“But we’re not crewmen,” another reporter objected. “And there isn't much to do onboard ship.”
Ted grinned, openly. Nothing to do? There was never any shortage of work to be done, even on a modern carrier. There were exercises and drills, spare parts to be inventoried… the crewmen could work from dawn till dusk and never get anywhere near finished. And then there was the ever-present rounds of basic maintenance. God alone knew what would happen if they skipped a few sections, but Ted had a very good idea. It would come back to haunt them at the worst possible time.
But he supposed that wasn't entirely true of the reporters. Only a handful of crewmen would speak to them openly, while the senior officers had been carefully briefed on what they could and couldn't say. The reporters were denied access to all of the interesting parts of the ship, leaving them wandering the corridors, chatting to crewmen in the mess or lurking in their cabins, accessing and viewing entertainment programs the Admiralty deemed appropriate for its crewmen. It was a shame they couldn't be put to work, Ted knew, but he wouldn't have trusted them to replace even the simplest plug-and-play component.
“That’s the nature of wartime,” he said, instead of pointing out that the crewmen had a great deal to do. “Long days, weeks and even months of boredom, broken only by moments of terror. When we reach New Russia, I assure you that you won’t be bored.”
The reporters didn't seem too happy at the reminder. They’d started out with the assumption that Ark Royal was effectively invincible, an assumption Fitzwilliam had dispelled when he’d shown them the damage inflicted by the aliens during the first battle. The next time, Ted knew, the aliens would be ready for them. Ark Royal was tough as nails, but a handful of nukes would crack her armour or — if they detonated inside her hull — vaporise her outright.
“True, Captain,” Yang said. “Will we be permitted to observe the battle from the bridge?”
“Perhaps not,” Ted said. “We have a secondary bridge that you can use as an observation point.”
He had to smile at their puzzlement. Ark Royal had been deliberately over-engineered, with almost every department provided with its own backup. The secondary bridge had never been reactivated completely — the CIC provided a secondary nexus of control and if it were to be taken out the entire ship would be lost with it — but it would let the reporters feel important as they watched the holographic displays. And it would keep them out of his and his XO’s hair.
“It seems that you have too many bridges on this ship,” Yang observed. “Did the designers overdo it?”
Ted smirked. “This isn't a civilian ship,” he reminded him. As if the reporter could be in any doubt! “We don't have time to wait for help if we run into trouble.”
He looked up as Midshipwomen Lopez entered, pushing a trolley in front of her. Two of the younger reporters actually helped to pile up the dirty plates for disposal, something that puzzled Ted — good manners were not something he associated with reporters — until he realised that they were trying to impress the young lady. So far, there had been no actual trouble, but Fitzwilliam had quietly told him that several of the reporters had tried to lure crewmen and women into their bunks. Ted had no objections, as long as it was a willing liaison, but some of the reporters he’d met didn't seem to know the meaning of the word no.
The terrifyingly thin young reporter looked over at him, nervously. “Are we going to run into trouble?”
“We’re looking for it,” Yang said, before Ted could say a word. They exchanged glances of mutual understanding. Yang, whatever his faults, was an experienced embed. If the other reporter had any qualifications for her position, Ted had no idea what they were. “This isn't a pleasure cruise, you know.”
The reporter’s face seemed to colour, very slightly. Ted couldn't help wondering just how much work she’d had done on her body; her face was unnaturally pale as well as thin. There were no shortage of humans who modified themselves to cope with the dictates of fashion or to live on marginally habitable worlds, but the reporter seemed to have taken it to an extreme.
“I know,” she said, finally. It was almost a whisper. “I know.”
Ted shrugged, inwardly. He’d suffered through four years at the Academy, plenty of time to come to terms with his own mortality. The Royal Navy’s highest losses — before the aliens had arrived — hadn't come from combat, but training exercises and simple shoddy maintenance. Each student had been told, time and time again, that they couldn't afford to take their eyes off the ball, not even for a second. Some of the horror stories had been exaggerated, but they’d still sunk in. Death was always a constant threat for young crewmen.
But the reporter had grown up in a safe world, where there had been no real danger. She was lucky, Ted knew, but she was also ignorant. Did she honestly believe, he asked himself, that her reporter ID would save her from alien missiles? The aliens hadn't bothered to check ID cards before opening fire in previous battles. They would hardly start now. Or had she accepted the theoretical danger and only just realised that it was real?
Midshipwomen Lopez departed, then returned with another trolley two minutes later. This one held small bowls of rice pudding, flavoured with spices and fruits the galley staff had scrounged up during the celebrations on Earth. Ted waited until each of the reporters had a bowl in front of them, then motioned for them to start eating. This time, it tasted better than he recalled. Clearly, having a famous starship making the requests helped ensure they got the very best of foods.
Smiling to himself, he finished his bowl and then nodded to Farley, the junior crewman present. Farley tapped his knife against his glass for attention, then stood.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “I give you God, the King and the United Kingdom.”
The reporters drank, some more enthusiastically than others. Fruit juice was common on earth, but rare on interstellar starships. Ted wondered, absently, just which of the reporters considered themselves neutral observers, then dismissed the thought. In his experience, there was no such thing as a neutral reporter. There were those who kidded themselves that they were being unbiased and those who were so prejudiced against the military that they swallowed the enemy’s story, hook, line and stinker.
Good thing the aliens don’t seem to care about our reporters, he thought. If they did, they could probably split the defensive alliance in half, just by telling us what we wanted to hear.
He rose to his feet. “Thank you for coming,” he said. The toast marked the end of the formal dinner. “As you will appreciate, my staff and I have work to do. But you are welcome to remain here as long as you like.”
Fitzwilliam followed him as he strode out of the private mess. “Captain,” he said, once the airlock was closed. “I didn't realise that they would be so awful as a group.”
“They wanted to outnumber us,” Ted snapped. He didn't really blame his XO for the dinner; hell, he’d heard stories of far less pleasant dinners with reporters and other unwelcome guests. “And they wanted to do something other than sit in their cabins.”
He shook his head, then jerked a hand towards the bulkhead. “Don't you just wish you could put them all down there?”
Fitzwilliam nodded in understanding. The star system they were travelling through had a barely-habitable world that was coming out of an ice age. Judging the world useless for conventional settlement, humanity had turned it into a penal colony. Criminals deemed utterly unredeemable were loaded into one-shot transport capsules, given a small quantity of food and supplies, then shot down into the planet's atmosphere. If they lived or died… no one on Earth gave a damn. The sociologists claimed that they would form a united society within two to three hundred years, but Ted had his doubts. A society built on criminals who should have been executed would be very far from stable.