Karadon (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  In answer to a barrage of questions as to what exactly he, or Karadon, or ISiS Corps intended to do about it, the Director of Karadon Freight clenched his fists.

  “Bleep off!” he snarled, and went through a staff-only door, slamming it in their faces.

  Alex watched this and smiled, nodding with quiet satisfaction.

  “Looks like Chokky Dayfield has lost control completely, now.” Sam observed.

  “He was never in control to start with,” Alex replied. He was far more interested in the fact that the media was still not showing any footage of or making any comment about the presence of Belassa Torres. Even though she was remaining in the background, the media would normally have highlighted her as representing Head Office, reporting about her even if she wasn’t giving statements or interviews. As far as the media coverage was concerned, however, she was invisible.

  There were only two possibilities to explain that. The first was that an official “Not For Broadcast” edict had been issued by an intelligence agency protecting her from being identified on holovision, which Alex knew was not the case. The second was that someone with a great deal of power and influence over the media had issued orders from on high that Director Torres was not part of the story.

  Alex would have given a good deal to know what was going on in her head, right now. Belassa Torres, however, was not appearing on camera. She had even stopped using the station’s computer network. That suggested she knew or at least suspected that the Fourth had infiltrated it. She had obviously not told Karadon’s board that, though, since they were all continuing to use the network and Radio Karadon was continuing to broadcast backup copies of everything they did.

  “All done, sir,” Arie came back to the command deck about ten minutes later, looking rather pink. By then, Ambit Persane was giving a rather more formal statement in the media suite, though the essence of what he had to say about the Fourth’s appalling behaviour was the same as that expressed by Durb Jorgensen. “I’m afraid it did get a bit, uh, personal, sir,” Arie admitted, resuming her seat at the command table. “And I had to go along with that or Tissa would have realised something was up. Do you just want to see the part about Captain Tenalt, sir?”

  She did not, she really did not, want to have to show the skipper that part of the conversation where her friend said she couldn’t believe that Arie didn’t fancy von Supernova.

  “I mean, he’s gorgeous!” she’d enthused. “And he’s got that dark, brooding thing going on – soooo romantic! Come on, you’re not telling me you don’t fancy him even a bit.”

  Arie had laughed, though blushing a little.

  “I like my men big, beautiful and brainless,” she’d said, which was true, in fact. Her latest boyfriend, on Therik, was a barman with ambitions to become a swimwear model. That was an aspect of her life, however, that she kept well away from the ship, and she really, really, really didn’t want the skipper to see that embarrassing exchange.

  Alex looked at the appeal in her eyes, and smiled slightly.

  “Just the part about the Captain,” he agreed. Arie let go a little breath of relief and put that clip on screen for him. It was just as Alex had requested, and carried off with such laughing ease that there was not a hint of anything artificial about it. Alex, having watched it, gave her a nod. “Well done,” he commended, and Arie grinned happily.

  Within minutes, Alex knew, that story would be flying around all the ships in port, adding laughter to the official reassurance. It would reinforce the point that the Fourth was in total control here, too.

  Even so, it was at least another half an hour before things started to settle down again, with call numbers dropping as people evidently realised that that was all that was happening for now, and headed back to bed. Alex stayed up, himself. He knew he wouldn’t go back to sleep now and knew better than to go and lay wakeful in his bunk.

  “You may as well turn in,” he told Sam. The computer officer had been working far more hours than he was scheduled to, helping with the massive task of sorting through the files uploaded from Karadon. The strain was starting to show in shadows under his eyes. “I’ll see out the watch.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Sam gave him a grateful look. “I won’t say no.” He handed over the watch screens and departed with a cheerful, “Goodnight.” Arie McKenna, however, stayed where she was.

  “I’m not a bit tired, sir,” she ventured, hopefully, “if there’s anything I can do to help.”

  Alex knew what she wanted. Newly qualified Sub-lts were only allowed to hold the watch on a ship of this size for brief periods while the ship was on routine duties. They got very little opportunity for watchkeeping with the ship on operations, unless it was to be holding the watch under a senior officer’s supervision.

  “All right,” Alex agreed. He led her through watch handover and passed the red-bordered screens to her. Then he left her to it. There were always piles of intel files awaiting his attention. The team prioritised anything of importance but Alex liked to dive through at least a sample of the low-level records being gathered from the station. They gave him a feel for how things were going there at grass roots level.

  The answer to that was “not well”. He already knew that the board was having to plan for a phased shutdown of sections of the station. They simply didn’t have enough staff to keep up with required maintenance, so as they fell further and further behind with it, some sections would just have to be shut down and sealed off. Reading the internal memos about that, the arguments over whether it should be sections of Leisure or Freight that were shut down first, revealed that the conflict between the two was now a fight for survival.

  Chantalle Rivers was fighting tooth and claw for the Leisure Division to be maintained. They might not have many customers, but the couple of hundred journalists they did have were reporting to tens of billions of viewers. More journalists were arriving with every liner, too, so shutting down any facilities in their part of the station just wasn’t to be contemplated. Every effort had to be focussed on persuading them that Karadon Leisure was safe and open for business.

  Durban Jorgensen, on the other hand, wanted the journalists thrown off the station. They were only aggravating the situation, he said, and it was just a stupid waste of resources to be maintaining a twenty four storey leisure resort for a couple of hundred journos. Karadon Freight, at least, was still doing some real business, even if it was only pre-contracted deliveries. It was the Freight business they had to get up and running again, he said, as the real business of the station.

  Even more interesting than their combative memos, though, was the private correspondence flowing off the station. Alex had no scruples about reading that. They were uploading copies of letters that people had written or recorded in their personal data cache on the Karadon network. Most of them were written. Intersystem mail was very expensive and a text letter would cost a fraction of a holo-recording. Topic searches through those letters had pulled up a number of them expressing their fears for the future of the station.

  “If many more staff go, I think we may have to shut it down entirely,” wrote one technician to his brother. “They’re paying us triple salary to stay and keep things going, but people are jittery. There was talk in the coffee room of certain people having guns in their quarters. I don’t know how true it is, but if I see guns, I’m out of here. Money isn’t everything.”

  Another employee wrote plaintively of a facility that had already been shut down.

  “They closed the school. Everyone with children aboard has gone now, including Dace and Teal, so that just left me. I didn’t know what to do. I could get a bunk on one of the liners, they’re letting people on their emergency bunkrooms for free, but what then? Jobs aren’t easy to come by, especially if you have to say that your last place of employment was Karadon. Hardly a recommendation, given the publicity. There’s the mortgage to pay, and that loan I took out. Mr Persane told me to shut down the school and offered me three times the salary to
work in PR. I told him I’m a teacher and don’t know anything about PR but he said it’s just answering calls and saying what I’m told to. I don’t like it but I don’t see what else I can do. I don’t want to lose the apartment and end up in court if I can’t pay the loan back. What do you think I should do, Mum?”

  Alex was still reading through a mound of equally revealing correspondence when Buzz Burroughs came onto the command deck.

  “I was going to relieve Sam,” he told the skipper, “but I see you beat me to it, dear boy.”

  Alex noticed that it was just after 0400, and grinned at his Exec. It was typical of Buzz to be that considerate, getting up early himself so that the overworked Lt could get a couple of hours extra sleep.

  “We had some visitors,” he told him, and brought him up to speed on the brief appearance of the Customs ships. Buzz tutted and shook his head.

  “I should rather have liked a word with that young man myself,” he observed. “The nerve of it. Still, I daresay you gave him your “blood-chilling psychopathic glare”.”

  Alex gave a spluttering laugh. That was a quote from one of the more memorable documentaries made about the Fourth. It had posited the remarkable theory that the League was preparing for all-out war with the Marfikian Empire and had created the Fourth as a black ops/suicide unit. In this theory, Alex von Strada had been put onto the tagged and flagged programme because he’d been found as a cadet to be utterly ruthless, sociopathic, even to the point of being willing to kill his own crew.

  “Actually…” Alex called up a recording of the Captain’s visit. Buzz watched it and laughed, too, giving the skipper a look of warm approval.

  “Very well handled!” he observed, and made a “point score” gesture with his finger in the air. “I think,” he said, “that your next step should be attending a social event – dinner on a liner, maybe.”

  Alex’s look of pure horror had the command deck crew in fits.

  “It’s supposed to be a microstep, Buzz!” he protested. “Not an Olympic long jump!”

  Buzz chuckled too. “Okay,” he conceded, “What about going for lunch with your friend on the Cartasay, then?” As Alex considered that, Buzz went on persuasively, “it’s on our operations list.”

  Alex conceded that in his turn. They had a long list of strategies they might employ to wind up the tension on the station. They weren’t just Alex’s ideas, or even just the officers’ – he’d thrown that one open to suggestions from any member of the crew while they were on their way out here. Many of the suggestions made had been impractical for one reason or another, but quite a few had made it onto the list. One of them was indeed that the skipper could go ship-visiting. Skippers were generally not expected to leave their ships while they were on active operations so that would have a big shock factor in itself, with speculation running wild over what he was actually up to.

  “They already think that Quill’s a Fleet agent,” Alex commented, though, with some concern. It had been naive to expect that merely telling the truth in an entirely frank interview would scotch that rumour. The media believing that Quill was an agent had its funny side and neither Alex nor Quill was really concerned about that. If the Landorn gang believed it, however, his life could be in danger. Alex had had to ask him to accept security protection. Knowing his friend, he had also spoken with the Queen of Cartasay’s captain, ensuring that she too understood the danger her second officer was in.

  “Well, meeting him isn’t going to put him at any greater risk than he’s already in, is it?” Buzz pointed out, reasonably. “And I do think, all joking aside, that it would be good for you to get off the ship for a while, even for an hour.”

  Alex looked at him, hearing a serious note under Buzz’s casual manner. He knew that Buzz was right, really. He’d barely paused to catch his breath in the last eight months. The seizure of the Might of Teranor had only been the start of it. Bringing the container ship back into port had stretched all of them to the limit. Arriving back at Chartsey hadn’t been any relief, either, as they’d come back into a maelstrom of publicity. In amongst dealing with that and the Teranor trial, Alex had been hustled from one high-level meeting to another. Then he’d been sent off post-haste to Therik, already training his crew and preparing them for the mission they’d be undertaking at Karadon. He’d had to deal with the confession of the Lucinde to having drugs aboard, too.

  Any hope he’d had of a rather quieter life on Therik had been dashed as they’d gone into port. They’d been met there with just the same kind of media frenzy and howling protests from campaign groups that they’d hoped to leave behind on Chartsey. What with attempting to calm that down, deal with the Lucinde prosecution, establish a groundside base, settle and train his new crew, get his new ship through refit and deal with the Second, Fleet Intel, Customs, the League Prisons Authority and the LIA, Alex had barely had time to sleep. He had not taken so much as a five hour shoreleave pass while they were at Therik. Then there’d been the demands of a full recommission inspection being carried out by the infamous Terrible Tennet. They’d had just three days between the end of that and arriving here.

  Alex was not, despite his nickname of von Supernova, superhuman. He was carrying the responsibility for this operation with the confidence that might be expected of a man widely tipped to be First Lord of the Admiralty himself by the end of his career. He was eating and sleeping well, with no obvious outward signs of stress or exhaustion.

  Buzz could see it in him, though. Alex was always on the alert, like a man spinning hundreds of plates in the air. He was spending around eighteen hours a day on the command deck, with just brief walks around the ship by way of relief. He hadn’t even been for his customary mug of tea in engineering since they’d arrived at Karadon. He was starting to get a little furrow of concentration between his brows. A few days away from it all at some lovely peaceful private resort would do him the world of good, Buzz felt. Since that was impossible, a change of scene and the chance to catch up with an old friend over lunch would have to do.

  “All right,” Alex agreed. “But if I do lunch on the Cartasay, you have to go to the Scarlet Glory, that’s only fair.”

  Buzz chuckled again. The Ruby Splendour had departed earlier that night, leaving the Scarlet Glory, also recently arrived from Chartsey, as Red Line’s biggest and most prestigious liner in port.

  “Fair enough,” Buzz acknowledged, and held out his hand. They shook on it, solemnly, and grinned at one another. “And for right now,” Buzz suggested, “Soppo and a dog?”

  Alex nodded, suddenly aware of being hungry. Soup and hot beef rolls – known in Fleet vernacular as “soppo and a dog” – were traditional nightwatch fare. It was hardly high cuisine. The soup was vaguely tomatoey with unidentifiable bits of dried vegetable, while the beef rolls were decompressed, rehydrated and flash heated from bullet-hard pellets. There was something very companionable about soppo and a dog on a long weary nightwatch, though. It wasn’t just that everyone on the watch was having it, but knowing that crews on ships across League space would be having the same, sharing in a tradition that had been going on for centuries. Even Alex, radical as he was, would not attempt to overturn that one.

  So they had soppo and dogs, chatting casually. Arie McKenna was radiant with pleasure. Holding the watch was a treat in itself. Sharing this quiet, sociable time with the skipper and exec in the small hours of the morning felt very special. They were pulling her leg a bit and that felt lovely, too, being on such terms with them.

  “The skipper was just the same,” Buzz told her, indulgently, “as a Sub on his first assignment. Couldn’t get enough watchkeeping. He was always getting up in the middle of the night asking if he could take the conn.”

  “Not always. Just sometimes,” Alex grinned at the memories that evoked. He could still remember the thrill of having those red-bordered screens under his control, feeling all the threads of command gathered in his hands. He’d been on his third tour of duty before that began to fee
l routine, and it had been another two years before holding the conn had become a chore. Now he only held the watch occasionally, it was a comfortable break from higher responsibilities. “You were always very kind about it,” he recalled. Buzz had been the Exec on Alex’s first ship, a formative influence in his own career.

  “Not at all, dear boy,” Buzz twinkled at him. “After forty years of watchkeeping, an eager-beaver young Sub keen to take the nightwatch for you is a joy to be treasured.” He winked at Arie, who chuckled. “You could, if you wouldn’t mind, dear girl, settle a bet between the skipper and myself, though,” Buzz said, his manner still gently teasing, “as to why you came fifth in your class.”

  Arie’s eyes widened. There was just something subtle in his tone that made it clear that he knew that that had been a deliberate decision on her part. The skipper grinned, too, amused and interested.

  “Er…” she said. She was just about to say that that was just where she’d come out in exams and assessments, but then thought better of it. This might be a very casual, friendly conversation, but they would think the less of her, she knew, if she lied. “Honestly? Because, statistically, five years in, officers who’ve graduated fourth or fifth from central worlds academies are of higher rank and more likely to be in shipboard postings than any other graduating outcome.”

  Both Alex and Buzz laughed at that, with Buzz giving the skipper a triumphant look and holding out his hand, and Alex, resigned, slapping it in a “pay you” gesture.

  “I should know better than to bet against you on profiling,” he observed.

  Buzz grinned broadly. He was not just Commander Burroughs. He was also Dr Burroughs, with a PhD in social psychology and a string of publications to his name. He was regarded as one of the Fleet’s leading experts on in-group/out-group socialisation.

  “To be fair, I wasn’t really sure,” he admitted. Then he told Arie, “We weren’t sure whether it was peer-ducking or strategic. It isn’t unknown for very high ability cadets to keep their heads down because they don’t want to get into conflict with aggressively competitive classmates, see? It’s rather more unusual for cadets to deliberately graduate lower than they could because they think it’s to their advantage, long term, but I have come across that before. And statistically, of course, you are correct, there’s no arguing with that. But statistics only tell part of the story. You could have been first in your class, easily, and a strong contender to be top of the sixty four this year. Did you not consider the chance to be on the tagged and flagged programme worth that?”