Mission Zero (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) (29 page)

He was not very attractive, the Cargomaster’s skipper.  He was pot bellied, heavy jowelled and had a thick, spotty complexion.  His eyes were intelligent, though, and he gave the corvette skipper an intense, searching look.  Alex, cool as always in social situations, merely shook hands with him and expressed the hope that the Cargomaster’s crew had enjoyed their visit to the corvette.

‘Sure did,’ the freighter skipper was still looking at him appraisingly, but seemed to make up his mind with that, and went on bluntly, ‘The best thing was seeing Ty Barrington and the others back in space.’  He gave Alex a nod which made it clear who he gave the credit for that, a man-to-man acknowledgement to which Alex did not react.  The freighter skipper did not seem put off by that.  If anything, the Fleet officer’s steadfastly calm demeanour seemed to strengthen that sense of decision in him.  ‘And I can trust you not to pull a Carolina on us, right?’ he queried, to which Alex gave him a look which was patient but ever so slightly reproachful.

‘I should have thought,’ he said, ‘that if you know anything about me at all, you know
that
.’

‘Yeah,’ said the freighter skipper, breaking into a broad grin.  ‘You’re one of the good ones, all right.  So… may I?’ he indicated a screen that was on the datatable.  Alex, looking mildly intrigued, gestured as if to say ‘carry on’.  At that, the skipper took out a lumo-pen, called up a chart on the screen, drew a ring around one of the stars there and wrote something next to it.  ‘All I’m saying,’ he said with a definite air as he returned his pen to his pocket and gave Alex von Strada a look which told him not to ask, or even to comment.

‘Fair enough,’ Alex confirmed, with an acknowledging nod.  ‘Thank you, Skipper.’

‘Thank
you
, Skipper,’ said the other man, and left the ship calling for a cheer from his crew for the Minnow as they departed.

‘Hmmn.’ once the airlock had closed, Alex regarded the information that the other skipper had given him.  His manner was thoughtful but noncommittal, conveying that it was interesting but nothing to get worked up about.  ‘Probably nothing,’ he told Mako, who was trying not to be too obviously curious.  ‘A lot of these leads go nowhere.  But we follow them all up of course, routinely, so we’ll pay this system a port of call, see if there’s anything to it.’

Mako just smiled and accepted that, picking up not just from the skipper but from a general lack of excitement, that it was highly unlikely to lead to anything.  He was, he found, quite pleased that the ship was getting under way again, with no regret at departing either from the slimeworld or at parting from the noisy sports-loving freighter crew.  It would be rather nice to be heading off, out of busy space lanes, just to have some time quietly to themselves.

It was, too.  Minnow became a self-contained little world, without the frequent distractions of encounters with other ships but with plenty to keep Mako busy and interested.  Some of that was professional, as he was able to record with pleasure that all three of the parolees were moving towards going back on active service.  Both Jace Higgs and Jok Dorlan were now being allowed to go on duty, shadowing their oppos.  Seeing Mako working in the galley seemed to spur Ty Barrington on, too, as he asked if he could do the same. 

He was put in charge of the hydroponics unit, in fact, which was beyond Mako’s own level of training.  It was a unit built in under the counter of the galley, producing a limited range of vat-grown salad stuff and vegetables.  It was a trivial thing, really, but very satisfying for all concerned to see Ty Barrington, who’d been so anxious when they’d brought him on board, taking charge of even that small responsibility.  Mako felt that himself as they prepped for lunch together, seeing how much stronger and more confident the PO was getting.  They had not been wrong, he felt, to bring these three out here where they could get themselves together with the support of their shipmates, in an environment that was, to them at least, familiar and homely.

It was increasingly familiar and homely to Mako too.  A few days into the Pagolis, he was asked if he would be ‘chaos maker’ during a drill.  That meant being provided with a supply of red stickers, going about the ship during the drill slapping stickers onto tech and crew.  This would take them out of action, either as damaged tech or casualties.

It was a sobering thought that there would be no minor casualties, in this.  Because everyone would be wearing suits, if people sustained any injuries at all they were liable to be life threatening, so all casualties were to be treated as needing stasis.  There would be no time to fix tech during the combat, either, so anything with a red sticker on it would be out of action.

In that, as the skipper observed, Mako really would bring a chaos factor to the exercise.  He didn’t know which tech was actually most likely to be damaged in combat, so his decisions would be entirely random.

In fact, they were not
entirely
random, at least where casualties were concerned, since Mako decided to have some fun by going after all the officers.  The scenario for the drill was a convoy escort, with four freighters under escort that were coming under attack from a Marfikian warship.  Minnow’s role was to keep themselves between the warship and the freighters they were protecting, taking out missiles that were fired at them, and taking cannon fire on their own hull to protect the far more fragile freighters. 

This, Mako had been told, was the most desperate kind of combat there was.  If they could manage to get out of it with their own ship and even one of the freighters intact that would be counted as a success.  If he had just been sitting there with nothing to do but watch as the simulated Marfikian warship fired at the helpless freighters it could have been really frightening, particularly as he knew that such combat simulations were based on records of real incidents.  Being part of it, though, with the crew in high spirits at the prospect of a full on combat exercise, was exciting.

There was much amusement on the ship as he was going around.  Some of the decisions he made about which tech to slap ‘out of action’ stickers on were apparently hilarious to the spacers.  As it became clear that he was going after the officers, too, the crew found that highly entertaining.  Once he’d taken out Dan Tarrance, Morry Morelle and Martine Fishe, he headed for the command deck, encouraged by a cheer from the crew.  Even the skipper and exec found that amusing.  Buzz surrendered with lifted hands and a chuckle as Mako slapped a red sticker on him, and the skipper merely sat back in his chair, accepting it when Mako took him out of the game.

It did feel like a game too, even though the ship really was juddering and shuddering under the force of speed and manoeuvres they were pushing it through.  Mako knew that they would not, obviously, push the ship so far as to make it really dangerous.  Everyone was enjoying themselves.  Nobody did more than curse when one of the freighters they were protecting lost its nerve and tried to flee from the convoy, at which it was promptly taken out by the Marfikians.  One bright silent puff of light and the simulated ship on their screens was gone, and with no more than a swearword or two, forgotten.  All effort was being focussed on protecting the remaining ships.  

Hali Burdon, however, now in command of the ship, clearly had her own ideas about how to fight off the Marfikians.  Taking stock of the situation with a glance as she arrived on the command deck, she gave crisp orders.

‘Hack the simulation and lay me a sim of Archer’s alongside it.’  She indicated the nearest solar system, which had several gas super-giants, and sketched where she wanted the simulation of it laid into the drill scenario.

‘Hack...?’  The young rating gave her an astounded look but Hali nodded confirmation.

‘Do it!’ she insisted.  Elsa made no further protest but got straight to work.  As she was doing so, Hali told the rating on comms to signal new evasive manoeuvres to the freighters, and laid in a course for them on the astrogation screen.

In seconds, they were turning into the simulated solar system, with Hali signalling busy instructions to the freighters and to their own helm. 

What happened next was so fast that Mako did not stand a chance of following it.  He had half a second to catch his breath as the enormous bulk of a gas giant filled every screen.  Collision warnings were shrieking at ear-drilling volume.  There was barely even time to remind himself that this was a simulation before an enormous cheer erupted from the crew, yelling and punching the air.

The Marfikian ship was gone.  Afterwards, it was explained to him that Hali had actually forced the corvette through the outer levels of the gas giant’s atmosphere, causing severe damage to their own hull and that the Marfikian ship had run into it and exploded on impact.  Their hulls, he gathered, were considerably thinner, a trade off between strength and speed which Hali had exploited.

Had the simulation been real, as the skipper observed in post-exercise debriefing, they would have saved three out of the four freighters and destroyed the enemy ship, a remarkable achievement.  They would also, however, have been so badly damaged themselves that they’d have been lucky to make it back to port.  Hali had also cheated on the exercise and broken Fleet regs, too, in ordering a combat exercise programme to be hacked and altered.  At no time, ever, had it been part of Fleet combat protocol to take superlight freighters into solar systems, or to shave planets with their own ships.  She had got that trick, as she freely admitted, off a holo-game, Cosmos Warfare, in which it was the solution to level seventy nine.

Alex von Strada clearly found that amusing.  He was obliged to record, officially, that the exercise was rendered null and void by CPO Burdon’s unauthorised alteration of the scenario’s parameters, but made his feelings on that abundantly clear by also recording a commendation for her and all the crew involved for the initiative and skill they had demonstrated in problem solving.  He also recorded thanks to Inspector Ireson for his role in the exercise, getting a laugh from the crew as well as applause when it was noted that his choice of casualties had been rather more selective than random.

None of them had any idea at the time that innocent conversation about the fun they’d had with this would end up on the news.  It would surge out on the media as a story that they actually
had
hurtled their ship through a solar system and grazed it through the outer atmosphere of a gas giant.  They had no way to know that not even release of the ship’s logs proving that it had only been a simulation exercise would change people’s minds about what they believed had actually happened here.  Mako would, in fact, be questioned and challenged about this for the rest of his life by people who believed him to have been ‘part of the cover up’.  At the time, sublimely oblivious to the oncoming storm, he merely joined the crew in celebrating their success with an issue of candy-chip cookies to mark the occasion. 

With that, life settled back to normal on the corvette.  Their main occupation became sweeping for data from the thousands of micro detectors that had been laid in the Pagolis region.  They found quite a lot of them destroyed, with barely even a spreading cloud of atoms to show where there’d once been a cup-sized detector.  The difficulty was, as Martine Fishe explained, that if a ship passed by close enough to
be
detected and recorded on the micro-scanners, the chances were high that the micro-scanner itself would also be detected.  There was a very narrow window in which the scanner could see the ship but the ship not see the scanner.  Any ship up to no good would be likely to have shuttles out, spiralling about the ship to extend their viewing range, for no other reason
than
to spot detectors and take them out. 

This made data pickup a frustrating exercise, but Mako noticed again that the Fleet crew did not seem to feel any great degree of frustration.  They were philosophical about it, accepting it as just what they’d expected.  The chances of them actually finding any useful data were, evidently, astronomically remote.  By the same token, nobody was holding out much hope for any outcome to the information the Cargomaster 469’s skipper had passed on to them. 

‘Even if it was good information, and not misdirection deliberately put about to distract us,’ Alex told Mako, ‘timing is
such
a narrow window in these things.  A cargo cache may only be in use for a few days between the ship that drops it off and the one that picks it up.  Even if it’s there for longer, the chances of finding the right place at the right time are just so remote, even with good intel on the place, you don’t stand much of a chance, realistically, unless you have the time, as well.  Which we don’t, here, just location coordinates.  So, we’ll check it out, but don’t be disappointed when we find nothing there.’

His expectations were clearly shared by the crew and, since they were the experts, after all, Mako didn’t give any more thought to the matter, himself.  It seemed a matter of mild interest when they arrived at the solar system to which the freighter skipper had directed them.

They did not go into the system.  It was a wild system in the early stages of formation, with tens of thousands of planetismals cannoning about, besides millions of meteors and great swathes of stellar gas still in the process of swirling and forming in the gas-giant region.  The Comet Cloud of gas and tiny icy fragments hurtling about at high speed was, in itself, a very dangerous barrier to entering the system.  It was just not somewhere any sane skipper would venture a superlight starship in any cross plane navigation.  The only way into it, as Buzz explained to Mako on a simplified astrogation chart, was to drop in vertically.  Even that would be difficult, requiring either precision timing to drop through the Comet Cloud, or ‘going in hot’, meaning firing guns ahead of you as you went to clear the way.