Mission Zero (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) (26 page)

‘We generally don’t.’  Alex said, with a smile.  ‘Which is why spacers do look out for one another, in that.  It’s possible even that someone decided to tell you about C-Storage and solaran visitors to excite and distract you and help you through the dip.  And it should help to be aware that it
is
just a dip, okay?  Particularly if you’re aware of it and doing the right things to fight it, you can get through it in just a day or two and be just fine.’

Mako felt comforted.  ‘Thanks, Skipper,’ he said.  ‘So, what would your advice be, then?’

‘Well, we’ll be calling in at Paradise Gardens in three days, which will get you off the ship for a bit.’  Alex said.  ‘And if an opportunity comes up for ship visiting, we’ll certainly include you in that.  Otherwise, the best advice is just to keep busy and try to stay focussed on why you’re here.  In which, would I be right in thinking that you’re in the zone now of feeling that you’ve already achieved what you wanted to, professionally?’ 

As Mako gave him an astounded look, the skipper read his thoughts on his face, and smiled.  ‘No, we haven’t been looking at your files, I promise you,’ he assured him.  ‘But you have stopped going around with questionnaires.  You’re no longer making notes, you’re obviously spending most of your time writing up reports, and you are no longer asking questions about the rehab policy and practice.  All your questions are about the functions of the ship.  So it’s not hard to figure out that you feel you’ve got everything you need, at least for now, for your report.’

‘Well, yes.’  Mako admitted.  ‘I wouldn’t normally spend more than a week inspecting a residential rehab facility on this kind of scale, and nor would I be there round the clock.  There is obviously a lot more to learn here, since we have no knowledge or experience of Fleet practice, but I do feel that I’ve been able to cover all the ground that I need to, as you say, at least for now.  I don’t want to get off, you know,’ he added, earnestly, as if concerned that the skipper might think he did.  ‘I do appreciate that my presence on board is something of an imposition but I would like very much to continue with the observations, to see the progress of the parolees and have the fullest picture possible not just for my report but to inform my future dealings with the Fleet.’

‘Yes, of course.  I wasn’t going to offer to put you on a liner going back, or anything,’ Alex replied.  ‘Obviously you are keen to see it through, and we are more than happy to have you on board, Mr Ireson.  We are, in fact, enjoying your company very much.  Not only is it gratifying to be able to talk about what we do with someone of your expertise, but there is, how can I put this, a great deal of pleasure for us in seeing the thrill and amazement on your face when we show you something of our world. 

‘So, if your professional observations aren’t going to take up as much of your time, perhaps you’d like to consider another focus.  We have any number of academic courses on board which you are very welcome to do, if you fancy that.  You might also consider choosing a member of the crew to shadow, to get a more in depth understanding of what’s going on aboard the ship.

‘Though I would also suggest, frankly, that you consider taking some time off.  Our watch schedule, as I’m sure you’re aware, does give crew one day in six as a ‘rest day’.  It’s not a day off in the groundsider sense, of course, because there are still general duties and drills, but it is a day when we take time just to lounge on bunks, watch movies, take time to be by ourselves.’

‘That sounds good,’ said Mako, with a betraying tone of yearning.  ‘But is there, can I ask, anything I might be able to do to help?  I don’t mind what it is – helping to clean the ship, anything.’  He had offered more than once to help with that.  All the crew not on watch seemed to be involved in a brisk cleaning session shortly after breakfast and he’d felt awkward being the only one not lending a hand.

‘Sorry – cleaning the ship is actually a lot more sophisticated than it looks,’ the skipper told him, amused.  ‘It’s a three week course in basic training that requires high school chemistry and biology as an entry point.  It’s a hazmat process, you see, equivalent to a qualification as a lab technician.  There’s only one job on Fleet ships that civilian passengers are allowed to assist with, by ancient tradition, and that’s helping in the galley.  There’s a food hygiene course you have to do for that, which you could do in a day or two.  You could then be authorised to lend a hand at the counter.  But it isn’t something we’d suggest, obviously, to any guest!’

‘Oh, you know, I would really like to do that!’  Mako felt his spirits rise, even at the thought.  It would be great not just to have something purposeful to do, but something that would be a small help to pay them back for all their hospitality.  ‘Could I really?’

‘Certainly – just mention it to Martins, and he’ll set you up with the course,’ the skipper said amicably. 

Mako thanked him and departed feeling much more positive, which he dutifully made a note of in his inspection notes, later, though without as yet committing anything to record about alien visitors.  That, he felt, would take some thinking about.

In the meantime, though, he was very effectively distracted by the prospect of even a brief excursion from the ship.  An hour or so later he was back on the command deck, this time to sit there looking out for a freighter they were expecting to pass.  If it was still on the same course and speed as when a liner coming the other way had encountered it, they should be coming up on it any time now.

He was, however, to be disappointed of that experience.  They certainly came up on the freighter pretty much where expected.  They slowed to exchange the usual courtesy signals: timecheck and shipping, news and entertainment flash.  An invitation to the freighter crew for an exchange of ship-visits, though, ended right there.  Not only was the invitation declined but they also declined the offer of a gift box, leaving the corvette nothing to do but signal them best wishes for the journey and speed on.

‘That’s a big ship.’  Mako observed, to cover his disappointment. 

Even that comment, however, demonstrated just how much he had learned in the last few days.  When he’d first come aboard, he’d looked at visual readouts, and since they always framed a ship in best fit to the screen, he had hardly any basis for telling them apart.  Now, though, he looked at heatscan, noting the impressive array of white-hot dots within the ship’s structure.  The ship, Colestar Logistical Solutions 11, was a long thin cylinder covered by porcupine quills, each of which was clustered about with shipping containers.  ‘How many engines does it have?’

‘Sixty eight,’ said Buzz, who was holding the watch.  ‘It actually out masses the Zeus by some way, but it is a lot slower and has a much smaller crew.  Zeus carries a ship’s complement of five hundred and ninety seven, but container ships even that big rarely have more than thirty to forty crew.  The Colestar Eleven has thirty four crew and nine passengers on board.  It carries up to fourteen hundred shipping containers, each of which, to give you some idea of scale, can hold five of the kind of lorry container you see in air traffic.’

‘Impressive,’ Mako said, and observed mildly.  ‘Though they weren’t very friendly.’

Buzz grinned.  ‘They’re almost certainly smuggling,’ he said, and laughed a little at Mako’s quick double take.  ‘There
are
other possible explanations for a ship refusing the offer of a Fleet gift-box, but when they’ve already been out nearly a month, the chances of them refusing for any other reason than ‘something to hide’ are very small.  They are on Customs and Excise’ list of ‘vessels of interest’, though that isn’t saying much given that the Customs list includes about twenty per cent of all freight shipping.  If you look on their launch record, it shows that they were taken aside, delayed several hours, by a thorough customs search.  But if you look at the records of sightings of them, it’s apparent that they were off route for some hours, five days out, which was almost certainly a rendezvous with another ship or pickup from a cargo drop.’

‘And that isn’t sufficient evidence,’ asked Mako, the ex-policeman, ‘for you to issue a search warrant?’

Everyone on the command deck laughed, and Buzz looked kindly at him.

‘Not even
close
,’ he said.  ‘There are no regulations requiring ships to stay on any particular route or travel at any particular speed.  If they choose to go off route, they do not have to explain that to us, we have no right even to ask that question.  And if none of us are looking particularly worried about that, it is because there is no flag on their file for suspicion of dirty smuggling, so what we’re looking at there, almost certainly, is something that spacers call ‘the heavy’. 

‘Essential spacer culture 101, okay?  Virtually all spacers smuggle to some degree.  It’s a fundamental aspect to spacer culture even in the Fleet.  Almost all of that is what spacers call ‘light’ smuggling, which means the kind of goods you walk through customs and if they challenge you about it, you say they are personal property.  Typically, that’s jewellery – Tyraxian gold, particularly, since that is very expensive and highly taxed.  You would just be amazed how much jewellery spacers wear when they’re going groundside and how little of it they have left when they come back aboard.  There are dealers, you see, who buy it from spacers in bars, and sell it on as ‘special import’. 

‘It’s cheeky, of course, dodging the tax you’d have to pay on it as an import for sale, but it really isn’t something that even Customs takes seriously, on most worlds at least, so long as it’s kept within reasonable and traditionally tolerated grounds.  Even in the Fleet, if crew go on shoreleave wearing as many rings as they can cram on their fingers and come back with nary a one, the traditional response, if any officer
is
daft enough to ask, is, ‘Lost them in a poker game, sir.’’ 

Bursts of laughter erupted on the command deck at that and one of the ratings urged Mr Burroughs to tell Mr Ireson ‘what the skipper had said’, which evidently meant something to him since he laughed.

‘First shoreleave,’ he explained, ‘after Skipper von Strada took command.  There’s always a question, you see, about how strict skippers are going to be about that.  We’d swung by Capital Gate in our first patrol.  Just about everyone had all the jewellery they could cram on and pockets full of perfumes and cosmetics as they went off on shoreleave.  You do have to pay duty on that kind of thing if it’s going to be sold on commercially.  When the first shoreleave party came back, there wasn’t so much as a ring between the lot of them.  The skipper looked them up and down and just said, ‘Must have been one heck of a poker game’, which has entered into Minnow legend, as you see.’  He grinned again as the crew hooted happily at this, ‘though it is in fact a very old joke in the Fleet, that.  The fact that he made it defined our attitude to walk-through light smuggling, turned a blind eye to, so long as it’s within traditional bounds.  

‘Heavy smuggling, that means getting
serious
quantities of uncustomed goods through.  We’re talking cargo, there.  Typically, a ship might buy cargo quantities of duty free goods at a station like Capital Gate and keep them off the manifest by stashing them somewhere outside the system.  If they are on the manifest, you see, even as passing through a port of call, official records will be generated, and on certain goods, they may be required to pay duty on them as passing-cargo, anyway.  So they stash the cargo somewhere to be picked up by something like a yacht.  They’re not subject to Customs scrutiny in anything like the same way.  Customs can’t possibly inspect them all, so if they’re clever about it, a yacht can pick up an uncustomed cargo and slip it groundside by various means, bypassing customs entirely.  We’re talking, there, about small bulk high value items like uncut gems, high tech parts, expensive spices, and chemicals that are subject to high rates of import duty.  Most spacers aren’t involved in ‘the heavy’ but it is something of a grey area because they certainly know a good deal about it and could tell Customs, or us, a lot more than they do. 

‘But then, see, there’s
dirty
smuggling.  That means drugs and weapons, which no respectable spacer will have anything to do with.  Up until fourteen years ago, in fact, we had excellent cooperation from the spacer community on dirty smuggling, because the majority of them hate it just as much as we do and would always pass on tip offs to us even if they didn’t want to talk to Customs.  But we are still, in that, reaping the whirlwind of the Carolina incident.  Has nobody mentioned that?’  He saw the blank, questioning look on the inspector’s face.  ‘No, well, it isn’t something the Fleet is keen to talk about, generally,’ he conceded. 

‘What happened, you see, that First Lord Attenor, First Lord Harangay’s predecessor, came to the office on a commitment to tackling the issue of ‘endemic’ spacer smuggling.  After several years of not getting very far with that, he issued new policy, new regulations, which threw the spacer community into turmoil.  It has always been understood entirely that if the Fleet brings over a gift box and comes aboard for a cuppa, that is on a purely friendly basis and does not constitute boarding for ‘permission to search’ purposes.  If you see something like cargo crates which do not have a customs seal, it is customary to be tactfully unobservant.   

‘The Fleet has always held that that is the only way to secure a positive working relationship with freighters in which they
will
tell us about dirty and at least some heavy smuggling, because without their cooperation, frankly, we do not have a chance.  But First Lord Attenor got a ruling from the Senate that things observed during social visits were legally admissible as evidence.  He set policy so that any officers seeing anything suspicious during visits were duty bound to question and record it, taking it further into full investigation if even the smallest evidence of uncustomed goods was uncovered.  That regulation has now been changed, but even now, you will notice that many freighters won’t let us aboard.  They’ll only accept the gift box at the airlock, just in case we open lockers and start nosing into their personal stuff.