Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (32 page)

‘I haven’t decided on that, yet,’ Alex reminded him. ‘But okay, on principle, good point. And I take your point about the refectory, too, though I have to say that I’ve stood out against making that a time-out area for officers
on
workload grounds, knowing very well that some of them would slide meetings and pastoral care in there to dodge workload limits. But if we set firm boundaries on what is okay and what isn’t in a designated social space, hmmn, maybe.’

‘Trust me, I will set firm boundaries,’ Simon said, with a grin of anticipation. ‘I have a lecture prepared for people who think it’s kudos to bust workload regs – two or three hours following them around and telling them every potential consequence to their short and long term health should get the point across.’

Alex thought about that, and looked appalled.

‘That’s...’ he said, and then saw Simon’s expression, ‘got my full support,’ he amended, hastily, seeing that the alternative would be for that lecture to be delivered at
him
.

‘Good boy,’ said Simon, with an indulgent note. Alex grinned – he was two years older than the medic – but just drank some more of his coffee, feeling that he’d dodged a bullet, there.

‘Thank you, Simon,’ he said, and admitted, ‘Sometimes it helps for someone to come in with a clear, outsider’s eye.’

‘You are very welcome,’ Simon said. ‘Special offer, this month only,’ he told him. ‘One free counselling session with every box of doughnuts.’

Alex smiled.

‘And, I take it,’ he queried, just a little uneasily, ‘entirely confidential?’

‘Oh, yes, certainly, goes without saying.’ Simon assured him. ‘Or
should
.’ He got up, evidently thinking that the ‘two guys talking about stuff over coffee’ had come to a natural end. ‘And if anyone asks what I was doing in the skipper’s sleeping cabin at four in the morning, I’ll just...’ he tapped his nose, significantly. ‘Mind your own.’

He gave him a twinkling look that made it apparent that he knew very well what people would assume from
that
, and went on his way, leaving Alex laughing.

Eleven

Later that day, Alex put the ruling into the log which created the interdeck. The name had been suggested by Simon himself to encompass not just the new exosuite but the gym and social facilities. The name, he said, was intended to convey an area of the ship that was ‘inter’, meaning ‘between’, as an environment where officers, crew and passengers could meet on equal terms. There was some precedent for that on Fleet ships, on carriers at least, which had a leisure zone complete with cafe and shops. For a frigate to create such a thing would be regarded as outrageously pretentious. But then, as Buzz observed, the justification for such a facility on a carrier was that they might be out in space for up to a year, which a frigate was not expected to be.

‘Since we’re doing the work of a carrier, we deserve the same facilities,’ he said, and with no argument on that from any of the other officers, Alex approved it.

It needed very little work – also at Simon’s suggestion, the study booths currently on mess deck four were moved into the conference room in the exo suite and the big screen there set up as an academic notice board. The provision of a drinks dispenser and putting a box of doughnuts on the table completed its re-branding as ‘the refectory’. There was a little unease amongst the intelligentsia at first, going in there. It was, after all, a room which had been designed for the hoped-for outcome, a meeting with the Samartians. Davie had kept it very clean and simple, white walls and a long grey conference table with straight backed chairs. It wasn’t, as one of the Second’s team observed, very
homely
. But given some doughnuts, it wasn’t long before they’d started discussing the psychological effects of minimalist design, and with that, they were off.

For Alex, though, it was the lounge that was to be his home away from home. Davie had designed the exosuite to be as multifunctional as space and ingenuity allowed. It was in itself a quarantine area, with a further small clean-zone within. Entering the main door brought you into an area which could be set up with sofas and low tables, small tables and chairs, a dining table or just left empty as an imposing ante-room to the conference room beyond. To one side was the smaller contained clean-room area, a comfort-zone facility for exo-visitors to make use of lavatories in a sterile environment. They did not know, after all, whether Samartians would be safe in their environment, and it was best to presume that they wouldn’t. On the other side of the ante-room was Simon’s little galley and a store for the furniture that wasn’t in use.

Inside the store was a corner Davie described as ‘the plant floor’. A compact siliplas extrusion plant had been installed, there. They had plastics extrusion printers in the artificer workshop, too, of course, but they were military hardware, designed for precision engineering. This was a commercial model, brought over from the Stepeasy, lighter and quicker, more suitable for making household items. Next to it was a considerably larger piece of tech with man-sized coils and an internal furnace. This was a micro-refinery, capable of breaking down siliplas items and recycling them back to base gel which could be used again. That was extremely power hungry – it would use enough energy in breaking down a five gramme teaspoon to power the average home for more than three months. That was not a problem on a starship, though, superlight mix cores producing more side-effect power than the ship could ever use.

Alex checked out the galley, too – he was required to, as this was the official skipper’s inspection which would sign off the refit work as complete. He had no fault to find with any of it, everything just as Davie had detailed in his proposal, at least until they came to the shop.

That was actually just a display case, tucked into an alcove beside the galley hatch. Alex had approved it to stock consumables like toiletries. Crew and passengers currently had to go to the hold to pick up anything they wanted in that line, which meant a rating having to get it for them from the relevant crate. It would be more convenient to have high demand consumables there which anyone could sign for and take.

To Alex’s incredulity, though, there was also a display of mugs and pens.

‘You have got to be
kidding
me!’ he exclaimed, as he took in the display of mugs and pens in different colours, though all with the Fourth Fleet Irregulars logo and a picture of the Heron. ‘Since when has any Fleet ship had a
gift shop?’

‘Market research indicates a demand for it,’ said Davie, very innocently. ‘And not just passengers, either, though they certainly will want to buy souvenirs for themselves and people back home. Members of the crew, too, have told me that they ‘wouldn’t mind’ being able to buy mugs and pens as gifts for family and friends – there’s a market for expansion of the range, for sure. Production was limited by manufacturing capacity, specifically, the amount of time I had on the plant floor before my boredom threshold kicked in. But given a bigger manufacturing base, I feel there’s good potential here for expanding the range, opening another outlet at the base and aiming to go intersystem corporate by the end of the year.’

‘Ohhhh,’ Alex groaned, but cocked a teasing eyebrow. ‘Getting corporate withdrawal?’ He queried. ‘Having to get your entrepreneur fix, any way you can?’

‘Business savvy, encoded in the DNA.’ Davie grinned back. ‘Can’t see an opportunity, no matter how small, without the itch to make it happen. Anyway, they’re on at cost – I do
know
you, see. You’re polite about the concept of clean and green corporate practice, but deep down in your soul, encoded in
your
DNA, is a fundamental belief that profit is a dirty word.’

Alex could not deny that the idea of trying to make a profit from his passengers and crew, no matter how trivial, would have made him very uncomfortable. But making them available at cost of production was just tongue-in-cheek amusing. So he just laughed, and the mugs and pens were allowed to stay.

The mugs, as it turned out, were a feature of the lounge, as the refreshment unit Davie had installed there was set up to use them rather than the Fleet-issue ones used in the rest of the ship.

‘Important to give the place a sense of identity,’ Davie observed, and Alex didn’t argue with that.

It felt, in fact, just lovely to sit in that light, airy lounge with its white walls, charcoal-coloured sofas and pale silver tables. There were two large holoscreens on opposite walls; one showed the very combination of watch and comms feeds that Alex liked to have on screens, while the other was set up as a holo-window, showing visual display of the space they were traversing. You really could sit here and watch the stars go by.

And Alex did just that, taking his down-time there from then on. The crew, seeing him having a game of triplink there with Misha Tregennis, were quite surprised. They were even more surprised to see him there late that evening, going to the lounge for his quiet time before turning in. It had been noted, too, that he’d pushed his seat back from the command table quite frequently, all day, sitting back, obviously taking a bit of a break.

‘What’s happened to the skipper?’ was a frequent question as the day went on. There was some anxiety over that, too. Skipper von Strada was their north star, their point of certainty no matter how far from home they might be. ‘Is he okay?’ people wondered, with worried speculation about the possibility that he might be on some kind of medical order, ill or exhausted.

By mid-afternoon, though, all became clear. Simon had already identified one of the worst offenders for busting workload regs – Cadet Officer Tina Lucas. She no longer had the exceptional-workload permit that Rangi had agreed to while she was shadowing the captain, and on record, at least, was keeping just within the rules. Because she was working with all the officers in so many different capacities, though, she was never under anyone’s direct supervision for long. And she was, as Simon had noted, adept at slipping work under the radar, carrying out tasks in such a way that they would not flag as work activity.

He was only waiting for Tina to make one mistake. At lunchtime, she made it. Instead of taking the half hour break she was scheduled for and sitting down to eat a proper meal, she grabbed a snack roll and some candy from the galley hatch and ate it on her way to engineering.

Simon pounced. He intercepted her before she got to engineering and asked her pleasantly what she was doing. When she made the even bigger mistake of using the word ‘just’ in her explanation, that she was just grabbing a snack today because she was a bit busy, Simon smiled.

And, for the next two and three quarter hours, he followed her, delivering his lecture. He was perfectly friendly about it, his manner earnestly helpful. But he just would not,
not
shut up. The only place she could get away from him was the lavatory, and even then he waited outside, resuming what he’d been saying at exactly the point he’d broken off as soon as she opened the door. All attempts to reason with him and point out that he was disrupting her work and being really
really
annoying had had about as much effect as attempting to reason with a dripping tap. She’d eventually gone to the command deck in the hope that Alex or Buzz would see what was going on and intervene.

Alex, though, just laughed.

‘Oh,
don’t
tell me you busted workload,’ he said, seeing Simon right at her elbow. He was, at the time, giving her an extremely detailed account of the effects of stomach ulcers.

‘Sir,’ Tina said, half pleading and half desperate. ‘I just grabbed a working lunch, sir. And he won’t
stop
.’

At the word ‘just’, though, Simon
did
stop. For one wonderful moment Tina thought she’d actually won, as the concerned, insistent drone broke off. Then she saw the look, heard the sigh, the air of a man prepared to do this as many times as needed to get his point across. Then he started the lecture again, afresh, all the way from the beginning. Tina looked for a moment as if she might howl at that, but managed to keep her composure, looking back at Alex with yearning appeal. ‘
Sir
?’

‘Sorry, Ms Lucas,’ Alex said, a little sympathetic but mostly amused. ‘You are on your own in this one.’ And as she looked at him, as if wondering as if this could be some kind of test, he told her, ‘Professor Penarth has taken on responsibility for monitoring health and safety regulations with respect to workload. This will be
his
version of a friendly intervention. And I would, I really would, strongly advise that you refrain from using the word ‘just’ in that context.’

By mid afternoon, when Tina finally cracked and begged for mercy, the Heron’s shipboard jargon had acquired a new verb – to be Simoned, defined as being landed on like a ton of duralloy for working when you shouldn’t.

Within a couple of days, though, that too was absorbed into shipboard definition of ‘normal’. Anxiety about the skipper turned quickly to amusement – it had of course been
noticed
that Simon had gone to his daycabin at four in the morning, though it was assumed that he had got the skipper out of bed and talked to him in the daycabin. Some few were indignant over this civilian newcomer giving their skipper a hard time and even interfering with the way he carried out his command. Most, though, saw that the skipper himself was fine with it, and had a laugh, too, speculating on how the skipper himself had responded to The Lecture.