Mission Zero (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) (18 page)

‘Oh, thank
God!
 We haven’t seen a ship for
days!’
  A female voice could be heard in the background, asking agitatedly if it was a ship, and what kind was it, at which the first voice told her, ‘Does it matter?  But please, please!’  He was clearly addressing them again, now.  ‘We’re so lost!  Please help!’

‘We will give you whatever assistance you need, pilot,’ Martine said, with patient authority.  ‘I repeat, this is the Fleet corvette Minnow responding to your distress call.  Please observe comms protocols.  Do not transmit until our signal has concluded and please try to stay calm.  We can’t help you until we understand the nature of the emergency.  So can you please state as calmly and clearly as you can what the problem is?’

‘I told you, we’re lost!’  The voice responded, after the usual four second delay.  ‘It’s been five
days
since we saw another ship!  We must be way off course!  There’s some problem with the autopilot and I can’t fix our position!  Please, you’ve got to help us!  It’s just me and Ema, here, and we’re on our honeymoon!’

‘All right.’  Martine grinned a bit at that, but spoke reassuringly.  ‘Do we have your permission to send an officer aboard to do a safety advisory?’

‘Yes!  YES!’  Two frantic voices came back, at that, with a tearful-sounding female one imploring, ‘Please come now!’

‘Uncle Buzz to the rescue,’ said Alex von Strada, and Martine grinned, touching a panel. 

‘Snatch team away,’ she said, and then, re-engaging with the yacht, ‘We are closing with you now and our team will be with you in fifty seconds.’

They were, too, with Buzz reporting over the comlink a few minutes later.

‘No tech or navigation problems,’ he said.  ‘The ship is on programmed course for Chartsey and position fix is confirmed.  Pilot and passenger are, however, shaken and anxious and would welcome a social assist.’

Martine looked at the skipper, who glanced at screens, considering.

‘We can give them half an hour,’ he decided.  ‘Bring them into central line and drop to L4, we’ll scout for a mother duck for them.’

‘Understood, thank you, sir,’   Buzz replied.  After a brief delay while he explained this to the pilot and his bride, the Minnow’s shuttle returned to the ship.  Rangi Tekawa was at the airlock to meet the young couple, ushering them straight into sickbay with soothing promises of a nice cup of tea.  Only two of the five crew who’d gone with Buzz, Mako noted, had returned with him.  As Minnow turned on a tight arc and accelerated away leaving the yacht behind, the skipper explained that they had left a relief crew aboard to mind the yacht while they looked for a ship further back which would take them into convoy for the rest of the journey.

‘They’re only seven hours away from Chartsey at their best speed,’ he observed.  ‘But that’s a long time if you’re panicking.’

‘I don’t understand, though – how did they think they were lost?’  Mako asked, mystified.

‘Panic,’ Alex said simply, but seeing that more explanation was necessary than that, drew his attention to astrogation screens.  ‘See this line?  That’s the central line for the route between Chartsey and Sharfur.  Most ships get as close to this line as they can when going intersystem, even though that does mean, yes, that you have ships running along it in opposite directions.  That really isn’t a problem in space.  Even if ships are only one second apart, we’re talking tens of thousands of kilometres, so the chances of them being on a collision course are, literally, astronomically remote.  But even if they were on a direct collision course with everyone aboard either asleep or drunk, even starseekers have autopilots with anti-collision software.  The moment the ship with the most powerful scanners sees the other coming, they will take evasive action far more quickly and safely than a human pilot could.  It sets off navigation hazard alerts, but as long as the ships are on autopilot, it’s okay.  Collisions,’ he explained, ‘only happen when pilots, for reasons which no doubt seem good to them at the time, are not only piloting under manual control but have disengaged automatic anti-collision systems.

‘But what’s happened here is that the pilot of the yacht has set a course which is twelve minutes away from the central line, and their scanners can only see around four minutes.  There have, in fact, been any number of ships passing them by.  At least a hundred ships must have gone right past them, both ways, over the last few days, but they were just that bit too far away either for the yacht to see them, or for their distress signal to register.  It’s perfectly possible to go for weeks in space without seeing another ship, even on busy routes.  But they obviously started to panic, thinking they
should
be seeing other ships, and decided, for whatever reason, that this must mean that they were off course.  Frantic efforts to work out their position using triangulation on stars would only have confused and panicked them more, and the more scared they got, the more convinced they became that they were lost.  All they needed to do was alter course to bring them closer in to the central line, and if they wanted to pick up with another ship in convoy, drop their speed so any ships behind would catch them up.  

‘So yes, a clearly inexperienced pilot getting into a panic, there.  But you can’t just tell people not to be silly and leave them in that state.  Dr Tekawa will calm them down and we may, hopefully, be able to find them an escort.’

They did, too, quite easily, discovering a container ship that was cruising at L6 just eleven minutes behind the yacht.  The situation being briefly explained to them, their skipper laughed, but readily agreed to take the yacht into company.  A rendezvous having been agreed, the Minnow returned to the yacht, Buzz going to tell the couple what arrangements had been made.

‘I’m very sorry to have been such a nuisance.’  They had asked if they could thank the skipper personally and so were brought onto the command deck,  revealed to be a fresh-faced, freckled young man in his early twenties and a young woman with a wifely look of ‘This is all
your
fault!’  ‘I’ve done lots of trips around Sharfur,’ the pilot explained, ‘but this is the first time I’ve gone intersystem.’

‘And the last,’ said his wife.  ‘We are going back by
liner
.’

‘But…’ her husband protested feebly, ‘we can’t just abandon the yacht, love…’

She gave him a Look, making it very clear what he could do with the yacht, and he winced.

‘All right,
I’ll
go back by liner,’ she said, with a steely note.  ‘And you bring your precious yacht if you want.  But you’re never getting
me
on it again.’

‘Actually, you were perfectly safe.’  It was the skipper, surprisingly, who stepped in there, with a little timely marital intervention.  ‘It is quite common for people to get a little anxious on intersystem runs if they’re not seeing other ships.  Your best bet,’ he told them both, ‘if you’re a little nervous about making the return trip by yourselves, is to hook up either with a yacht club convoy or a freighter to travel in company with them or even, if you want someone on board, hire a deckhand.  There are hundreds of spacers who’d pick up a berth to Sharfur, no problem, and it would cost you less than liner tickets.’

‘Oh!’  The pilot looked at his wife, who gave a noncommittal hunch of her shoulders.  ‘Well, we’ll, er, think about it, thank you,’ he said. 

Buzz took them back to their yacht and stayed with them until the freighter caught them up.  Then, having seen them settled in company, Minnow signalled best wishes to both ships and resumed their patrol.

‘And this is just routine, for you?’  Mako asked, amazed by the speed with which they set that incident behind them and turned their attention to looking ahead. 

‘Yes, absolutely – this is why we came out this way,’ Alex confirmed, placidly, ‘because it’s always like this.’

‘Always?’

‘Pretty much,’ he said.  ‘I certainly can’t think of any time we’ve been on this route for as long as an hour without having to do incident response.’

‘But…’  Mako struggled to get his head around that, ‘is Minnow the only ship patrolling this route, then?’

Alex looked amused.  ‘No – our sister ship, Krill, on the Sharfur station, routinely patrols back and forth and here are a couple of gunboats which sometimes rip through.  But you’ve seen the traffic stream, Inspector – it would need more than a hundred ships to patrol this route thoroughly.  And this is just one very short local lane, one of the shortest shipping runs in the League.  It is just not physically possible to have more than tiny flitting presence in any area and it is, if you’ll forgive me saying so, very much groundsider thinking even to ask why we can’t.  I understand, you’re used to being in an environment where authorities are always to hand, emergency services on call, traffic lanes being monitored and cruised by police patrols, all that.  But this is
space
, it is vast and wild and free.  Out here, the only help you have is other ships.  And when ships can pass within minutes of each other, without registering on one another’s scopes, that means most of the time you are out on your own.

‘People should know that when they leave port.  Spacers do, of course.  This is our home, this is where we live.  But nobody,
nobody
, not even the dumbest starseeker owner, can say they weren’t warned.  Everybody tells them, from port authorities to yacht clubs and Fleet advisories galore, once you leave system limits, you are on your own.  There is nobody to call and nobody is responsible for you,
but
you.  We are not legally obliged to patrol this space lane, nor are we under orders to do so.  I’m just bringing us out this way because I do know that it is a high incidence route.  The very fact that it
is
so short and busy, see, leads people who aren’t sufficiently qualified or experienced to feel that it’s okay.  And even a few minor assists in passing makes it worthwhile, I feel, to swing out this way rather than going on the quieter Karadon route.  It
is
routine, though, and we will be at this till around midnight, with every likelihood of incidents like these going on all evening.  So do, you know, feel free to go and get some dinner and turn in whenever you like.’

‘Oh – I’d rather stay if that’s all right,’ said Mako, feeling that he’d never felt less tired, though he was, admittedly, starting to feel hungry.  The skipper smiled agreement, but before he could say anything, another blip was appearing on their scopes, and this one too was flashing red.

It was another starseeker, this one very clearly in some difficulties because it was spinning like a bullet as it travelled.  For reasons incomprehensible to Mako, the Minnow’s crew found this hilarious.  Lt Fishe was obliged to call for quiet as gales of mirth erupted on the command deck. 

‘Starseekers!’  The Lt said, feelingly, but spoke to the rating at the helm with decisive professionalism.  ‘Match velocity for comms.’

‘Aye ma’am,’ the helm acknowledged, grinning broadly.  A moment later Mako was obliged to look away from the visual screen he’d been watching as the stars appeared to go into a dizzying blur.

‘We’re spinning around them to engage with their comms arrays.’  Buzz informed him, showing him on another schematic readout that Minnow was now whipping around the spinning yacht at such a speed even the schematic was blurring.  It was taking a few moments to establish a comms link but nobody, Mako noticed, seemed concerned, even when a terrified wail came over the signalling system.

‘I’m out of control!  Can you get me off?  Please, get me off!’

‘Stay calm, pilot,’ Lt Fishe told her.  ‘This is the Fleet corvette Minnow responding to your distress call.  We will give you whatever assistance you need but we need, first, to establish the nature of the emergency.  You have an ‘Uncontrolled Rotation’ error reading on your autopilot, yes?  Are there any other error readings or alerts?’

‘I don’t know!!!’  The pilot yelled back, as if feeling that the gulf of space between them could only be bridged by verbal volume.  ‘I’m in the survival pod! 
Please
get me off!  Shall I fire the pod?’

‘No, no, repeat,
no
, pilot, do
not
, repeat,
not
, disengage survival pod.’  Martine Fishe said, firmly.  ‘I need you to go to the flight console, all right?  Just please go to the console, sit down there and tell me if there are any other error readings or alerts.  Don’t worry, I don’t believe that you are in any danger, we just need to be sure we know what’s happening, all right?’

‘
Not in any danger?’
  The pilot shrieked.  ‘The effing ship is totally out of control!’

‘No, no, honestly it’s not, you’re maintaining course and speed is stable.’  Martine said, soothingly.  ‘You’re just
spinning
, okay, which I understand is alarming, but it’s not actually dangerous.  So we just need to check that there’s nothing more serious going on, then I’ll talk you through bringing the spin under control.  Don’t worry, we won’t leave you.  My name is Martine, okay?  And it’s Agnetha, right?’

‘Aggie,’ the other woman corrected, sounding a little more together, now, though still very frightened as she reported, ‘I’m at the console.  It keeps flashing ‘Uncontrolled Rotation’ on the screen, and it says ‘engage port thruster’, but when I tried it just went Blaaaaaaaa!’

‘Yes, starseekers do that.’  Martine said.  ‘But are there any other red lights or error messages, Aggie?’

‘No… no, I can’t see any.’