XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  Alex nodded.

  ‘All right,’ he agreed. ‘What’s the problem, Shion?’

  ‘I need to know,’ she asked, her gaze fixed searchingly on his face, ‘if I’m causing more work for you than I’m doing to help.’

  Alex broke into a wholly genuine grin.

  ‘Yes, of course you are,’ he said at once, and as she started to look sorrowful, went on just as matter of factly, ‘Cadets always do.’

  ‘Oh.’ She looked enquiringly at him. ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh, for sure,’ he told her. ‘Cadets on shipboard placement need intensive training, supervision and mentoring from just about all the officers and quite a few crew, too, in return for which they do a few routine chores. In sheer terms of workload, they get far more than they give. But that isn’t the full story, of course, because that time and effort isn’t wasted, it’s an investment in training them to become working officers. You are, actually, already doing considerably more than a cadet on assignment would be, at this stage. You’ve already undertaken live rescue ops, which I wouldn’t normally allow a cadet to have an active role in, and you’re training pilots, too, on top of working around the departments.’ He paused for a moment.

  ‘If you’re asking what I think you’re asking,’ he said, ‘whether I would still want you aboard if it wasn’t for the exodiplomacy factor, then yes, Shion, I would, absolutely. I think you have the makings of an excellent officer, and you would be very welcome here regardless.’

  ‘Oh.’ Relief flooded her face, and she smiled, then. ‘Thank you, skipper.’ She tipped her head slightly to one side, bird-like. ‘So, why won’t people let me do any work any more, then?’

  He saw that from her point of view, it might well look as if she’d been pushed off the ship because they were too busy right now to have time for her.

  ‘Honestly?’ Alex said. ‘We were asked to release you from all duties aboard ship while we’re at Karadon.’

  ‘Ah!’ Enlightenment dawned. ‘By the Diplomatic Corps?’ As he gave a little nod, she made a further realisation on her own, ‘And they’ve asked you to support them in trying to persuade me to leave?’

  ‘Well, told, rather than asked,’ Alex replied, mildly. ‘They have lead-agency authority in anything to do with you, you see, we take our orders from them. We’ve been told to be supportive and not to stand in your way as they try to persuade you to take up what they believe to be your rightful place as ambassador.’

  ‘But you don’t want me to go?’ She saw the answer in his face before he could speak, and went on, earnestly, ‘Can’t we tell them to take a running jump?’

  Alex grinned. ‘Well, I can’t,’ he said, with a very slight emphasis that he knew she would understand at once.

  ‘Ah!’ she said, and grinned happily, then. ‘And if I tell them to stop interfering, can I go back to work?’

  ‘Any time you like,’ Alex said, and the smiles they exchanged held complete understanding.

  ‘Thank you, skipper.’ She said, and got up.

  ‘Just one thing,’ Alex said. ‘We’ve taken a new Second team aboard – a Dr Jeol and her post grad student Ms Curlow. They have been briefed on your presence here but just flatly refused to believe it. I can ensure that they are kept out of your way till they do understand your exodiplomacy status, if you like.’

  Shion gave a little chortle of amusement.

  ‘That’s what happens,’ she observed, ‘when you confuse people by telling the truth as if it’s lies. But no, of course I don’t mind, skipper, and I won’t take offence if they won’t believe me.’

  ‘All right, then.’ He nodded, and left the cabin with her. ‘If you’re looking for something to do, later,’ he told her, as they walked the few metres from his quarters to the command deck, ‘the water QI’s need doing.’

  Shion laughed. She’d been thrilled the first time she’d been allowed to do quality inspection on the ship’s water supply. Since then, though she’d come to understand that it really was one of the most tedious chores officers had to do, always foisted on the most junior Sub aboard.

  ‘I’ll get right on it,’ she said, and went off with cheerful purpose. Alex smiled too, as he went back to work. Carvor Djenbo might not be very pleased when he saw the recording of that meeting, as Alex had already desk-mailed it to him, but Alex knew that it would not come as much of a surprise. He’d had a couple of days to get to know Shion by now, after all.

  It was another couple of days again, though, before Chantal Jeol and Tass Curlow finally realised that what they’d been told about Shion wasn’t a joke.

  They were, the crew were agreed, the most entertaining passengers they’d had aboard for ages. That wasn’t just because of the amusement over their refusal to believe that Shion was an alien, either. Their reaction was much the same when they were told about Davie North. Tass, indeed, got quite irritated over that.

  ‘That’s just insulting my intelligence,’ she snapped. ‘As if huge intersystem companies like that could be owned by any one person! Let alone a kid!’

  The snappy tone of voice would have made it evident even to someone who couldn’t see her that she was speaking to an officer – Arie McKenna, in this case. To the crew’s mild bewilderment and frank hilarity, Tass Curlow remained convinced that the Heron’s officers were brutes and bullies from the skipper to the youngest Sub. She was terse with officers, even with petty officers, and overly effusive with ratings. She spoke to them with such concern, indeed, that some of them just couldn’t resist playing up to it, making up the most outrageous stories they could come up with. To their delight, she would swallow any amount of those, believing them immediately, while telling her the truth got nowhere.

  Chantal too remained convinced that the ‘Shion thing’ was no more than an elaborate prank, even when other members of the Second assured her that it was for real. In her case, though, she just dismissed everything they said with perfect good humour, convinced that they were all in on the joke.

  She was, other than that, a very easy passenger. She’d already travelled on three Fleet ships and was entirely familiar with all the things like insignia and shipboard routines that normally took passengers some time to learn. She knew such things as health and safety regulations as well as any crew, was competent in freefall and entirely at home in shipboard rig.

  They liked her very much in the lab, too. There’d been some unease about strangers coming in, particularly after their experience with Candra Pattello. Both Chantal and Tass were friendly, though, and willing to join in with communal meal sharing, too, so a friendly atmosphere was soon established. The others, on Rangi’s advice, did not make a big issue out of trying to convince the newcomers of Shion’s origins. As Rangi observed when Mack asked him if he could show Chantal and Tass some medical proof of Shion’s non-human physiology, the more they tried to convince them, the less likely they were to believe. Give it time, he said, and they’ll realise we’re really not having them on.

  That happened on the fifth day of the ship’s stay at Karadon. Shion had been junior watch officer during the morning, helping Lt Vergan. At one point in the morning, finding himself tied up on a long call with the Customs ship, he’d passed her the communication screens with all the other calls awaiting response. This was constant. Official calls were coming in all the time, from various divisions on the station, from the Minnow, the Customs ship, from Fleet Intel and the LIA, not to mention the media. They were also under continuous bombardment from other ships in port. Nearly every ship arriving made courtesy calls to the Fourth, many of them also asked for visits or had things they wanted to tell them. None of it was important but politeness required at least some kind of acknowledgement from a watch officer. Shion, handed a comm screen on which forty two messages were awaiting response, had answered them all in under five seconds.

  This wasn’t something she normally did. There was very little outer sign of her superior reflexes or multicognitive intelligence in normal life around the ship. Th
is was, as she’d explained, because it was considered common courtesy amongst her people to adapt levels of talk, including speed and multitasking, to that of the slowest person in the room. That had caused much mirth on the Heron as the crew had debated which of them won that distinction, but they’d accepted Shion behaving, most of the time, at their level. Demonstrations like this were rare, and caused interested comment amongst the crew, with some laughing and frank envy, too, along the lines of ‘Wish I could deal with my paperwork that easily!’

  Tass, however, evidently thought that it was another attempt to prank her and Chantal into believing that Shion was an alien. And this time, she challenged Shion about it herself.

  They were on deck two. Shion was making her way around the ship with a couple of techs and a water testing kit, doing the routine daily checks on water purity at the twenty three locations that had to be tested.

  ‘Very looked like he was going to choke,’ one of the ratings commented, appreciatively, at which Shion gave a chuckle.

  ‘He told me to do them as quickly as I could,’ she pointed out. Very had, in fact, said just that, passing her the conn screens with an unthinking ‘Quick as you can’, meaning ‘don’t spend too much time chatting to people.’ Shion, however, had taken him literally, her fingers working controls so fast they were just a blur. Very had, indeed, goggled a bit at that and had a slightly strangled note in his voice as he’d told her ‘well done.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’ They weren’t talking to her, but Tass obviously assumed that that conversation was being put on for her benefit. She and Chantal were also working on deck two, at the open locker where the biovats were located. ‘This is getting really old,’ Tass complained, hands on her hips. ‘Can you all just please pack it in?’ she demanded. ‘We’re not falling for it!’

  The ratings burst out laughing, which only made Tass even more convinced that this was a ludicrous wind-up.

  ‘Look, I don’t mind that you won’t believe that I’m from Pirrell,’ Shion answered, amused. ‘Actually, I find it rather flattering, since it obviously means I’ve integrated well enough to pass for one of your people. But as much as I don’t mind it myself, and as entertaining as it is for the crew, I don’t think it’s fair to you, or kind, to let you go on believing that this is a joke. I am from Pirrell. I am of a different genome and I have a fundamentally different biology to yours. I also have much faster reflexes. Look.’ As she said the word, she handed Tass a pen. It took Tass a moment to realise that it had been the one clipped to her lapel, and that Shion had taken it so fast she hadn’t even seen her hand move.

  ‘That’s a good trick,’ Chantal commented, strolling up to join them. She looked amused, too, but condescendingly so. ‘Close-up magic, they call it, don’t they?’

  Shion looked at her, grinned, and held out her hand.

  ‘Here,’ she said, and taking Chantal’s hand, gently, she pressed it to her own heart.

  This was significantly lower in Shion than in human physiology, nestling below her lungs rather than between them. It was also of six-chambered construction rather than the four that was the norm for humans, and beat at less than a quarter of the human heartrate, too.

  Chantal frowned as she didn’t feel the ba-boom, ba-boom she was expecting. Instead she felt a slow rhythmic pulse, ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ba.

  As it sank in that this really was Shion’s heartbeat, Chantal looked, really looked, into Shion’s eyes. They were dark, and deep, with a combination of intelligence and serenity, a truly graceful spirit. As understanding finally began to dawn in Chantal’s face, Shion gave her a very slight nod, confirming it.

  Chantal’s eyes rolled back in her head. She gave a little sigh and her legs went out from under her. Shion caught her before she was halfway to the deck and supported her, though looking shocked, herself. As the ratings jumped forward to help, Tass clapped both hands over her mouth and shrieked.

  This was not, evidently, at Chantal having fainted, or at least not directly. Chantal’s look of astounded revelation and sudden collapse had finally broken through Tass’s own disbelief. She was backing away, now, looking at Shion with wide, staring eyes, making shrill cries behind the hands clutched over her mouth.

  ‘I see what you mean, now, about your people not being ready for open contact,’ Shion observed, a few minutes later. She was with Alex on the command deck. Chantal and Tass were in sickbay, having a nice cup of herbal tea and some time in the healing space. Shion was really upset about the panic she’d caused, though it had to be said that the rest of the crew found it highly entertaining. Chantal and Tass, it was felt, had come well up to expectations when the penny had finally dropped, with one of them passing out and the other having a panic attack.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ Alex said. ‘Multiply that by several billion and you’re looking at panic on a global scale. People just aren’t ready. We were once, I think, back in the age of Exploration, we’d have been thrilled by any kinds of people we met. Since the Marfikians, though, we too have become very insular, fearing the unknown, and ‘alien’ is a word that inspires fear.’

  Shion nodded, sad but accepting.

  ‘I feel awful at having done that to them,’ she said.

  ‘Well, they can’t say they weren’t told,’ said Alex, with a marked lack of sympathy and even a gleam of amusement. ‘Never mind, Shion. We’ll go and talk to them once they’ve calmed down, all right?’

  That took about half an hour, before Rangi called to say that Chantal and Tass would like to see Shion now if she could spare them a few minutes.

  Shion went to sickbay to apologise to them, only to find that they were wanting to apologise to her. Both were wide eyed and still rather shaken, but accepting, now.

  ‘I’m so sorry we didn’t believe you,’ Chantal said. ‘It’s just – who’d have thought?’ She was gazing at Shion with undisguised wonder. Strangely, it was Tass who still looked scared, hardly daring to move.

  ‘No, I should be the one saying sorry,’ Shion said, sitting on one of the cushions in the healing circle, and giving them an abashed look. ‘I’m so used to being with people who just accept me, I never thought how shocking it would be for you.’

  ‘But you are...’ Tass ventured, her voice barely audible, ‘an alien. Really, an alien.’

  Shion gave an apologetic smile.

  ‘Uh huh,’ she said, an idiom she’d picked up from the crew. Then, demonstrating that she’d been watching some of the more popular alien flicks in the shipboard library, ‘I don’t eat people’s heads or anything like that, though.’

  Alex chuckled, accepting the dish of herbal tea that Rangi handed him. It was one of Rangi’s nerve-soothing concoctions, served in porcelain bowls so fine they were almost transparent.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to forgive us finding it so funny,’ he said, ‘that you wouldn’t believe us. It’s not, of course, an uncommon reaction when people are brought in on exodiplomacy matters.’ They gave him startled looks at that, obviously feeling that this was such an astounding event that nothing like it had ever happened before. Alex, however, made it sound perfectly routine.

  ‘Other people know?’ Chantal asked, then, with her scientist’s need for precision, ‘How many people know about this?’

  ‘About Shion’s visit? A few thousand, I daresay,’ Alex said. ‘About the visits of Solarans to our worlds? I’d hardly like to hazard a guess. But given that every level of government is involved in that from the Senate to the city councils of any city they might be visiting, hundreds of thousands, for sure. All spacers know too, of course – we’re out here, we see things, and no power in the known universe can stop spacers talking to each other. Even members of the public meet them, sometimes.’ He looked at Tass with no attempt to disguise the gleam of humour in his eyes, ‘even take and publish holos of them.’

  ‘I knew it!’ Tass burst out, at that, her satisfaction at finding her beliefs vindicated overcoming her anxiety. ‘I knew it! They come to our worlds all the ti
me, don’t they? And it’s true, isn’t it? They go to museums!’

  Alex nodded. ‘Not all of our worlds, and not all of the time,’ he qualified. ‘And not all of the stories shared on networks like First Contact are true, of course. But yes, Ms Curlow, alien visitors come to our worlds on a fairly frequent basis, and yes, it is true that if you take careful note of closures of galleries and museums on various pretexts, you will find periods of two to three weeks across a given world where those closures look like the itinerary for a cultural sightseeing tour. And that is, in fact, what Solarans come to our worlds for, to see the sights and visit galleries and museums. At any given time, I daresay, there’ll be two or three parties of Solarans visiting our worlds. And yes, of course, the government denies it, and before you start saying that the people have a right to know,’ he fixed her in a steady look, ‘just think about how the two of you reacted, and you are at the most intelligent, travelled, open-minded end of our society.’

  ‘But if you never tell people,’ Chantal protested, ‘how are we ever going to be ready for this to be made public?’

  ‘Well, the Senate and the Diplomatic Corps believe that the best approach is what they call a ‘trickle out’ process,’ Alex informed them. ‘Information is released unofficially, while still officially denied. The presence of aliens on our worlds is still a fringe belief, a bit out there, but it will gradually come to be more accepted by the mainstream, an idea that people get used to slowly, so that at the point when it is decided to reveal our relationships with other species, that won’t come as too much of a shock to anybody. I doubt that I’ll see that in my lifetime, frankly, given how insular groundsiders are. They think of even other worlds in the League as foreign, so it may be a long time yet before they can accept other species as our friends.’

  ‘But they are, though?’ Chantal asked, looking at him searchingly. ‘No threat to us?’ She shot a sudden, apologetic look at Shion. ‘No offence.’