XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘The petals fall. We remember the Alari.’

  It was a genuinely solemn moment. Even the least imaginative, standing there, was conscious of the tragedy that had befallen this world, once so green and beautiful, so full of life. The descent of the ice caps had been a major, near-global extinction event – hundreds of thousands of species of plants and animals, just about every land-dwelling species on the planet, had been wiped out in that environmental disaster. It was right to pay some acknowledgement to that catastrophe.

  Everyone present then followed the ambassador’s example, with a break-ranks order. The Fleet crews had been told that making this particular gesture was entirely a matter for individual choice – the official salute part was over, now. But all of them chose to go and get a flower, waiting their turn as ten people at a time placed a flower at the memorial. All of them said the words, too, and made the gesture.

  Alex did so too, and stood back, watching with a sense of quiet satisfaction. The spacers were, he could see, putting real fervour into this ritual. Most of them believed that it would stop the curse which jinxed ships here, even if not all of them would have admitted it. That was, like the walking backwards throwing salt ritual to de-jinx the ship after a banshee incident, mostly about a psychological need to reassert some sense of control in the face of the frightening and incomprehensible. For Alex, though, it was a genuine tribute to those long-lost people, remembered for their lovely garden world and for their poetry. He didn’t even have a secret inner smile, seeing the mightily stiff army colonel march forward and place a flower with military precision, give two brisk taps to his shoulders and state ‘The petals fall. We remember the Alari.’ in harsh, formal tones. Whatever their cultural differences might be, the Fleet and army shared a tradition of honouring ceremonial, and strange as this must be to the army officer, he was carrying it through with all due dignity.

  Once the ceremony was over, they were all shuttled back to the city, making their way to the embassy for an official reception. The Diplomatic Corps had invited everyone attending the ceremony to come for drinks and a light buffet, something organised on their own initiative and hosted by the League Ambassador. There would not, she’d promised, be any speeches, it would be a purely social occasion.

  It was that, and a very enjoyable one, too. Even Alex enjoyed it, though such social events were usually something he endured with no expectation of pleasure. He was still on stone-faced public manners - even surrounded by his own officers and crew, the event was too public for him to relax into grinning and laughing. He did, however, thoroughly enjoy listening in on other people’s conversations as he moved around the crowd. Professor Garaghty, he felt, was having a much tougher time of it here than he was. Half the room seemed to want to buttonhole the professor, some to ask him questions but mostly wanting him to listen to them. Alex, at one point, heard a member of the Novamas Historical Society telling the professor that it was time they stopped teaching so much Canelonian history in their school curriculum.

  ‘We’ve got enough history of our own, now,’ he declared, with the fierce pride of someone born on a world that had only fourteen hundred years of human history and only the last six hundred of them out of the colony stage. ‘We don’t need to be borrowing Canelon’s.’

  The Canelonian historian handled this with twinkling goodwill, just as he did when, a little later, two members of Lost Worlds told him that they believed the Alari hadn’t died out at all but had relocated to Canelon when the ice age was destroying their world, becoming the ancestors of modern Canelonians. And that, as they explained, meant that it was actually the descendants of the Alari who’d come here to colonise their former homeworld. It was a nice thought, Alex felt, and a pity that it wasn’t true. But Jayforth Garaghty responded with cheerful, friendly interest, treating their ideas just as seriously as if they were fellow academics. He just laughed, even, when a Novamasian asked him, with typical bluntness, ‘What’s the point of all this ancient history stuff anyway?’

  In comparison, Alex got off very lightly with the usual round of introductions and people making conventional small talk before moving away from him as fast as courtesy allowed. The exception to this was the spacers, who were all keen to tell him what a great job he’d done for them, here.

  ‘I swear,’ said a freighter engineer, ‘that wind sounded different – calmer, peaceful – as we left.’

  That was pure imagination – the wind had been moaning, whistling and fluting just exactly the same before, during and after the ceremony. Alex didn’t argue about it, though, just noted from that and other comments that the spacers were happy now. The combination of the change in parking orbit and the memorial ceremony had convinced them, for now at least, that Alar was a safe world to visit. They would bring their ships back here again, and tell other spacers that it was safe to do so, too – there was a clear parking orbit now that ran on a broad, tilted ellipse so that no ship ever came closer than 1.3 billion klicks to the planet, and a simple ritual to appease the jinx. Every spacer who came here now would pay a visit to the Alari memorial, place a flower, and say the words.

  ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ Alex heard the army colonel say, in response to one of the system senators enthusing about how many more ships they were hoping to get here, now, and how much of a boost the increase in intersystem trade would be to their economy. ‘Spacers are a weird lot,’ the colonel said, with a long suffering air, and adding, with characteristic Novamasian tact, surrounded by spacers as he was at the time, ‘dongers, the lot of them.’

  Alex did have some conversations of his own, though only three which he felt himself were important. The first was with Depice Alard, formerly commodore of the freight convoy.

  Alex had been shocked to hear that Depice had been fired. They had all known that that was a risk, of course, for those spacers employed by groundside companies, but Alex had felt the risk to be a very small one. The eight companies of the mining consortium operated separately at the Novamas end of that operation, each of them owning their own ore-carriers and their own refineries, too. People qualified to operate the ore-carriers, particularly at officer level, were very scarce on Novamas so it was work which commanded high salary. If the companies fired their ore-carrier skippers for having taken part in the mass refusal to enter port, they would all end up either having to re-hire them or hire one another’s ex-employees anyway.

  In Depice’s case, however, she had stuck her head above the herd in taking on the leading, commodore’s role, and the consortium had agreed amongst themselves that the best way they could assert their own authority over all the other freighter crews was to make an example of her. So Depice had been fired by the company she’d worked for, and all the other consortium members had said they wouldn’t hire her, either.

  This was so unfair that Alex’s first reaction to the news had been to want to leap to her defence, either by speaking with the company directors personally or hiring lawyers to act on her behalf. Buzz, however, had assured him that she was fine.

  Now Alex saw that was true.

  ‘I’ve landed right on my feet,’ Depice told him, and gestured around her at the embassy, now her new employer. ‘How rock is this?’ Rock meant ‘cool’ in Novamasian vernacular. ‘Merchant Shipping Liaison Officer’ she declaimed her new job title with evident pride. She had been hired by the embassy, Alex was aware, to facilitate the further development of Novamas as a trading port, helping incoming freighters to deal with local authorities. A small but important part of her job would be to take spacers out to the Alari memorial site.

  ‘Are you really happy with it, though?’ Alex asked, a little uncertain. He could not, himself, imagine any worse fate, career-wise, than leaving space for a desk job in a groundside office.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ Depice laughed. ‘Do you have any idea how much these people pay? They’ve put me on at junior attaché grade – I’m making nearly twice as much as I did as a skipper, and there’s all sorts of stuff
like pensions and healthcare. I’ve even,’ she grinned, ‘got an expense account.’

  Alex recognised a fundamentally Novamasian attitude, and felt his sense of guilt at her losing her command lift from his shoulders. So he gave her a nod, then, with sincere congratulations, before doing his social duty in moving on to talk to a senator.

  That was not a conversation Alex regarded as important. A little later, though, he was formally introduced to Professor Garaghty, who of course pretended that they’d never met before. An invitation to dinner aboard the frigate, though, was given and accepted, arranged for the following evening.

  The only other conversation of note – or at least, that Alex felt to be of note – was with the League Ambassador.

  ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he said, as blandly as if he was merely thanking her for her hospitality, ‘A very memorable event.’

  Her Excellency League Ambassador Tari Snowden smiled back. She was quite new in post, having replaced the former ambassador only nine months earlier. This, Alex understood, was because of the message from the Solarans turning this sector into an exodiplomacy hot zone. Tari Snowden was an exodiplomacy specialist, with many years experience in working with Solarans. They had not discussed Alex’s XD-317 orders even in private, beyond her asking him to take it very gently and try not to muck things up. As their eyes met, though, there was a moment of perfect wordless understanding.

  ‘Such a shame,’ she said, placidly, ‘that Admiral Vickers was unable to attend.’

  Alex did not hoot with mirth, because he was on public manners. But he understood entirely that she meant exactly what she said, that it was a shame, shame on Alford Vickers, a truly disgraceful failure.

  She was right, too. Alford Vickers knew enough to be aware that the memorial and ceremony were being carried out by the Diplomatic Corps but at Alex’s request. He was boycotting it on that basis, barking with rage at the suggestion that he should lend his presence to that idiotic charade, dancing to von Strada’s tune.

  What he had failed to appreciate, though, was that the Novamasians themselves did not know that the request for the memorial had originated with Alex. Many people had commented during the event itself that they would have expected the port admiral to be there. It had even been commented on by journalists reporting about it on local news, something they’d picked up on as perceived to be something of an insult from the port admiral to the ambassador. They were rumoured not to get on, though quite how such rumours got into the public domain when Ambassador Snowden at least maintained perfect diplomatic professionalism was something of a mystery. It had certainly become common knowledge that Port Admiral Vickers loathed Skipper von Strada – the rumour doing the rounds, indeed, was that the admiral had refused to come to the event ‘if that little turd is going to be there’. That was not actually what he’d said but it was close enough to the truth, in spirit, to have a ring of authenticity about it.

  On many other worlds that would have become a major part of a hot story. Even here, where the political scandal aspect of that would go right over viewers’ heads, journalists had commented that the Port Admi was being a right moody twander. Comments were being made, too, that it was about time the Fleet sent them a decent port admiral, which anyone who knew Novamasian politics would recognise as a precursor to an official request from the president, on behalf of the Senate, to have the port admiral replaced.

  Alex, on the other hand, was now being regarded as quite a popular figure – a novel experience for him, given public perception of him on other worlds. Just as Roby Escalier’s rage had melted away magically at the sound of the word ‘compensation’, so too had the public outrage over Alex keeping the freighters outside the system, refusing to deliver their cargo.

  All that had been forgiven as it became clear just how much cargo the freighters had brought. Nearly everyone on Novamas either worked for a company that had benefited from that cargo arriving, or knew someone who did. This was not any kind of routine stuff, after all. Novamas was virtually self sufficient both in food and manufacturing for their own needs, and there was no luxury market here for intersystem goods like food, cosmetics and fashion. The only things they tended to import were high tech items that they could not manufacture for themselves. Many factories had been waiting for months for new plant which had been stuck in crates in the cargo-dump at Tolmer’s. Some of it would increase production, lowering consumer prices, and quite a lot of it would result in new jobs, too. There was new medical equipment for hospitals, new tech for refineries and a new super-computer for the university. People were happy, and as they started to get to grips with the idea that the new parking orbit meant that more ships would come and they would all be better off because of it, indignation turned to hey, all right! von Strada, it was conceded, had done a good thing, there. Now if only he could sort out the piracy thing, too, that’d be great.

  Alex had not forgotten ‘the piracy thing’, in amongst everything else. The junior officers he’d put on the case had been beavering away at it even before they arrived, dredging through all the records they’d been able to get hold of. They’d interviewed people here, too, including family members of those Novamasians lost on the Tangleweb – the other ships were all from far-flung corners of the League with no relatives on Novamas. They now had files that would satisfy any criteria of being ‘meaty’, with full and considered information clearly drawn upon in their précis and conclusions. They had not, unsurprisingly, come up with any results different from the original Fleet investigations. That included not being able to find any real indicators as to what had actually happened to the Tangleweb. Spacers were of the opinion that it had fallen victim to the jinx. The most likely non-supernatural explanation was that it was a case of ‘suicide by dephase’ – a very rare but not entirely unknown situation where a member of crew decided to go out with a bang and take everyone else with them. There was no indication that anyone aboard the ship had been suicidally depressed, but attention had focussed on a teenage crewman, said to be something of a loner, often choosing to do nightwatch duty alone and certainly technically skilled enough to have rigged the engines to dephase.

  There was, however, nothing like sufficient probability of that even to list it as a possible cause in the official report, with all the pain and offence that would certainly cause to the family of that crewman. Many of the Tangleweb families, indeed, believed that their loved ones were still alive out there somewhere, since no wreckage had been found. Some of them seemed to believe that the Tangleweb crew might have been dumped at a mining survival dome by pirates who’d taken the ship, hanging on out there somehow and waiting to be rescued. Others thought more optimistically that the pirates might have taken them so far before letting them get off the ship that it was taking this long for them to make their way back. They might, said one mother, just turn up on a liner, any day, just walk straight back through the door like they were all praying for.

  Any time Alex might have been inclined to regard ‘the piracy thing’ as unimportant, reports like that reminded him that it was not. Not for the families of the missing, at least. In order to convince the Novamasians that their concerns about piracy were unfounded, though, he had to keep working on gaining the trust of President Tanaya.

  Days passed, and things began to settle down. Many of the freighters departed, loaded up with rare metals and chemicals. Two of the ore carriers, too, departed, heading back to Tolmer’s Drift. There was time, at last, for the Fourth to accept invitations to the homeworld squadron, and to entertain aboard their ship, too.

  One of the events they laid on made the news. Ceri Belmok, the Communications Sub, organised it. One of his port duties was responding to mail that was rated too important to be handled by auto-answer but not important enough to bother the senior officers with. A little bunch of such public-relations mail had arrived all on the same day – fourteen identical letters from kids of around ten and eleven years old. It was apparent that they all came from the same residenti
al district and probably all went to the same school. The letters read:

  Dear Skipper von Strada

  What are you doing to that poor lizard on your ship? We have heard that you have done some dreadful experimenting on that poor lizard. We’ve never seen a lizard but they still matter. So you should leave it alone because it’s one of the very important species in our galaxy. Just because we don’t have animals in our world doesn’t mean we don’t care. We love life just as much as you do, so why kill the lizard on your ship?

  From the Ice Kids.

  The Fourth had a standing policy regarding mail from animal-rights protestors, depending on whether it contained threats of direct action against them, was from responsible organisations or concerned individuals. The ‘concerned individuals’ response also had a subset for ‘kids’, as they’d had their first letters from kids upset about what they’d seen Greenstar saying they were doing on their ship, way back at Therik.

  Ceri, therefore, had followed the policy and sent the kids an age-appropriate letter, explaining that they did have a lizard aboard, yes, but they did not do experiments of any kind on him. He was their ship’s mascot, like a pet. They’d rescued him after he’d been abandoned by his previous owner, only because he didn’t have any of the necessary paperwork, they hadn’t been able to take him to a planet to find him a home. The quarantine authorities, in fact, had wanted them to put the lizard to sleep, but instead they’d got special permission to keep him on the ship. He lived in a lovely habitat, specially designed for him, with all of them helping to look after him. Their ship’s doctor had even taken special training to be able to look after him if Lucky ever needed a vet. This, Ceri explained, was what Greenstar had heard about and misunderstood as the Fourth training their medic to do animal experiments. They would never, Ceri promised, do anything like that. He’d included some holos of Lucky in his habitat, and an information pack about his breed of lizard. He hadn’t expected to hear anything more about it than that, but had got back, very quickly, excited thank yous from the kids. They hadn’t expected anyone to even read their letters, really, since the Greenstar infosite they’d been inspired by had warned that mail-burst protests were only effective in getting attention when thousands of people took part and that organisations were known to just auto-file such mail into an archive or even auto-delete it, unread. Getting a letter back from an actual person had thrilled the kids, and they thanked Ceri, too, for explaining what was really going on.