Assegai

by S J MacDonald

  Lunch was enjoyable. The food – more grilled tofu and a small green salad, no dressing – might be Spartan but at least it didn’t make him bloat up like a flatus-filled balloon. The company was good, as he’d asked Min to join him in the flag dining room. And the meal was enlivened, too, by Simmy’s utter delight at undertaking her first silver-service.

  Technically, her performance was flawless. Her white steward’s tunic fitted perfectly and she had the white cloth folded over her left forearm with millimetric precision. Each dish was served correctly, too, offered to the diners from the right, with plates being cleared from the left. She didn’t make any inappropriate comments, either. The only words she uttered were ‘Sirs’ and ‘Ma’ams’ as she served them.

  All the same, any Fleet steward watching her would have been groaning aloud. A well trained steward ought to be as near invisible as was humanly possible, and Simmy was certainly not that. She was as excited as a child who’d just eaten a whole bag of sweets washed down with a whole lot of fizz. She didn’t so much glide around the table as bounce around it, almost dancing. She kept looking at Alex, too, checking constantly to see if things were to his liking. And her alert, interested look and responsive grins made it clear that she was listening to their conversation.

  ‘Well done, thank you,’ said Alex, when the table had been cleared, and at that she bounced onto her toes again with a little giggling squeak.

  ‘Ta!’ she said, and rushed out with the trolley, attempting rapid efficiency but in fact looking as if she was in training for a trolley-pushing race.

  When she’d gone, Alex gave Min an apologetic look which set her off in whoops of laughter.

  ‘Oh, yikes!’ She exclaimed, bringing herself under control. ‘Sorry, but, you know…’ she glanced at the door which had closed behind the rating. ‘Alex, she’s a lovely girl, but she’s an awful steward!’

  Alex laughed too, but shook his head.

  ‘Actually,’ he admitted, ‘I like her style. It’s the servility I find so uncomfortable, being waited on. Simmy’s fun – and I’d rather that wasn’t ground out of her, really. But it may be,’ he conceded, as Min looked at him quizzically, ‘that we may find other avenues for her talents…’

  Min laughed again and they stayed chatting for a while before heading back to work, Min to supervising a gunnery drill while Alex went back to the training deck for his first language seminar.

  That went well too, setting the tone and pattern for the kind of sessions these would be. There were no formal exercises, but a conversation in which Alex ensured that they all took part at their varying levels of Samartian. Some, at this stage, could barely introduce themselves, others could form simple sentences. And Dan Tarrance, it turned out, was bordering on fluent.

  ‘What?’ Skipper Hevine exclaimed, when Dan was chatting away to the captain in the sharp staccato of Samartian. ‘You’ve learned it already?’

  ‘Hev, please.’ Alex had already imposed a first-name protocol for these sessions, and one other ground rule. ‘Samartian, please,’ he reminded him, speaking that language himself, slowly and clearly for the beginner’s benefit. ‘Use your prompt.’

  They had all been told that they were only allowed to speak Samartian for the duration of the seminar, but they had translators on their wrist-coms which they could use to help. But only to help; the translators had to be set to silent, with people tapping codes to input what they wanted to say and phonetically written Samartian appearing on a prompt screen.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Hevine, using the Samartian term which translated literally as ‘I fall to the ground’. ‘I was… just … surprised,’ he was working his prompt laboriously, ‘to find… Dan…’ he shot an accusing look at the commander, ‘so speaking well… so soon.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ said Dan, and those who couldn’t follow him directly could read a live transliteration on their comms, ‘I’ve studied it a bit… just privately, you know, in my own time.’

  He was the focus of varying degrees of envy and resentment from his fellow trainees, and of a deeply suspicious look from Alex himself.

  ‘By which, I take it,’ he said, ‘that you have been dodging workload regs again, studying stuff off the record as ‘purely for personal interest.’’

  Dan gave him a seraphic smile. ‘Who, me?’

  ‘You,’ Alex confirmed, and with a severe note made even more emphatic by the harsh nature of the language, ‘Do not do it here.’ He gestured from his own eyes to Dan, indicating that he was going to be watching him closely, and Dan laughed.

  ‘My honour to obey, beloved,’ he acknowledged, holding up both hands as if in surrender.

  Alex grinned – that was indeed a perfectly courteous Samartian response – and turned back to the rest of the group, drawing them in to a discussion about how easy or otherwise they found it to learn other languages. Which raised the point, inevitably, that most of them had never even seen the need to try. Everyone spoke Standard, after all, and if you were going off into some bizarre situation where people spoke something else, that was what translation systems were for.

  ‘If we had relied on those at Samart,’ said Alex, ‘our mission would have failed.’

  He spoke with calm, absolute certainty, which put an end to that argument, but Alex kept the discussion going, keeping them talking till the end of the hour. By then he felt that he’d got a good gauge not only of their various linguistic abilities but their personalities. The group was rather more muted than he would have liked – surprisingly so, given what high achievers they were and the wealth of command experience between them. But they were, Alex could see, being held in check by Skipper Hevine, exercising a repressive influence even when he wasn’t saying anything at all.

  He would have to do something about that, Alex thought. But not today. He’d done all the work he was going to, today, and went strolling down to engineering with no more thought than to enjoy a chat, even if he wasn’t yet allowed a mug of tea.

  In Mid Hall, he found Engineer Commander Onwudiwe and Cadet Officer Naos yelling at one another. It was perfectly amicable – they were discussing the probable outcome of a flickball match due to be played that evening between Engineering and Comms. Paying attention to the discussion would have revealed that neither of them knew very much about it, but were merely repeating what more knowledgeable people had told them.

  But that hardly mattered. As Alex understood at once, this was not about the content of the discussion but about the sound of it. Engineers loved the sound of mix cores, that bone-tingling buzz of superlight fuel fizzing with twenty four dimensional energy. Many of them liked to hum or even sing along with it – Kate herself had had singing lessons as a child, a nod in the direction of the balanced life curriculum Gifted Child Institutes were supposed to provide. She had a trained operatic voice, anyway, and could enchant listeners with a wordless aria, harmonising with the engines.

  Right now, though, she was playing a game with the engineer which only the two of them could fully appreciate, pitching tone and volume so that their voices carried perfectly through the ever-changing dynamic of the engine buzz. The game was simply to keep it up for as long as they could, until one of them either lost the thread of the conversation or lost vocal control and started to sing rather than shout.

  In fact, it was a draw, since they broke off at Alex’s arrival.

  ‘Hiya, Captain,’ Janus Onwudiwe greeted him cheerfully, and gestured to a nearby rating who’d been listening to the yelled exchange with an enraptured expression. ‘Tea, laddo,’ he instructed.

  ‘Not for me,’ Alex said, and with a smile for both of them, ‘Just water for me, thanks.’

  ‘Doctor’s orders?’ Janus queried, and at Alex’s nod of confirmation, offered, ‘Have a cuppa – I won’t tell if you don’t.’

  Alex laughed, but shook his head again, strolling up the gantry stairs to join them on the control platform.

  ‘No, thanks.’ He didn’t comment on the need to set a good example
or that he’d given his word or any other sanctimonious remark. Instead he gave a frank grin. ‘Dr Payling would find out,’ he said, and felt with that that he’d made up for his first, unfair dislike of the Assegai’s medic, according him the same ‘holy terror’ status as Rangi, if not Simon.

  Janus didn’t press the matter, though he smacked his lips appreciatively over the mug of tea the rating brought him, stewed and sugared to the point where anyone else would have found it undrinkable. Alex, handed a freefall bottle of chilled water, nodded thanks and settled himself down to sit on the steps.

  The rating, however, did not go away. He was an Able Star in his early twenties, one of the younger and more junior member of the Assegai’s crew, and he was looking at Alex as if he expected more from him than a mere nod for bringing him the water.

  Had they served together before, Alex wondered? He certainly didn’t recognise the man, but there was nothing very memorable about him – average height by Central Worlds standards, average build, clean-cut but not at all striking features, insignia which indicated that he was an engineering tech – a core tech, qualified to work on the mix cores themselves. That made him a specialist, unlikely to do much work elsewhere round the ship. No, Alex decided. He couldn’t remember having met him before. But the man clearly expected something, some kind of recognition.

  ‘Hello, sir.’ He said, as Alex looked at him enquiringly, and informed him, half-bashfully, ‘I’m Norton, sir – Nobby Norton.’

  The name meant nothing to Alex, but he responded politely, anyway. ‘Mr Norton,’ he acknowledged, and waited to see what the man wanted from him.

  ‘Hah!’ Commander Onwudiwe came down to sit on the stairs next to Alex, giving a mighty guffaw as he saw their mutual bewilderment. ‘This,’ he declaimed, ‘is the famous Nobby Norton.’

  ‘Oh.’ Still none the wiser, Alex saw that the man had seen his reaction and was now looking crestfallen. ‘I’m sorry,’ Alex said, with real sympathy for his embarrassment. ‘I’ve been so much out of the loop over the last month, I’m completely out of things. So…’ he indicated that the crewman should join them, sitting on the steps. ‘Famous for…?’

  Nobby glanced at the engineer and sat down, though he looked as if he wasn’t quite sure what to say, looking to Janus again to help him out.

  ‘Thereby hangs a tale.’ Janus contrived to give the impression of giving the rating a hearty slap on the back whilst actually doing nothing of the kind – such a thing would not be tolerated on a regular Fleet ship, even from an engineer. ‘Our Nobby,’ he told Alex, ‘well, we had some concerns about him, didn’t we, laddo? Oh, nothing like misconduct!’ He saw the alarm on the rating’s face and interpreted it correctly, Nobby anxious in case the captain should think that meant he’d been misbehaving in some way. ‘Just what you might call not thriving as we thought he should, drawing into himself, kind of.’ He looked benevolently at the tech. ‘I was starting to get just a mite concerned,’ he said. ‘Then Silvie came aboard – she was going around, you know, just saying hello to everyone, passing remarks here and there but nothing like we’d been expecting… until she got to Nobby.’ He grinned and gave the crewman an encouraging nod. ‘You take it from there, laddo.’

  ‘Oh – well, the truth is that I had been getting kind of down on myself,’ Nobby confided. ‘Not feeling I was up to the mark, you know, when everyone else was so…’ he gestured helplessly. ‘And Silvie, she saw me, and she just… well, she just came straight over to me and put her arms round me and kissed me on the head, right there…’ he touched a reverent finger to the spot on his forehead where Silvie had given that comforting kiss. ‘And she said…’ he was, quite unconsciously, adopting a theatrical, almost sermonising tone, ‘‘Don’t be scared – you’re just as clever as anyone here. Be brave, okay?’ Then she looked at me and kind of laughed and said, ‘You’ll do,’ and went away again.’ He paused impressively, giving Alex time to consider that before going on, in fervent tones, ‘It was magic. I felt…’ he waved his hands about, ‘so much. It was like we’d sat down for hours, talking things through, all the things I’d been worried about, just gone, sorted, and I felt, you know, great. They say it wasn’t therapy, not esper therapy like Ab Abnedido had, but all I can say is that it took all my worries away and gave me my confidence back and everything’s just great now – and she did that for me, for me, in like, five seconds!’

  Alex understood. That was an encounter which would have been so trivial to Silvie that it wouldn’t have occurred to her to mention it, either at the time or since. It wasn’t therapy, not by quarian standards. The esper therapy Nobby mentioned had been carried out by experts at Quarus and had been accorded the same status as if Ab had been going in for surgery. It had been surprisingly fast and astoundingly successful – the man whose crippling phobia of spaceports had blighted his career had not long ago been chatting with security and customs personnel in the biggest, busiest spaceport in the League, perfectly relaxed and happy.

  For Nobby, evidently, his encounter with Silvie had had very much the same kind of impact on his own life. It was quite probably the most amazing thing that had ever happened to him.

  ‘It’s an astonishing experience, isn’t it?’ Alex said. ‘A profound encounter like that. It does feel as if you’re part of a conversation that goes on for hours, completely open and honest, with that tremendous, overwhelming feeling of connection. It’s as if the rest of the universe just fades right out.’

  ‘Yes!’ Nobby was amazed to finally find someone who understood what he’d experienced. ‘Yes! That’s it.’ He gazed wonderingly into Alex’s face. ‘Is it like that for you too, sir?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Alex said. ‘with Silvie, and with many other quarians – not all of them, by any means. When you meet, you either connect on that level or you don’t. And don’t ask me why, scientists say it’s a matter of biomagnetic resonance but quarians say it’s just instinctive, of personalities that click. You’ll find that, when you get to Quarus. And you – all of you,’ he looked at Janus, ‘will have that experience many times, for sure.’ He smiled back at the crewman. ‘I loved it.’

  Nowhere else on the ship could command rank officers sit down with ratings and have a chat like that. But by long tradition, sitting down on the gantry steps in engineering was considered time out.

  It didn’t last for long, even there. Nobby was on duty, and after the few minutes permitted for a comfort break he recalled himself to duty, thanked the captain, shared a grin with the engineer and departed, walking on air with the joy of a conversation he’d remember for the rest of his life.

  Janus stayed for longer. He was not, in fact, holding the watch, as Alex had known when he came here, but like most engineers he spent as much of his time as humanly possible hanging out around his cores. He had, indeed, even been known to sleep here on occasion, coming down to doss in a watchkeeper’s chair when he found himself unable to sleep in his comfortable bunk.

  He and Alex enjoyed a good goss for half an hour or so, Janus bringing the captain up to speed on at least some of the gossip which had been ricocheting around the Fleet at Chartsey. There was always plenty of that, with shipboard scandals, Admiralty intrigues and amusing incidents to be shared. So Alex heard about the court martial of a petty officer for pilfering supplies, notable because it turned out he’d been doing it for years, quite obviously, and nobody had taken any notice. His defence, remarkably, was that officers had to have known what he was doing, so he had tacit approval and permission for his deprivations. Alex laughed at that, but perceiving that Janus had long since finished his tea, he followed Fleet etiquette in this situation and got up, himself, with thanks to his host.

  ‘I’ll just call by for a word with Ms Naos,’ he said, and Janus smiled.

  It turned out to be more than a word. Kate’s work station was at the far end of Mid Hall from the control platform, requiring the navigation of five gantries and three sets of stairs. On the Heron, they had built her an elevated resear
ch station, perched above the engines, which she called her eyrie. Here, they’d tucked a workstation into the triangular space under some stairs, an L-shaped console with just enough room for the single chair. Kate was not, apparently, doing anything – just sitting on the chair, feet on the rests, gazing abstractedly at the flow of data over the banks of screens. She could have been daydreaming, but Alex knew better. He recognised Kate in thoughtful mode – not the astonishing drive of her mind in moments of inspired or really urgent thought, but the deep contemplation of very large ideas.

  He would have left her undisturbed, seeing that, but she turned her head and broke into a smile, jumping up with the required courtesy of a cadet greeting an officer.

  ‘As you were,’ said Alex, and seeing that she really didn’t mind being interrupted, gestured at the consoles, asking, ‘How is it going?’

  Kate took a second to figure out that this was no mere polite enquiry as to general progress, but genuine interest from someone who understood at least the general outline of what she was doing and was fascinated by it.

  Her face lit up with the rather touching delight she always showed when finding herself able to talk about the things which meant so much to her, and which so few other people could even start to understand. Alex was no genius, of course, and his grasp of wave-space physics was limited, but he understood enough, at least, to listen intelligently.

  Seeing that response, and knowing how this was likely to go once she started talking, Alex pulled out the folding chair from the end of the console and sat down.

  She was already talking before the weight was off his feet, and continued talking then, without stopping, for the next forty eight minutes. Alex never said a word, though raising his finger occasionally to indicate that he wasn’t following what she’d just said, at which she would obligingly back-track and figure out how to explain it to him so that he could understand. This, he knew, was useful to her in itself, clarifying her explanation for writing up her results. And by the end, too, she was using him as a sounding board, talking about a problem she was trying to figure out. Alex could be of no help in that – he could barely comprehend the nature of the problem, still less make any kind of potentially helpful suggestions. But sometimes, he knew, it was helpful just to reason a problem out aloud to someone else, and in any case, Kate wanted him to know where her research was taking her and what she was currently working on. He had, after all, asked how things were going.