Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (31 page)

‘Maddening, I’m sure,’ Simon agreed, and took a drink of his own coffee. ‘I get, I know, you’re someone who doesn’t really need intimate relationships, you get all the emotional involvement you need from your work and from casual friendship, not because of what happened to Etta but because that’s just who you are and always have been.

‘The only thing you
do
have an issue with, as far as I can see, is this thing about taking shoreleave,’ he observed. ‘I do get that. Obviously, in the immediate aftermath at Chartsey you wouldn’t have wanted to go anywhere, much, and by the time you were at the point where you might have started going on holidays again, the Fourth’s thing had kicked off. By the time you’d transferred to Therik there were all the security issues going on, too, and with medical and security on your case about it, taking leave became this issue of control over your private life, yes? Like, ‘If I can’t have a private life on my own terms, I don’t want one at all.’’

‘You make it sound rather childish,’ Alex said, which was a tacit admission in itself that Simon had got to the heart of his feelings on that, too. Then, with a suspicious look, ‘Did
Buzz
tell you that?’

‘Come on,’ Simon reproved. ‘You’ve got to know Buzz better than that. When I tried to talk to him about you he told me to take a running jump – well, not literally, he’s very good at making ‘Go boil your head in a bucket’ sound like ‘please don’t do that, dear boy’, but he was pretty fierce about it, lots of things about respecting your right to privacy and how inappropriate it would be to be discussing you with subordinates. Which I haven’t done, only tried to talk to Buzz because I know he’s your ‘significant other’, emotionally. And before you ask, no, I haven’t talked to Davie about you, either. But I am, myself, you know, a qualified and practising psychiatrist – not something I admit to at parties, it tends to make people either flee the scene or start telling you about their potty training. But it hardly, after all, takes any kind of genius to work out that the kind of shoreleave they are trying to make you take would be slow torture to anyone of your personality type,
and
that the more people try to tell you to do something you don’t feel they have a right to boss you on, the less likely you are to do it.’

‘Yes, okay, you’ve got me there,’ Alex admitted, laughing a little and relaxing again. ‘Work related orders, of course, obviously, I’m committed to obey those whether I like them or not. But when they start on telling me that they’ve organised a lovely retreat house for my shoreleave so I can get right away from all the stress and pressure, it does get my hackles up. That
is
supposed to be my private life, freedom for me to go and do whatever I want. Of course I accept that security issues mean I can’t do that, responsibly, but the whole shoreleave thing has, admittedly, become something of a bugbear.’ He gave the medic a philosophical look. ‘And you’re going to tell me I need to overcome that, I suppose.’

‘No, I’m going to tell you that you need to tell them to go boil
their
heads in a bucket,’ Simon told him. ‘Too
right
, they’re interfering in your private life – with the best of intentions, no doubt, on the assumptions that you are, A, so pressured in your work life that you need total rest on retreat to recharge your batteries, B, so driven that you won’t take any leave unless you’re forced to do so, and C, emotionally damaged and therefore in need of friends organising your private life for you. None of those assumptions are true. You
thrive
on pressure, and you do, despite appearances, have your workload very well controlled. You have never had an issue with taking leave, either, till recently – according to the record, you’ve always taken your entitlement of leave, both on short and long leave passes. So, what did you used to do, before? Before you got married, I mean.’

‘Oh – nothing very much,’ Alex said, a little surprised. ‘I’ve been very lucky – many Fleet officers spend years on the same station, but being on tagged and flagged means I’ve bounced around quite a bit, sometimes only in port for a few days. So when I’ve got leave, I’ve done the usual things, gone sightseeing, tried the local food, bought souvenirs.’

Simon did a theatrical double-take, looking around at the cabin which was so emphatically devoid of anything
like
souvenirs or personal bric-a-brac.

‘Not for myself,’ Alex clarified. ‘I usually send my parents something from any world I visit – nothing much, just ornaments. They have a cabinet in the dining room,’ he grinned, ‘which visitors get shown.’

‘Let me guess,’ Simon said. ‘The cabinet also has every prize you won at school, a holo of you in your graduation uniform and no pictures of you since.’

‘Have you seen pictures of my parents’ house?’ Alex asked, half laughing, but just a little uneasy, too, wondering what kind of information Simon might have had access to, and from where.

‘No, not at all – just showing off, there,’ Simon told him, laughing. ‘It’s a party trick, you know, psych profiling. I know you’re not close to your parents. They love you to bits and are hugely proud of you, but they can’t even begin to cope with what’s happening in your life, now, couldn’t even really understand your life before the Fourth thing happened. So now you and they have a tacit collusion that you all just pretend the Fourth’s thing isn’t happening. They’ll have stopped watching anything other than the local news, and you just don’t tell them anything you know would upset them. They didn’t come to spend your leave with you on Therik, either, huh.’

‘I didn’t expect them to,’ Alex said, at once. ‘They didn’t come to my graduation, either – graduating from the Sixty Four means your parents are sent travel warrants so they can come to Chartsey for the parade and dinner and all that. I never really expected them to come. You have to understand, these are people who start to pack for a trip at least four days before they’re due to leave, keep packing and unpacking the car to check that they haven’t forgotten anything, and worry about taking the right clothes with them for the weather, and this is when they are only going to a holiday resort an hour away from home. Travelling intersystem is just
way
beyond their comfort zone. And socially, too – they’re good people, and I would introduce them in the highest social circles myself, with
no
kind of embarrassment, but they are convinced that they would not know how to talk to people and would embarrass themselves, or me. I was impatient with them over it, once – there was a parents’ lunch at the Academy, first year, and they were making such a huge fuss about it, not knowing what to wear, saying they wouldn’t know what cutlery to use or what to talk about, I did lose patience with it and told them to just come in their gardening clothes, eat with their fingers and tell people who looked down their noses to get stuffed.’

Simon guffawed, made a pistol with his fingers and mimed shooting himself in the head. ‘K’pah!’

‘No, it didn’t go down well,’ Alex confessed, chuckling again at the memory. ‘But no, they didn’t come to Therik – I invited them, of course, but I knew that even the idea of having to get on a starship and leave their world, everything they know, would terrify them. And you’re not saying I’m wrong, are you?’

‘No, I think you’re all making the best decisions that you can, there,’ Simon assured him. ‘Of course, it would be nice if they were able to understand your world and support you in coping with it, but that’s like saying it would be nice if they were different people. They are who they are, and it’s good that you’re able to maintain even a low level of contact. I have no contact with my own parents at all – I frightened them even before the hothouse took me off and turned me into something they had no hope of understanding. The last time we met was just painfully awkward, nothing to say to each other. I decided that it wasn’t worth the effort. So well done you, all of you, for hanging in there with some kind of working relationship. I just meant, really, that them not coming to Therik when so many other families did must have been quite isolating, in itself, not in any major way but just leaving you feeling a bit at a loose end. So I’m wondering, you know, what you would have done with those ten weeks leave, if the security thing wasn’t an issue and you
could
just have done as you liked.’

‘Oh.’ Alex was startled. ‘Do you know, I never even thought about it?’ He came to a realisation, himself, even as he said that. ‘I suppose I just didn’t want to make it worse, thinking of what might have been. You just have to make the best of it, really.’

‘You mean ‘put up with it’,’ Simon amended. ‘Which isn’t you, Alex, not at
all
. In every other aspect of your life you’re a take-charge problem solver, so why are you being so passive about letting people restrict and organise your private life? The correct response to, ‘We’ve organised a lovely quiet house for you to spend a few weeks right away from it all,’ is ‘Go boil your head, it’s my shoreleave, I’ll go where I want.’’

‘Not so easily said,’ Alex pointed out, ‘when the people organising the shoreleave are friends doing so in care and concern for you. I do try, of course, to tell them that I really
hate
that kind of leave, but they’re just so convinced I need a ‘proper break’ and ‘need looking after’, I end up doing what they want just to make them happy. It’s not as if I have a lot of options, after all – thinking about what I might do if it
wasn’t
for the security issues is just pointless. The fact is that my every movement is monitored by the media and by activists. They can get me off the base to a safe house, okay, but it’s considered unsafe for me to go about in public, even disguised.’

‘And you’d hate that, anyway,’ Simon observed. ‘Sneaking about in disguise, really not in your comfort zone. But the thought occurs, Alex, why don’t you buy yourself a yacht?’ As the skipper stared at him, Simon smiled. ‘The idiot who tried to give you the V-2-8 obviously had no idea about military propriety, but he
did
spot something, there, in your enthusiasm for that yacht, your
joy
in it. So what’s stopping you buying yourself one, perhaps an old one that needs doing up, and keeping it at Therik to work on, on leave? I’m not being insensitive here, am I? You
could
afford it?’

Alex gave a very slight, almost unconscious nod of assent. The Fleet paid well, and he had never had much in the way of expenses. His only major purchase had been an executive-status apartment on Chartsey, bought when he’d got married. After the divorce was all over, he had sold the apartment and all its contents, giving every cent of it to a children’s charity in his daughter’s name. Even that had left him with significant savings, though, which had increased rapidly in the three years since. He could certainly afford a V-2-8 if he wanted one. It had just not occurred to him that he
could
buy one for himself. And even as he thought it, he laughed, shaking his head.

‘A V-2-8 needs constant full time attention,’ he said. ‘And even if I could get one as a restoration job, it would be an enormous, impossible job to take on as a shoreleave project.’

‘Well, something else, then, smaller and achievable,’ Simon suggested. ‘But some classic you’ve got a thing for, that you’ll get totally into and love.’

Alex opened his mouth to raise all the objections that were rising, but as he did so, counter-arguments were forming themselves too.

‘You know,’ he said, quite thunderstruck, ‘that is actually a really good idea! A shuttle, maybe – a caronix or maybe a jaytee forty seven, something like that. That’d be a great project to get into – I could keep it at the base to work on...’ he was silent for a while, obviously contemplating having such a project, perhaps working on it for years to restore every detail to original, pristine glory. Pleasure lit his face, and Simon saw him realising that shoreleave could, in fact, actually be something to look forward to. ‘I’d really like that,’ Alex said. ‘Why haven’t I even thought of doing that, myself?’

‘Ah hem,’ said Simon, attempting to look modest. ‘Genius?’ he prompted, and Alex laughed.

‘Well,
thank
you,’ he said. ‘That really is a genius idea and I will certainly take you up on it. And I do take your point, you know, I really do, about setting an example for my crew in good practice and compliance with health and safety regs. I
do
make sure I take a couple of hours down-time every day, and that’s not something put on me, just something I’ve always recognised was sensible. But I take your point that that may not always be apparent, if people are seeing me being on the command deck as implying that I must be working at some level. I’m often not, though I must admit I hadn’t realised that I take as many as twenty or thirty breaks in a day – have you been counting?’

‘Me? No.’ Simon grinned. ‘But Misha has. She can’t help herself, you know, she does performance-efficiency evaluations just automatically. Inefficiency really gets on her nerves, too.’

Alex knew that. One of the recommendations that Misha had made had been that they took out a particular console in life support and reinstalled it upside down. It was, she’d observed, a console intended for people to use from a seated position but was invariably used by people standing up. Alex had been surprised by how relieved she was when he accepted the suggestion and gave permission for the change. Every time she walked through there and saw someone leaning over the unused chair to operate that console, she said, it set her teeth on edge.

‘She says you pace yourself really well,’ Simon told him. ‘And having looked at that myself, I agree. If people really
did
copy what you do, they’d be fine. You take mini breaks all the time, pausing to watch screens or have a social chat with people for a few minutes. You zone into a meditative state, too, quite often, particularly in your longer breaks and late at night. Typically, in the nineteen hours you are usually out and about, you are usually perceived as working about eighteen of them, taking only short breaks like a cup of tea in engineering. In reality, you are generally only working about thirteen and a half to fourteen hours, and less than half of that is on high-demand activity that needs your full attention and effort. If that was apparent to your crew, for sure, we would not be looking at a situation in which breaching workload regs has become the norm. So, basically, if you’re on down time, get off the command deck. I know you can’t bob on and off every time you take a five minute breather, but do something that shows you’re not actively working at that time, push your chair back from the table,
something
that anyone even glancing casually at the command deck feed will recognise as showing you’re taking a little breather. And if it’s going to be more than five minutes, scoot off to the lounge, okay?’