Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (30 page)

‘I’m not suggesting that you take your breaks in your cabin,’ he assured him. ‘I know you hate it in there and so would I, fair enough, you like people around you, no problem. But there should be a place on the ship, other than engineering, where you and anyone else can sit, relax, write letters, play triplink, have a chat or watch the stars. And the irony is, there, that the one place on the ship that has that potential, the refectory, is blocked by a
stupid
rule that any time spent on a mess deck by officers has to be recorded as pastoral care, so officers actually trying to make use of a healthy, beneficial down-time get restricted in that by overwork rules. You can’t tell me
that
makes any sense. So what you need to do is move the refectory off the mess deck into the exosuite, make the conference room the academic hangout and open up the other facilities for anyone to use, too. The refit will be finished, tomorrow,’ he pointed out, ‘And it’s just ridiculous having such facilities sitting there empty. And seeing
you
, then, go there, the crew will recognise, themselves, when you are working and when you’re not, which will set a very much better example for them and bust this frightening culture of thinking that working yourself into the ground is actually
cool
.

‘I know, I know, they’re all high performance right now, you’re
good
at that, keeping people so motivated and high energy that they’d be the first ones to swear that they’re fine, great,
loving
this, having a blast, never felt so great in all their lives. But they can’t keep up that pace indefinitely and sooner or later, as operational pressure increases, they
will
start to crash. And don’t tell me that there isn’t an issue. You’ve got Jonas Sartin, an IA officer who has never broken the smallest rule in his
life
, being logged for breaking safety regs, and that in itself should have red-flagged to you that there is a serious problem. I am crediting you with concern for the welfare of your crew as well as concern for the operational performance of your ship, so I know that I can count on your full support in this, not just in doing as I ask with the exo-suite, but backing me in tackling this overwork equals kudos culture, head on.’

Alex drank some of his coffee, regarding the medic with cool, thoughtful eyes.

‘Tell me,’ he asked, in a noncommittal tone, ‘is this – turning up in people’s bedrooms in the middle of the night – something you make a habit of?’

Simon grinned.

‘As occasion requires, yes,’ he admitted. ‘I find it useful to ensure that I have someone’s full and undivided attention. It makes the point, too, that I feel very strongly about something.’

‘Very effectively,’ said Alex, drily. ‘And I won’t waste my breath telling you how out of order it is,
so
many ways, because you know that already. I am curious, though, as to why you didn’t wait till we’ve parted company with the Stepeasy – are you that confident I won’t boot you off the ship?’

‘Totally,’ said Simon, with absolute certainty. ‘I’m in the right. You’re smart enough to recognise that, and not so stubborn or arrogant that you’d let your own irritation with me stand in the way of what’s best for your crew. And besides, even if I did think you’d kick me off the ship, I wouldn’t wait until you couldn’t to speak up. I’m not that kind of sneaky – always up front, me.’

‘Hmmmn,’ said Alex. ‘You know, I am beginning to develop a strong sense of sympathy with the Dean.’ He couldn’t help but give a reluctant grin, though, as Simon laughed. ‘You are a right pain in the backside,’ Alex added. ‘But, speaking as someone who has been a right pain in the backside myself when I believe I’m in the right on an important issue, I don’t really have much ground to complain, there. Though it wouldn’t, I have to say, have occurred to me to try to make my point by going into the First Lord’s quarters and sitting on his feet until he listened. Don’t do that again, Simon. Please,’ he added, as the medic adopted a mulish look. ‘If you want to talk to me, you only have to say so – unless we’re on alert at the time, you can have my full and undivided attention without the need for this kind of shenanigan, okay?’

‘Okay,’ said Simon, in a tone that made it clear he would hold him to that. ‘And you’ll do it, then – open up the lounge and make use of it yourself.’ It wasn’t a question, and as Alex went to give an automatic response, Simon flung up a hand. ‘
Don’t
,’ he commanded, ‘try to fob me off with protocols or budgeting. This is well within your authority as captain to decide. I’m telling you that it is essential for the long term wellbeing of your crew and therefore the performance of your ship, so just
do
it, don’t dither about.’

‘I will make,’ Alex said, ‘a considered decision. Put your concerns, and your recommendation, in writing, officially, for the log. I will then have a cost-benefit analysis carried out, along with an Internal Affairs review to establish that such a proposal falls within regulation and policy.
Then
I will make the decision, properly, on a considered and fully informed basis.’

‘And how long is
that
going to take?’ Simon demanded, with some dismay, clearly having had some experience of university authorities fobbing him off with protracted bureaucratic process.

‘That depends on how long it takes you to get your report in,’ Alex answered. ‘If you can get that to me by breakfast, I’ll be able to give you a decision before lunch. Okay?’

‘Oh-
kay!’
Simon agreed, breaking into a grin of relief. ‘I thought you meant weeks. Sorry. Just – I’m used to having to bulldoze faculty and hospital management off their big fat bums. You have to be pushy with them to get anything done. But I’ve got the thing in writing for you, sure – thought you might ask for that,’ he said, complacently, and passed a file from his wristcom to Alex’s inbox, clicking off the stopwatch as he did so. ‘Two minutes eighty seven.’ He gave skipper a bright smile. ‘Shall I buzz off, now? Or would this be a good time for a chat?’

Alex stared at him for a moment and then laughed, helplessly. He was wide awake, no chance now of going back to bed.

‘A
chat
?’ He queried.

‘Well, counselling, really,’ Simon said, ‘but people respond better when you call it a chat.’

Alex’s eyebrows shot up. ‘And you consider that I am in need of counselling?’

‘See?
Instant
defensiveness,’ Simon observed. ‘So much better if it’s defined as a chat, off the record, just two guys talking about stuff over a coffee.’

Alex shook his head. ‘You are...’ he started, but couldn’t find the words, at least not ones that senior officers were supposed to use. ‘I just
know
I am going to regret this,’ he said, resignedly.

Simon, recognising this as an agreement to hear what he had to say, gave a little crow of victory.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘So, please, bear with me,
don’t
punch me in the face, at least until you’ve heard me out.’

‘I would never punch you, in the face or otherwise,’ Alex said, rather on his dignity.

‘Yes, well, people say that,’ said Simon, and left that hanging, with a rueful grin.

Alex cracked into laughter again. He just couldn’t help it. Simon had jack-hammered through all his usual defences. The very fact that he’d accepted Simon sitting here in his sleeping quarters cut through both professional protocols and his Novaterran heritage of reserve in public and formal situations.

‘No punching,’ he promised. Then, as a thought occurred that wiped the amusement off his face in a moment, he went on, guardedly, ‘Though I won’t, I tell you now, talk about my daughter, and I don’t want you talking about that either.’

‘Understood,’ Simon assured him, which Alex reflected afterwards was not at all the same thing as ‘okay, then, I won’t.’ ‘I daresay you’ve had way too many people giving you their opinions, huh,
and
their advice. Friends, no doubt, trying to set you up with dates, that kind of thing.’

Alex nodded, with a little grimace as recent memories flared.

He had gone to dinner at his friend’s house on Therik, having been assured that it would just be his friend and his wife, there. Inevitably, his friend had ‘surprised’ him by introducing another friend who had ‘dropped in unexpectedly’. She was twenty five, an engineering officer on a Red Line ship. She was intelligent, attractive, amusing, everything Alex might have wished for in a date.

Alex had left early, and had left alone. Quite apart from the very real security issues involved in anyone who dated, him, he recognised that he had emotional trust issues, carrying so much baggage from his divorce that he would bring major trust and intimacy issues to any future relationship.

He picked up his coffee, sipped, and looked back at Simon. And with that, he knew, just knew, that Simon had understood everything about how he felt, just from that quick grimace and the way he’d reached for his coffee. Simon was looking sympathetic, but amused, too.

‘Showing no understanding of you at all,’ Simon observed. ‘You’re absolutely fine as you are.’

He was evidently sincere, and Alex looked surprised. He was more used to medics talking about him in terms of emotional dysfunction and the grieving process. None of them had ever said, ‘you’re fine as you are.’

Simon laughed.

‘I know. Most medics don’t get you, either – most medics are pretty dim bulbs anyway, they don’t see what you’re like on the ship and of course you never open up to them, so they can only diagnose from assumptions. And Rangi, well, he’s a good kid and a decent surgeon, but he’s got his own preconceptions, with that spiritual healing riff, just can’t get past seeing you as an eagle-spirit with a broken wing.’ He spoke with tolerant scorn.

‘In reality, you are coping as well as anyone could,’ he told the captain. ‘Grief is not an overwhelming or unhealthy part of your emotional life, and your primary reason for not wanting to talk about it, these days, is because other people’s pity and patronising advice is just so infuriating. But relax, Alex, you won’t get any special voice or ‘the talk’ on closure and putting your life back together from
me
. Your life
is
together, I get that. And I don’t subscribe, either, to the mythology about you. A lot of people believe that you ‘threw yourself into your work’ after Etta was killed, that your command became the only thing that mattered to you and that
that’s
why you ended up founding the Fourth. There may be some element of truth to that emotionally – most myths have a grain of truth somewhere, after all – but me, I check
facts
.

‘The fact is that you have always prioritised your work. People talk about you becoming ‘driven’ after Etta’s death, but all the evidence I’ve seen is that you always
have
been, that that is a natural, normal characteristic of who you are. Fact is, Alex, you were back on duty within days of Etta being born, and happy in a posting that frequently took your ship out on patrol for weeks at a time. I know that you loved Etta very much, she was your world, groundside, and much in your thoughts out on patrol, too, for sure. But you are a
spacer
, Alex, and spacers really are a breed apart, psychologically, you
have
to be. It needs a particular kind of person to live and work out here – brave, of course, adventurous, all that, but also, fundamentally, someone who is prepared to head off into space leaving family and home, able to compartmentalise ‘family and home’ as ‘part of my life when I’m in port’. You couldn’t function as a spacer any other
way
. And I’m not criticising, here, honestly, I’m not. I’m just pointing out that this myth that you only became this work-focussed and driven because of Etta’s death is just that, a
myth
. You had the rehab
and
the R&D thing going on from before she was even born, didn’t you?’

‘Well, yes,’ Alex agreed. He’d looked very guarded as Simon was talking about his daughter, but was ready enough to discuss professional issues. ‘Though that just happened, really, it wasn’t planned. You have to meet certain requirements on the tagged and flagged programme, see, and amongst them are postings which involve dealing with underachieving crew, and a technical challenge. When it came time for me to have my own command, it was felt that I’d already met the requirement for motivating underachieving crew, so I was given the Minnow as a technical challenge, looking at ways to upgrade ships of that class to keep them competitive with more modern vessels. Only, it had been laid up in reserve for a year, un-crewed, and as word got around that I’d got the command and would be putting a crew together, a lot of other skippers sent me underachieving crew on special request for transfer. There were so many, in fact, that it was obvious I wouldn’t be able to handle that as a regular command, so it was agreed that I could use microsteps and rewards, with a rehab aspect to the command, too.’

‘Yes, that’s the authorised version,’ Simon observed. ‘But come off it, Alex. You had a
choice
. There had to have been a moment, somewhere in that process, where someone in authority said, ‘It’s unfair to expect you to do this,’ and you said, ‘It’s okay, I want to, bring it on.’’

He had him bang to rights on that, as Alex admitted with a wry look and a sip of his coffee. First Lord Dix Harangay had used exactly those words, indeed, and Alex’s answer, though more formal, had been, essentially, just that.

‘Well, you know,’ he said. ‘I’ve always had strong views myself about the reason bullocks
become
bullocks. I mean, these are by definition very high potential people who join the Fleet full of optimism, ambition and enthusiasm, and then within a few years or even months are kicking off, miserable, frustrated, insubordinate and causing problems. It seems entirely obvious to me that that is the Fleet’s fault for not giving them the opportunities they need to succeed. And just, please, do not even get me
started
on the absolute idiocy of imposing quotas on the numbers of particular qualifications a ship is allowed. I mean, just take pilots. Fleet regs for a frigate of this class are that they are allowed just eighteen designated pilots. If any other crew want to take pilot training, even if the ship has not already spent its woefully inadequate training allowance, if the rating does qualify as a pilot they will be rated ‘excessively qualified’ for that ship and actually taken off it, posted groundside until there may be a posting available to a ship that
doesn’t
have full complement of qualified pilots. That goes for engineers, higher grade techs and other restricted skills, too. I find it absolutely mind numbingly stupidly obvious that that is a ridiculous and destructive system. The theory may be that it prevents some ships having more than their fair share of highly skilled crew while others are under-skilled, but the reality
is that it’s positively deterring skippers from training up crew they know will then be taken off them, more often than not to kick their heels groundside. And that is doubly so where bullocks are concerned. Their most frequent cause for grievance by
far is applications for courses being refused, because training is so restricted anyway and other crew have to have the same chance of access, so once they’ve done one course they’re often told they can’t apply for any more because it’s not fair to the others. Me, I’ve always said, loud and strong, that I consider that unfair to the crew being denied the opportunity to excel, and worse, the whole stupid policy being damaging to the Fleet as a whole. So when I got the chance to put my money where my mouth was, as it were, and
give
those bullocks a shot at succeeding, there was no way I was going to turn it down. I had a point to make, politically, and I don’t deny that was a big factor, showing just what those ‘failing’ crew could achieve if they were given the opportunity. And that did dovetail with the challenge of improving the Minnow’s technical performance, too, so the rehab and the R&D have always gone hand in hand. And you’re right, yes, that
has
always been my highest priority, in terms of time commitment. I will admit that I decided to get married and start a family because it was a good time in my career to do so, convenient, and I never did pretend that it was any great romance – it was one of those agency matches, a marriage that gave us both what we wanted from it. Etta, though – yes, she
was
my world, it felt like everything I did, I did for her. Her death was devastating. It’s probably true that for a while, staying focussed on my work was the only thing that kept me going. But I came through that – I won’t say got over it, but I’m good now, I’m okay, my life
is
together. The only difficulty I have is getting other people to accept that. Try as I might, people just can’t seem to get past this assumption that I’m a tormented soul in need of salvation, and you’re right, far too many friends keep trying to set me up with dates. I try to be understanding about it, but it
is
annoying.’