Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (38 page)

They didn’t pressure or tease him, though one of the parties did bring him back a bit of rock, the only souvenir available from that kind of leave.

‘Hang on to it,’ he was advised, having laughed and thanked them uncertainly. ‘That’s going to have rarity value, soon!’

It was a pebble picked up from the planet they were planning to destroy. It was the third world out from the star, with a diameter of 11,000 km. It hovered on the edge of the habitable goldilocks zone where liquid water could persist. Any possibility that it might one day evolve a habitable climate was, however, made redundant by the nature of its atmosphere. Levels of carbon dioxide and sulphuric acid made it extremely inhospitable. Its surface was cratered, volcanic, mostly grey streaked with yellow. It wasn’t, the Heron’s crew agreed, nearly as pretty as the world they’d blown up at Ignition One. There was no pearl in the system here, either, no planet of outstanding natural beauty like the one they’d named Pellar. There was one gas super-giant, but its clouds were various shades of muddy brown, and the only planet with a ring system was itself an undistinguished fuzzy blue. Nobody minded very much when Alex told them that there would be no intervention, here, even if this test created system-trashing debris like the last one. They could get their senior-gunner ratings without that, after all.

They did that on the second day, while shuttles were out doing the required physical sampling to confirm that there wasn’t so much as a blob of algae living in the entire system. Alex took the ship in on a vertical loop, having their gunners take out any comets or meteors that might potentially cross their path in a horizontal orbit.

That was unnecessary, as all of them knew, just as it was no coincidence that the people given priority on the guns were those who did not yet have the senior gunner rating.

One of those was Jonas Sartin. He had been worrying about this for weeks, and with increasing intensity. To be the only member of the crew who didn’t have a senior gunner rating would be worse than embarrassing, particularly for a senior officer. He had even, secretly, taken to playing Cosmos Warfare in the privacy of his cabin, in the hope of improving his skills.

He had also, not so secretly, accepted help from a member of the crew. Able Star Pelli ‘King’ Gervase, one of their highest scoring sharpshooters, had taken on that role – respectfully, but with a determination Jonas had not been able to resist.

‘You’ll be fine,’ King was right there with him, like a coach in the last minutes before an event, seeing him strapped into the gun control and giving him the pep talk. ‘Just remember – don’t think,
do
.’

Jonas nodded. He had learned to let his conscious mind zone out, for this, though in a very different way from piloting the fighters. To pilot a swarm successfully you had to be entirely in the moment as a sensory event, fully alive to every sensation and soaring on wings of delight. To operate a gun successfully you had to zone out everything but instinctive hand-eye coordination. Conscious thought was not your friend, in that. By the time you’d looked consciously at a target and decided to lock on to it, it would already be too late. There was no possible issue here, as King had pointed out, of any risk of ‘friendly fire’. They were firing at rocks, and if any of their own shuttles came anywhere within range, the guns would be shut down automatically.

The first few minutes did not go well. Jonas was too tense, too focussed on trying not to think to be
able
not to think. Of the first forty two shots he took, he only hit thirty seven. Seeing the 88% accuracy rate made him feel quite panicky – at that rate, he wouldn’t even keep his qualification at basic gunner grade.

‘Okay, stop a minute,’ King Gervase spoke through his headset, calm and reassuring. ‘Take five – it’s just nerves, okay? You’re all tensed up. Do the stretches I showed you – remember, shoulder blades. It’s all right there, between your shoulder blades.’

Jonas did the exercises, flexing and releasing his shoulders, shaking out his arms and wriggling his fingers. Then he took back hold of the controls, watching as the ship swept through a few more six-second loops.

‘You can do this,’ the crewman’s voice was placid. ‘We’ve done this lots of times, remember, nothing new here. You can nail it, no problem. Just think about the end of month returns.’

Oh yes,
those
, Jonas thought, with a sense of doom that quite overcame his anxiety over what he was doing right then. He had, in a moment of madness regretted even as he was saying it, offered to compile all the financial records for the next end of month returns – work usually carried out by the department heads themselves. It would, Jonas had thought, give him a really broad, thorough view of the administrative processes in use aboard the frigate.

He was currently drowning in the engineering returns. He’d thought that would be the simplest department to get started with. Quite possibly it
was
, though that did not augur well for the rest of the departments. Engineering finances ought to be straightforward, all costs met from general operating funds provided by the Fleet and charged at an agreed rate when the ship was on a mission for which their costs were to be met by another agency. In this, though, as in so much else, bureaucracy had tangled things into an impenetrable maze. Someone at the Senate end of things had come up with a labyrinthine system of allocating ‘energy costs’ to projects at groundside equivalent rates. This meant that even the most trivial thing like the drinks dispenser in the exo-suite had to have its own energy account to be charged to the Diplomatic Corps when it was being used for diplomatic purposes and to shipboard welfare funding when it was being used as a facility for crew. The fact that it did not cost them anything at all to produce the power for that – that they had so much free energy from the superlight cores that they frequently had to vent excess off into space – then had to be accounted for by an even more convoluted process of deducting Fleet funding for engineering by however much had been charged for that power. There was, as with their financial entanglements generally, a kind of logic to each individual step in that procedure, but its combined effect was one of sheer lunacy.

Jonas started firing again, rather wishing that the targets he was locking on to there were the morons who thought you had to pay for electricity used on a starship, to pay for it at
all
, let alone at groundside rates. As he thought that, his hands flicked automatically in the ‘acquire target’ on the controls, his eyes connected with the optical authorisation panel and in the same moment that the ‘target locked’ screen appeared, his finger pressed the
fire
control reflexively. A perfectly innocent comet vanished without even a flash. It had been orbiting the system ever since being knocked out of the comet cloud eighty six million years before. At its closest point to the sun, every three and a half million years, it would acquire a long, feathery tail and, for a few fleeting weeks, be a thing of beauty. Right now though it was just a lump of dirty ice with the misfortune to be crossing the orbit Alex had chosen for his ship, so that was the end of that. It scattered away as a shower of snow-like remnants. Jonas, however, didn’t even look. He was already locking on to his next target.

Two hours later, to thunderous applause and cheering from the crew, the Second Lieutenant climbed out of the gun housing with a thousand shots fired and 96.4% accuracy. He hadn’t felt that proud even at his graduation.

‘Thank you
so
much,’ he said, shaking hands with his coach, who grinned back, almost as proud and happy himself at seeing his protégé succeed.

‘No big,’ he said, though it was, and both of them knew it. A/S Gervase was exactly the kind of crewman Jonas Sartin would have had most issues with, before coming here. He was a bullock sent to them for rehab – an aimless youth with floppy hair and a bored manner that had tested many a superior’s temper. He still had that manner; never appeared to be doing anything very much and certainly not to be giving it any kind of energy or enthusiasm. That, however, was purely a pose, which they had no issue with on the Heron. As Jonas had come to appreciate, the young crewman was actually working very hard, climbing up through the ranks as fast as Fleet regs allowed. He had given up his own time, on his own initiative, to tutor the Second Lieutenant in gunnery. He’d been there for the last two hours, too, watching every shot, giving moral support and occasional words of encouragement. At some point in that, they’d become friends. ‘Buy me a beer, next shoreleave,’ King said, and Jonas grinned back.

‘Done,’ he agreed.

Shoreleave was a very long way off, though, and for right now they had to be focused on the task in hand. Which meant, three days later, watching as the geoprobe was deployed.

It had caused some surprise on the ship when the skipper announced his choice of team for the mole’s deployment. The first time they’d tested the Ignite they had had a Devast geologist with them to carry out the system and target-planet survey they needed for detailed analysis of the missile’s effectiveness. This time, however, with only three places available to them, Devast had decided it was more important to send an engineer, and that the Fourth had sufficient expertise, themselves, to carry out the survey.

Most people had put their dollar on Tina Lucas being the one chosen to operate the mole – it was just the kind of challenge the skipper was likely to give her, after all. His choice for the high-prestige role of mole operator, however, had gone to a long-odds outsider.

‘Me, skipper?’ Chief Petty Officer Martins was the quartermaster, responsible for day to day management of ship’s supplies. He was also the chief steward, a role in which he could, at need, put on a white jacket and provide silver service. He had the typical squat, bull-necked and heavy boned physique of someone from Chielle, a high gravity world.

‘You are our highest qualified geologist,’ Alex pointed out.

Martins looked a little alarmed. Chielle was a mining world and he’d grown up absorbing general-knowledge awareness of geology and mining techniques. His interest had been kindled in that, though, by the Devast geologist travelling with them, and in particular, a talk she had given about the system survey she’d be carrying out. He had been inspired to do a personal interest course to learn more about it. It had only been a half-year part time course, though, with a week at a university field study centre while he was on leave.

‘I’m not sure a diploma in geologic sciences really counts as
qualified
, skipper,’ he told him, uneasily.

‘It puts Dip Geo on the CV, that’s good enough for me,’ said Alex, and then, in a reassuring tone, ‘Come on, there’s nothing to it. All you have to do is yell ‘Mole in the hole!’ at the right time and sound convincing when you say, ‘We’ve hit hot toffee, and it’s ferropericlase.’’

Martins gave a crack of laughter, and relaxed. It was apparent to him, and to everyone else, that Alex was making a point, here, to the Devast team and beyond, that you did not need an officer for such a task. CPO Martins was indeed the equivalent of a junior officer in all but the commission, but such a prominent, high status role would customarily be given to a senior officer purely on grounds of prestige.

Alex’s other choices for key roles were almost as surprising, though made perfect sense once the crew had figured out his reasons. Gunny Norsten, technically still a passenger, was invited to assume his astrogator’s role sooner than scheduled and to conn the ship into the target system. That was something the skipper would normally do, himself – and the very fact that there
was
a ‘normally’ on the Heron for entering wild systems was extraordinary. Most Fleet skippers would never take a ship into a wild system at all. Alex had done it so often now it was becoming routine. It was, in any case, apparent to them all that Alex was demonstrating his full confidence in Gunny Norsten in the astrogator’s role, and getting them all used to working with him in that capacity, too.

As for the officer chosen to be missile controller, nobody was more surprised by Alex’s choice than Jonas Sartin himself.

‘
Me
, sir?’ he queried, echoing Martins’ own astonishment. He had taken it for granted that the skipper would assign that role to their Ordnance officer.

‘You,’ Alex confirmed. ‘It will be good experience for you. And,’ he added with a smile, ‘you’ve earned it. Slogging away at the finances is hard, miserable work; you deserve to have some fun.’

Jonas couldn’t deny that the task of auditing the Fourth’s tangled financial affairs was both complex and depressing. There were times he doubted that it was even humanly
possible
to resolve that chaos.

He couldn’t deny, either, that the prospect of being the one to push the button and say ‘fire’ would be both good for the CV and personally thrilling. Only Alex, though, he felt, would have blatantly described the opportunity to fire a multi-million dollar test missile as ‘fun’. It was remarks like that, made on record, which fuelled the belief out there that he was wildly out of control, blowing stuff up for a laugh.

‘Thank you, skipper,’ Jonas said, and beamed back happily.

The geoprobe was quite an operation – hours had been spent on geoscan surveys just to determine exactly where the mole should be placed. Then it had to be programmed, taken down to the planet and set up in its launch cradle. Eventually, after final diagnostics, the launch team withdrew.

The Heron was, by then, on an internal orbit between the first and second planets. The Stepeasy remained outside – it was safe enough now that the frigate had cleared an orbital path, but this was quite a dusty system, micro-impacts could scar paintwork and Davie did not want to spoil the pure white elegance of his yacht. And besides, they were staying off the Heron’s scanners so that their presence did not have to be blurred out or explained on the data sent to Devast.

Once the deployment team was back aboard the frigate, CPO Martins came to the command deck. He had supervised the setting up of the probe very confidently – that was just tech, after all, and fairly basic tech, too, in comparison with starship systems.