Carrearranis (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 5) Read online

  But here was General Akade, aboard the ship for only a few days, reduced to just the kind of happy, uncritical admiration that seemed to overtake all the observers who came out here.

  Commander Mikthorn had started to wonder what the Fourth had done to turn a stiff army stalwart like General Akade into a grinning idiot. Could they, he wondered, be doping the tea?

  Further suspicion had crept in as he’d watched the Heron’s crew. There was something wrong there, the commander just knew it. Fleet crews never had the kind of tight, cheerful camaraderie that he saw on the Heron. Not, at least, outside the glossy world of a recruitment holo. Where were the personality clashes, the rivalries and jealousies, the bickering that he’d always thought was normal and inevitable when people were cooped up on a starship. On the Heron, everyone seemed to just get on, all mates together. And they did anything that was asked of them, too, even if it was well outside their job description or even below their rank, with a cheerful and even eager willingness to oblige. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t normal.

  And then, one night when he’d been lying in bed, wakeful again after a couple of hours’ fitful sleep, enlightenment had come upon him. It had not done so with any kind of blinding flash of revelation, but had crept into his awareness as he fretted over things.

  Hadn’t there been, he wondered, some girl… there’d been talk about it in the Second, still, though it had happened some time before he’d joined them. A girl from Chartsey university, that was it, a student – one of the team supposed to be going out to the Heron had dropped out for some reason and the team leader had, most improperly, taken this student along and asked von Strada to give her the necessary clearances so she could go aboard as her assistant. And von Strada had done it, even though the girl was a member of Liberty League and a known activist. And there’d been some kind of stink, because at first she was sending off just the sort of messages to her friends in Liberty League as might have been expected, describing the officers as abusive and the crew as oppressed – there’d even been some talk about Captain von Strada having punched a member of his crew. But then she’d been off on operations with them for a while and when she surfaced again it was to send messages to Liberty League telling them to ignore everything she’d said before, that they’d got the Fourth all wrong, that they were wonderful, and that she wanted to join them herself.

  The words that had been flashed around by an indignant and very suspicious Liberty League had been indoctrination and brainwashing. The Admiralty had evidently managed to convince them somehow to let it drop, as he hadn’t seen any further campaigning about it, but still, it had happened, and it had disturbing similarities with what he’d seen, the evidence of his own eyes, a hostile army general transformed into a grinning idiot in a matter of what…six days?

  If it wasn’t drugs, Commander Mikthorn thought, it must be some kind of indoctrination… and as he thought that, suspicion congealed in him into a lump of certainty.

  He had seen a documentary once about the methods used by cults to indoctrinate new members. He couldn’t remember it in any great detail, but he recalled that there was some kind of process – isolating people, separating them from friends and family, keeping them somewhere out of the way, that was the first one. Then there was love bombing, making people feel a valued and loved member of the group. Charismatic influence was in there too, he remembered, there had to be a strong, charismatic cult leader, a guru, the wise one whose word was law. And finally there was intimidation, the threats and even violence at any hint of disloyalty, anything that might be defined as betraying the group.

  And there it was, right there, going on right in front of him. They had even, he realised, been trying it on him.

  It was just so obvious, once you realised what was going on. Isolation – well, you didn’t get any more isolated than on a small starship out in the middle of nowhere, not only out of contact with family and friends but in a very confined and intimidating environment. The crew made sure to keep the pressure on, too. They frequently stressed how dangerous the situation was and how entirely dependent on them you were for your safety or even survival. At the same time, they bombarded you with overwhelming masses of incomprehensible information, which they of course would condescend to interpret only if asked to do so. It was no wonder, then, that people – so far from home, so helpless – felt a need to ingratiate themselves with the crew.

  Then there was love-bombing. And oh, they were sneaky with that! Even that innocent looking welcome pack provided you with clothes to wear like theirs. You were offered training, praised and given tremendous approval even for the smallest step towards behaving like a member of the crew. They were very free with their invitations to meals, cups of tea, friendly chats… sucking you in, Commander Mikthorn realised, just sucking you in.

  As for the charismatic cult leader, you did not need to look for long at the all-powerful von Strada and the unnatural reverence in which he was held by his crew, before you saw the reality there. And finally, when the really strong minded like himself stood out against this brainwashing, there was the intimidation – the dark looks, the insults, the uneasy feeling that if he stood up against them he might well find himself having the living daylights kicked out of him.

  The discovery that he was in the hands of a military unit functioning as a cult had appalled him, of course, but it had given him a sense of purpose, too. People had to know about this.

  So he had been writing, writing, writing. He’d written everything in his notebook, watching for evidence to prove his allegations – not to himself, because he knew that he was right, but to prove it beyond any doubt to all the authorities out there.

  In fact, he knew, they had to know this already. Some of them at least. The Admiralty knew, of course they knew, von Strada had been given a ship on irregular terms because his cult-based methods would never be tolerated in the regular Fleet. The Admiralty was turning a blind eye – no, positively covering up, because von Strada got results and that was all that mattered to them. Did the Senate know? Possibly. Anyway, he doubted that they would care. Again, it was results that mattered.

  The only way that this could be stopped, he’d realised, was for it to become public knowledge. The outrage it would cause would force the Admiralty to drop the Fourth, and the Senate would distance themselves from the scandal at light speed.

  The only difficulty was that Commander Mikthorn himself was bound by his oath of service not to release any classified, confidential or potentially damaging information to the media. He could do so as a whistle-blower, but the very thought of that made him feel nauseous. He liked to believe that he had the courage and integrity to stand up and be counted even on the most controversial issues, but the reality was that he was an Establishment man, and the idea of coming out openly against the Establishment was just too awful to contemplate.

  So, in desperation, he was writing letters. He was writing official memoranda to the Second’s head office, telling them what was really going on here and urging them in the strongest possible terms to separate themselves from any and all involvement with the Fourth as a matter of extreme urgency. He was writing to the Admiralty, to Third Lord Admiral Jennar, in his capacity as commander of Internal Affairs, giving him a detailed account of what was happening here and asking for him to take urgent remedial action. He was writing to a lot of other people, too – other officers, personal friends, anyone he could think of, to spread the word out there of what was going on. And if one of them then took that to the media, well... that wouldn’t be his fault, would it?

  He had written, so far, forty seven letters, all of which had been put onto secured tape and handed over to the courier skipper personally when they came over to collect the mail. There was a part of him afraid that his letters would never reach their destinations. There was another part even more afraid that the Fourth would, having intercepted them, exact some terrible revenge. But he had, he had to take that risk. He was the only one on this ship who knew
what was really going on, the only one who could do anything about it.

  He sat down, glowering, and began to write in his notebook.

  And it was shortly after that that Commander Mikthorn had what he considered – at the time, anyway – to be his brilliant idea.

  He was still writing – of course, writing – when he became aware that the lounge had become unusually quiet. Seven of the eight observers had rushed away to get involved with the data which was coming in from the satellites, as if they’d have anything useful to say about it. There was nobody else in the lounge either – clearly, almost everyone on the ship was so caught up with the influx of data that nobody was taking breaks. It was just himself and the eighth member of the observation party in the lounge, while Mako Ireson was getting things ready for dinner over in the little interdeck galley.

  The eighth member of the observation party, the one who’d stayed behind, was Ms Mara Divanelo. She, too, was evidently writing, on a comp screen spread out on the table before her.

  Commander Mikthorn had not previously taken much notice of Mara Divanelo. She was the current occupier of the slot reserved for members of the public on Telathor, a place awarded by random draw from those who’d put in their names for a lottery to come here, giving ordinary people a chance to see the mission for themselves.

  They did not come very much more ordinary than Mara Divanelo. She was 34 years old, worked in a low grade manufacturing job and had no qualifications beyond high school which she had left at 14. She wore cheap throwaway fashion and spoke with a blunt local accent – common as muck, in fact, and made no bones about it.

  Commander Mikthorn had not considered it necessary to do any more than perform a perfunctory handshake when he and Mara Divanelo had been introduced. Now, though, she caught his attention

  Mara Divanelo, obviously, had never stood a chance against the Fourth’s subtle and well-practised indoctrination techniques. She was evidently a woman of low intelligence and zero sophistication. The same documentary he’d watched about cult indoctrination had also shown how people could be brought back out of the cult by strong personalities setting them straight. He was vaguely aware that it was usually qualified psychologists undertaking such work and that there was probably more to it than ‘setting them straight’, but that was the impression he’d got from the documentary. He was himself, he felt, very good at setting people straight.

  If only, he thought, he could de-indoctrinate Mara Divanelo. All those lottery-winner Telathorans coming out here were global celebrities before they even left, and the media would be waiting both at Oreol and Telathor, resigned to the fact that she would come back in raptures about how marvellous and thrilling her experience had been.

  But what if, this time, she told the media what was actually going on?

  Commander Mikthorn looked at her… a dim witted, common little pleb, but that type often carried more weight with the public than intelligent and educated people like himself. And she was so dim, so easily led, it would surely be well within his capabilities to bring her around and… well, not prime her exactly, but make sure she understood what was going on and what she needed to say to the cameras. And now, when they were alone and everyone else was far too caught up in the data acquisition to pay any attention to him, was the perfect time.

  He looked over at her again, thoughtfully. Mara Divanelo was writing with the look of concentration and pecking movement of someone unaccustomed to it, like an uncertain chicken trying to find grains of corn amidst gravel. The sight of that strengthened his assurance that he would have no difficulty in setting her straight. He was a highly qualified senior officer, accustomed to command. She was a barely literate drone. The outcome was a foregone conclusion.

  He gave it a couple of minutes and then walked over to her table and sat down. She paid little heed other than to glance up, see it was him, and go back to her writing with renewed concentration. A more sensitive man might have noticed the dismay that flashed over her face, the defensiveness of her posture or the determined renewal of her task, and taken the hint. Commander Mikthorn, however, just looked at what she was doing with the air of an adult taking a kindly interest in the activity of a child.

  She was, he saw, writing either a letter or a diary entry. Something informal, anyway, without the structure of a form or report. Even upside down, he could see that the text was very simple, repetitive, a sentence piling up and up and up with no termination. The code for and was being tapped in every few words, and so was a phrase he read as so heart.

  He had lived on Telathor for long enough to be aware that ‘heart’ was current slang for ‘good’ and ‘so heart’ presumably meant ‘excellent.’ Not, of course, that he associated with people who would use such a vernacular, but he’d seen it on local holovision being used by common types. Just watching her write confirmed everything he had assumed about her. Datacoding was a simple process, a system of phonetic shorthand symbols selected from an intelligent keyboard. As he had noticed from a distance, she was hesitating over the codes, pecking them out where an experienced writer would have swept a pen through them, coding thought far faster than they could speak it aloud.

  ‘What are you writing?’ He asked, and did not feel that to be rude or intrusive. On the contrary, he was being nice to her by taking an interest in what she was doing.

  Mara looked up. Her expression was wary. She was, as usual, wearing too much makeup, a garish green and orange round her eyes and sparkles on her cheekbones. She had been pretty as a girl but looked heavy now, with muscular arms and a flat-footed tread. She looked better in the Fourth’s plain grey overalls than in her normal choice of clothing – lurid sarongs rather too bright and too short for her age and physique.

  ‘A letter,’ she admitted, though her expression conveyed a wish to respond with what the hell is it to do with you? ‘To me kids,’ she added, forestalling further enquiry with a blunt statement and going straight back to her screen. If she expected him to recognise that this meant that the letter was private and important and that she wanted to get on with it, though, she was crediting him with far more sensitivity and courtesy than he possessed.

  ‘How nice,’ he said, and with an air of congratulating himself for his escape, ‘I’ve never had children, myself.’ He wondered if he ought to establish a relationship by asking about her children, but the thought of being told all about them and probably shown holos too made his mind up on that one very fast. Time was precious, and he certainly didn’t want to waste any of it on her brats. Instead, he made an offer he felt would establish a relationship in the tutor-pupil roles he wanted. ‘I could show you how to scribe your name alphabetically, if you like, so you can sign it ‘Mummy’.’

  Alphanumeric scribing, actual physical writing spelling words out using the ancient alphabet, was the mark of a highly educated person in the League. Moreover, it was the mark of a person who’d enjoyed a classical education. It meant either that they’d been to a very expensive private school or that they’d studied classics at college. In Commander Mikthorn’s case, it was the former. It had to be said that he had never found much use for his scribing ability while serving in the Fleet, though he always considered that it looked good on his CV. He had, however, sometimes used it to impress women.

  Mara looked at him blankly. For a start, her kids would not make any sense of alphanumerics so what would be the point? And for another, she was Mam to them, not Mummy.

  ‘No thanks,’ she said, with a marked undertone of go away.

  Commander Mikthorn was undaunted. If the woman was too stupid to appreciate his attempt to bring a little culture and sophistication into her life, he would just have to go to Plan B.

  ‘Well, you’ve plenty to write about today, anyway,’ he commented, with a gesture to the screens which were now showing the drones being put through calibration testing. ‘Quite an event, eh?’

  This was Commander Mikthorn being crafty, attempting to win her confidence by pretending to be enthusia
stic about the mission too. It did not occur to him that he had been nothing but angry and negative for the previous ten days and that this sudden enthusiasm might ring just a bit false. As she looked at him in bewilderment, he gave her what he considered to be a charming smile. Mara recoiled slightly, not at all sure what to make of this.

  Commander Mikthorn saw her alarm and became more cautious. He saw himself as an expert fisherman playing a valuable catch. He mustn’t lose her by over-hasty reeling in.

  So, he began talking about the mission in the most general terms, how amazing it was that Carrearranis had been found and what a shock it had been to them all when the Guardian was lost. He kept talking for several minutes, apparently oblivious to the fact that it was a monologue.

  Eventually, though, Mara was reduced to such desperation that she started to talk herself, just to shut him up. It was clear that he wasn’t going to let her write her letter in peace and she was far too polite to tell him to leave her alone. A more sophisticated woman would have excused herself or found some way to oblige him to leave the table, but Mara was trapped by social inexperience and her own good manners. Having tried just staying quiet in the hope that he’d rattle himself out and leave, she started to talk herself in sheer self-defence.

  She, too, talked about the mission, the natural topic, and he saw that she had indeed been thoroughly indoctrinated. She talked about ‘the skipper’ in the inappropriate way the Fourth themselves referred to the captain, and her face lit up, too, as she talked about how heart it had been to be here, to see it for herself and meet them all.

  Commander Mikthorn really should have let her carry on talking. If he had done so, Mara would have told him what a huge fan she was of the Fourth and of Captain von Strada in particular. He could have found that out, in fact, by even the most basic research, even from watching five minutes of the media coverage about her before she’d left Telathor. Mara had been thrilled even by the news that the Fourth had been coming to Telathor for a courtesy visit. Nothing exciting ever happened on boring old Telathor, and the Fourth’s visit was the biggest thing to happen there in her lifetime. She had always believed in aliens, too, took it as gospel that there were all manner of alien presences and relationships that the government covered up, and believed, though the media hardly dared hint at it, that there was an alien aboard the Fourth’s ship. Alex von Strada himself seemed almost an alien – there had been documentaries and news features explaining why he seemed so aloof and unemotional in public, with fascinating programmes about Novaterre, his homeworld, as well as a drama-doc about the captain himself.