Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) by S J MacDonald Page B

she’d named Firefly. It wasn’t usual for the Fleet to name their fighters, but Alex had approved it, so even official reports now referred to them as Firefly, Bluebottle and Wasp.
    She went off, with that, with a ‘See you later,’ that included both Tina and Alex. The meeting had been brief, scarcely a few words exchanged, but it was apparent that they were going to be friends.
    It was another four hours before Davie North came back aboard. Neither he nor their other civilian passenger was allowed on board until the ship was certified as back in service with a status of ‘in training’. That meant everyone signed aboard, all watch posts manned and thorough diagnostics completed. Skippers were allowed a full twenty five hours for that on reclaiming their ships from port-watch. The Heron’s crew, however, would have been embarrassed for such checks to take more than a morning. It wasn’t even lunchtime when Alex called the Port Admiral.
    ‘Reporting Heron ready for active training duty, ma’am,’ he told her, at which she glanced at the time and laughed.
    ‘So noted, Captain,’ she replied, signing the certificate her end, and giving him a nod. ‘My compliments to your ship’s company on their usual speed and efficiency.’
    ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ said Alex, and smiled as the official notification went up on the board and the crew cheered. It wasn’t the coordinated ‘three cheers’ the Fleet considered appropriate for such moments, just a loud happy noise of applause, whoops and hands drumming on tables. Some of the new officers looked a bit shocked, just for a moment, glancing at the skipper on the open comms feed that showed the command deck on screens throughout the ship. Then they obviously reminded themselves that this was the Fourth , and they were just going to have to get used to that kind of thing. Lt Commander Sartin did not react at all, though very close observation might have detected a very slight compression of his lips as some of the crew set up a flickball style chant: Go Heron – we rule!
    ‘All right,’ Alex put an end to that very quickly, though his tone was one of amused tolerance. ‘If we’ve got that much energy, ladies and gentlemen, let’s not waste it. Full strip-down, go to.’

That got a cheer, too, and laughter. This was what made them a crack ship – under regulations they could now spend anything between a week and two months in shakedown training and drills to ensure that all the newcomers were up to speed before they became fully operational.
    Even way back when he’d first taken command of the corvette Minnow, though, Alex had had his own ideas about what constituted good practice. He had trained his crew to carry out full strip-down diagnostics of the kind that most Fleet ships would only undertake once or twice a year. Alex expected his crew to carry out such strip-down testing routinely before launch. As the old hands at least knew very well, too, it was a favoured method of his to shake new and old crew in together, running strip down over and over again till it was so slick they could do it in their sleep. There was nothing, he said, more effective either for training new crew up in ship’s systems or in working them into a smoothly functioning team. What it involved, after all, was effectively dismantling virtually all the ship’s systems, testing every component and putting it all back together again.
    They were already hard at work just a few minutes later when Davie and their other passenger arrived. Tech teams were at work all over the ship, with a busy hum and whine of tools and the choral effect of many voices working checklists.
    Davie rolled his eyes a little as he came aboard, recognising what that meant.
    ‘That is verging on obsessive, you know,’ was his greeting to Alex as he strolled onto the command deck. His retinue, Alex knew, would have gone into shock at the sight of him. He had had his hair cut short so that it was a scruff of dark