She noticed that Rangi was turning distinctly green around the gills, and glanced at him apologetically. ‘Sorry.’ She looked back at Murg, then at Alex. ‘But I think this is going to be a sticky, further on.’ She meant, as he understood, that this might well be a cultural sticking point, in which both sides regarded the other’s customs as unacceptable.
‘I don’t think there is any kind of protein they won’t eat. It is absolutely normal there to hunt wild animals for food, too, a normal thing to do in your spare time, go and shoot things as they say, for the pot. They also catch fish – that’s regarded, I gather, as something even kids can do to help provide food for the family. And there were all manner of regional delicacies they were keen to tell me about – in one region they have lakes teeming with a particular kind of insect, like a mayfly I think, swarming in clouds. The Samartians catch them in nets, squash them into patties, cook and eat them, fresh.’
Rangi leapt up with a strangled noise and ran for the lavatory. The others watched him go, not without sympathy but with some amusement, too. It was, admittedly, quite funny that Rangi, who wouldn’t turn a hair at all the blood and gore involved in surgery, would be really distressed at someone stamping on a beetle.
Alex, Murg and Tina exchanged the slightly smug grins of people who had all eaten giant spider legs on Ferajo – biovat produce, of course, but generally considered the highest benchmark of how adventurous you were, gastronomically.
‘Yes, I can see that might be a sticky,’ Alex conceded. Spacers were far more open to eating any kind of organic food than most groundsiders, but even they would recoil at the things the Samartians ate. ‘Diplomatic advisory, there, not to accept invitations to dinner.’
Tina gave a splutter of laughter.
‘I think I might balk a bit at that one,’ she confessed. But even as she laughed, Alex could see the signs of exhaustion starting to catch up with her. She was slowing down, pausing then to take a gulp of tea, and noticing with some surprise that her hands were trembling. That made her laugh again, wryly. ‘Collywobbles imminent,’ she observed, since she knew very well what to expect. Even now, it was apparent that laughter might very easily become tears.
‘All right,’ Alex grinned back at her, amused but with complete understanding. ‘Debriefing phase two,’ he told her. ‘Rest, recover, process.’
‘Sir,’ Tina acknowledged, and did not even attempt to claim that she would be fine and could go ahead with a written report, right now. She looked over at the door to the shower-lavatory which Rangi had dived into, and grinned. ‘Do you think we should check on him?’
That wasn’t necessary, as the door opened while Alex was still laughing. Rangi was pale, and smelt strongly of mouthwash, but he was very much on his dignity and determined to resume looking after his patient. Alex, therefore, allowed himself to be ushered out of sickbay, giving Tina no more than a nod of commendation.
It was several hours later that they began to get the really detailed, intel-analysed report. Tina had Murg’s help with that, not just in helping to organise the information but in using techniques which drew out more information even than Tina was aware of, herself. She had not been able to take any pictures during her visit, but Murg was able to create reconstructions of some of the things Tina had seen, on the same basis as a forensic crime scene reconstruction.
The first image, a holographic walk-through of the ship, was grabbed and marvelled over the moment Alex put it on the notice board.
All of them were tired, by then, but spirits rose noticeably as they got their first look at what it was like aboard a Samartian ship.
The first thing they had to figure out was that the Samartian ship was not, as they had thought, a single deck ship with four pressurised compartments. It was, in fact, technically a four-deck ship, though each ‘deck’ was only a couple of metres wide, and up to fifteen metres high. That would have been ridiculous if the decks had gravity, but it was logical enough on a ship which was in permanent freefall. Airlocks and internal hatches were circular, with most of the equipment and displays oriented vertically as if the nose of the ship was at the top. There were strict rules about moving around, on board, which Tina had been informed about at once – you had to go up through the ship on the port side, and downwards to starboard, and were only allowed to cross from one side to the other at the hatchways.
That made perfect sense as it became apparent just how little room there was for anyone to move about. Tina had told them there was a crew of thirty two aboard. Half of them were on duty, mostly tethered at various stations throughout the ship. Of the remaining sixteen, eight were currently on sleep-time, which meant that they had to stay in their fully enclosed sleeping bags, regardless of whether they wanted to sleep, or not. There wasn’t really anywhere else for them to be – the other eight off-duty crew were pretty much squashed into odd little alcoves here and there, waiting for their turn to eat or sleep, and watching holovision.
That was one of the most astonishing revelations, as far as many of the crew were concerned. The Samartians were watching a live holo-channel, carried through the sensor-comms network and time-delayed by however far they were from Samart. It hiccupped, apparently, every time they were a second further away or closer to the broadcast, but was considered perfectly watchable. It was a dedicated channel, broadcast out to ships on patrol, providing hourly news updates and a stream of entertainment programmes.
Entertainment by the Samartian definition of it, at least. Virtually all of their ‘entertainment’ output was reality-soaps; filming the everyday lives of people who lived in particular communities. Such filming went on for generations in the same locations, round-the-clock filming in lots of apartments which could be accessed live at any time by viewers on the ground. Aboard ship they only got the highlight programmes, that day’s footage edited into something very like a soap, though no soap would last long in the League using such mundane domestic dramas as these. One of the most popular was called ‘The Towers’, following the fortunes of about fifty families who lived in a block. The current high-drama storyline, in that, was the question of whether one of the kids was going to make it into military school, or not. Incomprehensible as it might seem, Tina had been assured that it was considered very exciting, on Samart, to be ‘on-filming’, and whenever any of the families moved out of a location there would be hundreds of thousands of applications to replace them.
And that was it, as far as on-board leisure provision went. There were no sports, no games, not even sharing of meals. The food aboard ship was similar to the Fleet’s emergency rations, high nutrient bars designed for keeping you alive, not for any kind of pleasure. The Samartian versions were organic, meat-based – Tina said it had looked like they were eating chunks of leather. The crew she’d spoken with had said that it was all right, if you ate it slowly, though they’d admitted to craving what they described as ‘real’ food, by the end of a two week tour of shipboard duty. Each person got their ration bar at the designated time, eating it by themselves. There was no such thing, even, as a companionable mug of tea, since drinks were provided as hydration packs which you had to drink when you were scheduled to do so.
There was no social life on a Samartian ship, really. Even conversation was discouraged, chat being forbidden while you were on duty anyway and frowned upon if it was in any way distracting to the watch crew, too. Virtually the only thing they could do when off-duty was watch holovision using the headset-caps they wore all the time, and needed even to be able to speak to someone right next to them.
The noise was, indeed, deafening – an attempt to recreate the noise aboard the ship as Tina had experienced it was blocked by the ship’s safety systems. They wouldn’t play any sound louder than that set by Fleet regs as the safe maximum, so would only play the reproduced sound at sixty two per cent of what Tina said it had been. Even at that it was a cacophony people turned right down, or off, within a minute or two, exclaiming over the head-jarring blast of it. They exclai
med again, too, as it was realised that the slightly blurred quality to many images was not down to Tina’s faulty memory but was a faithful reproduction of what it had been like, there, with tech shuddering, screens blurred and even the air shimmering with constant vibration and even some heat-haze from some of the tech. There was no mistake, either, about how dark it was, aboard – the Samartians used red light on their ships, maximising visibility of screens and backlit readouts, and there was a rosy twilight dimness, deep with shadows.
Respect for the Samartians rose considerably as people saw for themselves just what conditions they were working in. It made sense of a lot of things about Janai Bennet’s own visit, too – why she’d come through the airlock hatch sideways and fallen over, for a start, why she’d found the light so dazzling and why she’d been so amazed by so much about the Heron.
‘We really do live like gods, compared to them,’ Hali Burdon observed, and got no argument from anyone around her. There was even, Alex was amused to see, a certain amount of wealth-guilt going on, noticeable when Mako was taking the cake trolley around. Alex had asked Simon to bake them a treat for after dinner, if he wasn’t too busy or too tired, himself, and Simon had obliged. He’d made konaberry tarts, using fresh fruit from the biovat and decorating each tart with vanilla cream and a slice of crystallised lemon. They were delicious, and a very well earned treat for all their hard work that day. But still, quite a few people hesitated to take one, just at first.
‘Seems a bit… I dunno…’ said Jonno Trevaga, expressing a feeling that was evident on many faces. He glanced at the comm screen which showed the Samartian contact-ship, still cruising in isolation, and the watchful squadron beyond it. ‘Feels a bit mean to be stuffing our faces with this, when they’re, like, chewing dried meat.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ said Mako, holding out the cake tray. He had taken on the task of distributing treats when Simon baked them, as part of his role as the interdeck steward, and it was clear to Alex that he and Simon had already had that conversation. ‘We’re not being mean. We’d be gift-boxing them day and night if they’d let us, but they don’t want it, wouldn’t eat it if you paid them. And if we don’t eat these, they’ll end up in the garbage, which is practically immoral, wasting good food. So do the decent thing and have a tart.’
That made people laugh and they did accept the treats, but Alex was interested to note that they were feeling a sense of bonding, even of responsibility for the Samartians aboard that ship. And it was, particularly, the contact-ship on which they were focussed. They all understood now that everyone on that ship was a volunteer, pledged to stay outside the border for at least a month with their air and food supplies replenished by a weekly drone, while quarantine facilities were readied for them, back home. Once there, they would be put through all manner of medical tests and intensive observations. They had been told that might take up to a year, even two. Even the two dakaelin were doing the work of skippers, aboard ship, and would be in quarantine just like the rest of them. And still they had volunteered. Given all their previous experience of contact with other species, that was courage the Fourth could only marvel at. It was good, Alex thought, to see his crew building a sense of kinship with their oppos on the other ship.
What the Samartians did next took them all by surprise, though. They were not expecting any public disclosure of their arrival. Such a situation certainly would be kept secret in the League, as the announcement of an alien warship in close proximity to any of their systems, however friendly their intentions were said to be, would kick off panic on a global scale.
The Samartian government, though, apparently had more confidence in the ability of their people to handle high-impact information. They notified the Heron that they were about to release news about their arrival in Samartian space on their news networks, and even provided a copy of that broadcast, sending them hourly news-updates, thereafter, for their information.
The Samartians were not going public with everything they knew all at once – they were starting with the first announcement that a ship of unknown origin had been detected in their space, that it had been challenged, and had complied at once with an order to leave Samartian territory. They had provided the news with first footage of the Heron, pointing out the differences between it and any other ship they’d seen before, with comments on its size, speed and probable armament. That ‘news’ was, by now, more than a month old, but was being broadcast as if it was happening live.
‘They’re running it delayed-release so they can manage the information flow,’ Buzz observed. ‘Not to slam people with too much, all at once. That’s quite something, though, huh? Can you imagine, on our worlds, if the government released footage of an alien ship encounter, apparently happening live?’
Alex could imagine, only too easily – he had been obliged to study global panics of that kind as part of his command school training, and those were not images you ever got out of your head. Everyone knew that the Marfikians destroyed cities, so a Marfik-panic involved mass, chaotic fleeing from cities. As transport infrastructure clogged up, evacuation rapidly became rioting. Some people would kill in their desperation to save themselves and their families. Others, convinced that the end of the world was upon them, would commit suicide. The sheer human cost of such panics was on a truly appalling scale. The global economy would take a massive hit, too, so it might be years before a world fully recovered.
‘Don’t!’ Alex said, with a suppressed shudder. If their arrival here caused anything like such a panic on Samart, he would never be able to live with himself – and, Alex being Alex, it would never even occur to him that such a decision to broadcast that news was the Samartian government’s and therefore any deaths or disaster arising from it were not his fault.
The Samartian government, however, evidently knew their people. The majority of their population might be glued to their news screens, watching this, but they were too used to being under attack to be frightened by a ship that wasn’t even shooting at them, however strange it might be. They were intrigued, too, by the fact that it was neither shooting at them nor transmitting gobbledygook, as was evident in the news commentary a couple of hours later.
‘This is new, we’ve never seen a ship behave like this.’ The speaker was another of the ruling military junta, a stone-faced Dakael Bleen. ‘They always either fire at us or broadcast gabble. This ship is not attempting to communicate, it’s just complying with our orders. We believe it may be some kind of automated drone, perhaps a survey ship or something of that kind, programmed to turn away if it detects gunfire. We are following at escort range, and assembling squadrons in support. If it continues on its present course it will leave defended space in approximately fourteen hours. We will then, obviously, monitor in case it attempts to return. Currently, however, our assessment is that it presents no immediate threat to the world.’
It was a very odd feeling, seeing that encounter from the Samartian perspective. It really brought home to them that they were the aliens, here, and how very small they were, too, just one ship confronting a world of four and a half billion people.
Alex watched a little of that news broadcast, spent another half hour or so working through Tina’s report, and then went to bed. They were in this for the long haul, after all, and it certainly wouldn’t help the situation if he worked to the point of collapse.
As he climbed into his bunk, though, he was wondering how much longer he and his crew could sustain this pitch. They had enough supplies to stay here for another eight weeks, yet, and Alex would be prepared to stay longer and go to emergency rations if that was needed to secure an agreement for future meetings, but he was aware of how hard everyone was working, pushing to the limit of endurance. He was conscious of the strain on his own nerves, come to that. He recognised that because he found himself starting to wonder, even, whether all this had been worth it. They’d come so far, and worked so hard, had been flung into combat with a Marfikian attack squad and were having to pick
their way through extremely sensitive diplomacy – and for what? They had been hoping that the Samartians had some kind of advanced technology or skills they could teach them, to make their own worlds safer and perhaps even enable them to liberate at least some of the worlds under Marfikian domination.
It was apparent, now, that that was not going to happen. Even Davie had gone very quiet since it became apparent that the Samartian ships were so terrifyingly fragile and hazardous. He was working in the lab, busy at screens with an air of such focussed determination that it seemed almost desperate. Nobody was disturbing him; they just kept food and drink within his reach and gave him his space. He had boasted, once, after seeing a Samartian ship, that if he could get the answers to four questions he would be able to bring similar ships into production in the League. Alex suspected that he had got his answers to those questions, now, and wasn’t liking them at all.
The only edge technology the Samartians might offer was their expertise in nano-engineering, which was not beyond the League’s own ability to develop, had they ever seen the need. The secret of how the Samartians had fought off so many attempts at invasion over all these centuries was quite simply that they had sacrificed everything else to that cause.
That would not happen in the League, Alex knew that. There were already, and always, complaints about the ‘excessive’ amount of money spent on the Fleet and on system defences, complaints that got louder the further away from Marfikian borders you were. The suggestion that they might accept austerity measures, even food rationing, in order to prioritise resources to defence … well, it wasn’t something the voting population would consider for a moment.
Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) Page 49
