by S MacDonald
Now, though, seeing that nobody was listening to them and that the Heron was preparing to leave, they had launched a shuttle. It was heading straight for the frigate, flashing a barrage of emergency codes and demands for an immediate meeting with Captain von Strada.
Alex considered this, looking at the shuttle as it hurtled towards their security exclusion zone. At that point it would either have to be given permission to approach or turned away under threat of gunfire.
It took Alex less than two seconds to consider his options and make that decision.
‘No,’ he said, and tapped the control which authorised the watch officer to use non-lethal fire in order to force the shuttle away. It would, of course, cause massive furore for the Fourth to fire on an LIA shuttle, but better that, Alex felt, than having to deal with an LIA executive in the full throes of a panic-driven rant. The LIA would never admit that their agents were capable of panicking, of course. It was the Fourth, they said, who acted without due or indeed any consideration, in instant knee-jerk reactions which took no account whatsoever of security issues or potential consequences. From their perspective, Alex’s decision to head straight to Carrearranis would be utterly terrifying. They would consider it their absolute duty to do everything within their power to make him stop and listen to them as they explained all the potential risks of what he was intending. As Alex himself had recognised with regret some months before, their organisational cultures were so fundamentally incompatible that any crisis-response, like this, would inevitably set them at loggerheads. And right now, he had too much to think about to be dealing with them.
It was Very Vergan who signalled refusal to the shuttle, quickly followed in turn by a reminder of their security exclusion zone, and the required legal warning. Then, as the shuttle kept hurtling towards them regardless, it was Very who gave the calm order to one of their gunnery teams. ‘Fire.’
A brief spurt from one of the Maylard cannon and the LIA shuttle stopped signalling. It kept going straight on, too, passing behind the frigate instead of curving in to intercept. Alex, busy finishing his report to be forwarded to the Admiralty and League President, paid little attention either to the shuttle or to his crew’s reaction. Many of them yipped or winced in sympathy. Few had not experienced that ship-stunning impact in the course of combat drills, and however they felt about the LIA, they knew better than to take that lightly. Only a few people laughed, then broke off or turned them into embarrassed coughs as they realised that nobody else was finding this funny.
On the command deck, Very was following procedure with meticulous dispassion, calling a medical team to stand-by and signalling the shuttle to establish whether they were in need of assistance. The answer that came back about a minute later as the shuttle was brought back under piloted control made it very clear that the LIA personnel aboard it would rather take offers of assistance from hell itself than accept any kind of help from the Fourth. If it had been possible for that relationship to get any worse, in fact, it had just done so.
Alex really didn’t care. He felt only a calm satisfaction as he saw that the LIA shuttle was heading back towards the ship which was, by then, already moving to pick it up anyway. Signals were flying at them from both the shuttle and the Comrade Foretold, spitting fury and promising dire retribution. ‘I’ll have your command for this!’ Alex saw, as he glanced at the incoming tirade. That might have been a more impressive threat if the LIA hadn’t made it at least eight times already, on average once a week, and if Alex hadn’t been entirely assured that any review of this, no matter how biased, would find that he had acted wholly within the remit of Fleet regulations.
‘Break orbit,’ he said, seeing that the five minutes was up. And with no more than a flash of their arrays in reply to the Minnow’s salute, they turned out of the orbit they’d maintained for the last three months. They were on their way to Carrearranis.
Ten
It took them two hours and six minutes to get to the system. The first ten minutes of that were spent in getting rid of the LIA. As they curved away towards Carrearranis the Comrade Foretold, having picked up its shuttle, came after them with a determination which made it clear that they had every intention of coming with them all the way.
Alex, however, had different ideas. He had already told the LIA that they would not be allowed to come any closer to Carrearranis without the Fourth’s consent; a decision he had the right to enforce as Presidential Envoy and which LIA Director Harard Perkins had had to accept under deep and bitter resentment. Now, in the heat of the moment, it was apparent that he intended to disregard those orders. Alex, however, promptly reminded him of them, signalling a curt command for the LIA ship to withdraw to the quarantine border.
The ensuing exchange might have been quite comical in other circumstances. The LIA director, now restored to his ship, had been obliged to change his underwear and was, therefore, suffering as much from humiliation-induced rage as from terror at the insanity of what the Fourth was doing. Protests against being fired on and at not being listened to came spluttering from the Comrade Foretold with incoherent fury, to which the Fourth responded with coldly formal procedural signals. Since the Comrade Foretold was a fraction of the Heron’s size, the overall effect was of an over-excited micro-terrier yapping at the heels of a Doberman taking no notice of it whatsoever.
Finally, Alex sent a signal telling them that if they did not comply with his orders as mission commander, he would have no alternative but to launch ship-seizure operations and place them all under arrest.
It was evident that they knew that, one, Alex von Strada was entirely capable of giving such an order and that, two, if the Fourth launched such operations they would be completely outclassed. They might have personal body armour and some small arms on the Comrade Foretold, but the Fourth could deploy fighters carrying their infamous boarding teams with their modified hullwalker rig and huge black multi-function rifles.
Given a fifty second deadline before the Fourth launched their fighters, the Comrade Foretold turned away with a parting barrage of infuriated protest and some highly personal expletives directed at the captain.
‘Right,’ said Alex, once they’d seen the LIA departing. ‘Attention on deck.’ This was no more than a formality, since every member of the crew was already watching the command feed. The skipper would, they knew, brief them as soon as possible; clarifying what was going on, what he intended to do about it and what he needed from them.
And so he did.
‘It appears,’ he said, ‘that the arrival of the Solaran ship at Carrearranis has triggered a self-destruct programme in the Guardian and that it has, therefore, star-dived. We do not know at this stage whether the Solarans came here at the request of authorities on Chartsey or on their own initiative. Either way, it is apparent that the destruction of the Guardian was as unexpected to them as it was to us, which is why they came straight out to us in a state of agitation, asking for us to respond as such a situation is entirely beyond their ability to cope with. I feel it unlikely, myself that they will return; certainly not anytime soon, and in any case it is down to us to deal with this ourselves.
‘So…’ he paused for just a moment to ensure that everyone understood and was with him on that, and was satisfied that they were. It would not occur to any member of the Fourth to protest that the Solarans had caused this disaster so they ought to be the ones to sort it out. Even those who hadn’t encountered Solarans themselves knew enough to recognise that what the skipper said was simply the truth, that it would be entirely beyond the Solarans to deal with a situation involving large numbers of highly emotional humans. They would leave meetings in bewilderment even if the carefully trained humans talked too quickly for them to follow. To have thousands of people shouting at them in evident distress would have been devastating. In the circumstances, it had been a truly heroic effort for them to keep it together sufficiently to tell the Fourth what had happened, and nobody could ask any more of them than that.
> ‘The immediate priority,’ Alex told them, ‘is to establish comms – we’ll do that anyway we can, dropping drone comms to each island if their own network is completely down or we can’t interface with it. Once we have comms our priority will be to calm and reassure the people of Carrearranis. Do not expect that to be easy. The Guardian has been a fixed point in their world throughout their entire history, their teacher and protector, a comforting presence up high. And now it’s gone, without any warning, just gone, the shock and fear those people will be dealing with amounts to medical trauma on a global scale. And the fact that the ship which caused that disaster fled the scene as it did won’t have done anything to calm things, either. Dr Tekawa has prepared an advisory on how best to talk to and support people and we will all be doing that from the moment we come into direct comms range – I will expect all of you to talk to the people in your sector and to continue with that for as long as it takes to steady things down. You should expect to be on comms for several hours at least, for that initial contact.’
There were nods and murmurs of agreement from various points around the ship, and every screen Alex looked at showed steadfast, determined faces.
‘Overall,’ he said, ‘the message will be that they do not need to be afraid, that they are not alone, that we will not leave them and will be there for as long as they want us to be.’ He saw quick understanding on many faces, and gave a small nod. ‘We will,’ he confirmed, ‘be taking on the role of the Guardian with them, as protectors and friends. This is obviously a very sensitive situation and we will all have to be careful not to let that slip over into any kind of controlling role, remembering at all times that the Carrearranians themselves have full sovereign rights over the system and we do nothing without their consent. For a start, we will maintain long orbit outside the system. We will not, to be clear, be entering the system, still less going groundside, until I am satisfied that it is entirely safe and that there has been fully informed clear majority consent to that, so don’t get any ideas about jumping into shuttles and heading off down there with doughnuts and hugs.’ A very slight smile. ‘I know that’s what many of you may feel an instinct to do, especially when you can see people you know so upset and so scared, but allowing offworlders to land on their planet is the biggest decision these people will ever make, yes? And we can’t just impose that on them, or take advantage of the fear and distress they’re in to justify it. We have to calm things down, give it time, and respect their right to make that decision for themselves. For now, our only focus is to reassure them that we are there for them.’
That that was going to be needed became distressingly obvious when they disentangled the screaming signals from Carrearranis and played them separately. It was as desperate, as awful, as hearing people yelling for help from inside a burning building.
It got worse, too, when they went into orbit around the system. There was some slight relief as they realised that the planet’s internal comms network was still functioning, with a tiny but detectable energy signature. The islands were, therefore, still able to talk to one another. It was the out-of-system broadcast which had died with the Guardian.
‘Can we connect with it?’ Alex asked.
‘I think so…’ Davie North was heading up the comms team, looking for any way they could interface their system with the groundside network. ‘If we can lay a band of nanoweb…’
They laid a band of nanoweb right around the system, an extraordinary endeavour in itself and one which took them the better part of an hour, even with the practice they’d had in laying it around Oreol and on the route out to Border Station. The minutes seemed interminable, all of them acutely and horribly aware of the fear that was going on down on the planet. The temptation to just leap into shuttles and head down to reassure them was very strong. They stood firm, though, watching and waiting as the nanoweb was laid, activated and calibrated so as to act as a gigantic sounding board, boosting their own comms arrays to a signal which should be picked up groundside.
When it worked, when the comms signals from the singing stones began popping back onto their screens, there were gasps of relief from all over the ship, though no cheering. It wasn’t a moment for cheering.
It was heart-breaking, hearing the islanders crying for help to one another, and then, when the Fourth popped back up on their comms, turning to them in frenzied desperation. Most of the Carrearranians seemed to think that the Fourth could stop this happening, as if they could undo it and bring the Guardian back to them. Others just cried, despairingly, ‘What are we going to do?’ At best, the calmest response was one of utter bewilderment, ‘What happened? What was that ship? Where’s the Guardian gone?’ Some of them were in denial, refusing to accept that the Guardian had gone at all. It had left them before, of course, historically, though never away for more than a couple of days. Even those had been major events for the Carrearranians, times when they traditionally lit bonfires and sang songs throughout the night, as if fending off the fear they felt at being left alone. Now they had seen their protector, the rock on which their society was built, drive itself into the sun. Some could not believe it; some just wouldn’t.
As liaison teams got straight to work talking to their islands, Alex was on his own call to Arak. He was already at the singing stone along with most of the inhabitants of his island, clustering around with none of the formal arrangement of people that was usual on community calls. As expected, emotions were running very high. Many of the islanders were in tears. An elderly woman in the background was wailing in desolation, being comforted by people Alex knew to be her daughter and grandson.
He knew all of these people by then, not just their names and relationships but their personalities. The woman who was wailing was called Darac. She was the oldest resident on Arak’s island, at sixty seven years old, with few teeth left and thin grey hair. She had taken a keen interest in Alex’s own family, asking questions about his parents and grandparents. Just a couple of weeks ago, she had sent a message asking him to pass it on to his mother, showing her a special, secret-recipe way to cook the little rainbow fish which were a delicacy at that time of year. Now she was keening in a grief too overwhelming for words, rocking back and forth as her daughter and grandson clung to her, crying themselves.
Arak, Alex saw, was not crying. Instead he had the stunned, numb look of someone who’d suffered bereavement. He was moving slowly, as if struggling to function.
In that moment there was no Ambassador von Strada, representing the League. There was not even Captain von Strada, commanding officer. There was just Alex, reaching out to help a friend.
‘Arak, I’m so sorry,’ he said, speaking straight from the heart. ‘This is a terrible thing, a terrible time. But we are here now, all right? We are right here, I am right here, and I promise you that it will be all right.’ Others were already clamouring around the comm screen, all talking at once and some of them shouting, but in that moment Alex kept his gaze locked on Arak’s eyes. He was speaking directly to him but with a resonance which addressed everyone on the planet. ‘We will keep you safe.’
It was more than an hour before they were able to have anything like productive conversation. By then Alex had told them several times what had happened, at least as far as his own limited knowledge of the facts. He had reiterated even more often, and with deep regret, that it was not possible for them to get the Guardian back, no. There was no trace of it within the system and no doubt that it had self-destructed. The question of why was not one which Alex felt able to answer. The question of whose fault it was, though, was one he was prepared for.
‘It was nobody’s fault,’ he said, with conviction. ‘You did not know this would happen. We did not know it would happen. Nobody knew, nobody could have known. It is a dreadful shock for all of us and natural, in shock and grief, to want to hold somebody responsible for it. But in this, I honestly believe, none of us could have known what would happen.’
The question had been asked, of cours
e – the Carrearranians themselves had asked it over uncounted generations, as they pondered the possibility of visitors arriving at their world. Asked what it would do when the Clean Ship came, the Guardian had always given the same response; the same response Arak had given Alex when he too had asked that question. ‘I will protect and serve the people.’
How could anyone be expected to realise that that would mean a self-destruct programme? It was hard enough to understand even now it had happened. There was a kind of thin logic to it, seeing itself as defunct now that the Carrearranians were in contact with an advanced species from an uninfected world. Humans, however, would have considered that the need for the Guardian at such a time of change was more important than ever. They would never have devised such a programme. In such moments, Alex was acutely aware of how impossible it was really to enter the minds and fully understand the Olaret. Humanity might be their genetic and even cultural descendants, but that gave them no more than the glimpse of a shadow of what the Olaret themselves had actually been. It would be months before Alex himself could come to terms with what they had done. For right now, he knew, the only thing that mattered was to deal with the aftermath. And that meant keeping things together, on the ship and on the planet.
