Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (2 page)

‘I can’t imagine why,’ Jermane said, frankly. ‘I’m nobody at all important.’ The Sub chuckled, at that.

‘They don’t,’ he pointed out, pitching his voice above the long
whoosh
that erupted at that point, ‘usually send couriers to carry people who
aren’t
important.’

‘But I’m not, honestly,’ Jermane said, putting his hand on his heart. ‘I’m just a linguist, me. I work in Linguistics. I do linguistic analysis, that’s all, strictly backroom, never in front line contact or anything like that.’

‘Well, I guess they’ve got something they want you to analyse, then.’ The Sub said, and smiled. ‘Anyway, we’ll do our bit, get you to the rendezvous. It’s going to be quite a run, I’m afraid – five and a half weeks. But we’ll do our best to make you comfortable.’

It was not, as Jermane soon realised, possible to be comfortable aboard the courier. There were only two possibilities, either to sit at the little table in the living area, or go to his bunk. When they first showed him his bunk he thought they were having him on, winding up the civilian with this obviously ludicrous thing. He was still waiting for them to crack up laughing and show him to his
real
bunk when they said goodnight and left him to it.

It wasn’t a bunk, it was nothing
like
a bunk, nothing like any bunk Jermane had experienced, anyway. It was only just wide enough to lay on and had no mattress, or even proper bedding. He’d been given a paper-thin sleeping bag and inflatable pillow. There was no privacy screen, no lockers, no environmental controls. And it was in the airlock. They might
tell
him it was safe, that the airlock was also their survival pod, but it just didn’t feel right, laying there with the knowledge that there was only one hatchway between him and outer space.

And if he’d hoped it might be quieter in here, it wasn’t. The tank that made the
whoosh
noise turned out to be right over his bunk, adding an additional tremor every time it gushed off, which it did every few minutes at irregular intervals. His bunk was vibrating continuously anyway. It was like trying to sleep on a vibratory exercise table. And when he went to use the shower he found it coffin-sized. Having a shower or using the lavatory required careful planning and some agility.

He understood now, too late, why they’d asked him if he was subject to claustrophobia before he went aboard. And he would not have been human if he hadn’t thought rather wistfully of his quarters on the Embassy III, the third time the whoosh-tank woke him up.

Five and a half weeks, he thought. Five and a half weeks of this, and then probably another week on another ship that would take him to Sentinel. And then what? What could be so urgent, so important, that it merited the President himself sending a courier to race him out to Sentinel? What could there possibly
be
that he was considered more qualified to translate than any other linguist in the service? There had to be fifty linguists in the exodiplomacy service just as well qualified as he was, Jermane thought, and no reason he could think of to single him out for this or any other assignment. And not even to tell him where he was going, or why… that had to be something big, really
really
big, but if it was something like another species making first contact, again, why would they be asking for
him
?

Finding his brain running round in circles, Jermane wriggled into a marginally less uncomfortable position, trying to prop his pillow so that his teeth weren’t being jarred by the vibration, and counselled himself to patience. He was just going to have to wait.

*
*
*

              Five and a half weeks later, he stepped through the airlock to board the freighter Chanticleer. It was a trademaster-class freighter, with a crew of eight. They were considered comfortable ships by spacers, though not particularly roomy.

To Jermane, though, it seemed enormous. His ears were ringing with the sudden silence, or at least what seemed like silence after the din they’d been subjected to for the last month. The space he stepped into seemed vast, and the deck seemed to be swaying, too.

‘Hello.’ A briskly efficient woman was there at the airlock to meet him, giving him an understanding look as she saw his dazed expression and jelly-legged walk. ‘Mr Taerling, is it? I’m Andi Berenard, skipper of the Chanticleer. Welcome aboard.’

‘Uh, thank you, thank you very much,’ Jermane managed.

He had no idea who these people were, or why he was here. His hopes that they would be able to answer his questions, though, were quickly dashed. Having shaken his hand, the first thing Andi asked was, ‘So, have you brought us our orders?’

She seemed disappointed when he said that he hadn’t, though accepted it philosophically.

‘We’ve been here twelve days,’ she informed him, as she led him to the mess deck. ‘We’re waiting for orders on where we’re to drop off our cargo.’

They were carrying two cargo containers, Jermane discovered, later. He’d been able to have a long hot shower in a cubicle he didn’t have to squirm around in like a trainee escapologist, and a meal that tasted like the finest cuisine after the mushy prepacks served on the courier. Best of all, they’d given him a really good, fresh, fragrant cup of tea. Jermane was feeling better.

‘What kind of cargo?’ he asked, hopefully.

‘We have no idea,’ Andi Berenard grinned at that, as several of the crew laughed. ‘That’s not the kind of question you ask in our line of work,’ she explained. ‘We’re a civilian ship, but we handle classified deliveries for the Fleet, no questions asked. We won’t even ask you what it might be that you’re involved in.’

‘Just as well, since I don’t have a clue, myself,’ Jermane said frankly. ‘But you can’t tell me
anything
? Not where the cargo came from, or who it might be for, or how long it will be till we get there?’

‘None of the above,’ Andi Berenard confirmed. ‘We picked up the cargo at a cold drop around six weeks back, with orders to wait here till we’re told where to deliver it. All we know is that one of the containers has 11.64 tonnes of stuff in it, the other 3.62. So now you know as much as we do.’ She surveyed him thoughtfully. ‘And now, of course, there’s you. I daresay we’ll be dropping you, too.’

Jermane, the linguist, noted the significance of her using the word ‘dropping’ there, rather than ‘transferring.’

‘Dropping?’ he queried.

‘Yes.’ She spoke as if that was entirely routine. ‘As you’re evidently intended to be part of the cargo…’ she gave him a friendly grin to show that that was not meant to be offensive, ‘we’ll drop you along with it, to be collected. Don’t worry,’ she said, seeing his look of alarm, ‘we do this all the time – well, quite often, anyway. We’ll leave you at a survival dome with all the supplies you need; you’ll be fine.’

Jermane’s expression cleared a little. He was familiar with the kind of survival domes maintained along shipping routes. They provided emergency supplies and welcome opportunities for Fleet and freighter crews to get off the ship for a while. Few liners called at them, because the D7 worlds classified and used for that purpose were not likely to impress liner passengers. They were almost always of the kind that spacers referred to as ‘slimeworlds’, primitive biospheres with just enough of a survivable atmosphere to make them tolerable with no more than an oxygen nose-clip. The ones Jermane had visited were either freezing cold or steaming with humidity, the stink of rotting algae everywhere. Even so, most of them had gardens of a sort, a terraforming effort spreading out from the survival dome and added to by ships which cast out seeds and planted trees provided by the Terraforming Society. The domes themselves were like small hotels, too, with leisure facilities maintained and supplied by the ships which used them. It wouldn’t be much fun being left at such a dome, but Jermane would cope.

‘We will be on a shipping route, then,’ he surmised, which got blank looks and some bewilderment from the Chanticleer’s crew.

‘Highly unlikely,’ Andi told him. ‘It will almost certainly be a cold drop way out in the middle of nowhere. Our orders are that we’re not even to call in at Sentinel for supplies, coming or going – we’re dark running all the way, off route, avoiding all contact with other ships. But we carry our own survival dome for things like this, see – we’ll set it up for you and make sure you have everything you need.’

Jermane stared at her, and the cup of tea he held in his hand hovered between table and mouth as if he’d been put into some kind of stasis.

‘But…’ he managed to pull himself together after a few seconds, and set down the cup with exaggerated care, ‘you can’t mean that you’d leave me somewhere like that, in a survival dome,
all by myself?’

Andi looked sympathetic, but nodded. ‘It’s what we have to do in cold drops,’ she said. ‘It may be, of course, that we’re sent to a rendezvous where we can transfer you to the other ship directly, but to be honest I have to say that this kind of thing doesn’t usually work that way. The whole idea is to break the supply chain down into sections so nobody involved knows what is being moved, where, or why. We almost always make delivery to cold drops and never know who picked up the cargo, or what it was for.

‘You needn’t worry, though,’ she said, as she saw his expression. ‘There is a very well established procedure for this. We’ll make sure you’re absolutely safe and have everything you need before we go, and the other ship will pick you up quite soon, usually no more than a week or two. And you needn’t worry about being marooned; there’s always a failsafe in place where passengers are involved. Another ship will be tasked to carry out a check on the system later to ensure that you’re picked up okay. At the absolute worst, worst case scenario, you’d be there for three months before the failsafe ship picked you up, okay?’

She spoke as if she thought that that would be reassuring, and so perhaps it might have been to a spacer or an intelligence agent used to this kind of stunt. Jermane, however, was fighting against panic. He was a naturally sociable man and the idea of being stranded, completely alone, for anything up to three months was making him feel physically sick.

He opened his mouth to protest that he couldn’t do that, that they couldn’t possibly
do
that to him, and then realised what he was about to say, and closed his lips firmly. He could, of course, refuse to go. It was unlikely that Andi Berenard would force him off the ship at gunpoint. But he knew, with absolute certainty, that he wasn’t going to refuse. On the one hand, there was all his burning curiosity about what was going on here and his yearning for the adventure that had finally come his way. On the other hand, there was the sure knowledge that he would never have any self-respect again if he had to admit that, having agreed to the President’s request for him to undertake this clearly very important mission, he had bottled out because he was scared to be left on his own.

‘Okay,’ he managed, in a strangled voice.

Andi Berenard smiled at him with kindly understanding.

‘You’ll be fine,’ she promised.

Jermane was still just as apprehensive, though, when the courier bringing their orders arrived four days later. He was hoping against hope that the orders would be for a ship rendezvous or even perhaps that the Chanticleer should take him to X-Base Sentinel. He would almost rather have hoped that the courier would bring orders saying that he wasn’t required for whatever it was after all, than face the prospect of being left alone.

Almost, but not quite. His heart was hammering as he watched the courier flash into the system. The Chanticleer sent a shuttle over to collect their orders, sealed on high security tape that would not allow for them to be transmitted even on the most encrypted comms. Within moments of the shuttle disengaging, the courier had whirled away and hurtled off again, not even lingering for so much as a cup of coffee.

‘As expected,’ Andi Beremard informed him and her crew, once she’d opened the orders. ‘Cold drop, here.’

She indicated on a star chart and as her crew immediately started laying in a course for the designated system, Jermane stared anxiously at the map.

‘What’s there?’ he asked the skipper.

‘Nothing, that’s the point,’ Andi told him, after a brief pause in which she worked out that this was a serious question. ‘There are thousands of wild systems in this sector – this one will almost certainly have been picked out at random with those coordinates given only to us and to the ship being assigned to pick up the cargo.’

Jermane lifted his eyes from the chart and stared at her. He had a sense of being moved about like a very small piece in a very big game. Sooner or later, surely,
surely
, he would reach his destination and find out what they wanted him to do. The mind boggled, though, at what could be so important, so urgent and so secret, that it merited this extraordinary level of manoeuvring, just to get him to wherever they wanted him to be, along with whatever was in those containers.

‘And there’s nothing about me in the orders?’ he asked.

‘Sorry.’ She showed him the orders, which consisted merely of cold-drop coordinates and a time frame in which they were to deliver their cargo and get clear of the system. The order was signed by Dix Harangay, First Lord of the Admiralty.

‘Those orders are dated the same day as the letter to Ambassador Jeynkins,’ Jermane was desperate for any clue as to what he was caught up in, here, and seized on that tiny scrap of information. ‘But if they were sent at the same time, from Chartsey, shouldn’t these have arrived a lot sooner?’

‘Well, either they were held back to be delivered after you were likely to arrive, or they were sent somewhere else first,’ Andi commented, with a distinct lack of interest, either way. ‘It doesn’t really matter, Jer,’ she pointed out, as he looked doubtfully at her. ‘Speculation in situations like this only winds things up, makes you more confused and anxious. All we can do is follow our orders and be patient, even accept that sometimes we never
do
find out what’s going on. And that’s okay, you know? We have to trust that there are good reasons for this level of security, and if it’s in the best interests of the League for us not to be let in on the bigger picture, we just have to accept that and do our bit to the best of our ability.’