Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (35 page)

In this case, though, the Heron didn’t need to do that. Whatever ship it was that had brought the supplies here had cleared an entry route which was still fresh enough to be useable. Only a few cometary fragments had drifted into the hole, a process which would close it up within a few months.

The Heron was not going to enter the system, though. There was no need, and Alex didn’t put his ship through that kind of manoeuvre unless it was purposeful. They had two shuttles capable of carrying cargo containers, but Shion wanted to try out a modification she’d made to the grapnels on the fighters, so they were using them instead.

The role of leading the retrieval team went to Buzz, by right of custom that Alex would not have dreamed of removing from him. Buzz took Tina Lucas with him, though, allowing her to effectively lead the task while he supervised, ready to intervene if need be.

It was all very orderly – the ship was on standby alert just in case they needed to go into the system, Alex holding the conn and the ship half-rigged ready for action. Their fighters swept through, taking out the odd fragments that had drifted into the access hole. Scanners soon detected the short-range beacon which would identify exactly where in the system the containers had been left. At the same time, though, they were also picking up a distress signal. It was announcing, loud and clear, that there was a survival dome with a castaway on the third moon of the seventh planet.

‘Looks like they got us a linguist,’ Alex observed, and signalled authorisation to proceed to pickup, following search and rescue protocols.

Back on the Heron, then, they could only wait and follow what was happening via the reports that Tina sent. The first of these had a dataset which included an image of the survival dome taken from low orbit.

It was shockingly small; a four man unit no bigger than a suburban bungalow. It had been sited close to the north pole of the moon, a tiny pinhead of fluorescent green and orange against the grey and white of the lunar surface.

It
was
occupied, though, as was evidenced by the frantic calls that burst out from the dome within moments of their fighters passing through scanner range.

‘‘Mayday, mayday, mayday!’ It was a man’s voice, yelling on all channels. ‘Help! I’m here! On the moon! Can you find me? Can anyone hear me? Is anyone there?
Please
?’

They listened in as Shion calmed him down, established that it was safe to land, and did so. The moment they heard his name, Murg Atwood ran a search and posted a file to the command deck datatable within moments.

The only Jermane Taerling they had listed as employed by the Diplomatic Corps was a fifty four year old Higher Administrative Officer Grade 3. The publicly available files said that he was employed by the Cultural Division – the files the Fourth had access to said that he worked in Exodiplomacy. He
was
a linguist, but not a very distinguished one. He had a masters degree but not a doctorate, had never held a teaching or research post at a university. There was no list of publications on the file, at least not publically available ones. There were a few articles listed which had been published in the Diplomatic Corp’s in-house exodiplomacy journal, but the readership of that was obviously very limited.

The President and First Lord, though, had gone to extraordinary effort to get this relatively low ranking, undistinguished man aboard their ship. They would have to wait, though, to find out why. By the sound of it, he might need a little time to calm down before they’d be able to get much sense out of him.

There was a cheer, though, throughout the ship, as Buzz reported, ‘Rescue party has secured the castaway.’

It wasn’t much of a rescue, really – they spent a few minutes helping him to pack his belongings, got him into a survival suit and walked him over to Firefly.

He talked non-stop all the way through his rescue, all the way back to the ship and through the process of getting him aboard and helping him out of his suit. He was brought aboard through the deck seven secure airlock, met there by Rangi who took him to sickbay at once for medical assessment. He was still talking as Rangi led him there.

‘Thank you, thank you – is that lavender I can smell? You’ve no idea how wonderful it is to see you. I could kiss your feet – twenty two days I’ve been in that dome, the scariest place I’ve ever been in my life. Of course they
said
they’d come back and check I’d been picked up in three months but what if you didn’t arrive and something happened and they never came? And that ice coming in and out, in and out, like it was trying to
get
me. But there it is, safe now, thanks to you – I never saw anything so welcome in my whole life as that fighter, and that it was her grace, too –
such
an honour, never expected to...’

There was a little ripple of laughter through the ship as the sickbay door closed behind him, still talking.

*
*
*

It was another hour before they understood what had happened, and why the Diplomatic Corps had gone to such lengths to get Jermane Taerling out to them. They had the letter from the president he’d mentioned, as he’d given them that straight away, but it contained no clue even as to why he’d sent the linguist out to them. Jermane Taerling himself had no idea. He did, however, have a box of maximum security-sealed tapes from the Embassy III, which turned out to contain a copy of all the information so far provided by the Gider.

That caused a gasp, when Alex plugged in the first tape and accessed it. None of them had ever seen files that big, before. It had eighty seven files on it, identified only by a date and time. Every one of them was as big as a university library. Only a tiny, tiny fraction of them had even been translated, let alone catalogued and organised. Some had notes attached, more bewildering than helpful, such as the one that said ‘Lunar Geography #47’ and another that said ‘Commentary on Feet’.

Alex looked at the box, which contained twenty three of those high-density tapes, and began to understand why it had been felt that they might need a linguist.

Rangi Tekawa advised that they take their time with talking to Jermane, though. He’d come through his ordeal quite well, physically, though eating and sleeping at disjointed times. It had been much worse, psychologically – a naturally very social man who’d never choose to be alone for more than half an hour or so, he’d been fighting panic, there, in such terrifying isolation. Jermane Taerling had come to see the frost on the lunar surface as a living thing, creeping stealthily across the lunar surface, slowly but surely moving to engulf the dome. Rangi was of the view that he’d need counselling for that.

For right now, though, what he needed most was
people
. Rangi took him to mess deck one, a decision made primarily on his medical needs rather than his rank. They would normally offer official passengers the hospitality of the wardroom as a matter both of courtesy and of not imposing on the crew. All the wardroom cabins were occupied at the moment, but they could easily have fitted an extra bunk in somewhere and shifted around to give their guest a cabin.

The privacy that offered, though, was not something Jermane Taerling would welcome. He had always travelled, previously, as part of an Ambassadorial retinue. As one of the lower ranking members of such retinues, he had usually been accommodated on a mess deck and was very happy to be so, now, agreeing that he would definitely prefer that, yes.

The crew accommodated him with great goodwill. Bunk assignments were a matter of social complexity on Fleet ships and newcomers were usually expected to accept the bunks considered least convenient or lower status for reasons that would not be apparent to anyone other
than
Fleet crews. Chief Petty Officer Hali Burdon was in charge of organising bunk assignments. Seeing that the only bunks they had available were the lowest status ones that nobody would want, she asked for volunteers to give their passenger a better welcome than that. In the end, seven people changed bunks so that Jermane could have the one that was decided to be best for him.

Mess deck one, the largest on the ship, was run on traditional Fleet lines. It had three-tier bunks around the walls, many of them tucked into alcoves, a shower block and a galley hatch. Tables were set out in the usual Fleet way – eight seat ‘social’ tables at one end, two seat ‘semis’ at the other. Sixty four of the frigate’s crew lived here, and there would never be a time when there was nobody here, no time when Jermane would find himself left alone. They’d given him a bunk in the heart of things, one of those side-on to the mess deck rather than tucked at right angles into a cubby. It was the mid-bunk, too, most coveted as you didn’t have to duck down or climb up to get into it.

‘Oh lovely,’ Jermane exclaimed, when they showed him to it, ‘I usually end up with the bottom one – not that I’m complaining, of course I know they’re all the same, and so comfortable, too, not at all what I was expecting the first time I was told I would be sleeping in a bunk...’

Once he’d unpacked his belongings – talking the whole time, naturally – he exclaimed over the guest-pack they’d given him, as delighted by it as if it were gifts of great price. He had never, he said, been given anything like this when travelling on Fleet ships, nor on liners, how
lovely
.

‘It’s only the usual pack we give,’ Hali assured him, ‘to all our passengers.’ That was true – everyone from people they’d arrested to Senator Machet in her own VIP visit had been given the courtesy pack. It contained Fourth’s issue shipboard rig without insignia, deck shoes, night gear and a shower robe, along with a set of toiletries.

Jermane tried on a uniform rig, exclaiming over how weird he looked in it, but changed into a suit, then, explaining at length all the reasons he had for doing so. Then he sat down at one of the social tables for a cup of tea, though protesting that he didn’t actually need any tea, as such, since Rangi had given him some really rather lovely tea in sickbay.

Alex gave him half an hour to catch his breath, there, though it became apparent as time went on that Jermane was showing no signs at all of slowing down. They had, by then, finished bringing the supplies aboard, unloading the containers into the hold. There were no great surprises, there, at least – one container held tech and food supplies, including the promised coffee. The other contained crates, many of them with manifest documentation from Canelonian museums.

‘Finally!’ Davie exclaimed, once he was able to access the inventory that had been sent inside the container. ‘Someone with a functioning brain cell!’

He had been scathingly dismissive of the diplomatic gifts as ‘pots and paintings’, but there were no pots or paintings in the Diplomatic Corps container. It contained artefacts that might have been brought together for an exhibit of weaponry throughout the ages, ranging from an iron broadsword to modern rifles. By the look of it, many of Canelon’s museums would have a gap in their display cases or storage racks, though the artefacts were in the range of ‘significant, but not priceless’.

‘I can do something with this,’ Davie said, with a note of satisfaction, but set the inventory aside, then, to work on later.

Before long, the only task that remained was to clear away any evidence of their presence in the system.

‘We may as well take the opportunity for target practice,’ Alex observed, and logged orders for the containers to be dropped back sublight and left floating in space for live-fire exercise. He authorised live fire against the dome, too, the fighters being tasked to remove all traces of its presence. As he did that, he saw a look of quick concern on Jonas Sartin’s face, and looked at him enquiringly. ‘Problem, Mr Sartin?’

‘Just a thought, sir,’ Jonas replied. ‘If we are intending to leave no hint that the Fourth has been here, perhaps blowing up the dome may not be the most advisable solution. The presence of a crater where a moonbase used to be is something of a trademark, after all.’

His manner was so deadpan that it was a moment before they realised he was joking. Laughter broke out, not just round the command table but throughout the ship. Alex laughed too, but he gave Jonas a nod.

‘Good point,’ he said. ‘We’ll pack it all up neatly and leave it ready for collection, then. That’s the last thing anyone would expect us to do.’

Jonas grinned. Such survival domes were virtually worthless once they had been activated. They came highly compressed in two hard-shell cases that could be flung aboard a shuttle if the ship had to be evacuated. One contained the fabric of the dome, which would pretty much explode into shape once the casing was released. Re-packing such a dome was not considered economic; the dome would have to be as deflated as much as possible and strapped up into a bale, then sent to a specialist company for detailed testing and recompression into a new explosive casing. It was cheaper just to buy a new one. The second case contained the life support gear. Technically, there was no reason why it couldn’t be stripped out again, overhauled, sterilised and packed back into its case. No spacer would want to use it again, though – superstitions abounded, but amounted to a deep, immovable reluctance to use any kind of second-hand emergency kit. Only the most rigidly By The Book skippers would require such a dome to be packed up, transported and destroyed under procedures for disposal of Fleet property.

‘Ms Lucas,’ Alex looked at the cadet, ‘attend to that, will you?’

Tina beamed. That meant taking a team in, leading technical work in a spacesuit environment.

‘Thanks, skipper!’ she said, and hurried off at his nod.

Jermane Taerling was brought to the command deck half an hour later, as it was recognised that he was, by then, just about as calm as he was likely to get. He burst out into effusive thanks when he was introduced to the skipper. Alex meant to shake hands with him briefly, but Jermane, evidently starved of any kind of human contact, grabbed Alex’s hand with both of his and pumped enthusiastically.

‘Thank you, captain!
So
kind! I won’t be any trouble to you, I promise – I’m quite well housetrained, or I suppose I should say shiptrained – in travelling aboard Fleet ships, and I don’t suppose this will be very much different. Anyway I know all about the safety and ‘don’t touch the tech’ rules and all that so you don’t need to worry, you won’t even know I’m...’