XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

‘So, you know, Senator Blob, born on a world where looking at the sky is regarded as silly time wasting, goes to a school where learning about other worlds means watching holos about Chartsey and colouring in a map of Canelon, goes to college and then uni, where space-sciences are the loony fringe subjects, works in a good solid ground-staring job for twenty years, becoming more active in politics, ends up being selected by his party and standing for election, gets in, takes his seat in the System Senate. It’s the proudest day of his life. When Novamasians talk about ‘the senate’ they mean their government. Chartsey is so remote to them, in every sense, when they talk about that, they call it the Chartsey Senate, not even the League Senate, to them, it’s oh, way off out there, nothing really even to do with them.

  ‘So, Senator Blob takes his oath and has settled into his lovely new office and he gets The Visit from the diplomats, special briefing, first aider on standby, and it’s at that point that he finds out, only at that point, that his world is just weeks away from a barrier where our ships get turned around by unknown aliens and technology beyond our understanding. Seriously sir, honestly, Firewall awareness there amongst the general population is virtually zero. If you talk about the Firewall to most Novamasians they’ll think you’re talking about computer security. The culture shock of hearing about it like that is extreme. Denial, anger, confusion, they’re tearing down all his comfortable certainties and giving him huge, huge ideas to deal with, and fear, too, real gut-wrenching fear. The Diplomats make sure they’re not actually going to have a heart attack, give them a reassuring little talk, and leave.

  ‘Who do they turn to, then, to talk about it? Other Senators, obviously. And that’s when I think this shadow raider comes in, the belief they have that the aliens are coming through the Firewall and attacking their ships. And that makes sense, too, looking back, when you look at where the Abigale was lost, at one of the closest points to the Firewall that our shipping goes.’

  ‘Oh,’ Alex said, and as he thought about the Abigale case in that light, ‘Oh!’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Murg agreed, seeing that leap as he too saw the situation from a Novamasian perspective. The Fleet enquiry had not been able to determine why the Abigale transport, carrying miners and their families out to the newly establishing works at Tolmer’s Drift, had veered off course and crashed into nebula. The most likely cause, the investigation had decided, was faulty astrogation.

  ‘If they believe that was an alien attack...’ Alex said.

  ‘Well, the thought occurs, doesn’t it?’ Murg replied. ‘And imagine how terrifying for the Novamasians, to lose a ship like that, and believe it was destroyed by aliens. There’s your root for the fear that has just embedded deeper with every ship that’s been lost, since. We can tell them till we’re blue in the face that they do not, statistically, lose any more ships than any other sector of space, once risk factors are adjusted, but they’re the ones living with the Firewall looming over them, and known exo-glimpses, too. The biggest ships we know of have been glimpsed in this sector, even allowing for bewilderment and exaggeration. To poor old Senator Blob, it must seem like they’re just sitting there, totally unprotected and vulnerable to aliens picking off their ships and perhaps even threatening their world. The Fleet’s denial and refusal to give them a major task squadron must seem like brutal abandonment to them.’

  Alex nodded, having picked up that sense from the records and even current communications, the deep sense of grievance from the Novamasians that the Fleet was refusing to help.

  ‘But are we seriously suggesting here, I mean, seriously, that this has just gone on and on, for centuries, with the Novamasians convincing one another that they’re under alien attack and refusing to believe all assurances to the contrary?’

  ‘But that’s just it, you see, skipper – that’s why it’s so confusing,’ Murg explained. ‘There have clearly been times when the Novamasians have accepted central government assurances and it’s been okay for a few years, but then a new president gets elected and bammo, the fear factor is back. I think it’s culture shock, over and over.’

  Alex remembered what Terese had taught him, in leading him patiently through the basics of Senate operations.

  ‘It all comes down to people, in the end,’ he observed, and having thought about it for a minute, nodded. ‘You’re right, it does make sense of a lot of things. Interesting, Murg.’ He smiled at her. ‘Thank you. We’ll talk about this more, for sure, on the way. But for right now, you are going to go to bed and you are not even going to think about work until after lunch, understood?’ He saw an oh, but sir... look on her face and grinned. ‘It’s that,’ he told her, ‘or I will unleash Dr Tekawa, and if he gets you it’ll be a twenty five hour stand down order.’

  ‘I’m gone!’ Murg said, getting up hastily. ‘G’night, skipper!’

  Alex went back to bed himself, after she’d gone, though he didn’t go back to sleep. He just lay there, thinking, going through what Murg had told him. If she was right – and he felt instinctively that she was – then that had major implications for the approach that he would have to take at Novamas. Plans were turning over in his mind – possibilities, opportunities, allies and opponents, points at which pressure would have to be applied. Then, as his thinking clarified into a single coordinated picture, he smiled to himself and got up, heading for the shower.

  This, he thought, was going to be fun.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Alex said, as astrogation screens greyed out, ‘we are back in the Beyond.’

  That got a cheer, mostly amused, some ironic, but just a brief, casual cheer, crew just going right on then with their work or other conversations. All of them, though, were keeping half an eye on view-screens. This was their second day in Abigale Alley, and the point at which they had turned off the established course to Van Damek an alternative route.

  Being close up to nebula was rarely very scenic – the real glory of nebula was seen from a distance, vibrant colours lit by inner stars and stellar nurseries. Up this close it was often quite dull, formless cloud. The Crown, for one, only looked like a crown from Canelon, and only then to observers who’d already been told what it was supposed to resemble. It wasn’t even a big or important nebula, hardly more than a scrap in astronomical terms, barely three hundred light years across, an emission nebula of gas and dust being ionised by a cluster of young stars. They were skirting through the fringes of the nebula to get to Tolmer’s Drift, which was itself part of an older cluster. From this route, the swirl of the crown and the bright jewel of its lighting-cluster were to port and slightly above them.

  One of the reasons they had chosen this particular traverse, however, was its scenic potential. And they were, within hours, at the first of the viewpoints, Buzz drawing the crew’s attention to it with a joking tour-guide ‘Ladies and gentlemen, if you would care to look at the port view-screens...’

  There were delighted sounds across the ship, even a scattering of applause, as they saw the first scenic feature that they would be allowed to name. It was a ribbon of nebula, not visible from the Abigale route and not even visible to external view, either. Like other features within the nebula, it had been modelled using data from radio and electron-telescope arrays. Nobody had ever actually seen it till now, or if they had, they hadn’t logged the traverse.

  They enjoyed the feature for the next three hours. It changed, slowly, as their own perspective shifted. The strand was a golden colour, backlit by a bright yellow star. At first it looked like a long-necked bird, then shifted into something more resembling a dragon, before finally ending up looking like a fish. So Shion said, anyway. What other people thought it looked like was limited only by their own imagination. Shion, however, had been given the honour of naming this feature, either by choosing one of the suggestions made on the open note-board, or coming up with a name of her own. In the event, it was logged onto the charts as ‘The Lion’, a suggestion from one of the crew.

  L
ater that evening, too, they performed the ritual of tipping their hats to Abigale. This was not spacer superstition. It was tradition, a very different thing, and a courtesy, too, honouring the lost. Abigale was the mining ship lost in a disaster here more than four hundred years ago, and all spacers would perform the tipping ritual as they passed this point, just as they would roll their ships in passing a certain point at the Carotis, honouring Van Damek himself.

  They were passing the memorial on the far side of a curtain of nebula, so couldn’t actually see the memorial satellite there. They marked the point, though, as equivalent to where the ritual would happen if they were on the usual route, and carried it out, too, with all due respect. All hands stopped what they were doing and stood quietly, if not to attention, while they tilted the ship twenty degrees from normal plane of orientation, then at the order ‘All hands salute’ they gave the last resting place of the hundreds lost in that disaster a salute and respectful few seconds of silence. Then Martine said, ‘As you were’ and the crew went back to work, the ship coming back up straight.

  This was important, not just as a matter of honouring a lost starship, but because spacers themselves would certainly feel very strongly about abandoning the old route if that meant they were no longer paying their respects.

  Then they went on their way, naming other features as they passed, and in the final stages of training for the work they’d do at Tolmer’s Drift.

  This was bizarre, as Shion commented.

  ‘I can’t imagine that there’s any precedent in the regular Fleet for training crew to go on the bar and tell stories,’ she observed, seeing that some of the crew were, indeed, rehearsing this on mess deck one, role-playing storyteller and audience. There was even a script, for this, or at least, a list of key points and vocabulary that the storytellers had to include. The star, in this, without a doubt, was Ali Jezno. He was already regarded as the ship’s best storyteller, and his reputation went far beyond the ship, too. Alex had asked him to undertake one of the most important parts of the mission they’d be carrying out here, and the crew was helping him to prepare for that by role-playing miners and spacers in a bar, noisy and heckling.

  ‘You think not?’ Buzz picked Shion up on that comment, with a smile she’d come to recognise, making her laugh.

  ‘Uh-oh!’ she lamented, accessing a screen and getting to work. It took her only seconds to find that there was, indeed, Fleet precedent for this, though it was so heavily disguised in official euphemism that it needed a keen eye to recognise ‘Dissemination via oral networks’ as ‘ask the crew to tell people about it in spacer bars’.

  ‘The significant difference here is that it is done openly,’ Buzz informed her. ‘The Fleet has always used that means of disseminating information they want to get out in the spacer domain. It’s just that, customarily, that’s done with discretion. On another ship, in similar circumstances, the skipper would have asked me to have a quiet word with Mr Jezno, with nothing said about that publicly. Here, though, with our open-command policy, it’s on record, full knowledge, everyone involved.’

  They certainly were. Every member of the crew was enthusiastically involved in preparing for their operations here, at Novamas and at the Firewall. Everyone cheered as they emerged from their Van Damek to rejoin the established route. Then there was another cheer an hour or so later, when they came upon the first ship they’d met since leaving Penrys. It was an ore carrier, big, old and ugly, never going anywhere but between Tolmer’s and Novamas. It hailed them with delight – excited yells from the skipper and crew, amazement, they’d thought the Fourth was going straight to Novamas.

  ‘We’ve got a thing, at Tolmer’s.’ Martine told them, which got an even more excited gabble.

  ‘A thing? What thing?’ A second voice cut in, wildly hopeful, ‘You blowin’ somethin’ up?’

  ‘Just a thing,’ Martine said, deliberately mysterious, and giving Buzz a grin – that ‘we’ve got a thing’ line had been his suggestion. ‘Come on back and see, if you’ve got the time.’

  The Mineral Enterprise took nine and a half minutes to do a one-eighty turn, and even at best speed could only waddle at L6. The Heron, however, dropped down to keep pace with them, remaining in friendly, comms-range distance.

  By the time they arrived at the system they’d picked up three more ships that had been heading out, too, but had turned back to follow the frigate back into port. Spacers were rarely on such tight schedules that a few days here or there would matter, and they weren’t going to miss ‘the thing’, whatever it might be.

  Arriving at the system was quite a thing in itself. Those of the Heron’s crew who’d never seen a system being mined before were just flabbergasted by it.

  ‘I thought I knew what to expect,’ Shion said, expressing a reaction felt by many, ‘I’ve seen holos, documentaries, even pictures of this place. But look at it! Just look!’

  Alex nodded agreement. He had seen a mining operation before, in a passing visit to a Drift system aboard another ship, but it had been nothing like on this scale. Tolmer’s Drift had been drift-mined for more than four hundred years, with ever-more powerful machinery as technology advanced. The comet cloud was gone. An estimated two hundred million orbital bodies had been crunched up from the comet cloud alone – that, in mining terms, was easy pickings. They were mostly small, few much bigger than kilometres across, and many were hardly more than dirty ice, too. An interior asteroid belt had gone the same way. So had any moon smaller than a hundred klicks across, the rings of two planets that had had them, and roaming meteor swarms.

  They were now in the process of demolishing larger moons and plutoids, as technology had advanced sufficiently to make these workable. Scavenge-mining was also going on, working through the debris from previous mining to find minerals that might not have been detected or extractable by earlier technology.

  To call it a massive operation was an understatement. There were just no words big enough to encompass the wholesale destruction that had gone on and was going on in that system. And yet it was, strangely, beautiful. The debris from all that destruction was now just gas and dust, but it had formed rings – huge, glorious rings around the star, gleaming with reflected light. Those rings, in fact, were being formed by the mining operations, too – close focus in revealed the presence of many automated, bulky satellites, powerful gravity generators orbiting within the system, policing the debris into rings. Others, even more powerful, were in geostationary orbits, attracting dust and debris to them, forming planetismal sized clumps for the processing units to crunch up again. There were thousands of machines at work, perhaps tens of thousands, some of them as big as the Heron itself. The scale of it, viewed from long orbit, was just mind blowing.

  It had a very well developed system infrastructure, too. This was not some smash and grab operation; the Consortium had been here for centuries and they intended to be here for many centuries more, so they’d put in a great deal of investment. Consortium Tower, their headquarters, was a major space station in itself, with accommodation for several thousand staff and immense tech and workshop sections. There were no less than twenty six ground-bases around the system, too, many of them also active mining operations on the planets themselves.

  There were fourteen ships in orbit when the Fourth arrived – pretty typical for Tolmer’s Drift, and certainly far more than there would be at Novamas. Eight of the fourteen ships here, and three of the four that had turned around to come back with them, were freighters that had come here rather than go to Novamas itself. The others, like the Mineral Enterprise, were company ships, hauling ore to Novamas. They carried other freight back and forth, too, taking cargo from the freighters that came this far, though they didn’t bring much in the way of cargo back out to them. There wasn’t much export trade from Novamas. Generally, freighters brought high tech goods here and went away laden with minerals.

  Knowing that, though, even being able to recite trade figures from here and from Novamas, d
id not compare to the reality of seeing those ships here, in port, dumping out their cargos to the Freight Yard. This was not a yard of any kind, but an area of space designated for storage of cargo containers awaiting transport to Novamas.

  There had to be, even at a conservative estimate, at least fifteen thousand pieces of cargo, there, ranging from full sized shipping containers to great reams of crates hanging off enormous tethers. A freighter was there right then, adding to the pile. It was in superlight orbit, with cargo shuttles zipping back and forth, going superlight to take the crates the cargomaster was offloading, then decelerating to drop them into the yard. All systems had such areas, they were a routine and necessary part of cargo handling. But this was not cargo that would be taken planet-side by air-freight within a few hours or days. Some of this had been here for months.

  Alex looked at that, knowing what it represented for Novamasian industries waiting for that technology and supplies to arrive. No, he thought, the Novamasians were not being unreasonable in complaining about this. It was, indeed, stifling their trade and economy.

  He didn’t say anything, though. He was signalling greetings to Consortium Tower, requesting permission to enter system orbit. This was a pure technicality since they already had entered long orbit, but it was polite, and a necessary formality before they could launch shuttles.

  Permission was given with huge enthusiasm.

  ‘We were hoping you’d come, though we weren’t expecting you for a couple of months!’ A man in very old overalls, looking like he hadn’t had a shave for days or a haircut for months, hailed them joyfully. He introduced himself as Roby – fortunately, the autocall information displayed made it apparent that he was Robart Escalier, Chair of the Consortium Executive Board. They might have thought, otherwise, that he was just some random miner calling to say hi. ‘And it’s on my watch, yay!’ he crowed, and told them, rather than asked, ‘Come to dinner! We’ll throw you a right good bash!’