Nights Dawn (№3) - Neutronium Alchemist - Consolidation

“My name is Daphine Kigano,” Alkad datavised back—she ignored the speculative gaze from Randol at the name on one of her passports. “I’m a Dorado resident, and I wish to dock. I don’t see why that should be a problem.”

“It isn’t a problem, not under normal circumstances. I take it you haven’t heard of the warning from the Confederation Assembly?”

“No.”

“I see. One moment, I’ll datavise the file over.”

Alkad and the rest of the crew fell silent as they accessed the report. More than surprise, more than disbelief, she felt anger. Anger that this should happen now. Anger at the threat it posed to her mission, her life’s duty. Mother Mary must have deserted the Garissan people long ago, leaving the universe to place so much heartbreak and malicious catastrophe in their path.

“I would still like to come home,” she datavised when it was over.

“Impossible,” Mabaki replied. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m the only one who will enter the asteroid. Even if I were possessed I would present no threat. And I’m quite willing to be tested for possession, the Assembly warning says electronics malfunction in their presence. It should be simple enough.”

“I’m sorry, we simply can’t take the risk.”

“How old are you, Officer Mabaki?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your age?”

“Is there some relevance to this?”

“Indeed there is.”

“I’m twenty-six.”

“Indeed? Well, Officer Mabaki, I am sixty-three.”

“Yes?”

Alkad sighed quietly. Exactly what was included in the Dorados’ basic history didactic courses? Did today’s youth know nothing of their tragic past? “That means I was evacuated from Garissa. I survived the genocide, Officer Mabaki. If our Mother Mary had wanted me harmed, she would have done it then. Now, I am just an old woman who wishes to come home. Is that really so hard?”

“I’m sorry, really. But no civil starships can dock.”

Suppose I really can’t get in? The intelligence services will be waiting back at Narok, I can’t return there. Maybe the Lord of Ruin would take me back. That would circumvent any personal disaster, not to mention personality debrief, but it would all be over then: the Alchemist, our justice.

She could see Peter’s face that last time, still covered in a medical nanonic, but with his eyes full of trust. And that was the crux; too many people were relying on her; those treasured few who knew, and the blissfully ignorant masses who didn’t.

“Officer Mabaki.”

“Yes?”

“When this crisis is over, I will return home, will I not?”

“I shall look forward to issuing your ship docking permission personally.”

“Good, because it will be the last docking authorization you ever do issue. The first thing I intend to do on my return will be to visit my close personal friend Ikela and tell him about this ordeal you have put me through.” She held her breath, seemingly immersed in zero-tau. It was one lone name from the past flung desperately into the unknown. Mother Mary please let it strike its target.

Captain Randol gave a bass chuckle. “I don’t know what you did, Alkad,” he said loudly. “But they just datavised our docking authority and an approach vector.”

Andr

The small utility deck beneath the lounge was in a similar deplorable state. And the spaceplane was damaged beyond repair. The loading clamps hadn’t engaged, allowing it to twist about while the Villeneuve’s Revenge was under acceleration. Structural spars had snapped and bent all along its sleek fuselage.

He couldn’t afford to rectify half of the damage, let alone replace the spaceplane. Not unless he took on another mercenary contract. That prospect did not appeal, not after Lalonde. I am too old for such antics, he thought, by rights I should have made a fortune to retire on by now. If it wasn’t for those bastard anglo shipping cartels I would have the money.

Anger gave him the strength to snap the last clip off the circulation fan unit he was working on; the little plastic star shattered from the pressure, chips spinning off in all directions. Bombarded by heat from a possessed’s fireball, then subjected to hard vacuum for a week, the plastic had turned dismayingly brittle.

“Give me a hand, Desmond,” he datavised. They had turned off the lounge’s environmental circuit in order to dismantle it, which meant wearing his SII suit for the task. Without air circulating at a decent rate the smell in the compartment was unbearable. The bodies had been removed, but a certain amount of grisly diffusion had occurred during their flight from Lalonde.

Desmond left the thermal regulator power circuit he was testing and drifted over. They hauled the cylindrical fan unit out of the duct. It was clogged solid with scraps of cloth and spiral shavings of nultherm foam. Andr

“Merde . It’ll have to be broken down and purged.”

“Oh, come on, Andr

“Ship systems all have absurdly high performance margins. The motor can withstand a hundred spikes.”

“Yeah, but the CAB . . .”

“To hell with them, data-constipated bureaucrats. They know nothing of operational flying.”

“Some systems you don’t take chances with.”

“You forget, Desmond, this is my ship, my livelihood. Do you think I would risk that?”

“You mean, what’s left of your ship, don’t you?”

“What are you implying, that I am responsible for the souls of humanity returning to invade us? Perhaps also it is my fault that the Earth is ruined, and the Meridian fleet never returned.”

“You’re the captain, you took us to Lalonde.”

“On a legitimate government contract. It was honest money.”

“Have you never heard of fool’s gold?”

Andr

“Non,” Andr

“It doesn’t matter. Listen, I’ve just seen Harry Levine. He was in a bar on the second residence level. I got out fast, I’m pretty sure he didn’t see me.”

“Merde!” AndrDechal was docked, and had been for ten days. His SII suit’s permeability expanded, allowing a sudden outbreak of sweat to expire. “We must leave. Immediately.”

“No chance,” Madeleine said. “The port office wouldn’t even let us disengage the umbilicals, let alone launch, not with that civil starflight proscription order still in force.”

“The captain’s right, Madeleine,” Desmond datavised. “There are only three of us left. We can’t go up against Rawand’s crew like this. We have to fly outsystem.”

“Four!” she said through clenched teeth. “There are four of us left . . . Oh, mother of God, they’ll go for Erick.”

The fluid in Erick’s inner ears began to stir, sending a volley of mild nerve impulses into his sleeping brain. The movement was so slight and smooth it made no impression on his quiescent mind. It did, however, register within his neural nanonics; the ever-vigilant basic monitor program noted the movement was consistent with a constant acceleration. Erick’s body was being moved. The monitor program triggered a stimulant program.

Erick’s hazy dream snuffed out, replaced by the hard-edged schematics of a personal situation display. Second-level constraint blocks were erected across his nerves, preventing any give-away twitches. His eyes stayed closed as he assessed what the hell was happening.

Quiet, easy hum of a motor. Tap tap tap of feet on a hard floor—an audio discrimination program went primary—two sets of feet, plus the level breathing of two people. Constant pulse of light pressure on the enhanced retinas below closed eyelids indicated linear movement, backed up by inner ear fluid motion; estimated at a fast walking pace. Posture was level: he was still lying on his bed.

He datavised a general query/response code, and received an immediate reply from a communications net processor. Its location was a corridor on the third storey of the hospital, already fifteen metres from the implant surgery care ward. Erick requested a file of the local net architecture, and found a security observation camera in the corridor. He accessed it to find himself with a fish-eye vantage point along a corridor where his own bed was sliding underneath the lens. Madeleine and Desmond were at either end of the bed, straining to supplement the motor as they hauled it along. A lift door was sliding open ahead of them.

Erick cancelled the constraint blocks and opened his eyes. “What the fuck’s going on?” he datavised to Desmond.

Desmond glanced around to see a pair of furious eyes staring at him out of the green medical nanonic mask covering Erick’s face. He managed a snatched, semi-embarrassed grin. “Sorry, Erick, we didn’t dare wake you up in case someone heard the commotion. We had to get you out of there.”

“Why?”

“The Dechal is docked here. But don’t worry, we don’t think Hasan Rawand knows about us. And we intend to keep it that way. Andr

“For once he might make a decent job of it,” Madeleine muttered as they steered Erick’s bulky bed into the lift. “After all, it’s his own neck on the block this time, not just ours.”

Erick tried to rise, but the medical packages were too restrictive, he could only just get his head off the pillows, and that simple motion was tiring beyond endurance. “No. Leave me. You go.”

Madeleine pushed him down gently as the lift started upwards. “Don’t be silly. They’ll kill you if they catch up with you.”

“We’ll see this through together,” Desmond said, his voice full of sympathy and reassurance. “We won’t desert you, Erick.”

Encased in the protective, nurturing packages, Erick couldn’t even groan in frustration. He opened a secure encrypted channel to the Confederation Navy Bureau. Lieutenant Li Chang responded immediately.

“You have to intercept us,” Erick datavised. “These imbeciles are going to take me off Culey if no one stops them.”

“Okay, don’t panic, I’m calling in the covert duty squad. We can reach the spaceport in time.”

“Do we have any assets in the flight control centre?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Activate one; make sure whatever departure authorization Duchamp gets is invalidated. I want the Villeneuve’s Revenge to stay locked tight in that bloody docking bay.”

“I’m on it. And don’t worry.”

Desmond and Madeleine had obviously devoted considerable attention to planning their route in order to avoid casual observation. They took Erick straight up through the rock honeycomb which was Culey’s habitation section, switching between a series of public utility lifts. When they were in the upper levels, where gravity had dropped to less than ten per cent standard, they left the bed behind and tugged him along a maze of simple passages bored straight through the rock. It was some kind of ancient maintenance or inspection grid, with few functional net processors. Lieutenant Li Chang had trouble tracking their progress.

Eighteen minutes after leaving the hospital they arrived at the base of the spaceport’s spindle. Several intrigued sets of eyes followed their course as they floated across the big axial chamber to a vacant transit capsule.

“We’re two minutes behind you,” Li Chang datavised. “Thank heavens they chose a devious route, it slowed you up.”

“What about the departure authorization?”

“God knows how Duchamp did it, but Commissioner Ri Drak has cleared the Villeneuve’s Revenge for departure. The Navy Bureau has lodged a formal protest with Culey’s governing council. It should earn us a delay if not outright cancellation; Ri Drak’s political opponents will use the complaint to make as much capital as they can.”

The transit capsule took them to the bay containing the Villeneuve’s Revenge. It was a tedious journey; like the rest of the structure the transit tubes were in need of refurbishment, if not outright replacement. The capsule juddered frequently as it ran through lengths of rail with no power, the light panels dimming, then brightening in sympathy. It paused at several junctions, as if the spaceport route management computer was unsure of the direction.

“Can you manoeuvre a bit now?” Madeleine asked Erick, hopeful that free fall would grant them some relief from straining at his mass. She was carrying two of the ancillary medical modules which were hooked up to his dermal armour of packages, feeding in a whole pharmacopoeia of nutrients to the new implants. The tubes were forever tangling around her limbs or snagging on awkward fixtures.

“Sorry. Tricky,” he datavised back. It might earn them thirty seconds.

Madeleine and Desmond swapped a martyred glance, and bundled Erick out of the transit capsule. The hexagonal cross-section corridors that encircled the docking bay were white-walled composite, scuffed to a rusty grey by the boots of countless generations of crews and maintenance staff. The neat rows of grab hoops running along the walls had snapped off long ago, leaving only stumps. It didn’t matter, the kind of people frequenting Culey spaceport were hardly novices. Madeleine and Desmond simply kept Erick in the middle of the corridor, imparting the odd gentle nudge to prevent him touching the walls as inertia slid him along.

Once the transit capsule door closed behind him, Erick lost his communications channel to Lieutenant Li Chang. He wished the packages didn’t prevent him from sighing. Did nothing in this rat’s arsehole of a settlement ever work? One of his medical support units emitted a cautionary bleep.

“Soon be over,” Madeleine soothed, misinterpreting the electronic tone.

Erick blinked rapidly, the sole method of expression left to him. They were risking themselves to save him, while he would be turning them over to the authorities as soon as they docked at a civilized port. Yet he’d killed to protect them, leaving them free to commit murder and piracy in turn. Applying for a CNIS post had seemed such a prestigious step forwards at the time. How stupid his vanity appeared with hindsight.

His eye focused on a two-centimetre burn mark scoring the composite wall. Instinct or a well-written extended sensory analysis program, it was the result which mattered. That burn mark was on the cover of a net conduit inspection panel, and it was fresh. When he switched to infrared it still glowed a faint pink. With the spectrum active, other burns became apparent, a small ruddy constellation sprayed around the corridor walls, every glimmer corresponding to an inspection panel.

“Madeleine, Desmond, stop,” he datavised. “Someone’s deliberately screwed the net here.”

Desmond halted his ponderous glide with a semi-automatic slap at the stump of a grab hoop. He reached out to brake Erick. “I can’t even establish a channel to the ship,” he complained.

“Do you think they got into the life-support capsules?” Madeleine asked. Her own enhanced retinas were scanning around the fateful inspection panels.

“They wouldn’t get past Duchamp, not while his paranoia’s roused. We’ll be lucky if he even opens the airlock for us.”

“They’re armed, though; they could have cut their way in. And they’re in front of us.”

Desmond peered down the slightly curving corridor, alarmed and uncertain. There was a four-way junction ten metres in front of him, one of its branches leading directly to the docking bay’s airlock. The only sounds he could hear were the rattly fans of the environmental maintenance system.

“Go back to the transit capsule,” Erick datavised. “That has a working net processor, we can open a channel to the ship from there, even if we have to route it through the external antenna.”

“Good idea.” Madeleine braced her feet on a grab hoop stump, and gave Erick’s shoulders a steady push, starting him off back down the corridor. Desmond was already slithering around them, lithe as a fish. When she looked back she could see shadows fluctuating within the junction. “Desmond!” She scrambled inside her jacket for the TIP pistol she was carrying. An elbow hit the corridor wall, setting her tumbling. She tried to damp her momentum with one hand clawing at the coarse composite, while still fumbling at the obstinate holster. Her feet caught Erick, sending him thudding against the wall. He bounced, trailing long confused spirals of tubing, ancillary modules flying free.

Shane Brandes, the Dechal ’s fusion engineer, slid out of the corridor which led to the airlock; he was wearing the copper one-piece overall of the local spaceport services company. It took him a couple of seconds to recognize the frenetic woman four metres in front of him who was grappling with a gun caught up in her jacket. He gagged in astonishment.

“Don’t move, ballhead!” Madeleine screeched, half in panic, half in exhilaration. She brought the TIP pistol around to point at the terrified man. Her body was still rebounding, which meant she had to keep tracking. Five separate combat programs went into primary mode; her thoughts were so churned up she’d simply designated the classification rather than individual files. Various options for combat wasp salvo attack formations skipped through her mind. She focused through the sleet of data and looping problematical high-gee vector lines to keep the nozzle trained on Brandes, who was doing a credible imitation of raising his hands in the air even though they were visually inverted.

“What do I do?” Madeleine yelled to Desmond. He was wrestling with Erick, trying to halt the injured man’s cumbersome oscillations.

“Just keep him covered,” Desmond shouted back.

“Okay.” She squeezed the pistol grip in an effort to stop it shaking so much; her legs forked wide, stabilizing her against the corridor. “How many with you?” she asked Brandes.

“None.”

Madeleine finally tamed her wayward programs. A blue neon targeting grid slid into place over her vision and locked. She aimed at a point ten centimetres to the side of Brandes’s head and fired. Composite snapped and boiled, sending out a puff of unhealthy black smoke.

“Jesus . Nobody, I swear! I’m supposed to disable the starship’s umbilical feeds, and smash this bay’s net before . . .”

“Before what?”

Everybody had shunted an audio discrimination program into primary mode, so everybody heard the transit capsule door opening.

Desmond immediately activated a tactics program, and opened an encrypted channel to Madeleine. Their respective programs interfaced, coordinating their threat response. He turned to face the bright fan of light emerging from the door, his TIP pistol sliding around in a smooth program-controlled motion.

When Hasan Rawand came out of the commuter lift the exhilaration he was burning was hotter than any black-market stimulant program. He fancied himself as a hunting bird, power-diving on its unsuspecting prey.

The sharp reality of the corridor hurt. It was a situation so abrupt he was still smiling confidently as Desmond’s TIP pistol nozzle was locked directly on his head. Stafford Charlton and Harry Levine almost cannoned into his back as they left the commuter lift; the four mercenaries hired to provide overwhelming firepower were considerably more controlled, reaching for their own weapons.

“Rawand, I’ve programmed in a dead man’s trigger,” Desmond said loudly. “If you shoot me, you still die.”

The Dechal ’s captain swore murderously. Behind him the mercenaries were having a lot of trouble deploying in the cramped corridor. Fast encrypted datavises assured him three of them were targeting the crewman from the Villeneuve’s Revenge. Give the word, we can vaporize his pistol first. We’re sure.

They weren’t exactly the kind of odds Hasan Rawand was keen on. His eyes swept over the figure encased in medical nanonic packages. “Is that who I think it is?” he inquired.

“Not relevant,” Desmond replied. “Now listen, nobody makes any sudden movements at all. Clear? That way no real untimely tragic accidents occur. This is what we have here: a standoff. With me so far? Nobody’s going to win today, especially not if anyone starts shooting in here. So I’m calling time out, and we can both regroup and conspire to stab each other in the back some other happy time.”

“I don’t think so,” Hasan said. “I don’t have a quarrel with you, Lafoe, nor you, Madeleine. It’s your captain I want, and that murdering bastard Thakrar. You two can leave anytime. Nobody’s going to shoot you.”

“You don’t know shit about what we’ve been through,” Desmond said, an anger which surprised him powering his voice. “I don’t know about your ship, Rawand, but this isn’t a crew which deserts each other the first second it hits the fan.”

“Very noble,” Hasan sneered.

“Okay, here’s what’s going to happen next. The three of us are going to back up into the Villeneuve’s Revenge , and we’ll take Brandes with us for insurance. One mistake on your part, and Madeleine fries him.”

Hasan grinned rakishly. “So? He never was much use as a fusion engineer anyway.”

“Rawand!” Shane screamed.

“Don’t fuck with me!” Desmond shouted.

“Stafford, burn one of those medical modules our dear Erick is so attached to,” Hasan ordered.

Stafford Charlton laughed, and shifted his maser pistol slightly. The module he chose let out a vicious crack as the lance of radiation pierced its casing. Boiling fluid shot out of blackened fissures as the internal reserve bladders were irradiated. Tubes broke free, chemicals spraying out of their melted ends, causing them to whip about with a serpent’s ferocity.

Desmond didn’t even have to datavise an order; acting on the evaluation of their combined programs, Madeleine fired her TIP pistol immediately. The pulse burned away half of the flesh covering Shane Brandes’s left shin. He howled in agony, clutching at the mutilated limb. His voice subsided to a sob as his neural nanonics erected axon blocks against the pain.

Hasan Rawand narrowed his eyes, enhanced retinas absorbing the entire scene. He put a tactical analysis program into primary mode, which offered him two blunt options: retreat, or open fire. Estimated casualties on his side were fifty per cent, including Shane. When he added the secondary goal of successfully entering the Villeneuve’s Revenge the only option was retreat and reorganize.

“Want to play double or quits?” Desmond asked calmly.

Hasan glared at him; being thwarted was bad enough, but being mocked was almost intolerable.

The transit capsule doors opened again. A fist-sized sphere emitting intolerable white light soared into the corridor. Hasan Rawand and his accomplices were closest to it, receiving the full impact of the photonic blitz. Two of the mercenaries who had their retinal sensitivity cranked up wide were instantly blinded as the implants burnt out. For the others it was as though the terrible light were boring right through their eye sockets and into the soft tissue of the brain. Instinct and situation analysis response programs fused into a simple protective act: eyelids slammed shut and hands jammed over eyes.

Unseen in the glare, the three members of the CNIS covert duty squad dived out into the corridor, following Lieutenant Li Chang. Dressed in smooth neutral-grey armour suits, their active optical sensors were filtered for the intensity of the quasar grenade.

“Break through Rawand’s people, snatch Erick,” Li Chang ordered. She fired another quasar grenade from her forearm magazine, aiming along the corridor at Desmond. It never reached its intended goal, one of the blinded mercenaries struck it as he thrashed about.

The mercenaries had linked combat programs, coordinating their response. Guidance and orientation programs allowed them to fix an accurate line on the transit capsule door and bring their weapons to bear. Thermal induction pulses discharged, maser beams slashed about.

The dissipation layers on the suits which Li Chang’s squad wore deflected or absorbed most direct hits. The composite walls of the tunnel had no such protection. Flames squirted out amid fountains of smoking composite. Fire alarms screeched in warning. Turbulent jets of thick grey extinguisher gas roared into the air, turning to blobs of oily turquoise liquid as soon as the substance came into contact with any flame, smearing the combustible surface. Huge bubbling clumps congealed around the quasar grenades, smothering them.

Answering shots from Li Chang’s squad eliminated three mercenaries straightaway. But their bodies formed a formidable tangled obstacle blocking off the corridor, as well as contriving a shield against further energy weapon fire. Behind it, Hasan and his remaining active cohorts rallied hurriedly.

Li Chang fought her way through the swirling extinguisher gas to grapple with one of the corpses. Her armour suit gauntlets couldn’t get a decent grip on anything. The gas had slicked every damn surface. Two maser beams struck her chest and shoulder as she attempted to force her way forwards. She could actually see the gas crystallizing in long straight lines marking out the beams. One of the covert squad members was beside her, clawing at the dead man’s neck. The body was bucking fitfully between them, its mass impeding every move.

Another TIP shot struck her armour, diffracting. A wide splash of skin on the dead man veered to a rancid bruise-brown as the energy punched it. His clothes were smouldering, drawing the extinguisher gas like a condensing dew.

Her neural nanonics had to activate a nausea suppressor program. “Use the smarts,” she said, formulating search hunt parameter patterns. A volley of centimetre-long darts slid out of the cartridges on her belt. Miniature programmable missiles with a tiny ionic exhaust. They curved and rolled through the seething air, sliding around the awkward contours of the lifeless mercenaries, and accelerated down the corridor.

Li Chang heard a savage firecracker barrage as over two hundred diminutive EE warheads detonated in the space of three seconds. Sharp flickering fingers of blue-white light stabbed back past the floating bodies. Ripples of purple static surfed along the composite walls towards her. There was a sudden surge of air, sucking her towards the source of the light and sound. The three battered corpses began to move. A pressure drop warning sounded, its metallic whistle dopplering as the pressure thinned out fast. Emergency hatches were sliding out of the corridor walls, sealing off the damaged section.

“Captain Thakrar?” she datavised. “Sir, are you there?”

Scrambling after the corpses she could see the butchery which the smart darts had inflicted. A galaxy of blood globules spun around the ripped torsos of Hasan Rawand and the others. She assumed there were four in total. It was hard to tell.

Chunks of gore were splatting against the cracks in the wall, producing temporary seals which would shake and wobble under pressure, before being sucked through. Holding her breath—which was ridiculous as the suit provided her with a full oxygen supply—Li Chang flung herself through the centre of the bloody pulp, flinching every time the suit’s tactile sensors faithfully reported an object slithering down her side.

The corridor beyond was empty. An emergency hatch had cut off the junction. Li Chang hauled her way along to it. The wind was abating now, almost all of the air had gone.

A small transparent port was set in the centre of the hatch. When Li Chang pressed her shell helmet sensors against it, all she could see was more hatches closed across the other corridors. Captain Thakrar and the crew members from the Villeneuve’s Revenge were nowhere to be seen.

That was when a new sound was added to the fading clamour of the various alarms: a deep bass rumble which she could feel through the structure as much as hear. The light panels flickered, then went out. Small blue-white backup globes came on.

“Oh, God, no,” she whispered to herself inside the helmet. “I promised him, I said he’d be safe now.”

The Villeneuve’s Revenge was launching from inside its docking bay. Andre ions billowed out around the spherical starship as it rose laboriously. Hoses and cables jacked into their sockets on the lower hull tore and snapped; streams of coolant fluid, water, and cryogenic fuel sluiced around the cylindrical bay. Once the starship was above the cradle the drive exhaust played directly over the girders, reducing them to garish slag in seconds. The airlock tube stretched and flexed to its limit, then ripped free of the docking ring, pulling spars, data cables, and locking pins with it.

“What the fuck are you doing, Duchamp?” an enraged traffic control broadcast at the rogue starship. “Turn your drive off now.”

The Villeneuve’s Revenge was rising out of the bay on a pillow of radiant ions. Walls and support girders marked its progress by melting and sagging.

Andr

A ring of cryogenic storage tanks around the rim of the bay finally detonated under the unceasing blast of the starship’s exhausts. It was a chain reaction, sending out vast plumes of white vapour and spinning chunks of debris. The entire docking bay structure began to crumple under the force of the multiple explosions. Momentum damping mechanisms in the spaceport spindle bearings veered towards overload as the impulse juddered its way through the framework.

The wave front from the tank explosions struck the Villeneuve’s Revenge , fragments of wreckage puncturing the dark silicon hull in a dozen places. The starship was buffeted violently. An event horizon sealed over the hull, then shrank to nothing.

It was Gerald Skibbow’s third trip to the lounge: a spacious semicircular room cut into Guyana’s rock, with wide sliding-glass doors leading out onto a veranda that gave an excellent view down the interior of the asteroid’s second habitation cavern. Despite the apparent easygoing nature, the lounge was at the centre of the navy’s secure medical sanatorium, although the security measures were deliberately unobtrusive. Staff and patient-inmates mingled openly, producing what the doctors hoped was a casual atmosphere. It was intended to redevelop the social interactivity skills of the inmates who had been bruised by traumas, stress, and, in several cases, stringent interrogation. Anyone was free to come and go as they pleased; sit in the big spongy chairs and contemplate the view, have a drink and a snack, or play the simple games provided.