Everyone else in the room was taking a very studious interest in walls, carpets, ceiling or their own feet, trying very hard to pretend that they were not even there. The atmosphere was so quiet, you could hear the president breathing.
‘Of course you’re free to make your own decisions!’ Marc Tyborne sounded genuinely shocked. ‘Nobody is trying to force you, Shion.’
‘No, just to pressure and manipulate me,’ Shion said, and though she smiled, it was a bleak, humourless smile. ‘Which I have to tell you I find deeply offensive. I’ve tried to be understanding about it, accepting that things are different here and that it would be arrogant of me to attempt to impose my own morality on you. But if you really want to know what the problem is, Mr President, it is that you and the diplomats are treating me like some kind of idiot child you can trick or coax into behaving as you want. I have been trying to be polite about it. I even dressed formally last night to please you, though that is everything I came here to escape. But still it isn’t enough, you just keep on and on about wanting me to go to Canelon with you, as if I have the slightest interest either in seeing castles or being pushed into the diplomatic role you clearly want me to adopt. So I will say it straight, clear and straight so there can be no misunderstandings here. I am not an ambassador. I have no official diplomatic role. I have no intention of assuming any kind of diplomatic role. All I want is to be allowed to serve with the Fourth, without any further interference. If that is not acceptable to you then please say so now and I will make arrangements to leave your space.’
The president could not apologise fast enough. A prickle of sweat had broken out on his forehead, and he assured her repeatedly that they had meant no offence whatsoever, that it was an innocent misunderstanding, of course she had every right to self determination and they would respect her decision to serve with the Fourth, no problem.
Shion was gracious in victory. She smiled, accepted a handshake, and said that she was glad the matter had been resolved.
‘Did I do all right, skipper?’ she asked Alex, when they were on the shuttle heading back to the frigate – Shion was piloting, Alex sitting in the copilot’s place beside her.
Alex turned his head and looked at her. She had just faced down the League President, the highest ranking man in human space, and she had kicked his butt in no uncertain terms. And now she was piloting Alex back to the ship, hopeful of his approval.
‘Not bad,’ he said, and grinned. Try as she might, Shion was never going to be any kind of ordinary officer. But that, Alex felt, was fine. You just had to take the bizarre in your stride, in exodiplomacy. And he was proud of her, too, fully appreciative of how difficult that had been for her. ‘You can help Mr Burroughs with the watch and quarter bill, if you like.’
Shion gave a little crow of pleasure. The watch and quarter bill was Buzz’s responsibility, though he and Alex often worked on it together. It was a document of fiendish complexity, detailing duties, watch and action stations for every member of the crew. Shion found it fascinating, perhaps seeing patterns in it that weren’t obvious to human eyes. She said it was like a piece of music, reflecting the rhythms of life aboard ship. She knew every detail of it, too, in all its intricacy. Buzz would be working on the next eight-day cycle today, and would appreciate her help.
‘Thanks, skipper!’ Shion swung the shuttle onto the airlock with a grace that had already drawn some attention from keen eyed spacers. Shion had agreed not to carry out any manoeuvre that would betray her superhuman abilities, but she couldn’t conceal the skill with which she piloted even a workaday shuttle like this one.
They walked back aboard ship to gales of laughter. This had nothing to do with them, as they soon discovered. The crew were laughing at an item which had just gone on the notice board. This was a sub-screen to the command deck feed, on which anyone could post items of interest. In this case, Murg Atwood had posted a clip from an LIA report.
Alex and Shion joined a group at the nearest screen, drawn to it by the laughter of the people there. They saw footage of Tass Curlow, being covertly filmed by the LIA in what was evidently an evaluation of her security status. Tass was on Karadon, filmed in an encounter with some Liberty League activists. They obviously knew that she was working aboard the Fourth’s ship, and had surged around her, eager for anything she might be able to tell them about the abuse they believed was going on there.
‘Come on, Tassy, give!’ one of them urged. ‘What’s really going on on that ship?’
Tass looked around at them, her own expression one of anguish.
‘What is the point?’ she asked, speaking more to herself than to them, with a note of despair. ‘You wouldn’t believe me anyway.’
She had, the LIA agent noted, resisted all efforts to persuade her to break her confidentiality agreement, and they had rated her highly for that. For the crew, though, the really funny bit was when Tass, turning around, had seen a holo-ad playing on one of the concourse plinths. It was an ad for a newly released movie, an alien flick. This particular alien was of the green and slimy variety. The look Tass gave it was one of utterly withering derision. She knew better than that now, after all.
Alex grinned, too, but did have a look out for Tass when he got to the command deck. He didn’t mind the crew having a laugh about the civilians, but he didn’t want Tass to be feeling victimised by that.
She didn’t appear to be, though. He spotted her on mess deck two, where she was being consoled with a dish of ice cream and some sympathetic shipmates. She seemed to be enjoying herself, casting up her hands in an exaggerated gesture of disbelief as she spoke animatedly. A brief audio-focus on the conversation told Alex that she was having a fine time, there, amazed at the revelation that she had been followed and filmed by a real live LIA agent, an actual secret agent, that she’d been spied on by the government. Her words said that’s outrageous but her tone and body language conveyed a rather endearingly thrilled how cool is that!
Alex left her to it. He had managed to see Sam Barlow earlier, sounding him out as to how he’d feel about becoming exec on the Minnow. Sam’s reaction had been everything that Martine’s was not. Rather overwhelmed, utterly delighted, hardly able to believe it. He wouldn’t be transferring for a couple of days. This was, after all, already a sensitive situation, as everyone would realise at once that Dix Harangay had removed Lt Bulingo and put in a new exec to address Harry Alington’s rather obvious failings in his assignment here. Pulling Lt Bulingo off the ship immediately would have made it look as if Dix considered those failings to be his fault. So a certain amount of face-saving was going on. It was being put about that Harry Alington himself had asked for someone with experience of this kind of operation after Lt Bulingo had been offered a full time instructor’s post at the Academy. He would be leaving aboard the next liner to Chartsey, and after a decent interval of an hour or so, Sam Barlow would report aboard the Minnow to take up his new job.
Now that that had been confirmed with Dix Harangay, Alex had to see Very Vergan. That was a very enjoyable meeting, too. Very was only assigned to them till ISiS Penrys, at which point he would have to head back to his undistinguished position on the Apollo. There was, after all, a world of difference between a Lt serving in a minor capacity on a carrier with more than three hundred officers, and the third lieutenant of a frigate. On the Heron, too, it would mean being fully immersed in operations, handling intelligence, even being expected to make suggestions in strategy meetings.
Very went off, practically walking on air, and Alex, having spent some time catching up with the most urgent priority files on his desk, sent for Shion.
‘Two things,’ he told her. ‘And it is important to be clear that they are in no way related or one dependent on the other, okay? First, I’m sure you know by now that we’re losing Lt Barlow to the Minnow and that Lt Vergan is stepping up as second lieutenant. That, obviously, leaves us without an officer in charge of the fighter department.’ He grinned at her hopeful look. ‘And yes, of c
ourse, that’s yours.’ He said.
She very nearly hugged him, whooping with joy, but restrained herself just in time and saluted instead, which made him laugh.
‘Breathe!’ he advised. ‘You are, obviously, the best person to have charge of that department. You’ve still got a few days of the month we agreed for you to be working around the ship as if on final cadet placement, but I think in the circumstances we can forgo that. I will, though, still be expecting you to pitch in with routine duties and take your stint as junior officer of the watch, just like any other Sub, all right? And our agreement still stands, Shion – you don’t pilot, yourself, if there’s any risk of combat. Your role is to supervise maintenance on the fighters and to train other pilots, yes?’
‘Yes, okay,’ she reacted more thoughtfully to that, considering it. ‘But skipper, how will I ever know if I could fire a weapon in combat if I never go into combat to find out?’
‘Trust me,’ Alex said, with a dry note, ‘if there is even the slightest doubt about that, you have absolutely no place piloting a fighter in combat operations. Which is fine, it really is. If you’re happy to train other pilots then you’re playing your part. As I’ve pointed out before, none of our junior Subs take part in front line combat, and that one, I’m sorry, is just not open to discussion.’
Shion accepted that, grinning happily anyway at finding she was to be in charge of the fighters.
‘Okay, skipper,’ she looked at him with alert enquiry. ‘And the second thing?’
‘The second thing,’ said Alex, ‘is confidential – not to be discussed outside this office, all right?’ He waited for her nod, then continued, ‘It’s about our operations at Novamas. I can’t go into details – well, I could, frankly, but I won’t, not until I can discuss it with my other officers too. But I’m in the process, now, of being briefed about that situation, myself, and starting to think about what we might do there. I think it’s possible that you might have some information that could help, so I’m asking – just asking, no pressure – if you’d be willing to talk to me about it.’
Shion looked interested. ‘Is this something you’ve been told to ask me by the diplomats?’ she queried.
‘Yes and no,’ Alex answered frankly. ‘This is, in fact, one of the reasons they wanted you to go to Canelon, hoping to build the relationship to the point where they felt it appropriate to ask you these questions.’
‘But that’s silly!’ Shion said, quite taken aback. ‘If they want to know things, why don’t they just ask? If I don’t know or I can’t say, I’ll say so, and so long as that’s accepted, no problem!’
‘I did tell them that,’ Alex agreed. ‘But they are, you know, walking on their eyebrows, so anxious not to jeopardise the relationship that it all seems very delicate and sensitive to them. Me, I know you better.’ He smiled. ‘And this is me, okay, asking because I want to know as much as I can about that situation before I go into it on operations. I will, obviously, be sharing that information with Admiral Harangay, and he will pass anything relevant on to the Diplomatic Corps.’
That had been agreed at the presidential meeting. Ambassador Gerard had apologised to Shion, too, for the offence that their well intentioned but clumsy diplomatic efforts had caused her. They would, he’d assured her, back off and give her space – an unintentional pun there from the groundsider – and would no longer be looking over Skipper von Strada’s shoulder, either, or trying to manage his care of her. He had asked, though, that Alex continue to provide records of discussions with her, in just the same way as he sent other logs to the First Lord, and that she give her permission for Admiral Harangay to share information with them. Shion had agreed to that readily, and smiled, now, clearly not considering that to be an issue.
‘I don’t mind, so long as they’re not trying to drag or nag me off the ship,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know how much I can tell you that will be of any use, and I do know that you won’t like it.’
Alex gave her a startled look.
‘Superstitions,’ she explained. ‘I haven’t said anything because I know you don’t like people talking about jinxes. But when I realised where Novamas actually is...’ she touched her shoulders one after the other in the gesture indicating regret. ‘Strange, isn’t it, how folk memory preserves things, that even today spacers know what a terrible, haunted world Novamas is, even if they’ve forgotten why.’
‘Ah.’ Alex sat back, picking up his coffee and looking at her thoughtfully. He had, of course, been intending to ask her about Gide, but any insight into why spacers were so superstitious about going to Novamas could be useful, too. ‘Please...’ he gestured for her to carry on, and she did so.
‘I didn’t realise at first,’ she explained. ‘Your star charts are so different. We don’t have any star charts on Pirrell. The only map of the stars I know is the ceiling in the Hall of Grief, a memorial to the lost civilisations of the Falling. And that’s, you know, symbolic, not a detailed chart, it only shows inhabited worlds and their relationship to one another is shown in a very much flattened relief, so it took me a while to realise that your Novamas is actually Alar, one of the lost worlds of the Falling. The Keepers of the Hall have told me the stories so many times, and there is a statue, too, of an Alari, in the garden of memory. They were a beautiful people, ancient and tranquil, known for their poetry. Alari was a garden world – highly advanced technologically, but with a lifestyle not very different from the one we have on Pirrell. Their homes would have been forcefield generated, their climate micro-controlled, all their needs provided for by automated systems, but the essence of their lifestyle, the elegant homes and beautiful gardens, was the same. They were a sistering world of ours, from the same genetic roots, a common homeworld millions of years in the past.
‘And then, of course, there was the Falling. Plague took them very fast. They were one of the first worlds to become infected. They had already made the decision not to engineer a survival genome. Like many of the other nineteen peoples who made that decision, they felt it was too cruel a burden to put on such children, to leave them fighting for survival in such a devasted world. Others, forgive me, felt that it would be a hollow mockery of what they were, to leave such distorted versions of the people they had been. For the Alari, it was a decision made in compassion, feeling that it would be too terrible a legacy to pass to their children. They fell within weeks. The plague was airborne, anyone infected died within hours. They died in such numbers they could not deal with the dead, just had to leave them in their homes. When it became clear that there was a hundred per cent mortality and no hope left, the last few hundred of them gathered together and took their own lives, so that none would have to face the horror of being the last one alive on their world. The last message they sent out was, ‘The petals are falling. We go into peace. Let our being be remembered.’’
Alex put his coffee down. You could not, if you were any kind of human being, sit drinking coffee while listening to a story like that. He felt cold, and grief welled up in him, too, for those long-ago dead of Alar.
‘They set their world’s systems to self destruct.’ Shion said. ‘Alar was an ice world when they settled it, but it had been warmed for millennia by their climate controls. As they died, they deactivated that. Your people know that. The evidence of a warm climate suddenly transforming within a very few years into a frozen world is written in the geology of the world you call Novamas. Your scientists debate all manner of theories about what might have caused such catastrophic climate change, but it does not seem to occur to them that the real reason for it was the deactivation of climate controls. Or if it does, those theories don’t get published in scientific journals. But that is what happened, skipper, the ancient of Alar fell and the ice closed over their world. And then, eight thousand years later, your explorers arrived and within a few years, began establishing a colony there.
‘I do not believe the Alari would have welcomed that. The mining, the cities, the pollution, all that would have
horrified them. And if as we believe, a living world is more than the sum of its biomass, some essence of the Alari remains, a memory of them in the planet itself. I do not think that your people are welcome there, skipper. And they have forgotten the Alari, haven’t they? They pay no respect to the civilisation that was there before, there are no memorials, no grace, in this rude invasion of the Alari’s tomb. It does not surprise me that your people feel uneasy about going there. Spacers, I mean. Spacers seem to remember far more than groundsiders. Perhaps it’s the oral tradition, sharing folk memories between worlds and keeping them alive.’
Alex nodded. There were, he knew, myths of an ancient people having lived on Novamas, though the name of the Alari had been forgotten. It was not given any kind of scientific credibility, though. Most worlds had some kind of myth of a lost civilisation, after all, generally explained as a distortion of some natural disaster overcoming a Dark Age settlement.
‘Thank you,’ he said, soberly. ‘And thank you for not sharing that story with the crew, Shion. Even I find it profoundly disturbing. But you’re all right, are you, about going to Novamas, yourself?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, calmly. ‘I’m glad of the opportunity to go there, skipper. I can remember and honour the Alari, as they deserve. I would like to raise a stone for them, if that is possible, a simple monument in some quiet place.’
‘I will make sure that you can,’ Alex promised. Whatever his own views might be on the issue of lingering spirits, he was entirely at one with Shion on the matter of honouring the dead. ‘Tell me what you want, and I’ll see that it’s organised, all right?’
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