Mission Zero (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) (7 page)

‘Normal in the Fleet,’ Alex assured him.  ‘We may not have many luxuries on board but good coffee is regarded as a vital supply.  I apologise in advance for the food, I doubt you’ll like that very much, but at least the coffee is some compensation.’

‘It certainly is.’  The inspector smiled, but having taken another drink of his coffee, set it aside and picked up his comp again.  Then he looked surprised as Alex, unable to bear the sight of the mug of coffee just put down on the deck, got up and moved it onto the end table of the sofa.  ‘Did I do something wrong?’

‘Well, we’re rather particular about liquids on warships,’ Alex explained mildly.  ‘We operate all the time, you see, on the basis that the ship may go into freefall at any moment, so all our working practices are geared to that.  Having mugs of any liquid just sitting on a surface is a no-no, and hot coffee, well, that would get you a safety write-up if you were a member of the crew.’  He gave his slight smile.  ‘If you could just try to remember to look for the green rings on surfaces and put your drinks down there – they’re grav safe cup holders, you see, which will hold the cup and contents in place even if the ship goes into freefall.  Other than that you can ask for a freefall safe mug, though generally people don’t tend to enjoy drinks as much when they have to suck them through a tube.’

‘Ah – right, yes, I see.’  The inspector noted where Alex had his own mug in a green ring on his desk and gave him an apologetic look.  ‘I’m afraid I have a lot to learn.  I will try not to be a nuisance to you or take up too much of your time.  So… may we discuss Jace Higgs, Skipper?’

‘Of course,’ Alex agreed.  ‘Though if we are going to be as full and frank here as I would like to be, I would appreciate you closing that comp and agreeing to this being off the record.  If you’re going to write it down and put it in a report,’ he explained, as the inspector looked startled, ‘I will be compelled to give you a ‘no comment’ response to certain questions which have been ruled not for public disclosure.  So if you want honest answers, it has to be on trust that it does not get written down, all right?’

For answer, without even needing to consider that one, Mako closed his comp.

‘Off the record,’ he confirmed, and picked up his coffee, looking at the skipper with an expectant air.  ‘What I really want to know,’ he told him, ‘is
why
there is this evident and very widespread opinion in the Fleet that Jace Higgs was the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice.  There’s no dispute, I take it, that he did assault Lt Simons?’

‘No, there’s no dispute about the fact that he thumped her.’  Alex said.  ‘And though I don’t condone that kind of violence, of course, you won’t find anyone here who blames him.

‘She’s a horror, frankly, who should never have got a commission in the first place and certainly should never be in any position of authority.  I did put in an appeal against her being posted here, but I was told to just make the best of it and see if I could exert some influence and upgrade her personnel management skills.’  He sighed speakingly. 

‘I don’t know
why
people find it so hard to grasp what is, to me, the entirely obvious fact that you can not change people against their will,’ he said.  ‘Lt Simons is entirely satisfied with herself just the way she is and she has no respect for me at all, so how anyone could think that I could address her abrasive personality issues is a total mystery to me.  But there we are, I lost the appeal so we just had to make the best of it. 

‘It was… well, ‘nightmare’ doesn’t go anywhere near it.  I saw people who’d been making great progress backsliding because of her constant nagging at them.  Over the seventeen weeks that she was with us, I had her in this office thirty two times to discuss incidents in which she had upset or offended people.

‘She was on Jace Higg’s case from day one.  He has issues with dumb insolence, giving officers looks that make his opinion of them only too apparent, and she seemed to feel she had to defend her authority by slamming down on him at every opportunity.

‘On the day he hit her, she’d had a go at him for having his hands in his pockets.  Fleet skippers are allowed to set standards in minor policy like that ourselves.  Our shipboard policy is that we allow hands in pockets, other than for formal situations, but she was determined to impose a ‘no hands in pockets’ rule on us, no matter how many times it was pointed out to her that our shipboard policy allows it.  Anyway, they had another confrontation over it and Higgs recognised himself that he was wound up, so did exactly the right thing there and took himself off to our time-out room, the number eight airlock. 

‘Don’t be confused by the fact that that is also our designated brig.  On a ship this size all spaces are multifunctional and it isn’t anything more than a place people can go to when they need some peace and quiet.

‘Lt Simons, however, went in after him, which she had no right to do.  She accused him of skiving, threatening him with charges of being absent from his duty station.  When he told her that he had permission for time out, she said he was far too fond of pulling that one. 

‘That is not why he hit her.  He did not want to tell me why he hit her.  He just cried and wouldn’t say a word.  But the thing is, you see, that there is blind recording in the time out room, as perhaps I should mention, is the case everywhere aboard the ship.  We recognise the potential risk of there being any place aboard ship which is entirely off record in case any allegations are made, say, of inappropriate conduct from an officer.  So there is no place on the ship, not even the lavatories, that does not have cameras on continuous record.  I can assure you, though, that nobody can access those blind cameras in any other circumstances than a genuine need to retrieve incident footage, which in itself requires the signatures of two command rank officers, a mound of paperwork and reporting to Internal Affairs. 

‘We had to do that, of course, with an incident in which a crewman had punched an officer.  When we saw it… well, I was obliged to take a little personal time myself, frankly, just to come into my cabin and shut the door for a few minutes.  I don’t know if you are aware that my three year old daughter was killed in a car crash just over a year ago?’

He could say that now without his throat closing up, without the cold numbness engulfing his body, though it was beyond him yet to be able to discuss it in any detail. 

‘I do know that, yes.’  Mako assumed the awkward, embarrassed sympathy of someone confronting a tragedy too awful for normal social conversation.  ‘I am so sorry.  As a parent myself…’  He broke off as Alex had held up a calm but compelling hand.

‘Please, I don’t talk about it,’ he said.  ‘I only have to, for you to understand the depth of rage and hatred on this ship for what Lt Simons said, and why we feel so strongly, all of us, that her conduct constituted intolerable provocation.  My daughter was killed, you see, because she was not fastened into her child safety seat, which is all I want to say about that.

‘Higgs’s wife was pregnant when it happened, and they had already asked me if I would stand sponsor to their child.  That’s customary in the Fleet, a very usual kind of pastoral care.  When Lt Simons went into the time out room, Higgs was sitting there looking at a holo that had been taken at his son’s naming ceremony, five months after my daughter died.  He was obviously looking at that holo to calm himself, reminding himself of what was important.   

Then Lt Simons came in and started having another go at him.  If you saw the footage, which I can not show you because it was placed under evidentiary seal by the admiral presiding at the court martial, you would see the look of utter contempt he gave her for that.  He does a very good withering sneer, does Higgs.  It certainly wound Lt Simons up.  It is entirely obvious that she lost her temper.  In my view, the things she said were grounds for charges of unprofessional conduct. 

‘Seeing that he was looking at that holo, she told him that that kid of his did not stand a chance in life with him for a father.  He still didn’t hit her, which I hold to be evidence of a very high degree of self-control in itself.  But then, seeing that she wasn’t getting to him, she looked at the picture of me holding his baby and said,’ a muscle tensed in his jaw and he spoke with taut control, ‘You’re obviously battening onto the skipper for all you can get.  Of course, he’ll have a lot of baby stuff going spare.  You might need to wash the blood off the car-seat but I don’t suppose that would bother you.’

As Mako’s eyes widened with shock, Alex nodded grimly.  ‘Right,’ he said.  ‘
That’s
why he hit her.  Just…’ he gestured,   ‘lashed out, blindly.’

‘But… what could she have been
thinking
to say something so offensive?’  The inspector wondered, looking appalled.

‘Oh, that’s not the first time she’s made mock of somebody’s bereavement,’ said Alex, drily.  ‘The incident which made her reputation in the Fleet, some years ago, was one in which a crewman who’d been demoted on disciplinary grounds received news that his father had died.  Lt Simons is on record as having told him that it should be some consolation to him that his father had died before knowing what a disappointment he was.’

‘
What
?’  Mako gasped.  ‘And she got away with that?’

‘Evidently,’ said Alex, and took another sip of his coffee.  ‘She was censured for insensitivity, but it spoke volumes that she was the one who stayed on the ship and it was the crewman who was transferred.  Old School Fleet, there, see, protecting the officer, which I have, if it needs to be said, major
issues with myself.’

‘But… if that was known at the court martial, what she said,
surely
that should have been taken into account as mitigating circumstances?’

‘Absolutely, yes it should,’ Alex said.  ‘And if we had had the judge we were supposed to, I have no doubt it would have been.  Admiral Harper is not long retired and is one of the few Progressive admirals represented on the court martial bench.  I know her at a social level of having been invited to a dinner party at her house, but we’re not personal friends.  Third Lord Jennar, however, who is in charge of courts martial as part of his internal affairs remit, removed her from the rotation.  He said there was too close a personal relationship between us because I had been to her house.  And rather than move up to the next judge, since they organise other commitments around their scheduled rotation, he brought in a reserve. 

‘That was Admiral Michaels.  He is a hundred and twenty four years old – yes, seriously – and still serving as a relief judge for courts martial.  He is hard horse Old School, rabidly protective of the Fleet’s reputation and not in any zone where he would ever admit that a rating could have been justified in thumping an officer.  Attempts have been made to get him taken off the bench, but there he still is.  There is a clique within the Admiralty who regard him as something of an institution.  They can afford to be sentimental about him of course because they are not the unfortunate defendants brought up before him.  His sentences are legendarily harsh, and they
are
frequently reduced on appeal.

‘But that was what happened, see, and that is why people hold the view that Jace Higgs was shafted, because his court martial was rigged with a hostile judge who blatantly suppressed the evidence and gave a sentence ten times what the offence actually merited.’

‘Should he have got a custodial sentence at all, for that?’  Mako queried.

‘He would have, yes, regardless of the circumstances.  Fleet regulation does not allow for anything less in cases where a rating has struck an officer in deep space.  And yes, that’s important,’ the skipper clarified, as Mako gave him an interrogative look.  ‘There is a clear and definite distinction, right the way through Fleet regulations, between in port and out.  Offences in port are treated very much more leniently, with a certain amount of tolerance for shoreleave misconduct and the general lessening of formalities aboard ship when you’re in parking orbit.  But once you launch and leave the system, a much higher code kicks in. 

‘The Fleet cracks down very hard on anything which is considered to impair the safety and function of the ship, see.  Punching an officer definitely comes under that category and there’s no doubt he’d have got a custodial sentence, regardless of who heard the case and how sympathetic they were.  But we are talking, there, about two to three months to be served at the local glasshouse.  With me prepared to take him back that would have been it, he could come back to the ship once he was discharged.’

‘Oh, I see.  That’s quite different from army procedures, isn’t it?’  Mako commented.  ‘But didn’t he – Admiral Michaels – give Higgs a dishonourable discharge?’

‘Oh, yes.’  Alex said.  ‘Lt Simons apologised for insensitive reference to the loss of my child, but alleged that there was an inappropriate degree of intimacy between me and Higgs.  There was nothing in me standing sponsor to his child.  I don’t think there’s any skipper in the Fleet who hasn’t been asked to do that, often many times, for the children of crew.  Lt Simons, however, said that Higgs and I had had ‘inappropriate’ personal conversations, that he was well known to idolise me and that I treated him as a personal protégé. 

‘That is not, if it needs to be clear, the case.  The nearest we came to a personal conversation was when he approached me shortly before his baby was due.  He said that he would understand if I felt I did not want to go ahead with standing sponsor to his baby, if it was ‘too soon’, which was an obvious reference to the death of my own child.  I said thank you but that I would be proud to stand sponsor to his son.