Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (28 page)

There was, however, very little chance of that. As Alex had known very well when he threw the task out as a standby activity, the crew would get behind this a hundred per cent. Everyone qualified to work on the missile tried to get some time in on it; so much so that Micky Efalto was often obliged to turn volunteers away because there just wasn’t room in the workshop for them.

Jonas Sartin put some time in on it, too. It wasn’t something that would ordinarily have occurred to him even to take any particular interest in, but he soon realised that it was a matter of pride amongst the officers to have their name on the project. So Jonas put in an hour on it too, helping Martine Fishe install a telemetry cable. It was interesting, useful to add to his technical training log and satisfying to sign his name into the record of the build. It was enlightening, too, as he felt pride in being part of an endeavour that, if they pulled it off, would bring such cachet to the ship, not to mention producing a resource that might well be helpful to their mission. Micky, indeed, was not settling for merely reproducing the Ignite, but was working with Shion to upgrade the casing design.

‘It’s a perfect feedback loop, isn’t it?’ Jonas observed, chatting to Martine over breakfast. ‘I only realised it last night, though it’s just obvious, really – you’ve got all these people who are failing or just not fulfilling their potential in regular Fleet service because they’re not being challenged and given the opportunities they need. So you put them on a ship with a lot of exciting R&D projects and an unlimited training budget, cut them some slack on formalities and motivate them to excel. Result, one
very
high achieving team, on a cutting edge ship. And as that means you get to go on these high powered missions, elite, crack unit, that raises the bar again.’

Martine nodded agreement. ‘I’d say more of a vortex than a loop,’ she said, with a grin. ‘Anyone coming into it tends to be sucked in fast – most people joining us are very highly motivated to begin with, of course, having beaten off strong competition for the opportunity to serve with us. Mostly, though, they arrive thinking in terms of doing whatever courses it was they wanted to do that they haven’t been able to get on. As they come into this environment, though, expectations are
so
much higher, and such a buzz, always, tremendous drive, working up for operations, trying to make the most of every hour of every day – it’s very high energy. People are caught up into that almost as soon as they come aboard. You can see it, like a stunned, lost look for a bit as everything’s too weird and too fast, but then they come up to speed, get into the buzz, pretty soon they’re loving it. Which is great, obviously, no problem with that. The only problem we have is that nobody wants to leave.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘Like, ‘After
this
, how can I go back to
that
?’’

Jonas could see that. He was already looking back at the post he’d had on the Zeus and wondering how he’d ever thought it a busy, challenging job. His own posting here was on the standard terms of a secondment with the Fourth – between five months and a year, depending on operational requirements. After that, he would be going back to the carrier. Already, he could see that that might be a depressing prospect.

‘Of course,’ Martine said, with a grin, ‘vortices throw things
out
, as well as sucking them in. People don’t have to go back to their previous ships.’

Jonas knew that. He had also seen studies which confirmed – contrary to Captain Urquart’s opinion that serving with the Fourth was equivalent to flushing your commission down the lavatory – that a tour of duty with them was a career turbo-charge. Officers who’d served with them were able to take their pick of postings, while promotion rates for both officers and crew were greatly increased both during and after a secondment to them. He hadn’t considered that as a factor in agreeing to come and serve with them himself. He had agreed to that as a matter of duty, recognising that they needed his help disentangling their finances and that his presence could help protect against any further malicious allegations that might be made against them. But opportunities were here for the taking.

Martine saw him thinking about that, the future opening up with all kinds of possibilities, and she smiled. This was important, too, to get secondees to be thinking beyond their term of service with them right from the start, never letting it be forgotten that they
were
only here temporarily, but making that a positive thing. Jonas would be considering his options, now, thinking about it from time to time, so when he went back to the regular Fleet it would be with clear decision and purpose.

He would certainly have a lot more skills to offer. Being trained in the hot tech being trialled on the ship was a career-booster in itself, as officers with knowledge of those systems would be in high demand as those systems were rolled out into the regular Fleet. Operationally, too, taking part in a mission like this would score you high status anywhere but the most rabid ‘by the manual’ traditionalists.

Serving with the Fourth, though, also meant learning a whole load of other things, unimportant in themselves but broadening skills and experience. One of the requirements on secondment, for instance, was gunnery, Alex being of the view that every member of a warship’s crew should be able to operate a cannon, at need. Jonas had gunnery qualifications, of course, acquired as part of cadet training, but it had been a very long time since he’d held gun controls, and he never actually
had
fired one live, all his training done with simulators and guns set to blank fire.

Here, though, he was trained in the operation of the Maylard cannon, a course of theory and simulator training which would culminate in a live-fire exercise. It wasn’t long before he found himself being gently pressured to ‘go for the ace’ in that, too, as he was told that it was normal here to go for the senior gunner rating that required a thousand live shots at hard targets, with at least 96% accuracy.

‘It isn’t anything official, of course,’ Martine said, just a little too casually. ‘Just one of those ship’s tradition things.’

Jonas gave her a speaking look. He no longer found the need to maintain impersonal reserve, even on the command deck. That was where they were then, Martine having a companionable coffee with him at watch changeover.

‘Yes, I know,’ he said, drily. He had been outraged, himself, by the news sweeping through the Fleet that von Strada had given his entire crew, even the officers, senior gunner rating. They had, apparently, spent a week at a wild system, firing at rocks. The seniority rating came with a trivial bonus of a few dollars a month, which anti-Fourth’s campaign groups had heard about and ranted accordingly, but it was the
insult
Jonas had felt so strongly about, himself, the Fourth making a mockery of what should be a notable achievement.

He knew, now, that there was more to it than that – the part of the story that had been left out when it was doing the rounds on Fleet goss. Nowhere, in that, had it been mentioned that they’d been carrying out a top secret weapons test, for obvious reasons, nor that that missile test had failed, hurling debris across the system. Some of that, a tiny proportion but still megatonnes, had been hurtling towards one of the system’s inner worlds. It was uninhabited, naturally. The target system had been chosen and tested to ensure that there wasn’t so much as a pool of algae on any of its worlds.

Logically, it didn’t matter in the least that the debris was going to crash through the inner world’s rings like shotgun blast while continent-shattering strikes hammered the planet. Alex, though, had responded to a heartfelt appeal from the Devast geologist to save it if they could. They had done so – a pleasing if trivial salvage which had also provided their gunners with an abundance of hard targets. Alex had merely offered the opportunity for gunners to go for the seniority rating if they wished – it had been the crew themselves who’d worked that up into
all
of them going for it, achieving the record of being the first frigate ever to have a hundred per cent senior gunnery rating. They’d lost that standing, of course, when secondees left and new people arrived, but the newbies were being encouraged to take the higher level of training, too, and put time in on the simulator, building up their skills.

Going back to the regular Fleet with a senior gunnery rating on his file would, Jonas knew, be strongly disapproved of on the Zeus and he’d have to endure jokes about it anywhere. On the other hand, however, ship’s traditions were practically sacred. This particular tradition might only be a few months old, but Jonas could see that it was indeed very strong. He would not want to be the only one standing out against it.

So, he booked in for half-hour sessions on guns, three times a week, for ‘personal interest’ marksmanship practice. He also, with far more enthusiasm, signed up for advanced pilot training – an upgrade to his existing license which would qualify him to fly the fighters.

The chance to have ‘fighter pilot’ on his CV re-awoke the inner six year old in Jonas. It made him remember being a child, running around the apartment with his arms out making ‘Bzzzz!’ and ‘Fleeeep!’ and ‘F’tang!’ noises, in between shouting things like ‘Enemy on the starboard bow!’

Shion told him to embrace that, too.

‘That’s why people think the swarms are so hard to pilot,’ she commented, in their first simulator session. They were actually on one of the fighters, still docked onto the ship, using it in flight simulator mode. ‘They’re trying to fly them consciously, looking at the controls. It’s easier than that, it really is – if you rode a bike as a child, you weren’t watching your speed, angle of lean, torque or vectors. You just
rode
, feeling the balance, leaning into the curves, feeling that joy, like flying. That’s the feeling you need to have, to pilot these. It is a physical intelligence, like sport. So what I want you to do, now, is to set aside all the theory and drill-trained piloting you’ve done, think back to being a kid and just have fun with this, okay?’

By the time he came out of the simulator Jonas was hooked. He understood now why the flight simulators were booked out from six in the morning till midnight,
and
why making it onto the duty-pilot roster was the most coveted assignment on the ship. He had to be considerate in not grabbing more than the one hour a week on the simulator that the course required, mindful that others needed the time for qualifications they would actually use.

Not that he actually had the time to do any extra pilot training, anyway. Every hour was packed, with routine admin having to be fitted in somehow around the demands of combat drills, mission training, transfer training, watch duties and grappling with the Fourth’s chaotic finances.

The Heron, like all starships, operated on the twenty-five hour day, eight day week Chartsey Central Time. Of the two hundred hours in a week, Jonas was rostered to work a nominal fifty, though like all officers, expected to work to the job, not to the clock.

Most groundsiders would have considered that a fifty hour working week with just one day off on rest day was onerous. Liberty League certainly thought so, calling it punitive and rights abusing no matter how many times they were told that it was perfectly standard workload for Fleet personnel.

They did have a point, though, as Jonas was coming to realise. The original protests against the Fourth might have been down to a misunderstanding, but activist groups rarely continued campaigning at that pitch without what they considered to be very good cause. The Fleet themselves commented on the Fourth’s workload, which was often said to push at a hundred hours a week. Alex von Strada himself was well known as a tireless workaholic, liable to be on the command deck or working about the ship from before the morning watch was set till past midnight. It was believed that he expected his officers and crew to work just as hard. There were frequent comments in the Fleet about him hammering his crew with inordinate numbers of drills. Such comments made in the Fleet would also be shared with mates in the merchant service, who in turn would pass them on in spacer bars, all part of ‘the goss’ that was the lifeblood of the spacer community.

Spacer bars, though, were not exclusively for spacers, and any journalist or activist might overhear such discussion. Jonas himself, looking at the figures even before he’d been asked to come here on secondment, had considered that the number of drills the Heron carried out was excessive. He had said so, too, in conversation at social events, even with civilians present.

He regretted that, now, both because he’d come to understand that such comments were the fuel that kept the activist barrage going, and because he’d realised that the drills were not, in fact, either excessive or burdensome. Faced with the prospect of having to meet the ferocious Samartians, he would have been happy to do even more combat drills than they were doing already.

Part of the problem, Jonas felt, was that it just didn’t feel like work, here. Even combat drills felt more like playing games than anything. They
were
games, effectively, battles of wits between Alex and Davie North. They were often like kids playing tag, the frigate and the tender chasing one another in dizzying leaps and spins. Even the damage control drills that were part of that on the Heron were played as a competition between the various sectors of the ship, with kudos and cookies for the team which scored the highest for efficiency. They used very realistic special effects, too – the first time Jonas went through blowout drill he was actually alarmed, wondering if Alex really could be crazy enough to have triggered a real blowout for training purposes. The explosion both looked and sounded real, air was rushing with tornado force, an unsecured coffee mug flying past his head. It was only afterwards that he was able to confirm that it was, indeed, no more than special effects and a simulator programme running in the air-processing systems.

Even knowing that it was a simulation, though, there was always something of an adrenalin kick when the explosions and fires and blowouts were going on; the ship really was in freefall and they were responding to real tech deactivations, too, as ‘hits’ by the opposing ship’s blank fire triggered worst-case scenario damage to every possible bit of tech that might have been affected by it. Their training programmes didn’t quite go so far as to actually damage the tech, but it was rigged so that it would turn off and could not be reactivated until whatever work was needed to ‘fix’ it had been completed. So the challenge was real, even if the damage was not. Jonas found that he enjoyed the combat drills, the fast pace, the bangs and smoke, the teamwork, the having a laugh afterwards as they debriefed. Jonas would never have believed it, but he had to admit that combat drills with the Fourth were actually fun.