Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (15 page)

Six

There were two couriers circling at the rendezvous point. They had positioned themselves on opposite sides of an orbital path around the designated coordinates, circling at their lowest cruising speed.

They were barely larger than shuttles, though each glowed on heatscan with the ten mix cores that took up more than half the ship’s interior, massively over-engined for their size. They were Fleet couriers, too small to rate being named, but with numbered ID along with the Fleet emblem on their insignia.

The Heron saw them a good half minute before the frigate appeared on the couriers’ much less powerful scopes. As soon as they did see them, though, the couriers curved out to meet them, signalling salutes.

It was immediately clear, though, that neither courier had any passengers aboard for them, or mail either. They signalled at once, reporting that they were standing by to receive dispatches.

‘Acknowledge,’ Alex told the rating on duty at comms, and to the helm, ‘Holding vector Delta.’

As their comms arrays flashed, the helm swung them into a broad ellipse, dropping speed to L-basic. The Stepeasy followed suit, maintaining station on them, and the couriers fell in beside them, too, holding station on their starboard side.

Alex got up. Regulations required that he open sealed orders by himself, in his daycabin. He might well then make the decision to walk out and put them on the notice board for everyone to read, but he had to see them himself, first.

He was in his daycabin for eight minutes, which seemed a very long time to the people watching the command deck feed and waiting. The buzz of excitement had fallen into hushed expectation.

When he came back onto the command deck, his expression gave nothing away. His manner was as bland as if he’d just been told that they were to go on an entirely routine patrol.

‘Bear with me,’ he requested, speaking primarily to Buzz but in the knowledge that everyone else aboard the ship was watching too. Then he held out two security-sealed tapes to the junior officer of the watch. ‘Take those straight to the couriers, please,’ he said, with his usual courtesy.

‘Sir!’ Don Li yelped, saluted and departed in some confusion, horribly conscious that everyone on the ship was watching him. Fortunately he didn’t have to do anything very difficult. The duty pilot was already waiting by the shuttle, and both tapes were clearly labelled with the ID of the courier to which they were to be delivered. Buzz even thought to have a couple of gift boxes popped onto the shuttle, a routine courtesy which Don Li would have overlooked in his anxiety.

It took him just three minutes to deliver the tapes. During that time, Alex sat quietly, his manner making it clear that he had no intention of telling them anything until the shuttle had returned. The atmosphere on the ship was keyed up to such a pitch, it was as if every one of them had just seen five numbers of a lottery ticket come up, and were waiting for the final one to drop.

‘All right,’ Alex waited till the couriers had saluted them again and shot off at high speed in different directions, and until their shuttle had returned. ‘Attention on deck,’ he said, the ritual that heralded an official statement from skipper to crew, even though he knew already that everyone was listening. ‘This is the score, people. We will be heading out to sector four.’

He paused to allow the implications of that to sink in. Sector four was a massive zone, even by astronomical standards. It was that part of the League’s border which faced Marfikian-controlled space. The nearest League world to that border was Cherque, their most strongly defended world. The nearest Marfikian world was Lundane.

‘Our orders are for dark running all the way,’ Alex told them, and remembering that they had civilians aboard, added, ‘right off space lanes, no ports of call or contact with any other ships. We will be picking up supplies from a cold-drop in the Lundane Ranges.’

A cold drop meant that the supplies would be left for them in an uninhabited system – a trick often used by drug runners to transfer cargo without a contact-trail between the ships. ‘At that point, the Stepeasy will be leaving us. Second Irregulars teams and passengers will transfer to the Stepeasy, remaining in League space. We will then cross the border and Van Damek a route through the Ranges and beyond.’ He paused again to allow them to take in the enormity of what he was telling them, there, then delivered the kicker. ‘Our objective is Samart.’

There was a moment, just a moment, of utter stupefaction. Then there was the sound of a couple of hundred people expressing stunned disbelief. Quite a lot of that involved swearwords, but Alex didn’t pull them up for that. He had said a word, himself, that Fleet officers were not supposed to use, when he’d realised what he was being asked to do.

Samart was a legend amongst spacers. It was so deep in Marfikian territory that it was not believed possible for League ships to go there. There was only the vaguest information about it, much of it dating from semi-mythical encounters in ancient history. The one thing that was known, or at least very firmly believed, was that Samart had won every battle they had fought with the Marfikians, that their world had never been invaded.

‘All right,
breathe
, people,’ Alex advised. ‘We will have plenty of time to think this through, talk about it and train for it. These are our orders.’

He put the orders on the notice board so everyone could see them. The orders were coded XD-529, revealing that this was being classed as an exodiplomacy mission. They said what Alex had already told them, then went on,
You are to attempt to establish diplomatic lines of communication between the League and Samartian governments. Should response be favourable, you are to sound out what potential there may be for a mutually beneficial relationship.

There followed eight pages of more specific orders, signed by League President Marc Tyborne personally, and countersigned
Dixon Gerard Arakin Harangay, First Lord of the Admiralty
.

‘This is, of course, an extremely sensitive operation, carrying the highest possible level of secrecy,’ Alex told them. ‘Extreme measures are being taken to conceal where we are going. The Albatross has been posted to Dortmell along with two of the Seabirds sold to Customs. Part of their task there will involve attempting to make it appear as if we are also there on covert operations. It is felt that that will not only provide us with a plausible cover, but may give them some slight edge in their own anti-drugs operations.’

The Albatross was an excellent choice for that, as the well informed crew realised at once. It was a sister ship of the Heron’s, a Seabird-37 which could easily be mistaken for them on a long range scan. The Albatross’s skipper had also been upgrading her ship as much as she could along the lines pioneered by the Fourth. That was part of their remit, after all, to trial ways in which low-performance classes of ship might be upgraded cost-effectively. The Albatross had also managed to snare one of their most highly sought-after secondment officers, Sub-lt Arie McKenna, to assist with that technical upgrade. She would certainly be able to advise them on how to make it look as if the Fourth was in the area. Such a cover would almost certainly involve blowing up a starseeker or two, and the Albatross’s skipper, a friend of Alex’s, would undoubtedly be up for that, too. They were annoying little yachts, the bane of any Fleet skipper’s life.

The commanders of the Customs ships would probably not be prepared to go that far, but it was evident that they too were willing to take part in providing cover for the Fourth whilst undertaking their own anti-drugs operations at Dortmell. They too would be there in Seabird-37 class frigates the Fleet had sold them for just that kind of law enforcement operation, so with three of them flitting about, it was entirely possible that people would believe the Heron was there.

‘If our cover at Dortmell falls through,’ Alex explained, ‘the backup story is that we have gone to Quarus – rumours deliberately spread to satisfy even the spacer community that they believe they know where we are even if they realise we’re not at Dortmell. It is vital that as few people as possible know that we are attempting to reach Samart, that even the possibility isn’t suspected. One of the couriers waiting for us here is going to Chartsey, to confirm receipt of our orders with a President’s Eyes Only dispatch for President Tyborne. The other is on its way to rendezvous with a supply ship at a meeting point close to X-Base Sentinel. I was asked to designate a cold-drop site within the Lundane Ranges, this side of the border. The supply ship will get those coordinates from the courier and make the drop. They will not know that the supplies are for us. Absolute secrecy must be maintained, so I’m sorry, but there will be no mail calls till we are back in League space.’

He heard the catch of breath as the crew realised that meant they would neither receive nor be able to send any messages to their families, for months.

‘I hardly need to stress how important this mission could be.’ Alex said. ‘Samart is the only world we know that has fought off every attempt to invade it, reputedly beating the Marfikians in every battle that they’ve fought. If we can learn how, and bring back that technology for the Fleet – well, the potential is obvious. It is possible of course that we will have nothing the Samartians want – possible, too, it must be said, that they will regard us too as an enemy, so approaching them is not without risk. This, however, is what we signed up for – to serve in the defence of the people of the League. I do not feel, myself, that we could do any greater service than to get out there and give this everything we’ve got.’ He paused for a moment, gauging the reaction, and gave a satisfied little nod. They might be stunned, but there was an immediate murmur of agreement with that, mixed with some awe. Alex smiled. ‘Command briefing in twenty minutes.’

That meant he’d finished what he wanted to say, and was an instant signal for everyone else to start talking. Incredulity was running high, but within seconds all the crew were poring through the orders, exclaiming over them, calling up star charts, looking at the Ranges and exclaiming again.

Davie North came onto the command deck with a brooding, somewhat accusatory look.

‘At that point, the Stepeasy will be leaving us
?’ he challenged, taking a seat at the command table as if by right. ‘I might have something to say about that, you know.’

‘Oh, did I forget?’ Alex assumed an air of mildly apologetic innocence, taking a classified tape from his pocket and offering it to him with a little flourish.
‘Your
orders.’

Davie’s eyes narrowed, but he took the tape without comment and swiped it onto a screen. Then, after the half second it took him to read the contents, he burst out laughing. This, too, was signed by the president – not orders, in fact, but a request that Mr North, in his role as an accredited goodwill ambassador with the exodiplomacy service, render all possible assistance to the Fourth Fleet Irregulars in their mission. To this end, the president attached a legal exemption, passed by the Senate Sub Committee and also countersigned by Dix Harangay, to the rules requiring Mr North to be treated as a juvenile.

‘
Yes!’
Davie punched the air gleefully and turned it into a playful salute in one rapid movement. ‘I’m
in!’
He was, too – named in the orders as an official diplomatic consultant, with the same rights of access to information and meetings as a ship’s officer.

Alex grinned. He had no qualms about taking Davie with them on such a mission – this was, after all, quite literally what Davie North Delaney had been born for. Designed for. His father had not bioengineered him on a whim. He had seen a need for humanity to have a representative in relationship building with the far more advanced species beyond the Firewall. His multicognitive off-the-scale intellect and physical attributes had been engineered to create the perfect exo-diplomat.

They’d got that right, too. Davie had first met Solarans when he was six years old, having proven that he knew both language and culture at least as well as any Diplomatic Corps ambassador. He had raced in, too, when Shion arrived at X-Base Amali, spending months there with her. It was due to him that Shion was so fluent in their language and knew so much about their culture. It had, in fact, been at his suggestion that she’d come to serve with the Fourth.

Neither the Diplomatic Corps nor the president had been able to understand that – at one point, Davie had been extremely forthright even with the president himself for the way he was trashing the relationship, trying to push Shion into the high powered ambassadorial role they considered more appropriate. Since then, the advantages of letting Davie do things his way had become apparent. Someone, clearly, had realised how much he could help in this situation, too.

Alex would put money on that someone being none other than President Tyborne himself. Senator Machet had commented once, while travelling with them, that people often underrated Marc Tyborne. True, she said, he was a self-centred, self-serving blimp with a highly overinflated view of his own abilities, but he did have a
couple
of things going for him. One was credibility, as that loud self-importance played very well as presidential gravitas. The other was that he had an instinctive ability to spot people who would make him look good by getting things done.

‘Congratulations, Mr North,’ Alex said, sincerely. This was a major step for Davie, after all – not just
allowed
to have an active role in exodiplomacy, but asked to officially as diplomatic consultant on a major undertaking.

‘Thanks,’ Davie said, and as he was simultaneously reading the briefing that had come with his presidential request, gave a wicked twinkle, ‘Your Excellency.’

Alex pointed a stern finger at him. ‘Don’t start!’ he warned, though he grinned again as he answered the looks of startled enquiry from Buzz and the other officers. ‘Yes,’ he confirmed, ‘I’m a Presidential Envoy again – for the duration, this time.’