Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6)

by S J MacDonald

  Even so, it felt like an adventure, moving out into space that no human ship had ever passed through before. There was a moment when their astrogation screen wavered, the traditional chart screen blurring out and announcing Data Unavailable while the Naos screen continued to generate their own charts. This made little practical difference to the ship since they already relied on the Naos system and only referenced traditional charts for confirmation. In these conditions, the Naos system projected charts ahead for as far as eleven minutes with a reliable degree of accuracy, so they’d have plenty of warning if there were hazards ahead.

  They ran through their first Ridge just a couple of hours later. This was not a new discovery but the continuation of an already known Ridge which they’d have had to pass through on their way to X-Base Serenity anyway. It was known as Yoshimiro’s Ridge after the skipper who’d first identified it, more familiarly known to spacers as Yoshi’s Lament.

  ‘Oh, I remember this,’ said Silvie. ‘We went through it on the Stepeasy. Everyone has to say ‘oh no’ at a certain point, don’t they?’

  ‘They don’t have to,’ Alex assured her. ‘But it’s traditional, which for spacers is reason enough to do it.

  ‘I asked why, on the way in,’ Silvie commented. ‘And they got all confused and embarrassed. It was a Wall issue then – but try me now.’ She looked hopefully at Alex and he smiled. Silvie could not have understood human thinking about this kind of thing when she’d first come to the League, but it was possible that she might now, after everything she’d learned.

  ‘Part of it is history,’ he told her. ‘Way back in the earliest days of space exploration, this Ridge was thought to be a kind of natural barrier to reaching the Gulf. Starships were a lot slower and more fragile back then and turbulence like this was right at the edge of what even the toughest Exploration Corps ships could cope with. Anyway, legend has it that the Yoshimiro Expedition made it all the way out here and battled through the first part of the Ridge, and really thought when they’d cleared it that they’d done it, made it through. And then, you know, minutes later, you run into the second wave and it’s even bigger – the story which has been told by spacers ever since was that at that point the whole crew just went ‘oh no’. It’s part of the spacer goss, the tradition of stories that get told in bars and shared through generations. It’s a popular one for audience participation because at that point in the story everyone in the bar goes ‘Oh, no!’ and it’s like a shared joke and a shared community story. And since then it’s become customary for crews to give the ‘Oh no!’ at the mid-point of the Ridge. And, in the usual way of such custom and practice, it has transmuted over the centuries into superstition, as it began to be felt that it was a lucky thing to do, to acknowledge the Ridge like that, and an unlucky thing not to. Don’t ask me why that happened, no idea, but it doesn’t take much – a skipper who told his crew not to do it and then their ship had some problems, that’s all it would take.’

  Silvie looked at him in astonishment. ‘But that’s easy to understand,’ she observed. ‘I mean yes, of course, totally crazy, but normal for spacers. I can’t believe it seemed so complicated just a year ago!’ Then she broke into a startled exclamation as vibration rumbled through the ship and it began to make Ridge noise. ‘What’s that?’

  Alex listened, his own expression fascinated. All ships had their own particular noise when passing through areas of turbulence. The Heron made noises like irritable old people chuntering to one another. Or at least, it had. Now the chattering sound was higher pitched and more rapid, like a lot of small mammals chittering.

  ‘It’s the water tank,’ Alex realised. ‘We’re heavier – significantly heavier – and our mass balance has changed. It isn’t anything to worry about – just normal Ridge noise.’

  ‘Sounds like squirrels having a party,’ Silvie observed. ‘And we’re going to ride rough through it?’ She looked accusingly at Barney, with that. The Fourth usually used Ridges like this as advanced piloting exercises, attempting to ride them by the smoothest possible route. At Barney’s request, though, they were just going to power through this and every other turbulent feature.

  ‘Sorry,’ Barney said, though he obviously wasn’t. ‘But it is important.’ He didn’t actually look up as he spoke, his eyes fixed avariciously on the data which was already coming in. ‘Oh, wow, look at that!’

  There was a noise as if the squirrels were falling out over the last nut.

  Silvie got up.

  ‘I will be in my garden,’ she said, and departed.

  Forty two minutes later the racket and vibration ceased, with a general relaxation and smiles as blessed silence fell upon the ship. It was not hard to imagine how the Excorps crew had felt, since it would have taken them several hours to batter their way through it and they’d have experienced far more violent, teeth-jarring vibration, too. Imagining that the Ridge was some kind of natural edge-of-galaxy barrier, they must have cheered and celebrated, a triumph for humanity, breaking through that boundary. And then…

  Expectation held the ship on pause. Everyone had stopped what they were doing, everyone was quiet, listening and waiting… and there it came. Chittachittachittachitt…

  ‘Oh, no,’ said the crew, in unison, and laughed at themselves.

  The humour wore off somewhat, over the next five days. They were running through ridge after ridge, with that irritating noise going on often for an hour or more and rarely more than three hours quiet between. By day five they’d all been woken up by it more than once. They had all at some point experienced the annoyance of interrupted meals, too – even using freefall mugs and utensils, it was uncomfortable to eat and drink while the ship was vibrating. It was nothing like the intensity of launch, of course, but it went on and on, day after day, and after five days of it the first sign of chittachitta put people’s nerves on edge. The only person on the ship thoroughly enjoying it was Barney Barnholdt. And it was his fault. Not only were they rough-riding these Ridges at his request, but he was directing the ship, too, steering them towards areas of greater turbulence and actually seeking ridges out. It was soon apparent that he had a knack for finding them. His ability to do so from the Naos data was, in fact, a key element of his research.

  ‘You’ve no idea how valuable this is, Alex,’ he told the skipper, late on the fifth evening during one of the lulls. ‘Excorps has been very kind, taking me out with them a couple of times, but they have their own priorities, of course, and until we have a research ship fitted with the Naos system, we are dependent on the goodwill and generosity of yourselves and the Second.’

  Alex smiled. He already knew that Barney had been fighting a determined campaign to have a university research ship equipped with the Naos system, which was still military classified. The Second, aware that Alex would certainly want to take his ship off-chart anyway during his shakedown training, had offered Barney the opportunity of a week’s research in which he might direct the ship as he pleased. He was taking them diagonally away from the direction they’d intended to go in, but Alex didn’t mind that. They could make up the time en route to Serenity.

  ‘Our pleasure,’ said Alex, which was not true at all. He’d been looking forward to the Van Damek. Even trivial explorations like this were a pleasure, going where nobody had been before, and he enjoyed the challenge of navigating his ship through choppy terrain, too, with all the opportunities for real-life training which that offered.

  This time, though, it was different. It was Barney who had the navigation of the ship and he was evidently determined to take them through the choppiest space he could find. Even Alex, by now, had had enough of the jarring and chittering. It wasn’t even as if they had a goal, as they had on the far more difficult and uncomfortable Carrearranis exploration, making their discomfort worthwhile. The one consolation they had was that Barney was going to use the data to increase the range of their Naos chart-generating system. He was oddly reluctant to talk about how that was going to work, though. He nev
er talked about his research before or during it, he said, preferring to keep his ideas to himself.

  That was unusual, since members of the Second were generally only too keen to talk about their research at great length to anyone they could get to listen to them, but it had not occurred to Alex to doubt the research in any way. Barney had satisfied the Second’s project allocations team that his research could extend their chart-making range, and that was good enough.

  ‘So,’ Alex prompted, feeling that he was within his rights to ask how soon they might expect to see some results from all this discomfort, ‘do you feel you’re getting closer to being able to extend the range of the Naos system?’

  ‘What?’ Barney seemed momentarily confused, as if not sure what Alex was talking about. Then he remembered. ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ he said, though his tone was less than convincing. ‘I’ve no doubt that’s possible.’

  ‘Possible?’ A faint alarm bell was ringing at the back of Alex’s mind. There was just something about the way that Barney had reacted to that question, as if he wasn’t thinking about the upgrade to the Naos system at all. ‘But that is what you’re here to do, isn’t it?’

  Barney shot him a roguish look.

  ‘Officially,’ he said, and at that, a full all-stations alert went off in Alex’s head. He sat up, looking intently at the other man.

  ‘Officially?’ he queried.

  ‘Well,’ Barney said, as boyishly as if he confessed to having helped himself to the last slice of cake while nobody was looking, ‘I may have put greater emphasis on the practical application than was strictly justified, to get the Second to agree to this.’ He saw the look on Alex’s face and realised that the skipper was not finding this amusing. ‘I didn’t lie,’ he said. ‘It is true that if my findings confirm my theory that will enable the range of the Naos system to be extended significantly.’

  ‘But…’ Alex said, with an edge to his voice which made it clear that he expected a truthful answer.

  ‘Well,’ Barney attempted a winning little smile but it withered and died under Alex’s disapproval. ‘I’m a theoretician,’ he explained. ‘I think about wave space, visualise and navigate it as a theoretical space. The only research I do really is to gather data relating to a current train of thought to see whether I’m going in the right direction or not – just touching base with the real universe from time to time, as our Dean puts it. To actually put that understanding to practical use requires an applied physicist, not a theoretical one. But Kate is an applied physicist and I expect she’ll be able to use my findings to upgrade her system if I can show her how the flows work… and I think, I really do, that I can do that.’

  Alex looked at him with entirely genuine severity.

  ‘But you told the Second that you could upgrade our Naos system?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Barney admitted. ‘They wouldn’t have given me the funding otherwise. But what I’m doing is far more important, really, than any…’

  His voice faded out.

  Alex was angry. He had thought it quite amusing when Silvie had exposed Barney as a fraud during her lecture, obliging him to admit that he was not in fact the dreamy absent-minded academic he pretended to be and that he made use of that pretence to get people to do things for him. Even here on the ship, it had emerged, one of his colleagues had taken on doing his laundry for him after Barney had ‘inadvertently’ stuffed a t-shirt into the lavatory. The fact that you’d have to be a complete moron not to be able to tell the difference between a freefall lavatory seat and the laundry compartment, which was clearly labelled with instructions, did not seem to have occurred to them. They were so conditioned to expect that a genius physicist wouldn’t be able to tie his own laces without help that they’d fallen for it completely. That had seemed mildly amusing, if open to some questions about his personal ethics in exploiting other people.

  This, though, was different. The authorities had put the Heron at his disposal for a week of research because they had been told that he could improve the range of their Naos chart-generating system. He had lied to the Second’s project allocations team. He really was, Alex was realising, a user, and fundamentally dishonest, too – no wonder Silvie hadn’t pulled her punches when she’d talked about people like him stinking of excrement. He was a selfish, unscrupulous little… Alex pulled himself up because he tried not to even think language like that about people. Instead, he took a breath and did his own calming visualisation. It wasn’t the tree. He preferred the ‘happy place’, reminding himself of a time when he had felt entirely relaxed and happy, one of those moments which fixes itself in the memory with every sense heightened. His chosen happy place was actually the moment at which Silvie had told him she was going to ask for him to be the ambassador to Quarus. They’d been floating in a tropical ocean at the time. He could put himself back there in an instant – the warm sparkling sea, the great canopy of sky, a green-clad island on the horizon and the taste of salt in the air. And then the surge of joy, the somersault and the racing plunge down into cool, shadowy waters, like diving into infinity. He had never felt so alive, so at one with the world around him. It was a moment, he knew, that he would never forget as long as he lived. And it did make an effective happy place, as he drew in a breath picturing himself floating on the ocean’s surface and then exhaled as he remembered that exhilarating dive.

  Right, he thought, feeling his anger brought under control. He was considering his options. The first of them, and the one which anger had been prompting, was to terminate Barney Barnholdt’s research right this minute, and tell him what he thought of him, too, for waltzing this ship around turbulence for days under false pretences.

  Calm thought, however, told him that this would not solve anything. If they were to salvage anything from this they would have to gather as much data as possible for other scientists – perhaps even Kate herself – to work on.

  ‘Er.’ Barney could see that Alex was taking a breath to calm himself. He was vividly reminded of certain discussions with the Dean of his university. One in particular came to mind, with the Dean expressing his views on Barney getting other people to do all his lectures and seminars for a full semester. ‘Um…’ Then he attempted another beguiling smile, which he’d always found to be an effective methodology when dealing with angry officialdom. ‘You do understand, don’t you? The research I’m doing for my theory of interdimensional flows is orders of magnitude more important for humanity than any ‘better tech’ outcome.’ He spoke with the scorn of the theoretician for those he considered to be little more than mechanics. As far as he was concerned, clearly, it didn’t matter whether a theoretical advance was ‘useful’ in that sense – knowledge for its own sake was all that mattered.

  Alex had no particular issue with that as a point of view – he encouraged members of his crew to take training that was of no conceivable use to them professionally, exploring other interests and talents, and he would agree, too, that there should be funding for pure research even where there was no obvious practical benefit.

  What he did have an issue with was someone who took funding under false pretences. The Second would be livid over this when they found out. It wasn’t just about the money, either, or the place which had been denied to someone else because they’d given it to him. It would be embarrassing for them. The Fourth’s Sub-Committee accepted whatever projects the Second put before them, pretty much on the nod. Most of the Senators on that committee were on many others too, besides the everyday demands of Senate assemblies and all the other work which went with representing their worlds at that level. They had neither the time nor the inclination to go into the project documents the Second submitted, leaving it to their discretion to decide what projects would get the coveted places. The only exceptions to that had been a request that the Second prioritise the Ignite project, and that they clear the Lab for Professor Parrot’s nanotech project.

  When the Second had to admit that they’d prioritised a project which turned out to have
been approved on a misleading application, questions would be asked. The Second’s representative on that committee would have a tough time, and there might well be increased scrutiny in future of the projects which the Second was proposing. It wasn’t even as if this was a project which was just going on quietly in the background while the Fourth got on with their normal affairs. They had given Barney the ship, allowing him to send it wherever he wanted during the week of his research time. Alex felt used, and he knew his crew would be no happier about it, but the Second would be incandescent. They had been badly embarrassed twice already in their dealings with the Fourth – the first time when a member of the Ignite team had behaved so badly aboard ship that the rest of the team had fired her, and the second when one of their administrative officers had turned up at the Heron’s airlock in the throes of an emotional breakdown. Whoever had approved this research might well find themselves looking for another job.

  ‘It isn’t for me,’ Alex said coldly, ‘to comment on your professional ethics. You may continue with your research. But you will give your findings to us, first, in the hope that we might be able to see how to use them in extending the Naos system’s range. Kate Naos does, after all, have her own research in hand, in addition to her studies at the Academy.’

  ‘Well that hardly…’ Barney began, then realised that the end of that sentence would hardly be complimentary to any member of the Fleet. The academic community had been shocked to hear that Kate – widely known as ‘The Maths Kid’ for her child-prodigy solution to a wave space mathematics problem – had signed up with the Fleet and was going to the Chartsey Academy like any other cadet. They had not been much mollified to hear that she was being excused certain classes in her second year and being released for research work as ‘allocated study time’. She was considered to be one of the most brilliant mathematicians in the League and it was inconceivable to most people that she would throw that away by becoming a Fleet officer. Only those who knew her understood her passion for engineering, and the way her mind could soar when she was surrounded by superlight engines. ‘I’m sure she won’t mind doing the upgrade,’ Barney said defensively. ‘And it seems only right, too, it has been her project from the start.’