Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6)

by S J MacDonald

  Alex nodded understanding. It had been evident even using long-range observations from their own systems that there was a system relatively close to the far side of the Gulf with every indicator of a complex biosphere. Even the most primitive observational tools, spectrographic analysis of the planets as they orbited their star, had revealed one with an oxygen atmosphere, which could not be sustained unless there was life. More sophisticated tools had indicated that this was more likely to be oceanic life than land-based flora. Even more excitingly, there were tiny but significant indicators of variable energy levels at the surface which could not be explained by solar, geological or other natural causes… the classic indicator of a powered industrial society.

  It was, however, so far away that for centuries all people in the League could do was look at it through telescopes and speculate. They’d had to wait until their ships had the speed and range to make the Gulf crossing, even with all the tremendous effort involved in building space stations out there and building up stocks of supplies. That, in itself, had taken decades. And they weren’t there, even when they’d crossed the Gulf. Quarus was not sitting neatly and conveniently on the far side of it, it was some distance in and had required yet another pump station to be established before a ship could set out on the final stage and find a route.

  It was astonishing, looking at the record of that now. The space over there was not even that turbulent by modern starship standards, but back then it had been considered barely navigable. It had required just the same kind of tentative route-finding as the Fourth themselves had carried out in the exploration which had found Carrearranis. That, too, had been cutting-edge astrogation, route-finding only made possible by advances in tech. Which would, in their turn, be superseded… how long would it be, Alex wondered, before other skippers were looking at the Carrearranis route and marvelling at how tricky and convoluted it was when starships of their day would cruise right through that kind of space and think nothing of it.

  Excorps, anyway, had eventually found a route, though it had taken eleven major expeditions to do it, and by then the original pump stations out in the Gulf were defunct. New generations of ships could make the crossing in one go, so the only pump station still in use had been in an uninhabited system on the far side.

  ‘We know that there were pump stations, what type they were and where they were placed,’ Skipper Farah said, and called up images. ‘Type Geronimo pump station, mark 7.’

  It was tiny – much smaller than the frigate, and with a frail, old-fashioned look.

  ‘Basically, a survival capsule with cargo storage,’ Skipper Farah explained, indicating the shuttle-sized globular capsule and the cargo-containers connected to it by rigid tubes. ‘Standard pump station back then. And since it would cost a lot more to recover them than they were worth, they were routinely abandoned when no longer required.’

  ‘So – it was left for use in an emergency?’ Alex queried. ‘Like a survival dome?’

  ‘No, not at all, once it was finished with it was stripped of anything worth having and left as junk,’ Skipper Farah looked apologetic. ‘I know, junking space as we explored it. We wouldn’t do that now, but back then it was considered acceptable. Anyway, standard practice with the defunct pump stations was to get rid of them with a shove – seems weird now, I know, but back then it was felt that cluttering a route we’d continue to use with old space junk might present something of a hazard, and rather than destroying them we’d just give them a shove out of the way – a hefty nudge from a shuttle, usually, pushing them up to a good speed and leaving them to fly off. The difficulty is that the ship which did that to the Geronimo stations here, on its way out for an expedition, was lost on that expedition so we don’t have the records of how fast or in what direction they shoved them. The other one, Gulf B, was discovered some years ago and cleaned up with a missile. Gulf A, though…’ she gestured to indicate that it might be anywhere. ‘It ought to be easy to find,’ she observed. ‘We know where it was, it can only be sublight and space is so flat here that whatever direction it was shoved in, it will still be going that way. A lot of people think it must have been destroyed after all or we’d have found it by now, but all the same, we sweep for it whenever we’re passing through this area. And maybe, with your scanners…’

  It took a lot more than just using their scanners. It took intensive study of large scale astrogation charts, historical records and previous Excorps logs, and it took the combined effort of the entire squadron, including the Heron’s own fighters and the Stepeasy’s tender, searching for nine and a half hours in a tight grid-search pattern. Most people had given up watching, by then, feeling that the odds of them finding it were slipping away hour by hour.

  Finally, though, there it was – a fuzzy point on the edge of the Eagle’s scanners, signalled to the rest of the squadron.

  As they homed in on it, it became apparent why it had not been discovered before. It was in pieces. It was in a lot of pieces, and they were strung out in a very long path, too. It was evident that the station had broken up under acceleration, but the forces which had done that had not been applied evenly. Some of the pieces were moving faster than others – not much, but enough to stretch them out, in the intervening time, so that there were several billion klicks between them. No one piece was big enough to register on long range scopes, and since they were at the same temperature as the surrounding space, they didn’t show up on heatscan, either. Only a really determined grid search with a squadron using scopes like this would have stood any realistic chance of finding it. And now that they had, it was a distinct anti-climax.

  ‘It’s just debris,’ Skipper Farah observed, regretfully. ‘What a shame. I was hoping we could have a bit of a climb round in it before we blew it up. Never mind, though.’ She looked hopefully at Alex. ‘Target practice?’ she suggested.

  Alex gave her an amazed look.

  ‘This is part of your history,’ he pointed out.

  ‘Alex, it’s junk.’ Mel Farah shook her head at him. ‘It would have been junk even if it had been intact – interesting to have a bit of a scramble around it perhaps but ultimately, junk, which we in Excorps recognise now is not a nice thing to leave scattered in our wake. So I’d have been asking you to blow it up for us anyway. As it is, it’s just a load of broken bits.’ She surveyed the debris field appraisingly. ‘Quite good for strafing practice, I’d have said, but no good for anything else.’

  Alex homed in on the survival capsule, which was the biggest chunk of all the debris. Even that wasn’t intact, but it was still a globular shape. It was a mess, though. The circular airlock had lost its hatch, now spinning billions of klicks back in the debris trail. A cloud of other debris was hanging around it, matching speed, a tangle of wires and bits of broken stuff it would take forensics to figure out. It was, as Mel Farah had said, junk. The only thing to be done with it, really, was to clean it up. But Alex, usually so happy at any excuse for large scale detonations, was reluctant. This was no scrubby little starseeker or even a defunct moonbase, it was a part of history, a vital step in the long effort which had finally enabled people to cross this space. The people who had set this in motion, too, had been lost, had died out there. Seeing it still moving from the shove they had given it was a poignant echo from the past. It felt wrong to just blow it up like garbage.

  As he looked at it, and thought, Alex came to a decision.

  ‘Mr North…’ he addressed Davie through comms, since Davie was skippering the Stepeasy for this and was on his own flight deck. ‘If we retrieve that capsule, do you think you could find room for it on the Stepeasy?’

  Davie smiled. His was the only ship which could take the capsule aboard.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said, and with a measuring eye for the size of it, ‘Cargo airlock standing by.’

  ‘You’re not serious?’ Mel Farah was astonished. ‘It’s junk, Alex.’

  ‘It’s history,’ said Alex. ‘Excorps should have it for your museum at
Serenity.’

  She looked dubiously at the wrecked capsule.

  ‘Not sure they’ll thank you for that,’ she said.

  ‘Well, it’s a matter of perspective, isn’t it?’ Alex said. ‘You can either look at it as junk or as an evocative space-archaeological exhibit. And what I’m thinking, you see, is that if things go as we’re hoping, Serenity will be getting a lot of visitors – liners, you know, hotels, all that – and tourists do expect things to do. To be able to see, touch, even climb inside a capsule like that – well, that’s an exhibit I might go to myself.’

  ‘Bravo, Boss!’ Davie gave a laughing salute over the comms. ‘I’ll make an entrepreneur out of you yet – good spot on turning trash into value.’ He was scoping through the debris field as they circled above it, and highlighting particular items. ‘Get us these bits as well, will you?’

  It took a while, even using fighters and shuttles. Shion herself carried out the retrieval of the wrecked capsule. It was in a delicate state, and so surrounded by other debris that it was difficult to get a tether onto it anyway. Then, once she did have it, securing it to the fighter with cargo netting so that they could get it superlight without it coming apart took even longer. It was more than an hour before the capsule and all the bits Davie had asked for had been delivered to the Stepeasy. If costs were calculated for the whole squadron from the time that they had started searching for it, the price of retrieving that capsule was outrageous – a quarter of a million, easily, based on ship, fighter and shuttle operation costs, personnel time and resources deployed.

  Nobody cavilled at it, though. Only groundsiders would do that, not understanding at all that nominal cost was not at all the same as actual cost – operational and personnel costs would have been just the same for the ships whether they had carried out the retrieval or not, so the only real expenditure was that of time and the few resources they’d used. They had time to spare, time allowed in their schedule for such things as combat exercises, and the real-world opportunities offered by the wrecked station for piloting and retrieval skills were excellent training for search and rescue operations.

  And they did finish it off with a strafing run, too, the Eagle and the Heron spiralling around the debris and taking out every tiny scrap of it with manual gunfire. Then, having given themselves a cheer, they went back to find the end of the Geminax stream and resumed their route to Quarus.

  Five days later, Davie informed them that the Geronimo A exhibit was ready for visitors.

  ‘What?’ Alex had not expected him to do any more than store the capsule and put the rest of the collected debris into crates. ‘What do you mean – exhibit?’

  ‘Come and see,’ Davie invited.

  So Alex went. Davie had used his own lounge on the Stepeasy for this – one of his own lounges, the big formal reception room where he and Alex had first met. It had VR décor and was usually set up in astrodome mode, as it was then. The floor was clouded, nebula-like, since few people were comfortable walking out on a glass-effect floor with infinity dropping below them. Normally, there were white sofas and elegant little tables. Now, though, there was the exhibit.

  Alex could hardly credit what he was seeing. It was an exhibit just as he might have expected to see in a quality museum. There were walk-round information zones with the story of the Gemini A, from a technical specs screen to images of the crew from the lost expedition, and a screen, too, showing their search for it and how it had been found. Then, in ‘please do touch’ display units, were all sorts of bits, each with their own information panel explaining what they were and showing pictures of where they’d come from on the station, or of them in use.

  ‘Oh…’ Alex, drawn to one of the displays, gazed at the wrench which was in it. It was nothing like the high tech multi-function tool which spacers called a wrench these days; it was the most basic and primitive of tools, designed to do nothing more than tighten and unfasten bolts. ‘That is…’ he reached out and touched his fingers to it, looking at the images behind it of actual Excorps people using this, or another wrench just like it, to bolt another cargo unit on to the survival capsule. ‘Brilliant,’ said Alex, feeling the cold, slightly greasy surface. None of this was so precious that it must not be touched, everything in the exhibit could be handled. And the capsule itself, the centrepiece of the exhibit, was a wonder. It was on a low plinth, expertly lit and with a higher walkway around it too so it could be viewed from all angles. Even better, you could go inside, which Alex did, climbing through the small hatchway – steps had been provided, and the original airlock hatch re-attached, too, hanging open over your head as you wriggled through the hole. Alex did so and marvelled once he was in there. It was much smaller inside even than it appeared externally. Starship tech had become a lot more compact since this had been built, so with the internal hull layers, life support and other tech there was barely any room left aboard for people. This was supposed to be big enough for up to ten people to live in it for as long as supplies held out, but it was smaller, much smaller, than the inside of a courier.

  ‘Incredible,’ Alex said, emerging after a blissful few minutes exploring and imagining what it would have been like to actually use stations like this. Power had been restored to the capsule, so there was even the buzz of its rattly old life support and the faint smell of hot electrics. ‘But I didn’t expect you to actually put together an exhibit…’ he looked at the capsule and cast a startled glance back at the doors to the lounge. ‘How did you even get it in here?’

  ‘Dismantled and reassembled it,’ Davie said, ‘which we had to do anyway for safety checks. I enjoyed it,’ he glanced around at the exhibit with some satisfaction. ‘Gave me something to do.’

  ‘Well, it is excellent,’ said Alex.

  It was an opinion shared by almost all the people who went over to the Stepeasy to see the exhibit, which, within a few days, was everyone in the squadron. The exception was the Excorps guys, who just found it hilarious.

  ‘Do not even think about describing this as a memorial to the Juwar, though,’ Mel Farah said – the Juwar, named as always in Excorps after the skipper of the expedition, was the ship which had shoved the station off route, breaking it up, before heading off on the expedition which had cost them their lives. ‘We have a memorial to the Juwar, a real one, which we take families out to but is certainly not any kind of exhibit. So long as you don’t say that it’s a memorial, okay, fine, but…’ she gave a peal of giggles. ‘It is just a heap of junk!’

  ‘To you, maybe,’ Alex said. ‘But incredible to the rest of us, to see and touch a piece of exploration history, like this. Though I tell you what it needs to finish it off – pictures of you, modern day Excorps, with the old capsule.’

  They thought that was hilarious too, but with a little persuasion from Davie they agreed to take part in a holo-shoot, for which they dug out Excorps uniforms and posed. Davie had Blaze Tyler and his camera guy doing the shoot, Blaze directing and doing interviews while his camera guy captured holos. Alex and Davie were standing back, watching with interest as the mini-documentary was filmed. Blaze had brought props, too, including mock-ups of the kind of supplies which Excorps would have eaten back then. It took some doing to get them all into the capsule and jammed in so that the cameras could see all of them tucking in to leather-hard protein bars.

  ‘Try to look like you’re enjoying it, guys!’ said Blaze, and as the Excorps people hammed it up obligingly, he closed the hatch on them. ‘Just want to do some filming now of what it would have been like for them to live in a capsule like that for days at a time, okay?’

  And with that, leaving them not quite understanding yet that the hatch had been locked, he walked off, slapping hands with Davie and giving Alex a nod and broad grin as he passed.

  Alex and Davie stood there and waited, not speaking, just waiting for the Excorps people to realise what was going on. One minute, two…

  ‘Hey!’ Skipper Farah was banging on the hatch, apparently thinking it was stu
ck, ‘Blaze! You there?’

  They only had audio comms, as they were discovering that their comms would only connect with the battered radio of the capsule systems. This had been set so as to make anything inside audible through exhibit loudspeakers.

  ‘Oi!’ Mel Farah had evidently realised that the locked hatch and the locked-out comms were not a coincidence. ‘Blaze! Open up!’

  ‘He’s gone,’ said Alex, through the internal loudspeaker, and then, with a broad grin as he treasured the moment, ‘Told you that I’d get you back.’

  He turned to Davie as the Excorps guys started yelling and using language expressive of their reluctance to spend any more time crammed into this smelly old wreck, and the two of them shook hands solemnly. Davie, too, had been subjected to intense bombardment of Excorps humour. As, for that matter, had Blaze.

  They let them out after twenty minutes – the temptation to leave them in there for days or even for a few hours was quite high, but it really was extremely uncomfortable in there and there was a difference between pranking and torture, after all. The Excorps guys took it in good part, too, calling them all the names under the stars, but laughing with it and acknowledging that Alex, Davie and Blaze between them had got them, nailed it.

  ‘Though I never thought that I would see the day when you, you,’ Mel Farah said, to Alex, ‘would buddy up with a journalist.’

  Alex would not have said that they had ‘buddied up’. It had been Alex who’d suggested using Blaze to get them in the capsule but Davie who’d made the arrangements. Alex had barely exchanged more than a few words with the journalist, himself, since leaving Serenity. All the same, if he went onto the interdeck and saw Blaze there, he didn’t turn around and leave, just carried on as usual. He’d become accustomed to him, and Blaze was sliding into shipboard life, too, attending social events and hanging out with them on the evenings when the gym was set up as a bar. He had even hopped up on the bar himself once or twice and told stories, paying his way socially. It shouldn’t have come as any surprise, since the Diplomatic Corps certainly wouldn’t have chosen a hack for this opportunity, but Blaze Tyler really was remarkably good at integrating himself even with the prickly-defensive Fourth – fully embedded, indeed.