Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6)

by S J MacDonald

  The underside of waves began rolling overhead. They were quite pretty. Alex preferred watching waves from underneath to seeing them from the beach. There was a sense of ordered movement in them quite lost when they broke in the thump and splash of the shoreline. These were small waves, though – restricted by the size of the tank, they were just twenty or thirty centimetres in height and spaced so that there were no more than two or three of them rolling through the tank at a time. Alex was cruising with his wrist jets, waiting for the ‘strong tidal current’ to start, when it eventually dawned on him that what he was swimming in was the strong tidal current.

  To be fair, when he thought about it afterwards, the speed of the current was such that if it had been on a human world it would have been described as a rip tide with lifeguards on duty to prevent people swimming in it. Alex, however, had been taught ocean swimming by Silvie, building on his freefall skills with the use of powerful wrist jets. He had not realised himself how skilful and confident he had become. But if even he was disappointed with the tame tidal current, it must seem utterly pathetic to Silvie. And who, he wondered, had imagined that the eel which was a feature of this mode would be amusing to anyone for more than about three minutes?

  It was, admittedly, quite impressive visually, at least to start with – when an eel more than two metres long and as thick as his arm slithered up out of the rocky floor and shot past him in an undulating wriggle, it gave him enough of a start to be entertaining. It was a real thing, he recognised – robosim, but real – and it did not take him long to understand that it was supposed to provide a playful element. It was programmed to avoid contact, not to let you touch it, and if you got close it would dive down and vanish into the rocks. Then, a random interval later, it would pop out again somewhere else.

  Even a child, Alex felt, could have worked out that this was done with hatches and tubes. And even a child would have got bored chasing it after a few minutes. He certainly did, and since the tidal reef environment was just more of the same no matter which direction you swam in, he soon got bored with that as well. VR, no matter how good, just didn’t have the magic once you’d experienced the real thrill of swimming in open ocean.

  The third mode was even more boring – open ocean, a sparkle of sunlight above and a desert-like sandy seabed far below. The only ‘life’ here was the shadow of something enormous which passed by too far away to see clearly and which couldn’t be caught no matter how fast you chased it.

  He was unable to evaluate the final mode at all, since it wouldn’t activate for him.

  ‘You are not authorised to engage the Deep Sea function,’ the control panel told him, and went on to explain that it was a high pressure environment for which he would have to wear a pressure suit. Silvie would have been told the same. She could swim very much deeper than humans without protection but she would need a pressure suit at a kilometre down, too. Other quarians would not. There were adapts designed to live at those pressures, and a lot deeper.

  Alex made more notes, and having swum around for a bit and felt that he’d explored all that the aquadeck had to offer, he climbed back out through the hatch and continued his inspection in the air-quarters above.

  And this too, he realised now, was a bus depot. Yes, of course it was. He’d seen something almost identical to this in the briefing pack provided by the Diplomatic Corps, described as a ‘typical urban space’.

  It was difficult for them, Alex knew, and was trying very hard to be fair, there. Quarians did not define spaces in the same way humans did, at all, so this ‘typical urban space’ might be, for different users, the quarian equivalent of a bus station, a park, a meeting room, a gym or anything else they happened to want it for. As Alex had come to understand, though, from having Silvie aboard, such a ‘typical urban space’ had no more ambience for quarians than a corridor did for humans. It was useful, convenient, somewhere you might stop for a chat, but not somewhere you’d consider in any way special or homely. Here, too, nothing was real. The plants were all plastic and the water features used holographic water and sound effects.

  Alex lifted the leaves of a plant, saw the solid brown plastic of the ‘soil’ beneath it, and made more notes. For the first time in the years he’d known him, he finally understood why Rangi Tekawa kept a real tree in a pot. He’d always tolerated it, accepting Rangi’s assertion that it was beneficial to crew welfare to have a living pot plant on the ship, and satisfied that any dust or other hazard it might generate was safely contained.

  Now, though, he got it. To sit in the dappled shade of that tree, knowing that it was a living, growing thing, was a qualitatively different experience from being in a plastic garden.

  All right, Alex thought, and looked around for the mode-changers on this level. There were none. There was VR in the tank, obviously, but the only VR here was a holowall which you could set to scenic window or watch holovision on. Further exploration revealed that there were two bedrooms – hotel sized, equipped with webbing beds – a shower block and a galley hatch.

  Alex was amused by the shower block. It was no wonder, he felt, having spent a few minutes in there, that Silvie was so eloquent on the subject of human hygiene, which she had only just got used to on Serenity before Davie came to pick her up. Quarians didn’t use water for washing any more than humans would have thought to use air. They used sprays – cleansers and conditioners. Which products you used depended partly on your body type but was also a matter of personal choice. Quarians only wore clothes for protection and comfort, with no concept of dressing for status, for fashion, or for any other reason. They were, however, a people who enjoyed grooming. Discussion of skin conditioning treatments, especially, was a staple of social chit-chat. Grooming was also a social matter, and the Diplomatic Corps had got that right, at least. The ‘shower block’ was a cross between a salon and a spa … the kind of spa in which people walked about comfortably with no clothes on, chatting happily even with people that they didn’t know.

  It was, at least, a gentle introduction to that environment, having the place to himself. Alex made use of a lavatory, though that felt terribly exposed even though he was alone. He had an awful feeling that the door might open and Harmony crew walk in at any moment, and the kilt-like wrapover concealing his bodily functions did not go far towards any sense of privacy. He was, apart from the extractor wrap, naked, and remained naked, too, for the cleansing spray.

  ‘Oil or wax,’ he said to himself, surveying the range of conditioning products arrayed on shelves, and trying to kid himself that he was quite relaxed, here, even though there was no way to lock the door, ‘Oil or wax, the eternal conundrum.’

  He went for an oil-based conditioner and regretted it, as he’d used far too much and ended up feeling as greasy as a lukewarm chip. Another cleansing spray and rather less product left him skin-soft and fragrant, so he got his freshened clothes back on and went to see if he could get some coffee.

  He could, though there was no dispenser in the quarters. Any food or drink required had to be ordered at the galley hatch.

  Alex found this at the far end of the lounge. It was a sliding pressure hatch which, when opened, revealed a dumb waiter, a tray-lift between there and the galley above. There was a menu screen in a style which Alex recognised. He’d seen it in Embassies, and back before he’d become far too important to get his own drinks, he’d used it, too. In fact, he remembered being sent to get drinks from a system just like this by the officer he was shadowing way back when he’d been a cadet on final year shipboard placement. A kindly intentioned member of the Embassy staff had stopped and told him helpfully how to use it. ‘You press the cup icon there, see..?’

  Alex had been obliged to bite back, then, on a remark that since he understood superlight mix cores he could probably figure out a drinks machine. He felt the same way now, faced with step-by-step instructions on how to use the menu which kept ticking through at maddening pace and which he couldn’t find a way to turn off.

&n
bsp; ‘Skip!’ he tried, when he couldn’t find any ‘override instructional phase’ button to press or optic to look at. ‘Stop. I already know how to use a… oh, for pity’s sake.’

  Finally, he was able to access the programme and order a coffee. The system allowed him to select all sorts of things including the type of coffee bean, water temperature and additives, so he programmed it to provide a mug of dark, marin-spiced coffee just the way he liked it. And, just as he had expected, there was a slight delay and then it provided him with a small disposable cup of warm sludge.

  Embassy coffee.

  This was not ‘the good stuff’ enjoyed by those of Attaché rank and higher. This was the bog-standard Embassy coffee. Alex had asked one of their people, once, why their menu allowed you to make all those selections when it didn’t matter what you ordered, you got the same small cup of murky brown liquid. Apparently, though, you didn’t – there was a difference in the taste, he’d been assured, even though visually there was perhaps not a great deal of difference between tea, coffee, hot chocolate or beef soup.

  Alex sipped the coffee and decided that, on the whole, it tasted more like beef soup. To be fair, though, he would have had a similar experience on most Fleet ships. The Fleet issue tea and coffee microtabs were every bit as unpleasant as this, which was why every wardroom paid into a fund for a drinks dispenser of their own so they would not have to drink the muck. Mess decks, though, were stuck with it unless they had a progressive skipper like Alex who allowed them crateage, room in the hold for them to have their own supplies of decent tea, coffee and other treats. What shocked Alex here, really, was not the fact that the coffee was awful but that it was the bog standard Embassy coffee and not the good stuff served in real china to the upper echelons. The system should have recognised him as an ‘Excellency’ and produced the full works, fine china and silver cutlery and all. He hadn’t realised how much he’d come to expect that in his dealings with the Embassy until it was withheld. And if the hatch here was set to serve as it would have been for quarian guests, what did that say about the standard of catering Silvie had endured?

  Just to see, he accessed the quarian side of the menu and ordered a drink which Davie had had synthesised and produced for Silvie by a specialist lab. Quarians did not drink tea or coffee – no hot drinks, and only tepid food. Their nearest equivalent to coffee was a kind of kelp-based drink served at blood temperature. Alex didn’t know enough to be able to tell whether it was palatable or not, but it looked okay, served in a sugar-frosted glass with a sprig of some greenery in it.

  Alex took the coffee, and went and sat down. It was only then that he became fully aware of something he’d been subliminally conscious of throughout… the silence. Other than for the water sound-effect from the fake water features, there was nothing. No engine hum, no voices, no sense of the outside.

  He knew why. These quarters, upper and lower, were contained in an isolation bubble in exactly the same way as the lounges aboard liners. Passengers required to sit out launch and deceleration runs in the lounges ‘for safety reasons’ rarely understood that they were in a cocoon of inertial dampeners keeping things to a low rumble of vibration while the rest of the ship rocked, rolled, screeched and juddered. It was a very expensive system both in terms of the space it took up and the resources needed to keep it going through a launch. Liners considered it worthwhile because otherwise they wouldn’t get many passengers. The Diplomatic Corps evidently felt it worthwhile here, too, for the comfort of any quarians who might be aboard.

  And, Alex suspected, for their own comfort, too. The hatchway between here and the rest of the ship was locked. Airlock sealed, the Harmony’s skipper had said. Just buzz and we’ll open it for you. But the fact was that it was locked and the controls to that hatch were elsewhere. Alex could see the technical justification for that, with so much liquid water in the tank below, they would have to ensure it was safe every time before they opened that hatch. All the same, it felt… confining. And he was aware, too, that the cocoon was not merely inertial dampeners, but contained an electro-magnetic field known to interfere with quarian senses. They used that ‘empath shielding’ a lot on the Embassy ship, too – for the safety and comfort of their quarian guests, they said, though Silvie had said she believed that they used it to keep secrets.

  The silence was oppressive. Having drunk as much as he could stand of the coffee, Alex disposed of the cup and strolled around the lounge some more, looking at the artwork but not able to make anything of it – it was too abstract, and abstract, at that, in a culture not his own. And still the silence hung, getting heavier and heavier.

  Alex did something it would never normally occur to him to do… turned on the holovision. Selecting scenic options, he found a real-time stellar view and put that on. He wanted the view that they had on the interdeck – the four ships with the shuttle moving between them and the background of stars. What he got was just stars. There was no option for the squadron view, and since the stellar field was visually static, staring at that would be less interesting than watching paint dry.

  He had, he realised, with a glance at the time, been in these quarters for just over an hour.

  One hour. And Silvie had said she wanted him to stay for at least twenty five.

  ‘To get just the tiniest inkling,’ she said, ‘of what three and a half months of it was like for me.’

  ‘Oh lord,’ said Alex, and his heart went out to the child who’d embarked on this voyage. She’d been just fourteen at the time, with no name other than Ambassador, knowing very little of human culture and understanding even less. She had believed, herself, that she was ready, and because she had believed it her people had too, waving her off with cheerful goodbyes. Only as the days went by had Ambassador begun to realise that the journey ahead would test her courage and her endurance beyond anything she had ever imagined. She had spent quite a lot of her time on the Harmony, she said, ‘Curled up, reading.’

  Alex curled himself into a webbing chair in unconscious sympathy with her. Then he put some background music on, just to break the silence, and got out his comp. He had brought along his classics course, as the nearest approximation to the kind of reading Silvie would have done.

  It was interesting, but very far removed from his own experience. The language was not his own and he struggled to understand its nuances. The module he was working on gave him the text of a speech which had been made on Cartasay four thousand, six hundred years ago… or at least, the version of the speech which the Senator who’d made it had had carved into a stone record, defending himself and a fellow Senator against charges of treachery. It was a standard text in classics and even people who didn’t know a word of lareen might recognise the story from ancient Cartasay sword-and-sandal flicks – The Brothers who Fought for a Throne! Love, Death and Betrayal in the Heart of Empire!

  It was said to be a remarkable speech, echoing through the centuries with a resonance which spoke to all times, all people, long after the ancient empire of Cartasay had given way to the democracy of Chartsey. It addressed, so it was said, a very modern and indeed eternal question – how far personal loyalties, to one’s brother, say, should take precedence over duty to the state.

  To Alex, though, there simply was no question. If you were a Senator, sworn to the service of and representing the state, then you could not betray that trust and justify it by claiming that ‘higher loyalties had triumphed’. As he worked his way through the speech, looking up the odd word he didn’t understand, Alex formed the unconventional view that the heroic Senator who’d made such an eloquent speech upholding family ties over obligations to the state was a weaselling traitor who, if he’d done that in the modern world, should have ended up in prison for it.

  This, he found, when he finished reading and making his notes, had occupied another hour. Now what. He got up and went for another walk around, taking another look at the art. Was that one supposed to be a musical symbol or a sea snake, or what? Perhaps he might go f
or another swim…

  ‘Oh lord,’ he said aloud, ruefully. ‘I’m going nuts with boredom and I’ve only been here two hours.’ He wondered if Silvie was watching. If she was, she’d have sniggered at that. Anyone might be watching, come to that. Other than the bedrooms and shower block, these areas were under live cameras – again, the Diplomatic Corps said, for the safety and comfort of their guests. That wasn’t something which Alex normally felt the slightest bit self-conscious about, since he had been accustomed to being under blind recording at all times aboard ship since he’d first gone aboard a Fleet training ship, and was on open comms pretty much all of the time on the Heron.

  That was different, though. Open comms meant that he could see other people as well as them being able to see him. It felt awkward knowing that people might be watching him; probably were, but not knowing who they were.

  Well, he’d had enough of sitting in here by himself. Silvie had been able to leave these quarters to go about the ship whenever she asked, and they had, she said, only asked her to wait once while they were doing some work that wasn’t safe for her to be around. She had not asked him to stay in here the whole time, either, but had actually suggested that he get the ‘whole ship’ experience. He’d intended to leave that till later, but the isolation was getting to him, so…

  ‘I’d like to go for a walk around the ship, please,’ he said, calling the officer who could open the door.

  ‘Ye..ick....ly.’ The disjointed response sounded as if there was a serious problem with the comm, but the door opened. Then as Alex walked towards it, four people appeared.

  ‘Jadidna arpot cellaforum?’ Two of the people were the Attachés Without Brief who’d acted as his minders at the base.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Alex did not recognise the language at all and was mystified as to why the AWB would be speaking to him in anything but Standard anyway.