by S MacDonald
It was doubtful whether it helped, though. Over the next few days it became apparent that the more Commander Mikthorn was put down, the more obstinate and difficult he became.
There were, admittedly, some amusing aspects to it. The commander’s encounter with Silvie was certainly one of them. He had evidently prepared for his introduction to her – he had seen her before at a social event on Telathor which she’d flitted through like a supercharged butterfly, but this was the first time they had actually met.
Commander Mikthorn had prepared rigorously for the event. He had completed the training and even the meditation programme provided by the Diplomatic Corps for those who were going to meet Ambassador Silver. He had been practising again on the way out here, and when the moment came put into practice all the controlled breathing, calm visualisation and mental humming which he believed would prevent her seeing anything other than surface emotion.
As with many people encountering Silvie for the first time, however, his predominant emotion was fear. His biggest fear was that she would see something in him, something private, and humiliate him by revealing it to others. He had been assured that she could not read minds and that her social skills had progressed significantly since the days when she would comment on people’s sexual desires or their need to go to the toilet. Even so, it felt like a huge risk to his dignity to come face to face with her like that, and that fear hung around him like the miasma from silent, deadly, egg-fuelled farts.
Silvie handled it well. Shion had trained her in dealing with all manner of awkward encounters and this was a routine number five, stinky anxiety, to be handled with brisk, dispassionate courtesy and on no account wrinkling her nose, stepping back or uttering any variation of ‘Phewee!’
‘Pleasure to meet you,’ said Silvie, which she now understood was a code in formal etiquette and didn’t actually count as a lie. Then, moving straight on to one of her escape routes, she transferred his attention to the woman beside her. ‘Have you met Shion?’
It was at that point that things went wrong – horribly wrong if you were Commander Mikthorn, comically wrong if you were a member of the Heron’s crew.
Commander Mikthorn had Views about Shion. He had had Views ever since he’d heard that a visitor had arrived from the Veiled World and that she was now serving as an officer with the Fourth. For a start, he doubted that she was from the Veiled World, as it seemed so unlikely that after thousands of years of complete isolation, they would send one young woman to the League right out of the blue. Of course it was said that the Solarans had brought her to X-Base Amalfi direct from Pirrell, but who could ever be sure of anything when you were dealing with Solarans? Commander Mikthorn’s own View was that the whole thing was just too improbable to be credible. That was even more the case since she had become a member of the Fourth. That made no sense at all, since if she really was a representative of the mysterious Pirrell then she ought to have been looked after by the Diplomatic Corps and be housed on Chartsey where experts could learn – diplomatically of course – everything they could from her. It was just ridiculous to say that she had ‘chosen’ to serve with the Fourth. The authorities should never have allowed it.
More important than either of these Views, however, was Commander Mikthorn’s opinion of her value. In his world, money spent always had to be justified by outcomes, research targets met, product development targets achieved. In Shion’s case, he was aware that breath-taking amounts of money had been spent on her, from bringing her into the League to the ongoing diplomatic provision which entailed major teams following everywhere she went. He had worked out, to his own satisfaction, that more money was spent on Shion in a month than his office had to spend in a year.
And what was the return?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. She had not provided them with knowledge about any advanced technology. She had not given them any kind of scientific, strategic or even diplomatic benefit, since she was no longer in contact with her people and had said she had no intention of going back there. It was said that she’d given some information of benefit to historians, but where was the use in that? She was said to be a good pilot, too, but the League was full of good pilots. As far as he could see, all that money and all that effort was going to pay for this woman, of highly dubious origin anyway, to do no more than the routine work of any junior Sub.
In the moment in which he looked at Shion, his Views were as obvious on his face as they were in the surge of contempt and resentment. His glance was withering.
It was not the first time Shion had encountered such reactions. The Diplomatic Corps had had entirely unrealistic expectations of what she could give to humanity, and the more she’d tried to convince them that she had no knowledge of science or technology beyond that they already had themselves, the more assured they had become that she was keeping her advanced knowledge secret. That had been one of the reasons they had agreed to her coming to serve with the Fourth, in the hope that sharing their military secrets with her might build trust and prompt a reciprocal confidence. It had taken a long time even for Alex to convince them that she really did not have any such knowledge to share, and there were some even now who remained convinced that she had to know something she wasn’t telling them yet. Most had come around to accepting that she was not even an ambassador for her people, no kind of official representative, just a traveller working passage, as it were, with the Fourth. Occasionally, though, she met someone who considered her to be a disappointment, and showed it. So she would, herself, have shrugged off the commander’s sneer with a philosophical calm.
Silvie, though, was not having that.
‘Oi!’ She exclaimed, and poked the commander on the arm. Her finger was unexpectedly hard and he jumped back, clapping a hand to his arm and giving her a shocked look. ‘You – have some respect.’ Silvie’s finger was still hovering, poised as if to launch in for another poke at any moment. She never actually hit anyone – quarians were not violent – but she had perfected the art of finger-poking. It was only fair, she said, when humans were being so offensive it was actually painful for her. It might, indeed, be considered a form of self-defence.
For people confronted by a suddenly angry Silvie with that steel-hard finger waving at their ribs, though, the effect was terrifying. And it didn’t help, either, that Shion started giggling.
Commander Mikthorn looked at the two of them and came to a very important realisation. Shion was tall and dark, with fine-boned features and a slender, fluid grace, her chocolate-brown eyes currently gleaming with amusement. Silvie, beside her, was an enraged pixie, small and apparently delicate, with a subtle sheen to her skin, sapphire-bright eyes and spiked platinum hair.
He had been thinking of both of them as ‘women’. And deep down in Commander Mikthorn’s psyche, unacknowledged even by himself, he felt that women were softer, more emotional creatures than men, genetically predisposed to caring and nurturing roles.
Now he realised, looking at them, that none of his preconceptions about women could be applied to either of these two, because they were not human. They might look superficially human, but they absolutely were not.
With a dawning sense of horror, Commander Mikthorn really understood that he was in the company of aliens. Real aliens, not the nearly-humans he’d imagined them to be. They were, perhaps, all the more disturbing because they didn’t have waving tentacles or high bald heads. Something that looked human but wasn’t was profoundly unnerving. They were Other, he thought, like inhuman intelligences inhabiting human-like bodies. Silvie, seeing his response to that realisation, gave a small nod.
‘Score one for Wet Knickers,’ she observed, and with that, turned and tucked her arm through Shion’s, walking off with her. Shion was still laughing, and apparently about to make some protest, at which Silvie said, ‘I know – but come on, the man is a toad.’
Commander Mikthorn, doing the walk of shame to the nearest shower unit, made up his mind that he would never go anywhere near either
Silvie or Shion again.
This, however, turned out to be easier said than done, since it turned out that both of them, and for that matter Davie North, worked in the lab on an ad-hoc basis. All sorts of people, it transpired, were working in the lab, some of them scheduled for duty in the workshop while others seemed to just turn up and help out with anything from fetching coffee to getting hands on with the research. At one point Commander Mikthorn found about twenty five people crammed into the lab, having some kind of meeting. It looked, to his eyes, more like a coffee morning, as most people had mugs and there were boxes of doughnuts being handed around. It was chaotic, people talking over one another in an excited babble. Professor Parrot himself sat there listening to it all with no attempt to impose any kind of order on proceedings. He seemed to be enjoying himself, eyes bright with keen interest.
‘Ah,’ he spotted Commander Mikthorn standing disapproving in the doorway, and beamed at him, waving him in. ‘Come and join us!’
This was not the kind of reception the commander had anticipated, but the professor had been determinedly cheerful throughout. His team, though not quite as ebullient, were polite and at least partially cooperative. They were rather too willing, indeed, to explain to the commander exactly what it was they were doing and exactly what problems they were attempting to overcome. This was of no interest to the commander. He stated repeatedly that he was no scientist himself, in a manner which made it clear that he was proud of the fact, and he would never succumb to what he considered to be researchers trying to blind him with science. All he was interested in was whether they were providing value for money in the form of hard results, presented on time, in return for hard cash.
That was difficult to determine here, admittedly, because this particular team, extraordinarily, had both an open-ended research brief and an unlimited, no-questions budget. Commander Mikthorn himself had been told to provide them with whatever they might ask for while they were at Telathor, with no need for any of the usual application forms and review to ensure that the expenditure was justified.
The Fourth had certainly spared no expense in providing for them. The workshop the captain had mentioned might be compact, but it contained highly advanced engineering tech, some of it in top secret development itself and all of it unbelievably expensive. When he had raised the question of costs with Professor Parrot, though, the professor had waved that away with airy unconcern.
‘We don’t think about that,’ he said. ‘Jonas handles all the finances for us.’
Jonas, it transpired, was Lt Commander Jonas Sartin, the Fourth’s finance officer and Internal Affairs representative. He had readily supplied the commander with access to all relevant paperwork, including much that had bypassed the commander himself as it had been sent straight to Chartsey. Commander Mikthorn had actually stopped breathing for a while when studying the finances of this project, and had needed a cup of tea to settle his nerves.
It had been Buzz who’d provided the tea, and Buzz too who had sympathised with his predicament; head office breathing down his neck, orders he could do nothing about, teams stuck on Telathor who were going crazy at him. He was, Buzz had soothed, in a very difficult position. But at least he could report that he had carried out a thorough personal investigation, to satisfy head office that there were good sound reasons for the Parrot project to remain aboard the Heron.
And this, it appeared, was what everyone expected him to conclude. The reason, indeed, that Professor Parrot and his team were so cheerful was that Captain von Strada had given a personal assurance that there was no risk whatsoever of them being forced off the ship.
‘Over my dead body,’ he’d said, and they’d shaken hands on that.
It was Buzz, though, who’d suggested dealing with Commander Mikthorn himself with a charm offensive. The man could do nothing to them, Buzz observed, since he could not force them off the ship, had no power to withhold their funding and had been told he must not even attempt to interfere with their work. It would be easier, and less hassle all round, to treat him pleasantly, allow him full view of what they were doing and give him no grounds to complain about any aspect of their conduct.
Professor Parrot, therefore, was being emphatically helpful and cheery in his manner, though declining to discuss the issue of relocating to Oreol with anything more than the firm statement We need the facilities on the Heron for our work, after which he had excused himself to look at some data. Now, it appeared, they had nothing better to do than to scoff doughnuts amidst a free-for-all which looked more like an argument in an undergraduate refectory than any kind of serious academic discussion.
‘We’re having a project meeting,’ Professor Parrot informed him, and gestured hospitably towards the nearest box of doughnuts. ‘Sorry – say that again?’ He had already turned to a man who’d carried on speaking while the professor was inviting Commander Mikthorn in. It was clear that he was going to pay no further attention to the commander, expecting him to fend for himself. There was nowhere to sit, every seat already taken and nobody offering to get up for him even though, he noticed, most of them were of subordinate rank. The man who was speaking, indeed, had the insignia of a leading star. As he explained his point, the professor was listening to him just as if he was a fellow scientist. And while other people were already arguing with what he said, there was no question of dismissing him because he was a mere crewman and didn’t know what he was talking about.
A couple of people leaning on a nearby workbench shuffled up to make room for him, but the commander declined. He glared, too, as he spotted that someone was perched on top of a tub-like machine in the workshop that he knew for a fact had cost eleven million dollars. Then he saw that the figure perched on the machine was Shion and turned his glare away, hastily. He knew just enough tech to gather that the subject under debate, if such a noisy disorder could be termed a debate, was a question of various kinds of telemetry link, physical and via transmission. But this was nanotech they were talking about, a whole different world from the hard tech and cables used in the Fleet. The case the leading star was arguing appeared to be for some kind of quantum entanglement. This, it appeared, was generally considered a good idea, but there was considerable difference of opinion as to the best way to set about it. It was notable, too, that when Davie North made a contribution there was no respectful hush; he might be a genius but so were several other people in that room – including, of course, Professor Parrot himself. They were right at the limit of human engineering ability, pushing at that limit, and in that, Davie knew no more than the rest of them. So his suggestion was just that, and carried no more weight than any of the other opinions being shared. It was Professor Parrot whose word counted here. And he did take charge, too – a bell pinged, loud enough to be heard even over the hubbub, and having glanced at his wristcom the professor held up a hand.
‘Time,’ he called, though they’d all heard the bell and were falling quiet, all looking at the professor. ‘Thank you,’ he said, with an air of happy satisfaction. ‘We’ll try both integrated and associated,’ he decreed, and looked over at one of his team, a distinguished professor in his own right and the holder of several prestigious intersystem honours. ‘Mosh – will you head up the integrated team?’
A nod and salute with a coffee mug confirmed that he would, and Professor Parrot looked over at Davie North. ‘Associated?’ he asked, and Davie grinned agreement.
‘Pleasure,’ he said, and immediately held up his hand, asking, ‘Who’s with me?’ He glanced around and noted the several hands raised in response, giving them a nod of acknowledgement.
‘And me?’ Mosh queried, raising his own hand and smiling thanks at the roughly equal number volunteering to help him.
‘Programmes on the board asap,’ Professor Parrot requested, and brought the meeting to a close with a smile and ‘Thank you, everyone.’
The crowd cleared up quickly after themselves and departed, none of them giving Commander Mikthorn more than a passing glan
ce.
‘Now that,’ Professor Parrot told him, with a gesture at the departing group, ‘is what I mean by the facilities and support we have here. It isn’t just that they provide us with all the equipment we could want, bring us meals and generally take great care of us, though all of that is nice, of course. The real value of working here is in the extended team, members of the Fourth bringing all their knowledge and skills to the table.’ He looked over at a man who’d gone straight to the workshop and was busy there with another member of the research team. ‘Excellent,’ the professor beamed. ‘Just excellent.’
Commander Mikthorn seethed. This was, in fact, the reason why the Second maintained a lab on the Heron and why it was in such hot demand. The Fourth did not merely facilitate R&D projects on their ships but took an active part in them. In principle, even Commander Mikthorn acknowledged that there were benefits to that. In practice, though, he expected such collaboration to be run on orthodox Fleet lines, with liaison through senior officers and crew undertaking only such duties as were appropriate to their rank. Accustomed as he had tried to become to the lamentable informality endemic in the Second, it offended all his sense of Fleet decency to watch a rating spouting off about quantum engineering to a room full of officers and scientists.
He had, however, only one response. Buzz had talked to him too, pointing out that upsetting the professor or any member of his team might well be construed as interfering with their work. Commander Mikthorn had taken the hint, understanding that Captain von Strada would take the first excuse to get him off the ship. He would not, Commander Mikthorn had determined, give him that satisfaction. So, even in response to the outrage of that so-called meeting, the commander didn’t launch out with his opinion of the shambolic proceedings. Instead, he took out his pocket comp. It was rather larger than the palm-nestled disc most people found convenient. This was a blocky rectangular device he had to hold in his hand. It had, in addition, a wrap-around security panel with, absurdly, the words Classified Content emblazoned on it in lurid yellow. There had been a row about his comp, as the Fourth normally gave their guests a shipboard comp for the duration of their stay, courteously taking whatever personal tech they might have brought aboard into safekeeping. Few people argued about this. Those few who did had it explained to them that the Heron’s computer systems were of a radically new type, still under R&D field testing, with security systems which would not allow normal comps to interface with them. For those few of the few who still argued about that, there was the ultimate point that the Second Irregulars only allowed them to trial the computers on their ship under an agreement which specified that no visitor would be allowed to interface outside tech with them.
