It was just not in him to be conciliatory, though.
‘You’ll get your report,’ he snapped. ‘When I’ve carried out a proper investigation.’
He meant ‘once I’ve thought of an excuse’, as Alex understood, but he answered only with a cold, ‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Very well.’ The port admiral was feeling strangely derailed, aware that control in this situation had somehow passed from him to Alex, yet not entirely sure how that had happened. There was certainly nothing, not even an allegation of dumb insolence, that he could accuse Alex of. Any review of the recording of this meeting would show Alex conducting himself with impeccable formal courtesy. Deprived even of being able to rebuke him for his attitude, the admiral glowered even more. ‘So, what do you have to say for yourself?’ he demanded, prodding again, expecting Alex to attempt to justify himself.
‘Sir?’ Alex queried, as if mildly perplexed.
‘I asked you what you think you’re playing at, inciting this ludicrous defiance amongst the spacers,’ the admiral reminded him, sharply. ‘And I’m waiting for you to explain yourself, von Strada!’
‘I regret, sir, that I am unable to do so,’ Alex responded. ‘The nature of my orders being such that I am not at liberty to disclose them to you, all I may do in response to your concerns is to assure you that they have been duly noted.’
Alford Vickers took such a deep breath that his chest swelled.
‘You are not telling me,’ he snarled, ‘that this stupid, embarrassing expletive mob demanding changes of parking orbit is covered by your XD-317 orders!’
Alex looked him right in the eyes.
‘Yes, sir, I am,’ he said, and it was clear that that was all he was going to say, too.
‘All that stupid talk of expletive ghosts and jinxes?’ The Admiral was as incredulous now as he was angry. ‘You’re not telling me that anyone in high command or government is taking that seriously?’
Alex did not point out that the Fleet themselves had a long-standing safety order on the books, defining the inner orbit as ‘anomalous space’ they would not put their own ships into. He merely resumed his neutral-gaze stance and said in a flat voice, ‘I regret I am not at liberty to discuss the details of my mission, sir.’
That was perfectly correct, and the exact form of words the Fleet themselves recommended officers to use if a superior asked them about orders or matters they were duty-bound not to reveal. It was not to be expected, though, that Alford Vickers would merely accept it. He spent several minutes telling Alex that there could be no possible justification for his exodiplomacy orders regardless of what they were, and certainly no basis for the stupid expletive beliefs about ghosts and jinxes.
Alex, finding that he was merely repeating rant he’d already ranted earlier, passed the time by wondering just what the port admiral’s reaction would be if he could tell him the truth. It was an entertaining thought. ‘Actually, sir, we have good reason to believe that there is an ancient alien artefact located within the sun here which triggers a warning vibration whenever ships of sufficient size are detected approaching Novamas.’ It would be quite fun, Alex felt, to tell him that, just to see the look on his face.
He certainly wouldn’t believe it, though. Alex had done his homework for this mission very thoroughly, and was aware that Alford Vickers, in all his years of Fleet service, had never undertaken exodiplomacy role. That meant he’d never met Solarans. He would know, of course, that they were visiting League worlds. He would even know about Quarus, a world most people in the League did know about but regarded as a frightening myth. There was certainly no way that he, as a Fleet officer, could not be aware that aliens were real, and that there were many other species believed to be out there, too, as yet unknown. But Alford Vickers was evidently that rare thing, a spacer who thought like a groundsider. Aliens were not part of his personal reality, his everyday experience, so he put them into a little mental box and shoved them away into the most remote storage area in his head. Aliens in theory, out there, remote, okay, he could deal with that. Any suggestion of unknown aliens here and now, though, and he would adopt an attitude of instant denial. That was apparent, even, in his absolute dismissal even of glimpse-encounters in this sector, reported many times over the centuries. The size of the ships reported to have been seen were, in his mind, impossible, therefore they were impossible, therefore he had to find some other explanation for them. He’d reached for the usual ones used by groundsiders to dismiss spacer beliefs – fraud, overactive imaginations and downright intoxication.
Seeing that, Alex couldn’t help wondering whether Alford Vickers had been a good choice for this posting. He understood why Dix had chosen him at the time – a strong, no-nonsense officer like Alford Vickers was a good choice to try to talk sense into the Novamasians. With this region becoming an exodiplomacy hotzone, though, in Dix’s place, Alex would have replaced the port admiral here with someone a great deal more experienced in that.
His attention went back fully to the port admiral, though, as he realised that Alford Vickers was demanding to be told what his intentions were.
‘Or as much of them as you are prepared to disclose,’ he said, with heavy sarcasm.
‘I intend to support the merchant service in their efforts to secure safe parking orbits, sir,’ said Alex, disregarding the derisory snort that the admiral gave at this. ‘I intend to offer the services of my ship and crew to assist the Novamasian authorities with that. I would appreciate, and am formally requesting, your support and that of the Homeworld Squadron in that endeavour.’
Admiral Vickers turned that down, of course, immediately. He spent several minutes telling Alex that he could see no possible justification for such a request, that it would be damaging to his own relationship with the Novamasians to even make such a bizarre request of them, and that he didn’t want the Homeworld Squadron drawn into this outrageous stunt, either. Alex did not point out that Admiral Vickers was defying the First Lord’s own orders to give him every possible support, with that. He could manage perfectly well without the port admiral’s help; would undoubtedly do better without it, in fact. He just didn’t want it to be said, later, that he could have had the port admiral’s full support and assistance if only he’d asked for it. So he just said ‘yes sir’ noncommittally, and stood there politely till the port admiral finally dismissed him after another quarter of an hour of telling him the standards of conduct that he expected him and his crew to maintain while they were within his authority.
Alex had been standing in the port admiral’s office for nearly an hour and a half by the time he left – a further ten minutes had been needed for the admiral to express his opinions again when Alex was obliged to ask for his gun back, pointing out that he was under specific written orders from the First Lord not to go out in public without it.
Those orders did seem unnecessary here – Alex felt them to be so even on those occasions when he was having to go through public areas full of yelling demonstrators and mobs of journalists. Here, passing uneventfully back through a near-deserted concourse, he felt it to be all the more embarrassing. Still, orders were orders.
And the meeting had, on the whole, he felt, gone as well as might be expected.
Chapter Fifteen
Thirty six hours later, the Novamasians agreed to move their parking orbits.
That was not achieved without effort. Neither Alex nor Buzz had been to bed at all, Buzz spending almost all his time on comms while Alex alternated between dealing with comms and mail aboard the ship and going to meetings. Several of those took him groundside, an enlightening experience in itself.
Novamas was a strikingly pretty world, viewed from space. It was roughly two thirds ice, with icecaps extending into the tropics. The broad band of sea between them was a lovely streaky pattern of pink and green – the red bloom of algae and floating seaweeds that dominated the ocean here. Even as you entered the atmosphere, the combination of majestic glaciers and spectacular cloudscape
made for a world of breathtaking beauty.
Then you landed. Coming in on final approach to the planet’s only groundside spaceport gave an ariel view of New Canel, the planet’s capital city. Alex had seen views of it before, both in the official briefing about the system that had come with his orders, and in his own research about it before they’d arrived, but seeing things in person was always a different level of experience.
It was not an attractive city. Like all the inhabited areas of Novamas, it was built on ice which was itself in slow but constant motion. The cities had been built in the most stable parts of the ice cap, but even they were on the move at the rate of nearly a metre a year. Building high-rise on shifting ice was not a good plan, and atmospheric conditions didn’t favour that, either – the same conditions that gave Novamas its beautiful sky-scape of turbulent clouds saw storm-force winds ripping over the surface quite routinely, with hurricane intensity several times a year. No building on Novamas was more than four storeys high, and they were all squat, solidly built with very small windows. There were no streets – going outdoors on Novamas was something most people only ventured on the calmest, mildest days, if indeed they went out at all. The city itself sprawled over several kilometres, with a massive but low-built ore refinery right in the midst of it, surrounded by and linked to other buildings by blocky concrete tubes. These, Alex understood, contained the cross-city transport system of automated cab-car trains. Individual buildings had a tight, cramped air, all up close and joined together. The outside of the buildings was almost all grey concrete, with garish yellow emergency-services landing pads on the roofs of some buildings. The only air traffic was intercity buses, sturdy and powerful, designed to be able to fly even in the most hostile white-out conditions.
It was, apparently, quite a nice day at New Canel when Alex went there for the first time. The temperature was a balmy minus forty five and wind speed was only sixty six kph. The sun was shining, too, though threads of cloud were writhing across the sky in the fast-forward way they did on Novamas. Alex did not have to experience the temperature – part of the shuttle landing procedure was ground taxiing into a reception hangar, with a flexible tube that was extended out to your airlock from a boarding gate.
Once inside the city, Alex got a different perspective on it again. His first impression of the spaceport was that he’d come to an industrial area by mistake. Big, ugly freight cars were passing through the same transit system as passenger pods, leaving behind a slightly sulphurous whiff. The spaceport was also the city’s main bus terminal, with thousands of people passing through it on a complexity of moving walkways amongst garishly coloured advertising hoardings. A really old, rusty freight car was in pride of place as the central decorative feature of the passenger concourse.
With typical Novamasian egalitarianism, no reception had been provided for Alex at all. He had been summoned to an official meeting with a system senator, but there was nobody to meet him, no car, just the information, provided with the summons, that he would need to catch a northbound cab at platform 16 and get off at a station stop called Central Admin.
Alex could have managed that – he was no stranger to making his way around on unfamiliar worlds, after all – but the Diplomatic Corps sent a military attaché along to meet him unofficially and see him safely to his destination. It was a weird experience. On any other world, particularly given the uproar his actions were causing at governmental level, Alex would have expected to be bombarded by protesters and journalists.
Here, there was none of that. There was, Alex had gathered, no media culture on Novamas of journalists surging around in their hundreds, mobbing people in the news. Almost all journalism was editorial, carried out in studios using public-access cameras and comcall interviews. Dodging the media bombardment, therefore, was as simple as setting comms to auto-answer their calls with a standard statement. There wasn’t much of a protest culture here, either. They had very little tolerance for people they described as ‘wailees’, also sometimes written as ‘whaleys’. That was, Alex had learned, a Novamasian pun, referring to environmental protesters who were always ‘wailing about the whales’, Novamas’s largest creature. It had come to mean any kind of protest group, though, which the majority of Novamasians considered whingeing and whining. Liberty League did not have a strong presence here. No offworld organisation did, really, since few Novamasians were keen on strengthening ties with people from other worlds.
Alex did get stared at, as he and his diplomatic escort made their way across the spaceport, and at the other end, after a short ride in a cramped and smelly taxi pod, as they made their way into governmental buildings. This, however, seemed to be simply because he stood out as a foreigner. His escort, a tall man with pale blond hair, got stared at even more.
Two hours later, Alex made the return journey, again without any more incident than people staring, nudging one another and pointing him out. The meeting had gone quite well, he felt. The system senator had only spent an hour and a half being rude and obstructive, and Alex had only had to repeat himself four times, quietly and calmly, before the senator and his advisors understood the point.
It was, indeed, something that Alex said again, to the system president, later that same day when he was summoned back to talk to him in person. It was their first meeting, and genuinely did go quite well. It was apparent to Alex from System President Tanaya’s cautious manner that he was already half-sold on the idea of conceding to the spacers’ demands, and needed only to have the justification for that laid out in clear, straightforward language. So Alex obliged, making the same point that he’d already made to every other authority he’d spoken to about this.
‘You have been trying to get freighters to bring their cargo here instead of Tolmer’s Drift for nearly four hundred years,’ he said. ‘And we have done that for you, brought them right to your door. They are right there, right now, with more than eighty seven million dollars worth of cargo waiting to be delivered. And all you have to do, if you want it, is agree to allowing us to address their legitimate safety concerns by shifting parking orbits.’
‘Legitimate?’ Said President Tanaya, but it was not the outraged echo that Alex had had flung back at him the first forty or fifty times he’d said this to people. It was a tone which invited Alex to give him an answer he could use, when journalists wanted to know why he’d given in to spacer demands.
‘Legitimate, sir,’ Alex said, firmly. ‘You and I both know, of course, that there is no question of any supernatural element here, and I believe it is fair to say that many spacers are also of that opinion. It is a fact, however, a matter of historical record and indeed personal experience amongst the spacers that they experience alarming technical failures in that orbit. Regardless of the cause, utterly regardless of theories about why it happens, it has to be acknowledged that it does happen, and therefore presents a real and actual hazard to shipping. That is why they go to Tolmer’s, because their efforts to get authorities here to understand their concerns have been dismissed. You have it in your power to change that, here, today, once and for all, with nothing more than a nod and ‘Go on, then.’ My crew can move the satellites controlling that parking orbit, we can do it in a matter of hours and we will do so without any charge, providing full safety certification. As soon as that happens, the ships will come in, and not just today but continuing to come, greatly increasing the speed with which freight arrives here, and reducing the cost.’
‘But something like that can’t just be done on the nod!’ The president protested. ‘Such a major change to system infrastructure needs proper consideration, reports, public consultation, Senate debate ... it could take years.’
‘It is within your remit to authorise a temporary change to system infrastructure on safety grounds, sir,’ Alex told him, and demonstrated just how much he had learned from Terese Machet by quoting exactly which League laws and System Senate procedures the president could use.
‘Oh – well, if we’re talking ab
out temporary...’ the president said, looking relieved.
The deal was done in that moment, though it was another hour before Alex had explained exactly what they were going to do, both to the president and a number of other officials brought in on the meeting. The head of system traffic control resigned on the spot, but her deputy, a far more reasonable woman, listened carefully to what Alex proposed, asked some intelligent questions, and agreed, with due caution, that it could work.
‘We’ll want to do our own safety tests though, before I’ll allow ships to use it,’ she said.
‘Naturally,’ said Alex, and would have beamed at her with the warmest approval if the situation had not been so formal.
So the Fourth got to work changing the parking orbit. The control satellites were already geostationary, maintaining position relative to Novamas with their own centrally-controlled thrusters. They were very slow, though. Even at top speed, the satellites that needed to move the furthest wouldn’t get to where they were needed for four months, using their own thrusters. The Fourth, therefore, used fighters to move them. Shuttles could have done the job, but fighters were quicker. They swooped in, snatching satellites onto grapnel lines and darting them into their new position before slowing to a crawl to place them precisely and release them from the line. There were two hundred and thirty six such satellites to be moved. With all three fighters working at an average of eight minutes per satellite, they had the physical job of shifting them completed in just over six hours.
XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) Page 60
