by S MacDonald
He didn’t say any of that, though. He did just as Rangi had said, taking Endru Mikthorn out for a cup of tea in the lounge and talking to him about nothing of any importance whatsoever. He spent much of the time showing him the creatures he was evolving in his System Lord game – Commander Mikthorn was no more interested in that than he had been in the movies, but he was alert enough to make a comment or two. Then later, just as he was starting to feel that he’d had enough of vegetating on the sofa watching holovision, Buzz Burroughs popped in.
‘I’ve brought you something to read,’ he said, and popped a document onto the holoscreen – Rangi had restricted it so that only programmes and reading material he’d approved could be accessed. Buzz added his contribution to the recommended menu and Commander Mikthorn stared at it. He stared at it for a long time, making sure he really did understand what it was before looking back at Buzz.
The document which Buzz had put up on the screen was apparently the latest issue of the Flancer Florist Association’s in-house publication. The lead page offered the delights of an interview with the winner of a Florist of the Year award, an article called Wedding Wonders and a consumer comparison of snipping scissors, amongst others.
‘I love this,’ Buzz explained, seeing that Commander Mikthorn was not at all sure what was going on, even perhaps suspecting that he was being somehow insulted. ‘I collect in-house magazines – I suppose you could call it a hobby. Whenever I come across one that I like, I ask to be put on the mailing list. They’re generally very obliging. I don’t read them all, of course, couldn’t possibly, but I like to browse through them, particularly when I’m tired or it’s been a tough day. This, I admit, is a particular favourite. So soothing, you know, when you’ve been dealing with demanding mission work and command issues all day, to remind yourself that there are worlds out there full of people getting on with normal life in all its wonderful diversity. And it is wonderful, isn’t it, to realise that there are people out there for whom an article on ‘Five Fresh Ways with Tree Tulips’ is actually important? I love it, all the lovely mad eclectic things that people are into, from ‘Air Guitar Monthly’ to ‘Zoology Today’.’
Commander Mikthorn stared at him some more. He would never have suspected Buzz of reading floristry magazines, but he could see that this was no wind-up. And absurd as it was, it kind of made sense, too – Buzz, a sociologist in his academic role, was fundamentally fascinated by people, and by what made them tick.
Commander Mikthorn could not pretend to have much interest in people at the best of times, and he certainly did not have any interest at all in floristry. All the same, when Buzz had chatted with him for a while and gone, he found himself having a look at the magazine. Buzz had taken trouble to choose this and bring it to him, and it seemed rude not to at least take a little look.
Buzz was right, he found. It was strangely soothing to read about tree tulips and which brand of snipping scissors represented the best value for money. He found himself taking note of the ‘snip test’ assessing comfort in clipping a hundred tough stems and feeling just a little satisfied that the ludicrously expensive brand did not perform any better than the cheaper ones. That seemed in some small way to vindicate what he’d always believed about ridiculously over-priced products – good for them, he thought, almost as if the magazine had exposed a major social scandal rather than being mildly disparaging about floristry scissors. He found it quite engaging, too, to read about the Florist of the Year award. The winner was much too arty for his taste, with displays he would have put straight in the bin. There were features on the runners up, too, and he felt quite strongly that one of them should have won, her displays far superior.
He was browsing through the holo-spread on ‘Wedding Wonders’ and marvelling at how much money people would spend on the flowers for their wedding when Tan came back to take him out for dinner.
‘Uh…’ He was astounded to see Commander Mikthorn looking at holos of a bride surrounded by a tremendous floral arch, predominantly pink and white and much adorned with holographic butterflies. For a moment he thought that he must be looking at some family album, then he saw that it was a magazine article and gave the commander a startled look.
‘Buzz gave it me,’ Commander Mikthorn explained, with just a hint of a little grin. ‘Quite interesting, really – surprising.’ He gestured at the arch. ‘Would you believe they paid eighteen thousand dollars for that?’
‘No!’ Tan sat down, giving the holo full attention. ‘But it’s horrible!’
‘You wait till you see this one…’ he clicked back to the image of a floral pavement designed for a celebrity bride to process along, walking on the flowers. He and Tan having agreed that it was the most vulgar, ostentatious waste of money that they’d seen in years, they went off to dinner with the commander telling the ambassador that the article about scissors had been surprisingly good, and that the runner up to the Florist of the Year award had been robbed.
Afterwards, long afterwards, he would look back on that and realise how truly bizarre it was. At the time it all seemed perfectly normal, and nice, too, to be reading and thinking and talking about things that were so normal and a million light years away from everything aboard the ship.
Gradually, though, within another couple of days, he was starting to pay more attention to what was going on around him. He was amazed to discover that while he’d been out of things, a further eighteen people had been given life-saving treatment in the quarantine sickbay, and that the mission was now providing first-responder training to at least two people on each island. On most islands, one of them was the existing village healer, the other a volunteer to assist them. A new word entered the Carrearranian language – paramedic.
It was not paramedic training in the usual meaning. It hardly looked like training at all, since there was no culture of formal education on Carrearranis – they had no written language, even, other than for numbers, so the idea of introducing lectures, notes, work units and exams was a long way in their future.
Uneducated, however, did not mean that they were unintelligent. Taught in a culture-appropriate way, they learned very quickly. To be a paramedic on Carrearranis you had to be able to do eight things, eight being their equivalent of the League’s tendency to think in tens. All of the eight things were practical, each was taught in a series of sessions that lasted no longer than forty minutes. That, Simon had determined, was the point at which the average Carrearranian would stop absorbing new information and need a break.
When they were absorbing new information, though, so long as it was heavily weighted to oral teaching with a minimum of pictures, they took it in straight off and had superb recall. They were, Simon said, wonderful students – listened closely to what you said and remembered it. Who could ask for more?
Once qualified, paramedics carried their own comms and the medibands which had been part of their training. Seeing an islander slap a mediband onto a patient and read off the blood oxygen levels made Commander Mikthorn feel quite disorientated for a moment. Things changed so fast.
Nobody from the mission had been groundside yet, though. Alex had decided, in discussion with Arak, that they would not send anyone groundside until such time as they had heard back from the Senate. The issue of being recognised as fellow humans was clearly one of such critical importance to the Carrearranians that the progress of the relationship depended on it. At any rate, it was felt by both sides to be appropriate to wait until the Codicil had been ratified before the offworlders were given any further access to the planet.
In fact, analysis had picked up that the Carrearranians had quite enough to cope with for now and that starting to land giant people on their islands might well be too much, too fast. Time for a pause, said Buzz, to let everyone catch up with themselves, and Alex had agreed with that too.
Yet again, though, it would be Silvie who would precipitate things. As with so many situations involving Silvie, it happened very fast, with no warning at all.
Then Simon came in. Commander Mikthorn hadn’t seen him since his collapse, at least, not more than in the distance or on comms. He was glad of that, since he found Simon Penarth just a little bit scary. Well, terrifying, really.
Simon was walking across the lounge towards the galley hatch when Commander Mikthorn caught his eye. He didn’t mean to, far from it. It just happened. But seeing that the commander was looking at him, Simon gave him a pleased look and changed direction, starting to head towards him.
‘Simon!’ Rangi’s voice rang out over the interdeck PA, loud and firm. ‘Back away from the patient!’
Simon stopped, looking a little hurt. ‘I was only…’
‘Back away,’ Rangi insisted. ‘Three good paces and about turn!’
Simon stared at the PA.
‘I have,’ he observed, ‘created a monster.’ Then he grinned mischievously at the commander, took three theatrical steps backwards and went on his way to the galley hatch.
In fact, they had agreed long before on their demarcation of responsibilities. If a case required surgery, Simon took the lead. If it was a matter of therapy, the patient was Rangi’s. Simon’s own preferred method of undertaking psychiatric treatment was the quick-fix blitz approach. This generally worked, to be fair, but it did mean that a lot of his patients tried to thump him. Rangi preferred a less brutal rest-and-rehab methodology, which Commander Mikthorn, for one, appreciated. He even found himself laughing a little, grateful to be rescued from the ravening tiger.
In the next moment, though, a security alert started to blare, just half a second before it was overridden by the howl that called the ship to action stations.
This was not a drill. Full ship drills had been suspended while they were on such active operations, and departmental drills kept to a minimum. The interdeck, out of consideration for their passengers, was not subjected to anything more than a walk-through drill once a fortnight as part of new passenger orientation.
Commander Mikthorn leapt to his feet instinctively, trying to think for a moment where his action station was. Then he remembered that he was a passenger here, and a passenger on medical stand-down at that. Well, at least he knew what to do.
He abandoned his drink, leaving it there on the table – it was on a grav-safe surface and riggers would see to it. He didn’t need to look around to find out where the damage control locker was – he was spacer enough to have made a mental note of them as he went around the ship. In any case, it would have been hard to miss the damage lockers on the Heron. The alert itself had triggered the lockers to spring open, revealing the racks of suits and damage control equipment. Garish lights had flashed up around them and just in case that wasn’t obvious enough, big lit arrows had appeared on the floor, all pointing the way to the nearest locker.
A member of the crew got to the locker before he did, grabbed a suit for herself and stepped away. There was nothing rude about this, it was absolutely correct – rule one in alerts, suit up yourself and then assist others. Commander Mikthorn did the same, seizing the next suit on the rack and getting out of the way to put it on. As he was doing so the shrill peeps of five, four, three, two… were warning that the ship was going into freefall. It did so as the commander slapped the flat-packed suit down onto the deck and planted his feet in to activate it.
He had hated this, on the courier. He had never liked survival suit training and had barely scraped the required time limit for putting them on during the brief periods when he’d served aboard ship. On the couriers, though, they operated to Fourth’s standards of safety training and they had insisted on him practising with the suit until he could get it on in less than eight seconds even in freefall, even blindfold. He had been absolutely sure that they were winding him up with that and it had infuriated him.
Now, some small part of his mind took note to be grateful to them, as scrambling into the suit then was so quick it was like second nature. A wriggle of the hips, a squirm of the arms into the expanding sleeves, a touch to ensure that the helmet had sealed properly, and it was done. The suit had adjusted to fit him as he put it on, the transparent dome helmet flipping itself over his head to seal at the neck. Air pressure was good – ten hours, he confirmed with a glance at the controls projected onto the lower inside of the helmet. All fine, no problem, and he’d got his feet down before freefall kicked in so the sticky grip on the soles was holding him onto the floor.
It was at that point that he became aware of screaming, looked around, and saw a scene that he would remember, ever afterwards, with astonishment. With some hilarity, too, once he was in a position to look back on it and see the funny side. Just then, he was only aware of a kind of horrified awe.
Five of their eight official observers had been in the interdeck lounge when the alert went off. Four of them were the newcomers – the four who’d already been here a month had departed while Commander Mikthorn himself had been still curled up in his cabin watching movies, with another four arriving in exchange. They’d been aboard for three days now and were still at the stage of having guided access. This meant that they were taken to departments in the care of an escort who’d explain things to them and introduce them to people. This particular four had been to engineering, so they were already rather unnerved. The other passenger, in fact, had waited in the lounge for them to get back, ostensibly to console them but in fact to demonstrate the vast superiority of his two weeks’ greater experience aboard the ship. As they shook arms still tingling from contact with superlight cores, he’d been laughing in a condescending way, and had been about to tell them about his group’s experiences when the alert went off.
He was not laughing now. He was floundering in mid-air, because he had stupidly tried to grab hold of someone else who’d flown up when the ship went into freefall, to help them, and had been promptly dragged off the deck himself. The person he had tried to help was now hanging on to him like a drowning man, half-throttling him and kicking like crazy, yelling for help. Another passenger, a woman, was upside down in the air hanging on to the edge of a table with one hand, while attempting unsuccessfully to control her t-shirt with the other. Passengers weren’t allowed to wear clothing which would be hazardous in freefall, and they were advised about modesty issues, too, but this particular passenger had been insistent on her loose-fitting tunic top, which was now unbecomingly bunched around her armpits. Passenger number four was clinging to the ceiling, looking half stunned and exclaiming in pain as he felt the bump on his head where he’d impacted freefall bars. Only passenger five showed any freefall capability, and he was doing a moonwalk towards the locker with a look of great determination on his face and elbow-pumping in slow motion. It was a scene of incompetence incarnate.
Commander Mikthorn only stood staring at it for a couple of seconds before an overriding sense of duty kicked in. Crew were in fact already arriving – those who’d been in the lounge on breaks had hurtled out to go to their own action stations, but there were always four members of the crew assigned to the lounge. Two were riggers and damage controllers; two were there to look after the passengers. Mako was always there too, and very good, normally, at passenger-minding. But he was in the galley, currently shutting it down from the baking he’d been doing there.
Commander Mikthorn went to help the airborne civilians, grabbing a couple of suits to take with hi
m. Seeing that others were already going towards the panicking man and the head-banger up on the ceiling, the commander went to the assistance of the unfortunate lady showing her underwear. By the time he’d held her so that she could tuck herself in, and got her into a suit, the action stations alert was giving the little ping which signified that action stations had now been secured. He would only realise afterwards that it had been the last couple of passengers being got into suits which had brought the ship to full secured status. All hatches were closed, everyone was suited up, everyone was in the right sector and all necessary stations were manned. It was not that quick, by Fourth’s standards, but they’d done it in under a minute.
Silence fell. Everyone was looking now to see the reason for the alert. Commander Mikthorn did, too. The command deck feed showed that Alex von Strada was shouting at somebody – at least, not shouting exactly, but clearly exasperated and speaking with considerable force.
‘…for pity’s sake!’
He was talking, Commander Mikthorn saw, to Silvie. Making sense of what he could see on the command deck screens, it dawned on him that Silvie was aboard a shuttle, and that that shuttle was heading directly for the planet. At speed. It looked for one appalling moment as if she might ram into it, superlight, but in the next thud of the commander’s heart he saw that she was crash-decelerating.
And crash was the word. She was still hypersonic when she hit the stratosphere, with flames breaking out around the shuttle as it came down in a straight vertical drop. A sonic boom ripped out – the loudest noise that had ever been heard on that planet – and in the last kilometre she slammed down from Mach 2 to a complete stop with a deceleration which would have left a human pilot unconscious.
The shuttle had come to a halt a few metres above the surface of the ocean. There was an island in the background – there usually was, wherever you were on Carrearranis – but it was several kilometres away. The sea itself had been flattened by the down-blast from the near-crashing shuttle, with rings rippling out from beneath where it had stopped.
