XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘But it’s obvious, isn’t it?’ The president said, as if wondering why Alex couldn’t see something that was so entirely obvious to him. ‘It’s them. The Sola-runs. All this...’ he gestured with both hands, indicating confusion, ‘this stuff they claim about everyone but us being these peaceful serene and ancient thing, it’s just, well, come on, how dumb do you have to be to fall for that? They’re up to something, after something, checking out our worlds, and you mark my words, von Strada, you mark my words,’ he stabbed a finger at Alex’s chest, ‘there’s going to come a day, and not long coming either, when we are going to regret we ever let them near our worlds. I can’t believe people are so stupid, letting them come there, claiming they’re only there to see the art, I mean, come on, art! They’re checking out our defences, learning everything they need to know about us, and then, one day my friend, one day, wham!’ He slammed his hand down on the desk for emphasis. ‘We’ll wake up to alien ships in orbit round our worlds and them telling us ‘we are your masters, now’.

  ‘And don’t you dare laugh,’ he told the skipper, fiercely. ‘We’ve had our legitimate fears about this laughed at by the Fleet before, thank you very much, and the diplomats too, come to that, giving us a load of guff about ‘ancient and serene peoples’. I mean, come on. Why does anyone believe that? Have any of our ships even been to this Sola-russ? Have they blamey! Not safe for us to go there they say! Huh! Not safe for us to see the war-fleet they’re building! And all the time they’re lulling us along with this serene and ancient bull, laughing right up their sleeves at us, I bet, how utterly stupid and gullible we are. And us, right, right here out on the border, front line, the first world they’re liable to hit, and how much protection do we get, I ask you? One mouldy carrier and a rustbucket frigate, that’s what. Oh, the League really cares about us all right! And is it a coincidence, you think, really, that we won’t let them come here, put our foot down on that one from the start, no way, no how, not on our world, and hey, we get sightings right around our world and ships go missing, ships go missing all the time! The Fleet gives us a load of guff about it, but we are not stupid, we know the score! So if you’re telling me that our pirates are actually Sola-runs, no news there von Strada, no news!’

  Alex accepted that it was not going to be possible to convince President Tanaya that Solarans were no threat to humanity, not in any reasonable timescale, at least. If they had a month with nothing more to do than sit here talking that through, possibly. In one day? Not a chance. Still, he had to put his own views on record.

  ‘I am not laughing, sir,’ he promised. ‘Truly, not. I understand your concerns and I am very far from dismissing them, believe me. These are the questions, the fears, that everyone has when they learn about exodiplomacy. I had the opportunity, myself, to learn about it in much greater depth, to ask all these questions in frank discussion with people who really know about these things. I have also had the privilege of meeting Solarans myself – and yes, sir, I do consider it a privilege. I do, truly, believe that they are a peaceful people who mean us no harm. I believe that our government has made a good and sound evaluation of them as being no threat to us, and I do believe, yes, I really do, that they come to our worlds for no more ulterior motive than to develop our relationship through cultural exchange.’

  President Tanaya gave him a look that conveyed then you’re an idiot, emphasised by a scornful snort. It was something, though, that they were talking about this at all, and so frankly. The system president would not have said these things, Alex knew, at the beginning of their meeting. Had not said these things at the beginning of their meeting. They’d built up to this, both in terms of exodiplomacy exposure and the relationship that talking privately like this had opened up.

  ‘Oh, we know nobody listens to us,’ President Tanaya said, bitterly. ‘And it will be far too late by the time the ships are in orbit.’

  ‘Hmnn.’ Alex gave him a thoughtful look. ‘Can I ask, sir – have you considered talking to Ambassador Snowden about this?’

  The president gave him a speaking look.

  ‘There is,’ he said, definitively, ‘no talking to those people about this. Their minds are absolutely closed, ice stupid closed. They’re so convinced they’re on to a winner,’ his tone became sarcastic, ‘learning so much from our alien friends.’ He shook his head. ‘You can’t tell them. We learned that a long time ago. One of them even told one of my predecessors that he was racist!’ He gave Alex an indignant look. ‘Can you believe that? These things aren’t even human, and we’re talking about human rights?’

  ‘I believe you will find,’ said Alex, carefully, ‘that Ambassador Snowden will hear you out, with every respect and understanding for your views.’

  ‘You think?’ The president sounded sceptical. ‘Even if I got her to see sense, though, nobody on Chartsey is going to listen to us, are they?’

  Alex did not point out that the general idea was that it was the Novamasians who’d see sense, once they’d seen full evidence and had the opportunity to talk it through in detail.

  ‘Still, it opens a dialogue,’ he pointed out.

  ‘Really?’ The president did not seem entirely convinced. ‘We have some experience of trying to talk to the Dippies,’ he observed. ‘And I don’t want to make a fool of myself here, or be laughed at, or accused of being a racist.’

  ‘Believe me, sir, Ambassador Snowden won’t do that,’ Alex assured him. ‘And if I might suggest, perhaps, initially at least, a private meeting? It is, I’ve found, better to discuss these very sensitive issues on a one-to-one basis.’

  The president nodded, conceding that.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll think about it. But is this what they sent you here for, then? Chartsey? And what is this stuff about the Alarree? One heck of a coincidence that that happens just as you show up, and the Dippies making such a thing of it, too.’ He gave Alex a hard look with that. ‘You promised me the big picture,’ he said. ‘So give – tell me what’s going on, here, what’s really going on.’

  ‘All right,’ Alex said. ‘Three things – quite unconnected, other than in that they are all issues we’ve been tasked to, here. The first is that we were asked to use our strong relationship with the merchant service to investigate why they’re going to Tolmer’s Drift and see if there was anything that we could do to facilitate them coming here instead. I can confirm that we are working closely with the Diplomatic Corps in that, and I will not insult your intelligence by pretending that the revealing of the Alari Tablet is any kind of coincidence. But the information on it, I do assure you, is absolutely true, and everything I’ve said to you and the other authorities here has been true, too. I do believe that there is an anomaly within your system space, beyond our current scientific understanding but real, an observable physical phenomenon, and since we really don’t understand it the only thing we can do is shift orbits so that no ship is exposed to that risk again. I do also believe that it is good and right to honour the memory of the Alari, and if that helps spacers to feel that this is a safe world to visit now, we do just have to be tolerant and respect their right to their beliefs.’

  ‘They can believe whatever rubbish they want, so long as they come,’ President Tanaya said, giving him a nod for that. ‘So – two?’

  ‘Two,’ Alex said, ‘is the piracy. We are tasked to investigate that fully, to re-examine the eight disappearances over the last ten years in the light of Novamasian claims that they might be the result of alien incursion. We approached that with an open mind, going deep into records that frankly nobody else has accessed for decades, even centuries. It became apparent to us that there has been a major misunderstanding somewhere, way back, about the Shadow Raider. Some partly understood spacer story, perhaps. Spacers, well, we do spin a lot of tall tales – that’s part of our culture, an oral tradition, telling stories. It isn’t always easy even for other spacers to tell where a real account ends and exaggeration for entertainment value kicks in, and some stories a
re frankly just told for fun, or part of spacer mythology. The Shadow Raider is one of those stories.’

  He paused, and as the president looked searchingly at him, explained.

  ‘The Shadow Raider is a legend that goes back centuries, though you might not hear it spoken of much in most parts of the League, even by spacers – most of it is outside our borders. Here, see?’ He called up a star chart, picked out seven stars and highlighted the space between them, an irregular polyhedron. Only one of those stars, identified on the chart as Cherque, was within the League’s borders. Another, Lundane, was on the border, or at least, very close to the other side of it. Some of the others were worlds President Tanaya had never even heard of. ‘This is known as the Shadow Raider Cube, though it is, obviously, nothing like a cube. It’s said that there’s a ship that turns up sometimes in this space, every few years, raiding cargo. The incidents are described as being very much like turnaround – people don’t see anything, no other ship on scopes, nothing, but they wake up to realise they’ve been unconscious. The difference is that while their ship is continuing on its previous course, some or sometimes all of their cargo is missing. The authorities don’t take claims of cargo just vanishing in deep space the least bit seriously, of course. Spacers have been known, I know, to be prosecuted for theft or fraud, when they can’t give any explanation for a missing cargo that groundside authorities accept. Many such cases may well be theft, fraud or hoaxes, obviously, there’s no kind of hard evidence and not even any coordinated record of such incidents. And not likely to be, given where it is.’ He indicated that the ‘cube’ ran deep into Marfikian territory, and President Tanaya stared at him.

  ‘But this is proof! Aliens are attacking our ships!’

  ‘No sir,’ Alex told him, carefully. ‘I don’t believe there is an exo-ship raiding our space, though there may have been some sightings in the region that triggered the legends, like the Space Monster of Sector Seventeen, same kind of thing, something big and fast and strange glimpsed occasionally on the edge of scopes, spacers make up stories to try to make some sense of it. But there is, you see, one particular element of the story that I feel, personally, pushes it into ‘monster yarn’. The Shadow Raider, you see, is believed to target ships that are carrying cargoes of chocolate.’

  President Tanaya did a double-take.

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘I’m only telling you what I’ve heard,’ Alex said. ‘Some ships, I’ve been told, refuse to haul cargoes of chocolate in that sector, think it’s unlucky, asking for trouble. Which just goes to show, frankly, how daft people can be. But there you go, that’s the story, the legend.’

  The president expressed himself at some length on just how utterly out of their heads spacers were.

  ‘What are you people on?’ he demanded. ‘Total dongers! Who would make that stuff up?’

  ‘Well, stories like that are usually about spacers trying to make sense of things,’ Alex explained. ‘We live in a very dangerous, unpredictable environment where we may well encounter things beyond our understanding. When people are faced with the frightening and incomprehensible, it’s human nature to try to make sense of it any way we can. You start with an observed fact – say, that cargos are said to be taken from ships while their crews are knocked unconscious. You link that to existing knowledge of crews losing consciousness in turnaround incidents, and go ah hah¸ that might mean it’s some kind of exo-encounter. Then you look at all the cases you know about, trying to find some kind of common denominator; someone notices that a particular kind of cargo is a common feature, bingo, there you go. The fact that it’s said to be chocolate, well, that may be because chocolate is a common cargo on those routes or it may have been thrown in just as an amusing punchline. But that is all the Shadow Raider is, you see, a spacer myth, a tall tale equated even by spacers themselves to be on a par with the Space Monster of Sector Seventeen. It certainly isn’t something that the Admiralty or the Senate would consider any kind of serious exodiplomacy issue.’

  The president of Novamas said a word. Alex just stayed quiet, giving him time to get past that first emotional reaction. That didn’t take long.

  ‘But you are telling me, seriously, honestly, that you think our ships weren’t attacked by shadow raiders, then?’

  ‘Seriously, honestly, sir, ‘ Alex told him. ‘We have re-investigated all eight cases from the last ten years, ourselves, as fully as possible. The Tangleweb is the only one that remains unexplained, and we may never know what happened to them. But that, sadly, is in the nature of the environment. We do know what happened in the other seven cases, as much as you ever do really know what’s happened in these things, and the facts and findings were just as reported to you at the time.’

  The president looked unconvinced. ‘You’re not telling me,’ he told Alex, bluntly, ‘that it’s normal for that many ships to just vanish or blow up! Eight ships in ten years! And that’s just the head of the iceberg! We see, what, a hundred ships a year here if we’re lucky, and you’re telling me that nearly one in a hundred of them has just exploded in space, and that’s normal?’

  Alex suddenly understood his perspective, as if he’d taken a step sideways and a picture that had made no sense resolved into simple clarity.

  ‘Oh, I see!’ he said. He spent the next several minutes talking through statistics, leading the president through it ensuring that he understood it every step of the way. For a start, as he explained, the president was basing his ‘hundred ships a year’ on the ships that actually came to Novamas, while the Fleet was looking at that on a sector-wide basis. Their own stats on how many ships were actively traversing the Novamas/ Tolmer’s Drift sector were nearer seventeen hundred a year than the one hundred the Novamasians were basing their estimates on. He also dropped the number of ‘vanished’ ships from eight to six.

  ‘Honestly, sir, we know very well what happened to these two,’ he indicated their names on a list. ‘They went to Lundane and bought new registration there. The fact that they had made a point of telling lots of people that they were on their way to Novamas does not mean that they even came in this direction. It’s just part of the fraud, hoping to make use of the bad reputation this sector has, to make their disappearance seem more plausible.’

  ‘But how come they haven’t been found and arrested, then, if you know they’re at Lundane?’ The president asked, indignantly.

  ‘Lundane isn’t one of our worlds, sir,’ Alex informed him, after a moment to realise that the president did not know this, or where Lundane was. ‘It’s across our border – only just across our border, in the Ranges. It’s the only world under Marfikian rule that we have any direct contact or trade with. Frankly, they were given the ability to give freighters League ship registry a long time ago, to facilitate ships from outside our borders being able to come into our space, for peaceful purposes. It only applies to small unarmed freighters, and though, yes, we do obviously know that many of the worlds which avail themselves of that are sending intelligence units to gather information, that’s fair enough after all since we use the same route to do the same thing the other way. We’re talking human visitors here, of course, and the more we know about one another the more chance we have of one day being able to build relationships and stand united against Marfikian aggression. There is, however, a known down-side to that in that some League shipping has exploited that by going out to Lundane, getting new registration there, and coming back into our space with a new ship and personal IDs. Both these cases have been reported to the police, of course, and there are intersystem warrants out for the ships and their crews, but since nobody knows what the new registry is and they’ll certainly have changed both their own and the ships’ appearance, and they’ll be constantly on the move, of course, it may be years before the police catch up with them. You can, however, take my word for it, these ships aren’t missing, they just pulled off an insurance fraud.

  ‘As for the others, well, these three were all dongers, quite frankly
, total nutters out from Canelon on yachts, looking for previously unclaimed systems to dive. This sector is the nearest area to Canelon where the divers haven’t already claimed every diveable system, so this is where they come. That’s one of the ‘risk adjusting factors’, see, in our working out whether the ship losses in a sector are within statistical norms. Your sector is high risk, not because of any particularly difficult navigation but because it’s a playground for dongers. You don’t see them here because they don’t come out this far, but they certainly see them at Tolmer’s. It drives them nuts, there – at least once every month or so, some yacht comes screaming out of Abigale and rips through the system in a vertical dive, doing one of the routes the system-diving community has identified and given names amongst themselves. Most of them take the route known to divers as ‘The Headspin’, a helix that takes them between dust rings and out past the grinding machines. They are putting their own lives in extreme jeopardy with that, and that of any miners who might be out there working, too, but that is the point, for divers, the adrenaline rush, flirting with death. They broadcast from their yachts as they’re diving, yelling and whooping, then tear back off down Abigale before the authorities there can get hold of them. At any given time, there will be two or three yachts out in this sector, system diving, and the death rate on that is, yes, very high. As a rough rule of thumb, they stand about a one in a hundred chance of killing themselves every time they make a dive. And they don’t just come out here, make one dive and go home, obviously, they’ll be diving all the systems en route to find one nobody else has laid claim to. It’s only a wonder to me that any of them survive at all, quite frankly, and a remarkable achievement by the Fleet investigators to have even found the evidence of wreckage.