Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘They’re telling us so much, so fast, we can’t keep up with analysis. A lot of it hasn’t even been translated yet. They just keep coming, you see. They turn up every few hours, even just minutes between their visits sometimes, different ones every time, saying hello, and they always bring us a datapack, just anything they think we might be interested in. They download it through comms, masses, masses of data, yottabytes, streaming for minutes at a time. The first time they tried to down-stream it blew half the circuits on our comms array before the overload cut-out cut in. There’s just, you know, libraries full of information, there, no chance of even being able to read it all, all we can do is scope for key words to figure out what’s immediately important and what will have to wait.

  ‘The Samart data did flag up. There was a memo, we get lots of memos, it’s a joke in the office that we hardly have time to do any work for reading all the memos. But there was one about Samart, I remember.’

  He looked warningly at Alex, and around at the other few officers at the datatable.

  ‘This may come as a bit of a shock,’ he advised. ‘I know you guys are pretty well up on exodiplomacy but some of the GD is pretty high impact. On the Samartian language, they tell us that there was, pre-Firewall, an ancient civilisation that created a number of genetically adaptive colonies known as nursery worlds – amongst them Quarus, Samart, Prisos and our own Chielle. Big stuff to get your head around, I know,’ he said, sympathetically, as they stared at him in surprise. ‘But that is supported by some of the more obscure things that the Solarans have said about those worlds – something about eggs, never understood. But it does seem that there was this ancient civilisation which created the genomes on those worlds, referred to as the Olaret.’

  ‘Yes, we know,’ Alex said. ‘And the reference to ‘nursery worlds’ and ‘eggs’ is in line with Pirrellothian archives describing those worlds as ‘Olaret Nestings’.’ He gave the stunned linguist a brief, deprecating smile. ‘Shion gave a talk.’

  ‘Oh.’ Said Jermane, understandably disconcerted to discover that the people he’d endured such a horribly uncomfortable journey to assist actually already knew about this. Then his sense of humour came to the rescue and he cracked up laughing.

  Alex gave him a grin, for that. Jermane’s honest mirth was infectious, and it was a relief to see, too, that even after such a long ordeal, he still had that sense of humour.

  ‘Well, okay, I’ll be learning from you, then.’ Jermane conceded, but his face was lighting up with excitement as he contemplated that. ‘What an opportunity! We get Mindful, of course, but to actually meet her grace – I mean yes, obviously, I’ve met her already, but...’ he broke off as Alex had held up a hand to interrupt, looking startled.

  ‘Sorry?’ he queried. ‘What do you mean, you get Mindful ‘of course’?’

  Mindful was their shipboard academic journal, not considered any more important by any of them than the sports or current affairs magazine. They did send copies of all three journals to the Admiralty, amongst the many hundreds of other reports and records they were required to send in monthly, or at least, to bundle into files monthly and send on as soon as they could. There was, Alex was vaguely aware, an office somewhere deep in the bowels of Admiralty HQ where they monitored the output of all the Fleet’s shipboard journals and the holochannel that the bigger ships might have. He was also aware that anything sent to the Admiralty falling under the broad heading of ‘information provided by Shion’ would be passed on to the Diplomatic Corps. As far as he was aware, though, that was only sent to a particular exodiplomacy attaché, who would disseminate any useful information to the people who needed it via XD-coded diplomatic memo.

  ‘Well, the journal, obviously,’ Jermane looked confused, himself, by the skipper’s own surprise. ‘We get the journal – not as often as we’d like, but then, you’re away on operations so often, it’s hard to keep up regular mail. But of course, yes, we get Mindful, always something we look forward to on the Embassy III. We have our own exodiplomacy journal, of course, a highly restricted mailing list as I’m sure you’d imagine, but that does tend to be rather narrow, rather dry. Mindful is far more entertaining, and informative, too. And so wonderfully eclectic, anything from history to superlight physics.’

  ‘Well, we enjoy it,’ Alex replied. ‘But you’re telling me, seriously, that our shipboard society journal is being distributed out there, routinely? Do you mean just to the Embassy III?’

  ‘Oh, no – it’s on the same mailing list as our Exomatters, I believe,’ Jermane said. ‘Goes out to all the exodiplomatic community – you didn’t know?’

  ‘There’s probably a memo about it somewhere that I haven’t got to, yet,’ Alex admitted, drily. He tended, these days, to only read Admiralty memos if they came in with urgent or vital priority. ‘Though I don’t know why I’m surprised,’ he commented. He had recently discovered that a policy he and Buzz had written on how to handle exodiplomacy briefings had been sent out to embassies across the League. ‘Not the first time we’ve found something we’re doing here kicked out there without our knowledge. And no harm, really, if people find it interesting. But on the subject of opportunity to talk to Shion, I do have to draw your attention to our policy, which all passengers are asked to comply with, of not harassing her with questions.’

  ‘Oh – yes, of course, captain,’ Jermane promised, hastily, putting his arms briefly in a cross-pose over his chest. ‘I don’t want to be the slightest trouble to you, and wouldn’t dream of annoying or offending her grace in any way. I know,’ he added, with an embarrassed look, ‘I’ve been told that people call her Shion here, and that I should do the same – but it is a little awkward for me, captain – as a member of the Diplomatic Corps I’m bound by our rules and protocols, really, and I can’t imagine that Hay-Chee would be happy with someone of my status first-naming her grace.’

  ‘Well, consider that protocol overridden on my responsibility,’ Alex said. ‘I’ll give you that in writing if you need it so, but do, please, stop calling her ‘her grace.’ Shion is correct, both in shipboard usage and diplomatically, all right?’

  ‘Yes Captain – thank you,’ Jermane looked pleased to have that resolved. ‘I am under your authority, of course. It seems that I’ve been lent or borrowed or attached – I’m told, as a civilian consultant?’

  Alex nodded.

  ‘We’ll sign you aboard on that basis,’ he agreed. ‘And I’m sure we’ll benefit from your experience, too – quite a CV there, Mr Taerling. Field assignment at three X-bases, and at Quarus.’

  Jermane blinked, a little bewildered.

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary, captain,’ he assured him. ‘Though wonderful to have the opportunity to visit Quarus, of course, and fascinating to work at the X-bases, nothing hundreds of DC staff at my level haven’t experienced.’

  Alex smiled.

  ‘Well, more than any of us have experienced,’ he observed. ‘And I’m sure we will find good use for your skills, Mr Taerling.’

  He started working with them on the Gide Disclosure straight away, assuring them that he was perfectly fit and would really enjoy getting stuck into the files.

  ‘Stuck’ was the operative word, as they very soon discovered why so little of the overwhelming yottabytes of data had even been translated yet. The matrix was still at an early stage of development. It only recognised perhaps thirty to forty per cent of any written text anyway and generated a range of potential translations for what it could read. Quite often this generated the kind of incomprehensible garble that the exodiplomats called ‘junk’.

  Even Davie, with his multicognitive intellect and superhuman reading speed, could make little of it. For the first time they saw him really working at full stretch, frowning with concentration as he ran translation matrices and searches for anything that was both comprehensible and relevant. He was scoping through five screens simultaneously, every screen flicking too fast for human eyes to read. Shion sat beside him doing the same t
hing, the two of them passing anything they found to the rest of the team for analysis.

  ‘Paydirt,’ Davie said, three hours and forty eight minutes after they’d started, and flashed a happy grin as he passed substantial files to the centre of the table for them all to share. During the course of a vast historical information download, the Gideans had passed on not only confirmation that Zamarat was one of the Olaret Nestings, but information about their world.

  The information about Zamarat was extensive, in itself – a largely temperate world, 62.3% surface water, with tundra forest at the poles and deserts around the equator

  ‘It looks panspermic,’ Simon observed, recognising that the biosphere looked very similar to the ‘standard’ which had been found on hundreds of worlds. Only a handful of worlds in human space stood out as having evolved unique biospheres. Two were in the League; Ferajo and Mimos.

  Before anyone could reply, though, Davie had got their attention again with a triumphant exclamation. ‘Ah!’ He had discovered the DNA profile of the Zamarati themselves. ‘Oh hoh!’

  He raised his eyes and looked across the table to where Rangi Tekawa was looking at the same information.

  ‘Straight as an arrow stood he, silver haired and sapphire eyed.’

  It was obviously a quote, but neither medic knew it. There was no recognition on Alex’s face, either.

  ‘The Silent Prince of Akamar.’ It was Shion who supplied the tag, looking up with a pleased expression. ‘The Lay of the Silent Prince.’

  ‘Jamalkin,’ said Murg Atwood, not to be outdone.

  ‘Well – grey hair and blue eyes, perhaps,’ said Simon, homing in on the DNA data that indicated the way that the genome would look.

  ‘Silver grey and crystal blue,’ Davie insisted, and turned to Alex. ‘The story of the Silent Prince is a Dark Age Prisosan legend, found in various versions but best known in the poetic Lay of the Silent Prince by Ab Jamalkin. He wrote it more than two thousand years ago but it must have been a very old legend, even then. The story is that of a hero –silver haired and sapphire eyed – who’d been driven out or fled from his own people and had taken a vow never to speak. It turns into the usual three-trials format of Prisosan mythology, but the point is, origin-genome Prisosans themselves are black haired and brown eyed. They don’t have the gene for grey hair or light eyes. But this DNA says that almost all Samartians will have those characteristics- they may be born with blonde or red hair but they’ll be silver grey by the time they’re adult, with vivid blue eyes. So what are the odds, do we think, that our silver haired and sapphire eyed prince was a visitor to Prisos from ancient Zamarat?’

  Objections came from all directions.

  ‘Unlikely,’ Shion said. ‘The whole point of the Nestings was that they were isolated, quarantined, self-sufficient colonies. They had no intersystem travel capability and they were off-limits to other shipping, too, like protected sites.’

  ‘It’s a long stretch,’ Simon said, dubiously. ‘I don’t see how you can reach that far from genome characteristics to ancient mythology.’

  ‘And Akamar bears no linguistic relationship to Samart or Zamarat,’ Jermane pointed out.

  Davie looked patient.

  ‘On that basis,’ he reminded Shion, ‘given the total isolation of your world for the last ten thousand years and the Veil technology that bounces off any ship approaching it, it isn’t possible for you to be here.’

  ‘Oh, but...’ Shion started to say that she was only here because the Solarans had the ability to get past the Veil and had given her a lift, then took his point and grinned. ‘Okay, theoretically possible,’ she conceded.

  ‘And long stretch or not, we do know that mythology is the way that societies remembered what they could of the previous civilisations through the Dark Ages,’ Davie told Simon. ‘We find the same legends being told on different worlds, and time and again, we find that there is truth to them, like the legend of the Lost Library of Cartasay, which we know now,’ he glanced at Shion, ‘is real, and out there, somewhere.’

  Shion nodded. She had told them that herself, in the casual way she had of mentioning information that would send seismic waves through the academic world.

  ‘And as for the linguistics,’ Davie gave Jermane a tolerant look, ‘Try ‘achamane’ in old Prisosan, ‘achar’ in Quarian and ‘archa’ in Chayalene. Derivative root, I would suggest, an Olaret word, ‘acka’.’

  ‘Meaning commonality – distant.’ Jermane worked it out, and his eyes widened. ‘Oh, I see! The Silent Prince of Far Away!’

  ‘Something along those lines, I should think,’ Davie confirmed. Even as he spoke, he was using screens with graphics software, generating and modifying images. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘If this DNA profile still holds, this is what you can expect the Samartians to look like, given that profile and their homeworld environment.’

  Everyone looked at the pictures, not just those at the table but everyone who was looking on through the command deck feed. Davie had generated images of a male and female ‘typical’ Samartian based on the genome. They were small, light boned and slender. They had strikingly narrow hands, each with three slim fingers and an opposable thumb. Both had clouds of grey hair and striking aquamarine eyes.

  ‘Remind you of anyone?’ Davie asked, with an air of innocence.

  ‘Shanuk!’ Rangi Tekawa exclaimed, though Simon glanced at Alex, then opened up a Novaterran genome-profile for comparison.

  Alex looked at the images, his manner one of academic interest. It was true that Novaterrans also had the light-eye gene, though more commonly grey, as in Alex’s own eyes, than blue or green. They also had what other worlds considered to be an early-onset greying gene. Alex knew that by the time he was forty he would be starting to get the characteristic pepper-and-salt look of that genetic heritage.

  ‘There are strong, significant genetic similarities with the Novaterran genome,’ Simon confirmed, looking up from his analysis.

  ‘And with the Shanuk, too!’ Rangi was clearly thrilled. ‘We’ve always known that the Shanuk and Novaterran genomes are related, but just look at this...’ he put up DNA comparison screens showing the presumed Samartian genome, Novaterran and Shanuk. ‘Three peas from the same pod – or at least, from the same field.’

  Davie looked teasingly at Alex. ‘I think you have a real edge here, skip.’

  Alex considered, ignoring the ‘skip’ which was obviously provocative. It had been apparent from the start that one of the factors considered in the decision to make him the Envoy, rather than sending along a suitably qualified exo-ambassador, had been the belief that the Samartians were more likely to respond to a military authority, if they were going to respond to anyone at all. Alex’s personal characteristics of cold formality in public and high honour would also have been considered. Now it transpired that his people and the Samartians had a genetic similarity. That might, or might not, give him some small advantage in his dealings with them. In an approach this precarious, though, Alex would take any hint of an edge he could get.

  ‘Possibly,’ he said, and nodded acknowledgement. ‘Thank you, Mr North – speculative, of course, but something to think about.’

  ‘But this is extraordinary!’ Jermane Taerling could hardly contain himself, bobbing in his seat. ‘The implications! If the Samartians have not gone down a route of bio-engineering or cyborging, we could be meeting people just like us! And yet they’ve beaten off the Marfikians time and time again – there must be something, something more to it than that, but oh, wow, to see that falling into place, to be here when such a phenomenal discovery was made – it will need writing up, of course, and will need a book, let alone an article!’

  ‘Mr Taerling,’ Alex cut in neatly, as even the linguist needed to draw breath occasionally. He managed to silence him, too, with no more than a firm tone and slight smile. ‘If you are going to get that excited every time we find a point of interest, this could become a very long meeting.’

  ‘Oh.’ Je
rmane pulled it together, with a comically guilty grimace. ‘Sorry, skip.’

  Alex glanced at Murg and saw that he could rely on her to have a quiet word with the linguist and explain that he really didn’t like people calling him ‘skip’, and that only Davie North was privileged to use that or any of the other annoying forms of address with which he baited the captain.

  So, they got back to work, building up their best guess of what they might find at Samart. The discussion was interrupted briefly by their departure from the system where they’d picked up supplies. As they curved out of orbit, their destination on the notice board came up. There was a star-registration with coordinates, but also the informal ID the Devast team had chosen, Ignition Two. They were heading there with an eta of three days, fourteen hours.

  ‘Oh!’ Jermane was startled, evidently spacer enough to read the destination screen. ‘Are we going somewhere else?’

  ‘Yes – we’re testing a new missile, the Ignite,’ Alex informed him. ‘We’ll be there for a few days, doing that.’

  ‘Oh.’ Jermane looked even more surprised. ‘I hadn’t heard anything about that.’

  ‘I’m very glad to hear it,’ Alex said, with a dry note that made Davie grin. ‘We tend not to like people knowing about it when we’re doing top secret missile testing. And you didn’t, I gather, pick that up from any of the Mindful talks given the first time we tested this missile.’

  ‘No – they must have left those out,’ Jermane said, and looked so wistful that the skipper had to grin.

  ‘Well, you can have full access now,’ he told him, and Jermane crowed with delight. But with that, as the files just kept piling higher and higher, they all got back to work.