Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (40 page)

The others were all leaving. Some of them were a little shamefaced as they did so – Alex had turned down an application to stay from Misha’s post-grad assistant, seeing that he was shaking with fear even as he tried to tell the captain how much he wanted to stay. The Devast team, too, had felt obliged to offer to come along in case they could be of any help in providing information about the Ignite. They had been rather obviously relieved, though, when Alex had pointed out that there was no need for that as the Fourth knew all about it themselves. It was true, too, that it was important for them to stay behind in case the Heron didn’t return. They would need to take the test-fire data back to Devast, convince their board that the problem had been solved, and bring the Ignite into production as quickly as possible.

So Mack McLaver and the others departed, cheered off the ship by the crew and still calling out thanks and good wishes as the airlock closed behind them. Just minutes after that, the superyacht signalled a salute to the frigate as the Heron turned away. Quite a few people watched the yacht fall behind with a pang of regret. It had been good to have their company during the last nine weeks’ dark running. Now they really would be isolated, entirely out on their own.

There were many, too, thinking of their families. All of them had left mail with the Stepeasy, all of them conscious that if they did not return, that would be the last messages their families would ever get from them. Buzz had advised that people shouldn’t make those messages over-emotional. If the worst happened and they didn’t make it home, they would want their families to see that they had been strong, happy, embarking on a great adventure. And if that
wasn’t
true, as Buzz observed, they were on the wrong ship.

All the same, there were some tearful moments on the ship as people recorded holo-messages for partners, parents and children left behind. It was hard not to get emotional, when you had to say things like ‘if I don’t make it home, I want you to know that I love you very much’. People were watching footage they’d brought with them from Therik, too, messages recorded for them by their loved ones and holos from shoreleave. There was an atmosphere on the ship, not of homesickness exactly but of sentimentality.

At the same time, though, there was a thrill of expectation. Whatever regret there may have been over leaving the Stepeasy behind was overcome as the yacht vanished from scopes in a couple of minutes. People turned away, returning their attention to what was happening aboard the ship.

At first sight, that looked like nothing very much – business as usual, the skipper on the command deck and Buzz doing rounds. This was an official procedure carried out every day by the Exec, doing a visual inspection and using spot-check scanners to confirm that the ship was in a clean and tidy condition. Teabreak Li, the Housekeeping Sub, was following. The Sub knew very well that the ship had been thoroughly cleaned that morning and that the worst possible thing that could happen was that Buzz might pick up and mention, very pleasantly, something that had happened since Teabreak’s own fanatically careful inspection. That did not stop him being tense as a coiled spring, though. Some of the crew found it amusing to wind him up by putting fingerprints on walls or mug-rings on tables.

And there, sure enough, was a dirty great greasy handprint on the grab-rail of a zero-gee ladderway. It was visible with the naked eye, obvious from metres away. It could only have been put there seconds before the Exec and Housekeeping Sub came into that section of the ship. Already, the autobot that kept that ladderway clean was homing in on it; a busy, purposeful little beetle.

Buzz looked at the handprint, glanced around at the handful of crew working in the section and homed in on the one who had a hand oh
so
casually in his pocket. Teabreak, beside him, was almost quivering with indignation.

Buzz smiled at the suspect, one Leading Star Jonno Trevaga. Trevaga grinned back, trying to look as much like an angel as his bullish features would allow. Buzz’s own smile was indulgent. They had been quite worried about Trevaga for a while. He’d been so devastated by the consequences of his mischief at Karadon that he’d vowed he’d never mess around again. And he had, too, maintained an alarmingly high standard of saintly behaviour, far
too
saintly to be either good for him or sustainable, long term. It was good to see him relaxed and having a harmless laugh again. Or at least, Buzz thought so. Teabreak’s brooding look was not nearly so appreciative.

‘Satisfactory response to recent contamination,’ Buzz stated, for the inspection record.

He moved on with no more comment than that, leaving the crew grinning. Even while they were having rounds and winding Teabreak up, though, they were keeping half an eye on an astrogation screen. It had a countdown in one corner, signalling how long it would be until they crossed the League border.

As that ticked down to under twenty minutes, speculative buzz intensified. The crew had been expecting an announcement from the skipper any time these last few days, telling them that they would not be able to indulge in the traditional fun and games of border crossing. This was not at all the same kind of situation as when they’d left League space to go to X-base Amali, after all. That had involved rising out of the irregular pancake of League territory, the border just a technicality.

This, though, was very different. This was an active border. The moment they crossed the border here they would technically be within Marfikian-controlled space, behind enemy lines. It hardly seemed the time to be indulging in horseplay.

On the other hand, any rational analysis would conclude that they would be at no greater risk that side of that border than they were this. This region might be non-charted but it was rated low hazard for ordinary navigation. They would not reach the area hatched out as non-navigable for another seven days, yet. The chances of encountering Marfikians out here were so remote as to be not worth considering, too.

Even so, there was a question hanging over it right till the moment when the astrogation chart showed that they had crossed the notional plane that defined League territory. Buzz was back on the command deck by then, sitting next to Alex with an air of amused expectation.

Then Hali Burdon went onto the command deck, along with Able Star Jenni Asforth, currently the youngest member of the crew.

‘All right, hop it,’ Jenni said, with a disrespect that would have got her on a charge at any other time than this. ‘We’re outside League borders, Fleet rules don’t hold any more and we’re taking the ship.’

Alex surrendered to this mutiny with a grin, leading his officers off to the wardroom where they were to be nominally ‘detained’ for the next hour. Hali took the conn, herself, as she was perfectly qualified to do, and waited for the few seconds to be sure that all other essential posts were being held by petty officers, too. Then she grinned, nodding to Jenni who was to be ‘skipper’ for the next hour. Jenni grinned hugely, drew breath, and gave the wildest order in the Fleet’s lexicon.

‘Let the rumpus begin!’

As the crew ran wild around the ship, playing ball games, having food fights and enjoying all the usual rumpus fun, Alex and the officers enjoyed the equally traditional tea party in the wardroom. There was something wonderfully absurd about sitting there sipping tea and nibbling little sandwiches while the crew was running riot. Several of the passengers joined them there, too, having been given the option of taking sanctuary in the wardroom if they liked.

‘I suppose this is what the media got hold of,’ Jermane observed, a little uneasily, as a thunderous ball game hurtled past the wardroom door, ‘when they were reporting that you’d had a riot aboard, that time at Karadon.’

He was speaking to Martine Fishe, who smiled confirmation.

‘Impossible for us to explain what was really going on, of course,’ she commented. ‘Since to do so we’d have had to admit to having left League space. Though they knew the score there, of course – the more clued up journos, at least. It was just that protest thing they do, broadcasting the story they know isn’t true in protest against not being allowed to report what they know
is
. That didn’t bother us nearly so much as spacers, obviously, recognising immediately that the kind of riot being reported could only
be
a border-crossing rumpus. One of the Fleet’s oldest customs, this, you know.’

‘So I’ve been told,’ Jermane said, even more uneasily, as a demonic howl erupted somewhere nearby. ‘Er ... it
is
perfectly safe, I suppose?’ Reassured on this point, he sought refuge in his usual voluble talk, speculating at length on whether there might have been some actual incident of mutiny, preserved for centuries in this odd tradition.

Alex let the linguist’s rabbiting float past him like machine noise. He was enjoying the sense of holiday, not just for the crew but for him personally. In keeping with the topsy-turvy tradition of the rumpus, the usual order of things in the wardroom was reversed, too, with the most junior officer presiding and the seniors expected to defer to the Subs.

‘Please pass the pastries, Alex.’ Tina Lucas, sitting as head of the table, was clearly enjoying herself as she bossed the skipper and other senior officers around. But she was playing host to perfection, too, ensuring that they all had plenty to eat and drink and were all included in the conversation.

At the end of the hour, then, Alex reclaimed control of his ship, leading all the officers onto the command deck in the ritual counter-mutiny.

‘I’m the skipper here,’ he told Jenni. ‘
You
hop it.’

There was laughter and cheering round the ship as Jenni gave his place back to the skipper, and more laughter again as Teabreak Li discovered the joke that they’d played during the rumpus. The ship, the
entire
ship, was covered in dark greasy handprints. It would take the autobots at least forty minutes to clean that lot off, and in the meantime the frigate was in a state of filth that would make any Housekeeping Sub break into a sweat.

Teabreak, however, scored some kudos points. There was no howl of dismay when he saw the state the ship was in, not even a rigid determination not to react. Instead he cracked up into honest laughter, freely conceding that they’d got him, with that.

‘I’ll be having nightmares about this,’ he lamented, standing on deck two and surveying the couple of thousand hand prints which adorned it. But he was laughing as he said it. And that was, indeed, the end of his torment – after two months of giving him grief for one thoughtless remark, the crew was prepared to let it go.

The ship settled down – once the handprints had cleaned off, there was no evidence for the rumpus beyond a minor bruise or two. And, now that all the excitement was over, nothing to do now but get down to the serious business of getting their ship to Samart.

They were all focussed on that. With the supply pickup and missile test out of the way, it had assumed a far more immediate focus. So much so, indeed, that the navigation to get out there seemed almost routine.

That it wasn’t going to be that easy became apparent within hours of them entering the non-navigable zone.

The reason it was hatched out on charts as non-navigable were the wisps of nebula which lay across the region like chaotic cirrocumulus. To groundhog eyes it might look as if the gaps between them, millions of kilometres across, were more than sufficient to navigate a starship through. At the speeds they were travelling, though, a million klicks was nothing at all, flashed past in nanoseconds. In an emergency, the ship could make a 180 turn in 8.7 seconds. For safety, they would not enter any canyon in which they didn’t have a clear ten seconds lateral manoeuvring room, as well as sufficient visibility ahead to be sure they’d have time to turn if the canyon closed. Once you’d zoned out all the areas which remote observation had determined had too high a particle density for a ship to traverse, and all the areas too narrow for the frigate to enter, even the remote observation charts were an alarmingly spidery three dimensional labyrinth.

Remote observation, however, was only half the story. The physical obstacle of the nebula was only part of the problem. Without detailed, accurate knowledge of the wave space topography which was itself heavily distorted by particle density, they could find themselves drifting away from where the on-board dead reckoner believed them to be. Drifting off course when you were trying to navigate an already very tight route through nebula was, clearly, not good.

Anyone who thought that their revolutionary wave-space scanner would enable them to cruise effortlessly through the Ranges, though, soon found out otherwise.

They were just eleven hours into the navigation when they hit their first dead end. It looked clear enough, but the scanner detected an area of dirty space ahead, triggering an automatic turnaround.

‘I’ve never understood why spacers call it ‘dirty’,’ Jermane observed, as they reversed their course. ‘Is it because there’s, you know, dust in it?’

‘No.’ Mako Ireson was sitting with him in the lounge, watching the command deck feed. It was reassuringly calm up there. The ship had come to standby alert when the turnaround was triggered, bringing the skipper and astrogator to the command deck. Alex was just waiting placidly, though, while Gunny Norsten looked at their options. ‘It’s because wave space is all, like, twisted up – like turbulence in atmosphere, you know? It can throw engines out of phase, which can blow up the ship, so we don’t go into that.’

The confidence with which he spoke raised grins in everyone around – the very idea of Mako,
Mako
, instructing the linguist in astrophysics was as entertaining to the spacers as a small child explaining solemnly that stars were like suns, really, but very
very
far away. Jermane was grateful, though. He’d found a kindred spirit in Mako, the only other groundhog on the ship.

‘So, what are they doing now, then?’ He wondered, seeing a remarkably casual lack of activity, or concern, on the command deck as they headed back the way they’d come.