Ceri was so touched by that that he’d asked if he could invite the kids aboard to see Lucky for themselves, which Martine had approved for whenever they could fit it in. Ceri, therefore, made all the arrangements. The kids, each with a parent escorting them, were picked up from the spaceport and given a shuttle-tour of the solar system before being brought to the Heron, where they were shown around the secure zone and taken to sickbay to meet Lucky. They weren’t allowed to bring their own cameras along but Ceri and Rangi took snaps, creating souvenir holo-albums for them all to take home along with goody-bags of pens, shipboard mugs and candy. The kids were hilariously amazed by their encounter with the lizard – they’d never actually been that close to a living animal before, and only the bravest of them could nerve themselves to touch him, and at that only with the tip of a finger, yelping at the feel of reptilian skin.
Ceri was quite surprised, though, to see that on the news, later, being reported as news, like the kids had done something really extraordinary. They were interviewed and snaps from their holoalbum were shown on the news, too, under headlines about it as a ‘wildlife adventure’ and ‘space safari’.
That came in useful, though, a couple of days later, when President Tanaya brought his own kids aboard. Alex had asked if it would be possible to have a private meeting with the president aboard the Heron. And a truly private meeting, too, just the two of them alone. He had already found it to be impossible to have any kind of private meeting with Novamasian officials groundside. Even when he’d asked for private meetings with system senators, there would be at least ten staff present and other people coming and going constantly, too. His request to be allowed to meet with the system president entirely alone had been greeted very dubiously, too, even when Alex had explained that he had things he could only tell the president in person. That was just not the Novamasian way of doing things, at all. It had taken more than a week and at least fifty exchanges of suggestions and counter-suggestions before they were even prepared to consider it.
The ‘lizard thing’ was seized upon, therefore, as an ideal cover for the president to be visiting the ship without anyone picking up on that as anything very extraordinary. President Tanaya had twin sons, aged eight and three quarters, who certainly were envious of the treat the Greenstar kids had had. Even a hint that their father might be able to get them aboard to see the lizard too was sufficient to get them clamouring for him to do just that, at which point he asked Alex if he could bring them for a visit because they were plaguing the life out of him to do so.
Alex agreed at once, of course, so arrangements were made for the president and his family to pay an informal visit to the ship, ostensibly as a treat for the kids although it was also acknowledged that the president and skipper would have some discussion about the Fourth’s anti-piracy operations.
There was no great ‘First Family’ pomp about the visit. The president’s wife was a working GP and their kids went to their ordinary local school, where the fact that Daddy was the president was a matter more for teasing than respect. The president’s wife, in fact, did not often attend many official events at all, and admitted frankly to taking time off for this simply because she too was curious to see aboard the Fourth’s ship, and found it exciting to encounter a real, live lizard.
President Tanaya, however, had no desire at all to see the lizard. By prior agreement, therefore, he was deftly separated from his family and their escort as soon as they came aboard. His aides and security people weren’t happy about that. He might only be the president of a remote little mining world with less than a billion people, but he was their president and even the egalitarian Novamasians felt instinctively that the president should be escorted and have staff around him.
He seemed, indeed, a little smaller once he’d been brought through a secure zone hatchway into the main part of the ship. All system presidents had nine ack alpha clearance anyway, by definition, it went with the job, but Alex had carried out a risk assessment including the risk of exposure of their classified tech, and decided that was not an issue. President Tanaya had a non-technical background. He could be allowed to walk through the ship because he just would not have a clue what he was looking at.
He didn’t, either. President Tanaya was a quintessential groundhog. It took three of them to get him safely from the deck seven entry hatch to the skipper’s quarters on deck two. Every zero-gee ladderway was tackled like a major challenge, the president yelping and hanging on to the gliderail for dear life as he found himself in freefall, with Alex helping him up, a petty officer below to keep his feet steady and another above to help him off the ladderway back into gravity. Even that was highly disconcerting to him, as Novamasian gravity was 0.2 g higher than the Chartsey standard starships used. Seeing that he was finding it really uncomfortable, complaining that it made him feel weird and lightheaded, Alex had the ship’s artificial gravity ramped up to Novamasian norm. Even so, their visitor seemed glad when they arrived in the skipper’s daycabin. He was surprised, though, when he saw how small and plain it was.
‘Is this it?’ he queried, looking around. ‘This is your apartment?’
‘My daycabin, yes, sir,’ Alex said, adding with a gesture at the sliding internal door, ‘I have a sleeping cabin, too.’
The president slid open the door and had a look. This was not rude, in Novamasian terms – knocking on doors was a foreign concept to them, as they took it for granted that they could walk through any door unless it was actually locked.
‘Well, they certainly don’t house you in luxury,’ he observed, closing the door again. ‘So much for the ‘champagne lifestyle’.’ He looked at Alex enquiringly, a touch of apprehension evident under his attempt at a cool manner. ‘Where would you like me to sit?’
‘Please – have my seat,’ Alex invited. Though the seats around his desk were actually identical, the placing of them, with the seat facing the door occupying one side to itself, made it clear that this was the skipper’s place. The president showed a certain child-like pleasure in sitting down there, joking as he did so, ‘Does this mean I’m in command of the ship?’, and then, without giving Alex a chance to respond, looking at the wall-mounted screen angled so that anyone working here would have clear view of the many busy subscreens it displayed. ‘What are all those graphs and things?’
‘Watch screens and command feeds,’ Alex told him, and pointed out the engineering and astrogation screens, as well as the internal open-comms feed that gave views of the crew at work throughout the ship. They were well aware that they had a VIP on board who might be watching them at any time, so there was a rather self-conscious and unnecessary amount of work going on.
‘I could do with something like that to see what people are up to in my offices,’ the president joked. He was, however, fully aware that Alex had not brought him here for a casual chat, so now that they were settled, gave him a look of rather nervous expectation. ‘So – what’s so top secret that you can’t even discuss it in front of my chiefs of staff?’
‘Yes – I apologise for the cloak and dagger ‘your eyes only’, sir,’ Alex said, answering the irony in the president’s tone rather than the words themselves. ‘But it is, as I hope you’ll appreciate, a rather sensitive matter. Can I just ask for your patience in answering a couple of questions for me? You have had the official system-president briefing on exodiplomacy, yes?’
The president inclined his head, looking suddenly very wary. Alex knew exactly what was in that briefing, and how diplomatic personnel were trained to deliver it, too. He was also aware that the whisky file briefing on Novamas was so sensitive that it usually involved a pawn-sacrifice manoeuvre in itself. That had certainly been the case with President Tanaya, as the attaché sent to deliver the briefing had been yelled out of his office and obliged to resign his post even for trying to convince the president that there were no alien pirates attacking shipping in the region.
‘So – forgive me, sir, but I need to establish this – could you te
ll me, please, what non-human species you already know about?’
‘Well, them,’ said the president, with such emphasis that it was immediately apparent to Alex that he was only referring to the Solarans. ‘The...’ a slight pause, and it was evident that he could not bring himself to say the word aliens, ‘exo-thingies,’ he said. ‘Sola-runs.’ Then he looked at Alex with something of a double-take and dawning suspicion, ‘What do you mean, species? You mean there’s more than one?’
Alex mentally moved the peg down from ‘already fully exo-aware’ on the big picture briefing continuum he and Buzz had devised, to ‘partially exo-aware’.
‘Well, there’s the Marfikians,’ he suggested, calmly, since that was a non-human species everyone did know about.
President Tanaya, however, looked puzzled.
‘They’re not exo-thingy though, are they?’ he queried. ‘They’re just like us only with machines and computers grafted into them – cyborg, that’s the word. Half people, half robot.’
That wasn’t what they were really like at all, but Alex let that pass.
‘I believe their DNA falls well outside the definition set by the Homo Sapiens Identification Act,’ he observed.
‘Well, of course it does,’ the president came back, as if with wholly unarguable logic. ‘That Act was written to define ‘us’ and ‘them’. But I’ve heard it said that there’s more variation within the definition of human DNA than there is between what’s called human and what’s Marfikian. And you’re not saying, are you,’ fear was rising in his eyes, now, ‘that we’ve got Marfikians around here?’
‘No, sir, not at all, there’s no suspicion of that at all,’ Alex assured him. ‘I’m just having to establish where you are in your understanding of exodiplomacy matters before I brief you. So can I ask if you have heard of quarians, at all?’
The president flushed, sitting bolt upright, instantly and mightily indignant.
‘Look, what kind of dongers do you think we are?’ he demanded. ‘Donger’, as Alex was already aware, was Novamasian slang for ‘nutter’, meaning a right ding-dong head. ‘Quarians! You’ll be asking me next if I believe in ice elves and pixies!’
‘Ah,’ Alex said, and was not really surprised. The situation with Quarus was weird, even by exodiplomacy standards. Humans had been in contact with them now for almost a century, but no quarian had yet set foot in human space and it was unlikely that any of them would, at least in the foreseeable future. Unlike the Solarans, they were not prepared to come to human worlds secretly. When they came, they said, it would have to be openly, greeting the peoples of the League in honest friendship. They were significantly more advanced than humanity in their technology, particularly in the field of bio-engineering. Quarians, indeed, came in several forms or ‘adapts’ as they called themselves, adapted for different conditions on their ocean world. Even the most human-looking of the adapts had gills, and some of them were semi-reptilian.
The interesting thing about that from an exodiplomacy point of view was that information about first contact with Quarus had been put out into the public domain, officially, more than seventy years before. It was not a world across the Firewall, but it was more than a year’s travelling away, across the gulf to the neighbouring spiral arm of the galaxy. Because it was felt that people weren’t likely to be so frightened of aliens so far away, and so reminiscent of legends of mermaids and merpeople, too, a decision had been made to release news that the Exploration Corps had found an ocean world with a peaceful, harmless population of aquatic people, making it sound like they were just humans genetically adapted to be able to breathe underwater. If the reception of that had been positive or even acceptably neutral and curious, further information would have been disclosed, building to an invitation to quarians to make the big first contact visit.
Reaction, though, had been almost unanimously horrified. The quarians, however distant, however peaceful they were said to be, were bioengineered and that in itself made them far too much like the cyborg Marfikians for people to cope with. Public opinion polls, even after the most sensitive news release and favourable coverage, had come back overwhelmingly as ‘we don’t want things like that on our world.’
So, first contact had stalled right there. On some worlds the authorities had even felt it necessary to reduce the risk of alien-panic by having the news release dismissed as a hoax. By now, more than seventy years later, even those who remembered the original broadcasts and hadn’t then been told it was a hoax only remembered it as some mad thing on the news that hadn’t come to anything. For most people, if they heard about it at all, it was from parents and grandparents as some semi-mythical belief that there was a world out there somewhere with people who had gills. There was no specific mention of quarians in the system-president level briefing, though briefing diplomats were allowed to discuss that as part of general question-opportunity at the end of the official file disclosure. Clearly, nobody had done that with President Tanaya.
Alex mentally took the peg out of ‘partially exo-aware’ and put it right in at level one entry on the big picture briefing.
‘Right...’ he said, and called up the briefing file, giving the president a measuring look. ‘This is going to take a couple of hours, sir.’
Two and a half, in fact, including time for the president to have a restorative pause and cup of tea at the point where he accepted that quarians were, in fact, real. Alex let him set the pace. The way they’d designed the big picture briefing, in fact, allowed for the person working through it to break off at any point where they felt that it was getting too much for them, and Alex told the president that they could break at any point, no problem.
President Tanaya, however, showed the grit that had got him the presidency in the first place. He asked for a tea-break when he was faced with evidence that quarians were real, but went back to the file within minutes, looking at the images.
‘They’re disgusting,’ he observed. ‘Like monsters. What kind of people would do that to themselves?’
Alex reflected that accepting things were real was not at all the same thing as being open minded about them.
‘They’re a very peaceful people, sir,’ he reminded him. ‘They have no weapons or military capability, and every evaluation shows that they are no danger or threat to us in any way.’
‘Yes, yes, but ...’ the president looked at an image of a semi-reptilian reef adapt, long slender physique, protective coppery scales and a cascade of metallic green hair. ‘Errrgh!’ He flicked through other images and then turned them off, with a look of revulsion. ‘Don’t tell me there’s worse than that,’ he said, since he had already recognised, himself, that the briefing intensified in shock factor with each step up to the next level.
‘In terms of physical difference to ourselves, no sir,’ Alex said. ‘The quarians are the most alien species we have encountered yet, in terms of their appearance.’
‘All right, then,’ the president nodded, looking relieved and then resolute, giving Alex a nod. ‘Bring it on,’ he told him, which Alex understood to be a request to take the briefing up to the next level.
This involved the very sensitive matter of alien encounters within League space.
‘It is important to be clear about this, sir, that we have no records of any exo-ship ever having deliberately caused harm to any of our vessels,’ Alex said. ‘All the information we have is that there are no aggressive or militarised species beyond the Firewall, no aliens out there likely to attack us. Everything we know tells us that the species beyond the Firewall are far more afraid of us than we are of them, and with good reason, too, since we are aggressive, weaponed-up and militarised, not to mention that we carry diseases that could wipe out entire populations. The Solarans are the only people we know who continued to send ambassadors through the Firewall, trying to reach out to us, even when we responded to that with brutality. It is possible, though, possible, that other species do sometimes send either ships or probes into our space, trying
to learn about us, perhaps to evaluate whether we’ve achieved a degree of civilisation yet that would make it safe for them to contact us. Spacers do sometimes see things, just momentarily, on the edge of scopes, that we believe are ‘exo-glimpses’, though it is only fair to say that some of them at least may be down to technical problems or the phenomena of signal ghosting in dirty space. Such exo-glimpses do seem to occur more frequently in certain sectors than in others. The Novamas sector, being close to the Firewall, is well known for such incidents – there have been twenty seven reported sightings in the last thousand years, all of them involving fleeting glimpse of something very fast, and very big.’
‘I’ve heard that spacers say that, that they see ships here as big as planets,’ the president admitted, cautiously.
‘Well, maybe not quite that big, sir, but we’re certainly talking about something estimated as several kilometres in diameter,’ Alex said. ‘Though other aspects of the reports are inconsistent, and there’s no discernible pattern to the sightings. Here, see...’
He opened the next level of the briefing file and the president spent some minutes looking at reports, some of them very old, about the sightings, including analysis of the intervals between them and Diplomatic Corps conclusion that at least half of them were down to technical faults, imagination or hoaxes. This, however, still left a significant number regarded as genuine exo-glimpses, indicators that an unknown species was visiting their space.
XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars) Page 63
