XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  Alex smiled again at the appreciative buzz that went up round the ship. He had, he knew, gained a valuable political ally, in Terese Machet. And a good friend, too.

  As always, though, his thoughts were focussed primarily on the job in hand. They had to complete their own task at Penrys by taking fuel aboard for onward transit to Novamas. This was nothing like as dangerous as transferring fuel into the Ignite missile. Here, the fuel was in containment units and would remain so, fully powered up throughout the transfer. Any ship, in fact, could carry such units, provided they had the necessary transport systems. At the request of the Novamasian government, however, superlight fuel in transit to their world was always carried by the Fleet. This was actually part of their deeply held belief that their world had a high risk of piracy around it. One of the ships that had gone missing in that region had, indeed, had a cargo of fuel aboard, though that was more than a century ago. Since then, however, the Novamasians had made so much fuss about the high risk of transporting such immensely valuable fuel through their region that the Fleet had, eventually, given in to pressure and agreed to carry fuel to Novamas on their own ships. It only needed a ship to make the run every year or so, after all, since Novamas didn’t have ship-building spacedocks and very little need for superlight fuel.

  The fifty eight containers they were taking them were duly brought aboard and slotted into the storage units in the hold. As soon as that was done, the Heron departed, themselves, cruising off towards Novamas but moving away from the main shipping route.

  They would be running off-route, now, out on their own. That had already been planned, long ago, when their orders were drawn up. The original intention, after all, had been for them not to be briefed on the Gide situation until they reached Penrys, so this time had been allowed for them to make plans and train up ready for the mission. That wasn’t really necessary now but Dix had told Alex to stick with the orders as given. The Fourth, as he observed, had a talent for getting into major operations even on the most routine patrol, and he didn’t want them being distracted or diverted by drug runners, pirates, banshee-haunted starseekers or anything else. Besides, he’d said, he was sure that Alex could make constructive use of the time.

  So, they turned away from ISiS Penrys and headed out, far from shipping lanes, towards Tolmer’s Drift.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The next day, Alex was working in his daycabin, puzzling over reports about the Novamas Jinx that were just part of the mass of files they’d collected at Penrys.

  He did not believe in the jinx as a jinx, for one moment. The phenomena ships experienced while in port at Novamas were well documented, though. They were commonly experienced when ships were in perihelion with Novamas itself, their orbits at the closest point to the planet. Alex was not the first spacer to recognise, too, that all the phenomena reported –hatches opening by themselves, systems glitching, even vibration and hull-noise – were of a kind routinely, normally, rationally to be expected when a ship was in a superlight acceleration field. Novamas’s launch and deceleration tunnel had been investigated several times, on theories that it was somehow misfiring and generating high energy fields that were affecting ships in orbit. The band of space within the system where most incidents were reported had also been surveyed in case there was some dirty-space phenomena there, a twist in multidimensional space causing a microscopic wave-space vortex. The wave space topography within the system had been found to be abnormal, but abnormally flat rather than distorted, and flat space should not interfere with ship’s systems in any way at all. The large and energetic magnetosphere of Novamas itself had also been considered as a suspect – it was generated by a large molten core, unusually large for a planet of that type and age. There was no way that a magnetosphere could cause effects like that of a superlight field accelerator, though.

  Having ruled out, as they said, all possible scientific basis for the phenomena that spacers reported, therefore, the Novamasian authorities had decided, long ago, that there were no such phenomena. It was all, they said, a matter of mass hysteria, minor technical problems being exaggerated and interpreted in irrational beliefs about supernatural causes, perpetuated by the spacers themselves spreading such beliefs and fears.

  Alex knew how that went, once belief in a jinx had been established, and understood entirely why the hard-headed Novamasians had come to that conclusion. He also, however, had a meticulously documented incident on his desk, highly classified but indisputably authentic. A Fleet destroyer, the Predator, had been visiting the system a hundred and twenty four years previously on a courtesy visit and fuel run. As they had passed Novamas, the entire ship had shivered, several lights had popped and a low groan had sounded from the hull. Many of the highly trained Fleet crew had panicked, which was one of the reasons the incident was classified. Full investigation had revealed that the ship had indeed vibrated just as if it was being subjected to a strong superlight acceleration field. It had been discovered, too, that the sense of overwhelming dread that many of the crew had experienced, even the sense of a terrifying presence on the ship, was due to infrasound, the ship vibrating at the wavelength known to cause that kind of fear.

  That did not happen, Alex knew, without good, solid, physical reason. There was some kind of energy being generated around that planet, something strong enough to vibrate starships, and something that had been going on for hundreds of years, too.

  Perhaps, Alex felt, even as long as ten thousand. He didn’t believe in curses, but he did know that ancient civilisations had had far more powerful technology than anything humans had yet achieved. He also knew about the Veil, at Pirrell, a system that turned back starships by slowly increasing vibration in them as they got nearer to the system. He had an idea, so speculative he hadn’t even formed it into a definite theory even in his own mind. He’d been hoping for some kind of clue in the records of investigations, but it was clear that the Novamasians had never really taken the claims of spacers seriously, and even the Fleet-funded investigations had petered out long ago, unable to find a scientific explanation.

  ‘You wanted me, skipper?’ Shion looked through the door a couple of minutes after Alex had sent a message asking for her to report to his daycabin.

  ‘I do, yes.’ He gestured her to a chair and she sat down, looking interested. ‘I have something I’d like to run by you,’ he said. ‘A theory. It sounds utterly bonkers but it’s the only thing I can come up with that seems to fit, and I’d really appreciate your opinion – without, in any way, asking you to reveal any aspect of Veil technology, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, looking very interested then, and settling herself to listen. ‘Shoot.’

  ‘I think,’ said Alex, ‘that the physical phenomena spacers have and are interpreting as ‘jinx’ may be explained by the presence of some kind of alarm or warning beacon, related to the fall of the Alari, perhaps a plague beacon, warning ships that the planet is contaminated with plague. I think that beacon may be somewhere on Novamas, perhaps deep under the ice, but triggered by some means to buzz starships on particular proximity orbits. Do you think that’s possible, Shion, that technology from back then could still be there, and functional?’

  Shion nodded, without hesitation. ‘Ours is,’ she pointed out, which was what Alex had realised, himself. ‘And the beacon thing, yes, I know that was sometimes done – that’s part of the Point Zero story, that they moved stars to seal it away for all time, with a beacon that would call out plague, plague, plague to any ship that tried to pass. But if it’s the same kind of thing...’ she hesitated, and looked at him, ‘can we go totally off the record, skipper?’

  Alex considered. There was no place on the ship that wasn’t on the passive recording system. There was, however, just one way around that. He took a comp from his pocket and set it so that its contents could not be read by the ever-present cameras, and handed it to her with an encouraging nod. Shion looked at the settings, wrote briefly and handed it back to him.

 
; ‘If it’s the same kind of system as ours,’ Alex read, ‘it won’t be on the planet. It will be in the star.’

  Alex looked at her and understood, straight away and entirely, why it was that Shion had said that her people could not share the Veil technology with others. It had nothing to do with preserving it for their own protection. It was, quite simply, that they themselves either did not know how it worked, or could not gain access to it. Even the best tech that humans had could not survive within a star, and the Pirrellothians had nothing more sophisticated than hydrogen motors.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, knowing what huge trust she was placing in him with that information. He did not ask her if she had any ideas on how it might be deactivated. The question ‘Can you tell me how to deactivate the defence systems that are the only thing protecting your world?’ was just not something that should be asked of any officer, of any citizen.

  ‘Welcome,’ she said, just as succinctly, and nodded thanks as she saw him carry out a total obliteration delete on the message she’d written.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘If it is the case that we’re dealing with an ancient quarantine beacon, which we obviously are not going to find and wouldn’t even begin to know how to deactivate even if we did, we’ll have to work on the basis of keeping ships out of the affected area.’

  Shion nodded. It would be no use, after all, going to all the trouble of laying the jinx with a ceremony to appease spacer beliefs, if they then continued to experience just the same very alarming phenomena.

  ‘That’s the only thing you can do, really,’ she agreed.

  ‘Okay – thanks.’ Alex said, but grinned at her then as she would have got up to leave. ‘Second thing, then...’ Shion laughed, as she could see that he was joking, there, being so casual-cool about the ancient quarantine beacon still buzzing ships that came too close to the lost Alari world. ‘I have,’ he told her, ‘twenty eight thousand files of governmental records going back nearly three hundred and fifty years, to the first recorded dispute between the Fleet and Novamasian Senate over allegations of piracy. Even our précis software can’t crunch that down to anything like manageable points, so I could really use a hand with some very fast multi-tasking data analysis.’

  Shion beamed. She didn’t get many opportunities to work at full intellectual stretch, and Alex had known she’d enjoy this. He explained exactly what he needed and left her to it, leaving her the use of the daycabin so that she could concentrate. She was working eight screens simultaneously as he left, and humming happily to herself as he closed the door.

  ‘There you go, skipper,’ It was three and a half hours later that Shion emerged, passing a file onto the desk-screens he had in front of him. She had condensed the governmental records into just sixteen pages of bullet-point notes, each referenced to sources. It would have taken a team of ten trained analysts at least a week to do that, working flat out, but Alex gave her the smile and thanks that he would give to any officer for a busy but routine afternoon’s work.

  ‘Nothing jumped out at you?’ he queried, and she shook her head, giving that quick, light touch to her shoulders that her people used to signify regret.

  ‘Sorry, no, skipper.’

  Nothing jumped out at Alex, either, when he read through her notes, and some of the source materials referenced. He learned quite a bit he hadn’t known before, particularly about the early history of the dispute, but nothing that made any sense of why the Novamasian Senate, over hundreds of years and so many changes of government, remained absolutely, obstinately convinced that they were losing ships to alien piracy.

  He passed the file to Murg Atwood, hoping that she might see something in it he couldn’t.

  Seventeen hours later, she got back to him.

  ‘Skipper! I’ve got it!’ Alex was roused from sleep by the voice emerging from his bunk’s com-panel. He could see, blinking at it, that it was Murg Atwood calling. He could also see that it was 0437. ‘I’ve cracked it!’ Murg gabbled, half crowing with delight, ‘I’ll meet you on the command deck!’

  Alex got up, pulled on a uniform and walked to the command deck. Murg was already there, practically hopping up and down in her excitement. She looked awful. Her hair was a mess, her eyes were red-rimmed and her cheeks were unhealthily flushed. She was also speaking so fast that she was barely coherent.

  ‘It’s the whisky file,’ she told him, before Alex could even greet her. Then she gave a manic laugh, babbling on, ‘Culture shock – every seven years, wham! Shadow raider!’

  ‘Murg.’ Alex spoke to her calmly, quite firmly. He might actually have thought she was drunk, if he hadn’t recognised the signs. ‘Go take a shower, do some breathing exercises and calm down,’ he instructed. ‘And do not, not have any more coffee.’

  Murg gave another manic, hilarious laugh, but saluted.

  ‘Back in ten minutes!’ she acknowledged.

  ‘Fifteen,’ said Alex, and she laughed again as she hurtled away.

  Very, who was holding the nightwatch, stared after her for a moment and then looked back at the skipper, quite stunned.

  ‘Triple-caffeine espressos,’ Alex informed him. ‘With four sugars.’

  ‘Ah.’ Very grinned, since he had been genuinely concerned, there, that the petty officer might be intoxicated. She was certainly on quite a buzz, but not an illegal one, so he relaxed.

  Murg was calmer when she returned, showered and neat and apologising, then, for having woken the skipper.

  ‘I didn’t realise the time,’ she admitted, sitting down at his invitation.

  ‘That’s all right,’ Alex said, and looked encouraging. ‘I’m intrigued.’

  ‘Oh.’ She composed herself, opening files and embarking on a far more professional briefing. It took some time. She’d spent hours going through files, starting with the précis points that Shion had created, following leads through the forest of documents like a hunter tracking spoor. She had gone, as Alex had himself, right back to the first recorded incidence of dispute between the Fleet and the Novamasian Senate over the reason for a ship’s disappearance, the incident that had set the pattern for that repeated argument going on with every ship disappearance since.

  ‘And it is a repeating pattern,’ she told him. ‘Over and over again, the same things said both in public claims of piracy and secret correspondence saying they believe their world to be experiencing alien incursion. Over and over again, the same pattern of fear from them responded to by reassurance from the Diplomatic Corps, the Fleet and the Senate. It may seem to be okay again then for a while but then, kablam, back it comes – and it only comes back when a new system president is elected, there, a pattern repeated every time there’s a first time president. I believe that it’s the whisky file that scares them witless.’

  It had been Terese Machet who’d told them it was called that, the file that newly elected officials were handed to brief them on exodiplomacy matters. It was called the whisky file because political myth had it that the official who gave that file to the newly elected president traditionally put a glass of whisky on the desk at the same time.

  In fact, as Terese had told them, they would be more likely to have a first-aider present in case the politician had a panic attack. And that wasn’t a joke, either. It could be really, seriously overwhelming for someone who’d stood for election to their city council on some issue of local concern, thinking that the most important thing they were going to have to deal with was arguing over allocation of city budgets, to find themselves being handed an exodiplomacy briefing file. Most, even at national and system senate level, would refuse to believe it, the classic initial response of denial, thinking it had to be some kind of ‘wind up the newbie’ prank. Once they realised it was for real, there would be anger, often a lot of anger, fuelled by fear, demands to know why this was being kept from the people, why they’d never been told this before. Later would come acceptance, understanding of the need to prevent wholesale panic, and the adopting of a political view about it all.
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  ‘Yes,’ Alex said. ‘But the Diplomatic Corps does that – city, national and system level briefings just the same as any other world in the League.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Murg agreed. ‘But Novamas is unusually isolated, socially. Hardly any spacers go there and the ones who do are pushed pretty firmly into staying away from the population. They have no tourist trade to speak of and one of the lowest uptakes of offworld news and entertainment of any world in the League. There’s no continuity of relationship with League representatives, either – no ambassador or port admiral has ever remained in post there for more than eight years, and most of them don’t even make five. Nine out of ten of them are told to leave by the System Senate, too, exercising their right to demand a replacement. So it occurs to me, you know, these people, so isolated, who are they going to talk to about this scary stuff they get told in the whisky file? And I do think it hits them a lot harder, you know, than it would people on any other world.

  ‘They’re groundhogs, for a start, very much groundhogs on Novamas. It’s a local idiom, many sayings on the theme of ‘those who look at the floor find diamonds, those who look at the sky find lamp posts.’, meaning,’ she mimed walking with head tilted back and walking into a lamp post, bam.

  ‘That’s a big part of their culture, to focus on the real, feet on the ground, very much focussed towards the ground, in all sorts of ways. They were originally a mining colony, of course, and it seems deeply ingrained, the idea that things of value are to be found by looking down, digging, hard work. Their education system is geared by that, too – I’ve checked, and their astrography curriculum is even more pathetic than most League worlds. Students are required to know where Chartsey is and to know the main exports and names of continents on Canelon, and that’s it, sir, really is. There is no chair of astrography at the system university, just not enough students to support one so it comes under space sciences.