Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘It’s all right!’ He managed a shaky grin, and with that, looked directly at where he knew the camera was located, speaking directly to them on the command deck. ‘He’s awake! Ali’s awake!’ And then, with a quick gasp of breath, ‘And he said – he said…’ he gulped, getting himself together again as emotions threatened to overcome him, ‘I just had the weirdest dream!’’

  Alex closed his eyes momentarily, feeling a wave of such intense relief and gratitude that tears welled up in his own eyes. Fleet training held, though, and he contained himself to a quiet sigh.

  The rest of the crew were not nearly so reserved. There was a good deal of cheering, shouting, hugging and crying over the next several minutes, with Rangi at the centre of it. It was soon established that nobody could go and see Ali – he’d roused only briefly and had now gone back to sleep. But the fact that he had spoken settled one fear at least – he wasn’t going to be a shambling idiot.

  Alex was kept informed of Ali’s progress through the day – they all were, as Simon posted updates on the notice board. The news that Ali was sitting up in bed having a cup of tea was greeted with delight. The news, half an hour later, that he was arguing with Rangi over whether he could get up to go to the lavatory made people laugh, and cheer, even applauding in their joy at the news.

  As it turned 1100, though, all attention focussed on Martine Fishe as she took her place in the exosuite. She was wearing dress rig, that having been established as the protocol for formal diplomatic encounters. She looked smart in the high-collared tunic, but quite at her ease.

  ‘Is it wrong that this feels like the best fun I’ve ever had in my life?’ she asked Buzz, who’d gone with her to settle her in the encounter room. ‘I mean, obviously, don’t get me wrong, I know what’s at stake, I couldn’t be taking it any more seriously, but at the same time… should I be more nervous, Buzz? I don’t want to come at this over-confident.’

  ‘No, you’re fine,’ he assured her, resting a fatherly hand on her shoulder. ‘Treat it just like a media call.’

  Martine grinned. The Diplomatic Corps had spotted a talent in her which even the Fourth hadn’t recognised, asking for her specifically to take on a difficult media-handling. Security had been breached and spacers at Karadon had realised that the Fourth had been outside League borders, with an immediate and well-informed understanding that they had almost certainly been out to an X-base, where they might well have met Solarans. In order to forestall rumours about what they might have done there, and just in case word did start to get around that the Fourth had an alien visitor aboard, the Diplomats had played what they called a ‘proactive subversion’ move. Martine had actually stood there in front of a room full of journalists and stated, on camera, that they had an ‘alien princess’ on board who at the time was on Karadon, shopping for shoes. It was absolutely true, but the tone in which she said it made it sound like a sarcastic answer to a stupid question – the journalists had yelled derisively and laughed, and nobody had taken any such rumours seriously, since.

  Martine had undertaken quite a few other media conferences since then, acquiring a semi-official public relations role. She actually enjoyed it, taking on journalists with sporting enthusiasm.

  ‘Okay,’ she straightened herself up, glanced at her own image on a comms sub-screen to check that everything was as it should be, and nodded. ‘Bring on the penguins.’

  That made perfect sense to Buzz – it was Buzz himself who’d taught her the technique of visualising journalists as squawking, flapping penguins in order not to be intimidated by them; a technique he’d trained everyone in the Fourth in, in fact, to help them deal with public barracking.

  There was only one ‘penguin’ to deal with in this case – the Samartian officer who appeared on the big screen once the holo-link was established. He was the rank-equivalent of a commander on the Samartian ship, evidently judged by the Samartians to be senior enough to ask the tough questions but junior enough so that if things went badly wrong, he could take the blame.

  The pressures on him, right then, were almost beyond imagining. They knew that this hololink was being transmitted back to Samart. The authorities there would certainly be watching it, just a couple of hours time-delayed, and at some point, if public disclosure continued, everyone on the planet might see this footage. What he did, now, everything he said, would be judged by his people, and by history.

  It was understandable, therefore, that he was betraying some signs of tension. As they had learned from the visit of Janai Bennet, expectations of self-control and public demeanour rose along with higher rank. Such a junior officer as Janai Bennet could chat informally and make social mistakes with no great loss of dignity; dakael, in high command, were expected to be stonily controlled.

  As a mid-rank officer, Caldai Genave had not yet fully mastered the ability to keep all his feelings concealed. He looked about thirty, his hair already ash-grey, eyes the vivid blue that was common to his people. His skin tone had a certain waxy pastiness which suggested that he was not normally that pale. His breathing was consciously controlled, and his posture uncomfortably rigid. From time to time, he glanced off-camera as if looking for information or direction from someone.

  Martine looked at him with friendly interest, which she maintained even when he glared back at her. He was not, in fact, particularly intimidating – his glower had more of the quality of a cat caught in headlights than a tiger on the hunt. As they took the measure of one another, a little smile crept onto Martine’s face and he had a little swallow.

  When he spoke, though, his manner was curt, barking out an introduction and telling her that he had been assigned to ask her some questions arising from the information provided in their contact-pack.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Martine said, her own manner remaining easy and pleasant.

  ‘Confirm,’ Caldai Genave snapped, ‘Is it true that it was your people who gave the Enemy the knowledge of how to build starships?’

  ‘Yes.’ Martine said. Just that. She made no attempt to excuse it, or to apologise – the information in the first-contact pack had already made it clear that the League deeply regretted that particular first contact mission.

  ‘You were allies with the Other, at the time?’

  ‘Yes.’ Martine confirmed. ‘Prisos was what we called a Foundation world – in formal alliance, moving towards joining the League.’

  ‘You had a defence agreement. You had promised to protect them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you found the Enemy, and they learned from you how to build starships, and began to attack other worlds?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you left the Other, Prisos, took your ships away, as they begged for your help? And now they despise you as cowards and betrayers?’

  ‘That’s about the strength of it,’ Martine agreed, and then, in case that idiom didn’t translate effectively, made it clear. ‘Yes.’

  ‘This being so…’ Caldai Genave glanced off-screen for a moment, took a breath, and demanded, fiercely, ‘why should we trust you?’

  ‘You shouldn’t,’ Martine said, at once. ‘You would be fools to trust anyone who came to your border with offers of gifts and friendship, and you are not fools, far from it. Obviously you must treat us, and everything we say, with the very greatest caution, and we would not expect anything else. Trust can only be achieved over time, through learning about one another, and experience.’

  ‘But you expect us to trust you,’ Caldai Genave pointed out, ‘when you tell us yourselves that you betrayed the Other, broke your promises to them, left them without defence against the Enemy.’

  ‘Yes, we did that,’ Martine said. ‘I will not even attempt to justify it, it was an act which brings no credit on the League, an act many of us feel is the most shameful act in our history. We have been honest about it, telling you about it ourselves right away, because we feel it is important to forge a relationship in truth and honesty, and to hold back such a thing as secret would
destroy all trust, too, when it was discovered. So we are open about it, we have told you what happened, and how much we regret it.’

  ‘But,’ Caldai Genave’s voice was almost trembling with suppressed emotion, ‘what kind of people are you, that you would do such a thing?’

  ‘I know, it’s awful,’ Martine said, her tone genuinely sympathetic. She had seen the Black File, historical documents still considered so contentious that they were kept under nine-ack-alpha security. Few officers even in the Fleet had access to them, but the Fourth did – Alex considered it essential for them to understand the sensitivities, here, and he had released some of the Black File records as operational briefing. The record of the Fleet squadron leaving Prisos under a barrage of frantic signals begging them to stay had been harrowing viewing. The Marfikians had reached Prisos just a few weeks later, with a stark note in the file that Prisosan resistance had been overcome with the destruction of their largest two cities, casualties estimated at sixteen million.

  Even Jermane Taerling, having watched that, had stopped trying to push the official line excusing what they’d done.

  ‘They hate us, of course, we can’t blame them for that. We have tried to apologise, many times, but they blame us for what happened, then and since, even more than they blame the Marfikians. I can’t, and won’t, attempt to justify what we did, there are no words beyond ‘we had no choice’ and that is always a lie, obviously, there is always a choice. In this case, it came down to a decision that it was more important to protect our worlds than to honour our commitment to Prisos and the many other worlds which we withdrew from, abandoned. I can try to help you understand why that decision was made, not as justification of it but simply to provide you with a frame of reference in which you can evaluate, yourselves, what happened.’

  The Samartian glanced off screen again and gave a short nod, saying nothing.

  ‘Suppose,’ Martine said, ‘just consider a similar, hypothetical situation. You are aware now that the Prisosans have been attempting to form an alliance with you against the Marfikians, yes? And now you know that, you may decide at some point to enter into an alliance with them, perhaps with an agreement in which you promise to provide ships to aid with their defence. And for a while, you do that, in a spirit of true, honourable alliance, with every intention of maintaining that, full commitment to it. Only then, you see, the Marfikians come out with a new, faster, more deadly Thorn, and they have thousands of them, thousands, coming both at you, and at Prisos. Put yourself into the position of the decision-maker, there, understanding that you will need every ship, every gun you can muster to stand any chance of protecting your own world. If you try to defend Prisos as well, both will fall. So, what do you do?’

  She gave him time to really think about that, and knew he had understood it when he turned an even more unhealthy, waxen grey.

  ‘Fates preserve me from ever having to make such a decision,’ he said, with a fervent note.

  ‘Amen to that,’ said Martine, and paused to allow the translation team to put that into an appropriate idiom.

  ‘It is understood.’ Caldai Genave caught his breath, giving another quick nod back to her. Another, slightly longer glance off screen, and a flick of his eyes which was rather obviously in response to someone giving him instructions. ‘But,’ he said, and squared back up at Martine again, his tone harsh, ‘it could be said, then, that it would be better, more in our interest, to form alliance with the Other, with Prisos, than with you.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Martine agreed. ‘We can give you the coordinates of a Prisosan X-base, a point of contact away from their world, if you want to approach them.’

  She spoke as if the Fourth was taking it for granted that the Samartians had ships of intersystem range, which they were holding back about. ‘But I should tell you that you should not expect them to turn up here any time soon. After their last three diplomatic missions failed to return, Prisos decided forty years ago that enough was enough, that they would give up on attempts to make contact with you. They are focussing their efforts, now, on forging alliances with other worlds – at great risk, of course, given Marfikian reprisals when they suspect worlds of conspiring to rebel. But that, we know, is what they are doing, and we can tell you that Prisos has no intention of sending any more ships here in the foreseeable future.’

  She let that hang just for a couple of seconds, and saw the side-screen analysis flash up a very high probability that Samart did not, in fact, have any intersystem-range ships. There was blank dismay on the Samartian officer’s face just for a moment, with a flicker of micro-expressions which were instantly analysed both by the software they were using and by individuals. Davie got in first, with a tag that said 99% they don’t have intersystem, but there was an immediate chorus of agreement from other members of the team, including Murg Atwood and Buzz Burroughs.

  Martine smiled. She might look as if she was alone, there, standing in the exosuite, but she certainly didn’t feel it. She was surrounded by a team giving her every possible kind of support from sophisticated analysis of micro-expressions to simply willing her on. She felt like someone about to shoot for goal, cheered on by a thunderous crowd.

  ‘We could drop them a message for you, if you like,’ she said, as if this was nothing of any great importance. ‘We could tell them that you’re interested in making contact, and pass on whatever invitation you want to send. We can give them the translation matrix, too, and specs for the comms tech needed to interface your systems.’

  Caldai Genave stared at her with blank incredulity, and in her head, Martine heard a thousand voices yelling, ‘Score!’

  ‘You would do that?’ Genave was betraying bewilderment, even giving a helpless little flap of his hands. ‘Why? If it means we ally with them, and not with you?’

  ‘They are not our enemy,’ Martine said. ‘They hate us but we do not hate them – it is one of our deepest regrets that we have not been able to find a way to overcome their loathing of us to forge an alliance with them ourselves. We would not consider this to be an ‘either them or us’ situation, either, as we see no reason that you have to choose between us. We would, indeed, encourage you to make contact with Prisos, as there are many advantages to that not just for your world, and theirs, but benefit to the interests of the League, too, in strengthening resistance to Marfikian threat. It may be, even, that at some point in the future you may be of help to all of us, mediating in the role of ‘mutual friend’. But that is a possibility for the far future, obviously – for now, of course, you need to learn all you can about us, and Prisos, and anyone else you want to talk to, to form your own opinions and decide how you want to proceed. And if that should be that you ally with Prisos and don’t want any more to do with us, we would still consider that to be a good outcome, good for your worlds directly, indirectly for us all.’

  ‘Anyone else?’ The Samartian’s eyes were wide. ‘More Others will come?’

  ‘Oh, for certain, yes – if word goes out that you have opened diplomatic contact, many worlds out there will send a deputation. You have to understand that Samart is revered, greatly honoured. Your world has huge respect even in the League, where it is known to most people only as something like a legend. Other worlds, which have themselves suffered under Marfikian invasion, hold Samart in awe. We all want to learn from you, all want your alliance. Even worlds which would not otherwise trust one another will certainly want to befriend you. But this is something that should be said, all right? We understand, we really do, the danger to your world, and to others, caused by our visit. We, after all, can slip back through the nebula and stay safe behind our borders. But if the Marfikians discover that we have a ship here, that may in itself trigger increased hostility both against you and against Cherque, our own border-world. If they discover that you are engaging in alliance with Prisosans and other worlds, perhaps providing them with ships or with the expertise to make them, there will, we know, be truly terrible, catastrophic reprisals. Secrecy is p
aramount. Only a handful of people even in our own government know that we are here. And we will respect, entirely, your wishes, your decision, in how that information is managed, whether you allow us to send more Fleet or Diplomatic Corps ships, and what information, if any, you wish us to pass to the Prisosans, or anybody else.’

  ‘It is understood,’ Caldai Genave said, a little shaken, but assertive, ‘The Enemy must not know you are here – any of them that see you must and will be destroyed.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Martine said, though that in fact had been one of the first things Alex had established with them, after that terrifying misunderstanding had thrown them into combat. ‘But may I also ask a question, Caldai?’

  There was the expected sidelong glance, a brief hesitation, then a nod.

  ‘It is possible.’

  ‘Okay – I can’t help wondering,’ Martine said, the use of ‘I’ making this a personal curiosity rather than an official diplomatic enquiry, ‘It is obviously not beyond your technological ability to build starships with intersystem range. So I have to ask, why have you not done that? Even perhaps to fight back against Marfik by taking the fight to their world?’

  There was a pause of several seconds, and if he’d stood there with a hand to his ear it couldn’t have been more obvious that he was listening to something on his headset.

  ‘We didn’t believe it to be purposeful,’ he said, which Jermane Taerling promptly amended to We didn’t see the point. ‘We did send exploration ships out in our ancient history, but none of them returned. It was realised – believed – that all other species are inevitably hostile, incompatible cultures without hope of understanding competing for the means of life. The decision was made that we would defend our own space. The right decision, we thought, as we were able to defend against the Enemy when they came. There have been times when people have said that we should build big ships, find out where the Enemy’s world is and attack them. But what could we do? Even if we could conquer them, how could we rule them? Destroy their cities? That would make us no better than they are. And what would be the point? Even if we destroyed their world, every other species is just as bad or even worse…’ he suddenly remembered who he was talking to, and qualified, quickly, ‘So we believed. Have believed, for millennia. It is called the Law of Life, that all life strives in competition for resources and that all intelligent species are inimical. Some few of our people have always had belief that there might be friendly species out there, but only a few, not something most people took seriously. We did not believe it was even possible to communicate with other species.’ A wry note, and a tiny grimace. ‘We are having to change many of our ideas.’