, quite thunderstruck, ‘that is actually a really good idea! A shuttle, maybe – a caronix or maybe a jaytee forty seven, something like that. That’d be a great project to get into – I could keep it at the base to work on...’ he was silent for a while, obviously contemplating having such a project, perhaps working on it for years to restore every detail to original, pristine glory. Pleasure lit his face, and Simon saw him realising that shoreleave could, in fact, actually be something to look forward to. ‘I’d really like that,’ Alex said. ‘Why haven’t I even thought of doing that, myself?’

  ‘Ah hem,’ said Simon, attempting to look modest. ‘Genius?’ he prompted, and Alex laughed.

  ‘Well, thank you,’ he said. ‘That really is a genius idea and I will certainly take you up on it. And I do take your point, you know, I really do, about setting an example for my crew in good practice and compliance with health and safety regs. I do make sure I take a couple of hours down-time every day, and that’s not something put on me, just something I’ve always recognised was sensible. But I take your point that that may not always be apparent, if people are seeing me being on the command deck as implying that I must be working at some level. I’m often not, though I must admit I hadn’t realised that I take as many as twenty or thirty breaks in a day – have you been counting?’

  ‘Me? No.’ Simon grinned. ‘But Misha has. She can’t help herself, you know, she does performance-efficiency evaluations just automatically. Inefficiency really gets on her nerves, too.’

  Alex knew that. One of the recommendations that Misha had made had been that they took out a particular console in life support and reinstalled it upside down. It was, she’d observed, a console intended for people to use from a seated position but was invariably used by people standing up. Alex had been surprised by how relieved she was when he accepted the suggestion and gave permission for the change. Every time she walked through there and saw someone leaning over the unused chair to operate that console, she said, it set her teeth on edge.

  ‘She says you pace yourself really well,’ Simon told him. ‘And having looked at that myself, I agree. If people really did copy what you do, they’d be fine. You take mini breaks all the time, pausing to watch screens or have a social chat with people for a few minutes. You zone into a meditative state, too,
quite often, particularly in your longer breaks and late at night. Typically, in the nineteen hours you are usually out and about, you are usually perceived as working about eighteen of them, taking only short breaks like a cup of tea in engineering. In reality, you are generally only working about thirteen and a half to fourteen hours, and less than half of that is on high-demand activity that needs your full attention and effort. If that was apparent to your crew, for sure, we would not be looking at a situation in which breaching workload regs has become the norm. So, basically, if you’re on down time, get off the command deck. I know you can’t bob on and off every time you take a five minute breather, but do something that shows you’re not actively working at that time, push your chair back from the table, something that anyone even glancing casually at the command deck feed will recognise as showing you’re taking a little breather. And if it’s going to be more than five minutes, scoot off to the lounge, okay?’

  ‘I haven’t decided on that, yet,’ Alex reminded him. ‘But okay, on principle, good point. And I take your point about the refectory, too, though I have to say that I’ve stood out against making that a time-out area for officers on workload grounds, knowing very well that some of them would slide meetings and pastoral care in there to dodge workload limits. But if we set firm boundaries on what is okay and what isn’t in a designated social space, hmmn, maybe.’

  ‘Trust me, I will set firm boundaries,’ Simon said, with a grin of anticipation. ‘I have a lecture prepared for people who think it’s kudos to bust workload regs – two or three hours following them around and telling them every potential consequence to their short and long term health should get the point across.’

  Alex thought about that, and looked appalled.

  ‘That’s...’ he said, and then saw Simon’s expression, ‘got my full support,’ he amended, hastily, seeing that the alternative would be for that lecture to be delivered at him.

  ‘Good boy,’ said Simon, with an indulgent note. Alex grinned – he was two years older than the medic – but just drank some more of his coffee, feeling that he’d dodged a bullet, there.

  ‘Thank you, Simon,’ he said, and admitted, ‘Sometimes it helps for someone to come in with a clear, outsider’s eye.’

  ‘You are very welcome,’ Simon said. ‘Special offer, this month only,’ he told him. ‘One free counselling session with every box of doughnuts.’

  Alex smiled.

  ‘And, I take it,’ he queried, just a little uneasily, ‘entirely confidential?’

  ‘Oh, yes, certainly, goes without saying.’ Simon assured him. ‘Or should.’ He got up, evidently thinking that the ‘two guys talking about stuff over coffee’ had come to a natural end. ‘And if anyone asks what I was doing in the skipper’s sleeping cabin at four in the morning, I’ll just...’ he tapped his nose, significantly. ‘Mind your own.’

  He gave him a twinkling look that made it apparent that he knew very well what people would assume from that, and went on his way, leaving Alex laughing.

  Eleven

  Later that day, Alex put the ruling into the log which created the interdeck. The name had been suggested by Simon himself to encompass not just the new exosuite but the gym and social facilities. The name, he said, was intended to convey an area of the ship that was ‘inter’, meaning ‘between’, as an environment where officers, crew and passengers could meet on equal terms. There was some precedent for that on Fleet ships, on carriers at least, which had a leisure zone complete with cafe and shops. For a frigate to create such a thing would be regarded as outrageously pretentious. But then, as Buzz observed, the justification for such a facility on a carrier was that they might be out in space for up to a year, which a frigate was not expected to be.

  ‘Since we’re doing the work of a carrier, we deserve the same facilities,’ he said, and with no argument on that from any of the other officers, Alex approved it.

  It needed very little work – also at Simon’s suggestion, the study booths currently on mess deck four were moved into the conference room in the exo suite and the big screen there set up as an academic notice board. The provision of a drinks dispenser and putting a box of doughnuts on the table completed its re-branding as ‘the refectory’. There was a little unease amongst the intelligentsia at first, going in there. It was, after all, a room which had been designed for the hoped-for outcome, a meeting with the Samartians. Davie had kept it very clean and simple, white walls and a long grey conference table with straight backed chairs. It wasn’t, as one of the Second’s team observed, very homely. But given some doughnuts, it wasn’t long before they’d started discussing the psychological effects of minimalist design, and with that, they were off.

  For Alex, though, it was the lounge that was to be his home away from home. Davie had designed the exosuite to be as multifunctional as space and ingenuity allowed. It was in itself a quarantine area, with a further small clean-zone within. Entering the main door brought you into an area which could be set up with sofas and low tables, small tables and chairs, a dining table or just left empty as an imposing ante-room to the conference room beyond. To one side was the smaller contained clean-room area, a comfort-zone facility for exo-visitors to make use of lavatories in a sterile environment. They did not know, after all, whether Samartians would be safe in their environment, and it was best to presume that they wouldn’t. On the other side of the ante-room was Simon’s little galley and a store for the furniture that wasn’t in use.

  Inside the store was a corner Davie described as ‘the plant floor’. A compact siliplas extrusion plant had been installed, there. They had plastics extrusion printers in the artificer workshop, too, of course, but they were military hardware, designed for precision engineering. This was a commercial model, brought over from the Stepeasy, lighter and quicker, more suitable for making household items. Next to it was a considerably larger piece of tech with man-sized coils and an internal furnace. This was a micro-refinery, capable of breaking down siliplas items and recycling them back to base gel which could be used again. That was extremely power hungry – it would use enough energy in breaking down a five gramme teaspoon to power the average home for more than three months. That was not a problem on a starship, though, superlight mix cores producing more side-effect power than the ship could ever use.

  Alex checked out the galley, too – he was required to, as this was the official skipper’s inspection which would sign off the refit work as complete. He had no fault to find with any of it, everything just as Davie had detailed in his proposal, at least until they came to the shop.

  That was actually just a display case, tucked into an alcove beside the galley hatch. Alex had approved it to stock consumables like toiletries. Crew and passengers currently had to go to the hold to pick up anything they wanted in that line, which meant a rating having to get it for them from the relevant crate. It would be more convenient to have high demand consumables there which anyone could sign for and take.

  To Alex’s incredulity, though, there was also a display of mugs and pens.

  ‘You have got to be kidding me!’ he exclaimed, as he took in the display of mugs and pens in different colours, though all with the Fourth Fleet Irregulars logo and a picture of the Heron. ‘Since when has any Fleet ship had a gift shop?’

  ‘Market research indicates a demand for it,’ said Davie, very innocently. ‘And not just passengers, either, though they certainly will want to buy souvenirs for themselves and people back home. Members of the crew, too, have told me that they ‘wouldn’t mind’ being able to buy mugs and pens as gifts for family and friends – there’s a market for expansion of the range, for sure. Production was limited by manufacturing capacity, specifically, the amount of time I had on the plant floor before my boredom threshold kicked in. But given a bigger manufacturing base, I feel there’s good potential here for expanding the range, opening another outlet at the base and aiming to go intersystem corporate by the end of the year.’

  ‘Ohhhh,’ Alex g
roaned, but cocked a teasing eyebrow. ‘Getting corporate withdrawal?’ He queried. ‘Having to get your entrepreneur fix, any way you can?’

  ‘Business savvy, encoded in the DNA.’ Davie grinned back. ‘Can’t see an opportunity, no matter how small, without the itch to make it happen. Anyway, they’re on at cost – I do know you, see. You’re polite about the concept of clean and green corporate practice, but deep down in your soul, encoded in your DNA, is a fundamental belief that profit is a dirty word.’

  Alex could not deny that the idea of trying to make a profit from his passengers and crew, no matter how trivial, would have made him very uncomfortable. But making them available at cost of production was just tongue-in-cheek amusing. So he just laughed, and the mugs and pens were allowed to stay.

  The mugs, as it turned out, were a feature of the lounge, as the refreshment unit Davie had installed there was set up to use them rather than the Fleet-issue ones used in the rest of the ship.

  ‘Important to give the place a sense of identity,’ Davie observed, and Alex didn’t argue with that.

  It felt, in fact, just lovely to sit in that light, airy lounge with its white walls, charcoal-coloured sofas and pale silver tables. There were two large holoscreens on opposite walls; one showed the very combination of watch and comms feeds that Alex liked to have on screens, while the other was set up as a holo-window, showing visual display of the space they were traversing. You really could sit here and watch the stars go by.