Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘And you still pray to thank them?’ Silvie observed, seeing that in the way that he felt about the Olaret.

  ‘Well, I know that they’re not angels as such,’ Owun admitted. ‘I always did have some doubt over that part of the story – seemed to me like ‘angels’ was just a way of saying that something had happened we didn’t understand. But the Olaret, they created us and gave us a beautiful, abundant world, and they did that even though they themselves were dying out, a gift of life and hope for the future, and me, well, I’d say that deserves some thanks. So I know it’s just, well, me talking to the void, but it makes me feel better just to say thanks in their honour, so yeah, I say a prayer for them sometimes.’

  ‘That’s beautiful – very strange, but beautiful, the way you feel about it.’ Silvie told him. ‘Quarians, I guess you could either say that we have no sense of the sacred at all or that everything is sacred to us, but we have no religious beliefs like that. We always remembered that the Olaret created us and our world – ours is another like Carrearranis, created from scratch, rather than the colonisation of an existing terraformed world like Camae. So it’s obvious from the fossil record that there was nothing but slime there till ten thousand years ago and then suddenly pow, over the course of three centuries an entire, beautifully rich biosphere developed, and no way that could be natural. And we’ve never had a dark age, either, we started off with robotics and genetic engineering and we’ve gone on from there. Not far though. Humans find it incredible how little our technology has changed over thousands of years, but it does everything we want it to so why would we want it to change? Humans say it’s a static society, like that’s a bad thing.’

  ‘Life hasn’t changed much on Camae, either – better technology, of course, but we still love the old songs and the old ways,’ Owun said, with evident nostalgia. ‘My family has a croff – a little house in the mountains. I spent most of my summers there, growing up. I can still taste the air… and oh, the stars. The galaxy like an arch right across the sky… I used to lay on a rock and just stare up at it all, dreaming of all the worlds out there we know and all the ones we haven’t even found yet. I knew I’d have to come out here and see it for myself. But I do still love Camae and I will be going back there to settle down, one day.’

  ‘I used to stare up the stars too – same stars, possibly even at the same time,’ Silvie said. ‘But I knew from very little that I would be coming out here, so it was always exciting for me, imagining what it was going to be like. And no, of course I didn’t mind being created for this,’ she chuckled, as he gave her a slightly troubled look. ‘I was never pressured into anything, you know. It was obvious to me even as a small child that I was a unique adapt, and it was explained to me that I’d been engineered so that I could, if I wanted to, when I was old enough, go and visit the humans and find out about them. If I’d decided that I didn’t want to, nobody would have been the slightest bit upset – they didn’t have any expectation that I would do it, not in the human sense. But they engineered me for this and they did a great job, my sense of curiosity and adventure are way higher than an average quarian’s and I just couldn’t wait to get out here and see new worlds. And as much as I love my world, too, I’m not done with the exploring yet – lots more to see and do before I even think about going home to settle. And I definitely,’ she grinned at him, ‘want to visit Camae.’ She gave a sudden peal of laughter as his jaw dropped perceptibly. ‘No, I wasn’t doing a gnnnnh tease!’ she assured him. ‘I mean it. It sounds like a beautiful and fascinating world – and we share the same language, or near enough to understand one another, and that’s amazing… Shion,’ she changed into League Standard as Shion had come onto the command deck and was strolling over to join them, ‘Did you know that Camag and quarian are practically the same?’

  ‘I did, yes,’ Shion confirmed. ‘All the Olaret worlds share the same root for their ancient languages. Quarian is closer to the original Olaret, but they’re close enough to be mutually comprehensible.’ She grinned at them. Both were her particular responsibility, as she was Silvie’s official guardian officer while she was still under sixteen, and Owun’s rehab officer. ‘You seem quite excited about it,’ she observed.

  They stared at her incredulously.

  ‘You didn’t think to mention it?’ Silvie was astonished, seeing that even now Shion evidently didn’t consider it to be important.

  ‘Well, no,’ Shion sat down with them, with a quick smile of greeting for Alex and the others there. ‘You know that your worlds are both Olaret colonies, you share that heritage, but why would the fact that you speak variants of the same root language be any more significant?’

  Owun turned his head from one side to the other. On one side of him was Silvie, quarian ambassador. On the other was Shion, traveller from the Veiled World.

  ‘I think,’ he remarked, ‘my brain might explode.’

  ‘Yeah – got that,’ said Silvie, and spiked him casually on the arm with her finger. As he jumped and said ‘Hey!’ she continued to look at Shion. ‘Language is important,’ she said. ‘Finding someone from another world who speaks the same as you, or nearly the same, that’s like finding a long lost relative. You’re a linguist, how can you not understand that?’

  ‘I like languages,’ Shion replied, with a smile. ‘They’re like a great big tapestry woven together over millennia and I love figuring out all the roots and dialects and using that to solve puzzles like translating in first contact – that’s what’s interesting and important to me. I can’t say I’ve ever really thought much about the emotional significance of it – frankly I can’t imagine being emotionally invested in a language, not in that way. But I’m glad it’s made both of you happy.’

  Silvie and Owun continued to gaze at her, the quarian and the human together, for once, in a divide of understanding between them and the lady of an ancient race. Then Silvie laughed, giving her a look of the deepest affection before turning to Alex, whose mind was buzzing with energetic ideas.

  ‘Did you know?’ she asked him, and saw the answer before he could speak. ‘You never thought about it either?’

  ‘Well – with every respect to Camae,’ Alex said, ‘It has to be said that it is very remote and a very quiet world in the sense that they don’t put out much broadcasting. I have to confess that I didn’t even know that they spoke their own heritage language there until Mr Gwyn was posted to us.’ He gave the crewman an apologetic glance with that. ‘And if I had realised that it’s similar to quarian I’m afraid that I would have thought that it was just, well, interesting. And, admittedly,’ he looked appraisingly at Owun, ‘potentially useful.’

  Silvie nodded eagerly, knowing how pleased her people would be to meet someone who shared their own linguistic heritage. ‘He should be a goodwill ambassador,’ she said, and then as Alex shot her a please don’t do that look, her eyes widened and she looked at him as if he’d given her the sternest of rebukes. ‘Sorry!’ She glanced at Owun, telling him, ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’ She looked back at Alex. ‘Plans within plans,’ she observed, and then giggled helplessly as he continued to give her a steady gaze. ‘Okay okay okay – shutting up now, skipper!’

  ‘That,’ Alex said, ‘would be very much appreciated – thank you, Silvie.’ He gave her a grin and then looked at the bewildered crewman. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘All a bit much – and unfair to lay this kind of high impact stuff on you. But I would, if you are willing, like you to work with Shion to develop your understanding of your language and its history, so that you can talk about it to any quarians who are interested – would that be all right with you, Mr Gwyn?’

  The second lowest ranking rating on the ship made a slight gulping noise, but nodded rapidly.

  ‘Skipper,’ he agreed, and it was apparent that for the moment he would have struggled to find any other words.

  ‘Good,’ said Alex, and looked at Shion. ‘I’ll leave that with you, then,’ he said, and Shion, realising that he meant Owun’s
welfare as much as his linguistic training, smiled acknowledgement and got up.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, dropping a hand lightly onto Owun’s shoulder. ‘Cup of tea.’

  She led him off, Silvie watching them go for a moment and then turning back to Alex with a searching look.

  ‘What are you up to?’ she wondered. ‘You’re doing that thinking in six directions at once thing – and I’ve told you before, human brains aren’t designed for that, it’s a head-spin. Oh – I get it!’ her puzzled expression clarified all at once into one of pleased recognition. ‘You’re having a brilliant idea!’

  ‘Well, an idea,’ Alex conceded. ‘Time will tell whether it’s brilliant or not. But I’d rather not discuss it, Silvie, all right?’

  ‘Okay – secrets, I get it.’ Silvie nodded owlishly, mimed zipping her lip and looked at him with an attempt at serene innocence which only made him chuckle.

  ‘Not secrets,’ he assured her – and with that, everyone on the ship. ‘It’s just that ideas that strike you as brilliant at the time you have them often turn out to be flawed and unworkable once you’ve given them some thought, so I prefer not to discuss things until I’ve thought them through thoroughly from all angles.’

  ‘Okay – I won’t ask,’ Silvie promised, and got up. ‘I’m going swimming,’ she announced, and assuming an air of authority, ‘Advanced Class D report to the tank asap.’

  That meant that the people already using the tank for basic diving lessons would have to get out, and that the three people in the advanced group would have to stop whatever other work and training they were doing to go to the tank for however long Silvie wanted them. But this was normal on the Heron, already adapted to working with quarian notions of scheduling. Silvie had agreed to give everyone on the ship experience of swimming with her before they got to Quarus, though they had to have achieved an intermediate diving certificate with human instructors first.

  Alex had been in the first group – not because he needed the training since he and Silvie had swum together in real oceans, but as a guinea pig to ensure that the training was safe. Silvie did not always remember the frailty of her human companions.

  He hadn’t needed to worry. The tank programming was set so that if any of them got into difficulties the programme would cut out straight away, and there was always a lifeguard on duty. It was an amazing experience, too. The tank was accessed via a suit-room above it, with four showers for people to suit up, a lifeguard station and a pressure hatch in the deck. It took some nerve, the first time, to jump or slide down into that water, knowing that you were putting yourself into a water-filled tank with the hatch about to be locked above you.

  It didn’t take long, though, to forget that you were in a tank. It was a VR environment with full surround imagery, capable of reproducing any environment from turbulent reef to the pitch black of deep ocean, and not just visually either as water pressure and temperature were set to reproduce real quarian environments. Powerful current generators meant that you could turn in any direction and the water would act like a smooth rolling floor, enabling you to swim any way you liked while the scenery flowed around you. As with all multi-use VR it had its limitations; the group had to stay quite close together and be going in the same direction or the imagery would fragment. That was the challenge of this training, to mark Silvie and stay close enough to her to keep the VR stable. Even equipped with high speed wrist-jets and all their freefall agility skills, it took some effort. But remembering the plunge into those cool blue depths, the dancing shoal of a million fish, the leviathan which they themselves had spun around, Alex smiled. Installing that tank had been extremely difficult in more ways than one. It had required extensive technical refit to make room for it, expert designers to create it and specialists brought in to fit it. Just getting permission for it had been problematical. The Fleet had accepted Silvie’s aquarium as a diplomatic welfare provision, but a VR tank for training purposes was a different matter again. The Diplomatic Corps had never felt the need to install real water tanks on their Embassy ship – people going out there did dive training in facilities before they went, with a freefall VR room using air currents to simulate ocean for training aboard ship. Even the First Lord had balked at the expense, the technical difficulties and the safety issues of installing a high pressure water tank with an access hatch. The weight of it had altered their mass-balance, too, so significantly that they’d had to shift two of their ballast tanks more than a metre back. It had, all in all, been one of the most complex and expensive refit jobs the Heron had undertaken, with the ship in spacedocks for more than ten weeks even with every tech they could get aboard it working round the clock. The Fourth’s Sub-Committee would not have approved it, had it not been for the fact that Silvie had backed Alex in his assertion that it was essential equipment for the mission. Her request, as the quarian ambassador, trumped all other considerations.

  Alex knew he was right, it was worth it. He did not know yet what he was going to do to improve the diplomatic relationship at Quarus, if indeed he could do anything at all. He had some ideas, but nothing like a firm plan. He didn’t want a firm plan. Far too many people had gone to Quarus already with firm plans and expectations, which the Quarians only saw as grabby and needy. And besides, what he could do would be defined by circumstances entirely beyond his control, so making plans was pointless.

  What he did know, though, was that if they were to stand any chance of setting things right at Quarus, they must go there as fully prepared as it was humanly possible to be, and that included as near to realistic experience of the quarian environment as it was possible to achieve. By the time they got there, they must all be ready and able to swim with quarians, for real.

  There was, though, a long way to go before that. So Alex, repressing a slight twinge of envious wish that he could go swimming too, turned back to the stack of probationer reports awaiting his attention, settled himself back to work and picked up his pen.

  Five

  Two weeks later, they left navigated space and began their Van Damek.

  ‘I still don’t understand why you call it that.’ Barney Barnholdt had been invited to make use of Davie’s work station for the duration of the experiment, and was watching with keen interest as they approached the edge of previously mapped space. ‘I mean yes, Van Damek, great explorer and all that, but grammatically, I mean. A Van Damek Exploration I could understand, but just calling it a ‘Van Damek’ is grammatically incorrect.’

  He was speaking to Buzz, who smiled back at him tolerantly.

  ‘Spacer tradition,’ he explained, and seemed to think that that was explanation enough. ‘So – everything all right for you, Barney?’

  The wave space physicist made a final check on the screens he’d set up, and nodded.

  ‘All ready,’ he confirmed.

  ‘Green, all green skipper.’ Buzz informed the captain, and Alex gave an equally formal acknowledgement.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Burroughs …’ a touch to the PA. ‘All hands, we are about to commence Van Damek exercise.’

  A cheer went up. One of the things Alex had brought back with him from Chartsey was a plaque awarded by the Van Damek Society, an organisation which promoted and rewarded exploration of previously non-navigated space. This plaque had been the highest category of honour they bestowed, a Jubilee plaque for pioneering a route to reach an inhabited world. It was now on display in their main airlock, distinguished by the fact that it was one of the few honours in which Alex himself took real pleasure and pride.

  The exploration they were making here was considerably less important. It was within League space, far away from shipping lanes and so not opening up any route which was ever likely to be used by anyone else. The space was turbulent but not likely to be dangerous and the system they were aiming for had no indications of life. It would just about rate a Cartographer Certificate from the Van Damek society, which any reasonably sized yacht could achieve if they were so inclined. There were, after a
ll, huge swathes of space even within the League which had never been directly traversed by starships, or at least not by anyone who’d bothered to file a flight record with the authorities. Looking at a chart of the League, in fact, it was immediately apparent that explored space generally consisted of systems within easy reach of inhabited worlds, used mostly as destinations for leisure craft, and a web of established shipping routes between worlds and ISiS stations. In many areas, you didn’t have to go much more than a week beyond shipping lanes to reach zones defined as ‘not yet traversed’ and there were hundreds of thousands of systems which had not yet been visited. They weren’t likely to be, either, other than by self-financing explorers who went first-footing systems for the sheer delight of doing it, or by the lunatic fringe of the spacer community, system divers out hunting for thrills.

  Out this way, even that was unlikely. Though they were only two and a half weeks from Therik at their own cruising speed, most yachts would struggle to get out here in under a month. There was nothing out here to attract either explorers or system divers, no spectacular natural wonders and no high-energy early phase systems, either. This was a region of mostly elderly systems, dim suns and brown dwarfs. It was a thin region, too, stars scattered widely and becoming fewer as ships approached the Gulf. The space was turbulent and would have many ridges and troughs, but it was just the faded remnants of what had once been a very much more dynamic cluster. This was what the space around Carrearranis would become, given a few tens of billions of years.