Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (7 page)

That was a significant concession. While he was officially still on leave, all operational matters regarding the Fourth were landing on Jen’s desk. She was only handing on to him such mail as she felt was compatible with ‘light administrative duties’. He understood that this was in no way an attempt to hijack his command, but a genuine concern about his workload and welfare, so had accepted that with good grace. It wasn’t as if he had any choice about it, after all.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘You’re welcome,’ she returned, just as politely. ‘But that’s not all – I have mail for you from Dix, to be passed on if convenient.’ Her grin conveyed that Dix Harangay knew very well that by now Alex would be back at work, with or without her approval. There was no way to stop him working, as Dix knew better than anyone, short of locking him in a cell without a comp or comms, and even then you couldn’t stop him thinking. ‘I suppose you’ve heard that Top Cadet went to Tinika Lucas.’

Alex nodded, looking intrigued by this change of subject. Discussion about the hot contenders for the Top Cadet position was a staple of conversation in the Fleet, as keenly followed amongst them as debate about sports stars. If Alex had been putting money on it, his bet would have gone on Tinika Lucas to win. News of her success had already reached Therik a few days before, along with confirmation that she’d been posted to the Falcon.

‘Cadet Officer Lucas, however,’ said Jen, ‘has appealed against her posting.’

Alex’s eyebrows shot up, with a ‘She did
what
?’ reaction that made Jen grin again.

‘Her argument was,’ she told him, ‘that by ancient custom, the top cadet gets the most prestigious posting available, and she made her case that by rights that ought to be the Heron.’

Alex’s jaw dropped slightly.

‘You’re kidding!’ he protested.

‘I am not.’ She put her hand on her heart, then tapped at a panel on her desk, transferring the paperwork to him. ‘See for yourself.’

She was quiet for the minute or two it took him to read the documentation, including the covering note from Dix Harangay addressed to Alex himself.

When he read the
What goes around comes around
comment, Alex couldn’t help but break into a grin. The only other cadet in recent years who’d have had the chutzpah to try something like this had been Alex himself. He could only admire Cadet Lucas’s ambition and determination, really. On the other hand, he didn’t want her on his ship if she was going to be a problem.

‘What’s she like?’ he asked Jen, looking up from the files.

‘Couldn’t say,’ Jen replied. ‘I haven’t met her yet myself – didn’t want to give her any inflated sense of her own importance.’

Alex laughed. He knew that the courier had arrived from Chartsey about four hours ago. As he saw the wicked gleam in her eyes, Alex knew at once what she had done.

‘You’ve left her sitting in reception?’ he queried, and she grinned confirmation.

That was a little unkind – Tinika Lucas would have staggered off the courier, jelly-legged and with her ears still ringing from incessant engine noise. It would have been considerate, really, to assign her quarters where she could have a shower and a decent meal, rather than keeping her sitting in reception for hours.

‘Do you want to see her?’ Jen asked, and at his nod of assent, tapped controls that would tell security to have Cadet Officer Lucas escorted to her office.

When she arrived a couple of minutes later, both of them surveyed her with silent appraisal. Tina Lucas, however, was giving nothing away. She was the very model of Academy-trained decorum. She did not look directly at them as she snapped off a textbook salute, and neither her expression nor tone as she gave them ‘Good morning, ma’am – sir,’ held any hint of personality. She had a Fleet kitbag with her which she set on the floor and stood to attention next to it.

‘Cadet Officer Lucas,’ Jen acknowledged, and after a slight pause, informed her, ‘I have passed your application to Captain von Strada for his consideration – Captain?’

Alex nodded thanks for her handing the matter to him, looking at the cadet, himself, with unemotional scrutiny.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Do you expect me to be impressed, Ms Lucas? Or flattered?’

‘Sir, no sir,’ Cadet Officer Lucas responded, promptly.

‘Captain Buchanan,’ Alex observed, ‘is an officer I hold in the very highest esteem.’ That was true, in fact. The Falcon’s captain had been a strong influence in Alex’s own career. Alex had even been known to quote him, on occasion. ‘Had Captain Buchanan taken offence at this,’ he told her, ‘I would not even consider you for a placement.’

That too had been apparent from the files – Dix Harangay had asked Captain Buchanan if he wished to note any complaint against the cadet for disrespect. He had, on the contrary, given her his support, filing a comment to confirm that he too considered she would have greater opportunities aboard the Heron than she would aboard his ship. Alex could just imagine him saying that, too, with his quiet, thoughtful manner.

‘As it is,’ Alex continued, ‘I have to tell you that we are in no way prepared to have a cadet aboard, and that having to organise training, schedules and mentoring for you would be a significant demand on officers who will already be working flat out. So can you, Ms Lucas, give me one good reason why I
should
take you aboard?’

She did not hesitate, not for one moment.

‘I can be useful, sir.’

Alex looked mildly interested, though a gleam of amusement did show in his eyes.

‘In what way?’ he asked.

Tina Lucas looked at him directly for the first time, and it was as if she answered, calmly and firmly,
You name it, I’ll do it
.

‘I have technical and administrative skills, sir,’ she said, clearly meaning ‘beyond that normally expected of a final year cadet.’

As Alex considered this, she gave him a steady look, her brown eyes quietly determined. ‘I can organise my own training programme, sir,’ she suggested.

Alex very nearly did grin then, particularly as he imagined what his executive officer would have to say about that. His own decision was made in that moment. In fairness to her, however, there were things that had to be said.

‘Hmmn.’ He looked at her searchingly. ‘And you do understand, do you, all the implications there would
be
in you doing your placement with us? Professionally and personally?’ He did not give her time to respond, but went straight on, laying it out clearly. ‘Professionally, you’d be allying yourself very emphatically with the Progressive element within the Fleet. You may not think that matters much at this stage of your career, but I have to tell you it does, very much. You will, for sure, have already outraged a good many Old School officers, and given how highly placed so many of them are, that can only make your career more difficult. The more closely associated you are with us, the more difficult that will be.’

He spoke, there, with the conviction of personal experience. He had learned the hard way that enemies made so heedlessly at the age of nineteen could cause you major problems even years later.

The look of intelligence in her eyes made it clear that she understood very well that they were talking, there, about the Third Lord, Admiral Cerdan Jennar, and those traditionalists in the Fleet who supported him.

‘And personally, too,’ Alex went on. ‘However carefully people may have told you about the security issues involved in serving with the Fourth, you can have no idea how intensive and wide ranging that is until you experience it – by which time, of course, it is too late. From the moment you are known to be serving with the Fourth, you will be vulnerable to media intrusion and a whole range of security issues from activists shouting abuse at you in public to very serious terrorist threats. There is no such thing, for anyone serving with the Fourth, as a normal life. Any time you leave the ship or base you are under security conditions. You can’t even take a shoreleave pass to go for a quiet meal out of uniform, at least not without prior arrangement with security and suitable protection. Our personnel frequently come under attack, not just verbally but actual physical attack. We’ve had shoreleave groups who’ve had their drinks spiked, been punched, even had chairs thrown at them. And fair warning, Ms Lucas, if the police are called to a restaurant where chairs and food are being thrown, their tendency is to arrest the Fourth’s personnel even when it is entirely apparent that they are the innocent victims. You need to think about that seriously, you really do. As Fleet personnel, we are very used to being treated as people of high social standing. It is difficult and highly stressful to find yourself the focus of such rage and hatred simply because of the uniform you wear. Here...’

He got up and gestured for her to accompany him as he led her across to one of the windows. It faced the front of the Port Admiralty building, with its frontage square and neat flowerbeds. Jen’s office was on the eighteenth floor, so the tumult of demonstrators and media down there were tiny. Even as they watched, more and more of them were pouring out of buses and a nearby subway, heading for the frontage like hundreds of ants surging in on a blob of candyfloss.

One of the more cerebral media stations had actually run their own analysis of the dynamics of this situation, observing how long it took for news that von Strada was at the Port Office to be leaked, how quickly various campaign groups responded to that, how that then triggered a rapid surge in the presence of the media themselves
to
cover the protests, which in turn drew in a swiftly gathering crowd.

Alex had been here for about half an hour. It was a high response time of day – neither the media nor the activists tended to respond with any great enthusiasm at four in the morning, but during office hours, particularly given dry weather, the response would be rapid.

‘When I arrived a quarter of an hour ago,’ Alex told the cadet, ‘there were only about twenty journalists hanging about, mostly freelancers mooching on the chance of scoring footage they could sell to the big boys. There were only a couple of protesters, too – members of Liberty League maintaining their round-the-clock vigil. Look at it now. Those are Outside Broadcast vans, setting up, and that’s the police, establishing barriers to keep the various protest groups away from each other – very often, you see, they have almost as many issues with one another as they do with us, so the police have to implement what they call ‘demonstration calming procedures’ and anyone else would call riot control.

‘There will, given another half hour, be at least ten organisations represented down there. Liberty League, of course, will rush people here in force, many of them students. They have an admirably well organised rapid response system, signalling all their activist members whenever there’s a call to action stations, laying on buses and bringing in the mobile publicity unit. They, of course, campaign against us on the grounds of their belief that we abuse our crew and are using prisoners as expendable in dirty operations. See the ones in the red tabards? That’s Families Against the Fourth, a splinter group of Justice Now.
They
campaign against us on the grounds of their belief that we are releasing dangerous criminals from prison, giving them a champagne lifestyle at public expense, and allowing them to run riot and rampage, endangering respectable citizens.

‘Over there
is
Justice Now, you can always spot them by the yellow placards. In the usual way of splinter groups and their parent organisations, FAF and Justice Now will certainly be shouting abuse at one another very shortly, if indeed they are not doing so already. Also somewhere in the mix will be Greenstar, who remain convinced that we carry out experiments on animals aboard our ship, regardless of all assurance to the contrary. None of them are a problem, really – they may be noisy and occasionally spit or throw food, but they are legitimate, responsible organisations. Over there, though, where you can see the police forming a much stronger cordon, that will be the local branch of Human Frontier, racist thugs hoping to get a
real
riot started. If this goes according to form, we will also have representatives of First Contact, campaigning for us to admit that aliens are visiting our worlds. They tend to feature in the ‘and also’ coverage, particularly when they lay claim to alien abduction, telepathic communication with aliens or having seen aliens shopping at the mall. Beyond that, there will be several organisations who don’t really have any particular issue with the Fourth, but are very keen indeed to get even a few seconds of airtime to publicise issues they
do
feel very strongly about, like People Against Poverty, racing people in to grab camera time saying, ‘I don’t know why these people are wasting time protesting against the Fourth when there are very much bigger issues in our society,’ a point of view I have a good deal of sympathy with, myself.

‘The people you can see over there are members of the public, massing under the Human Gravity Principle that the bigger a crowd of onlookers becomes, the more attractive it becomes to other people. At a certain point, when it reaches critical mass, local politicians will appear to grab airtime for their own agendas.

‘You might hear people talking about this casually, joking, and it does all look quite harmless from up here, doesn’t it? Mildly amusing, even. But go down there and walk outside, Ms Lucas, and there will be nothing amusing about it whatsoever. You can’t even make out words amongst the yelling fury that comes at you, it’s just a wall of hatred roaring at you.

‘And what you have to understand, in that, is that once you are identified as a member of the Fourth, you may face that hatred coming at you anytime, anywhere. Facial recognition systems may pick you out, even if you’re out of uniform and doing the ‘hat and shades’ routine. And if you are spotted, either by a journalist or some activist scoping where they suspect members of the Fourth might be, you will have that coming at you, right in your face, till security can grab you out. We have found it necessary, even, to run risk assessments on people’s families, providing Protection of Privacy Orders and security support as needed. Anyone joining the Fourth, even on secondment,
must
consider those issues very seriously, responsibly, in making that decision.’