Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4)

by S J MacDonald

  Tina, though, stood her ground. ‘Five minutes?’ she pleaded, sharing the appeal between Rangi and the skipper.

  ‘No,’ said Rangi. His manner was understanding, even apologetic, but uncompromising. His one and only concern was to get Tina through quarantine and med checks, and nothing was going to stand in his way. Seeing the stubborn set of her jaw, indeed, he deployed his ultimate weapon. ‘Look, if you’re not in sickbay in two minutes, Simon will come get you.’

  Tina went with him, protesting as they went that she was absolutely fine, but accepting the inevitable.

  She was fine, as Rangi confirmed about half an hour later. Nobody on the Heron had expressed any fear about Tina’s safety while she was away – it was understood that there was no point giving themselves the horrors with what the Samartians might be doing to her over there. All the same, there were few of them who hadn’t had uneasy thoughts about the possibilities – hostile interrogation, drugs, even, amongst the more dramatically inclined, vivisection. It was a genuine relief to see her back aboard ship, and even more of a relief to be assured that she had been treated very well by the Samartians. She was very tired, of course, or would be once the adrenalin high she was on began to collapse, but the best thing for her right now was, indeed, to be allowed to tell her story.

  Alex went to sickbay for that, along with Murg Atwood. Fleet regs required anyone who’d been in first-contact situations to remain in sickbay under medical supervision for at least two days, regardless of how sure they might be that they had not been in any way infected or contaminated. Alex and the others had had to do that, themselves, after the Gide encounter, and Tina knew better than to argue about it. She was out of her survival suit, now, and Rangi had arranged things for a comfortable debriefing – a small version of his healing circle, with bean-bags around a meditation focus. It had gently shifting, hypnotic light-waves which Alex recognised were set to a calming frequency. He recognised the scent of a soothing aromatherapy pod, too, mingling with the fragrance of chamomile tea.

  For all his unorthodox style, though, Rangi was all medic as he told Alex, ‘You’ve got twenty minutes.’ Then, with an evaluating glance at his patient, ‘Twenty five at the most.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Alex said. He was even more grateful when Rangi promptly got rid of Simon and Banno Triesse. Banno was still in sickbay and would be an in-patient for a couple more days, yet, though he was becoming increasingly mobile. He was sitting on his bunk on the other side of sickbay, trying not to be obtrusive but obviously just as burning with curiosity as the rest of them. Simon wasn’t even trying to pretend to be unobtrusive, standing nearby with every appearance of intending to stay there and listen to what Tina had to say. And, knowing him, to join in and ask questions, too.

  ‘Simon – would you please take Banno for a cup of tea on the mess deck?’ Rangi’s tone was friendly, but it was very clearly an order phrased as a request. Simon stared at him in surprise for a moment, then grinned. For all his assumption of authority in medical matters, and his undoubtedly greater skill and experience, the fact remained that Rangi was the ship’s medic, here, this was his sickbay, and Simon no more than a civilian consultant working under his supervision.

  ‘Yo, boss,’ Simon acknowledged, choosing to make a joke of it, and jerked a thumb at Banno. ‘Come on, sunshine. We’re taking a hike.’

  That was a major event for Banno – his first steps outside sickbay, and a big thing for him to go back to the mess deck where he’d been injured, too. Only a few friends had been allowed to visit him, so there would be uproar, cheers and a great many hugs as he came back amongst them. In fact, they heard the first yells of delight go up before the door had even closed behind them.

  It was good that Simon had gone, Alex realised. Sickbay seemed a good deal calmer without his frenetic energy. Alex, even mindful as he was of how limited their time was likely to be, here, was careful to maintain that calm environment. He and Murg sat down, both accepting bowls of tea from Rangi. He sat down too once he’d served them, watchful but quiet. Murg was very quiet, too, her manner one of placid interest.

  ‘All right,’ Alex said, seeing that Tina was doing her best to hold that calm demeanour, too, but fizzing with things she wanted to say. ‘Debriefing phase one,’ he reminded her. ‘No need to make a report, just talk. What was it like, there?’

  As he’d known it would, that question unleashed a torrent, Tina sitting forward and gesturing energetically as she responded.

  ‘Incredible, skipper,’ she told him. ‘Awful, in a way – worse than a courier! You wouldn’t believe how tiny it is, aboard – their hulls have to be at least a metre thick, no kidding, and then there’s all the tech, there’s literally hardly any room to move, even a courier crew would call it claustrophobic. They don’t have any living quarters – no mess decks or bunks or anything like that at all. They sleep in – well, they call them life capsules but they’re more like body bags, stasis bags kind of thing, fixed to the hull and people just zip themselves into them to sleep. And they don’t even have their own. There are thirty two people on that ship, skipper – honest to God, thirty two! And they only have eight sleeping bags – two in each capsule. Every capsule is almost like a separate ship, with eight of them in each one, pretty much all of the time. Everything is so tightly scheduled, honestly – when they sleep, when they eat, what they’re doing, all the time, no such thing as leisure, while they’re on-ship. They only ever are on ship, normally, for two weeks at a time, and honestly, skipper, I’m amazed they even manage that. They’re tough, those guys, I can tell you that for sure – way tougher than us, in terms of the standard of living they’re prepared to accept. There’s no way the Fleet would expect, or allow, anyone to serve under those conditions. The safety thing alone – we wouldn’t even rate those ships as spaceworthy. Some of their vital systems don’t even have backup, let alone triple-redundancy. Life support, my God! Their ships can’t stay out more than two weeks at a time, skipper – they don’t have any tanks aboard, at all, they rely entirely on air-recyc which has only 86% efficiency, so by the end of a week they’re breathing air we’d rate as hazardous to health. There are no showers aboard, either – they have some kind of wipes but they stay in the same clothes, in their suits, for two weeks! As they put it, the ship gets a bit stinky!’

  She shook her head, marvelling. ‘And the noise! They have to use comms even to talk to one another face to face, or they’d be yelling their heads off. Teeth-juddering vibration, of course, too – constant freefall, too, obviously, as they don’t have gravity generators. Nano-tech, sure, some of their tech is really amazing, manoeuvring thrusters, top of that list! But their safety standards are terrifying – barely any heat shields, even, and the ship is stuffed with fluorocarbon plastics. They take it entirely for granted that their ship can fill up with toxic gases in any kind of plastics fire, and that’s ‘normal’, they tell me, during combat. If I wasn’t so in awe of their courage, skipper, I’d have to say these guys are insane!’

  Alex gave a calm, ‘active listening’ nod. Tina needed to do this, he understood, expressing at least some of the things which had stunned and overwhelmed her.

  ‘You’re sure about the fluorocarbons?’ he asked, not because he doubted her but just to prompt her in that direction. Tina nodded quickly, well aware of how important a discovery that was.

  ‘Totally,’ she said, with absolute conviction, and went on to explain. ‘A lot of their fittings are metal – aluminium, mostly – like control slides and even panels. That ship would fail safety inspection on that alone.’

  Alex nodded understanding – the League had regulations about what parts of any ship had to be made of non-conductive material. Control panels were a basic, in that.

  ‘I commented on that and they told me that they keep plastic parts to a minimum, because of the fumes,’ Tina said, and paused very briefly to show the significance of that. ‘I thought it was some issue with the matrix not translating properly so I said I di
dn’t understand and one of them called up some chemistry diagrams to show me. Here, see?’

  She used a pocket comp to draw a series of recognisable molecular diagrams.

  ‘I couldn’t put a name to it at first,’ Tina admitted, ‘but I recognised it as a carbon-fluoride compound, and I could see it was a polymer, and what they were showing me, there, was the release of gas under combustion – carbon monoxide, obviously, carbonyl fluoride and hydrogen fluoride. I asked if all their plastics were like that, and they looked at me like I was an idiot and said yes, of course, plastic is plastic. I asked if they made any other kind of plastic and one of them said that they used to make plastics from petrochemicals, historically, but that it had got too scarce, or perhaps too expensive – something they replaced, anyway, with fluorocarbon processing. It’s theoretically possible I suppose that they do make siliplas and for some reason consider it to be such hot tech they have to keep it secret and so they were lying about it, but honestly, skipper, they showed me far more sophisticated stuff than that – no hesitation showing me nanotech – and they were just so casual about it I would honestly put everything I own on them not having siliplas.

  ‘It’s hard to explain, too, but they have this attitude, a mind-set, which I’m certain is no kind of act. They seem to have decided, sometimes a long time back, that certain things are just impossible, flat out impossible, so they’ve stopped researching them at all. Like, with language.

  ‘I mean, I get it – they only speak one language, you know? Globally, historically, from what I can gather there’s hardly even any variation in dialect. Linguistics is not even a recognised science, there, they have no expertise in it at all. But they have decided, see, long ago, that it is not actually possible to decipher ‘alien transmissions’. I mean, they don’t just recognise that it’s a very difficult thing for them to do, they actually have what they consider to be a rock solid scientific law about it.’

  Alex was reminded of Shion, laughing and commenting with affectionate amusement on the human tendency to assert ‘scientific laws’ over the universe.

  ‘They have this formula, a kind of probability equation,’ Tina explained. ‘They know, obviously, that there are other civilisations out there and that some of them have intersystem travel ability, but they have worked out to their own satisfaction that all such life forms will be inherently, inevitably hostile both to them and to each other, on some kind of ‘survival of the fittest’ imperative. They also believe it is impossible for any species to understand another because there is no common frame of reference. One of them actually said, you know, actually told me, that some of the ships which had come blitzing at them – presumably Prisosans – had been flashing their lights in recognisable mathematical progressions, but, he said…’ she held her hands out in a gesture of helpless incredulity, ‘he said, ‘But that’s meaningless, doesn’t get you anywhere!’’ She paused just for a moment so that Alex could take in the enormity of that, too.

  ‘They’re baffled by how we’re managing to learn their language – their best theory to date is that if it is true that the Olaret, the Old Ones, created some lifeboat colonies, then maybe some of our worlds are ‘human’ too – human by their definition, obviously, meaning sufficiently like them to be able to speak their language. They think we’re the first ‘other humans’ they’ve met. The Marfikians, obviously, are a terror, but they have no understanding at all about Prisos. They call their ships ‘The Other’, and it is a common belief, based on the beetle-style of Prisosan ship design, that they are an insectoid species. They’re finding it really hard to accept that Prisosans are people just like them and have been trying to reach out in the hope of alliance all this time.’

  That would, indeed, be a hard thing for any world to accept. Alex himself still winced with guilt and embarrassment when reminded how the League had treated Solaran diplomatic overtures across the centuries.

  ‘I did try to explain,’ Tina told him ruefully, ‘about ancient root languages and how we use algorithms to build a translation matrix, but I might as well have been telling them they could flap their arms and fly. But that’s what I mean, see – they’ve got this closed-door mind-set, that once they’ve decided something is scientifically impossible, that’s it, they don’t waste any more time or effort thinking about it again.

  ‘And their whole culture, everything, is geared entirely to focus on defence – well, obviously, their world has been under pretty much constant attack for the last fourteen hundred years. But psychologically, they’re so focussed on that, nothing else matters. Defence isn’t just their top priority, it’s kind of their reason for being. It would just be inconceivable to them to waste any time or resources on anything which didn’t directly contribute to defending their world. It’s like their lives are stripped down to the absolute minimum. They don’t even have furniture, you know? Not like ours, anyway – metals and plastics are prioritised for defence, they don’t waste them on things like chairs and tables and beds. They use mats – small ones to sit on during the day, bigger ones at night to sleep on, no such thing as a separate bedroom. A family lives in one room, with some kind of night-screen for kids to sleep behind, but that’s it, that’s normal life on Samart. They have hardly any possessions – basic clothes, basic everything, no fashion or beauty industry, no leisure industry to speak of, everything goes to manufacture sensors, ships and ordnance. And that would not be the case, would it, if they had siliplas?’

  Alex nodded agreement. Siliplas was so very cheap and easy to manufacture that there would be abundant capacity for domestic use even with all the demand that the defence industry could have. Culturally, of course, it was entirely possible that a society might prefer a minimalist style of living, but experience had shown that when people were provided with siliplas, as a cheap, abundant and extremely versatile material, their levels of consumerism rose exponentially.

  ‘No – good point,’ he observed. ‘So you think, then, that they may have just not have thought of making plastics from silicates?’

  ‘I’d be amazed if the idea hadn’t occurred to them at some point, surely, it has to, even a kid could think of that,’ said Tina, with unconscious arrogance, there, as a child who had herself grown up on starships, absorbing understanding of science and advanced technology from the time she could toddle. ‘I can’t believe that they’ve never even considered the possibility of polymer-bonding silicates, and with their skills in nano-tech it really would be child’s play! But I think – my guess – is that they did some experiments on that line, maybe long ago, had some problems with it and decided that it wasn’t possible.

  ‘And that would have been that, see? Even if someone did realise, now, that it’s actually a really easy thing to do, they wouldn’t get any research grant or whatever they do on Samart, because the mainstream, absolute belief is that it isn’t possible. To them, I dunno, it would be like someone applying for a research grant to study…’ she floundered for a moment and laughed a little, waving her hands again, ‘actually, I can’t think of anything far out enough that we wouldn’t give someone a research grant for it,’ she said. ‘But the Samartians just don’t do speculative research, they were clear about that, research is always prioritised on the basis of how likely and quickly they feel it is to yield useful practical defence outcomes. And there is no private research, no manufacturers carrying out their own R&D, no independent universities or labs, nothing like that. All research resources are under government, and that means military, control. But all I can say is that I am as sure as I can be, skipper, one hundred per cent, that they do not have siliplas production.

  ‘They don’t have biovat, either. When I told them we produce our food in biovats there was just this silence, the most awkward moment in the whole visit, which turned out to be because I was talking about using gene-based manipulation of nutrients and to them that is just absolutely…’ she shook her head. ‘Genetic engineering of any kind is not just illegal, there, it’s a huge cultural
taboo. I don’t believe they’d eat biovat food, skipper, they said that they’d consider such food ‘unwholesome’ but they were being polite, there, and I got the definite feeling that what they really meant was ‘an abomination’.’

  ‘Is that why you pegged them at six on Donavet?’

  That question came, surprisingly, from Murg Atwood, though it was asked in such a casual tone that it seemed to be no more than interested conversation.

  Tina knew better, just as Alex did, himself, understanding that Murg would have a very good reason for focussing in on that point. She was here as their most talented intelligence analyst, and part of what she was doing was evaluating just how reliable Tina’s information actually was.

  ‘No, no – well, partly,’ Tina said, and took a moment to gather her thoughts before answering the analyst, ‘No biovat puts them pre-nine, of course, but I did explore the possibility that they’d developed alternate sophisticated food production techniques. Pegging at six was founded on multiple indicators – statements and observation that their diet is wholly organic, much of it consumed with only the simplest level of processing – cooking, really – either at factory or domestic level. The absolute for pegging at six, though, is that they consume meat – farmed, domestic and hunted from the wild.’

  It was Rangi who reacted most strongly to that, setting down his tea-bowl and staring at her, aghast.

  ‘It’s all about the protein,’ Tina said, in response to Murg’s look of encouraging enquiry. ‘They rate protein very highly, it’s considered to be like a sin, or unpatriotic, to waste it. They’re given a certain amount of farm-produced meat every week, as a key part of their ration, but they nearly all, from what I could gather, supplement that with domestic livestock. They were talking about their families killing birds for them when they got home, clearly meant as some kind of celebration, and they told me, and showed me pictures. The most common livestock, which they said just about everyone has, are birds, like pigeons, which they keep in cages on the walls underneath their windows. They’re prolific egg layers, I gather, and they’re mostly kept for that, people eat the eggs, but if they stop laying or for special occasions, the Samartians kill and cook them.’