Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘Jah-did-na,’ the other AWB enunciated, slowly and loudly, miming putting something into his mouth and then rubbing his tummy. ‘Vooooooom!’

  ‘Oh.’ Alex realised all at once what was happening here. He’d been through similar exercises in exodiplomacy training. It was babble-talk, made-up, deliberately incomprehensible, a role-play exercise in hyper-linguistic communication. ‘Podi,’ he agreed, throwing himself happily into the spirit of the thing. ‘Jadidna, vooom!’

  It was, though, more than a bit disconcerting when all four of them got very much closer to him than he liked, pressing close around him so that he couldn’t take a step without them moving too, and while one of them babbled brightly away to him – apparently telling him some story which Alex couldn’t get a handle on at all – the other three were muttering at him and to one another, a hubbub of surprise and curiosity and alarm and in one case, all too evidently, an urgent need to visit the lavatory.

  ‘Oh.’ Alex got it, then. Silvie had arranged this. She’d got them to act in a way which would give him a similar experience to the one she’d had when she’d come aboard this ship – confusing language and an uncomfortably invasive muttering huddle.

  Fifty three minutes later he was back in the quarian quarters. He just couldn’t stand it out there. It had very soon become evident that everyone aboard the ship was in on this, bibble-babbling at high volume and clustering around him in claustrophobic mobs. Or at least, most of them did. A few fled screaming from the sight of him, including the skipper who fled from the command deck, yelping as if his trousers were on fire. There was no sign of Silvie herself, but Alex had no doubt that she was nearby, directing and thoroughly enjoying the show. He was absolutely sure that she was responsible for the food he was served, too... lukewarm blood-weed soup and a plankton sandwich. This was Silvie’s version of ‘soppo and a dog’, and at that, probably a fair representation of how nauseating human food had been to her until she’d got used to it.

  Feeling that however high his respect and admiration for her had been before, it had not been high enough, Alex went and cleaned his teeth, using quite a lot of mouthwash, before settling down again. An attempt to put a movie on revealed that the holoscreen had been set so that whatever he put on would have the soundtrack scrambled and odd flicks of random cartoons inserted, so he put some music on – that, at least, was undisturbed – and went back to his course. Curled up, he thought. Reading. Yes. That was just about the only way you’d stay sane through this experience.

  If he thought that he’d got through the worst of it, though, he just had no idea. He’d barely been reading for a few minutes when the door opened again and more people came in.

  Alex recognised them at once – the Excorps guys, the eight people Silvie had invited to go with them purely for the pleasure of their company. Just for a moment, relief rose in his face, as he imagined that they’d come over just to have a chat and a laugh with him.

  Then he saw how they were dressed.

  Then he saw what they were carrying.

  ‘Oh, noooo.’

  A minute later he had been forcibly changed into a sea-god costume complete with trident and a seaweed wig, then stood up on a box they’d brought with them. They were dressed as mermen and mermaids themselves, also with long green seaweed wigs, and the row that they were making was just horrible. Some of them were singing, if you could call that singing, perhaps their own interpretations of whale or dolphin song, but they kept breaking off to shout things at him – happy things, by the sound of it, but very excited and very loud. They were stroking and patting him, too, milling around him on his box so that he couldn’t have got down without shoving them out of the way, looking up at him with admiration, with delight, with worship.

  ‘You know I will get you lot back for this, don’t you?’ Said Alex, though his voice was barely audible under the din of joyous devotion and hooting. ‘You rotten…’

  They picked him up and carried him around the lounge, singing cacophonous praise. This went on till Alex had long since stopped finding it the slightest bit funny, upon which they put him back on his box and started asking him to do things for them. He couldn’t have understood what any of them were saying even if he’d been able to make out any individual voice in the yelling. But soon they were grabbing at his clothes, shouting at him insistently – clearly, whatever it was they wanted was very important and urgent and they weren’t going to accept no as an answer.

  ‘No – no, go away!’ Alex slapped vigorously at a hand which was grabbing a part of his costume where no Fleet officer should be grabbed, ‘Stop it! Get off!’

  By the time they eventually left, wailing with anger and dismay and disappointment, Alex had had enough, more than enough.

  ‘All right, Silvie…’ he called her directly, speaking to her even though she didn’t pick up her comm, sure she was listening. ‘I get it, I do, the environment is awful and the people are bewildering and the expectations drive you nuts, but… oh, my God…’

  A man had come in – just one man, but he was wearing a full-body strobe suit flashing so blindingly that it was impossible to look directly at him. He had some kind of loudspeaker on him which was pumping out multiple voices at ear-piercing decibels. Some of them were doing calculations, others were apparently having conversations and one appeared to be obsessed with pizza.

  ‘HELLO!’ The man roared through a megaphone which was even louder than the combined voices, ‘I LOVE YOU, WILL YOU BE MY BROTHER?’

  ‘Shut up!’ Alex howled, screwing his eyes shut and clapping his hands over his hears. Dignity be damned, this was unbearable. ‘GO AWAY!’

  As the Davie simulator went away, bellowing sorrow and a need for three-cheese toppings, someone else came in.

  It was Buzz, smiling warmly.

  ‘All right, dear boy?’ He was himself – absolutely, wonderfully, himself. And as he came over, offering a hug, Alex had to fight a desire to fling himself at his Exec and cling to him like a kid. ‘Don’t worry,’ Buzz gave him one of his gentle embraces and patted him kindly between the shoulder blades. ‘I’m here to the rescue.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Alex said, in heartfelt tones, shaking his head. ‘That was intense.’

  ‘Never mind – I’m here now.’ Buzz guided him to sit down, reassuring, ‘I’ll get you a coffee.’

  It was the good stuff, served in a mug just as Alex liked it.

  ‘Ahhhh.’ He savoured it, but then gave his second in command a doubtful look. ‘How are you…?’ he gestured to indicate here, since Fleet regs would not normally allow both skipper and exec to be off the ship while it was superlight.

  ‘Bull is ship-sitting for us,’ Buzz told him, and Alex relaxed.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he was coming to a realisation, though. ‘You were in on this, weren’t you?’

  Buzz smiled. ‘I helped make the arrangements,’ he admitted. ‘And persuaded the Harmony people to take part – mission field training, of course, a microcosm of what Silvie experienced. In which,’ he beamed paternally, ‘I, by the way, am a combination of you and Shion, the love and care you wrap around her all the time.’

  ‘Yes – got that,’ Alex said. ‘And I think it’s fair to say that I now understand entirely why Silvie pokes people. I thought I did before, but… as she said, no substitute for experience.’ A sudden, horrible thought occurred. ‘I don’t actually have to stay here all night, do I?’

  ‘No – we can head back when you’ve had your coffee,’ Buzz said. ‘Just take a few minutes to get your equilibrium back.’

  ‘I’m fine now,’ said Alex, but all the same he made himself more comfortable and took another drink of coffee. Then he looked back at Buzz. ‘Silvie’s idea?’

  Buzz nodded. ‘She thought it was important that you really understand what you’re asking, when you ask quarians to make the trip to Serenity. And in that understanding, that you make arrangements here that her people might be able to cope with.’

  ‘Yes,’ Alex agreed.
‘I see that. I’d have made mechanical changes and talked to people about the need for honesty but I wouldn’t really have understood. Now I do, so fair enough. And – the Excorps guys? Is this what they were brought along for?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Buzz said serenely. ‘Silvie just invited them for fun. It was me who asked them to pitch in with the sea-god bit. Neither the Diplomatic Corps nor the Fleet seemed to want to put a team together for that, but I thought the Excorps guys might be up for it. And they were.’

  ‘They certainly were,’ said Alex, remembering the glee in those faces, and those wandering hands. ‘They had way too much fun.’ He drank some more coffee and started to laugh. It was a little snurge at first, but as he looked back at all the things which he’d been put through, he cracked into a deep, genuine laugh. ‘Please, please tell me,’ he begged, ‘that there isn’t going to be a holo of me dressed as Oceanicus on the notice board?’

  ‘No – blind recorded only, and the only person watching was me,’ Buzz said, with a grin. ‘Which reminds me, what were you reading? You seemed to get quite cross about it.’

  ‘Oh – Commidus’ speech on Higher Loyalty,’ Alex said. ‘Downright criminal if you ask me…’ he grinned as Buzz went off into a peal of laughter. ‘But isn’t Silvie here, directing?’

  ‘No…’ Buzz composed himself and explained, ‘She was, but she got bored when you were just sitting there reading and went back to the Heron for a swim.’

  He and Alex looked at one another and then both of them just gave way and enjoyed a good laugh.

  Work began on the Harmony the very next day, as Alex sent tech teams over there to strip out the quarian quarters. Some things were easier to convince the Diplomatic Corps people about than others. Persuading them to strip the VR from the aquadeck and leave it as an empty tank for quarians themselves to set up as a living garden was relatively easy, as they’d seen Silvie’s garden on the Heron and seemed to be expecting something similar. Getting them to scrap the plastic plants and fake water features in exchange for sofas and bunks, though, that took some doing.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry…’ Alex had taken Shion along to the meeting with the Harmony’s senior people, and it was Shion who stepped in when they balked at turning the quarian zone into an ordinary human lounge and bunkroom, ‘but this is something the Diplomatic Corps gets wrong, again and again. You seem to have this utterly fixated belief that the only way to make other species comfortable is to recreate their environment as closely as you can. That’s true, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, that’s fundamental,’ The Harmony’s skipper was also a military attaché and the most senior of the Diplomatic Corps people on the Harmony. ‘That goes back, oh, as long as we’ve been doing first contact, really, and it is fundamental, so important to show respect and consideration, creating a safe and comfortable encounter zone.’

  ‘Theoretically, perhaps,’ Shion said. ‘Though I would take issue even with that. When I came to the League, I didn’t come here to see a bad fake of my own environment, I wanted to see yours. And your encounter zones are not comfortable, because it is profoundly disturbing to be in an environment which ought to be familiar but isn’t, because things are wrong. Even when it’s little things which are wrong, like pictures hung upside down or furniture not quite on the right scale, it just feels weird and wrong and very very far from comfortable. The best thing by far, as we proved at Samart, is to provide an encounter zone with due sensitivity to the needs and comfort of visitors, but without any attempt to recreate their environment. So have web furniture available for those who might want it, by all means, but make the lounge a mess deck with sofas and bunks. I believe that you will find that quarians will find that pleasing, adventurous but still comfortable. And do, please, for mercy’s sake, stop giving them blood-weed and plankton to eat. Have you not, in all this time, figured out yet that the only reason they give that stuff to humans is because it’s hilarious?’

  ‘Mmmn,’ said the skipper, unhappily. ‘It has been suspected. But the difficulty is, you see, that there is no culture of restaurant dining or street food on Quarus, meals are almost always eaten in homes, and we have never been able to gain access to observe domestic life.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Ninety four years,’ Shion observed. ‘You’ve had an embassy there for ninety four years. And you don’t even know what they eat?’

  ‘We know what they’ve told us,’ the skipper said, with some defensiveness. ‘But most of the time we can’t even get anyone to meet our ambassador or even take our calls. They don’t want to talk to us, just don’t. And when we can persuade them to send someone to the presidential office to talk to us, chances are they either won’t turn up at all or will go away again before we can have any kind of productive discussion. We have never been allowed in any of their homes, we have never been allowed free access to their cities, we’re basically just stuck up on the Embassy trying to figure out what to try next.’ He looked at Alex, and it was clear that he considered that things had reached a desperate pitch when Alex von Strada was the next thing they were trying. ‘Of course, sir,’ he said, with a conciliating manner, ‘we will comply with whatever directives you give…’

  ‘But?’ Alex said, seeing that the skipper felt so strongly that he had something important to say that he was even prepared to contradict His Excellency.

  ‘Well, sir,’ the skipper said, ‘please forgive me for saying this and I apologise if I am speaking out of turn, but it is simply that we have spent so long there, working so hard and being so very careful, the relationship so very tentative and fragile, it is… somewhat alarming… to have all of our established provision and practices overturned.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Alex, reminding himself that he was dealing with an organisational inertia which had the slow unstoppable force of a rock-grinding bore-hole robot. They had coped very well, considering, with his radical ideas and cockeyed way of going about things, but everyone had their limits and it was apparent that for the skipper, the sofas and bunks were a step too far. It might be absurd, but it was that tiny little final straw which might snap the goodwill and cooperation. ‘So, all right,’ he said, showing that he was diplomatic enough to know when to compromise. ‘We’ll set the lounge up with provision for both the sofa/bunk environment and a quarian style one, using transitory systems so that it can be either/or or a combination of both, with controls for that in the room for visitors to decide for themselves – all right?’

  The skipper didn’t burst into tears of relief because military attachés weren’t supposed to do that sort of thing, but he thanked Alex with such fervour that his feelings were apparent – it would have broken his heart, clearly, for that awful plastic lounge to be utterly destroyed.

  Alex left Shion there with other officers, surveying and planning the refit, while he headed back to the Heron. He let Nyge pilot him there, expecting that the cadet would enjoy that. But as the shuttle began the short trip between the Harmony and the Heron, he saw that Nyge was self-conscious, quiet with tension.

  ‘Problem, Mr Tomaas?’ Alex asked, with slight surprise and some concern. Nyge had apparently been thriving in his placement, even when the run-around had pushed him to red-eyed weariness.

  ‘Oh…’ Nyge, in turn, saw that Alex was perfectly relaxed, cheerful, and looked a little surprised, himself. ‘I, uh,’ he reminded himself of the need to practice honesty, and explained, ‘I thought you’d be… annoyed, skipper.’

  Alex thought about that and chuckled.

  ‘You mean ‘seething with frustration’,’ he suggested, and at Nyge’s little nod and wry look, laughed again. ‘I will admit,’ he said, ‘to feeling a little impatient at times when I’m busy and they’re dragging things on ten times longer than they need to take. But seething with frustration? No.’ He could see that they were within seconds of approaching the frigate, and so directed Nyge, ‘Take us on a loop of the squadron, will you?’

  ‘Sir.’ Nyge was delighted to do so
, every moment of free space piloting a joy in itself, and a treasured opportunity for private conversation with the skipper.

  ‘You profiled the Ambassador’s office, at Serenity,’ Alex reminded him. ‘And you just spent an hour in the skipper’s office on the Harmony. Notice anything?’

  ‘Oh – I wasn’t profiling, skipper…’ Nyge was uneasy, since Alex had not asked him to profile the Harmony and he wasn’t sure that he was really allowed to have done it.

  ‘Of course you were.’ Alex looked amused. ‘Once you can do this it’s as difficult not to do it as deciding not to read signs which are lit up at eye level. And we are training you to be an accurate, analytical observer, Mr Tomaas. So, what did you notice?’

  ‘Oh – that it was the same, skipper.’ Nyge said. ‘Same décor, of course, but the same in the detail, too, indicators of a strongly hierarchical bureaucratic organisation with a high degree of cultural compliance.’

  Alex smiled. A few weeks ago Nyge would have described his observations as conjectures in everyday language, but he had learned the language of intelligence reports as well as the practical skills of quartering a room and making mental notes.

  ‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘And I will save you a great deal of research by telling you that I have never yet set foot in the office of any senior Diplomatic Corps personnel without hitting exactly that same profile. There is,’ he added, ‘a rumour that somewhere out there is an attaché with an orange rug on the floor and a collection of china birds, but that is an Intel myth, a unicorn. Even the most radical member of the Diplomatic Corps I know, a gentleman with a reputation as a way-out-there eccentric, profiles exactly the same way as the rest when you visit him in his office. His reputation for wild eccentricity, in fact, rests upon his known enjoyment of computer games in his private time, and a slightly unorthodox choice of attire when travelling on couriers.’

  Nyge’s grin showed that he knew exactly who Alex was talking about – Tanlen Ganhauser, the current Ambassador to Carrearranis.