Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6)

by S J MacDonald

  It was quite something to see. She was taking huge loping strides, very fast and on a very low trajectory, each footfall pushing her forwards rather than up. As she gathered speed, too, she was running very low to the ground, her upper body still while her legs became a blur. It was just not a way that any human could run, not outside the realm of cartoons or special effects. It would take a slo-mo camera to capture the precision of the bending knee, the flexing ankle, the heel-push and extending lead leg, almost a hurdling move, keeping her skimming within centimetres of the surface but at speeds more like flying than running. By the time she reached the top of the ridge her feet were hitting the ground several times a second and every step was carrying her forward around eighteen metres.

  Alex felt his heart jolt as he saw her hurtle over the crest of the ridge and disappear into the crater beyond. He had to remind himself quite firmly that she couldn’t hurt herself even if she hurled herself off the biggest cliff on the planetoid. Even if she used her wrist-jets on full power and crashed into the ground, her survival suit would ensure she wasn’t even bruised.

  All the same, he had to do a little breathing exercise to bring his heart rate back under control, before setting out at a far more plodding pace to follow her tracks up the slope.

  She was long gone by the time he got there. Her footsteps were clear, running down the steep slope of the crater wall. In such light gravity it really made little difference whether you were running up, down, or on the flat. Not that there was a great deal of flat on this planetoid. Where it wasn’t cratered it was heavily ridged, with an odd spike of mountain.

  Alex stood up at the edge of the crater, looking over it and the landscape beyond. The horizon was very close here and the sky was dark, the sun a lurid orange glow casting dramatic shadows. As he stood on the edge of the kilometres-wide and deep crater, Alex breathed in the timeless peace of this lifeless place. When this system had been forming, full of hurtling planetismals around a much dimmer yellow star, his own home system had been nothing more than inchoate dust just starting to swirl amid the remnants of a supernova. This place had been old before Novaterre had even been born. It had been ancient by the time that life was being seeded on his own and other worlds. The flash of plague which had annihilated so many races and the ten thousand year rise of humanity since was barely more than a millisecond against the billions of years this planetoid had been orbiting that star. And here it was, he and Silvie, the first of their people ever to stand here. And probably the last, too. There was nothing here to draw future visitors, so theirs might well be the only footsteps ever made on this ground.

  It was a moment which would have inspired a time of quiet reflection in just about any human finding themselves there alone. Not Silvie, though. She was giggling as she tore across the landscape with the apparent ambition of planting as many footprints onto it as possible.

  Alex knew where she was. Their comms were on silent so that they could both enjoy some quiet time alone, but he was keeping an eye on her whereabouts. He had seen her race off towards the horizon before on first footing expeditions, getting right away by herself and enjoying the opportunity to really stretch herself. They had adapted a VR treadmill in the gym to be able to keep up with her, but that still wasn’t the same as being able to run free in a real environment. Since she was quite safe and evidently enjoying herself, Alex allowed himself some down time, too. He was there for a while, just thinking the kind of big, deep thoughts that places like this tended to generate in spacers. Quite soon, though, he was tempted to go and plant a few more footprints of his own, so turned and started back down the slope. It would be interesting, he decided, to see just how easy it was to do that low-trajectory running Silvie had demonstrated.

  Not easy at all, he discovered. Press too hard from your toes and you’d sail up on a curve which really was flying rather than running. The first time he did that his suit systems told him that he would be aerial for forty eight minutes before his grav-boots would engage again, so he was obliged to bring himself back down with jets. The second time he’d got it so wrong that he went off spinning in an acrobatic tumble. Even when he’d managed to get the technique working reasonably well, the speed of the low-trajectory flight got away from him, so that he hardly had time even to see where he was going to put his foot, let alone plan how to exert the correct pressure to skim him on forwards. After more than half an hour of trying, he had only managed three consecutive steps without having to use jets, and those at a steady walking pace. And still, Silvie was running. If anything, she was going even faster – the reading on Alex’s monitor said she was now running at 97.7 metres per second, which on the decimal time used aboard ship was the same as 977 kilometres per hour. It was a fantastic speed even in these near-zero gee airless conditions; truly superhuman.

  If she goes on at that speed… Alex thought, and then as he realised what she was doing, he laughed.

  For the next hour and a half, he relaxed around the shuttle area. He didn’t need to sit down to be comfortable, so at times he just stood there, lightly anchored to the ground and letting his mind roam. When he wanted to move he just plodded around for a bit, making an erratic circle of footprints around the parked shuttle.

  When he knew that Silvie would be coming over the horizon, he stopped and watched. It was the opposite horizon from the one she had vanished over. She had run around the entire circumference of the planetoid, more than two thousand kilometres, in two hours and forty seven minutes.

  There was little to see – a flash, a blur, and she’d shot past him. By the time he’d turned his head she’d leapt off the ground and was using her jets to turn and decelerate, casting a wide arc around and coming in for a gentle landing beside him.

  ‘Oh!’ She was obviously expecting him to be amazed, greeting him with a huge grin and then looking startled as she saw that he was no more than mildly amused. ‘I just ran right round the planetoid,’ she told him, in case he hadn’t noticed.

  Alex chuckled. ‘Was it fun?’ he asked, and Silvie beamed.

  ‘It was heart,’ she said, a bit of slang she’d picked up at Telathor for something so wonderful it went beyond normal vocabulary. ‘But you’re not even surprised.’ She gave him an interrogative look and Alex felt a little twinge of regret, not wanting to spoil her pleasure in her solitary race around the planetoid.

  ‘Well, you know, humans do this too,’ he told her. ‘Not as fast, of course, and with more equipment, but essentially the same thing. It’s called Stroid Scrambling – an adrenaline sport on some worlds but banned by others. Therik has banned it and it never took off at Telathor, which I guess is why you’ve never seen it.’

  Silvie looked it up on her comp as they went through decontam in the airlock to clean their suits of dust. Stroid Scrambling, it turned out, was the space equivalent of rock and ice climbing groundside, involving crampons and axes with rock and ice pitons to keep the scrambler attached to the asteroid surface. There were many branches of Stroid Scrambling, too, from expeditionary, to be the first to scramble a particular asteroid, to mass-participation races.

  ‘Have you done this too?’ she asked Alex, as he lifted the shuttle from the surface and laid in a course back to the frigate.

  ‘Me? Yes.’ Alex smiled. ‘The Fleet Junior Cadets at high school used to take us on a residential week every year – staying aboard their training ship and doing a whole range of activities. Stroid Scrambling was one of them – at the safest level, obviously, a beginner grade route and each of us hooked on to an instructor, but I always enjoyed it. I did a Stroid Scramble for Citizenship at college, too – you have to do something of benefit to the community for that, volunteering or fundraising, so I did a fundraiser.’ He flicked her a grin. ‘Look up the Great Potato Run of 37 – Novaterre calendar.’

  Silvie did so, and found him – a rather gloomy looking youth of fifteen wearing race number 1342 and running to raise funds for a medical research foundation. The Great Potato Run, she discovered,
was an annual event at Novaterre, popular enough to be covered by the news. The Great Potato itself was a lumpy asteroid which had become the venue for the biggest mass participation scramble in the system – so big that once the race was under way they formed a human chain right around the route. Elite athletes could do it in under three hours, but the majority would take between six and seven hours to complete the route and there would always be the heroic ones coming in hours behind everybody else. The event was limited to twenty four thousand participants for safety reasons, but that year, Alexis von Strada had been one of them. He’d come in two thousand, three hundred and fourteenth, which was creditable, and had raised seven and a half thousand dollars for the charity – more than his father earned in a year.

  Silvie gave a little crow of delight at the images she found of him, waiting in one of the starting gates, scrambling his way over the rock and ice with hacks of his axe and stamps of his crampons, then coming in to the finish.

  ‘You don’t look like you were enjoying it much,’ she observed.

  ‘No, not really,’ Alex admitted. ‘I enjoyed the training, but the actual event was so crowded, being herded about like that – no, it wasn’t as much fun as I’d expected. I never did it again, though I did go for a scramble with friends a couple of times, before I joined the Academy.’

  Silvie picked up the nuance in that and looked enquiring. ‘Not since?’

  ‘No.’ Alex smiled. ‘Because it’s banned on Chartsey, and for that matter on the majority of League worlds, Stroid Scrambling isn’t on the curriculum at Academies. Technically there’s no reason why you couldn’t go scrambling while you’re on leave, if Stroid Scrambling is legal in that system of course, but you don’t get much leave during cadet training and I was never passionate enough about it to keep it going.’

  ‘But it isn’t banned in the Fleet, is it?’ Silvie was familiar with Fleet regulations and had not come across one mentioning Stroid Scrambling. ‘Oh!’ she realised as she spoke what the issue was, and rolled her eyes. ‘You can’t do it, even here,’ she said, ‘because it’s banned at Therik, right?’

  Alex nodded. ‘Spot on,’ he commended. Where system by-laws like this were concerned, ships had to comply with the laws of their base-world, even when out in intersystem space. This, as Silvie had pointed out more than once, led to some ludicrous anomalies in which one ship could do something with impunity which another would get into trouble for, but as Alex had also pointed out, more than once, it was considered more important for ships to establish a bond of complete trust with the worlds they were defending, and respecting their base-world rules was part of that.

  ‘So – even if you went to Novaterre, where it is allowed?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Alex confirmed. ‘Though the opposite is not true, obviously, a ship from Novaterre couldn’t let their crew go Stroid Scrambling at Therik because it is illegal there. But the citizenship thing, however anomalous it might seem, is important, Silvie. It’s as if we are honorary citizens of our base world, and we carry that citizenship with us wherever we go, a bond, like a root, which defines us as belonging to that world.’

  ‘I don’t understand, though,’ Silvie admitted, ‘why something can be a mass participation event on one of your worlds and illegal on another. Isn’t that something the Senate should make a law about?’

  ‘No, really not,’ Alex chuckled at the thought of how worlds like his own would react to the news that the Senate was banning Stroid Scrambling, which they certainly would if they went on the basis of the majority view, most worlds having banned it on safety grounds. ‘It is a cultural issue – on Novaterre, see, the tradition of Stroid Scrambling goes way way back before the League even made first contact with us. If you look at the earliest history of space exploration on my world you’ll see that after people had visited our moons their next step out was to land on asteroids – drones first, of course, but then manned landings. There’s still footage of the very first asteroid landing, and you can see that the people are using equipment not a million klicks from the kind of crampons and racing axes that people still use today. It wasn’t much longer after that that ‘going all the way around an asteroid’ became a thing. Novaterrans into the sport, in fact, are likely to tell you that we invented it, though every other world where it’s practised will tell you the same thing.’ He paused for a moment, slithering the shuttle through the comet cloud with a duck and a roll to get around a planetoid not much smaller than the one they’d just visited. ‘And as with most human activity, the fact that we’ve been doing it for so long makes it normal, even something we’re proud of, and something we’re willing to accept as a high risk adrenaline sport. On other worlds, though, where they never developed Stroid Scrambling early on, attempts to introduce it horrified people by the number of accidents. On Novaterre we take it for granted that race stewards will need to keep rescuing people who lose their grip or their nerve or collapse for some reason, and we’ve developed safety procedures which provide for that. On other worlds without that tradition or that base of safety provision they see it as emergency services having to save people who are behaving like idiots, so they’ve banned it. On those worlds they would tell you that Stroid Scrambling is as dangerous and irresponsible as System Diving. Which, to be fair, it can be, if people go off without the proper training, equipment or safety supervision. But what you just did wasn’t really Stroid Scrambling anyway – no crampons, no axes, just running.’

  Silvie grinned happily. ‘So much fun,’ she said. ‘Near zero gee, near zero air resistance – I’d have gone even faster but the suit wouldn’t let me.’ She plucked disparagingly at the thin but multi-layered and extremely tough material of her survival suit. It was so flexible and light to wear that it was easy to forget you even had it on, but evidently it was rather more restrictive at the kind of speeds Silvie had achieved. ‘Like trying to sprint in wellies,’ she said, ‘galumphing round me…’ she gave Alex a slightly reproachful look, ‘is this really the best you can do?’

  ‘Really, yes,’ said Alex, and was definite about it. ‘There are thinner spacesuits, yes – even disposable ones for tourists – but nothing I’d be prepared to allow you or any member of my crew to go around in.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Silvie conceded, as the shuttle curved around to come up alongside the frigate, and chanted something she had obviously been told many times, ‘It is called a survival suit for a reason.’

  ‘And we do not,’ Alex confirmed, completing the mantra, ‘compromise on safety.’

  He was obliged to say that again a little later, reassuringly this time, to a rather nervous Oti. All the Second’s people and their other passengers had been offered the opportunity to go first footing, too, in ones and twos along with the crew. Barney was the only one from the lab who’d refused, declaring offensively that he had better things to do with his time than go gawping about on some rock. Oti really did want to go, but was anxious enough to ‘just ask’ the skipper if it really was a hundred per cent safe.

  ‘All the chosen destinations have been thoroughly risk-assessed,’ he promised her. ‘And they’re as safe as any of the kind of sightseeing place you might go to on a tourist bus. You’ll be in very safe hands, too, with an escort who’ll take very good care of you, and trust me on this, Oti, we do not compromise on safety. And if at any time you find it too much you can just get back aboard the shuttle, all right?’

  Oti did not get back aboard the shuttle because it was too much. She had to be told to get back aboard the shuttle because she didn’t want to leave.

  ‘That was the most incredible thing I have ever done in my entire life,’ she said, as if the thirty four years of her life so far was an eternity. ‘Thank you, Alex, thank you.’ She shook his hand with that, pumping it enthusiastically, still a little tearful at the intensity of the experience.

  Admiral Dafour, though nothing like so emotional, also shook hands with the skipper and thanked him.

  The inspection party was
still not venturing much outside their Lair, though Buzz and Rangi between them had managed to persuade them to take some of their meals in the interdeck lounge and to use the gym facilities for exercise. They were as determined as ever to remain as near to invisible as was possible until the point at which Alex declared the ship ready for inspection, resolutely not taking any notice of any of the preparatory training which was not supposed to form any part of their opinion or findings. Had they been offered the opportunity to go groundside along with crew parties, they would certainly have declined. Instead, they had been offered the use of a shuttle and a risk-assessed destination allocated solely to them, to visit independently. They were all Fleet personnel, after all, with three qualified pilots amongst them. Admiral Dafour had accepted this, after some words from Rangi about the medical advisability of getting off the ship at every given opportunity, so the inspection team had been for their own first-footing experience. That had been a new thing for all of them, and something none of them would ever forget.

  ‘Most enjoyable, Captain von Strada,’ Admiral Dafour told Alex, in a rare and fleeting appearance on the command deck made specifically to thank him. ‘And most kind of you to put such resources at our disposal.’

  ‘Not at all, sir,’ Alex said, knowing very well what was required of him for the benefit of the log and all those who would watch it, ‘Your wellbeing and that of your team are my responsibility while you are guests aboard my ship, and it was no more than a routine suit-walk during system stopover.’

  This made it clear that he had not been doing the inspection team any favours, which might have been seen as compromising by those looking for any excuse to undermine the Fourth. Admiral Dafour gave a brief smile and a crisp handshake, acknowledging that, and with that, was gone. He would not so much as sit on the command deck for a cup of tea and a conversation on record. Nobody, but nobody, would be able to say that this inspection had been in any way flawed by inappropriate involvement with the ship during the pre-inspection period.