Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (77 page)

Alex was so preoccupied with contemplating a lunch consisting of baked fish, pear and blue cheese salad that for three more vital seconds he failed to notice what Banno was doing. By the time he did, Banno had already set out the condiment tray and was laying cutlery with a legerdemain worthy of a close-up magician. Even as Alex was opening his mouth to protest, a salad bowl appeared on the table, green leaves and sliced pear, glossy with dressing. And, in the next moment, plates with fish steaks already on them were being dealt into place with the elegance of a croupier.

‘Enjoy,’ said Banno, and departed, triumphant.

It wasn’t silver service, to be sure – it was a very long way from silver service, and the very idea of setting table and serving food in under ten seconds would make any professional steward shudder. Banno
had
pulled it off, though, and as Alex realised that he had been very successfully distracted while the crewman whipped lunch onto the table, he just had to laugh.

The salad was not, it had to be said, a hundred per cent successful. It was delicious on its own, and so was the fish, but the combination wasn’t great.

‘Fish and pear… okay.’ Misha observed, having tried it. ‘Well, okay
ish
. Pear and blue cheese, lovely. But fish and blue cheese?’

They all agreed that it was better to eat the two separately, and did so, making two courses of it. They were chatting as they ate, and by the time Alex exchanged their plates for the dessert tray from the trolley, were at ease enough to talk quite frankly about how they were feeling at the prospect of going to the dome. It was a great thrill, of course, as well as a tremendous responsibility, but all of them admitted, too, to having a touch of apprehension, a fear that they would not be worthy.

In Jermane, that was most apparent in his unease at the rank he was going to have.

‘I’m not
arguing
about it, or anything,’ he assured Alex, ‘but it still doesn’t seem like it can be right, really, for
me
to be an Attache.’

Alex smiled. He had made Jermane a Cultural Attache for this assignment, lifting him from the ranks of civil service administrative grades into the glory of holding diplomatic accreditation.

‘I
am
allowed,’ he told the linguist, with a touch of mischief. ‘I looked it up.’

Jermane had looked it up, too, secretly, worried that his bosses in the Diplomatic Corps might take exception to this and perhaps say he should never have accepted it, that the captain had no right to bestow such rank and title. He had found, though, as Alex had, that amongst his entitlements as a Presidential Envoy was the right to appoint diplomatic personnel, right up to and including the rank of Ambassador. He had held off from
that
, recognising that the appointing of their first ambassador to Samart was, properly, the remit of the President’s office. But it was, he felt, appropriate to give Jermane the status that his role here really deserved.

‘Attache Taerling…’ Jermane tried it out again and laughed, shaking his head. ‘I just can’t get myself to believe it.’

The others laughed, too, assuring him that they had just as much difficulty really believing that they were actually doing this.

‘When I came on this trip,’ Misha recalled, ‘it was just to study how the Fourth achieves your performance efficiency. Routine ergonomic survey, with fair warning that we’d be dumped off the ship if you were going anywhere like Quarus. If you’d told me then that I’d get to come to Samart, I’d have thought
that
was nuts. If you’d told me I’d be heading up a team on a year-long assignment here, I’d have thought you were completely off your head.’

Murg smiled. She had been on quite a number of deep-cover missions, some of them lasting for months. The last of them had actually involved her pretending to leave the Fleet, getting married, and operating a freighter with her partner, which they had been doing for more than a year at the point where Alex picked them up. She would never talk about her work for Fleet Intel, but they all knew she must have incredible stories to tell, had she been at liberty to do so. She had been on the first contact party to the Gider, too, had been aboard their encounter-ship and danced the Dance of the Lizard.

‘Business as usual, for me,’ she said, and as the other two looked at her with some uncertainty, gave a spluttering little laugh, ‘Not!’

‘You’ll all be fine,’ Alex said, recognising that a reassuring word at that point would be expected. ‘I wouldn’t have chosen you if I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure of that. You’re a credit to us, and will be a credit to the League, too, for sure.’ As they sat a bit straighter, at that, and looked varying degrees of abashed, he smiled at them. ‘Just a little advice,’ he said, and addressed each of them in turn, starting with Misha. ‘Do
not
allow Ms Atwood to drink too much coffee. Make Mr Taerling go to bed, no sleeping on a sofa in his clothes.’ He looked at Jermane. ‘Give Ms Tregennis a game of triplink when she needs to take time out. Make sure that Ms Atwood sits down and eats a proper meal at least once every day.’ He looked at Murg. ‘Make sure Ms Tregennis finds time for workout, and make Mr Taerling sit down and watch a movie now and again.’ He looked around at the three of them. ‘Basically, look after one another, yes?’

They promised him that they would, and he knew that he could not have chosen a better team, but all the same, he felt a little touch of anxiety at the thought of leaving people here,
his
people, his responsibility. Even watching the cargo shuttle head off later that day, gave him a twinge of apprehension. Realistically, Buzz and Very were at no greater risk, heading into the defended zone, than they were sitting out here on the edge of it, but they would be out of contact, beyond Alex’s ability to help them if anything went wrong, and he couldn’t help a little twinge of worry.

It was thirty seven hours before the shuttle returned, bringing with it a hold full of boxes and two very tired but delighted officers.

‘Honestly, skipper, you should have
seen
it!’ a red eyed Very Vergan told him, within moments of Alex meeting them at the quarantine airlock. ‘It was…’ he struggled to find the words, waving his hands helplessly, ‘
incredible
.’

Actually, as it turned out, they hadn’t been able to see very much, or at least not in any great detail. As had been agreed with the Samartians, the shuttle had been escorted by a squadron of their ships – eight of their ships, in fact, which had maintained such close-order station around the shuttle for the entire flight that Very had had to over-ride the proximity alarm. As they approached the outer reaches of the system they dropped out of superlight, their escort ships peeled away and a swarm of system fighters swept in in their place. They were smaller than the ships – quite obviously of the same basic design as the four units which were bolted together to make a patrol ship, but even narrower, with barely room aboard for pilot and gunner. There had been at least a hundred of them in complex formation round the shuttle – an ‘honour escort’, the Samartians said, though it was tacitly understood to be a security cordon as well. Just as had been agreed, as the shuttle went sublight to pick up the cargo they had deactivated all their hull systems except for one comms array, relying on the Samartians for flight control and navigation. They had been virtually blind, but for a visual through the comms array which was hardly better than they’d have seen with a decent pair of binoculars.

Even at that, what they had seen had left them speechless. The busiest port in the League was Chartsey, considered by spacers to be packed-out overcrowded, with thirty four major space stations, heavy industry, shipyards and junkyards in addition to the hundreds of big ships and thousands of smaller ones in parking orbits, along with more than a million system vehicles, bus-shuttles, taxis and leisure runabouts.

Samart, Very said, made Chartsey look like a rural port in the back end of nowhere.

‘They have
lanes
,’ he said, ‘I don’t just mean like traffic lanes laid down on charts and marked out with sats; they’ve got so much stuff in their system that they’ve actually got lanes, like tunnels, you have to navigate to get through it. From a distance it looks almost like a wild system, full of debris and gas, but then you realise that it’s actually zoned, and how much of it is moving, like, under power, and it just takes your breath away. A lot of it
is
rock and gas, like asteroid belts only built, or made, or whatever the right word is. The comet cloud is really thin, practically non-existent, and it looks like they’ve put most of it inside the system, as defences. And they haven’t even got grav-sats! They have to physically haul every lump of rock around – they told us they use drones for that, auto-hauls they call round-ups, no bigger than our cleaning autobots, that are just out there, millions of them, moving rocks around. And they must have a billion missile arrays, too, honest, skipper, at
least
a billion, and mines, lord, who
knows
how many minefields, we couldn’t even start to count the
fighters
. Best guess, they have to have at
least
sixty or seventy thousand! These guys have got more firepower than the entire
Fleet!
’

Buzz was just as amazed, in his case not so much at the scale and power of the Samartian defences, but at the mineral wealth it represented. Samart had never mined even nearby systems and had no trading capacity with anyone, so all their raw materials came from within their own system. Even with recycling metals, Buzz observed, Samart had to have extraordinary mineral riches to have enabled them to make all that.

‘All right.’ Alex had let the two of them talk, as he welcomed them back and led them through to sickbay, but he handed them over, then, to Rangi, for the necessary quarantine and medical checks. ‘You can tell me all about it, later,’ he said, and left them there, going straight back to the airlock as their housekeeping Sub, Teabreak Li, was in something of a quandary.

He had been tasked to bring the cargo from the shuttle and put it into the vault. There was a well-established procedure for bringing any items aboard: the item would be scanned before being brought through the airlock, ensuring amongst other things that the container was safe and hermetically sealed. The outer surface of the crate would then be put through decontamination and a biohazard sticker put on before it was taken through into one of the secure bays within the vault. It was a procedure, and a handling system, which had been specifically designed for processing crates of drugs seized in law enforcement operations, and it
should
have been so routine that even the least experienced Sub could handle it.

Teabreak was far from inexperienced, by then – he had, indeed, recovered very well after that disastrous start in his first few days aboard the ship, and had become a solidly reliable young officer.

In this instance, though, Teabreak was at a loss. The Fourth had asked that the cargo be provided in hermetically sealed containers, and had told the Samartians about the kinds of crates they would themselves be using – standard spacer cargo crates, solid casings, insulated against extremes of temperature and radiation, with internal atmospheric management and a control panel. They had been expecting something similar in return, but the Samartians evidently didn’t use that kind of crate, or anything like it. They had delivered their cargo sealed in plastic bags.

They were, admittedly, quite thick plastic bags, triple layered and edge-sealed with tape, but they were still no more than plastic wrapping – and fluorocarbon plastic, at that. It wasn’t possible to put it through decontam procedure because the plastic was itself a toxin.

‘The only thing I can think is to use some of our own crates,’ Teabreak said. ‘But that still leaves us with the plastic, which we’ll have to deal with at some stage.’

Alex considered.

‘We’d best strip it off now,’ he decided. It would take hours of work in biohazard protocols, but they would have to tackle the plastic sooner or later and it might as well be now. He sent Tina and a couple of the other Subs to help, and went through clean-room procedures himself as even being on the shuttle had put him into quarantine risk. When he got back to his cabin, too, he took a shower and changed into fresh uniform. When he came out of his sleeping cabin, still fastening the collar of his shipboard rig, he found Simon and Misha in his daycabin. Misha was obviously a little embarrassed about that – she was
that
much of a Fleet officer, after all – but Simon had never felt the need to ask permission to come into the skipper’s quarters, or even to knock. Alex could only be glad, really, that he
had
waited in the daycabin and not come straight through to the shower.

‘Alex!’ Simon greeted him with a breezy ‘Ah,
there
you are!’ manner which conveyed that if Alex
had
been a minute or two longer he very likely would have put his head round the sleeping cabin door to talk to him. Misha was attempting to apologise for intruding but Simon talked right over her. ‘Sorry – just need a minute,’ Simon told him, as if his intrusion, and his request, was the most trivial thing imaginable. ‘Just do us a divorce, would you?’

Alex sat down, and gestured hospitably, inviting Misha to sit down – Simon hadn’t needed an invitation and was already hitched onto the corner of the desk. Looking at them, Alex was relieved to see that neither of them showed any signs of strong emotion.

‘No big,’ said Simon, seeing Alex’s assessing look between the two of them. ‘Meesh wants a clean break, is all.’

Misha smiled confirmation.

‘If you don’t mind, skipper,’ she said, obviously meaning, ‘If you’re not too busy.’

Alex had to look it up. He had aced the Civil Law module in command school, but that felt like a very long time ago and he couldn’t remember even reading about how to do a divorce. In fact it turned out to be remarkably straightforward. As with most other legal procedures carried out on a starship, it required only that the appropriate paperwork be completed, signed and recorded in the log. The appropriate paperwork was on file – the Fleet really did have procedures and paperwork for
everything
– and it took only a couple of minutes to fill it in, and for the two of them to sign it.