Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (10 page)

They were not the least appeased in that to be informed, under nine ack alpha clearance, that Davie North was uniquely qualified to support Shion, since they had similar physical and intellectual abilities. The medical term for Davie was gehs, genetically engineered homo sapiens. His physiology certainly fell outside the range defined in the Homo Sapiens Identification Act, so he was technically not human. He had been born on a League world, however, and given League citizenship, and nobody was about to go up against his father by trying to have that citizenship or any of its rights removed from him.

One of the reasons Davie and Alex were friends, though, was that Alex was not the slightest bit impressed either by Davie’s superhuman abilities, tremendous wealth or the power he undoubtedly had as a member of the Founding Families. Aboard ship, he was treated just like any other fifteen year old passenger. And both of them knew, too, that Davie would rather be here, with all the frustrations of not being allowed to do tech work, than anywhere else in the galaxy. He went off quite happily, at any rate, heading for the wardroom to unpack his kit. Their other passenger, having stood back politely while Davie talked to Alex, came over to shake hands with him then, exchanging friendly smiles.

‘Good to have you back with us,’ Alex observed.

Mako Ireson grinned. Technically, he’d been back with the Fourth for more than three months, now, having accepted a post as liaison between the Fourth and the League Prisons Authority. He understood what Alex meant, though, that it was good to see Mako back aboard ship, heading out with them on operations. He was with them, ostensibly, to monitor the progress of the first civilian to join them under the scheme he had himself proposed.

That was not, it had to be said, going very well. There had been, initially, more than fifty applicants for places on the scheme. Candidates had to be either ex-prisoners or on parole from civilian prisons, with some kind of spacer background and otherwise meeting normal Fleet recruitment criteria. The selection process had whittled that down to seven, of whom Alex had accepted four. Two of them had quit even before leaving their homeworlds, unable to cope with the media blitz that exploded around them. A third candidate had dropped out just three weeks into training, deciding that military service wasn’t his thing after all.

That left the last man standing, Banno Triesse. He had come aboard with the rest of the crew, having completed basic training weeks before. He was rated probationary star and, like any first voyager, expected to spend the first month shadowing an experienced member of crew before being rostered for duty. He was, however, already at work, handing tools for his mentor. There was no need, really, for Mako to come aboard to monitor his welfare; all of them knew he’d be fine. Mako, though, had asked if he might come with them if it wouldn’t be too much trouble. He could justify it professionally as seeing the scheme through for a full report to the LPA, but it was understood that what he really wanted was to be in on the adventure. If rumour was true, there was a good chance they might be heading out to Quarus, and Mako would claw through the airlock with his fingernails for such an opportunity.

‘Thank you, skipper.’ With some little pride, the Prisons Inspector pointed one way, then the other. ‘Port. Starboard. See? You don’t have to tell me this time.’

Alex laughed. In many respects, Mako Ireson was a natural born spacer – adventurous, sociable, hard-working, everything you could ask for in a shipmate. Unfortunately, this was combined with a level of scientific understanding and technical skills barely above that of an eight year old. The crew found his incompetence highly entertaining, but they were fond of him, too – he was, as he knew very well, regarded as their pet civilian.

He and Davie would not be the only civilians on board, though. It was less than an hour before the Second Fleet Irregulars’ teams started coming aboard. There was no hurry about that. They had been told that they could come aboard any time between the frigate going back on active status and the day before they launched, giving them the better part of a week to get themselves and their gear aboard. Alex was not surprised, though, to find them signalling requests for boarding straight away. For one thing, they would want time to get all their gear aboard, unpacked and set up. And there would, for sure, also be an element of concern just in case the ship launched unexpectedly and left without them.

They were certainly all very keen. A few of them were old friends – the first was Professor Sandy Arbuthnot Maylard, known as Sam to his friends, who’d been with them on the Karadon operation. He was primarily a physicist specialising in forcefields – the Maylard cannon still in field trials on the Heron were a significant development in non-lethal weaponry, effectively a stun-gun for starships. He would certainly be working on improving those systems while he was aboard, but being something of a polymath would also be working on the ongoing biovat project, developing their ability to produce fresh fruit and vegetables aboard ship. He had brought a research assistant with him to help with that, a thin, pale post graduate who looked as if he hadn’t seen daylight or a square meal for quite some time. Then there was Lt Commander Guntur ‘Gunny’ Norsten, a Fleet officer but on attachment to the League Cartographic Service. He was here to continue the work that Kate Naos had started, trialling the system that created detailed wave space charts from their own engine telemetry. He, Alex knew, was as good as having another officer on the team. He was just as pleased to see Mack McLaver coming back aboard, having formed a good opinion of the systems engineer the last time he was with them.

They were, a little to Alex’s surprise, going to have another crack at the Ignite project. The Ignite missile test they’d carried out during their last task-series on the way to Novamas had been a spectacular failure. It was
supposed
to destroy a planet so completely that there was nothing left of it but highly energised tachyons. In theory, it would enable tactical targeting of moons and worlds being used for weapon or warship manufacture while leaving the inhabited world unharmed. It was meant to be their latest ‘edge’ weapon in the stand-off that was the only thing preventing the Marfikians attacking their worlds. The test missile, however, had fired fractionally too soon, resulting in a system-trashing tsunami of debris. The Devast Industries team responsible for the project had evidently thought it would take them years to resolve the firing issue to the point where they were ready to test again. Here they were, though, back again, Mack leading a team of two specialist engineers. Devast had learned from experience in
one
thing, at least, Alex noted. They had made Mack project director, with line-manager authority over the others – Devast’s ‘round table’ egalitarian management structure had been a major problem the last time.

They had evidently taken care that there would be no repeat of the horribly embarrassing situation with Professor Candra Pattello, anyway. The paperwork sent with them by the Second made it clear that all three had been subject to in-depth personality profiling and mission training, too, as close to Fleet basic training as was feasible for civilians.

The other team, occupying the last two berths in the Second’s on-board lab, consisted of one of the Fleet’s own officers on assignment to the Second. Whether she actually
was
a Fleet officer in any meaningful terms was debatable, though – Misha Tregennis had certainly graduated from a Fleet Academy, but she had never served a tour of duty either aboard ship or in groundside admin. She’d been snapped up by the Second and spent the last eight years working for them in the Strategy and Operations think-tank. The Second had learned early on in their incarnation that if they wanted the best civilian minds to work with them on R&D projects then they had to be accommodating. The Second, therefore, had a first-names protocol with an optional ‘uniform’ of chinos and logoed t-shirts that could be worn by Fleet and civilians alike. Lt Tregennis came aboard wearing a low-cut shimmer top and skin-tight leggings, greeted the skipper with a ‘hi’ and invited him to call her Misha. In contrast, her assistant was smartly dressed in obviously brand new Second Irregulars kit, hair glossed into a solid cap and his face scrubbed to the point of shining. He
was a civilian, a post grad who’d beaten off more than three hundred other applicants for a year-long internship with the Second. He stood to attention, all but saluted, called Alex ‘sir’ and marched himself off to the lab like a soldier.

Getting
them
aboard, though, was the easy bit. Nearly all research teams came aboard with huge quantities of stuff, despite the fact that their lab was already well equipped. The Second was supposed to ensure that the combined teams did not bring aboard more gear than could be carried in the lab, but as crate after crate after crate was brought aboard, it became apparent that either they’d got their maths wrong or the various teams had brought more than they were supposed to.

‘All right, dear boy?’ Buzz came onto the command deck as the evening watch changeover sounded.

Alex grinned at him. A team of techs was dismantling part of the command datatable even as he was working on it, while another was taking apart the secondary helm console, activity mirrored all around the ship as the busy hum and checklist chants went on and on. Shuttles were still buzzing back and forth, bringing their own supplies aboard, with a team organising the tonnes of crates into their hold. Sub-lt Paytel was in the corridor outside the lab, itself stacked with crates, negotiating with the Second’s teams as to what was essential to have in the lab, what could be carried in the hold and what would have to be taken back groundside. From somewhere was wafting the scent of the strange, vaguely tomato-like soup and hot beef rolls, ‘soppo and a dog’, that the Fleet served up, traditionally, at busy times.

‘Great,’ said Alex, and added, with an air of deep contentment, ‘Good to be home.’

Five

The next eight days passed rapidly. Alex got very little sleep. He seemed to be everywhere about the ship, much of the time, supervising the strip-down and drills which were working the crew into a unified team. He was also dealing with all the procedures and paperwork required of a Fleet ship going back into active service following a period of stand-down, on top of the normal burden of bureaucracy any skipper had to deal with while in port.

Tina had never had so much fun in her life. Buzz had agreed that the best use of her time in this pre-launch period would be for her to continue shadowing the skipper and assisting as required. It wasn’t long before she found herself being handed the kind of tasks that really tested her assertion that she could be of use to them. The first of these was to deal with the formalities involved in bringing Lucky back aboard.

This was, in itself, a bizarre situation. The Fleet very definitely did not allow pets of any kind aboard their ships, and the fact that the Fourth had had to register their frigate as a space zoo in order to keep the gecko aboard was a matter of hilarity across the Fleet. After extensive negotiations, it had been agreed that Lucky would be looked after by the Port Authority while the ship was on stand-down. That had meant a medical isolation unit at the quarantine facility being specially adapted for the lizard, with suitably qualified vets employed at the Fourth’s expense to care for him.

Bringing the lizard back aboard ship needed far more, though, than merely fetching him back from quarantine. It required that the habitat created for him in their sickbay be checked and certified anew by the civilian authority which granted licenses to keep exotic animals. It also had to be inspected by the quarantine authority, with special arrangements made for a sterile transfer from the isolation unit to the shipboard habitat. Since all of the civilian authorities involved strongly disapproved of the Fourth keeping a lizard on their ship, they were just as unhelpful in that as they could be, to the point of being downright obstructive. Added to that was the complication of Greenstar making a last-minute legal application in a groundside court, trying to prevent the handover of the lizard. It was a waste of time trying to convince Greenstar that the Fourth was not conducting illegal experiments on their gecko. Even if they could convince individual activists of that, the position of the organisation would not be budged. And even if they did believe that Lucky was a much loved pet and mascot, Greenstar would still protest the keeping of a lizard on a warship, as an unsafe and unnatural environment for it.

Alex handed that over to Tina to deal with, commenting that Dr Tekawa was too busy at the moment to be bothered with all that. The medic certainly did have a good deal to do with all the new people coming aboard needing both medicals and the orientation he was responsible for in his role as shipboard safety officer. The truth was, though, as Tina understood very well, that Dr Tekawa was inclined to become emotional where Lucky was concerned, so dealing with his anxieties was actually part of the task in itself.