Mission Zero (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) Read online

  Fourth Fleet Irregulars

  Mission Zero

  S J MacDonald

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright 2011 S J MacDonald

  Kindle Edition: License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Acknowledgements

  Cover Design by http:/DigitalDonna.com

  Thanks to Penny for proofreading.

  Any errors remaining are entirely my responsibility.

  Dedication

  For Barbara – Sister, Friend and Fellow Adventurer.

  This book contains absolutely no jokes about bats.

  ____________________

  Chapter One

  Jerome Tandeki turned his head, looking alertly at the group of spacers once more engulfed in laughter at their end of the bar. Getting into a spacer hangout was not easy for any non-spacer, let alone for a journalist. With a great deal of effort and expense, however, Jerome Tandeki had managed to become a member of several of the spacer hangouts around Chartsey. He had even managed to get on such terms with them that they would talk freely around him. It was off camera, of course, but had enabled him to get the lowdown on many a story before any official information went out about it.

  More than twenty years of experience as a special correspondent for ABC on space affairs had taught him that when a group of spacers were laughing like that, there was some hot new story on the goss. So he levered his beer belly off the bar stool he’d been occupying for the last hour or so and ambled over, signalling to the barman to provide a round for the group he was joining.

  He did not make the mistake of asking any questions or even greeting anyone particularly beyond affable nods and smiles. Spacers were a very tight community with their own customs and manners. They tolerated outsiders like Jerome when they could be trusted to behave themselves and to be generous in standing rounds, but he would never really be accepted as one of them. So he just joined them, smiled casually at the nods and thanks for the round that he’d bought, and listened.

  It took him a few minutes to catch on to what they were talking about. It was about the Fleet corvette Minnow, often a talking point amongst spacers. The Minnow was the Fleet’s current “bullock farm”, a bullock being Fleet jargon for difficult and underperforming personnel. Where such people were just stupid or useless, the Fleet slid them quietly into unimportant groundside roles. For those few who were of high potential they were not achieving, however, there had always been the last ditch option of the bullock farm, a ship or skipper with a reputation for turning difficult crew around.

  For the last couple of years that had been the Minnow, under the command of one of the Fleet’s highest flying young skippers. Alex von Strada had been, at twenty four, the youngest officer promoted to command for more than a century. He was “tagged and flagged”, on an accelerated promotion scheme and expected to achieve flag rank before he was forty.

  Jerome was aware that there’d been some trouble on the Minnow eight or nine months before. A crewman had punched an officer in the face while the ship was out on deep space patrol. He had subsequently been sentenced to two years in the infamous military prison on Cestus. There was widespread feeling amongst spacers that the rating had got a raw deal, but Jerome had not pursued that as a story. It just wasn’t important enough even to make a mini-story on a subscreen, that, let alone the full on live hotscreen coverage that every journalist yearned for. He’d almost forgotten it, himself.

  Now, though, the story was obviously the cause of great amusement. The group at the bar was having a laugh over some joke about the Minnow’s skipper pampering his crew. A gale of laughter went up at the suggestion from one of them that he might take to bringing them breakfast in bed.

  ‘Champagne breakfast, naturally!’ said a tall Korvoldian. He bowed and presented an invisible tray, ‘Champoyyyyyne, sir?’

  The others laughed again and Jerome grinned too, but signalled bewilderment in the hope that at least one of them would enlighten him. One of the others, most obligingly, did so.

  ‘You’ve heard about the Minnow and the ice creams, right?’ A sturdy middle-aged woman prompted, at which Jerome nodded. That had been a joke doing the rounds a few weeks before. Skipper von Strada had put in a bulk order at a famous ice cream shop and had ice cream sundaes delivered for his entire crew. It had been a reward for all of them achieving good conduct targets during a patrol, paid for out of his own pocket. Fleet skippers were not supposed to buy their crew ice creams for being good, of course, which was why spacers had found that funny. Jerome had chuckled at it too, though even the most cursory investigation had told him that there was nothing to it beyond a mildly amusing but perfectly legitimate reward, authorised by the First Lord of the Admiralty himself. One of his rival journos, hearing the same story, had tried to pitch it as a funny for ‘also in the news’, but it had been turned down by his editor, since few people outside the spacer community would get why that was supposed to be funny and it certainly wasn’t news.

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ he said, recalling it to mind. ‘What’ve they done now, then?’

  ‘Nothing – well, not yet,’ the woman grinned. ‘But there’s a new scheme up, isn’t there?’ Seeing his incomprehension, she continued, in the lilting Neuwaldian accent, ‘Minnow’s been put on detached service, see, to be a rehab unit. It’s some deal they’ve done with the Admiralty to get that guy back, the one who punched the officer. Him and a couple of others are being brought back from Cestus…’

  ‘Let out on parole, like.’ Another put in, helpfully.

  ‘And the crack is,’ one of the shoreleavers, a Fleet crewman who was rather lubricated and inclined to be genial, leaned forward, breathing beerily on the journalist, ‘what’s he gonna do now, huh? He was giving his crew ice creams, so, when it was just a semi-hemi official thing.’ He seemed pleased with the cadence of this and repeated it, jabbing a friendly finger into Jerome’s chest for emphasis. ‘Semi-hemi official thing,’ he stressed, and cast his arm wide, narrowly avoiding slapping another drinker on the nose, ‘But now,’ he widened his eyes with astonishment, ‘now he’s got a free hand, see, what’ll he do now? Beer for breakfast, ha ha!’ He guffawed at his own wit.

  ‘Champagne!’ The Korvoldian insisted, and with that, the discussion became an animated one over the rival merits of beer versus champagne as a breakfast beverage. It was some time before Jerome was able to cut in, hardly able to credit what they’d appeared to be telling him.

  ‘Are you telling me that prisoners are being released from Cestus to serve on Minnow on some scheme?’ He just had to ask this time, and as there were confirmations from several of them, he queried, ‘I haven’t seen any kind of media release on that!’

  ‘Well, there wouldn’t be any, would there?’ said the Fleet shoreleaver, as if that was entirely self-evident. ‘For one,’ he jabbed a rather unsteady finger at the journalist, ‘ship postings is classified, so if they told you they would have to shoot you, ha ha!’ Overwhelmed with hilarity again, he dropped an arm around Jerome’s shoulders, miming a gun with his free hand, and pretending to shoot him in the head. ‘Bang bang!’ Then, with hardly a pause for breath, he picked up the thread of what he’d been saying, ‘And two… two,’ he held up two fingers to be sure that Jerome understood him, ‘the Fleet don’t want our dirt
y knickers out in public, see, so we don’t talk to no stinking journalists.’

  Jerome, entirely familiar with that attitude from the Fleet, just smiled, looking as little like a journalist as he could contrive.

  ‘Is this dirty then?’ he asked, all innocence, and knew that it was from the laughter that erupted.

  ‘Bless the child,’ his new best friend said indulgently, though Jerome was considerably older than he was himself. That, too, was a typically patronising comment that might be made by any spacer, regarding groundhogs as rather helpless, stupid little creatures. ‘Don’t you know that von Supernova has had the Admiralty by the nuts for the last six months? He was threatening to resign and go to the media unless they gave him his crewman back. And good on him, I say! Here’s to von Supernova!’ He raised what was left in his glass. There was general acclaim with most of the others joining in the toast, too, sincere in their admiration, though laughing.

  Jerome had no difficulty understanding who they meant by “von Supernova”. Alex von Strada had acquired that nickname early on in his Fleet career.

  ‘There’s a skipper who stands up for the little guy,’ one of the spacers observed.

  ‘Not many of them about.’ Another added, to further agreement, in amongst which a small, broad spacer commented, ‘Higgs was shafted.’

  As enlightenment began to dawn on Jerome, he had to make a conscious effort to keep his manner calm and casual. He signalled to the barman to put another round on his tab. He had a feeling it was going to be worth it.

  * * *

  Sub-Lt Harles Hollis was not having a good day. He had never really wanted to go into the Fleet at all, but Mummy was a Vice Admiral and he hadn’t had the strength of will to stand against her expectations. She had pulled strings to get him into the Academy, organised extra tuition to keep up his grades, and pulled even more strings to get him a prestigious placement aboard the raptor class Eagle for his all-important final year shipboard assignment.

  Harles didn’t even like thinking about those three months. It had been an unmitigated disaster, with the lowest point of all something he would cringe to remember the rest of his life. He had vomited with nerves on the command deck. Even worse than that, he had splattered the captain with it.

  There were limits to nepotism even in the Fleet. Harles had had to write and tell Mummy that he had failed his shipboard placement, not just because of the vomiting episode but also with a general nervous incompetence. The Fleet had allowed him to graduate, as they usually did when you were so close to getting your commission, but with the option either to accept permanent groundside posting or to resign his commission as soon as he received it.

  He had opted to stay, mostly because he just couldn’t face the prospect of what Mummy would have to say if he quit. They had, at least, sent him to Chartsey to work in the prestigious HQ building there. He’d been assigned to the PR department, which was generally felt not to need any more talent than a personable manner and the ability to look good in dress uniform. That view was going to change drastically because of what would happen today, but up until now, at least, PR had been regarded as the least demanding of all roles within the Fleet.

  It was not fun, though. Harles was acutely aware that everyone in the building knew that he was the bozo who’d thrown up on Captain Stuart, and the other officers in the department all treated him like a high school kid on work experience.

  As with any disaster, Sub-Lt Harles Hollis being the senior officer in charge in the PR department on that particular midweek afternoon was the result of several colliding factors. The semi-retired vice admiral who headed up the department was absent ‘at a meeting’, unspecified, which probably meant that she was playing golf or meeting someone socially. The commander who actually ran it was genuinely at a committee meeting elsewhere. The other two Subs were off doing talks at high school career days, and the Lt who would normally have been holding the fort there in the commander’s absence had discovered an urgent need to get a new pair of dress uniform shoes before a big event that evening. As he’d been about to leave the office, he’d hesitated, looking at Harles, and then made a decision, and a comment, which would haunt him for the rest of his career.

  ‘I’m only going to be an hour or two,’ he’d said, and adding, ‘Call me if there are any problems!’ he’d set off to get across the city to the Fleet dress outfitters.

  There were not, so far, any problems. Harles was swinging idly in his chair, with seven petty officers and ratings unhurriedly employed in other workstations in the open plan office. There was nothing to do. Harles had already finished the filing that was his main task of the day. The most exciting thing he could look forward to was the slight possibility that someone might be put through to him with some problem over a PR event. At which, unless it was very easy to resolve indeed, he would do no more than take a message.

  Then…

  The comscreen on his desk gave the fleep that indicated an internal call, and the chief petty officer who should really have been running the department appeared on the screen.

  ‘Got a journalist on hold, Sub,’ he informed him, ‘wanting a statement on the Minnow. You want I should deal with it?’

  Harles attempted a look of cool authority that only succeeded in looking huffily indignant. He could not object to the CPO addressing him as ‘Sub’, since that was perfectly acceptable courtesy in the Fleet, but he suspected – correctly – that everyone in the office called him that because they really didn’t feel he merited a ‘sir’. The CPO was also twice his age and had a tendency to be just a little obvious in treating Harles as a dumb kid.

  ‘No, I will deal with it,’ he said, it being departmental policy that only officers could give official statements to the media. ‘Put him through.’

  If the CPO hesitated, it was only momentarily. The thought may have passed through his mind that even Hollis couldn’t mess up a totally obvious and straightforward ‘no comment’, but he obeyed anyway, regardless of what he thought.

  ‘Jer Tandeki, Sub,’ he told him, and added, as an afterthought, ‘ABC news.’

  Anyone who had been working in the Admiralty PR department for nine days, let alone nine months, ought to have known that. The CPO was not surprised to see no look of recognition on Hollis’s face, though. If you were asked to list five qualities the Sub-Lt had, ‘clued up’ would not be amongst them.

  ‘What can I do for you, Mr, uh…?’ Harles consulted the info panel at the bottom of the screen, as he answered the call, ‘Tandeki?’

  Jerome gave him a slightly startled look. He was on such terms with the Fleet’s PR office there that the Lt would call him with a friendly heads up if they were going to be releasing a major statement about something, so it came as quite a shock to find himself not even being recognised. Then he realised, of course, this had to be the Sub they’d been joking about in the office, hoping he wouldn’t throw up on them.

  ‘Is Cant Joplar there?’ he queried, though the CPO had already told him that the Lt was out of the office. ‘Any chance you can patch me through to him?’ His own attempts to call the Lt had got an ‘unavailable to take calls, please leave a message’ response, but the office, he knew, had a priority number they could use.

  ‘I’m sorry, no,’ said Harles. ‘I am the officer in charge,’ he stated, with emphasis. ‘If you have any queries, you can put them to me.’

  Jerome contemplated him for a moment, and decided that he might as well ask.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Suppose you tell me what’s going on with the Minnow, then?’

  ‘I’m sorry? The Minnow?’ Said Harles, with genuine perplexity, before memory supplied the necessary information, ‘Oh, yes, the corvette,’ he recalled, though still looking puzzled, ‘What about it?’

  ‘Come off it,’ Jerome said, not buying for a moment that even a dumb rookie Sub could be working in the PR department and not know about something this big. ‘Word is,’ he informed him, ‘that they’ve been put on some kind
of detached service, with prisoners released from Cestus to serve aboard on some kind of scheme, so what gives?’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Harles, cross at being caught out by something he didn’t know anything about, though in truth, this was a very large category. ‘I’m putting you on hold,’ he told the journalist, and did so, turning to another screen and activating a search for current status on the Minnow.

  Lt Joplar had taught him to do this, spending many patient hours drilling the procedure into him. The first thing he had to check was the classification of the information being requested, and he got, in fact, no further than that, since the first screen on the Minnow came up with the red border of officially classified information, with the code on it ‘Eight ack gamma’.

  Even Harles knew that that made it classified information relating to ship deployment, with the ‘gamma’ tag indicating that it was considered sensitive in PR terms. Even a few seconds looking at the screen told him why.

  The Minnow was being moved onto irregular terms of service. A whole new division was being created for them, in fact. The Fleet already had three Irregular divisions. The First Fleet Irregulars was their Intelligence Division. The Second was Research and Development. The Third had been created shortly after the task of running debris-sweep ships through space lanes had been foisted onto the Fleet. Now they were forming a fourth unit. It was described on the screen as a rehab unit, which even Harles knew would be in line with what they were doing on the Minnow already. The level eight code on it, however, indicated that there were classified aspects to that, and the “gamma” indicated that it was not to be discussed outside secure areas.

  A more experienced or intelligent officer would have been on the ball with that. They would know the score and use their own discretion when explaining things, strictly off the record, to a journalist of such high standing as Jerome Tandeki. Harles Hollis, however, was entirely in the dark, and genuinely scandalised by a journalist calling to ask about something that, according to the screen in front of him, was strictly classified. That outrage was clear in his manner as he went back to the call.