Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (52 page)

‘Oh yes,’ Alex confirmed, ‘and it would be weird if you weren’t. Things are bound to be a bit jittery for a day or two. Just hang in there, Shion. And you know where I am if you want to talk, okay?’

‘Okay,’ she said, and gave him a half-joking salute. She was already back at work as he acknowledged it with a grin and turned away.

Mako Ireson, when he found him, was even more defensive. Alex knew he had to be going through hell right now. It had been Mako’s own suggestion to set up the scheme allowing civilians to join the Fourth on a rehab basis. He had been closely involved with it throughout and had been shadowing Banno Triesse through all his basic training and his first month on the ship. It was inevitable and even justified that he should feel some sense of responsibility for Banno being here.

Knowing Mako as he did, though, Alex realised that the prisons inspector would be tearing himself apart over his role in Banno ending up on the ship, blaming himself for his injuries. He was ready to take Mako off for a coffee if need be, to talk it through with him.

Mako, however, was having none of that.

‘This is
not
about me,’ he said, with a ferocity that was all the more striking because it came from such a mild, easy-going man. It was as if a rabbit had suddenly fired up porcupine spines.

‘All right,’ Alex said, and respected his
back off
glare, giving him a nod and leaving him to help as much with the work as he could.

It took him nearly two hours to go around the ship, making sure he had a word with every member of his crew, assessing how they were coping and giving each whatever it was they needed to feel better – a note of sympathy, a bracing tone, or a joke.

The irony of it was that he
was
‘going through the motions’ there in a sense, and the crew knew it, too. Skippers were trained to do exactly this in the aftermath of a traumatic incident, and much of what Alex said, even the way that he said it, would have been recognised by anyone who had attended the Fleet command course on handling emotive incidents. It could have been seen as an empty, even manipulative process.

With Alex, though, the crew understood very well that he
did
care, and cared very deeply, but that this was the only way the Fleet permitted him to express that concern. They were just as constrained, themselves, by regulation and custom, as some things were not done, or said, even in the radical Fourth. There was almost a sense of ritual façade as the skipper did his rounds, everyone playing their part in the traditions whilst the subtext of real feeling was conveyed in a glance, a smile, a tone of voice.

Alex felt heartened by the time he returned to the command deck. His crew was shaken, he knew that, but they had not lost confidence in him. There was a sense of the ship returning to normal, too – Jonno Trevaga was on mess deck two, attempting to persuade Teabreak Li that since they had to repaint the walls anyway, it was a good opportunity to go for a change of décor.

‘I mean grey, it’s so
blah
,’ he said, mock-earnestly. ‘Why can’t we have something nice? Sunshine yellow, maybe?’

Sub-lt Li demonstrated that he had learned to recognise when he was being wound up, and to deal with it Fourth’s style.

‘Yes, with little pink pigs flying around it, too,’ he retorted, and gestured at the walls. ‘If you would be so kind as to paint them grey, Mr Trevaga.’

‘Well, it was worth a try,’ said Jonno, and grinned at his rigging partner, waiting with the paint. ‘Come on, boyo – let’s splat the blah.’

Alex heard the flicker of laughter that went around the ship at Jonno and Teabreak’s mild little joke, and felt almost more proud of them for that than he had for their performance in combat. It was now, he knew,
now
that the true courage of a crew would show, in the aftermath of high adrenalin when they were all exhausted, stressed and still having to cope with a very high demand, uncertain situation. His own demeanour was a key factor in that, of course, as the crew would take their cue from him, but not even the calmest and most cheerful skipper could keep a crew together if they didn’t have the grit to begin with.

He was, he knew, extraordinarily lucky. Virtually every member of his crew was someone he’d either picked himself or would have picked, given the choice. Virtually all of them had been rated able and talented during training when they joined the Fleet. And all of them, without exception, were giving of their utmost. No skipper could ask for a finer crew than that.

Typically, Alex did not include himself in that evaluation. If pressed, he would have to admit that yes, he
had
graduated First Cadet and become the youngest skipper and then the youngest captain in the Fleet. But being the youngest to achieve something only mattered in the sense that it gave you an edge of experience over people of the same age with similar qualifications. Alex himself would have said, and truly believed, that he had been over-promoted for his current age and level of command experience, that the promotion to captaincy had been forced by circumstance rather than truly earned. So he saw himself, very much, as a frigate skipper working hard to step up to task force responsibilities, rather than as a brilliant high flyer.

And he could not, he knew, be doing this without Buzz. The Exec was a rock solid support, both professionally and personally. Nobody could have done more than Buzz to keep the ship and crew together during the frantic aftermath of combat and then the long, exhausting effort of first phase repairs. Nobody could have been more understanding of Alex’s needs as he gave the skipper space to come to terms with what had happened. And nobody, for sure, could have timed it better when he
did
decide that Alex needed some help.

The skipper had been back on the command deck for some minutes after finishing his rounds, and Buzz saw him slump as he sat there looking at screens. It was tiny, such a small movement that most people wouldn’t even have noticed it. Buzz had been watching for it, though – the slight drop of his shoulders that Alex would give at the moment when he realised that he had now done everything he needed to do, that all he could do now was wait.

‘Can I have a word, dear boy?’ Buzz indicated the hatchway which led through the main airlock to Alex’s daycabin. ‘One minute,’ he clarified, as Alex looked at him doubtfully. They had agreed that one of them would be on the command deck at all times throughout these operations, and given what had happened today, Alex was reluctant to leave anyone else in command even for one minute. ‘Martine can handle things for a minute, can’t you, dear girl?’

Martine Fishe gave a calm smile.

‘I might even manage two.’ She had taken no offence at the decision to have either the skipper or exec on the command deck around the clock, though she too was a command rank officer. This was effective first contact, and as today had demonstrated,
anything
could happen.

‘All right,’ Alex said, a little reluctant but not wanting to show doubt in Martine’s abilities. ‘One minute,’ he told them both, and followed Buzz into his quarters.

They were back in just twenty eight seconds. Buzz did not say anything at all – as the door was closing, he simply turned and put his arms around Alex, drawing him into a hug. He held him tight for perhaps five seconds, then patted him on the back a couple of times and let him go.

There was nobody else in the galaxy who would hug Alex like that. His mother hadn’t hugged him for years even before he’d left home, though she patted and stroked him and touched his face at times of high emotion. His father’s notion of a hug was an arm’s length, embarrassed and momentary grappling.

Buzz, though, gave great hugs. Alex felt as if he was being enfolded, not just in strong and caring arms, but in a cocoon of reassurance.
I’ve got you. It’s okay. I’m here. Everything will be all right.

When he stepped back, Alex’s eyes were brighter than usual, and he could only give a short nod.

‘Thanks,’ he said, and Buzz smiled, resting a hand on his shoulder just for a moment, and giving him a nod in return.
You’ll do
.

Then they went back to work, everyone politely pretending not to know that the exec had taken the skipper aside for a comforting hug. Alex was far from being the only one to get that comfort from Uncle Buzz that day, after all.

Things seemed to settle down again after that. Alex made the crew who’d be taking the night watch get some sleep during the evening, but continued working, himself, and carried on holding the watch till four in the morning when Buzz came to relieve him.

It was 0417 and Alex had been asleep for nine minutes when the comm by his bunk fleeped him awake.

‘Yes?’ He was instantly alert, with a rush of anxiety, as he saw that the call was coming from Simon Penarth.

‘You told me to tell you when you could visit,’ Simon said. ‘And you can, now.’

‘Oh.’ Alex looked at the time, suppressed the tiny, unworthy part of him that wanted to groan and burrow back into bed, and swung his legs out of the bunk. ‘On my way.’

He arrived at sickbay a couple of minutes later, having taken time to freshen up with a near-scalding hot shower – as good as three hours sleep, he reckoned, though medics tended to take a different view.

‘You,’ Simon told him sternly, ‘ought to be asleep.’

This, from the man who’d got him out of bed, seemed just a little unfair. Alex was also bewildered by what was happening in sickbay, which was nothing at all. It was set up in its surgical mode, an operating table in the centre where Rangi normally had his synth-grass healing space. Simon had turned off the jungle glade holowall, too, revealing the wall of sickbay tech which Rangi normally concealed behind it.

Of the patients, there was no sign – the stasis bags would be in the storage locker behind the dispensary.

‘How are they?’ Alex asked, deciding to ignore Simon’s comment and focus on what was important.

‘In stasis, what else?’ Simon said. ‘I wouldn’t have disturbed you if you hadn’t ordered me to tell you – somewhat peremptorily, I have to say – as soon as you could visit. So I’ve told you and here you are and you can see for yourself that there’s nothing going on so just go back to bed, all right?’

Alex thought about attempting to explain to the civilian that locking a skipper out of any department on his ship
was
technically mutiny and that he had, in the circumstances, been remarkably forbearing. He considered, too, attempting to assure the medic that his few minutes of sleep and a hot blast shower had fully restored him and he didn’t need to go back to bed. Then he looked at Simon and thought again.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll come back in the morning.’

‘Not before eight,’ said Simon, opening the door for him.

He opened it again to admit him when Alex went back at eight next morning, and rather obviously hadn’t been to bed, himself. ‘Coffee?’ Simon offered, by way of a greeting.

‘Ah,’ Alex said, recalling the last time that Simon had offered him a coffee, the ‘two guys having a chat over coffee’ which had, with hindsight, been the most effective counselling session he’d had since the loss of his daughter. ‘Do we
have
to?’ he asked, trying to keep the pleading note from being too obvious.

‘What?’ Simon looked startled, then realised Alex had misunderstood. ‘No, no!’ he repeated. ‘Just – some things I need to ask you, medic to skipper, so do you want a coffee?’

‘I’m fine, thanks,’ Alex said, still looking at him a bit warily. ‘What is it, Simon?’

Simon gestured to a bunk that he’d flipped into a sofa, and they sat down.

‘I need to ask you, Alex – I need all the records you have on Ali Jezno, okay? All the footage that’s recorded by blind cameras, any other recordings you have for him from off the ship, access to his personal holos,
everything
. Rangi tells me that it takes the signatures of three command rank officers and the IA officer to access that stuff aboard ship, so I need you to do that for me, okay?’

It wasn’t a request, but it wasn’t quite a command, either, with some recognition that Alex had a right to a say in this decision.

‘Why?’ Alex asked, mystified, and then, as he realised the scale of what Simon was asking for, ‘And why would you want
all
of it? You’re talking about thousands of hours of footage, there.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Simon. ‘But I need it to give Ali as much of his memory back as possible.’ He saw the confusion on Alex’s face and pressed on, ‘I’m not talking about playing stuff back to him while he’s in a coma, obviously, that’s not feasible and rarely effective anyway. I’m talking about neuro-restoration, effectively reprogramming his new brain cells with memories. It is a very limited technique, of course, it can’t engramize memories of how he felt or other sensory input, but the more we can give him back, the better.’

Alex stared at him. ‘You can
do
that?’ he queried. ‘You can actually reprogram his memories?’

‘Yup,’ said the League’s most brilliant neurosurgeon. ‘Actually what you do is to stimulate memory formation in those cells and feed in the images and sound, so it’s forming new memory of those events rather than restoring old memories as such, but still, better than nothing.’

Alex continued to gaze at him, looking quite alarmed, now.

‘And is that approved by the Medical Ethics Authority?’ he asked.

‘Yes, yes,’ Simon said, quite impatiently. ‘It would be unethical, of course, if we were programming him with anybody
else’s
memories, or editing in any way what we decided to give and to withhold – the general view on that is that if you decide to go with memory restoration you have to give the patient everything you have. So just give me everything you’ve got, okay? I’ll format the data from visual to neuro-signals myself, but it would be helpful if it could be provided as adjusted view. People can’t see themselves, after all, so just feeding memories of himself as seen from outside would give him the weirdest sense of out-of-body experience. Can your programming guys come up with some kind of algorithm which would adjust the footage to be what he would have seen, from his point of view?’