Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6)

by S J MacDonald

  Alex already knew which was the case even before he opened the official dispatches.

  ‘We have a new ambassador,’ he told Buzz and Bonny, meeting them in the privacy of his cabin.

  He shared the section of the report which explained that, and both read in silence for the half minute or so it took them to understand what had happened. Ambassador Harvey, the sitting ambassador at the time when the orders to withdraw had arrived, had felt the need to discuss them with the quarians himself. It had taken him several days to secure a meeting with the current president. Quarians took no notice of humans saying that the matter was important or urgent because they were always saying that, like toddlers yelling ‘Wanna go potty!’ when really, all they wanted was attention. A couple of quarians did start to pop along to see what was wanted this time but one of them was distracted by meeting a friend and the other got no further than the entrance to the presidential office before turning away from the awful squawking that was going on in there. Eventually, though, a generous soul responded to the news that the humans were upset, and went to see what they were screeching about now.

  Informed by a somewhat agitated ambassador that the League was proposing to take the Embassy I out of the system entirely, the president of the moment was baffled.

  ‘If Silvie says that’s best,’ she told the ambassador, ‘then it owwww!’

  She had to retreat very quickly, crying with pain, and needed care from her own people to recover from the impact of emotion which the ambassador had hurled at her. He might just as well have punched her in the face.

  It would take some time for the ambassador himself to understand what had happened there, how all the anxieties which had been building in him for weeks now had crested to a crescendo of worry, and how that had been powered even higher by all the frustrations of the years he’d spent training and then working on the Quarus mission. And then he was just pulled out, without ceremony and with no explanation he was willing to accept. It was that sense of all his endeavours and those of his predecessors having been useless, and a strong feeling too that he was being insulted, which had rushed up in him in a burst of outrage. It had only been momentary, but it had been enough to send the quarian president rushing from the office in tears of pain. Another crash and burn at Quarus.

  ‘But why was he even trying to talk to them?’ Bonny was mystified. ‘I thought his orders said that he wasn’t to discuss it, just salute the system and depart.’

  ‘They did,’ Alex confirmed. ‘But this is the problem, Bonny. And this is absolutely confidential, understood? Not to be written up for command training, not to be mentioned even hypothetically, yes?’

  ‘Understood,’ Bonny confirmed.

  ‘I was,’ Alex admitted, ‘waiting, hoping that the journey back might have alleviated the situation. Evidently…’ he looked at the report with regret, ‘not.’

  He shared the rest of it with them and they read. Buzz, as he absorbed its text and subtext, made murmuring confirmatory noises. Bonny, on the other hand, became increasingly shocked.

  ‘I wouldn’t have believed that the Diplomatic Corps could be so…’ she waved a hand, trying to find the word… ‘rude!’, she said, eventually.

  Alex gave a rueful smile. The reports and letters from the Embassy I, initially written by Ambassador Harvey and then by his replacement, were directly confrontational. They did not understand at all why they were being removed from Quarus and they had a very long and very angry list of reasons why that should not have happened. It was very apparent that they were obeying orders only with extreme reluctance, and evident to a thoughtful reading that they had come very close to refusing to obey them at all. They had, they stated, been fully prepared to work with Ambassador von Strada, fully prepared, but this high-handed dismissal of them after all the decades of effort was directly, personally insulting as well as being diplomatic sabotage.

  ‘How much do you know,’ Alex enquired, looking at Bonny, ‘about Outpost Syndrome?’

  There were a few seconds while Bonny thought about that, applied it to her knowledge of what was happening here, and then gave him a startled look.

  ‘You mean…?’ she started, and then, as the full implications hit her, amazement and horror flashed onto her face. ‘No!’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’ Alex said. ‘It was identified as a problem just five years after the first diplomatic mission went out there. And it’s never, regrettably, really gone away.’

  Bonny thought about that, too, and was appalled.

  ‘They haven’t been able to sort it?’ She asked. ‘In the best part of a century?’

  Alex glanced at Buzz, who picked up the cue and explained.

  ‘It’s the Gulf, primarily,’ he said. ‘Outpost Syndrome is always a factor when a small part of any organisation is operating far away and isolated from the parent group. It was a recognised and understood phenomenon right from the earliest days of the League – and quite natural, really, for groups operating far from HQ with very slow and erratic communication to feel that they know better than the people back home, that they understand the situation better and are better placed to make field decisions. Drift, of course, can take many directions but the defining characteristic of Outpost Syndrome is that the outpost group ends up in conflict with their own organisation, ignoring or defying core protocols, regulations and orders. When that happens the only practicable solutions are, obviously, to pull out the people involved and/or send in new management to get things back into line. The difficulty at Quarus is that the Embassy there is operating under conditions in which Outpost Syndrome is almost inevitable, with the extreme isolation, extremely slow communications and the extreme challenge of the situation they are attempting to cope with. As soon as it was realised that it was an issue there, the Diplomatic Corps, of course, sent in a fresh team.’

  He paused, allowing Bonny to figure out for herself why that hadn’t worked. Which, after a moment, she did.

  ‘But crossing the Gulf…’ she said, slowly, thinking it through, ‘is such a psychological leap and barrier in itself that by the time the fresh team got out there they were, I’m guessing, more inclined to join with the breakaway group than to stand against them on behalf of Head Office.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Buzz agreed, with a look of warm approval. ‘Well done, dear girl. It took the Diplomatic Corps three attempts at switching out teams before they realised the psychology that was in play there. They’ve tried, oh, so many times, with so many different approaches, sending out specially trained teams, psychologists, all sorts. Twenty six years ago they used the excuse of the new generation Embassy ship coming in to pull the old team out and replace them entirely. They have policies in force there now which limit the term of service on the Embassy I to just two years at a time, and everyone who goes there has to undertake rigorous vetting and training. As you see,’ he indicated the far from diplomatic messages which had landed on Alex’s desk, ‘it hasn’t helped much.’

  ‘But the Diplomatic Corps is one of the most solid organisations in the League!’ Bonny was shocked. ‘They’re the glue which holds our worlds together! Rock solid dependable, they’re the last people in the galaxy I’d expect to have an outpost going rogue!’

  ‘Which is why,’ Alex observed, ‘it is so sensitive. And all the more so because Quarus is such a hugely important diplomatic mission and Head Office is very well aware that the effect of Outpost Syndrome is one of the reasons it just isn’t working. They keep sending people out there to implement solutions, but things do just look very different from that side of the Gulf. Sometimes people do attempt a kind of half-hearted compromise but more often than not they just write back to Head Office saying that they’re unable to do what they were sent there to do because Head Office themselves have got it wrong, haven’t understood the situation, have no idea what the people out there are dealing with and really need to get behind and give them their support.’

  ‘Ah.’ Bonny considered that too, and grimaced. ‘So,
’ she asked, ‘What are they doing, then? I mean, what is it that Head Office is telling them to do, but they won’t?’

  ‘Oh, that’s a very long list,’ said Alex, with some wry amusement. ‘But essentially Head Office has been attempting to get them to be more relaxed, more open to unstructured encounters with quarians in the interests of relationship building. But they won’t. Part of the problem is that Diplomatic Corps personnel are, by their nature, slow and steady bureaucrats who would find the idea of relaxed, unstructured situations challenging even in a normal environment. And on the far side of the Gulf, faced with a bizarre and alarming alien world, they tend to react in quite a predictable way. Overwhelmed by so much that they can’t control or even understand, they pull back to the psychological safe ground of controlling what they can. Which, for the most part, means internal activity, micro-managing every aspect of what they themselves are doing. The word Head Office uses to describe what’s going on out there, in fact, is ‘hyper-bureaucratisation.’’

  He let Bonny think about that, and smiled a little as he saw the shock on her face as the significance of that sank in.

  ‘Sorry?’ She said. ‘The Diplomatic Corps is describing people as ‘hyper-bureaucratic?’

  Alex and Buzz both grinned at that, as anyone would who’d had to endure the mill-grinding pace of dealing with Diplomatic Corps procedures.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Alex. ‘Says it all, really. But even Head Office considers that the Embassy I is beyond all reason. They not only adhere fanatically to even the smallest little rule and protocol but are constantly coming up with their own rules and procedures which they consider to be essential for the situation that they’re in. One of the examples I was given was an ongoing situation with tape clips.’

  He gestured to a rack on the wall beside his desk, which held a number of high security tapes. Tape clips were small, cheap items designed to do no more than hold the thin discs neatly upright.

  ‘For reasons beyond the comprehension of anyone at Head Office,’ Alex said, ‘the Embassy I has decided to treat tape clips with much the same protocols as small arms. Anyone drawing a supply of tape clips from stationery has to justify doing so with a case of need. If granted, they then become personally responsible for the tape clips and have to file regular audits on how many they have in their possession and how they are being deployed. Other members of staff monitor this and will actually do spot checks counting how many clips members of staff have in their possession. And there is a committee, a special resources sub-committee which meets every month to look at stats and reports, to discuss them at length and then write their own minutes and report to the office management.’

  Bonny was laughing as he was speaking, but as neither he nor Buzz joined in with it she realised, slowly, that Alex was actually serious. Her own laugh faltered out.

  ‘For real,’ she said, still not quite able to bring herself to believe it. ‘Tape clips. For real.’

  ‘For real,’ Alex confirmed. ‘They have spent an estimated 4.5 thousand dollars and at least six thousand staff hours over the last five years alone, purely on the issue of monitoring tape clips. And that, you see, is what it takes to get even the Diplomatic Corps Head Office describing you as ‘hyper-bureaucratic’.’

  Bonny stared, thinking it through.

  ‘Because they have no control at all over anything to do with the quarians, but tape clips are something that they can control,’ she realised.

  ‘That, and the fact that they have nothing better to do,’ Buzz confirmed. ‘The majority of people on that ship will never see a quarian, after all, and there is very little genuine work that they can undertake. So they settle for make-work, trying to make themselves feel busy and purposeful in the face of overwhelming chaos. And once people are doing that make-work, invested in it, it becomes astonishingly difficult to get them to stop. If they stop filling in all the busy-busy forms they’ve invented for themselves, for one thing they’d be admitting that everything they’d done had been a total waste of time, and for another, it would leave them with nothing to do but face the daunting reality that they have nothing purposeful to do because their mission is basically dead in the water.’

  ‘Oh.’ Bonny considered this in the light of her own knowledge of diplomatic efforts at Quarus, notably an attempt a few years previously at sending out one of the Fleet’s most experienced exodiplomacy teams on the Buzzard. ‘Is that why the Buzzard only stayed for three months?’

  Alex nodded. ‘It wasn’t just a lack of cooperation,’ he said. ‘It was outright hostility. The Embassy wouldn’t allow them any involvement unless their officers had been trained and approved by them. Seeing that some of her officers were being sucked in to the micro-management mindset and that she was never going to be allowed to do things any differently from the Embassy herself, the skipper made the right decision there and withdrew. And that, of course, is the real reason the Embassy has been pulled out now, because they would have made our mission there as difficult as possible and been, at best, a time consuming obstacle we’d have to be battling constantly.’

  ‘And now they’ve just been pulled out,’ Bonny realised. ‘Yanked out with no warning and told to leave it to us.’ She looked back at the angry protest and thought about the delay in the Embassy’s complying with their orders. ‘Ah.’ She said again, and her grimace this time was sympathetic as well as wry. ‘Furious resentment.’

  Alex nodded again.

  ‘It will be very important to remember that they are, every one of them, in the grip of a very real psychological condition,’ he observed, ‘from which the Corps will have to ease them down to the point where they themselves recognise that obsessing about tape clips was neither healthy nor helpful. There are professionals standing by at the Embassy here to help with that and that isn’t, thankfully, our responsibility. But there may be some flak heading our way and I don’t want that to impact either on our own morale or on our relationship with the Diplomatic service as a whole, all right? So the message will be, from all of us,’ he gestured from himself to include Buzz and Bonny, ‘that we understand entirely how upset the Embassy guys will be at being pulled out like that and we will take no offence at anything they might say ‘in the heat of the moment’.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Bonny, and understood then why she had been brought in on this highly sensitive situation. She would certainly have shown extreme surprise at discourtesy from any Diplomatic Corps people directed at them, and strong indignation, too, at any disrespect shown to the skipper. Now she knew what was really going on, she would help to keep things calm.

  Four days later, the Embassy I arrived. It was an impressive sight, bigger and more modern than the other Embassy ships Alex was familiar with. It was the size of a carrier, though unarmed with any more than tiny impact-defence lasers. Because it was unarmed it had a relatively tiny Fleet crew, just ninety eight of them instead of the thousand or so there would have been on a Deity class carrier of this size with its hundreds of cannon, missile arrays and fighter squadron. The Embassy staff itself was quite small, too, relative to the teams Alex had encountered on the mission to Gide and to Carrearranis. If the mission to Quarus had ever got off the ground, the Diplomatic Corps would have anything up to eight hundred staff working on that ship. As it was, there were currently three hundred and forty seven.

  Even so, it came into port looking majestic, and all the more so because it was flanked by two ships which were impressive in their own right. They also were civilian versions of Fleet ships; in this case, adapted from the Raptor Class destroyer. The Amity, to port, had been the supply ship on-station when the Embassy was withdrawn. The Tranquillity, to starboard, had been en-route to relieve them and been turned around by the Embassy on its own way back to Serenity.

  There were no signals at all, other than for formal salutes, as the Embassy I rumbled through deceleration and made its way in stately silence to its assigned orbital point.

  Having given them the usual time to get settl
ed, Alex sent a courteous greeting to the man he was replacing as ambassador, offering the opportunity to meet either aboard the Heron or in the groundside embassy as Ambassador Jones preferred. He got back only an automated response confirming that his message had been received by His Excellency. And it was more than an hour later, after lengthy exchanges of signals between Ambassador Jones and the Ambassador at the groundside Embassy, that he got an invitation to join both Excellencies at the groundside Embassy for the formal handover to recognise Alex as the in-post ambassador to Quarus.

  Alex sighed a little at that. Technically, he already was the active in-post ambassador to Quarus and had been so from the moment Ambassador Jones received his orders to stand down. In effect, he’d been functioning as the in-post ambassador right from the moment the President confirmed all Alex’s requests for the provision to be made at Serenity.

  The Diplomatic Corps, however, liked these matters to be conducted with some ceremony, so Alex duly put on his dress rig and went down to do his duty by them.

  It was a tortuous occasion. It would have been mind-numbingly tedious even without the rage and hatred of Ambassador Jones, only partially concealed beneath a veneer of professional decorum. There were painfully awkward handshakes, wholly insincere expressions of respect and goodwill, horrible lukewarm drinks and then, for Alex, the torment of the Official Holo.

  This took a good half hour to accomplish. It would normally take place in the ambassador’s office of the embassy which was being handed over. Since the Embassy I was remaining here, though, and the Diplomatic Corps did not consider Alex’s daycabin a suitable venue for the occasion, the official holos were taken in the ambassador’s office at the Serenity base. Alex had to endure being posed in a series of solo shots and then go through it all again with a series of shots with his ambassadorial staff. Since the only actual ambassadorial staff he had was Attaché Jun Desmoulin, who functioned as his adjutant, the deficit had to be made up using the Eagle and Harmony’s skippers and a handful of other senior officers. Few of them had taken part in a holo-shoot like this before and it took a long time before the holographer was satisfied.