by S MacDonald
Milli departed, still chuckling, and Alex went back to work.
Twenty Six
Two days later, Commander Mikthorn was in the lab, watching as the team regarded Prototype Embedded Entanglement Telemetry Pairing Mark 147.
PEET-P #147 was being shown at millions-times magnification on a holographic display. It was an odd looking thing, weirdly blobby and with bits of it that did not seem to be entirely there. Parts of it were moving, too, far too quickly for the human eye to detect. Beside it, the other half of the prototype was also displayed. Readings on the screens below them showed the energy output of both and a great deal more information beyond the commander’s ability to recognise, let alone understand.
He understood, though, the awed silence.
‘Is it wrong?’ Professor Parrot asked eventually, ‘to worship something that you’ve made yourself?’
He asked that without taking his eyes off the prototype, speaking as if to himself.
‘Idolatry, I believe,’ said another of the scientists, and there was another silence, during which another of the team wiped away a tear which had trickled onto his cheek.
‘That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life,’ said the wave space physicist.
‘Geminax,’ said another, unexpectedly, and after a moment’s thought there was some nodding and murmurs of agreement.
‘Geminax,’ Professor Parrot affirmed.
For almost the first time in his life, Commander Mikthorn found the classical education his parents had paid so much money for actually came in useful.
‘The twin gods of ancient Lara,’ he observed, and there was a reverent note in his own voice. You did not need any kind of scientific knowledge to recognise that the nanotech which had the team here spellbound was the one, the breakthrough which would take the League up into a whole new era of high speed long range comms technology. Even Commander Mikthorn could see from the readouts that that thing, that tiny tiny little thing right there, could put out a broadcast more powerful than that of an entire planetary comms array. And it was stable. Unlike prototypes one through forty six, it wasn’t losing its telemetry through decoherence; the failure of the entanglement link.
It felt like something tremendous to be here when this happened, to see it. In years to come, when comms were being laid which enabled ships to speak with flight control at systems even hours out of port, Commander Mikthorn would remember this moment. It would make him very proud, too, to see early-warning networks being laid around their most vulnerable systems, helping to defend them against Marfikian attack. He might not have been any part of the scientific discovery, but he had helped, in his own small way he had helped, keeping the lab tidy and making sure they ate properly.
He was going to fall down on that responsibility today, though – it seemed like just minutes later that Rangi Tekawa turned up, curious to know why the lunch which had been brought into the lab had been brought away again untouched.
‘Oh – did they bring lunch?’ The commander was amazed to see what time it was, and to realise that he hadn’t even noticed the rigger bringing in the hot trolley, or coming back later to take it away. He’d been just sitting there listening to the others talking about the prototype, enthralled by the little he could follow and just loving the excitement of being there. ‘Sorry, Rangi – it’s just that…’ he indicated the displayed prototype. ‘Geminax is working.’
Rangi looked at him and sighed.
‘So soon,’ he mourned, ‘are the virtuous corrupted.’
Commander Mikthorn gave him an affronted look, just for a moment, then gave way to a grin.
‘Fair point,’ he acknowledged, and got up with an air of purpose. ‘Lunch, people!’
Five days later, they laid a trail of Geminax prototypes between the system and Border Station.
‘See, I told you, this is why we work with the Fourth,’ said Professor Parrot, and Commander Mikthorn, for once, had nothing to say. Going from one working prototype to having two hundred of them ready to lay out in field trials in just five days was an astounding feat in itself and had been quite something to witness. The actual laying of them, though, was something else again. This was not like the nanoweb which they’d learned to fire out from sublight drones. The Geminax prototypes had to be individually and precisely placed. Sending a shuttle equipped with drones to do that would have taken days, and would have taken up the time of a pilot and resources, too, which could be better used for the mission.
Shion, therefore, had volunteered to place the Geminax units for them. Watching her do that, until she got beyond the range of their long range scanners, was an education. She was piloting Firefly in spectacular fashion – decelerating to an actual stop, holding absolutely still for just the fraction of a second it took to deploy the Geminax unit in precise position, then accelerating away. The fighter was superlight in under three seconds, flipping over easily and flitting back at an angle and on a deceleration which brought it to a halt again exactly at the point where the next unit was to be placed. Commander Mikthorn had never seen piloting like it. Nobody had, really. Even the Fourth were impressed. And the fact that she was going to keep doing that, accelerating and decelerating in and out of superlight every few seconds, two hundred times, and in dirty space at that, really made the commander appreciate just what they meant when they said that Shion was the best pilot they had ever seen. And somehow, watching that, the question of whether she represented value for money or not no longer seemed all that important after all.
Within an hour, anyway, the Geminax trail was laid out to Border Station. There were a few minutes of telemetry testing, confirming that it was all up and running and that they were good to go, and then Professor Parrot, sitting on the command deck, made the first historic call – the fastest long range call ever made with human tech.
‘Good morning!’ He called the Minnow, and they all watched the signal transmission rate. This time last week, the best they had been able to do at this distance, with the highest powered, classified military hardware in the League, had been a superlight boosted transmission which took just over eleven hours to get out to the comms buoy. Now, they were watching the signal flash out there. At three minutes forty two seconds, it registered as having completed transmission. And sure enough, three minutes and forty two seconds after that, Milli Walensa appeared on screen, smiling broadly and giving them a wave.
‘Hello, Heron!’ she greeted them, and went straight on, ‘Huge congratulations!’ And to her own crew, ‘Three cheers for Geminax!’
They were on almost-live comms with Border Station from that moment on, though whether that was really much of an advantage or not became an issue just a few days later when the first civilian ships turned up there.
The first to arrive was the convoy from Telathor, which had been poised and waiting at Oreol. It consisted of five freighters and a hastily converted ferry, bringing gifts and assistance from Telathor, quite separate from that being provided by the League.
Alex knew what was aboard the freighters, of course. The Telathorans had decided for themselves what they felt the Carrearranians stood most in need of. They had brought vibrant coloured sarongs, soft shoes and sunhats, self-heating casserole pots, laser knives, wall-sized holovisions, sewing machines, all manner of toys for children, comfy air chair-beds for the elderly and huge quantities of artwork created as a gift for their new neighbours. The freighters containing food had been quietly sent back after the mission team at Oreol had convinced them that the fruit would make the Carrearranians sick.
The people on the ferry had been changed, too. The doctors and disaster relief people had been withdrawn as it became apparent that the Embassy II already had ample staff of their own to provide medical and other aid. What was needed, Alex had told them, would be financial advisors and business lawyers. It had taken a little while for the Telathorans to believe that he could be serious, but at President Arthas’ intervention, suitable advisors and lawyers had indeed b
een recruited, given a crash course in safety on Carrearranis and rushed out here with a host of admin staff.
They got no further than Border Station for now, though.
‘The Telethorans are wonderful people,’ Alex had advised Arak, and through him, the other regional chiefs. ‘You will never meet a warmer, more generous people.’
‘But..?’ said Arak warily, hearing that note in Alex’s voice.
‘Their generosity,’ said Alex, ‘can be… overwhelming.’ He was remembering what had been intended to be no more than a quiet one-week courtesy visit, insisted on by President Arthas as they were on their way out to the exploration mission. It had turned into five weeks of irresistible hospitality. All of them had piled on weight, and shipboard discipline had slid significantly as people were drawn in to the ‘tomorrow will do’ culture of that fun-loving, time-doesn’t-matter planet. ‘It’s as if…’ Alex sought for an allegory Arak would understand, ‘as if the people of eight other islands all came for a visit at once, all of them bringing far more food than you could eat and giving you piles and piles of stuff, clothes and gourds and boats and everything, insisting that you have it even though you don’t need it. And they stay, see, they stay for a long long time, and all the time they are wanting you to eat…’ he adopted a Telathoran idiom, cooing encouragingly, ‘Coom onnn, have just a little, coom onnn, it won’t hurt, you need feeding up, coom onnn, just try a bit.’ He looked significantly at the laughing president. ‘We were there for a few weeks,’ he told him, ‘and most of us put on so much weight that our clothes didn’t fit by the time we left.’
‘You should have just told them no,’ Arak told him, mystified as he so often was by the inability of offworlders to deal with such very simple problems.
‘We tried,’ said Alex. ‘But they make it very difficult. They just want to give, and give, and give, and with the best of intentions, so kind and generous, they can be a bit like a storm wave, sweeping everything before them. Also, it has to be said, they are very tall, one of the tallest people in the League. They showed a tendency to treat us like kids, so…’
He gave a wry look, and shrugged.
‘Ah,’ said Arak, and understood that. ‘So we should tell them not to come?’
‘No, no, on the contrary, they will be very good friends to you,’ Alex assured him. ‘You just need to be sure, I think, that you are friends on your terms, not theirs. Don’t let them come to your world until you feel ready for the visit, and you say yes or no to the things that they will bring you.’
That was so obvious to Arak that it hardly needed saying, but he took Alex’s advice and recorded a message to be passed on to any and all ships arriving at Border Station.
‘We’re not quite ready yet to have lots of visitors here,’ Arak explained, ‘so we’ve asked our friends in the Fourth to keep your ships back at Border Station until we feel ready to have more visitors.’
The Telethoran convoy accepted that, albeit with cries of dismay and attempts to get the Fourth or the Diplomatic Corps to ask the Carrearranians to allow them through, as an exception. When it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, they submitted, though whether that was out of respect for Carrearranian sovereignty or a reluctance to tangle with the Fourth was a moot point. They stayed out at the Border Station, anyway, though making full use of the rapid-comms system to call, and call, and call again. And as more ships turned up, clearly, that was only going to get worse. And did get worse, as within a matter of hours a second convoy appeared – just as Tan had predicted, the authorities there had not been able to hold them back once word that the quarantine had been lifted reached the outpost. Also as Tan had predicted, two of the first ships to make it out there belonged to intersystem corporations bringing out investment teams. A third was a freighter, chartered by a well-meaning charity from Telathor, separate from the official gift convoy, who wanted to bring out blankets and tents and who took some persuading that the Carrearranians did not stand in need of either. The fourth ship was a very expensive private yacht, owned by one of Davie North’s reclusive relatives – a cousin, he said vaguely, who Alex didn’t need to meet, as she’d only come out to see if there was anything that she could do to help.
These four ships also remained at Border Station. But they, too, made use of the Geminax system to call the Fourth and the Diplomatic Corps, mostly to protest at the call-screening which the Embassy was providing, again at the request of the Carrearranians themselves.
It was only six days after that that Alex handed over ambassadorial duties to Tan Ganhauser. It was obvious that the moment for that had come – they were now firmly into second phase, official relationship established, treaty signed and the aid and development phase of the mission swinging into action. This was Tan’s remit, not his. The last of his responsibilities was to ensure that the handover went smoothly, with no shock to the people of Carrearranis and no sense that they were being abandoned.
That might have taken months, had the Carrearranians themselves not been a sea-faring people. Visits to other islands were a routine part of their lives, and it was understood, just obvious, that going for a visit meant that you stayed for a while and then you went home. Alex had never said that he would stay here for always, only that he would stay for as long as they needed him.
Now the Embassy was here, and it was their people now who were going to the islands, as the Fourth’s teams had faded into background support. It was Tan who was chief at Embassy Island, too, and Tan who had increasingly appeared on global comms, as well as discussing issues of importance with the chief elders. Quietly, too, the Fourth’s people had been letting it be known that while they loved being here, they were thinking too of their own families, partners and children they hadn’t seen for many months.
‘We do understand,’ Arak assured Alex, calling him early one morning. ‘Tan and the Embassy people are here to help us now – we know you’re tired, you’ve been working very hard, you’re not as strong as we are and we know there’s been a lot for you to do. Of course you’re tired, you miss your families and you want to go home. We’ll miss you too, you are great friends to our world. But you will come again, yes?’ He grinned. ‘We will insist on that.’
‘I would love that,’ said Alex. ‘We all would… thank you, Arak. And thank you for your understanding.’
As it turned out, though, the Fourth would not be leaving quite yet. There was a brief ceremony aboard the Embassy II, in which Alex relinquished his role as Presidential Envoy and handed over to Ambassador Ganhauser. As with all official ceremonies there was an ever so slightly absurd aspect to it, as the ritual required them to shake hands at the moment of transfer.
‘Your Excellency.’
‘Your Excellency.’
Then there was a smattering of applause from the onlookers, and Ambassador Ganhauser was whisked away for the official holo with his senior staff, leaving Alex to go back to his ship.
If he thought he was going to get away with that, though, he was mistaken. The newly installed Ambassador Ganhauser lost no time in issuing two official edicts to Captain von Strada. The first was that he was to present himself at Embassy Island the following evening for a formal dinner in his honour. The second was that the Heron was to remain here for another four weeks.
Alex could only say ‘yes sir’ to both orders, as it was Tan who now had operational authority here.
‘I did hope,’ he admitted to Buzz, the following evening, ‘that I might get away without the dinner.’
Buzz just chortled, handing Alex a small box containing the graduation ring he always had to hand for dress events. Alex, who made a point of either giving it away at the event or dropping it into garbage disposal afterwards, took it and shoved the thing onto his finger without comment. It was, in fact, quite an inoffensive article in itself, a gold band inscribed with Alex’s name, the date of his graduation from the Academy on Chartsey and the declaration Top Cadet. It had been an honour well earned, a genuine achievement, to be
the top rated cadet of his year across all the academies in the League, and he had been quietly proud of it at the time. Since, though, it had come to symbolise everything he opposed about the Old School element in the Fleet, the hidebound thinking, resistance to any change, tradition for tradition’s sake. He felt it was embarrassing, too, like still displaying prizes you’d won as a child. Those Academy days seemed a very long way off, now.
All the same, Buzz got his way, backed up by a recent Fleet reminder to all holders of such honours that they were required for dress occasions.
‘There,’ Alex presented himself for inspection. ‘All right?’
Buzz was silent for a moment. He hadn’t seen Alex in dress uniform since they’d left Telathor months before. Back then, Alex had been struggling with the same over-feeding hospitality that had piled on the kilos for all of them. He’d needed to breathe in to be able to fasten his pants, and the tunic had looked uncomfortably tight around his midriff.
Now it hung loose on him – so loose, in fact, that Buzz found himself quite shocked. He hadn’t noticed, seeing him every day in shipboard rig, how much weight Alex had lost during the course of this mission. He was thin¸ now, at the lowest level of his healthy weight and, being of a naturally stocky genome, not looking well on it. There were shadows under his eyes, shadows which Buzz himself had become so accustomed to that it had just become Alex’s normal look. Only now, mentally comparing how he had looked the last time Buzz had seen him in this uniform, did it really strike home how near exhaustion Alex actually was.
‘You’ll do,’ he said, vowing privately that Alex would get all the rest and feeding up needed to bring him back to his usual sturdy good health.
Tan, however, was ahead of him on that one.
‘Sorry about this,’ he said, welcoming Alex to the reception. He was looking very grand himself in the official Diplomatic Corps regalia – a tuxedo of a style dating back centuries, with a broad silk sash and foaming cravat. He looked very natural in it, though, just as quintessentially himself as he had been in skydiving gear or the Fourth’s shipboard rig. ‘I know, no fun at all for you.’ He smiled kindly. ‘But essential, all the same. And at least we’ll give you a good feed.’
