Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6)

by S J MacDonald

  That, they all knew, was due to Davie North’s father. He’d provided new system infrastructure for Serenity at the same time he’d sent his people over to Quarus to ask the quarians to engineer his notion of the perfect son. He’d done quite a lot of other things for Serenity, too – the X-base had been supported by his family for generations and they could have pretty much anything they asked for.

  The Heron went through port-entry procedures just as they would have at any League world – there was a port admiral here, medical authorities, even a branch of Customs and Excise with an office on the space station. They had a warm welcome too, though, with a blitz of cheerful greetings as they emerged from the deceleration tunnel.

  ‘Wow,’ said Buzz, looking at the ships in the parking zone to which they’d been directed. The Serenity base was located on the fourth planet and the parking zone was between the fourth and fifth planet, very close to the inhabited world by spacer standards. Three of the ships in orbit there belonged to the Fleet, including the ship they were to rendezvous with here – a fine, clean-lined destroyer of the Raptor 42 class, bearing the Fleet emblem and the ID Eagle. A little further off was a remarkably similar ship – same class, actually out of the same spacedocks, but carrying the Diplomatic Corps insignia and the ID Harmony.

  Neither of these had made Buzz go wow – both were expected – and there was nothing about the clutter of smaller ships, Fleet and freighters, to arouse any astonishment.

  It was the two ships some distance off, as if holding themselves aloof from plebeian contact, which had prompted the exclamation. One of them was the Stepeasy, though not instantly recognisable as such since it had evidently suffered a brutal paint-job since the last time they’d seen it. Davie had put his ship through makeovers before, but had apparently settled on a clean white look with bright, clear hull lights.

  Now, though, the superyacht had been painted a heavy, gun-metal grey, with minimal lighting giving it a shadowed, menacing look. Those elegant lines were unmistakeable, though, and the tiny, stark ID still said Stepeasy.

  ‘Ah,’ said Alex, hoping that this grim look was not an expression of Davie’s feelings, but looking rather uneasily, too, at the ship in orbit ahead of it.

  This was a liner, recognisable at once to spacers as a princess-class liner from the White Star fleet. They were at the smaller end of interstellar liners, carrying around two thousand passengers and about a hundred and eighty crew, two thirds of whom were primarily engaged in looking after the human cargo. Instead of the usual White Star paintwork and some ID like Therik Princess, though, this liner had ruby and gold chevrons all over it. With sparkles, Alex noticed, as there was a crystalline glitter to the paintwork. The many shuttles dotted around it were in a contrast shade of green. The hull lighting was garish, with a dazzle-effect ID announcing it to be the property of the Acko Intersystem Corporation. Acko was a familiar name amongst spacers; it was a company which specialised in providing system infrastructure such as spacedocks and stations.

  The fact that it was here might be thought to indicate that Acko was involved in some development work at the base. The size of that ship, though, the horrible taste of its décor and the fact that it was parked directly ahead of the Stepeasy all told Alex what was really going on. And just to confirm it, the name blazoned beside the main airlocks was Entrepus.

  Lord knew how many generations of starships had carried that name. Davie would know. Davie would know exactly, because he’d been brought up knowing about all his ancestors right back to the great-great-grandfather of the Delaney who’d launched the very first Entrepus. It had been, Davie said, the sixth superlight ship to leave Chartsey, more than two thousand years ago, and the head of their family had named their personal transport in that ship’s honour, ever since.

  So there was the Entrepus, personal transport of Andrei North Delaney: Davie’s father. Alex had not been told a great deal about him, though he’d gathered from some of Davie’s comments that Papa was a somewhat over-affectionate parent, smothering his Davie-Boy with a love which was hard to distinguish from domineering control. The captain of the Eagle, too, had told him about Mr Delaney’s appalling personal taste in décor and art, his sense of humour and generosity, and the weird bubble of isolation in which he spent his life.

  Part of Alex had hoped that he might get to meet Andrei Delaney sometime, out of sheer curiosity to see for himself what he was really like. He had not wanted to do so here, though, and as a truly terrible thought occurred, he felt a chill brush his spine. Andrei Delaney here was a shock, though hopefully he had only come along to spend time with his son and see them off on their journey.

  If he’d decided he wanted to go with them, though…

  Alex tried to set the thought aside. No point panicking, he told himself. Then he looked back at the severely military style the Stepeasy had adopted and thought about what that might mean as evidence of Davie’s current state of mind. Okay, he conceded. You’re allowed to panic a little bit.

  While he was thinking this, he was dealing automatically with reports as the Heron settled into the long sublight deceleration which would bring them to their parking orbit in around three hours. For the first half an hour of that they would be left alone, other than for welcoming signals, as it was customary to give incoming ships that time to sort themselves out post-deceleration before expecting them to make or take calls.

  Alex, though, called the port admiral within a few minutes, paying his respects as duty required but greeting her with pleased surprise – it was Terrible Tennet.

  ‘I was expecting Admiral Forlane,’ he admitted, since that admiral had certainly been in charge at Serenity the last he’d heard, at leaving Therik.

  ‘He asked for a transfer.’ Terrible did not smile, did not betray by so much as a micro-expression how much she admired the Fourth’s captain. Her tone, as always, was crisp and acidic.

  Alex felt a twinge of concern. Admiral Forlane was a decent, hard-working officer and Alex did not like to think that he’d fled a prestigious posting because of worry about the Fourth, about him.

  ‘Oh.’ He said.

  ‘Not because of you,’ said Terrible, with a bracing undertone of Don’t imagine the universe revolves around you, von Strada. ‘Admiral Forlane,’ she said, ‘was at Chartsey when Ambassador Silver paid her visit. When informed that she was returning here…’ she let that hang, as self-explanatory.

  ‘Ah,’ said Alex. A good many senior people in all services had quit or been fired after Silvie’s first visit to Serenity, including the officer who’d been port admiral at the time. Admiral Forlane would be very much aware of that. And he would certainly remember every hideous detail of the hours Silvie had spent at Chartsey.

  ‘I came out,’ Terrible said, ‘on an interim posting. And we are standing ready here, as per your request.’

  ‘Thank you, ma’am.’ Alex said. He knew that they should have done everything he’d asked for, as all agencies had been told by their head offices on Chartsey to give full cooperation. But things did not always go to plan, and there was always the possibility that local branches could interpret ‘full cooperation’ into ‘as obstructive as possible’. ‘Then, with your permission, I will bring Silvie down right away.’

  ‘Permission granted,’ said Terrible, since shuttles weren’t generally allowed to leave the ship until it had achieved parking orbit. ‘Come over to the office when you’re ready.’

  ‘Ma’am,’ Alex acknowledged, and ended the call with a brief, appreciative smile.

  Eight

  Five minutes later, he was piloting a shuttle on an intercept course with the planet, with Silvie beside him.

  ‘You’re in a very odd mood,’ Silvie complained, giving him a hard look, ‘Secrets and denial, not like you at all.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Alex did his deep breath and calming visualisation, though aware that his emotions were still a tangle of excitement, hope, worry and enjoyment. ‘Bit busy in my head today,’ he admitted. />
  ‘More than that.’ Now that they were away from the ship, Silvie was focussed on him. ‘This is so so important to you – but what is? Oh, me? It’s more than wanting me to be safe and enjoy myself, isn’t it? It matters, really really matters. Why, skipper?’

  ‘I’d rather not say,’ Alex told her. ‘But I’m hoping that we’ve learned enough so that you’ll have a much better experience here this time.’

  Silvie gave a disparaging ‘Tuh!’ and Alex couldn’t help grinning. She had been eloquent on the subject of her previous visit to Serenity – the place was just awful, the accommodation sucked, she was never allowed to swim by herself and the people were a mess, angry or scared or just downright hysterical whenever she tried talking to them. If it wasn’t for the fact that they’d promised to send Davie out to get her, she’d said, she’d have got back on the ship and demanded to be taken home.

  ‘Things are different now,’ Alex said. ‘Better, I hope.’

  He flew the shuttle on a slow trajectory, giving them a good view of the planet as they approached. It was a grey-green world, four major continental landmasses and a few thousand significant islands. Mountain ranges and high tundra were stark, bare rock, but there were streaks of green at lower altitudes. The continent on the southern hemisphere where the X-Base itself was located was noticeably greener than the others, much of it covered by dense forest, above which were misty clouds.

  Alex, though, steered away from that, taking them over a zone in the southern ocean which was itself streaked with green; blooms of photosynthesising plankton thousands of kilometres long.

  ‘This isn’t where they brought me before,’ Silvie observed, seeing that he was taking them towards a landing pad afloat in the ocean.

  ‘I should hope not,’ said Alex. When he had looked into Silvie’s visit here, he’d discovered that she had some reason for her complaints about the accommodation they’d provided.

  They had meant well, of course, and had done their best. The X-base had been holding themselves ready in the hope of receiving quarian visitors for almost a century by then. Facilities had been built for them in the first flurry of hope after first contact had been made, but as the decades had passed and the relationship had deteriorated, there hadn’t seemed any realistic hope that quarians would come here in the foreseeable future. The underwater facilities, therefore, had been left to stagnate. Nobody had even been there for years before the Harmony came into port and signalled that they had the quarian ambassador aboard.

  With hindsight, they had been strangely desperate to get her off their ship and into base accommodation. Half an hour after she’d arrived at the base, everyone had understood why. There had been a frenzied effort to get the underwater facilities ready for her – the nice, distant underwater facilities – and she’d been rushed out there as soon as they were ready.

  The facilities, though, were old, far too big for one person and decorated with hastily dusted plastic flowers. For Silvie, it was like being dumped into an abandoned hotel full of stale smells and greasy carpets. When she’d tried to go swimming, they had chased her with mini-subs – for her own safety, they said. Alex understood that, given the awful responsibility they had for her safety and her terrifying lack of any sense of danger. The subs, though, were noisy and churned up the water, sometimes enveloping her in choking clouds of silt and sometimes, to her horror, catching jellyfish in their propulsion jets. And they kept calling her, too, asking her every two minutes if she was all right. It was hardly surprising that her memories of this world were of being bored, uncomfortable and frustrated.

  Alex was hoping to change that. He had made recommendations for improvements to the facilities at Serenity even before he knew that he would be bringing Silvie back here. As soon as he had known that, he’d sent far more detailed requests for the provision he wanted to be made. That request had gone racing to Chartsey while the Heron itself was still at Carrearranis, so there’d been plenty of time for all the agencies concerned to carry out what he had asked.

  They had done a good job. The landing pad was big enough to take two shuttles, and self-stabilising so that it was just as straightforward as landing on solid ground.

  ‘Oh.’ Silvie stepped out with an unenthusiastic look at the ocean. They were away from the phytoplankton streams here, since that was no more pleasant for Silvie to swim in than it was for humans to trudge through crusty and oozing bacterial mats. The ocean here was mostly grey, as many things appeared in the pallid light from Serenity’s star. This was an oddly small fuzzy light in the sky, a decaying white dwarf. Serenity was a rare astronomical find – in a million systems the only planets or remnants of planets found around white dwarfs were either the metallic cores stripped of their surfaces during the red giant expansion or worlds so tortured by tidal forces that they were little more than cinders. This was the case with the other three planets in closer orbit. In confirmation that every rule had its exceptions, though, Serenity had formed a young planet in its old age, and moreover, had formed one of a decent size and firmly in its habitable zone. Powerful tidal forces from the dense star helped to counteract the weak sunlight, keeping the surface heated just enough for the more resilient kinds of life to survive.

  ‘It’s cold,’ Silvie grumbled. ‘And there’s that smell…’

  She was about to point out that it should have been called X-Base Stinky rather than Serenity, but at that moment she saw the car.

  It was bobbing at a pontoon to one side of the landing pad. It was only a third of the size of the shuttle, and evidently intended to be aquadynamic with sleek curved lines and a bottle-nose.

  ‘Oh, hey!’ Silvie recognised it at once and ran straight over, jumping down onto the pontoon. ‘You got me a car!’ She could sense his pleasure in her excitement, and that satisfaction, too, which told her that this had been his doing. ‘A real one!’

  ‘Actually,’ Alex said, scrupulously fair, ‘it was Mr North who…’

  ‘Pvvvv!’ said Silvie, expressing her certainty that while Davie would certainly have designed it and made the necessary arrangements for it to be built and transported here, it had been Alex who’d made that request. ‘Thanks!’ she added, already opening the upper door, and giving him a look of radiant delight and a cheerful wave, she jumped in and slid into the pilot’s seat. Alex had made no move to follow her and she could see that he did not intend to come along, so she closed the door behind her, already engaging the controls. ‘Bye!’

  ‘Call if you want anything,’ said Alex, as the car broke free of the mooring and did an experimental little wriggle as she tested the feel of it. ‘Have fun!’

  The car shot down under the water as if being snatched by invisible hands. As he resumed his own place at the shuttle controls, he saw it in the distance, arcing out of the water, somersaulting in aerial mode and then diving back down. It was a quarian car, after all, constructed in the same way as their own vehicles.

  Alex smiled. He hoped that she would like the new accommodation below, too, when she eventually got around to exploring it. It was just a simple pressure dome, with no attempt to make it look fancy, just a clear-view bubble over single-occupancy quarters. But it was not, as the other accommodation had been, an attempt to recreate a quarian environment using holos and plastic. This was a Serenity environment, with living reef in the water gardens and living plants in the air-filled sections.

  Alex lifted off the landing pad, but set a slow, low-trajectory curve which would take him to the base the long way round. He wanted a few moments to himself, and he wanted, too, to take a look at this planet.

  It was not particularly big as planets went, nor particularly beautiful, but he gave himself time to look at it properly, and to feel the scale of it. It was so easy, from a spacer’s perspective, to see planets as tiny objects. Even within the space of a solar system they were tiny little blobs of rock or gas, which you had to go up to quite close before they became impressive. It was very easy, too, to think of a planet like this
as little more than a space station, a convenient rock with one miniscule spot where a few hundred people had established a temporary foothold.

  The reality, though, was this – continents, mountains, rivers, lakes great and small, a whole world full of natural wonders. Fern forest swarmed through valleys and undulated over hills. Great plains of mossy tundra swept to the horizon. Islands as yet untouched by terraforming rose starkly majestic, spray flying high as waves thundered on their cliffs. A chain of volcanoes smouldered in a lava-soaked landscape here; there, great glaciers, cracked and splintered by tidal forces, were full of yawning chasms. With a fast aircar you could circle this world in a matter of minutes. If you could walk round it, though, it would take you years. Even though people had been using this world as a base for a thousand years and more, there were still many places which nobody had visited yet. It was a dramatic world, too, with more than six hundred active volcanoes on the land alone, and massive rift volcanoes under the sea, a network of them like scars around the planet. Tides here were extreme; you could see the tidal bulge from space and the average at coastline was around ninety metres, a great withering away of the water every three and a half hours only for it to come roaring back in again in huge foaming waves. This was a solar tide, not a lunar one – this planet had no moons – but that fuzzy little sun was so dense, and this planet so close to it, that every rotation flexed the crust and drew the ocean high. It was seasonal, too, as the planet’s path was the usual ellipse and twice in its year it passed so close to the star that volcanoes erupted, icefields collapsed, tides became titanic and the earth shook in violent earthquakes. They were almost at perihelion right now, with earthquake season in full flow.