Carrearranis (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 5)

by S MacDonald

  For those, though, who watched the news a little longer before exploding into outrage, it would emerge that the so-called declaration of war had been nothing of the kind, just a fix, a done deal which had given Carrearranis all the same rights as if they had been a colony world in early phase development. It meant that they could call on the League for funding, not as charity, but as of right. It gave them full rights of participation in a global council, too, in which they had equal votes with the League’s representatives but also a veto which they could use to stop any development on their world which they didn’t want. It gave them the same rights as League citizens, too, including a right to healthcare, education and unrestricted travel.

  When it was confirmed that this did mean, yes, that Carrearranians could come to their worlds, use tax-funded facilities and claim benefits, right wingers across the League would get every bit as outraged as the left would over the brutal invasion of a helpless little world. Fundamentally, most of the arguments would be about money, the left suspecting that the League had occupied Carrearranis in a ruthless asset grab while the right decried how much it would cost the taxpayer to support them. And in the middle of it all, a target painted clearly on his forehead, would be Alex von Strada, the villain of the hour. How far the President and Senate would protect him remained to be seen. Either way, if it cost him his command, the Fourth, everything he had, Alex knew that he was doing the right thing here.

  ‘Eight,’ said Arak, coming to the end of his conditions, ‘We the people of Carrearranis grant to the peoples of the League the island of 263227 on unrestricted leasehold for a period of two hundred and seventy five League Standard years, on condition that no mining, nor felling of trees, nor any environmentally damaging activity be permitted there.’

  That got hoots from some of the watching villagers. The Fourth, with Tan, had chosen the site for the groundside base with great care, both for its geography and environment. There was nothing there to mine but basalt, and no trees to fell even if you were so inclined. It was regarded as a barren rock, of no use to the Carrearranians at all.

  Alex kept his face very straight.

  ‘I accept your surrender,’ he said, ‘and agree to your conditions on behalf of the government and peoples of the League of Worlds.’

  There was a lot of cheering, at that, another surge of hugging, lots of arm-slaps and some kissing. Alex managed to keep his composure throughout, though he was perhaps a little pinker when Arak called everyone back to order, reminding them that they had to honour the occasion with a song.

  They sang the League anthem, at which Alex and Martine got to their feet and sang it along with them while Silvie… well, Silvie just sat on the ground and laughed and laughed. It was not, perhaps, the most musical performance of the League anthem ever performed, with an uncertain drone in the middle and Darac, the oldest resident, as usual, going for the high notes like a crow with a sore throat. But it was special, all the same, and Alex found that he had an unexpected lump in his throat. Carrearranis, the lost colony, had been brought into the human family and into the protective embrace of the League. They would have rights, and advisors to protect against the unscrupulous few who’d try to exploit them. Alex could do no better for them than this, and he knew it. And as they sang together, those cheesy old words really seemed to mean something… stars so bright, worlds unite… let the light shi-i-ine onnnnn! Then Darac hit the high note with a noise like a strangled duck and Alex almost laughed aloud on a wave of sheer delirious happiness.

  It just didn’t, he knew to the depths of his being, get any better than this.

  Twenty Five

  Things happened very quickly after that. Within days, every island had had their first-footing visit. There were thirty seven minor casualties amongst the offworlders – thirty six who had to be treated for various digestive disorders and one crewman who was so enraptured with looking around that he tripped over a tree root and sprained his wrist. Other than those minor hiccups, the visits went off splendidly. True, it had to be admitted that the Carrearranians considered offworlders to be a monumentally ugly bunch, all out of proportion with their great heavy limbs and enormous faces, but they were mostly very polite about it and the visitors took jokes and comments in good part, anyway.

  And ‘visitors’, very soon, meant more than the Fourth. Liaison teams came down the first time, and then later, brought ‘friends’ from the Embassy, shadow teams who would be working with them and taking over as the Fourth withdrew. It was the new teams which brought down the first shower units, now redesigned to meet both Davie and Arlit’s approval. They looked very different, redesigned as leafy arches with the light open-weave panels the Carrearranians were used to, rather than the solid walls the unit had had before. All the tech was the same, but with crucial differences in programming – no scents, no foams, just the lightest of cleansing sprays which Arlit said felt lovely. The lavatory had been redesigned, too, against a certain amount of resistance from the Diplomatic Corps team. Davie, though, had been insistent, and Arlit had backed him up. Carrearranians didn’t poo in the woods because they had nowhere else to go, they pooed in the woods because some of the plants which grew there needed that fertilisation. Once Davie had proven to the Embassy team that removing the excreta of a couple of hundred people from the island ecology would have a significant impact which they would then have to provide artificial fertilisers to address, the team had given way. So the newly provided showers processed poo into little dry pellets and presented them back to the user in a thin starch capsule which the user could then go and dispose of in the woods. The capsule would dissolve in the next rain shower and the woodland would be hygienically fertilised.

  The showers were a success, resisted by the usual grumbling few but generally much admired. They had been spread around the planet so that as many people as possible could see and try one, with the promise that within a few weeks they would be able to provide two units for each island, and within a year, a unit for every household.

  What they could do right now, though, and did, was provide storm protection. They only had ten sets for this, but as they demonstrated the following week, they could move them around and install them as required.

  ‘And how are these sticks,’ Sarat asked, ‘going to stop the wind blowing down our houses?’

  She spoke with the tolerance of a grown up humouring children in a nonsensical game. Sarat’s experience with Alex in the run-up to the last storm to hit her island had convinced her that offworlders knew nothing about the weather and were liable to panic if a cloud so much as passed over the sun. Now they’d turned up, with another storm coming up from the south, trying to convince her that if they put these sticks in the ground around the village, neither the wind nor the waves could do them any damage. If the Carrearranians had had any element of the supernatural in their culture, she might have considered that they were claiming to be able to be able to work magic. As it was, she just thought they were like silly children playing a game.

  ‘The sticks are powered, like the singing stones.’ Very Vergan, the regional liaison officer, had come down personally to see the force-fence installed. He knew Sarat well enough not to even try to convince her about this – only the evidence of her own eyes would do that. But she’d asked, so he repeated the explanation he’d already given her when asking for permission to bring in the protection ahead of the storm. ‘When they are turned on, they will create energy in the air which will surround your village like an invisible wall.’

  Sarat hefted one of the forcefield generators in one hand, looking dubious. The generators were sturdy tubes about a metre high, encased in dark red plastic housings with League writing on which meant nothing to the Carrearranians. Very and his team had turned up with twenty of them, which they were standing ready to install.

  ‘And they won’t do any damage?’ Sarat queried.

  ‘None at all,’ Very promised. ‘The generators – these sticks – put a little spike down into the gr
ound to hold themselves steady, but no deeper than you dig your holes for house-posts. May we show you?’

  Sarat agreed to them putting one into the ground to show her, and was satisfied at least that it wasn’t damaging the ground. Bital, their village’s technology elder, assured her too that it was safe. She herself was keenly interested in the process, wanting to get hands-on herself by learning how to plant the tubes. When it came time to activate the fence for demonstration, too, it was Bital who explained it to Sarat and the others gathered round.

  ‘It makes two panels of energy,’ she told them, holding her hands palms facing one another but slightly apart. ‘The inside one is the insulator, which keeps it strong and stable and makes it safe for the people inside, so if we touch it we won’t hurt ourselves. The outside one is the conductor, and that’s the clever bit,’ she grinned with the happy light of a natural technophile who’d discovered her vocation – rather late in life, to be sure, since she was at least sixty – but with all the enthusiasm of a teenager. ‘The conductor absorbs the energy from the wind and the waves hitting it, and turns that from kinetic into thermal energy. That means that all the energy from gusts and waves is converted into heat, so the air outside the fence gets hot but the waves and wind just lose all their force.’

  ‘The units we’ll be bringing out for permanent installation,’ a member of the Embassy team put in, helpfully, ‘have heat exchangers which convert the energy from wind and waves through a capacitor to charge a power cell. But these are just for emergencies.’

  ‘There’ll be a lot of noise,’ Very advised. ‘The water will pile up against the forcefield and as every new wave surges in there’ll be a flat sort of thud and a big burst of steam. The wind, too, rises as it hits a hot wall like this, so there’s a big plume of steam, very noisy and dramatic. But inside…’ he gestured at the village, ‘no wind, no waves, all safe.’

  Sarat cocked an eyebrow at him, folded her arms, and gave him the look of a matriarch regarding an idiot boy. It did not matter one bit, in that, that she stood half the height of Very Vergan. All the authority here, as he recognised, was hers.

  ‘If you think that I am going to trust my people and all our homes to one of your tup machines, young man, you are even more tup than I thought.’

  In the end, it was agreed that Sarat would evacuate the village just as usual, but that Bital and a couple of others would remain with the offworld team at the village site. This, from their point of view, was to demonstrate the effectiveness of the protective force-fence. From Sarat’s point of view it meant that she had people there she could trust to bring the offworlders to safety when their bonkers idea failed.

  In the event, of course, it didn’t fail. The offworld team spent six hours sitting in the village site chatting with Bital and the others while a great hissing plume of steam poured off the dome like a small but fierce volcano. All the tests that Bital had set up – an old house panel Sarat had been prepared to sacrifice, some gourds set strategically about the village, a row of stones – were in exactly the same place when the villagers returned as they had been when they left.

  ‘All right…’ Sarat surveyed the curved wall of silt which had been left against the force-fence, and the pristine sandy ground of the village. ‘It worked this time,’ she conceded. Bital and the others had been talking to them on comms, throughout, and there’d been a general feeling amongst those crammed in the storm-cave that Bital and the others were having a lot more fun than they were. And the storm, too, had still delivered all the bounty they rejoiced in – a thistly gourd tree had come down, no good for boatbuilding but excellent for firewood, and there were, again, hundreds of gourds scattered all over the island, needing only to be picked up. ‘I may,’ said Sarat, ‘let people stay next time, if they want.’

  Life was changing on Carrearranis, and it was changing fast. The mission was changing, too, not least because they were already moving their centre of operations groundside.

  The Embassy II had come equipped for this, and rather to Alex’s surprise had assured him that they did not need any assistance from the Fourth with it.

  ‘This is not a situation like Oreol, where you have to do what you can with survival domes and makeshift tech,’ said Tan. ‘We have bespoke facilities, which our people are thoroughly conversant with and trained to install. You are, of course, at liberty to direct and inspect every aspect of the base installation, but it would give us very great pleasure, very great pleasure indeed, if you would be so kind as to just give us the nod, give us a week and then come see what we’ve done.’

  Understanding that Diplomatic Corps pride was at stake, there, Alex agreed to do just that. He couldn’t help noticing the number of shuttles heading down to the League’s foothold territory, many of them truck-sized cargo shuttles, and he couldn’t help noticing, either, that a surprisingly large complex was springing up on what was now being referred to as Embassy Island. Perhaps even more surprising, to spacer eyes, was that there wasn’t a dome in sight. Spacers always used domes as survival habitats and there were many such domes left on slimeworlds near to shipping lanes, too, officially serving as emergency refuge but more usually used as a shoreleave stopover. The original X-Base at Oreol had been built with pressure domes, too, as Tan had said, by the Fourth using survival domes and adapting tech to what was needed. All those domes, though, were needed because they were on planets with a hostile or barely breathable atmosphere. That was not the case on Carrearranis and normal prefab buildings, Tan said, would be fine.

  Alex tried not to shudder inside at the thought of splatting prefabs on Carrearranis. Things had to change there, he knew that, and he knew that he could trust Tan not to allow anything which would pollute or harm this world. All the same, though… prefabs.

  He should have known better. The Diplomatic Corps regarded themselves as the League’s premier service and they certainly were not about to set up an Embassy here in a clutter of prefab huts. They were prefabs, assembled like kit buildings using click-together panels of thick siliplas. Nobody, though, could have described them as huts. They were more like pods – broad ovoids which stood on hydraulic legs, avoiding the need for foundations and enabling the building to be stabilised on the sloping and uneven ground. The pods were glossy, in the deep blue of the Diplomatic Corps, with rows of silvery picture windows. Moving ramps led up to the entrances, with moving walkways, too, between the pods, the landing zone and the vehicle park.

  Alex walked around it – or rather, was glided around it – in a state of genuine amazement. One of the pods was a hospital, small but impressively equipped. It had beds for up to fifty patients, four operating theatres, a therapy suite and eight treatment rooms. In the next pod were the emergency services, including a fleet of ten air ambulances with paramedic crews, five specialist air-sea rescue vehicles and a fire and rescue service equipped to deal with anything from a house on fire to a major earthquake.

  Looking at it all, Alex was acutely aware of how tiny and amateur their own efforts had been, with a couple of converted shuttles and some drones. Looking at the top of the range rescue vehicles with their highly trained crews, he couldn’t help remembering Silvie, stranded in the sea with her shuttle hanging uselessly five metres over her head.

  The rest of the embassy was equipped to the same high standard. There was an education centre, gearing up to start offering primary education for children and offering a range of adult education and training courses. That would take some time since they had to adapt their teaching materials, all heavily weighted to visual in the early years and text-rich later on. Once they’d been convinced that Carrearranians did not learn well that way and did not even think in visual terms, they had set to work rewriting their teaching materials to focus on still images and oral content

  Having shaken hands with some of the people brought in to educate the Carrearranians, Alex was led on to the commissariat, the pod which provided dining and rest facilities, as well as accommodation for staff.
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br />   ‘We won’t be using this for a while,’ Tan explained, showing Alex the narrow corridors lined with rooms. ‘We’ll be moving a few people down, later on,’ Tan told him, ‘as we start to shift into using this as our base. For now it’s a work base – people will live on the ship and come down for duty as required.’

  There was, as Tan confirmed, no research pod or laboratory, groundside. Their own research teams would continue to work up on the Embassy II, as would the manufacturing division.

  ‘Chartsey and Telathor universities are combining to fund their own research facility here,’ he explained, ‘I expect them to be here within seven or eight months. We’ll give them the use of some land…’ he pointed across the slope of the volcano, ‘not too far away, but far enough to keep them separate. And all manufacturing and industrial processes, of course, will be located on Small Moon.’

  Alex nodded, and was lost in his own thoughts, then, as Tan took him up to the highlight of the tour. This was the main embassy building, sited at the highest point on the slope and the biggest of the pods, too, longer and broader and three storeys high. As they glided up the long ramp to the entrance, Alex wondered what the Carrearranians would make of this. Would they be awed? Probably not. There was little room for awe and wonder in their hard-headed, logical psychology.

  Alex was not awed by it either, though it did give him a weird sense of déjà vu. The Diplomatic Corps had an absolute policy when it came to the décor of their premises. Whatever the building might look like from the outside, the interior made no concessions whatsoever to local architecture, climate or culture. This was a little piece of Chartsey – of ancient Chartsey, really, as the style of décor had been regarded as classical on Chartsey right back into the mists of history, when it had been known as Cartasay. So there was the dark, polished-oak style flooring, the high windows, the diamond-shaped notice boards. Even the smell was the same, the standard issue fresh-mint scent in the air processor mingling with the orange citrus of the cleaning spray used by the autobots.