Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (34 page)

‘
Would
I?’ Mako answered, his look of radiant joy answer enough in itself.

‘Excellent – talk to him about it, then, and to Buzz, to be sure you’re happy with it all, before we make anything official.’ Alex said. ‘But I should say, too, in fairness to you, that you should probably wait a few days before you make that decision. I’m sure you’ve noticed already that we’re in a Telmar Dip, today.’

Mako groaned, and smacked himself on the forehead, indicating that he had
not
noticed it. He’d experienced this before – it was a very common and well understood phenomenon on starships, a point of psychological dip that often happened two or three weeks out into the journey. In this case, there was a sense of slight anti-climax, perhaps, after the big event of their newbies graduating, and they were also at a low point in terms of the journey. They weren’t half way there, yet, and though there was plenty to do and no shortage of motivation, there was a sense of ‘a long way come but an even longer way to go’ which could affect morale.

‘It isn’t major,’ Alex assured him. ‘We’re all so focussed on the mission, it will pick up very quickly, anyway. But I’ve arranged a combat exercise, this afternoon, which should help everyone over the slump.’

It did that.

The combat exercise was something new, a ‘capture the flag’ game which would involve, for the first time, boarding operations.

There was little operational justification for that, as Alex freely admitted. They were not intending any kind of boarding operations against the Samartians and there was no point even training to attempt to board a Marfikian ship. On the very rare occasions where their ships were so damaged that they couldn’t get away, they exploded, presumably in self-destruct, before any attempt to board them could be accomplished.

It would do no harm, though, Alex said, to give their boarding teams a workout, and might be useful, at least, in training to defend the ship from being boarded, themselves.

For this first exercise, though, it would be the tender which was boarded. The rules of the exercise were set out in a briefing, and Alex handed Davie a token ‘trophy’ – one of their Fourth Fleet Irregulars mugs from the interdeck. The object of the game was simple – the mug had to be kept on the tender’s command deck datatable with no tricks like gluing or chaining it down, and whichever ship had possession of it at the end of an hour would be declared the winner.

Davie, however, upped the ante, right from the start. As he was going through the airlock to board the shuttle that would take him over to the tender, he stole their emblem plaque.

He took it so quickly, they didn’t even see what he’d done until the airlock hatch was closing. He had the plaque in one hand and a rivet-puller in the other, waving both at Buzz and grinning.

The plaque was only worth a few dollars. It was just a siliplas panel embossed with Fleet insignia and their full ID and registration number. It was displayed, as regulations required, at eye level on the bulkhead facing the main entry airlock. Nobody took any more notice of it than any other routine signage about the ship.

Davie had got them nailed, though, knowing exactly what kind of reaction taking their ID would get. He was sniggering when Alex called him as the shuttle crossed over to the tender. He could hear the indignation going on in the background, behind Alex’s request that he bring their ID plate back,
now
.

‘Come get it,’ Davie challenged, and broke off the comms.

Alex just had to grin, and to acknowledge, too, that Davie had just made this exercise a good deal more engaging even than it would have been, with a prize of
real
value at stake.

He had a lot more up his sleeve than that, though. The tender gave them a very lively run of it in the pursuit phase of the exercise, with more than half an hour of acrobatic manoeuvres and blitzing fire before Alex was able to send his fighters in.

Buzz took over at that point – he was leading the boarding parties, three teams boarding from the fighters which had swooped to different airlocks. They were wearing the mirror-finish combat suits and carrying the ferocious-looking rifles, both unique to the Fourth, which Buzz himself had developed. Both, in fact, were special effects, the suits no more than shined-up hullwalker gear and the rifles just an impressive casing fitted over perfectly standard Fleet issue boarding guns. Davie had been allowed to arm his crew, too, with survival suits and simulator weapons, with agreed rules similar to those of a laser-combat game.

Davie, however, was playing by his own rules. Everyone on the Heron was able to watch what was happening via the boarding party helmet feeds being shown on the command deck. When they saw what Davie had done, the whole ship erupted with laughter. Shion was laughing so much she had tears streaming down her face. That was something of a problem since she was in a combat suit, herself, though remaining aboard the lead fighter as pilot, ready to get the boarding party away. She was certainly not capable of piloting safely, right then, but to be fair, nor were either of the other two. Even Alex cracked up, abandoning any attempt at maintaining composure.

Davie had equipped his crew with simulator weapons, all right. But he had given them glop guns. They were firing a luminous custard-like glop which splatted and spattered everywhere. He had also equipped them with pop-grenades which scattered sparkles and pink confetti.

Alex and Buzz would have said that they had, between them, trained for every conceivable eventuality. Neither of them, however, had trained for a situation in which their boarding parties were incapacitated by sheer hilarity, falling about laughing, yelling like kids and hurling bits of glop back at their attackers.

They did manage to retrieve their plaque in the end, but only because Shion pulled herself together sufficiently to hand over to her co-pilot and join the boarding ops herself. The tender was in freefall and she zipped through it so fast that nobody had time to get a target lock on her, just saw a blur. She’d grabbed the plaque before they could stop her, getting a huge cheer from the Heron’s crew and a laughing surrender from Davie.

They were still laughing about it hours later, with their plaque restored to pride of place. The operational benefit of the exercise was debatable, but the boost to morale was very real.

The irony of it was that when news about
that
got out, nobody would believe it. It just had to be a wind-up, Fleet and merchant spacers would agree, hearing tales of custard guns and descriptions of Buzz Burroughs covered in yellow glop and pink sparkles. That was just too bonkers, even for the Fourth.

The following day, Tina Lucas came to see the skipper. It had been confirmed by then that Mako Ireson was going on the mission, and she wanted her own position clarified. Knowing that the skipper would expect it, she provided an application which analysed what contribution she could make, balanced against the demand she was making on officers’ time in training and supervising her.

It was generally considered that a cadet had performed satisfactorily, in that, if they managed to give back 15% productivity in return for 85% of time demand on the officers. A cadet who managed a 30% contribution against 70% of time demand was considered to have performed superbly well. Tina’s ratio of contribution to demand was currently running at about 50/50, an extraordinary achievement even for the Top Cadet.

Alex, however, did not seem impressed, either by that or by the analysis she had produced of Fleet regulations.

‘The fact that there are no specific orders regarding your coming on the mission may be interpreted as permission for you to do so at my discretion,’ he conceded. ‘However, it may equally well be interpreted as an expectation that I would follow established Fleet regulation and procedure, there, in
not
taking a cadet on a mission with a high hazard rating. For me to take you over the League border, into uncharted space, into combat operations, would need one heck of a lot better justification than, ‘She’s a good kid and she wanted to come.’ And it could be argued, even, that there is a good case for leaving you on the Stepeasy, to look after the Second’s people we’ll be leaving there. So you’re going to have to do better than this…’ he indicated her application. ‘Sorry.’

Tina gave that a good deal of thought, which took her the following day to the command deck datatable where Jonas Sartin was attempting to make some kind of sense of budgets. When she asked if there was anything that she could do to help, he answered without even looking up.

‘I wouldn’t mind a coffee.’

Tina fetched coffee for him and for the officer of the watch, though strictly speaking it was the rigger on duty who was supposed to do that. She put Jonas’s coffee on the freefall safe ring at his elbow, and sat down quietly beside him. Then she copied several of the screens he had in front of him, and set to work on them, saying nothing.

Several minutes later, she handed him a completed tax form for all the cargo they had taken on at Therik. That was something that had been on Jonas’ To Do list, albeit very low on that list, ever since they’d launched. As a warship, they were entitled to claim back export taxes on all goods purchased, but neither the system tax offices nor the central League taxation department on Chartsey made that easy for them. Often, spacers didn’t bother even attempting to reclaim the export taxes, since the time, effort and expense involved could be more than the refund itself.

Tina, though, had completed all the forms, working her way confidently through the incomprehensible tax-office jargon and attaching all the invoices and other supporting documentation that they would require. Jonas looked at this, blinked, and then lifted his head to stare at her.

‘When did you learn
that
?’ he asked, since it certainly wasn’t a common skill even amongst officers.

‘Oh…’ Tina gave a self-deprecating little grin.

The truth was that she had grown up on a tramp freighter. As with most tramp ships, the skipper was more interested in cargo that would take him somewhere he wanted to go, rather than in making a profit. When Tina was about twelve, though, the ship had hit a financial crisis, having insufficient credit to buy cargo. The skipper had applied for a loan from an intersystem bank, and had got one on the condition that he and the cargo boss completed a basic business finance course.

Tina had ended up helping them with it, as the sight of such terms as ‘gross profit margin’ and ‘elective taxation domain’ tended to make both the skipper and the cargo boss – known to her as Mum and Dad – extremely nervous and confused. Finding it interesting, she had continued with business studies and had, by the age of fourteen, effectively taken on management of the freighter as a business.

‘I just picked it up, working on freighters,’ she told Jonas. ‘I’ve never taken any exams, so it’s not on my CV, but I can balance statements and budgets. So if I can be of any assistance, sir..?’

Jonas looked at Alex, who was working at his own end of the table, and Alex nodded, confirming that he had no problem with that. Then as his gaze rested on Tina, he gave another slight nod and a smile. That would, indeed, tip the balance in her favour, if even Jonas, the Internal Affairs officer, was on-side with her remaining aboard.

And so they cruised on, settling down for the night as the ship darkened down, and Alex took the conn. He loved nights like this, with all the busy work and laughter fallen to slumbering quiet. The Stepeasy and the tender were on station either side, but they too were tranquil, neither signalling the frigate nor one another. He knew their chances were not great of succeeding on this mission. But he also knew that he and everyone else aboard was doing their utmost, even in this early preparation stage, and he could ask no more than that, either of them or of himself. So he settled contentedly to conning his ship as they sped towards the Ranges, as silent and graceful as a trio of sharks streaking through a starlit ocean.

Twelve

Eight weeks and four days after leaving Therik, the Heron cruised into orbit around the pickup system.

They were, by then, already in the League-side reaches of the Lundane Ranges. This truly was wild space; major areas of nebula and dirty space hatched out on charts as non-navigable, and many thousands of solar systems throughout the Ranges which bore the tag ‘yet to be surveyed’.

Of the hundreds of those located in this region, Alex had selected one at random. Like all systems within League space and a good many beyond, it had been subjected to survey from astronomical arrays. Such surveys had become a great deal more sophisticated since the earliest days of space exploration, when it had only just been possible to detect a green biosphere in systems within a few hundred light years. These days, remote observation could determine planets, moons and asteroid belts with a precision that was almost as good as a chart.

Almost, though, was the important word there. The kind of idiots who took yachts out system-diving, relying on such remote-observation to hurl their ships at some mad angle through the planets, were risking their lives in the most suicidally dangerous ‘adventure sport’ outside leaping off a cliff without a parachute. Until a ship was actually there with sufficiently powerful scanners to identify every asteroid and comet down to the smallest lump of ice, the system was uncharted and therefore not safe to navigate. There wasn’t even a safe way in, no access cleared through the comet cloud of ice and dust which surrounded most solar systems. The only way in was either to try to pick your way through the flotsam in high-agility manoeuvring or to go in hot, guns clearing a path.