by S MacDonald
‘Commander!’ He raised his to get everyone’s attention, ‘Hey! It’s Commander Mikthorn!’
It took a minute to get everyone away from their various workstations and apparatus. Professor Parrot himself had to be taken by the shoulder and shouted at in order to bring him up from the depths of thought he inhabited.
‘…D6 recursive,’ he said to himself, as he surfaced, like a man reminding himself of the point where he’d left off a task. Then he looked up irritably. ‘This is quiet time!’
‘Commander Mikthorn is here!’
The professor looked around, saw him and got to his feet. He probably intended to spring to his feet, but an elderly academic who’d just spent six hours sitting in the same position did not have a great deal of spring in his knees. So he climbed up instead, supporting himself with one hand on a sub-particle interferometer. ‘Commander!’ he said, and there was that in his face and in the tone of his voice that Commander Mikthorn would never have imagined he’d see in a billion years. It was pleasure – not the sarcastic over-brightness of his former welcome, but the real thing.. Professor Parrot, without a shadow of a doubt, was genuinely pleased to see him.
‘Ah, Commander…’ he came forward, hobbling a bit on stiff legs, but grasping the commander’s hand in both of his and pumping it with enthusiastic welcome. ‘So good to see you on your feet again,’ he said, which was evidently meant to be metaphorical. ‘I’d have come to see you,’ he said, still holding his hand and gripping it, now, in a hugging grasp. ‘But Rangi said you weren’t up to talking, yet. But come in, come in… sit down!’ he looked around to find somewhere the visitor could sit, and pretty much pulled him into the operator seat of a laser which was capable of drilling a hole through the wall and straight on out through the hull of the ship. A half-drunk cup of some milky drink had been abandoned on the top of the laser housing, forming a sticky ring on its surface. The drink itself had obviously gone cold, a thick pale scum floating on the surface. It looked about half an hour away from starting to grow mould. Part of Commander Mikthorn’s mind noted this. Also the fact that someone had stuck a small grav-safe tray onto the housing, perhaps in a last ditch compromise to make it safer when people dumped cups on it. If this had been the intention, it had failed. The cup was next to the grav-tray, not on it.
‘My dear fellow,’ said Professor Parrot, still holding his hand, and patting it now. ‘I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am…’ embarrassed noises from the people clustered around him caused him to correct himself, ‘how sorry we are. We were just appalled … devastated … no idea what you were going through back there, if only I’d thought, taken the time to consider, I could…’
‘Professor…’ Realising that this was liable to go on indefinitely, Commander Mikthorn took charge. Changing his grip so that it was now him holding Professor Parrot’s hand, he gave it a reassuring pat and let it go. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘You were not responsible for my problems on Telathor. I don’t hold you – any of you – responsible.’ he looked around at the seven people clustering around the professor and for the first time, really paid attention to who they were. People had been trying to tell him this all along, of course, but he’d just brushed it aside, resentful of any efforts to impress him with the importance of Professor Parrot’s team.
But here was the truth, standing in front of him. All eight of these people were in the top echelons of their field. All eight of them held either active or honorary professorships, all eight had more letters after their names than Commander Mikthorn himself would even recognise. Five of them were geniuses – officially so, having the standard of intelligence and ability which was formally recognised as genius by the League. The other three were officially savants, of genius-level ability in some regards but not quite meeting the full abilities required to have genius on their official ID. All eight, though, were of the calibre that the League’s top universities would fight over and crow to the stars if they got them for their faculty. And here they were, more brain power and ability in this one room than he had ever met, or was ever likely to meet. It occurred to him that what they were doing here must be of overwhelming importance, to have brought them out here away from their universities, their own work, their families, and to have kept them out here too, month after month. And it also occurred to him that what they were doing must be extraordinary, to have kept their egos from reaching critical mass in this confined space. If he had learned little else from his experience of managing projects, it was that quite a high proportion of these rock-star scientists had a streak of diva about them. He’d always imagined before he went to the Second that academic rivalries were conducted through the medium of contrary articles and papers. And so they were, mostly. But when big egos were kept too close together, academic rivalry could slide into hatred, scheming, insults and hissy fits. There was a notable absence of that here, and now he thought about it, he realised that he’d never seen them flashing out at one another, or at all resentful of Professor Parrot’s bossiness. Team, he thought, and recognised that he was indeed looking at a tight unit, here. Good, he thought. That would make them easier to deal with.
‘Captain von Strada,’ he said, as they told him how kind he was being, and how understanding, ‘has asked me if I could help out with the project admin.’ At the back of his mind he heard Sub-lt Travers; Work that guilt for all it’s worth. ‘Of course,’ he said, and looked up at them with just the tiniest trace of anxiety, ‘I’m not fully recovered yet, but if you think I might be able to help…’
He left the lab forty minutes later, the new project administrator. And he left it tidy, as a confession that he found things like cups of liquid on unsecured surfaces really made him nervous had them positively scrambling to put things in order. Having thanked them very warmly for their understanding, the commander left the lab with handshakes and goodwill all round.
Thank you, Rangi, he thought, and resolved to thank the medic properly, later. Rangi had been absolutely right to suggest this. He was ready to come back to work, and it was important for him to get back his sense of purpose and his self-esteem by doing work which was at the appropriate level for his rank, and work which was both genuinely important and challenging, too. As for playing on their sense of guilt to get them to cooperate, well…
All’s fair in love, war and project admin, he thought, and went on his way with a light step and a broad grin in his heart.
Twenty One
Three days after that, the mystery of the Solarans’ intervention was solved with the arrival of mail from Chartsey.
Both Alex and Tan Ganhauser took it very well, receiving the news from the League President and Ambassador Gerard respectively. They had retired to Alex’s cabin to read the mail, as the covering orders required them both to open the documents in private. Neither said anything for a minute, after they had finished reading. Then Tan said, ‘Much as we expected, then,’ and Alex gave a nod and murmur of agreement.
‘I would appreciate it,’ he told his crew a few minutes later, as he put the presidential memorandum on the ship’s notice board, ‘if you could keep bad language to a minimum.’
There was some, but not much. The shock of the Guardian’s destruction was firmly in the past, by then, and compensated for by the thrill of what they were doing. Any time they were inclined to grieve over what might have been, they only had to consider where they would be right now – still stuck out at Border Station going round and round in never ending circles – compared to all that they were actually achieving now that they’d been able to get to the system. And, on the whole, the news brought no surprises, anyway, as they’d long since worked out for themselves what was most likely to have happened.
‘The usual bleeping bleep up,’ said one of the crew, laconically, and in that might have been speaking for all.
‘We have heard, now, from our president, about the Solarans coming out here.’ Alex was speaking to Arak, as he tended to before making a general public announcement.
‘Oh yes.�
�� Arak’s expression sobered, and his tone became guarded. ‘Them.’
‘I’m afraid,’ Alex said carefully, ‘that it was a mistake, that it was our president, in fact, who asked them to come here.’
‘What?’ Arak was astounded. ‘Why?’
Alex hesitated for a moment, trying to find a way to put this into a language that would be diplomatic enough to satisfy the authorities back home – not least the president himself – and at the same time, inform Arak clearly of the truth. Alex felt very strongly that he and his people were entitled to that. What he really wanted to say was, ‘Because President Tyborne is a bombastic twit with all the patience and grace of a charging hippopotamus.’
‘President Tyborne was informed,’ Alex said, ‘that we were in a stand-off, able to communicate with you but only through limited and time-delayed comms. He was informed that we would be in that position for months at least, probably for years, gathering information about your world and the Guardian like a trickle of raindrops. He was…’ the word impatient hovered on his tongue, but he forced it back, ‘anxious to move things forward. So he asked the Solarans for help.’
In his mind, he was remembering the self-congratulatory tone of the memo the president had sent: I made them understand how urgent it was; we didn’t want them thinking about it for ten or twenty years. It had explained another point, too: I told them not to come near you first in case the Guardian saw that as them being contaminated by contact with you. But I have asked them to inform you of the outcome, and to communicate any information that they gather, before coming on here to tell me how things went. The final paragraph was downright chirpy; I know it will surprise you, the Solarans turning up unannounced, but I have every confidence in your ability to cope with the unexpected (laugh). I hope to hear very soon that they’ve done the job for us, bagged the Guardian and got you through to the planet. Best of luck with it Al. Regards, Marc.
‘He asked them not to come and see us before they came here, in case the Guardian rejected them for having been close to us,’ Alex explained. ‘They were asked to try to convince the Guardian that it would be safe to allow us to move closer, at least as far as the edge of the system. Obviously, things did not work out that way – I’m very sorry, Arak, I really am.’ He bit back from saying ‘We should not have taken such a risk,’ but Arak could hear that in his tone anyway, the shame he felt at his president’s actions.
‘Your president is tup,’ he stated, and gave a little nod. ‘Silvie said he was.’ It was evident that what Alex said merely confirmed what Silvie had already told him. ‘She said your people often choose tup ones to be your chiefs.’ He looked curiously at Alex. ‘She says it’s because you think it’s better to have a tup chief than a clever one; that you think clever ones are dangerous because you don’t know what they might do.’
Alex looked back briefly on the recent history of League presidencies, and grinned.
‘Well, that’s an interesting suggestion,’ he said. ‘But I am a Fleet officer, you see, and a Presidential Envoy, representing our president in person, so I really can’t say anything like that. All I can say is that I am truly sorry, that President Tyborne was trying to help, that the Solarans acted in good faith and that nobody could have foreseen what would happen. Nobody did foresee it, anyway – not you, not us, not the people back on Chartsey.’
‘And not Them?’ Arak asked shrewdly.
‘I don’t believe they did foresee it, no,’ Alex said, with evident regret and sympathy, remembering how horrified the Solarans had been. ‘They were very much upset, too.’
Just how upset became apparent in the very next day’s mail. President Tyborne was as near to frantic as the League President was permitted to be.
‘The Solarans didn’t come back, but all the ones who were here have gone, requested immediate evacuation and were taken away on the Eagle this morning. They won’t talk to us, they’ve shut down completely – the only thing they said when the exoteam begged them to explain was ‘Grief, Fear, Pain’. We have to treat this as the Solarans withdrawing their embassy – they’ve all gone, every one of them, and no idea when or even if they will be back. We are very much concerned at what has happened out there. I am sending the Zeus to support you. Report at once, full details.’
The irony was, of course, that at the same time Alex was reading that, his report of the Guardian’s destruction was landing on the presidential desk. This was the difficulty in operating at so remote a distance, and why an Envoy had to have such a high degree of autonomy and authority to make decisions on the government’s behalf. It also meant that the Envoy didn’t know what was going on back home, often until it was too late to do anything about it.
‘I honestly don’t know which is worse,’ Alex told Tan later, in private. ‘The worry over the Solarans withdrawing their embassy like that, or the news that the Zeus is heading out here.’
Tan gave him a startled look. He knew which of those he was upset about, and it certainly wasn’t anything to do with the Zeus. He’d been rather more pleased at that news than otherwise. The Zeus had only just been superseded as the League’s newest carrier – by long tradition the ship which held the status of the biggest and newest in the Fleet was always assigned to head up the Homeworld Security Squadron at Chartsey, with all the prestige of being the homeworld squadron flagship for the capital world. As the Thor had just come into service and assumed that top role, the Zeus would normally be dispatched on an extended tour of courtesy visits around the central worlds, together with one or two of the outer ones just for the look of the thing. It seemed to Tan a very good thing that they were going to have all the benefit of such a great, modern ship coming out to assist them. The Zeus was actually of the same class of ship as the Embassy II, with more than a thousand crew and facilities far beyond the frigate’s.
‘What’s wrong with the Zeus coming out?’ he asked, and noted Alex’s wry grimace.
‘We were part of the Zeus squadron, once,’ he explained. ‘Before the Fourth was formed, when I commanded the Minnow. It was not, let’s just say, a happy experience for any of the people concerned. Captain Urquhart and I…’ he crooked the forefingers of each hand and tapped them together, illustrating graphically how he and the captain had butted heads.
‘But…’ Tan was hesitant, ‘he will be under your command now.’
Alex gazed at him. ‘I thought you knew the Fleet,’ he said, making Tan grin.
‘To an extent,’ Tan qualified. ‘As much as any outsider can, I like to think. But do, please, enlighten me.’
‘Okay – precis version,’ Alex said, and ticked off on his fingers, ‘One, Captain Urquhart detests me, Two, he is a staunch supporter and personal friend of Third Lord Admiral Jennar, who hates me even more. Three, Captain Urquhart has spent the last eight years thinking of himself as the absolute top dog in ship command, captain of the Chartsey homeworld squadron, doesn’t get any bigger than that. And now he’s been bumped out, knocked down to second best by the captain of the Thor. Who is, by the way, a lady who will make very sure that he feels her supremacy in a hundred little niggly ways. Four, he is still senior to me in Fleet service as his captaincy is of much longer date than my own. The last time we met, I was a junior skipper, commanding a corvette. Five, he is being sent out to serve under me under my Envoy’s authority. Just how happy and supportive do you imagine he’s going to be?’
‘But surely,’ Tan was a little shocked, ‘professionalism…’
‘Yes, I used to think that, too,’ Alex said drily. ‘I had total faith in it, believed right to the heart that whatever differences of view or politics or personal feeling there might be between officers, their duty and service would rise above all that and enable them to work together in a calm, impersonal, professional manner. And that is true, generally speaking, of Fleet officers, I still believe that’s true. There are, though, a small minority who let the side down and when they do, well, I have learned the hard way just how hostile, obstructive, devious
and contrary they can be.’ He shrugged. ‘I can deal with it if I have to, but I have better things to do with my energy and I really don’t want the hassle. The time and effort it would take to bring them up to speed would be extremely disruptive even if we could count on them to be a hundred per cent supportive and giving it their best effort.’ He considered. ‘Perhaps Froggy could make use of them at Oreol.’
Tan grinned. ‘Okay,’ he said. He would bring the Zeus out to support him once the Fourth had gone, but didn’t make an issue of it now. ‘But…’ looking closely at him, ‘you’re really not worried about the situation with the Solarans?’
Alex gave another rueful smile. ‘Well, I’m not happy about it, obviously,’ he said. ‘But I’m not going to lose any sleep over it, no. One of two things will happen. Either they will come back once they’ve recovered from the shock of what happened here, or they won’t. Either way there is absolutely nothing we can do about it – if they’ve all gone, from all the worlds they were visiting, then we’re stumped. We can’t get through the Firewall to go to their world and we have no other means of communicating with them.’
‘The Gider?’ Tan suggested, a little surprised that Alex should have overlooked this avenue, given that he’d been the one who’d made that first contact. He had to be aware, too, that there was a major ongoing mission out there, with the Embassy III heading it up. ‘I know the Gider and the Solarans have had their issues, but…’
‘They don’t talk to one another,’ Alex said. ‘When the Gider wanted the Solarans to tell us something, they did it through a third party – there was a tantalising mention of ‘Chethari’, though I gather they’ve refused to be more forthcoming about that since. So I suppose we could ask the Gider to ask the mysterious Chethari to ask the Solarans what’s going on with them and when or whether they’ll come back to our worlds, but by the time a reply, if any, has been filtered through the Chethari and Gider, I wouldn’t give you a five cent bet on its reliability. Remember how much it got messed up the other way, when a comment about how many more ships we have these days was turned into ‘The Gider insist that you move your ships back from their border.’’
