The Farshoreman

By Matthew K. Spencer

85,000 words long, The Farshoreman is a well paced, near future science fiction adventure in spacecraft building.

Between their mid-teens and mid-twenties, a group of young women pursue what seems an impossible shared dream, in a world which a second pandemic and ominous geopoliticial trends have made dangerous and uncertain. On their way, they carry with them the vaguely-defined hopes and unfulfilled ambitions of members of the older generation, who lend a hand when others in powerful positions are indifferent, obstructive or even hostile to the young women and their cause.

Inspiration, technical and political innovation and stiff measures of grim determination see them through to a conclusion where their dream proves to be more important to the wider world than they could have ever imagined.

Along the way, they learn about love. Not merely the affection they might feel for a sexual partner, but the love that shares danger as well as happiness, which prompts them to risk their lives not just for each other, but for others whom they have never met before and whom they might not even like. They learn that adulthood is not just about making your own choices in life; it's about doing your best when others are doing their worst.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matthew K. Spencer
• Release date: Dec 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005315016

Matthew K. Spencer

Matthew Spencer is a British electronics engineer. Almost entirely self-educated, he attended Fearnhill School (in Letchworth) and Mander College in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Recently, he has worked to help develop equipment for monitoring noise pollution in the marine environment, which to some extent mirrors work done on monitoring and analysing noise in industrial and domestic situations on land in the nineteen-eighties. He suspects that in the developed world, noise pollution is currently affecting marine life more severely than chemical pollution, not least because it is more problematic for regulators and researchers to measure and understand. Occasional great leaps in human understanding are generally facilitated by the development of a new form of measuring instrument. Always worth a try when the human race gets stuck somewhere.The author has also designed an electronic ignition system especially for classic racing motorcycles.Other written work includes a screenplay, "Crushed Fennel", some hard Science Fiction (the Forest series) and "The Farshoreman", which is published on Smashwords and associates from the 22nd of December 2022

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The Farshoreman

A Science Fiction novel by Matthew K. Spencer

Notices

The Farshoreman is copyright (c) Matthew K. Spencer 2022. All rights reserved.

Matthew K. Spencer hereby asserts and gives notice of his right under s.77 of the Copyright Designs & Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of The Farshoreman.

This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

This is the first edition, text finalised 26/5/22.

Cover Art by Katie Hounsome.

The artist retains the right to utilise the images produced for self-promotional needs.

Global License for usage of the cover image has been granted in perpetuity to Matthew Spencer (Authorship) for printing, digital and promotional needs including the right to explicitly and publicly reserve the right to use the cover image to promote adaptations or treatments or to include it within adaptations or treatments.

Smashwords Edition, Licence Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Title

Notices

Prologue, The Political Master

Chapter 1, Jaguars and Lemon Curd

Chapter 2, The Seat and the Board

Chapter 3, Public Transport

Chapter 4, The Shell

Chapter 5, Ambitions

Chapter 6, In The Paw Prints of Giants

Chapter 7, Complementary Sciences

Chapter 8, Images

Chapter 9, Conspiracy of Excellence

Chapter 10, Brief Appointment

Chapter 11, The Spoiler

Chapter 12, The Potter's Field

Chapter 13, Recovery

Chapter 14, Bowing Out With Dignity

Chapter 15, Managing Talent

Chapter 16, Trajectories

Chapter 17, Choughs and Needles

Chapter 18, Promotion

Chapter 19, The Armoury Of Ideas

Chapter 20, The Plate

Chapter 21, Covert Surveillance

Chapter 22, A Question of Balance

Chapter 23, Thursday Morning, Eleven AM

Chapter 24, Dirty in Dorset

Chapter 25, Cricket

Chapter 26, A Reasonable Expectation of Privacy

Chapter 27, The Air-rifle

Chapter 28, Proof and Peace

Chapter 29, The Day of the Warrants

Chapter 30, The Decoy of Many Levels

Chapter 31, Extra French

Chapter 32, A Lingering Suspicion

Chapter 33, A Stiff Supporting Spine

Chapter 34, The Exiles

Chapter 35, The Flight of The Farshoreman

Chapter 36, The Price of Peace

Dedication

Please Review

Prologue, The Political Master

The spectacle was awesome and, as so often with the Nazis, also rather strange. When they first reclaimed the Rhineland a great torch-lit mythological pageant had been laid on with, amongst other delights, large numbers of naked girls (many waving spears) bouncing along gaily through the streets of Frankfurt on horseback. Whether the Leader enjoyed this or not was sufficiently uncertain for the practice not to become established in the Third Reich, but, by heaven, the crowds enjoyed it while it lasted! Even most of the female spectators thought it good fun at least, and a certain minority amongst them reckoned it was excellent.

Here at Nuremberg, although there were young women aplenty, uniforms rather than lissome nature were the order of the day. Order being the order, not just of this day and night, but of the next thousand years.

The darkening sky was seared and banished from sight and mind by scores of searchlights, confining even that vast open-air arena in a shimmering cathedral of light, which imprisoned, too, the beholder's imagination and wandering thoughts, till he could no longer think of the world beyond.

Legions marched, wheeled, stood and listened as one, while one harangued them. If, in Christ, it is possible for myriads to be one and yet every single one still an individual soul, under Hitler there was only Hitler. Yet, above Hitler, was there something separate, even so?

Afterwards, various foreign dignitaries, delegates and observers were presented to the Leader. The President of the Oxford Union found himself a dignitary for the first time; people in Britain were disposed to treat him as a sort of glorified schoolboy to be patronised and absent-mindedly encouraged. And he was pleased to be accorded the deference of flunkies, even the courteous respect of the Leader himself on this momentous evening when Hitler's power and authority was most evident, most total! The contrast rankled.

They did not meet again and the student became a soldier who fought heroically in the war against Hitler. Still, there was a yearning for that mesmeric evening of order and the respect he had been accorded.

***

The Prime Minister studied the briefing notes with barely-concealed irritation and contempt. Used to this, his private secretary waited for a syllable or two requiring a response. Loughborough? Yes, Geoffrey Pardoe studied there. The College of Technology rather than Physical Education; it's all a bit far removed from my own experience! He is athletic, though, but not in any vocational sense.

From Loughborough, and yet he's a rocket scientist! Would it make a difference if he'd been to Oxford? Well, I'd know what I was dealing with and he wouldn't harbour foolish fantasies about putting this country ahead in the space race!

Actually, Prime Minister. The really informed opinion, the ones who understand the technicalities rather than the political expectations that is, wonder if it is such a fantasy. So much of the American effort is slave to what they took from the Nazis, and so much of the rest is being done by the numbers for the big corporations in the most expensive way, that it's not inconceivable at all that someone might stick to the essentials and get ahead of them. The missile he built for the County Class destroyers works all right! There was a sudden stiffening in the Prime Minister's posture, a palpable change of attitude.

"He did that, did he? I didn't know. Yes, the Sea Slug missile works all right. There was an awkward silence as the Prime Minister revisited the notes, then. He says that what he still insists on calling 'Great Britain' can be an important part of a European space launcher programme for the cost of eleven miles of motorway each year. So helpful of him to put it in terms that I can understand! There was a distinctly wintry smile. We'll have the eleven miles of motorway, then. If anyone's going to lead Europe into space, it's going to be the French."

The private secretary, like the rest of the Civil Service, was beginning to learn that nothing was technically or commercially possible without either the French or Germans, or preferably both -and usually the Italians thrown in for good measure. Putting-forward purely national projects for government funding was already seen as professional suicide, as was trying to seek a leading role for Britain in any European venture. The decision the Prime Minister had just made meant no subservient British role in any European launcher project either! And everything had to be European now, so there would never be cooperation with the Americans instead.

The new Jaguar fighter-bomber was shaping up to be a shining example of how Anglo-French cooperation could produce something genuinely world-beating. Interestingly, few people at the very apex of the British political establishment seemed at all happy with this and the alumni of the Ecole National were plainly horrified to discover that political collaboration had bred technical success. Now that Dassault had been allowed to take over the French industrial partner, Bréguet, only the most grimly-determined potential export customers for the Jaguar were going to succeed in buying them from a French salesman, that was certain!

He wondered how many other areas of policy were going to be subject to the same triumph of hidden agenda and open arrogance over expertise as science and technology. Education perhaps? Law and order even? He shuddered.

Chapter 1, Jaguars and Lemon Curd

The three objects vying for the little boy's attention were: a lemon-curd sandwich, a prototype Jaguar aircraft and a wasp. The sandwich was desirable, the wasp definitely not -and the Jaguar was a little beyond his developing perception. Still, the word was amongst the few dozen he could recognise, because whenever there was a fluttering whistling roar in the sky, older children and adults tended to point upwards and say Jaguar! Just as in other circumstances, they moved smartly away and said wasp!

Decades later, he was able to work out that this had been because the new jet trainer was having its role expanded once the concept of buying the hugely-expensive F111 for the RAF, mainly to perform tactical strikes, rather than deep strikes, was accepted as madness. Test flights from Boscombe Down and Farnborough made Jaguars frequent visitors to the skies over the village for a period of time that seemed like forever to a child, because it had been his whole life, so far.

Fortunately, by waving the sandwich at his father and forming the essential word wasp! a few times, with increasing stridency, the little boy was able to divert adult attention from the noisy but difficult-to-perceive object in the sky to something important, such as the nasty creature hovering determinedly around the smell of lemon curd. Although the Jaguar was noisy, everyone seemed to admire it and was interested as it roared around. The wasp was properly dealt with and the sandwich could now be safely consumed.

Easier to perceive than the objects in the sky, were the smells of an English village on a warm afternoon: creosote from garden fences and telegraph poles; the tangy but not unpleasant note of a distant bonfire; flowers, especially honeysuckle and roses; the dry smell of carpet-dust disturbed as the little boy's older brothers and their friends fired a home-made crossbow at a target surrounded by rolled-up old rugs that were supposed to prevent the bolts from penetrating the garage wall. The crossbow had been manufactured using the suspension leaf-spring of a delivery van for a limb and was therefore infeasibly awkward to cock, even though the eldest boys were around thirteen years old and quite strong. The boys' fathers had kept a wary eye on the whole project, each independently thinking of several ways that problems could be overcome and the massive latent power of that spring harnessed more effectively. Both had kept their own counsel in the hope that a certain measure of inefficiency might spare a life or two without stifling the boys' excitement and their creative urges.

Some summer's afternoon garden smells that were later to become omnipresent were, in those days, completely absent: barbecues were still unknown and people sat in the garden to eat sandwiches; lemon curd, for instance; and now Spam!

Jaguars apart, neither was there much intrusive noise. Lawnmowers, as owned by ordinary people, had to be pushed and just whirred when properly adjusted, this process being a fascinating one for a little boy to watch because it happened close up and involved his father, which made it much easier to perceive than more distant or abstract happenings. Even the next-door neighbour working to fix his old houseboat -he still had one or two eight millimetre machine-gun bullet holes to repair- was using a muscle-powered breast drill to make the holes a uniform shape and diameter so hardwood dowels could be glued in.

Whether the neighbour's wife would ever again let him take that boat anywhere near water was an irrelevance: it had brought him and a dozen soldiers back to Hampshire one desperate day thirty-some years earlier and slowly fixing it was a sacred duty, if a touch unrealistic. Actually, the soldiers had saved the boat as much as the boat had saved them, because with any fewer than a dozen tin helmets being plied as bailers, it might have sunk mid-channel and not by the local jetty, where it had been obliged to stay for a while until resources and the authorities allowed its retrieval.

Later, before it got dark, the family ventured out for a walk, the older boys spotting Redwings amongst the miscellany of sailing craft out on the river and the Solent. As Jaguars appeared to be the most interesting thing in the sky, a Redwing seemed more important and interesting than any other sailing boat. There was a hovercraft too; an amazing thing, different to a boat. This, apparently, was what their parents had wanted them to see. The little boy was beginning to absorb the message: it was good to make amazing things.

Chapter 2, The Seat and the Board

The seat in front of him was an amazing thing. To be inert for so long, then to function at the moment of decision, unhesitatingly and unerringly. The power of life and death concentrated into something so much more than mere furniture: it was the physical expression of an unbreakable sequence of interdependent logic that could happen at the proper moment and no other time. Even the batteries powering its intelligence were such that not a spark of electricity would be produced until they had been jolted into life by a pyrotechnic cartridge melting the electrolyte and letting it flow onto silver battery plates. The nylon parachute canopy had been packed so perfectly into a vacuum-sealed canister that was also the back of the seat, that it could hardly have occupied less volume if it had been melted and poured in! Despite its necessary complexity, the seat was probably the most exquisitely functional and trustworthy thing that men had ever made.

Guy? His secretary had obviously come to remind him about something -of course! The board meeting! Lord! I'm sorry, Tina, but I was thinking so hard about what I might say, that I nearly forgot to go and say it! I'm not too late, am I? No, Guy, not yet, but perhaps you'd better get a wiggle on! They hurried from shop floor to board room, Tina updating him on the attitude of the other directors as they went. This was hard to do sensibly and in detail at a run, so she settled for they're all in a fine old panic. Ah, then they had seen the headlines on the financial pages about the advent of uninhabited combat aircraft rendering ejection seats superfluous!

All the essential facts, and there were not too many of those, behind the articles, had been in the public domain for many years now. Yet, somehow, several newspapers had all cobbled together more or less the same story out of them on the very morning of Test and Baxter Aerospace Limited's Annual General Meeting.

Tina being his personal secretary, it wouldn't do for her to sit in on a formal board meeting, so she left him to it with just one final bit of encouragement. Those directors seated nearest the door got the distinct impression that Dr Guy Beech FRAeS had been propelled into the room with a firm hand in the small of his back and the words good luck -and don't bloody weaken!

Samantha Baxter, the Company Secretary, greeted him with a sympathetic smile. She was the most important representative present of either of the firm's two founding families, although generational fragmentation of the family holdings meant Samantha was uncorrupted by any hint of absolute power. Now he was here, she could begin.

As Company Secretary, Samantha was responsible for seeing that the meeting met all the statutory requirements. She had to present accounts, minutes of the previous meeting and so on. This gave Guy a bit of time to think and catch his breath, but it was important, too. If a limited liability company was a mechanism that allowed you to do business, probity was the requisite lubrication. Impropriety could take any form from finessing the accounts, through trying not to present (or even keep) any accounts at all, to outright fraud. It was also quite common for a company to be formed for no purpose other than to obscure the true ownership of some private asset or another. In such cases, the statutory meetings usually consisted of a crook and his accountant sitting at a restaurant table and pretending to be Managing Director and Company Secretary for five minutes. All of these things amounted to grit in a mechanism built on trust.

As his thoughts and resolve crystallised, Guy started to see his surroundings with sudden clarity. It was an odd effect, because surely his eyes had been seeing things equally clearly up to that moment, but somehow, like a camera being thrown into sharp focus, he was conscious of the boardroom's details rather than an abstract sense of place.

The sun was shining on a row of oak filing cabinets in a glimmer of golden streaks in the wood grain and gleaming brass handles and index-card holders. Not every firm kept archives in the boardroom, but these were reports on every incident where the company's products were deemed to have saved a life, along with letters from grateful survivors. The row of filing cabinets accounted for one long wall. There was just one file detailing how a period of negligence by a handful of employees had cost a life: Guy's predecessor had got rid of those responsible and then taken early retirement, as if it had been his fault for assuming that everyone in the company shared its standards. Guy had had some rebuilding to do in that regard, but the unions had backed him, knowing that the jobs -and honour- of everyone depended on on the tradition of saving life.

The boardroom smelled of beeswax -everything had been polished a day or two in advance and just dusted this morning, so it wasn't overpowering- with just a hint of acrylic resin from the workshop buildings. There was coffee, perspiration and warm wool: the normal scent of modern businessmen at a meeting -and something altogether more glamorous, which was Samantha. If she wore perfume at all it was nothing flashy or obvious, but Guy always knew when she was present, even if she was behind him and hadn't spoken, so he assumed that there was some kind of fragrance or even pheromone involved. Perhaps the same was true of Tina, but she always spoke to him, as to everybody, so there was no testing his subconscious recognition!

Not that there was any romantic entanglement with Samantha: it would be unprofessional -and he'd always assumed she was worthy of someone really special, like a film star or something, although they were often vain and she wouldn't tolerate that. The way her presence affected him without their being in love made him frightened of how besotted he might get if they were! Needing not to let his mind wander too far in that particular direction, Guy got ready to do his bit.

Thank you, Samantha. Right then. We've got a couple of motions tabled which I will get to in a minute. First, I would like to describe the situation of the company, as it is now and as it will in a few years time. He could see the odd sign of visible anxiety around the table, so Tina hadn't been far wrong.

Mrs Tanner looked particularly worried. She was the biggest non-family private investor in the firm and she'd already been burned quite badly by the evaporation of much of her late husband's fortune, held in Chelmcom shares. When he'd first entered the room, he thought he'd caught a look of pure hate from her, being directed at Wayne Gurney and Daryl Seebohm. That pair had been recently nominated for the board by the banking houses they worked for. Their employers had gradually acquired a significant number of Test and Baxter shares, as the more dissolute family shareholders used them as loan collateral. As a private limited company, Test and Baxter shares couldn't simply be traded into, unlike those in Chelmcom, which had thrived as a public limited company for a generation before disaster struck.

Chelmcom had been an exemplary British industrial company, but once the City institutions had got their way over the company's direction by voting in their own choice of Chairman and Chief Executive, Chelmcom's twelve-billion pound net worth was completely expended on a string of takeovers and repositioning, which ultimately served no purpose except to generate massive professional fees for all the consultation, auditing, monitoring and trading inherent in each of the takeovers and disposals. By the time the City wide-boys had finished, there was nothing left of a once-mighty company except a discredited name and shell-shocked shareholders with stock now worth about fourteen pence a share, when it had been genuinely worth as many pounds. (Disregarding the contrived, week-long peak of twenty-four pounds when the wide-boys had taken their personal profits.) Guy understood Mrs Tanner's fears and he understood her rage. He had to stop it exploding all over the boardroom, though!

"The company's present situation is genuinely pretty good. We've just developed a new ejection seat; it has now been certificated and accepted by the F35 Programme Office, which programme will go through to completion, whatever some journalists might think, because the Americans still have more than a thousand legacy fighters to replace, mostly in roles, such as close support or airspace policing where no sane person would dare to deploy the current generation of unmanned aircraft. Especially given the recent legal ruling in The Hague about autonomous weapons systems, which today's newspaper articles all ignore! The F35 itself will remain in production for the next ten years, alongside the new Tempest, all of which are to be reconfigurable on their bases for manned or unmanned operation. There will also be late-production Typhoons and Super Hornets getting late-life upgrades and there are several other trainers and fighters in production around the free or almost-free world, all of which are suitable platforms for our new seat, so it isn't unreasonable at all to anticipate ejection seat sales to better two thousand units over the next fifteen years, which is the economic life of our new tooling."

They could believe that was just a happy accident if they liked! The main thing was that he was sounding confident and giving some clear indications that they still had a market left. One of the other private investors on the board evidently had an observation to make. Guy decided that it would do no harm to hear it now. Mr Jourdain?

Dr Beech. When I ran my own electronics factory, I found that equipment for office computers had a life in the market of just a few months, which was one of the reasons I moved into scientific instruments for a more stable market. I was never in a position to plan ahead for fifteen years, so we aren't doing too badly here, even if the UCAVs are about to invade!

Guy had an idea that Frank Jourdain had had a hand in the blue box in the middle of the South Kensington Science Museum, which, according to a little brass plaque, had been switched on in 1977 and was still accurately measuring ambient noise levels in the main hall in a new century. That blue box was in danger of attracting pilgrims if it kept on working for many more years!

Thank you. We do indeed need to plan now for those fifteen years, and beyond, if we are to take advantage of what Mr Jourdain bravely identifies as more of a unique opportunity than an impending crisis. I don't actually expect the ejection seat market to have completely disappeared in fifteen years, or even twenty years, in fact, but it will be smaller and much more specialised.

Adrian Baxter, Samantha's cousin, had a point to make. Only thirty, he represented a few other family shareholders of his generation and was the type known to Guy as brash, although Samantha tended just to say Adrian as if that had meaning enough. Adrian's nickname amongst the workforce, though, stemmed from Tina's congenital inability to mince words.

If the end of our core market is in sight, even supposedly fifteen years ahead, shouldn't we be working out how to dispose of or wind-up the company, for as much as we can get while there's still some life in it? Guy decided to mark Tina's words more closely in future, even when they were particularly foul and personal. Wayne Gurney and Daryl Seebohm were distressed, which was interesting. Mrs Tanner was obviously wondering if this might just be the safest thing, Samantha was apparently thinking that she should have taken much less care of Adrian as a child, and Frank Jourdain recoiled. Old Tommy Test, the only surviving director from the other founding family, looked to be on the brink of tears and Jonathan Petter, representing shareholding members of staff, had just had his worst suspicions confirmed. The only other director present, Richard Longacre, showed no expression at all. Guy felt a sudden chill, despite the heat of his irritation with Adrian.

Well, I suppose that is a question we should legitimately consider at some point, so as to ensure that we are indeed working in the best interests of all the shareholders -and not just ourselves around this table. Thank you, Adrian. There was a decanter of water on the table, Frank Jourdain thoughtfully poured Guy a glass and he took a grateful sip. Thanks.

The admissible virtue of Adrian's plan was that orderly and pre-meditated butchery would at least be clean and might minimise exposure of the company's