Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (9 page)

She was obviously aware of how busy he was, with all the screens open in front of him and several calls awaiting his attention. She was also looking at the bank of screens on a side bulkhead which gave views of all the working areas around the ship. This was one of the Fourth’s most controversial innovations, an open-comms system which enabled anyone aboard to watch and listen in on what was happening on the command deck, whilst at the same time allowing the officers there to keep an eye on what was going on throughout the ship. Shion could take all that in with one glance, identifying everyone and what they were doing. Her attention, though, focussed in on engineering, where Alex was in discussion with Morry Morelle, their engineer. Tina Lucas was standing next to him, making notes on a comp. ‘Oh, is that her?’ she asked, with ungrammatical enthusiasm. Then, answering her own question as she saw the cadet insignia on the girl’s uniform, she looked at Buzz with yearning hope. ‘Do I get to be her oppo?’

Buzz smiled. Shion’s status was rather irregular, given that she had never been to a Fleet Academy or officially graduated as an officer. She had been given honorary League citizenship by the President, and signed into service with the Fourth on an honorary basis, too, undertaking duties at Alex’s discretion. She was, however, accepted by all of them as a working officer, carrying out all the duties of a junior Sub. It was Fleet custom to assign any newcomer to the ship an ‘oppo’, someone of equivalent rank who would be responsible for settling them in. In the case of cadets on placement, that role was traditionally taken by the most junior Sub aboard. And that, in terms of length of service, was Shion.

‘Yes, of course,’ Buzz said, making that decision without hesitation. It would have been insulting to do anything other than assign her to that role as the most junior Sub. ‘And you’ll be expected to help train and mentor her, just like any other officer.’

Shion gave a most un-princess like crow of delight. ‘Woo hoo!’ She exclaimed.
‘Real!
’

And with that she was off, leaping down the zero-gee hatchway with a triple somersault.

Tina was every bit as happy to meet her. She already knew as much about Shion as could be learned from files and Fleet gossip. She had learned even more over the last few days. The first time she had seen Alex von Strada laugh had been just a couple of hours into her shadowing him. He had been checking his mail as they walked across the base, and suddenly just cracked up laughing. She had not been so impertinent as to enquire why, of course, but he had told her, and even showed her the message. It was from the Diplomatic Corps, informing him with a slightly desperate note that Shion and Davie North were currently in a red-light security situation in that they were drawing a good deal of public attention. They were currently exploring the experience of travelling by public transport, something the security team was edgy about in itself. Finding a busker on a sky-train platform, however, they had joined in. Shion could play any instrument, and sing, and was giving a virtuoso performance. Davie was having fun improvising percussion around her and the busker’s jamming session. Quite a crowd was gathering. The Diplomatic Corps wanted Alex’s advice as to whether they should intervene.

Alex told them no. Shion might be happy to stay there for hours making music with her new friend, but Alex had a good understanding both of Davie North’s lack of musicality and his very low boredom threshold. They would be on their way, Alex said, within ten minutes. And he was right, too. It was just a few minutes later that Shion had sent Alex another of her enthusiastic messages, telling him that she and Davie had been performing music for people. The busker had evidently insisted on giving them some of the money people had flashed to his collecting beacon.

Alex had burst out laughing again, at that. Davie North was one of the wealthiest people in the League – he owned, amongst many other corporations, ISiS Corps and Vetris Shipyards. Shion had also been given a Diplomatic Corps credit card with a million dollar a year spending allowance. She had never used it, preferring to live on her Sub-lt’s salary, but neither of them, for sure, stood in any need of the twenty dollars the busker had pressed upon them. Their naïve delight in using that money to buy themselves lunch on the train had made Alex laugh, but with such a look of warm affection on his face that Tina had been amazed.

She had discovered, since, that stories about his warmth amongst friends, and his wicked sense of humour, were if anything understated. He was, indeed, an entirely different man in private. He had talked to her a lot, too, about many aspects of life in the Fourth, including his own account of how Shion had come to serve with them and what it was like having her aboard. So she felt almost as if she had already got to know Shion before they met.

The feeling was obviously mutual. As Alex introduced them and they shook hands, they exchanged the happiest of grins. For Shion, this was
real
, her ultimate accolade, being given the same responsibility as any other Sub would be. For Tina, it was her first exo-encounter. And for all the differences in their genomes and cultures, the tall, elegant alien and the stocky human girl recognised a kindred spirit in each other, the spirit of adventure that had drawn both of them to this ship.

‘I’m your oppo,’ Shion told her, and with obvious understanding of the importance of formal and informal name usage, asked, ‘Is it Tinika, or Tina?’

‘Tina,’ the cadet said, with a tone that made it clear that she never used her full given name, by choice. Then she added, with a hopeful look, ‘ma’am.’

Shion laughed.

‘Shion,’ she corrected. She had adopted the name ‘Shionolethe’ upon coming to the League, leaving behind her the name and titles of her life on Pirrell. It meant ‘free spirit in flight’ in her home language. Some bureaucrat had subsequently amended that to Shion Olethe in the faked ID they’d created for her, but nobody in the Fourth ever called her Sub-lt Olethe. ‘Have you found your quarters and unpacked and all that?’ she queried.

‘Yes, thanks.’ Alex had given her ten minutes, on coming aboard, to find her cabin, unpack, shower and change into shipboard rig. She would have to do the official orientation and safety tour, shortly, along with all the other newcomers. That was a pure formality, though, since she was already familiar with every aspect of the ship from the most detailed tech-specs to every complexity of the watch and quarter bill.

‘All right – we’ll catch up later,’ Shion promised, explaining, ‘I have to go do the fighter checks.’

The Heron was the only frigate in the Fleet to carry fighters. They had three of them, swarm-class fighters docked to specially constructed bays on the ship’s belly. Shion was their flight commander. She would be itching to get back at the controls of her favourite fighter, the one she’d named Firefly. It wasn’t usual for the Fleet to name their fighters, but Alex had approved it, so even official reports now referred to them as Firefly, Bluebottle and Wasp.

She went off, with that, with a ‘See you later,’ that included both Tina and Alex. The meeting had been brief, scarcely a few words exchanged, but it was apparent that they were going to be friends.

It was another four hours before Davie North came back aboard. Neither he nor their other civilian passenger was allowed on board until the ship was certified as back in service with a status of ‘in training’. That meant everyone signed aboard, all watch posts manned and thorough diagnostics completed. Skippers were allowed a full twenty five hours for that on reclaiming their ships from port-watch. The Heron’s crew, however, would have been embarrassed for such checks to take more than a morning. It wasn’t even lunchtime when Alex called the Port Admiral.

‘Reporting Heron ready for active training duty, ma’am,’ he told her, at which she glanced at the time and laughed.

‘So noted, Captain,’ she replied, signing the certificate her end, and giving him a nod. ‘My compliments to your ship’s company on their usual speed and efficiency.’

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ said Alex, and smiled as the official notification went up on the board and the crew cheered. It wasn’t the coordinated ‘three cheers’ the Fleet considered appropriate for such moments, just a loud happy noise of applause, whoops and hands drumming on tables. Some of the new officers looked a bit shocked, just for a moment, glancing at the skipper on the open comms feed that showed the command deck on screens throughout the ship. Then they obviously reminded themselves that this was the
Fourth
, and they were just going to have to get used to that kind of thing. Lt Commander Sartin did not react at all, though very close observation might have detected a very slight compression of his lips as some of the crew set up a flickball style chant:
Go Heron – we rule!

‘All right,’ Alex put an end to that very quickly, though his tone was one of amused tolerance. ‘If we’ve got that much energy, ladies and gentlemen, let’s not waste it. Full strip-down, go to.’

That got a cheer, too, and laughter. This was what made them a crack ship – under regulations they could now spend anything between a week and two months in shakedown training and drills to ensure that all the newcomers were up to speed before they became fully operational.

Even way back when he’d first taken command of the corvette Minnow, though, Alex had had his own ideas about what constituted good practice. He had trained his crew to carry out full strip-down diagnostics of the kind that most Fleet ships would only undertake once or twice a year. Alex expected
his
crew to carry out such strip-down testing routinely before launch. As the old hands at least knew very well, too, it was a favoured method of his to shake new and old crew in together, running strip down over and over again till it was so slick they could do it in their sleep. There was nothing, he said, more effective either for training new crew up in ship’s systems or in working them into a smoothly functioning team. What it involved, after all, was effectively dismantling virtually all the ship’s systems, testing every component and putting it all back together again.

They were already hard at work just a few minutes later when Davie and their other passenger arrived. Tech teams were at work all over the ship, with a busy hum and whine of tools and the choral effect of many voices working checklists.

Davie rolled his eyes a little as he came aboard, recognising what that meant.

‘That is verging on obsessive, you know,’ was his greeting to Alex as he strolled onto the command deck. His retinue, Alex knew, would have gone into shock at the sight of him. He had had his hair cut short so that it was a scruff of dark curls,not only unglossed but unbrushed. His stylists would not be able to put it back into ringlets now even if he gave them the chance. He was wearing off the peg clothes, too. They were notably quieter than the kind of thing he’d worn before; as Alex had suspected all along, his insistence on wearing bizarre combinations, clashing colour and style, had been rebellion against the team of valets who kept trying to dress him in silk suits as Papa preferred. Now he really was free to choose for himself, he’d opted for a grey sweatshirt, lightweight sports pants and soft-soled deck shoes. He would, Alex knew, soon change into the shipboard rig he was allowed to wear without insignia, blending in with the crew as much as he could.

As he spoke, Davie glanced at an array of screens showing footage from around the ship. Shion could be seen working there with a couple of techs, stripping out one of the fighters’ telemetry systems. ‘I don’t suppose...’ he looked at Alex, saw the answer on his face, and sighed.

‘Sorry,’ Alex said. He understood how Davie felt. He was, after all, a more than competent pilot and engineer, skipper of a yacht that was actually bigger and faster than the frigate, and rather better informed, even, than some of their own officers. The newcomers were having to be shown some of the Heron’s hot tech, systems they were testing as part of their R&D remit, whereas Davie already knew it inside out.

Alex, however, remained immovable. He did not doubt Davie’s knowledge or ability. It wasn’t even that he was a civilian – suitably qualified civilians with the necessary security clearance
could
help out with tech on a working passage basis. The sticking point for Alex was that Davie was just fifteen years old. He understood entirely how maddening that had to be for someone of Davie’s intellect and abilities. He owned and ran major corporations and had been an accredited goodwill ambassador for the Diplomatic Corps since he turned fourteen. It was just downright ridiculous, as he pointed out, that Alex would not so much as allow him to change a pin chip on the Heron.

But there it was, and in this, at least, Alex was not prepared to bend the rules at all. Davie might have become an adult, legally, at fourteen, but he would not become eligible for military service till he turned sixteen. The same rule applied to civilians working aboard – Kate Naos, a maths prodigy working with the Second, had been obliged to wait several months till she was old enough to come aboard and carry out her research. Alex, therefore, would only allow Davie to travel with them as a juvenile. He was stretching a point, in that, as far as he was prepared to go, by not following pre-sixteen rules in appointing an officer to be Davie’s official guardian.

‘Tuh!’ said Davie, but obviously knew there was no point arguing about it. Both of them knew, after all, that he had no official right to be aboard the ship, and that Alex might well reconsider that situation if Davie was becoming a nuisance.

Davie was aboard, in fact, at the suggestion of the First Lord. Dix Harangay had told Alex that he might take Mr North along with them, at his own discretion, if Mr North was willing to continue his role as an exo-ambassador with Shion. The Stepeasy would be accompanying them, too, with Davie’s ship to hand as a fall-back just in case Shion should decide at any time that she had had enough of being with the Fourth and wanted to do something else. Alex, Davie and Shion were all happy with that, as were the Diplomatic Corps. The only people
not
happy with it were Cerdan Jennar and others who felt that allowing a fifteen year old any kind of involvement in diplomatic affairs was beyond even the outrage they’d come to expect from the Fourth.