Karadon (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) Read online

  “Good morning. Skipper von Strada,” he introduced himself, as if that was necessary. “Welcome aboard, Lt Commander.” He smiled at Murg, too. “Chief Petty Officer. My apologies for the rude awakening. I will explain in debriefing, but for now,” he glanced over his shoulder as another officer came through the hatchway after him, “let’s get you checked over, and let you catch your breath. This is Dr Tekawa, our medical officer.”

  The man who’d come in joined them, with that, adding his own bright smile and an enthusiastic handshake apiece.

  “Hi, Rangi Tekawa, MO, call me Rangi,” he said, all in one go as if this was how he always introduced himself. “Pleasure to meet you both.”

  Tom’s mouth was dry and his pulse was thudding so fast he felt almost dizzy with it. In all the bewilderment, one thing was clear. These people did know that he was an officer working for Fleet Intelligence. They even knew his and Murg’s proper ranks, not the ones with which they’d “retired” from Fleet service. “Come with me,” Rangi held out his arms like an encouraging shepherd. “I’ll get you a nice cup of tea.”

  Tom looked at Skipper von Strada and he nodded confirmation.

  “Go on,” he said.

  Tom couldn’t think of anything to do but comply. This was hardly a good place, after all, to get into a discussion about why the Fourth was busting their cover like this. He could only hope that the skipper had good reason for it, which he’d explain in due time. Twenty two years of Fleet service had instilled a habit of obeying senior officers, too, and for all Alex von Strada’s friendly welcome, that was a definite command.

  “Sir.” Tom found himself straightening up automatically. He didn’t salute – he wasn’t in uniform – but his manner was very much that of a Fleet officer as he acknowledged the order. He glanced at Buzz, too, who beamed at him approvingly. Then he allowed himself to be ushered away. Murg gave a rather unsteady, “Sir.” too, and came with him. As they left, they could hear the skipper, behind them, talking to his Exec.

  “Excellent job, Buzz,” he commended, and with a touch of formality, “Please convey my compliments to your team.”

  Buzz’s answering chuckle and, “Thank you, dear boy,” was overlain by Rangi Tekawa assuring them that sickbay wasn’t far.

  It was on the deck above, in fact, and took just moments to reach. As they went through the hatchway they could hear the kind of excited hum of talk that Tom would have expected. The airlock they’d been brought to, obviously, was some section of the ship sealed off from the rest. The main part of the ship had the same warm spicy smell mingling with scents of fresh coffee, though. Rangi Tekawa beamed at them encouragingly as he guided them to a nearby ladderway. All of them went up the zero-gee ladder as easily as groundsiders might go up one step, passing through a tech space and through another pressure hatch.

  Tom could hardly believe his eyes. He knew what a Fleet sickbay ought to look like. It would be full of gleaming chrome and white, with a treatment table in the middle and some bunks behind screens.

  What it would not have was a wall-sized holoscreen showing fabulous scenery with a waterfall and brightly coloured tropical birds. It would not have a central space covered with artificial grass and a circle of ethnic-style beanbags. It would not have a tree in a pot.

  “This is our healing space,” said Rangi, happily. “Do come in. Sit down.”

  Tom sat down on the beanbag indicated, saying nothing. He had, he remembered now, seen an item on the news about Dr Tekawa. An undercover journalist had captured footage of the Fourth’s medic attending some spiritual retreat. He had been filmed in a meditation circle, wearing a very strange feathered hat, standing amongst trees, on one leg with his arms in the air, chanting, “I am the oak, I am the willow.”

  This, the media had pointed out gleefully, was the officer responsible for certifying members of the Fourth as psychologically fit for duty. It had also said that the medic had been fired from his first shipboard posting, his skipper describing him officially as “not suited for shipboard duties” and unofficially as a nutter.

  Tom had laughed, at the time. He had his own beliefs about the Fourth and had taken it for granted that that had just been spin, and rather daft spin at that. Only the most gullible, he felt, would have fallen for that one.

  Now, he looked up at the rainbow covered ceiling, feeling the warmth of a solar lamp. He could hear the waterfall, the birdsong, the little tinkle of crystal wind chimes. Either he was still asleep and having the weirdest dream of his life, or the Fourth was a lot more irregular than he’d believed.

  “This is Alvyn, my assistant.” Rangi introduced a capable-looking man who’d come in behind them. He sounded quite proud of having an assistant, which he was. As a junior medical officer, still at Sub-lt grade, he would not normally have been considered for the post of Medical Officer aboard a frigate. As in so much else, however, the Fleet had bent the rules in that, using the fact that Heron was on irregular terms of service to allow von Strada his own choice of ship’s medic. “Lemongrass and ginger I think, please, Alvyn.”

  “Coming right up,” his assistant agreed, with a smile for the patients. He went into the cubby-sized dispensary, where he could be heard making tea.

  “Try to relax,” Rangi folded himself down onto a beanbag, looking alertly at them both. “Nice, steady breathing,” he instructed. “I’m seeing very high stress levels in you both.”

  Tom and Murg both looked at him with speaking expressions.

  “I know.” Rangi gave a sympathetic smile. “All a bit overwhelming right now, like sudden depressurisation. Just take your time, catch your breath and don’t worry. You’re in safe hands with us.”

  Strangely, Tom believed him. This sickbay was on the far side of bonkers and the situation they were in was incomprehensible, but there was something very calming about Rangi Tekawa. He had warm brown eyes and an air of understanding entirely how you felt. It was just like sudden depressurisation, too, with that same sense of disorientation, light-headedness and shortness of breath. Realising that, Tom felt better about it, taking some steadying breaths and getting his head together.

  “Can you tell us anything about what’s going on?” he asked. There was no point even trying to deny that he and Murg were Fleet Intel. The decision to just accept that these people knew that had made itself, in the moment that he’d acknowledged the skipper’s order.

  Both of them had held to their cover even in the stress of the boarding and arrest. They would have continued to do so, too, even if that had meant staying under arrest all the way back to Therik. They were so deep undercover that they would literally have gone to prison rather than risk busting that cover.

  Now, though, it was obvious that that had already been busted. Why the Fourth hadn’t just told them that straight out instead of going through the search and arrest was only one of a hundred questions clamouring for answers.

  “Yes, certainly.” Rangi smiled at them, and at Alvyn, who returned at that point carrying a tray. Tom did not want herbal tea. He could have done with a good stiff whisky, or failing that, a mug of strong coffee. He nodded thanks, though, as the assistant handed him a delicate porcelain tea-bowl. His first sip of the tea was simply because he was thirsty. It tasted surprisingly good, though, so he carried on drinking it. Murg grimaced a little over hers, but sipped it politely.

  “I daresay you know we’ve been assigned on operations, here.” Rangi awarded them another smile for drinking the tea.

  “We know that, yes.” Tom said, drily. “Though you weren’t expected here for months.”

  Rangi gave a little chortle. “That,” he said, “was the general idea. Actually, we cleared for active duty two days ago. The Hermes did our inspection on the way out here, see.”

  Tom did see, though he could hardly believe it. The last news of the Heron had been them heading off with the deity-class carrier Hermes on their first deep space trials just four weeks ago. That gave them only a few days for testing their new systems a
nd training before the three-week inspection had started. Unless, of course, the inspection had cut a lot of corners. Tom could believe that of the Fourth, but not of the Hermes’ commander.

  “Captain Tennet?” he queried.

  “Terrible herself,” Rangi confirmed. Captain Pearl Tennet was known as “Terrible Tennet” in the Fleet because of her adherence to by-the-book procedure. If there was one thing that was absolutely certain, it was that she would not have anything to do with a falsified, slipshod or short-cut inspection. “She gave us a “highly commended,” Rangi told them, grinning at the memory. “ Though she looked like she’d been biting lemons when she said it.”

  Tom could well believe that. He had served with Terrible Tennet once, a long time ago, and knew what her opinion would be of the Fourth. If they had got a “highly commended” rating from her at full inspection, there could be no doubt at all that they’d earned it. Which was, he realised, deliberate. The Fleet had had the Fourth’s inspection carried out by an officer of such high standing even with the Old School traditionalists that there could be no question about its integrity. Quite how they’d managed to bring the ship to active standards so fast was a question that could wait till later. For now, he was far more concerned about his and Murg’s cover having been blown.

  “Impressive,” he observed. The tea was very refreshing. He felt calmer and his head was clearing. “And you’ve been briefed, obviously,” he glanced at the assistant who had sat down with them and was also drinking tea, “on our situation.”

  “Oh yes, we all know about that,” Rangi told him, comfortably. “It must have been very stressful for you, running deep cover ops off the wire for so long.”

  It had been more than stressful. Tom and Murg had been working together in Fleet Intel for eight years before they’d been asked to take on this assignment. They worked well together as a team and had been friends outside work, too. Neither of them had imagined that there would be any problem about getting married as part of their deep cover for this job. They had expected to be able to cope, too, with working off the wire, reporting only to one person without any of the normal resources and backup. It would not, after all, be the first time they’d posed as a couple for cover purposes, and they were no strangers to being out on their own on space assignments, either.

  This, however, had been different. They had “resigned” from Fleet Intel to get married, buying the Fancy Free. Family, friends and colleagues had all believed that was genuine. They had nobody to turn to, nobody to rely on except each other. Most of the time, they were trapped together in the claustrophobic environment of the freighter, not even seeing another ship for days at a time. There had been times when they’d felt that they were the loneliest people in the galaxy.

  Tom, however, had no intention of discussing that. Rangi’s airy statement that “we all know about that” had sent his stress levels rocketing back up.

  “When you say all,” he asked warily, “who exactly do you mean?”

  “All of us,” Rangi told him. “Everyone on the ship. The skipper briefed us yesterday.”

  “Everyone on the ship?” Tom’s heart was starting to thud again. “He told crew?”

  “Uh huh.” Rangi looked at him with some concern. “It’s all right – relax. We all have clearance.” As Tom and Murg looked at him, anxious, incomprehending, he smiled at them. “Two things you need to know about this ship,” he explained. “The first is that we all, all, have nine ack alpha clearance. The Second insisted on that, for a start, as part of the deal we have with them. They’re using the ship for space trials of some of their hottest new tech, see, with a team aboard working with us on that. They wouldn’t even let us see their stuff, let alone use it, unless everyone aboard had the highest level of clearance.”

  Tom could understand that. The Second Fleet Irregulars was the Fleet’s Research and Development division. The Fleet had found long ago that if they wanted to recruit the kind of genius they wanted, they had to be prepared to give a little on military protocols. The Second, therefore, was a hybrid of Fleet and civilian researchers working together, operating on informal, first-name terms. Security, however, was paramount. The Second was notoriously reluctant even to give the regular Fleet their new toys to play with. The moment you let the regular Fleet have stuff, they said, you might as well publish the specs. There were rumours that Alex von Strada had done some kind of deal with them to get the latest hot tech for his ship. Remembering the nanoscanner they’d used to scan the crate, Tom nodded.

  “Fleet Intel, Customs Intel and the LIA were all pretty knicker-knotted over security, too,” said Rangi, chattily. “They’ve all been told to work with us, you see, giving us full cooperation. The LIA is not happy about that, it must be said, even with all of us having nine ack alpha clearance, mostly because of this,” he activated an optical control on a wall-screen as he spoke, “the second thing you need to understand about this ship.”

  Tom and Murg looked at the screen. It showed a room on three levels, full of work stations and readouts. About fifteen people were working there, including three at a big navigation table on the highest level. One of them was Alex von Strada, the second was a very young officer with Sub-lt’s pips and the other was a woman Tom recognised as Lt Commander Martine Fishe. She was evidently holding the watch, red-bordered watch screens on the table in front of her.

  “That’s the command deck,” Tom said, feeling bewildered again.

  “Yes.” Rangi turned up the volume and the command deck became audible. There was a busy, purposeful buzz, all three officers working on screens and crew working at stations. A rating at the comms station caught Tom’s eye. She had a shock of purple and orange hair and an equally lurid make-up that the Fleet would not have tolerated for a moment. Then from somewhere off camera came a joyous whoop and the sound of several cheering voices that made the watch officer laugh.

  “Nice to see the kids having fun,” Martine observed.

  “Sure is,” Alex agreed. Then, as something came onto the screens in front of him, he grinned. “Excellent,” he said, and got back to work with a lumopen, highlighting and making notes.

  Rangi turned down the volume again. “What you have to understand,” he told Tom, breaking it to him gently, “is that that command deck feed is on throughout the ship, all the time. The crew can see what’s happening there and listen in on discussions at any time, even when the ship is on alert. Command team briefings are held there, too, open for anyone to watch. The skipper, you see, believes that the team works best when everyone knows what’s going on.”

  Tom was lost for words. Two thousand years of Fleet tradition had created a mystique around the command deck that was not unlike that of a holy shrine. Crew had to be specially cleared to work there. It was actually an offence for them to talk about anything they’d heard there, even to other crew. On very small ships like corvettes, of course, that was something of a technicality because the crew could hear conversations on the command deck anyway. Even so, there was a protocol to it, an age-old tradition respecting the command deck as a place apart.

  It now became apparent to Tom why even Progressive officers in the Fleet used words like “radical” to describe Alex von Strada, while Old School officers tended to splutter things like “outrageous” and “disgrace to the uniform.”

  “That’s something you’ll just, you know, have to get used to,” Rangi told them. “Command information is shared here, routinely. So, the skipper briefed us yesterday. Not that that came as much of a surprise. We’ve been practising for these ops for months. Anyhow, he told us yesterday that one of the reasons we’d been pushing the pace to get here was to hit this window of opportunity while your ship was in port. He told us that he wouldn’t decide what action to take until we had intel on whether you’d managed to buy drugs, but that all being well, if you had, we’d go with the seizure. Which we did, obviously. The skipper will explain that to you, later. But you should know that you’ve been lent to us, okay?
The skipper’s got orders for you, from the Admiralty. My orders are just to give you a general orientation, as well, of course, as giving you a medical and settling you in.”

  “Lent to you?” Tom queried.

  “Uh huh.” Rangi smiled at them. “My understanding is that Admiral Harangay asked Admiral Smith for the ace up his sleeve at Karadon, and apparently, you’re it.”

  Tom almost grinned, at that. The current head of Fleet Intelligence, a role always called “Admiral Smith”, was a man with a mind like a five dimensional corkscrew. He had an unknown number of special operations units reporting directly to him, handling the most sensitive of assignments. Tom and Murg were one such unit, with only one other officer, their contact at Therik, knowing they were still on Fleet Intel’s payroll. First Lord Dix Harangay would have known that Admiral Smith had some kind of deep cover unit working at Karadon. It would have taken more than pulling rank to get him to hand them over to the First Lord, too. Dix Harangay would have had to be persuasive.

  “So, who else knows about us now, then?” Tom asked, anxious to know just how far that reveal had gone.

  “Only us,” Rangi assured him. “Admiral Harangay briefed the skipper about it personally, and as far as I know, he didn’t tell anyone about it till yesterday.”

  Tom was not reassured. Regardless of the fact that they all had the highest level of clearance, with the entire crew of the frigate in on it, he would not put ten dollars on that information remaining contained for so much as a week.

  “You obviously had very fast and very detailed intel on us from aboard the station,” he observed.

  Both Rangi and his assistant laughed at that.

  “Sorry,” Rangi said, seeing the guarded look that had come into both Tom and Murg’s eyes at that sudden burst of laughter. “It’s just an in-joke,” he explained. “We’ve got two teams hacking their computers, with a bit of a competition going over which of them can score most out of the seventeen specific pieces of information the skipper has asked for. That’s what that is.” He indicated a detail on the command deck feed that Tom hadn’t noticed before. It was a tiny overlay amongst a border of watch-screen information, merely reading “JD: 4 DM: 5”