by S MacDonald
Alex smiled, but he was aware that Shion was waiting to get his attention, and looked at her enquiringly.
‘There is,’ Shion observed, ‘another possibility – people who meet the criteria for a clean ship from an uninfected world.’ She grinned suddenly as people around them stared at her in breath-held excitement. ‘No, not my people,’ she said, seeing that they had not understood, and pointing out patiently, ‘My people are no way ready even to travel into your space freely yet, still less become involved in affairs like this. But the Solarans are.’
There was a startled silence. It had not occurred to any of them to consider the possibility of involving the Solarans. That oversight spoke volumes as to the way that Solarans were perceived by humanity, as did Alex’s dubious look, right then.
‘They are wonderful people, of course,’ he answered cautiously. ‘But…’
Shion chuckled. ‘But..?’ she teased.
‘But,’ said Alex, being very carefully diplomatic, ‘communication is complex and not yet wholly successful even with the best of intentions and great effort both ways. I believe that would make it… problematical … to ask them to represent us in any exodiplomacy role, really.’
‘I know,’ Shion looked frankly amused. ‘You don’t understand more than half what they say and humans find them extremely frustrating to work with. But you should remember, really, that it was the Solarans who kept sending expeditions through the Firewall throughout human history, so determined to make contact with you that they continued to do that even over thousands of years when every effort ended in the death of their ambassadors. I think that gives them a proven track record in first contact endeavours and they could certainly get through quarantine.’ She saw the doubt in his eyes, and smiled. ‘But it is your decision, of course.’
Alex considered. He could send a request through the Diplomatic Corps to the Solaran embassy on Chartsey, asking for their help. Even thinking about doing so, though, raised a host of immediate objections. It would complicate things tremendously; working with Solarans at any practical level was extremely slow and sensitive; it would effectively be an admission of failure on their part, his part; it just wasn’t a way that humanity wanted to take that relationship.
‘It might,’ he conceded, ‘be something we’d consider as a last resort. But for now…’ he smiled. ‘Let’s just try handling things for ourselves.’
Davie North, who’d been watching him closely for a reaction to that suggestion, nodded agreement. He even looked a little relieved, having been concerned for a moment that Alex might seize any possible means of accessing the Guardian’s technology without considering the wider impact on humanity’s relationships with other species.
Technically, Davie had no say in the Carrearranis mission. His own focus was on looking after Silvie, as he was still officially responsible for her and would be again in very real terms if she decided to leave the Fourth at any time. His own ship the Stepeasy was ready to take her anywhere she wanted to go and he would have to be the one coping with whatever chaos she caused. He was frankly relieved that she was happy to stay on the Heron and pleased to be able to help with their mission, too.
And just how he was allowed to help changed two weeks after their return to the border. It was Davie’s sixteenth birthday – celebrated of course with a party and cakes galore, a birthday message and gifts from his father and many other family members and friends. His father, amongst many other gifts, had given him all his business holdings on Carpania.
There weren’t many people who would have thanked him for that. Carpania was the most polluted world in the League, infamous for its cheap and dirty plastics production and for the corruption of authorities who were supposed to be protecting the environment. All the factories his father gave Davie were filthy, spewing out pollutants into the air and contaminating ground water. They had thousands of outstanding compensation claims against them for deaths and injuries caused directly by polluting incidents in which clouds of toxic gas had been released. As it stood they were profitable, but the cost of making them clean and safe, let alone cleaning up the damage they’d already caused, would be crippling.
Davie, seeing the transfers of ownership, was deeply moved.
‘I’ve been asking Papa for these since I was five,’ he said, showing them to Silvie. ‘And he’s always said no, thinking this whole ‘clean and green’ thing is some childish whim I’d grow out of. So his letting me have them is like acknowledging me having different views from his, accepting me doing my thing even if he does think it’s ludicrous. And the important thing, obviously, of course, is that I’ll be able to put people in to clean things up.’
Silvie gave him a rare hug, nearly in tears herself both at the strength of his emotions and her own, but laughing, too.
‘You are lovely, Davie,’ she told him, which made him laugh as well.
He was equally touched by the present he got from Alex. It was no great surprise, really, as Alex had always assured him that the only reason he was not allowed to get hands on with ship’s tech was the absolute rule about under sixteens being barred from technical work, which even Alex would not break. Davie had anticipated, then, that his birthday present from the skipper would be some kind of token of his right to work on ship’s tech from now on, perhaps a toolkit with his name on it.
What he actually got was a wrench, ‘wrench’ being spacer jargon for a multi-functional tool which all techs carried routinely, slapped onto one of the magnagrip patches on shipboard rig. Alex presented Davie with his in a tongue-in-cheek ceremony which Davie responded to suitably.
‘How weird is this?’ he laughed as he put the wrench onto a thigh patch. ‘I’ve wanted this so much, for so long, I thought when I got it I’d race round the ship and access every single system, possibly in alphabetical order. But now…’ he shook his head, marvelling. ‘It’s nice, but somehow it doesn’t seem all that important.’
‘Good,’ said Alex, grinning back. It would have worried him if Davie still felt that he needed to prove himself somehow by doing tech work. ‘But now you are allowed to help out we’ve scheduled you for duty.’ He waited for the tiniest of pauses and then put up a watch and quarter bill on the big screen for Davie and everyone else to see. ‘Water QI’s tomorrow, okay?’
There were roars of laughter and a good deal of cheering as Davie turned pink. The water quality inspections were a chore traditionally given to the most junior officer aboard ship. Scheduling him to do that could have been a joke, but it wasn’t. It established that he would be allowed to work at the level of an honorary officer, but a junior one, on the same basis that Shion herself had been permitted to join them. It was the best present Davie could have had, and it was several seconds before he was capable of speech. When he did speak, of course, it was to hide his embarrassment under a joke, giving Alex a ridiculously exaggerated salute and bark of ‘Sir Yes Sir!’ which made everyone laugh again. But there was no hiding the delight in the grin he shared with Alex afterwards. And nobody, seeing the care with which he carried out the water inspections the following day, could doubt that he was taking his new role seriously. He was more than one of the team now; he was part of the ship’s company.
Six
The arrival of the Minnow was a significant event at the border station. It wasn’t just that the corvette brought them supplies and an influx of new faces. The arrival of one ship and the subsequent departure of the other marked the passage of time like the ticks of a metronome – every two weeks, tick, another unit of time acknowledged. Just about everything – mission objectives, watch and quarter bills, social life – revolved around the sixteen day fortnightly schedule.
On their sixty fourth day at the comms buoy now known as Border Station, the Minnow returned. There was a brief ceremony as salutes were fired, the patrol ship slipped off station and headed away to Oreol and the corvette moved neatly in to take its place. This put them cruising off the frigate’s starboard side, both of them in fixed orbi
t below the comms buoy itself. Shuttles were soon plying between them, transferring passengers and supplies, and bringing Milli Walensa over to the flagship for a private meeting with the captain.
‘You wouldn’t believe it if you saw it,’ she told Alex, having handed over the official dispatches. ‘Now that the route to Oreol has been confirmed as safe, ships are heading out there en-masse.’
Alex looked surprised – the actual route to Oreol was still classified, partly in the interest of public safety and partly to protect the team there from just this kind of invasion.
‘How did they get the route?’ he queried.
‘Oh,’ Milli had to cast her mind back to what was, for her, old news. ‘Alien Truth got hold of the chart somehow and put it in the public domain. They suspect a leak in the Embassy. But the important thing is that the chart is out in the public domain. They’ve had more than fifty ships arrive at Oreol since, most of them private yachts or charters. White Star is actually sending a liner to start running cruises.’
Alex gave a crack of laughter.
‘You’re making that up!’ He said, at which Milli grinned and flicked open a file from her wristcom, accessing an advert which she played on his desk’s central holoscreen. It was, indeed, a White Star advert, announcing the start of a thrilling new venture, the Oreol Cruise. It would be a three week trip from Telathor, with the highlight a visit to the Haven Base. The staggering price tag indicated that they expected high demand, not only from Telathorans themselves but in the longer term, from offworlders making the journey out here just for this. Carrearranis was, after all, the first inhabited world to be found since Quarus had been discovered nearly a century before. It was News. It was also Adventure. Oreol was the closest people could get to it yet, and a high adventure destination in its own right. Such a trip would give people dinner-party bragging rights for years. White Star was right, Alex realised, there would be huge demand for such a trip, particularly combined with five star luxury. Even so, the thought of liners running sightseeing trips to an X-base in the middle of first contact endeavours made him goggle a bit. He took a moment to get his head around it, took a drink of coffee and sighed.
‘Every time I think things have got as mad as they can possibly be…’ he observed, and Milli laughed too.
‘You don’t know the half of it,’ she said. ‘They can’t refuse people landing at the base, obviously. Well, they tried,’ she recalled, with a chuckle. ‘Pulled the whole ‘military classified zone’ thing and tried to keep people outside system limits, but the first few ships promptly spaced all their food supplies and declared themselves in a state of emergency. As it became clear that they would go to just about any lengths to get in, a decision was made that it was safer to accommodate them, so they’ve put up a visitor dome with its own landing pad and run guided tours round the facility.’
Alex nearly choked on his coffee.
‘They haven’t mentioned anything about that in reports,’ he said, putting his mug back down on a grav-safe ring.
‘Well, no,’ Milli agreed. ‘It was decided not to bother you with it – actually of course they’re acutely embarrassed by the whole situation and don’t want you to think that they’ve not got things under control. Which they have, really – I mean, they’re gearing up to dealing with it, as bonkers as it is to have to run an active X-base in dual role as a theme park. But there’s a gallery now in the mission control room where visitors can stand and watch, and a round the clock live feed to the media, too.’
Alex considered that and reached for his coffee again. The Haven base was under the joint ownership of Excorps and the Diplomatic Corps. Alex spared a moment to feel sympathy for them, but then focussed on what that situation implied for him.
‘They can’t get out here, can they?’
‘No,’ Milli said, with a grin which held a wicked twinkle. ‘They’re trying, of course, lots of them either trying to chase us or the couriers. But Telathor has sent over a squadron of SDF fighters and they’re maintaining the quarantine zone. We’ve fitted them with Maylard cannon – they seem to enjoy being able to take pot shots at people who won’t do as they’re told.’
Alex chuckled. The Maylard cannon had been trialled by the Fourth and was now spreading throughout the Fleet as its effectiveness had been demonstrated in live operations. System Defence Forces and police with system vehicles were also keenly interested. Often described as a stun-gun for ships, the Maylard cannon hit the target with non-lethal but incapacitating force. A side effect of its vibrations was that people subjected to it often found that bladder or bowels, or both, cut loose. The SDF were often treated dismissively by spacers who knew very well that they wouldn’t really fire at them because they were speeding a bit or out of their lane, so Alex could imagine their glee at being given such effective teeth.
‘Well, as long as they’re kept away from us,’ said Alex, shrugging off the hordes of civilians as Oreol’s problem, not his. ‘We have enough to deal with in the ones who get sent out.’
This was not really fair. All the scrambling, in-fighting, shouting and tears involved in competing for a place in the Heron’s observational party went on far away, primarily on Telathor and then again on Oreol. Only the few successful candidates made it out to the frigate, and they were so aware of how privileged they were that they weren’t inclined to be any trouble. It helped, too, that only four of them came at a time, replacing half of the party. This meant that they always had four old hands who’d been aboard a couple of weeks already to help settle the newcomers in. They were always keen to demonstrate their experience and expertise, and by the time they left the newbies were, themselves, ready to impart their wisdom to the wide-eyed, lost-looking new arrivals who came aboard clutching their kit bags. There were rarely more than one or two incidents a day of rule breaking, inappropriate behaviour or emotional outbursts, and Mako Ireson dealt very calmly with those. Alex himself only had to show his face at a weekly dinner for the visitors, exchange pleasantries with them when they were being shown the command deck and respond to questions put to him through their liaison officer at daily briefings.
This, admittedly, was a minor irritation. Sub-lt Kit Travers was one of their supernumerary officers, as they carried far more Subs than was usual for a ship of this size. Like the other supernumeraries, he had been given a departmental role in addition to training and operational responsibilities, and in Kit’s case was responsible for looking after the Second Irregulars lab and any other civilian passengers they might have. Whilst it was Mako who looked after them day to day, Kit Travers was their go-to officer for any operational questions they had. He was meant to act as a buffer between them and the skipper, answering their questions so that Alex wouldn’t be bombarded with them, and to be fair to him he was able to answer at least nine out of ten to their satisfaction.
The difficulty was that there was always one – at least one – who refused to accept something being told them unless they’d heard it from the skipper himself. Kit had to recognise that and do the best he could to prevent them messaging or intercepting Alex as he went around the ship, insisting on formal protocol. This meant that at the end of each daily briefing when Alex asked, ‘Any questions?’ eyes would turn to Kit with resigned looks as, more often than not, he held up his hand with an apologetic look. The prize idiot question, to date, was, ‘Sorry, skipper, but could you please confirm that it is not possible to ‘creep up on Carrearranis’ by moving nearer a few kilometres a day?’
This kind of thing was, of course, annoying, but Alex had the normal spacer view of groundhog civilians anyway so shouldn’t even have been surprised by their stupidity. Milli looked interested, and a little concerned, too, feeling that things had to be bad if the skipper was finding the passengers that irritating.
‘Driving you nuts, Alex?’ she enquired.
‘No, not really,’ Alex conceded. ‘It’s just that I’ve got used to relaxing in the interdeck lounge and I can’t any more. Mako stops them co
ming over to me and asks them to respect my privacy, of course, but they stare, watching every move I make and usually with muttered indignation, too. It’s as if they think I shouldn’t be allowed to take even a ten minute break. I tried to have a game of triplink last week and they huddled in the corner glaring and muttering about me like a malevolent chorus.’ As she chuckled at the image, he grinned.
‘I don’t know which is worse, myself,’ Milli said. ‘Bringing them out when they’re all hyped up and scared and asking questions all the time, or taking them back when they’re full of it and telling us how they would run the mission if it was up to them.’
Alex laughed and drank some coffee. It was understood between them this was a very precious time-out in which both could set aside all the expectations of being positive and talk frankly, even enjoy a little grumble about things which got on their nerves. It was half an hour, once a fortnight, in which they could both stop being Skipper and just be Alex and Milli.
Outside that, of course, Alex remained unrelentingly positive, patient with passengers and optimistic about the outcome of their mission. Even on days when the passengers were being more than usually idiotic, even on days when the best success they could record was that they’d gained information about a previously unknown species of fish, Alex was cheerfully confident. His crew took their cue from him, morale remaining high.
‘Rather you than me,’ he said frankly, grateful that he at least did not have to deal with the insanity that was erupting at Oreol. He felt, to some degree at least, pleasantly insulated from all that, out here at the border.
That, however, was not going to last. One of the dispatches Milli had brought advised that a flotilla of couriers was being raced in and that they would soon be operating a daily run between the border station and the X base.
