Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (27 page)

‘Okay, fine, I’ll put an organics warning on the packaging,’ Simon conceded. ‘Though I generally find that if you tell people they’re eating organic, many won’t try it at all. Which is dumb – where
do
they think the nutrients used in vats come from?’

Alex grinned – he too had noticed a bizarre assumption amongst groundsiders, particularly on Chartsey, that nutrients used for food production were made ‘in factories’, with no understanding of the fact that the raw products those factories were processing were crops. Agricultural worlds might have millions of kilometres of crops under cultivation, whole continents golden with ripening wheat or the vivid green of prota-beans. There were no farms on Chartsey, though, only a continuous influx of nutrient-filled tankers, keeping the capital world fed.

‘Well, dumb or not, you have to respect people’s right to decide for themselves whether to eat organic or not,’ he said. ‘Though I don’t think you’ll have many refusing, here. And yes, Simon, you may certainly bake.’

He held out his hand and Simon shook it, looking pleased.

‘Thanks, Alex,’ he said.

Alex didn’t react – he actually didn’t mind at all if passengers called him by his first name. Some of them did, for a while, as if feeling the need to assert their civilian status. Before long, though, they’d slip into shipboard ways and slide into calling him ‘skipper’.

Simon, though, remained rock solid in his own identity as a civilian, first naming everyone and continuing to dress in his sloppy groundsider gear. He was cheerful and friendly with everyone, equally at home in the Second’s lab, the wardroom and the mess decks. He was quick to take the tests he needed to, as well, to enable him to work aboard the ship both as a chef and as an artificer tech. It was in both capacities that he supervised the installation of the fittings that would create the exo-suite galley. It was tiny, only just room in there for him to work, but Simon expressed himself as delighted with it, calling it his own little kingdom.

And he was, to Alex’s relief, not the least temperamental. Even when Alex called a combat drill ten minutes after Simon had put cakes in the oven there was no complaint from him, still less the hysteria that would certainly have erupted from the likes of Marto and his Army. Simon merely dealt with it capably as the oven and other unnecessary tech shut down and the galley went into freefall. It was members of the crew who made dismayed noises, realising that the cakes would be ruined. One taste of the fondant fancies that were his first offering had got Simon quite a fan club on the Heron – by agreement, he would only bake if Alex or one of the command team asked him to, making that a treat for the crew. Within a week, the news that he was baking would get a happy buzz going through the ship.

He was, however, far more than just a talented chef. He was soon a familiar face in the artificer workshop, machining parts and equipment Davie wanted for the exosuite. And he was, obviously, also a medic. Rangi Tekawa, with superhuman effort, managed
not
to follow him around like an eager puppy asking him a thousand questions a day. Instead, he managed to do the mature, professional thing and not try to monopolise his hero’s time. It was obvious to everyone, though, that Simon
was
his hero. That didn’t take a knock, even on Simon’s frankly expressed opinion of spiritual healing.

‘It’s okay as welfare provision,’ he said, with lordly tolerance, ‘no issue with that – as I’ve said many times in the literature, anything that makes the patient feel more comfortable and confident in their treatment is valid medical technique. But let’s not have any cack about ‘natural healing’, Rangi. Patients are sick because nature has gone wrong. They get better because we
fix
them, scientifically. Science rules.’

Rangi, devoutly spiritual himself, just laughed. If anything, he seemed pleased by Simon’s blunt, dismissive attitude. Simon, it seemed, was well known in medical circles for his forthright views, often expressed in letters which the recipients tended to splutter with fury about even years later. One of the issues he’d had with the faculty at Chartsey SU, indeed, was a request from the Dean that he tone down such unsolicited advice to fellow medics.

‘But what’s the point of being Professor of Neurosurgery at Chartsey Med if you can’t light a rocket under some dumbo consultant?’ was Simon’s entirely typical response.

The relationship with senior faculty had clearly been somewhat strained, even before the situation with the hotel job had brought things to breaking point. Simon had persuaded one of Chartsey’s leading hotels to allow him to bake in their kitchens, after telling them that he could do better than the delicacies they were offering as part of their famous afternoon tea. Having proved that he
could
, they’d come to an arrangement by which he could turn up there whenever he liked and bake chef’s specials. Since they had rules about amateurs working in their kitchens, though, they employed him as a visiting chef. When the Dean had objected to this as a faculty member taking a second job without the consent of the university, Simon had said he’d donate his earnings from the hotel to whatever charity the Dean wanted. The Dean, however, had not been appeased. Things had been said about appropriate professional image, of the loss of respect amongst students for a professor who had a weekend job baking fairy cakes, of the way that reflected embarrassingly on the faculty as a whole, verging on the unforgivable sin of bringing the university into disrepute.

Simon had resigned, after that, with a letter so blistering that the Dean had refused to enter it into faculty meeting minutes, merely recording that Professor Penarth’s resignation had been accepted due to his desire to explore wider avenues. The rest of the faculty had voted him ‘Emeritus’ status, though, something that was usually only conferred when a professor retired after long and distinguished service, so it was apparent that the Dean had not had things all his own way.

Alex was not surprised, as he got to know Simon better, that Davie had offered him a job. Quite apart from his obvious talents, Davie and Simon had a lot in common. Simon didn’t have Davie’s multicognitive intelligence, of course, but he was the nearest thing humanity came to that without genetic enhancement. He, too, had grown up in a strange, isolated world, surrounded by teams of people monitoring his every waking moment. Most importantly, he was a free spirit, unconstrained by other people’s small-minded views of what he should be. Davie would admire that, Alex knew. And he would like it, too, that Simon was not impressed either by his genetic enhancements or his wealth. It had not been any offer of money that had overcome all the universities and companies scrabbling to make Simon the best offer they could get on the table. It had been, quite simply, the offer to let him do whatever he wanted. The one proviso Davie had made was that Simon would not be his doctor – he had enough medics on his case, he said,
more
than enough, so Simon could treat anyone else as patients if he liked, but must leave him be.

So, Simon did his own thing, and was very soon so much at home on the Heron that it felt as if he had been with them all along. Their other passengers were just as well integrated, helping out in whatever ways they could and merging comfortably with the crew. The one tension was the Devast team’s doubt over the Fourth’s ability to fix the Ignite missile.

The Devast team had that doubt clear on their faces when they met with Alex and the Ordnance team in the missile room for the inspection and sign-off of the upgraded missile. The only thing Micky Efalto had actually done had been to replace the nano-gyro, a regulating device on the chronometer. It was a remarkably low tech bit of gear, no more than a nano-metronome which oscillated around a thousand times a second. Exactly how many times it oscillated was one of the controls adjusted by engineers to calibrate superlight cores for local wave-space conditions.

‘But it just can’t be that simple,’ said Jate, the Devast team’s superlight propulsion engineer. She must have said ‘it can’t be that simple’ at least fifty times over the last week, but still evidently felt that it needed saying again. They were standing around the Ignite, two metres of boxy octagonal casing with a plain grey finish. ‘The gyro we used
is
the diamond standard for missile design.’

‘Ours is better,’ Micky said, with the air of someone prepared to have this conversation as many times as it took for the poor fools to understand it. ‘Morry’s gyro self-calibrates for all but the most extreme conditions, using a gee-balance to stabilise...’

‘Thank you, Mr Efalto,’ Alex interposed, knowing that once he got started on that lecture, Leading Star Efalto would just keep talking till somebody stopped him.

The Devast team looked at Morry Morelle. The ship’s engineer had developed this modification more than ten years before – that was one of the reasons Alex had fought to get him as engineer on the Minnow, because of his previous involvement with Second Irregulars R&D. Morry smiled modestly.

‘I do believe that this will address the issue of temporal drift,’ he assured them, again, for at least the fiftieth time.

The data received from the first Ignite test had shown that according to the missile itself, it had detonated precisely on schedule. The difficulty was that in the two hours between it being fired out in deep space and arriving at the target point, wave space contours had affected the superlight field, causing both physical and temporal drift in the navigation system. The missile, after all, did not have the massive control and calibration systems a superlight mix core did on a starship.

‘Well, the only way we’ll know is when we fire it,’ Mack observed, philosophically.

‘If it
doesn’t
work, though,’ Jate pointed out, with a tone that made it very clear she really meant
when
it doesn’t work, ‘we’ve only got one missile left. And even if it
did
work, it would be better, ideally, to have one to test, one to demonstrate and one to give them along with the specs.’

She had a real gift for stating the obvious, Alex felt, but just smiled, patiently.

‘I have every confidence in our team,’ he said, and looked around at them – the engineer, ordnance officer, Micky Efalto and Tina Lucas, brought in on the project more to learn than to contribute. ‘Well done, all of you,’ he said, knowing that the hardest aspect of this project had been contending with the anxieties and scepticism of the Devast team.

‘And we can always make another missile,’ Micky Efalto added, reassuringly.

The Devast trio cracked up laughing. Then they realised that he meant it. They had brought some crates of parts along in addition to the two finished missiles, in case they were needed for the refit. Technically, there were at least most of the bits there needed to build a third missile, but it wasn’t as if you could put it together like a model starship kit.

‘Don’t be daft!’ Jate told him, amused but patronising to the nth degree. ‘You can’t just build a missile like this! You need labs, clean rooms, a sterile assembly space – our prototype construction at Devast occupies two hangars and an office block.
And
employs more than eight hundred people.’

‘Or,’ said Micky, ‘you can do it in a starship artificer workshop.’

The Devast team did not look convinced. They had been in the artificer workshop. It was one of the few departments on the ship contained in its own area. Most departments had tech all over the ship and a control area which was, like the command deck itself, also a transit route for people going through. The artificer workshop was different because it was a noisy and high hazard area, liable to produce quantities of dust. It was run on clean-room protocols with internal airlock access and a requirement to do clean-room decontam and wear survival suits. Once you got in there, though, it hardly seemed worth the effort. The four by six metre room was so packed with equipment, tools and stores that there was only just about room for two people at the workbench. It was mostly used for training. It was possible that the Devast’s team’s impression of it had been coloured by the fact that when they visited, one of the rookie crew was being taught how to make rivets, operating a punch machine that might well have been found in a well equipped high school.

‘There isn’t even room in there to
put
the missile, let alone build one,’ Mack observed, with a grin.

Micky Efalto folded his arms, tipped his head to one side and stared fixedly at the Devast project manager.

‘Wanna bet?’

Mack laughed. ‘Not with the skipper here, no,’ he said, and grinned at Alex, evidently expecting him to laugh and dismiss the suggestion as obviously impossible.

‘Very wise,’ Alex told him. ‘If I was putting a dollar on it myself, it would be on our team.’ He looked at the rating, considering.

‘Just give me a week,’ Micky requested, with an air of hope and determination, clearly a
point
to make here.

‘A week’ in Efalto-time meant something more like two months, Alex recognised. The Devast team would be gone by then.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘but throw it out for standby – you supervise, task series and inspect.’

That way, he felt, they stood a reasonable chance of getting the missile built before the Devast team departed. It meant that Micky would list all the jobs that needed to be done in the assembly, in the order that they needed to be done, just as was their custom for strip-down diagnostics. In this instance, though, the jobs would be picked up and carried out by any suitably qualified techs giving it some of their standby time, time when they were rostered for duty if needed but could do training or other approved activity, otherwise.

‘Done, skipper!’ said Micky, in much the same tones as if he spat on his hand and slapped it with the skipper’s.

Alex nodded back. Both of them knew that there was big kudos at stake, in this – it wasn’t really a matter of impressing the Devast team here, or even of them going back to their company and impressing
them
. Word would get back to the Second Irregulars, the Admiralty and the Senate. None of them would want that to be a report that the Fourth had tried to build a missile on their ship, but failed.