‘Do I want to know,’ Silvie enquired, ‘why everyone is talking about people being sick?’
Alex chuckled. They were in the encounter zone, where Alex was having his mid-afternoon snack of a large glass of water with a small, dry, rock-hard nutrient biscuit.
‘No,’ he said, ‘you really don’t.’
‘Okay then.’ Silvie dismissed the matter and gave him a measuring look, instead. ‘You’re still very tired,’ she observed. ‘All stodgy and purple.’
Alex couldn’t deny it. The bloated feeling was still heavy on him, and there were depths of gloom beneath his superficially cheerful mood. Stodgy and purple about summed it up. A thick, dark purple, mixed with swamp-acid green.
‘Sorry,’ he said, knowing that could not be comfortable for her to be around. ‘I will be fine in a day or two.’
Silvie accepted that, with a very quarian lack of comment. She’d already said what she thought about the state he’d been reduced to, and that he’d allowed them to do that to him. She didn’t need to say it again.
‘It is nice here,’ she observed. ‘They take good care of you – us.’
Alex bit a tiny piece off his biscuit, which tasted like rubberised charcoal.
‘Lovely,’ he agreed, which made her laugh.
It was nice there, though – a very relaxing place, and they spent more than an hour just sitting there, chatting. Which was how Alex got to hear about the fun and games there’d been over the fighters.
‘Shion asked for two more swarms to make up a wing, once it was agreed that she’d be pilot instructor,’ Silvie told him. ‘And Min was all for it, signed all the authorisations, no problem. Only when they went to send the jettoes down and get the swarms, Fulfilment said no – IA had put a Pol and Proc block on the req.’
Alex raised his eyebrows. For Internal Affairs to put a Policy and Procedure hold on Supplies fulfilling a command requisition was extraordinary.
‘They said they had concerns about the jettoes being swapped out for fighters of lower performance,’ said Silvie. ‘Which is beyond ridiculous, obviously, the swarms are way better when they’re piloted right.’
The key words there were when they’re piloted right. The reason the Admiralty had been obliged to quietly take the Swarm class fighters out of service almost as quickly as they’d brought them in had been because they’d turned out to be almost impossible to pilot. Their biometric controls were so hypersensitive that even a stifled sneeze on the part of the pilot could fling them into wild tumbles. Fitting stabilisers had made them safe, but in doing so, had reduced their manoeuvrability to such a point that they were actually less agile than the fighters they were supposed to be replacing. Most of them had gone into the Reserve, an embarrassing and expensive mistake. But the Fourth had been allowed to have three, under their R&D remit of looking for ways to upgrade underperforming tech. And that way, as it had turned out, was Shion. She could not only pilot them superbly herself, but was able to teach human pilots to set aside their rote-learned training and fly the swarms instinctively. A swarm flown by any pilot Shion had trained was indeed far and away superior to the smaller jetto fighters. And with the opportunity for her to train pilots here, Alex was not surprised that Min had leapt at the chance to have swarms on the Assegai, too.
‘Shion said,’ Silvie told him, ‘that it was just the Weasel being a git.’
She was undoubtedly right, Alex thought. The Weasel – aka Third Lord Admiral Cerdan Jennar – was almost certainly behind it. There was a characteristic vindictive stupidity about it that was almost as good as a signature.
Not that he would see it that way, of course. From his point of view he was Doing the Right Thing. The Powers that Be had decided the Assegai would be assigned jettoes, and that should be the end of it, no question, no argument, and all the more so because the Assegai was his pet project and he expected them to demonstrate unquestioning obedience as an example to the rest of the League.
Alex von Strada being sent aboard the Assegai, of course, had infuriated him beyond the power of words to express. It was unsurprising, really, that he had dug his heels in, alert to any sign of von Strada’s corrupting influence and refusing to allow even the tiniest deviation from orthodoxy.
‘But Min made some calls,’ Silvie said. ‘And Shion was told she could have her pick out of all the swarms in the Reserve. I went with her and we tried all of them till she chose the two she liked. It was fun.’
Alex gave a gleeful little splutter at that. There were, he’d estimate, at least seventy swarm-class fighters being held in the Fleet Reserve. It would have taken hours even for Shion to try them all. She must have been having the time of her life.
‘This guy there kept telling her that they’re all identical,’ Silvie recalled. ‘Which is daft. Even I can feel they handle differently.’
They shouldn’t. Production was automated and extremely precise, with not the hairsbreadth of difference between any of the hundreds of swarms which had been built. Alex had not been able to detect any difference, himself. But he knew Shion could. She could tell you which fighter she was in even blindfold, just by the feel of the response to controls. And where her own beloved Firefly was concerned, the fighter was almost as much a pet as a vehicle.
‘Anyway, Shion says Min is solid gold,’ Silvie commented. ‘Which she is, of course, lovely warm radiance, and yes, I know,’ she caught the slight alarm rising in him at that, ‘privacy, respect for personal privacy and command dignity and all that. All I’m saying, lovely and warm.’
‘Fair enough,’ Alex said, and then, conscious of a mounting inner pressure, excused himself before Silvie felt compelled to point out to him his need to expel gases. The encounter zone had two facilities – a human shower/lavatory by the door and a quarian bathroom at the other end. Alex used the human one, as it was nearer, emerging a few minutes later with a feeling of relief, however temporary. The word ‘hero’ had been applied to him at Chartsey, all the time, every day, everywhere, till he was sick of the sound of it. He wondered what those people who saw him as some kind of movie-style hero would think if they could see him now, weary and farting. Some hero.
‘Poor darling,’ said Silvie, as he returned. The gloom that had been so obvious to her was now rising in him like a tide of consuming depression. ‘You need a nap.’
‘I don’t…’ Alex started, caught her eye, and sighed. ‘I could lie down for a bit, I suppose,’ he conceded, without enthusiasm.
‘Come home,’ Silvie suggested. ‘There’s a quiet room there for you, you can have a nap there.’
‘All right.’ Alex didn’t think he would sleep, but he could see that it would please her so he nodded and got up, taking the hand she held out to him.
Moving through the swim tubes was strange. There were swim masks in a locker and the option of changing into diving rig, too, but Alex was happy just to pull on a mask and step into a pool in his shipboard gear. The tubes, Alex knew, snaked through the ship, secure within 1.3 metre wide metal conduits. He’d noticed them around the ship, tucked under gantries or running along under ceilings.
From the inside, though, you got a very different perspective. From the inside, the tube appeared to be a transparent material, slightly flexible to the touch, surrounded on all sides with blue. It wasn’t the blue of a holographic ocean, but the same kind of abstract geometrics as in the encounter zone. 3D shapes shifted and flowed gently in beguiling patterns, with tints ranging from a pale sunlit blue overhead to the shadowy blues of the depths far below. There was a sense of enormous space.
And there was real life. Alex was so occupied with gazing at the view beyond the tube that he almost swam right into a drifting jellyfish.
‘Oh!’ he back-sculled hastily, ‘Sorry!’ he hardly knew himself whether he was apologising to the jellyfish or to Silvie, who was following and had to stop quickly herself as he floundered. ‘I thought the fish were just on the aquadeck.’
‘No, they’ve got the run of the network,
’ Silvie told him, grinning at his shock. Her voice was different underwater. She was breathing with internal gills, her voice clear but richer, like two voices speaking in perfect unison. ‘Come and see.’
Alex went, and saw. He saw the garden Silvie had created at the point where three tubes joined – a tiny coral garden full of anemones and miniature fish. He saw the Tank, a VR facility in which the Assegai’s crew would learn to swim too. And here, he made a new friend.
‘This is Ulric,’ Silvie introduced him to a fish which had come swimming over to meet them. It was of a type Alex recognised from his visit to Quarus, a groupo, very common within cities there. They were not kept as pets, as such, but like all the sea life found within cities, swam in and out of the buildings freely. This particular species was noted for its friendliness. They were pretty bright, too – quite capable, Salomah had told him, of recognising individuals of their own kind and quarians, too, and of forming emotional attachments.
They weren’t, it had to be conceded, the prettiest fish in the sea. Ulric the groupo was around twenty centimetres long and almost as wide at the head. He had goggle eyes and a wide, downturned mouth, like a grimacing clown. His fins burst out of him like bunches of feathers stuck here and there, wafting like fans when he opened them to swim.
‘I have no idea why they called him Ulric,’ Silvie observed, giving the groupo a little tickle under its bulbous chin. ‘He was living at the lab,’ she explained. ‘But he was happier to come with me.’
Alex didn’t doubt it. This was a fish which had been engineered to live alongside empathic species. He was an emotionally intelligent being and had probably found life in a lab pretty boring and lonely. His affection for Silvie was obvious, anyway, and when Alex reached out a finger to offer a tickle, Ulric turned obligingly so that Alex could reach his favourite spot, right under the jaw line.
‘Hello Ulric.’ Alex said, and felt himself to be approved.
When they swam back through the junction to the aquadeck, anyway, Ulric followed them.
‘There’s a safe tank here,’ Silvie paused to point out a subsidiary tube just before they went into the aquadeck itself. ‘All the fish get moved into it when the ship goes to alert.’
That would be achieved, Alex knew, with a combination of forcefield nets and directive currents, containing and moving the fish rapidly without harming or distressing them. They’d installed a similar system on the Heron, in case of needing to drain the aquarium down in an emergency.
The aquadeck, though, would be Silvie’s own haven, her assigned safe space for when the ship was at alert. It was, after all, one of the safest places on the ship, a capsule within a capsule, with separate power and life support systems of its own.
And it had, too, the controversial ‘empath shielding’ with which the Diplomatic Corps had been offending the quarians for decades. A combination of highly insulated casing and an oscillating electro-magnetic forcefield, it formed an effective barrier to empathic awareness. It was one of the reasons the quarians had stopped going aboard the Embassy ship, finding such barriers all over it and feeling – correctly – that it showed an insulting lack of trust and a desire to keep secrets.
Here, though, it had been transformed into a very welcome facility by the simple method of putting the controls for it inside the capsule, under quarian control. So Silvie could, at will, dim out the background noise of all the emotions on the ship. And it was, in fact, routinely set so to create a quiet zone she could retreat to whenever she wanted a break.
And for Silvie, of course, that meant the underwater lounge as well as the air-room above. The lower level was just as big, and every bit as vibrant, as the space above, with netting here and there for lounging in, quarian-style.
Today, though, they went up through the plunge pool, pausing by it for the flash-dry system to work. Clothes, hair and skin were blasted dry in just a couple of seconds – quite a bracing experience, till you got used to it. But Alex was used to it, and stepped away from it as casually as if he’d just passed through an airlock decontam.
‘This is your cabin,’ Silvie told him, leading him through the riot of flora to one of the doors at that end of the lounge.
‘Oh, my…’ Alex paused in the doorway, transported in one heartbeat to one of the happiest moments of his life.
It was, he recognised at once, a replica of the rest-room at Salomah’s place. Which was, in itself, an inadequate description. Quarians lived in shared homes, not unlike student dorms in their communal nature. They had no such thing as a permanent fixed address, moving often, whenever the fancy took them, and not having even so much a fixed room within the dorm which was exclusively theirs. They did, however, have rooms they generally used, a combination of water-filled sleep chamber below and a rest-room above where they could go for some quiet time or what they called a dry nap. Salomah had taken Alex to this room, the original of this room, in her home in the deep ocean city of Feyor. She’d depressurised it so he could survive taking off his diving gear to have something to eat, and he’d sat there with her, eating and chatting and looking at the view. It was the only time in his life he had looked at a planetary environment and felt, and known, I could live here.
It was, admittedly, more like space than being on a planet. Feyor was the deepest city on Quarus, far below the reach of sunlight, with pressure that would kill any human instantly without deep diving rig. And it was beautiful in the same awe-inspiring way as nebulae and stars in firefall. The entire city was lit by its phosphorescent gardens, with scenery and sea life even other quarians considered spectacular and would come to Feyor to see. And there beyond the city were the dark towers of massive hydrothermal vents, spewing superheated water in geysers which soared up into the dark.
And there it all was, right there. Holographic, of course, but so convincing that Alex could easily have believed that he was there, for real. He could even see little figures swimming about out there – quarians, enjoying the gardens. It looked like real footage, not a CGI construction.
‘Thought you’d like it,’ Silvie commented, with happy satisfaction at the wonder and the pleasure radiating from him. ‘All yours,’ she told him, and with a gentle little push to move him through the door. ‘Enjoy!’ She told him, and as the door closed, ‘Take a nap!’
Alex did as he was told.
Seven
Whether it was the nap, the detox or his natural resilience, Alex was certainly feeling better the next day. And it was unexpectedly enjoyable. His first briefing with the trainee group was brisk and purposeful, Jarlner and Bennet were settling in well and Shion, as she assured him, was having a blast.
‘Loads of new pilots to train,’ she enthused, ‘and such a lovely ship, and the GD. Did you know they’re into the GD here?’
It took Alex a moment, then he realised what she meant.
‘No.’ The GD, as far as Shion was concerned, could only mean the Gide Disclosure. The Gide had been handing over yottabytes of information at a time ever since first contact, with more data arriving sometimes at the rate of several times a day. It was now believed that the sheer volume of it was greater than the sum total of human knowledge, as represented by the combined system libraries across the League. But it was, frustratingly, delivered in a form their systems could only read as fragmented garble. The Gider were unable to help and so far the best human efforts had only resulted in algorithms which, with patience, might compile as much as a millionth of one per cent of the data into a readable form. Even this, though, required intensive human engagement, finding meaning almost as much by instinct as with logic. When meaning was found, it might turn out to be anything from a fragment of science currently beyond human comprehension to a treatise on the breeding habits of snails. All across the League, thousands of academics were beavering away at the GD, like people scrabbling for diamonds in a planet-sized desert. Shion herself worked on the Disclosure when she had nothing else to do, though her interest was more linguistic than searching for particu
lar content. ‘Are they?’ Alex was mildly surprised.
‘In a big way,’ Shion assured him. ‘They weren’t allowed to have a lab here, though the Second did offer.’ She gave him a meaningful look. ‘Guess-Who blocked it as ‘inappropriate and distractive.’’
Guess Who, in this context, was a rather more polite way to refer to the Weasel, Cerdan Jennar.
Alex gave a little grunt of wry understanding. Jennar had been trying for years to sever the agreement by which the Second Irregulars had a lab on the Fourth’s ship. Whether this was despite or because of the fact that this had been identified as a key factor in the Fourth’s success as a unit was a moot point. He would say, of course, that he was acting in the Fourth’s own interests, and in the interests of fairness, too, as he claimed to consider it outrageously unfair that the Fourth was burdened with all the extra work that having the research facility aboard put on them.
‘Min wanted an academic stimulus,’ Shion explained, ‘so she asked if they could have access to the GD, and made it a thing, you know – exodiplomacy work, which people have to sign up to and be trained for. It took off, like…’ she indicated a rocket on a steep launch ramp, ‘pow. More than eighty per cent of the crew are signed up to it. There are three seminars a day, open for people to work together when they want, and a GD society which runs talks and things just like Mindful on the Heron. So when I’m not training pilots or hanging out with Silvie I can get stuck into that.’ She beamed. ‘Thank you so much for letting me come, skipper. This is way better than going on leave.’
Alex was coming to the same conclusion. Five months on Therik now seemed quite dull, compared with the interest and enjoyment which was on offer here. He did, admittedly, feel a pang of regret and some guilt at the thought of disappointing his parents. But they would accept, he knew, that he’d been whisked away to another high-powered mission, more likely to be proud than resentful. And there would be other times.
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