Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘Can I have a word, dear boy?’ Buzz indicated the hatchway which led through the main airlock to Alex’s daycabin. ‘One minute,’ he clarified, as Alex looked at him doubtfully. They had agreed that one of them would be on the command deck at all times throughout these operations, and given what had happened today, Alex was reluctant to leave anyone else in command even for one minute. ‘Martine can handle things for a minute, can’t you, dear girl?’

  Martine Fishe gave a calm smile.

  ‘I might even manage two.’ She had taken no offence at the decision to have either the skipper or exec on the command deck around the clock, though she too was a command rank officer. This was effective first contact, and as today had demonstrated, anything could happen.

  ‘All right,’ Alex said, a little reluctant but not wanting to show doubt in Martine’s abilities. ‘One minute,’ he told them both, and followed Buzz into his quarters.

  They were back in just twenty eight seconds. Buzz did not say anything at all – as the door was closing, he simply turned and put his arms around Alex, drawing him into a hug. He held him tight for perhaps five seconds, then patted him on the back a couple of times and let him go.

  There was nobody else in the galaxy who would hug Alex like that. His mother hadn’t hugged him for years even before he’d left home, though she patted and stroked him and touched his face at times of high emotion. His father’s notion of a hug was an arm’s length, embarrassed and momentary grappling.

  Buzz, though, gave great hugs. Alex felt as if he was being enfolded, not just in strong and caring arms, but in a cocoon of reassurance. I’ve got you. It’s okay. I’m here. Everything will be all right.

  When he stepped back, Alex’s eyes were brighter than usual, and he could only give a short nod.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, and Buzz smiled, resting a hand on his shoulder just for a moment, and giving him a nod in return. You’ll do.

  Then they went back to work, everyone politely pretending not to know that the exec had taken the skipper aside for a comforting hug. Alex was far from being the only one to get that comfort from Uncle Buzz that day, after all.

  Things seemed to settle down again after that. Alex made the crew who’d be taking the night watch get some sleep during the evening, but continued working, himself, and carried on holding the watch till four in the morning when Buzz came to relieve him.

  It was 0417 and Alex had been asleep for nine minutes when the comm by his bunk fleeped him awake.

  ‘Yes?’ He was instantly alert, with a rush of anxiety, as he saw that the call was coming from Simon Penarth.

  ‘You told me to tell you when you could visit,’ Simon said. ‘And you can, now.’

  ‘Oh.’ Alex looked at the time, suppressed the tiny, unworthy part of him that wanted to groan and burrow back into bed, and swung his legs out of the bunk. ‘On my way.’

  He arrived at sickbay a couple of minutes later, having taken time to freshen up with a near-scalding hot shower – as good as three hours sleep, he reckoned, though medics tended to take a different view.

  ‘You,’ Simon told him sternly, ‘ought to be asleep.’

  This, from the man who’d got him out of bed, seemed just a little unfair. Alex was also bewildered by what was happening in sickbay, which was nothing at all. It was set up in its surgical mode, an operating table in the centre where Rangi normally had his synth-grass healing space. Simon had turned off the jungle glade holowall, too, revealing the wall of sickbay tech which Rangi normally concealed behind it.

  Of the patients, there was no sign – the stasis bags would be in the storage locker behind the dispensary.

  ‘How are they?’ Alex asked, deciding to ignore Simon’s comment and focus on what was important.

  ‘In stasis, what else?’ Simon said. ‘I wouldn’t have disturbed you if you hadn’t ordered me to tell you – somewhat peremptorily, I have to say – as soon as you could visit. So I’ve told you and here you are and you can see for yourself that there’s nothing going on so just go back to bed, all right?’

  Alex thought about attempting to explain to the civilian that locking a skipper out of any department on his ship was technically mutiny and that he had, in the circumstances, been remarkably forbearing. He considered, too, attempting to assure the medic that his few minutes of sleep and a hot blast shower had fully restored him and he didn’t need to go back to bed. Then he looked at Simon and thought again.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll come back in the morning.’

  ‘Not before eight,’ said Simon, opening the door for him.

  He opened it again to admit him when Alex went back at eight next morning, and rather obviously hadn’t been to bed, himself. ‘Coffee?’ Simon offered, by way of a greeting.

  ‘Ah,’ Alex said, recalling the last time that Simon had offered him a coffee, the ‘two guys having a chat over coffee’ which had, with hindsight, been the most effective counselling session he’d had since the loss of his daughter. ‘Do we have to?’ he asked, trying to keep the pleading note from being too obvious.

  ‘What?’ Simon looked startled, then realised Alex had misunderstood. ‘No, no!’ he repeated. ‘Just – some things I need to ask you, medic to skipper, so do you want a coffee?’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ Alex said, still looking at him a bit warily. ‘What is it, Simon?’

  Simon gestured to a bunk that he’d flipped into a sofa, and they sat down.

  ‘I need to ask you, Alex – I need all the records you have on Ali Jezno, okay? All the footage that’s recorded by blind cameras, any other recordings you have for him from off the ship, access to his personal holos, everything. Rangi tells me that it takes the signatures of three command rank officers and the IA officer to access that stuff aboard ship, so I need you to do that for me, okay?’

  It wasn’t a request, but it wasn’t quite a command, either, with some recognition that Alex had a right to a say in this decision.

  ‘Why?’ Alex asked, mystified, and then, as he realised the scale of what Simon was asking for, ‘And why would you want all of it? You’re talking about thousands of hours of footage, there.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Simon. ‘But I need it to give Ali as much of his memory back as possible.’ He saw the confusion on Alex’s face and pressed on, ‘I’m not talking about playing stuff back to him while he’s in a coma, obviously, that’s not feasible and rarely effective anyway. I’m talking about neuro-restoration, effectively reprogramming his new brain cells with memories. It is a very limited technique, of course, it can’t engramize memories of how he felt or other sensory input, but the more we can give him back, the better.’

  Alex stared at him. ‘You can do that?’ he queried. ‘You can actually reprogram his memories?’

  ‘Yup,’ said the League’s most brilliant neurosurgeon. ‘Actually what you do is to stimulate memory formation in those cells and feed in the images and sound, so it’s forming new memory of those events rather than restoring old memories as such, but still, better than nothing.’

  Alex continued to gaze at him, looking quite alarmed, now.

  ‘And is that approved by the Medical Ethics Authority?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Simon said, quite impatiently. ‘It would be unethical, of course, if we were programming him with anybody else’s memories, or editing in any way what we decided to give and to withhold – the general view on that is that if you decide to go with memory restoration you have to give the patient everything you have. So just give me everything you’ve got, okay? I’ll format the data from visual to neuro-signals myself, but it would be helpful if it could be provided as adjusted view. People can’t see themselves, after all, so just feeding memories of himself as seen from outside would give him the weirdest sense of out-of-body experience. Can your programming guys come up with some kind of algorithm which would adjust the footage to be what he would have seen, from his point of view?’

  ‘They won’t need to,’ Alex said, feeling
secretly quite pleased that he knew more about something than Simon. ‘We already have that capacity,’ he answered Simon’s enquiring look. ‘As part of the blind-filming system. The whole point of it is that it can be accessed if there’s an incident which requires investigation. That often does mean that you need to look at things from the different perspectives of the people involved, physically, in order to understand what they could see and how that influenced their actions. So we can certainly run the footage through a perspective filter. But we are talking about a lot of footage, Simon. There’s blind filming of all the time that Mr Jezno has been on the ship, which is fourteen months – even if you knock out time he’s been asleep or on leave, you’re still looking at hundreds of hours of footage. Can you really get him to remember all that?’

  ‘Yes and no.’ Simon said. ‘We code it through sensory experience – the first stage of memory formation, right? Basically, you allow him to experience all those images and sounds again, at high speed, as fast as his brain can cope with. The brain itself selects what information it will encode into short term memory and then consolidate into long term storage. The more familiar information is, the more neural connections it already has, the easier it is to engramize. Then you just keep running that data, again and again, allowing the brain to build up solid, coherent memories. He won’t remember everything we show him any more than you remember every moment of the last fourteen months, but he will have memories of the events which are most important to him. Fourteen months is actually much smaller than I’d like, but we can only work with what we’ve got. And we do only have one window for this, okay? This technique only works with new, young brain cells which haven’t yet got any neurological data. If you try to do it with already working cells the data just gets scrambled. So we get one shot at this; four, maybe five days when we can hit those new cells with all the data we’ve got. During that time Ali’s brain will be hyper-stimulated. He won’t be conscious but he’ll experience it like a really vivid dream. We’ll keep him on life support during that period, just to keep him fed and hydrated and manage his biochemistry. Then we put him into a bunk and let him wake up naturally – there’s nothing freaks patients out more than coming round to find themselves full of tubes and wires, or even worse, in a tank. After that, he’ll be in rehab for a while. We won’t know till he wakes up just how much memory he’s formed or exactly how much functionality he’ll have, so there’ll be tests and we’ll determine then how much rehab he’s going to need. Rangi will come into his own, with that – he’s an excellent nurse.’

  ‘Simon.’ Alex gave him a reproachful look, which made Simon look startled for a moment and then laugh.

  ‘I didn’t mean that in any derogative way,’ he assured him. ‘I often pee doctors off by telling them that nurses do far more for their patients than they do. Rangi is an excellent nurse. He doesn’t see a patient as a technical problem to be fixed and walk away from, he’s all about the care, and that ongoing relationship. In that sense, he’s a better medic than I am – I have to admit that I lose interest once I’ve done my bit. I’m a great surgeon, but I’d be a lousy GP. Anyway, Ali will be in good hands for the rehab. My best guess, if everything goes as planned, is that we’ll need to keep him in sickbay for maybe a week and then as an outpatient for two or three months, but don’t hold me to that. So, that’s Ali.

  ‘Banno is a lot more straightforward – that’s a perfectly routine limb replacement, along with some equally routine internal repairs, which any trauma surgeon ought to be able to do competently. I say ‘ought’ because I have some issues with the standards that many so-called consultants seem to feel are acceptable. Far too often, they’re so focussed on mobility that they drop the ball on sensory and reflex nerves. Reflex nerves, particularly – I’ve come across cases where the surgeon hasn’t bothered with them at all.’

  He snorted, and it was apparent that he was recalling some past confrontation over that issue, as his nostrils flared slightly and a militant tone came into his voice. ‘You can not call reflex nerves ‘unnecessary’.’ Remembering who he was talking to, he explained, ‘The reflex nerves are what makes you jerk your foot up so quickly if you feel yourself stepping on something sharp. They’re fiddly little beggars, located in the muscles, time consuming to fit when you’re constructing a replacement leg. Some people think it’s okay to leave them out and rely on pain receptors instead, meaning that if you step on something sharp you’ll realise that it’s hurting and look down and then lift your foot as a conscious reaction to seeing what’s happening. Not acceptable by my standards, and I won’t tolerate sloppy sensory work, either, leaving the patient with any numbness, tingling or lack of sensitivity.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Alex, aware of a kind of horrified fascination. ‘Did you say you’re going to construct a leg?’

  ‘Yes. Sorry to have to break it to you, but it really isn’t like they do it in the movies,’ Simon said, with a long-suffering note. ‘You can’t just programme a leg and pull one out of a tank fully formed. It’s like an artificers’ workshop – you can make parts, but you have to assemble them to make working tech. So we’re growing the bones, muscles, nerves, skin, everything we need, in different vats, and Rangi and I will put that together before we get Banno out of stasis. It’s actually not difficult,’ he said, with unusual modesty. ‘Second year med students get to do a leg, using their own DNA – it’s kind of a rite of passage, a thing, you know, whether you’ve ‘done the leg’ yet. Obviously you wouldn’t want to use a leg a student had put together, they’re basically assembled with a glue gun and biotape. Me, I use neuro-grafts so fine you’d need a microscope to find the join.’

  He saw the searching look Alex was giving him and spread his hands defensively. ‘Look, genius, okay?’ He reminded the skipper. ‘Actual, bona fide, certificated genius. When I told them at the Gifted Institute that I wanted to work as a doctor they were horrified, actually said ‘Why are you wasting your talents becoming a brain surgeon? You could do so much more!’ Me, I like to think I’m using my abilities the best way I can, pushing our medical knowledge and skills forward and dragging the morons along with me whether they like it or not – not unlike yourself, in that, in your efforts to modernise the Fleet. But yes, Alex, I can put a leg together and you can kick me round the ship if Banno has anything less than a hundred per cent functionality in the new one, okay?’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that, but thank you,’ Alex said. Simon was arrogant at the best of times and could be infuriating, but right now Alex could not have been more grateful to have him aboard.

  ‘All right, don’t get mawkish,’ Simon told him, responding more to the heartfelt tone in Alex’s voice than to the words. ‘I’m just doing my job, here, so don’t do the ‘noble healer’ thing at me.’

  Alex was suddenly reminded of Marto, weeping and embracing him at a formal reception, calling him a hero. He broke into a laugh.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he repeated, just as the door opened and Rangi came in. He paused for a moment, concerned in case he’d interrupted a private discussion, but seeing the welcome on both their faces, came in with a smile.

  ‘Morning, skipper,’ he said, with a slightly cautious look as he remembered the last time he and the skipper had spoken. Rangi was uneasily aware that Alex might not be best pleased that he, a Fleet officer, had supported the civilian medic in an act that was, indeed, technically mutiny.

  ‘Morning,’ Alex said, with a reassuringly friendly grin. Rangi had already said that he would respect Alex’s decision with regard to Ali Jezno and was willing to work with Simon on the brain restoration, keeping his personal views just that. Alex was relieved, though, to see that the two medics were on good professional terms again.

  ‘I’ve just been telling Alex we need access to the blind recordings,’ Simon told him. ‘And you’ll back me up on that, right?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Rangi said, without hesitation. ‘I’ve already done the paperwork.’ He turned to Alex. ‘We really do ne
ed it, skipper, if we’re to give Ali the best chance we can.’

  ‘All right,’ Alex held up a hand, seeing that Rangi was about to start explaining and persuading, something he could keep up for hours. ‘I’m sold!’ he assured him. ‘Though it’ll have to go to command discussion, of course, and I do feel that it would need support from the crew. They have rights in this too, remember – it’s footage of them in conversation with Mr Jezno that will be accessed and used. I can’t ask for their permission, as such – that’s not allowed under Fleet regs, but I think we have to give people the opportunity to voice any concerns or objections they may have to their footage being used, okay? Don’t worry, I’m sure nobody will refuse that, but it’s a matter of principle, see?’

  Simon didn’t really see, and clearly didn’t want to.

  ‘Just as long as you get me the data before two o’clock,’ he said. He got up as he spoke, reaching over to slap Rangi’s hand casually. ‘Tag,’ he said, ‘You’re it.’ Then he nodded to Alex, already walking away. ‘I’m going to bed.’

  Alex and Rangi exchanged looks of perfect, wordless understanding as Simon went out, but Alex was already getting up, too, his manner purposeful.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let me see them.’

  Rangi took him to the stasis locker. He knew there was no point in the skipper going to see this, that it would do the patients no good and only distress him, but he also knew Alex well enough not to even attempt to stop him. They had to go through Lucky’s habitat to get to the stasis locker, adding a surreal twist to an already unnerving situation.

  This had been the dispensary before Rangi had converted it to a roomy habitat for the gecko. Lucky was drowsing on a tree branch, basking in the warmth of a sun lamp as they passed through. He raised his head and chirruped when he saw Rangi, trotting along the branch to meet him, head cocked alertly.