Mission Zero (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) (40 page)

It was less than that, in fact, since Mako went and helped supervise a checklist to ensure that the airlock came up to required standards.  In the midst of that, the departure of the shuttle leaving for Chartsey was hardly noticed.  The crew gave them a quick cheer to send them on their way, but they were gone almost before Mako had time to realise it.  Eighteen days from now, hopefully, they would be arriving at Chartsey.  His own family, like all those anxiously awaiting news, would be reassured that he was fine.

For right now, though, he had work to do.  So he just sent his love silently with the shuttle and got on with it.

____________________

Chapter Fourteen

Three weeks later, a huge cheer erupted aboard Minnow as reinforcements arrived.  Then the cheering fizzled out into dismayed silence as the incoming ships came into visual range and they saw what the Admiralty had sent them.

This was not the destroyer they’d been hoping for, nor even the frigate they’d expected if Falcon wasn’t available.  These were gunboats.  They were barely more than twenty metres long, armed with four laser cannon.  They had a ship’s complement of twenty four apiece, including the three officers.

‘They just can’t be serious.’  Jenni Asforth, at the helm, stared in disbelief as the ships identified themselves as the Midge and the Firefly.  ‘That can’t be
it
, can it?’

The Minnow’s crew had been watching scopes with yearning hope for the last few days.  They were all exhausted.  They’d been working double watches for more than three weeks in order to keep watches aboard the Might of Teranor as well as on the Minnow.  Keeping watch wasn’t the half of it, either.  As anticipated, the factions aboard the freighter had entrenched and become bitterly hostile.  The Might of Teranor’s crew were restricted to their quarters and the mess deck, which had become a verbal battleground.  It was rare to get through so much as an hour without some kind of bickering argument breaking out.  There’d been no day yet without at least one blazing, shouting, swearing row.  The Minnow’s crew came back weary and tense from duty on the freighter.  The prospect of a larger ship turning up was like light at the end of a tunnel.  A destroyer or frigate would have enough crew to be able to take over crewing the Might of Teranor.  They would also be able to take the prisoners currently aboard the Minnow onto their own ship.  The Minnow’s crew would finally be able to relax, catch up on their sleep and just enjoy the rest of the run back to Chartsey.

‘Asforth.’  Alex spoke pleasantly but with an undertone that reminded the eighteen year old pilot that it was not appropriate for her to voice her opinions on the command deck.

‘But sir…’ for once, Jenni was not responsive to the hint, ‘they’re about as useful as crates of lettuce!’

Alex didn’t disagree with her.  Gunboats were very fast but they were not considered operationally useful for deep space duties.  They were most often used for courier work or escorting larger ships in order to extend the range of a search. 

‘Perhaps they’re scouting for Falcon,’ Dan Tarrance suggested hopefully.  Minnow was sticking very tightly to a pre-set course so that whatever ship the Admiralty sent would be able to find them.  It was possible, though, that the Admiralty had sent the gunboats along with the destroyer they were hoping for.  If they’d spread out to maximise their chances of finding the corvette and freighter it was possible that Falcon just wasn’t on their scopes yet.

Then the gunboats came into signalling range and the Midge began flashing the code that announced that they had orders for Minnow from the Admiralty.  It was instantly apparent from that that there was no larger ship in the offing.  Groans and muttered curses broke out, audible from the mess deck and even on the command deck itself.

‘All right,’ Alex said, with a reproving note.  He might share his crew’s concern at the arrival of the gunboats but Fleet protocol did not allow complaining on the command deck.

‘There’s probably a bigger ship coming.’  Buzz was more sympathetic to the crew’s feelings.  He was over on the Might of Teranor, where he was spending at least ten hours a day keeping the situation under control.  The two ships were running close enough to maintain a comms link without time delay, with a voice link kept open at all times between the two command decks.  There was a background buzz of incredulity from the Teranor’s command deck, too, and Buzz’s tone was soothing.  ‘They can’t just have sent us two gunboats.’

For once, however, Buzz was wrong.  First Lord Dix Harangay had indeed made the decision to respond to their request for help by sending them two gunboats.

‘It’s a political decision, of course,’ Alex informed his officers.  They’d gathered in the wardroom a quarter of an hour later.  Mako had been invited to attend too, all of them listening intently.  ‘First Lord Harangay is of the view that this should be, as he put it, our triumph.  He wants the Fourth Irregulars to be seen to be successful.  He sees this seizure as serendipitous.  If we can bring it home, as he says, our reputation will be made and our future assured.  Sending out a larger ship with a senior officer superseding me would, he says, steal our thunder.  So he’s sent the Midge and Firefly to support us.  Their skippers are under orders to report to me and escort us back to port.’

There was silence round the wardroom table.  There was nothing that could be said.  The First Lord of the Admiralty had made his decision and there was no arguing with that.  They could all see his point, too.  Looking at the big picture, it was probably the best decision that could be made for them in the long term.  The fact that in the short term it meant four more weeks of exhausting work just had to be accepted.  The crew would accept it as well, once they’d had a good grumble and talked it over every which way.

Mako just nodded too.  He had been hoping to be relieved of his own sense of responsibility for the prisoners when a larger ship arrived, but his disappointment at that was far outweighed by the relief of getting mail from his family.  It had only been a matter of hours between the arrival of the Minnow’s shuttle and the departure of the gunboats.  The Fleet had, however, contacted all the Minnow’s families on Chartsey as well as having sent the mail the shuttle had carried.  They had told them that gunboats would be leaving directly and allowed them to send mail.  Mako had been far from the only one aboard the corvette to get a little tearful over the messages they’d received. 

By the time the shuttle had arrived in port, Minnow had already been a month overdue.  It was apparent that the media had, by then, whipped up a frenzy over them being ‘missing in action’, with speculation as to whether they’d been sent on some top secret mission which might have destroyed the ship and killed everyone aboard.  There’d been pundits on air explaining that it was very unlikely that searches would even be able to find debris. 

The Admiralty had done their best to keep things calm.  Warships, they’d pointed out, were not like liners.  They didn’t run to schedules and there were any number of reasons a ship might be late back from patrol.  This had obviously not carried much weight against media panic mongering, however.  Even Mako’s wife, usually unflappable, had been close to tears in the message she’d sent him.  Her first words, ‘
Thank God you’re okay!’
were eloquent of her own relief.  His son had cheered and whooped and his daughter had cried and said she’d thought he was dead.  It would be four more weeks before he could hug them, but at least he knew they were okay.

The news that the gunboats had brought would take rather longer to absorb.  The media situation had initially calmed down a couple of weeks after Minnow’s departure.  There were, after all, only so many times you could show the same activists saying the same things.  Public interest had dropped, and with it the media coverage.  The Admiralty had been doing their utmost, too, to resolve the misunderstanding about the nature of the rehab scheme being carried out aboard the corvette, though expert opinion was that they were on a hiding to nothing with that one.  The media were firmly convinced that the Admiralty was covering up something dodgy about the Fourth and were not going to be easily convinced otherwise.  Having hailed Jerome Tandeki as one of the great heroes of investigative journalism, too, they were not likely to be open to accepting that the hottest story of the decade was actually no more than a PR cockup by an incompetent junior officer.  Activist groups were even less likely to be brought around by Admiralty PR efforts.  The Admiralty was seen as reactive, desperately fighting the firestorm, and as such had very little credibility. 

The news that the Minnow had arrested the Might of Teranor and was bringing the freighter in with a major drugs seizure had, as expected, fired things up to a whole new level.  It had been taken as proof that the Fourth Irregulars had been formed to use prisoners in covert operations considered too dangerous for the ordinary Fleet to undertake.  It was apparent, right from the start, that no amount of explaining that the Minnow had just got lucky was ever going to be believed.  They would be returning to a media blitz which would make the previous publicity look like coverage of an Admiralty garden party.  Clearly, though, the Admiralty – or the First Lord at any rate – were prepared to back them, despite the controversy that would rage about them for years to come.  As Buzz had observed, spacers might tell them things when they wouldn’t trust the regular Fleet.  With that situation so sensitive and the Fleet helpless without information from the spacer community, both the Admiralty and the Senate would back the Fourth regardless of public opinion.

That, though, was a situation they wouldn’t have to deal with for another month.  For right now, they just had to focus on the job that was in front of them; getting the Might of Teranor and their prisoners safely back to port.

‘The Midge and Firefly will be able to help with watchkeeping on the Teranor.’  Alex said.  He had spoken with both the gunboat skippers.  They were actually Lieutenant Commanders, only called skipper by courtesy.  Both had put themselves and their ships at his disposal for whatever assistance they could offer.  ‘They can give us three crew each per watch, which is some help.’

It wasn’t
much
help, but the officers accepted it philosophically.

‘I’d best get back to the Teranor.’  Buzz observed.  He’d come over to Minnow for the briefing, leaving Hali Burdon in command.  The prisoners there were understandably agitated, wanting to know what was going on.  The faction following the engineer, Cass Bridewell, had been hoping that a larger ship would turn up and take the first mate, Kem Salmond, aboard, along with the others they held responsible for the drug running.  Now they were going to be stuck together on the Teranor for the rest of the trip.  They were not likely to be happy.  ‘With your permission, sir?’  Buzz asked the young skipper, and Alex nodded.  There were obviously not going to be any questions, and there was nothing to discuss.

‘All right.’  He said, and got up himself with an air of purpose.  ‘Let’s get to it.’

Part of that meant, half an hour or so later, going to see the prisoners they had aboard Minnow.  All the detainees had been given the opportunity to send mail to Chartsey themselves when the shuttle departed, and most of them had, at the least, requested legal advice.  The gunboats had brought a flurry of mail for them from law firms.  All of it said the same thing, advising the prisoners not to make any kind of statement until they were back in port and had the benefit of legal counsel, and to keep as detailed a record as possible of all conversations with Fleet personnel.

Protocol required Alex to inform the prisoners that they were not going to be transferred to a larger ship, as had been anticipated, but would be continuing the journey housed in the Minnow’s airlocks.  Mako went along with him as a matter of good practice.  As much as he would have liked to be watching the messages from his family again, reading the mail from his boss at the LPA, and starting to get to grips with the masses of media footage the gunboats had brought out, he felt obliged to accompany Alex on his daily visits to check on the prisoners.  Marlon Steppard had already made allegations saying that he feared for his safety and that the automatic recording system aboard the ship could be edited.  Mako felt that having an independent witness present would be advisable in the circumstances, for whatever good that might do, so he was always present when officers or crew were going into the cells.

That was a wearisome duty, even at the best of times.  Marlon Steppard whinged constantly.  He was not supposed to make any kind of statement until he had legal representation but it was impossible, short of gagging him, to prevent him doing so.  He had already told everyone he could get to listen to him that he had had no idea what was in the container.  He had, he claimed, been intimidated into picking up the container by Kem Salmond and Rikado Marsh, who’d threatened both his own safety and that of his family unless he went along with it and kept his mouth shut.  He’d thought, he swore, that it was just a heavy cargo of uncustomed tetracitrine.  At the same time, though, he’d said that Kem Salmond was mixed up with some very dangerous people and that he believed Rikado Marsh to be a killer.  His defence lawyer would no doubt get him to understand that he could not claim both to be naively innocent as to the possibility of the container holding drugs, and at the same time terrified of the criminal underworld his first mate was involved in.  They would, no doubt, also make use of his allegations of brutality while he’d been held aboard the Minnow.  At the very least, he would claim that being held prisoner in an airlock had him in constant fear of his life, as he was afraid they might open the outer door at any time and space him.