Mission Zero (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) (16 page)

Mako had already learned that the airlock he and the others had come through was known as primary one or the ‘entry’ airlock, always left for visitor shuttles to dock to, while the one over on the port side was primary two, with the largest of their own four shuttles riding at it.  The snatch team were just standing there, waiting with an air of philosophical resignation.  

Which was, it turned out, fully justified.  A signal requiring the yacht to state the nature of the emergency got a clearly very flustered response, as a slightly panicky middle-aged man told them that his watch and the shipboard chronometer were 2.7 seconds adrift. 

This was not, Mako had already been told, comms in the way he was used to them.  Comms were being transmitted by means of signalling arrays on the sides of the ships.  With a time delay of around two seconds, it was a series of messages back and forth, rather than a live conversation.  Mako heard the Second Lt give a quiet little sigh at hearing that message, and saw one of the crew roll his eyes expressively, too.  He understood enough, by then, to be aware that the reason starships routinely signalled timechecks to one another in passing was because knowing the exact time was vital for the dead reckoner to be able to calculate your position.  Buzz had mentioned that certain contours in wave space might cause your chronometer to drift very slightly.  Mako didn’t understand what that meant, but he’d gathered that knowing the time accurate to the nanosecond was vital for starship navigation.

‘Check your chronometer with time signalled, pilot,’ Martine replied.

‘Oh, they’re the same!’  the response came after a few seconds.  ‘Is that all right, then?  Should I just change my watch?’

‘Is your wristcom rated for space use, pilot?’  Lt Fishe queried patiently.  ‘Is it certified for freefall?’

There were several more seconds delay and then the reply came back, part bewildered, part defensive.

‘It isn’t a cheap one.  It’s a Landex.’

Mako almost felt that he could understand the head shaking and chuckles on the command deck and the grin that appeared on the Lt’s face.

‘Understood, pilot,’ she said, her voice professional.  ‘Recommend you stow your wristcom for the duration of the voyage as it will not give you accurate time readings.  I am transmitting a copy of Fleet guidance for starseekers, which you should find of assistance.  We would also recommend that you return to port of origin, if you have any doubts as to your competence to undertake the voyage.  Or, failing that, that you permit us to guide you into the company of a more experienced pilot.’

After the delay, the response came back, highly indignant.

‘Oi!’  the starseeker owner protested.  ‘I’ve got a competent crew certificate from the Starseeker Club!’  He could not hear, of course, the splutters of laughter on the Fleet ship, at that.  ‘And I have every right to be out here exercising my constitutional right to the freedom of space,’ he stated, in what sounded as if it might be some kind of rehearsed declaration.  ‘We will not be turned back or placed in convoy and require no further assistance.’

‘So noted, pilot,’ Martine replied without surprise.  ‘All the best for your voyage.’  Minnow accelerated past the yacht without further ado.  ‘Stand down, all,’ she said, with a touch to the PA, and reported to the skipper, who had just carried on working on some deskwork as soon as he heard the nature of the ‘emergency’, ‘routine advisory, sir.’

‘Thank you, Lt,’ Alex said, just as if he hadn’t heard the whole exchange himself anyway.  He smiled briefly at Mako as the crewman who’d taken his coffee away brought him back a fresh one.  ‘Starseeker Club,’ he commented, with a little shrug.  ‘The
militant
branch of starseeker ownership.’ 

As Martine Fishe chortled and the crew laughed, the skipper explained, ‘The Chartsey Yacht Club is at least responsible enough to insist that all owners joining them must meet reasonable standards of qualification.  They provide their own training courses too, with a scheme in which new owners have an experienced pilot along with them for their first few trips.  We still think starseekers should be banned on safety grounds, but at least CYC has a sensible approach. 

‘The Starseeker Club, however, was founded by people who don’t see why they should have to take training and tests in order to exercise their constitutional right to the freedom of space.  They
are
militant about exercising their rights, as you heard – that is exactly the form of words the club teaches pilots to say to make Fleet ships leave them alone.  Which we have to, see.  As they know very well, a direct refusal of advice and a declaration that they stand in no further need of assistance means we have to back out of comms range unless there is overwhelming evidence that their lives are in imminent danger.’

‘But… aren’t they in danger, there?  If the pilot is incompetent?’

‘They’ll be all right, so long as nothing goes wrong.’  Alex told him, matter of factly.  ‘That’s our issue with starseekers, really.  They
are
so easy to operate that an entirely unqualified person with no experience at all can figure out how to set the autopilot controls, which work just like the cruise control on aircars.  And most of the time that’s fine, which is what the Starseeker Club says, see, that the vast majority of their trips are uneventful, so from their point of view, we’re making a big fuss about nothing. 

‘They just don’t seem to be able to understand that the problems arise when the autopilot
can’t
deal with something, because that, by the very nature of it, means that it requires some kind of technical response.  If the pilot has no idea what they’re doing, they are then at high risk.  Stupidities like wearing a watch that isn’t rated for space use have their amusing element, but having to log a patch of debris and try to work out what ship it was is not funny at all.  Often, you don’t even find that, when they’ve gone off route and it may be weeks before anybody even realises they’re missing.  Search patrols are the worst of assignments because you know very well that, barring a miracle, the best outcome you’re going to get is some kind of confirmation of debris, to give the next of kin some closure.’

That was a sobering thought and Mako drank his coffee, then, thoughtfully, watching the scopes ahead.  The next ships they passed made everybody laugh too, but in a good way.  There were five starseekers and a larger yacht cruising along in formation at a steady L9.  This, Mako learned, was something the Fleet approved of, or at least, did not disapprove of as strongly as they did of starseekers being out there on their own.  It was an official Chartsey Yacht Club convoy, which Buzz explained, they sent out every week on the Sharfur run, strongly recommending their starseeker members to join. 

If starseekers
had
to go intersystem, Martine observed, this was the way they should do it, in convoy with a well-qualified skipper as ‘commodore’.  It was, in fact, evident that the skipper leading the convoy on the larger yacht was well known to the Minnow, as Martine greeted him with a highly unofficial signal of ‘Quack, quack, mother duck!’, to which the commodore replied, just as good humouredly,  ‘Quack quack, Minnow.’  Even as that signal came in, though, more were arriving from the obviously very excited starseekers, all playing at once.

‘Hello, Minnow!’

‘Oh, wow, hi, it’s you!’

‘Is that the Minnow?  Jenna!  It’s the Minnow!’

‘Hello!  Hello!  Is that a Fleet ship?’

‘Minnow ahoy!’

‘All right,’ the voice who’d answered to ‘mother duck’ made a general signal that the Minnow picked up too.  ‘Pipe down, you lot,’ he said, and after a little clutter of ‘sorries’ and ‘only saying helloes’, resumed comms with the corvette himself.  ‘No assistance needed, thanks,’ he said.  ‘But be advised that we were passed eighteen minutes back by a mad bat.’  A flicker of accompanying transmission brought a copy of the relevant record from the log.

‘So noted, thank you, mother duck,’ Martine said.  ‘And be advised that you have a lame duckling sixteen minutes astern,’ she sent a copy of the relevant log entry to the commodore, and after a little delay, he came back with a chuckle.

‘Already tried to pick that one up on convoy formation,’ he reported.  ‘But we were told to quack off.  Will fall back and try again.’

‘Thank you, mother duck!’  Martine replied, laughing.  ‘And best wishes for your voyage, all.’

They accelerated away again, sent on their way by enthusiastic signals from the little flotilla.  Martine grinned, explaining in an aside to Mako, ‘They’re good – he’s ex-Fleet.’  Then, speaking to the skipper, ‘Permission to chase bat, sir?’

‘Granted,’ said the skipper, apparently regarding this as a routine request, which it evidently was, as nobody seemed to be surprised by it.

‘All hands, bat pursuit in progress.’  Martine informed the crew, and added, for Mako’s benefit, ‘We’re going to high speed pursuit so you will feel some vibration, but nothing like the launch.  There’s no need to suit up for this.  We’ll ready a snatch team but it is a routine intervention, okay?’

‘Okay,’ he acknowledged.  ‘But what is a ‘mad bat’, please?’

‘A ship exceeding its safe sustainable speed.’  Alex answered, as Martine was occupied with supervising the intensifying of the mix cores.  Almost immediately, Mako could feel a buzz in the ship sufficient to put a ripple on the surface of his coffee.  Their speed was now reading at L27.  A few seconds later, they flashed past a couple of freighters, with hardly time even for a flashing exchange of coded transmissions.  ‘Going like a bat out of hell, see, pushing a ship to the limits of its performance.  That really is very high risk.  They are also overloaded, with five people aboard, when it’s only designed for four.  Starseekers only carry supplies for four people for two weeks, so with five of them aboard they’ll be running low before they get to Sharfur.  Which is probably one of the reasons they are pushing the pace.  The other is, self evidently, that they are teenagers on a jaunt.’ 

As Mako looked at him questioningly, Alex put a copy of the screen the ‘mother duck’ commodore had sent him onto the table in front of the inspector.  ‘That tells us their registry, see?’ he said.  ‘And we have a copy of the port authority records of all ships launched up to the moment we left port ourselves.  You can tell a lot from that because Customs does require ships to file a manifest listing all the people on board.  So, this yacht is in fact registered to the father of the young man who is on the manifest as the pilot for this trip.  The four others on board are teenagers too.  From the fact that the university issued exam results a few days ago, my guess would be that being allowed to take Dad’s yacht for a run to Sharfur with some of his mates, is a reward for good exam results or something of that sort.  

‘He’s actually quite well qualified, as far as that goes.  He has a pilot’s ticket from the Chartsey Yacht Club and has been pilot of record on two previous trips to Capital Gate.  But I suspect that they are all wildly excited by the launch and heading off for their jaunt to another world, so they’re blitzing it and may be partying aboard, too.  And there they are,’ he drew Mako’s attention to a dot on the heatscan, which they were coming up on very fast.  ‘And this is where we demonstrate our agility,’ the skipper observed, with a smile for Martine Fish, who nodded.

‘Helm, lay us alongside,’ she instructed, and the rating at the helm nodded acknowledgement, already operating controls.

‘Aye, ma’am.’

Mako did not even see what they did.  One second they were tearing along on a route that made it look as if they were going to rip right past the starseeker and the next they had dropped in to cruise at long-range communication distance.  They were now making L11 again, which was nothing to them but at the upper limit of what the starseeker could achieve.  If they could keep it up the whole way, it would shave two days off the trip, but even Mako understood that pushing a starship to the limits of its performance would, obviously, put its systems under stress and make it much more likely that something would go wrong.

Comms were established and the skipper’s guess that they might be partying on board seemed to be confirmed, as comms opened with a confusion of shouting, cheering and laughing at their end, and loud music blasting, too.  But the music was hastily turned off and one voice told the others, urgently, to shut up,
can
it, and addressed them with conciliatory apology.

‘Yes, sorry, sorry, I know, we’re going a bit fast,’ he said, and could be heard hushing others in the background, too, with a rapid command of ‘Shut it!’ to someone who cheered.  ‘But it’s okay, I
am
a tech, and we’re not drinking, or anything.  Dry run,’ he assured, earnestly, and someone, again, could be heard in the background, saying, ‘Shame!’ and being quickly hushed by the others, who had evidently picked up some sense of the seriousness of the situation.

‘So noted, pilot.’  Martine said, in an entirely neutral tone, once the blip signalling the end of their transmission had sounded.  ‘Requesting permission to send an officer aboard for safety advisory.’

There was a distinctly audible swearword at the other end, and some furtive, anxious whispering, but the pilot came back to them with a rather shamefaced sounding, ‘Permission granted.’

Martine looked at the skipper, as did Buzz Burroughs, and Alex von Strada gave a nod.

‘Go to, Uncle Buzz,’ he said, which was evidently regarded as sufficiently official permission, the Exec giving a grin and heading to the airlock with the same team of suited-up ratings who’d mustered there before.