Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘Possibly,’ said Hetty. ‘But a thorough diagnostic of your quarters has failed to locate any device.’

  ‘Ah.’ Said Alex. ‘I’ve been giving that some thought – just an idea, of course, but since there obviously is, or was, a projection device, and since we can’t locate it with any of our normal sensors, the thought occurs that it might be nanotech.’

  Hetty looked interested. ‘Powered down, and therefore undetectable?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Alex. ‘It may even have been set to self-destruct once it had played its projection – the disintegration of a molecule sized device would not even register on anything less sensitive than a microscope. Setting up a device to play a pre-recorded broadcast in my cabin at a pre-set time would be child’s play to anyone with nano-engineering skills. It could even have been done at Therik – though not, I think, before then since my quarters were moved aft during the refit. Though even then, well, the device could have been attached to some piece of furniture that was moved with the cabin. It could be anywhere – and when they are powered down, the only way you can tell a nano-engine from an ordinary molecule of duralloy is with specialist nano-scanners.’

  ‘You believe it may have been, then, a parting gift from the nanotech team, or something of that kind?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Alex admitted. ‘I assumed at first that it was the Excorps people because it was brash and loud and it seemed just the kind of thing they might do, but now, I really don’t know. I suspect that it is nanotech, though that shouldn’t have generated any static charge at all, I can only imagine that it was programmed to do that in order to provide a physical, hair-raising effect. But the only way to find it would be to set up sensors in there and hope it activates itself again. I do think that it might have been set up some time ago – no real basis for that other than that it seems like too much of a coincidence that it happened when we were half way across the Gulf. I mean, almost exactly half way.’

  Hetty gave him a look which conveyed that she really did not need him to point out things as obvious as that. The half way point was psychologically significant, so if someone was planning a prank a long way ahead, that might well be the time they’d choose.

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘So, we have facts – the measured strength of the electrostatic discharge - your observations and the theory that it may be nanotech which was either on very narrow band or direct to optic broadcast, nanotech which is virtually impossible to locate when powered down and which may have been installed in your quarters at any time, say, during the last year.’ She looked at him steadily. ‘I will need from you a list of the people you consider to have the technical proficiency to set this up. I also need the most detailed and accurate simulation you can achieve, showing exactly what it was you saw and heard. We have forensic witness software you can use for that.’

  Alex was about to protest that that seemed a little over the top for investigating a prank, then he remembered that static discharge and nodded.

  It took him the best part of an hour to produce a simulation, which Hetty took him through again and again, careful never to lead him in ‘remembering’ things but ensuring that they got the best and most accurate information possible.

  When it was done, and she played it for the last time and he confirmed that that was as near to exact as he was ever going to get, she studied him again, thoughtfully.

  ‘You know what it looks like, of course,’ she said.

  ‘Obviously,’ said Alex. ‘Why do you think I’ve been referring to it as ‘the figure’?’

  ‘A wise decision, skipper,’ Hetty agreed. ‘Given how superstitious so many of our company are, and the sensitive time, too, around mid-run.’

  ‘You don’t think that they could actually believe…’ Alex said, and then remembered the banshee incident. Everyone involved in that had said that no, of course they didn’t believe in the banshee, though at the same time, weird things did happen in deep space and carrying out these traditions never did any harm. Alex himself had been obliged to do the banshee-banishing ritual of walking backwards and throwing salt over his shoulder. His crew would have considered the ship jinxed, otherwise, and regardless of how Alex might feel about that himself, he knew that such superstitious alarms could become self-fulfilling prophecies. This… thing in his cabin… no, of course they wouldn’t believe it, but all the same… ‘Yes, of course they would,’ Alex said, and sighed. ‘We’re not going to have to show them this, are we?’

  ‘If I fail to find any evidence or leads any other way,’ Hetty said, ‘I’m afraid it will be necessary – witness stimulation, you know.’

  Alex did know. Hetty herself had taught him IA’s investigative procedures in theory during cadet training and in practice in command school. In many respects they were founded on those of the police. Establish the facts, obtain witness statements, check means, motive and opportunity of identified suspects, have a case review. If the investigation wasn’t going anywhere, release of selected footage, such as that from security cameras, might be used to stimulate memories or realisations in people who had not known, till then, that they had anything of significance to tell. In this case, it was possible that someone might recognise something familiar about the figure, remember a conversation, a doodle, anything. And however remote that possibility was, Hetty Leavam would pursue it in her indefatigable quest for the truth.

  ‘Well,’ Alex said, trying to be optimistic, ‘Let’s just hope it won’t come to that.’

  Fifteen

  ‘So,’ Alex said, three days later, addressing the crew in a whole-ship briefing. It was very quiet, everyone watching him intently. ‘Commander Leavam,’ he said, ‘is satisfied that nobody in the squadron is responsible for what happened in my cabin the other night.’ A slight pause. ‘Thank you all for the assistance you have given with that endeavour.’

  There was a slightly smug preening amongst the ship’s company, while Commander Leavam remained expressionless. Her investigation had been somewhat hampered by the fact that every single member of the Heron’s crew had turned detective. They had ideas – lots of ideas – and were very keen to investigate them and to pass their findings on to Hetty Leavam.

  It had got worse, too, when their attention had turned beyond the ship. Any offence which might have been caused on the other ships by the Heron’s people questioning them about the incident was mitigated by the acceptance that if anyone had done that to their skipper they’d be just as fired up about it. And detective fever, it turned out, was contagious.

  Faced with hundreds of amateur detectives all trying to do her work for her, Hetty had handled the situation with her usual calm professionalism, merely setting up boards for people to contribute their findings and suggestions, in much the same way as the police, groundside, might set up a public call-line asking for information relating to a particular case. Just as with such a call-line, the great majority of the calls received were a waste of time, but still, it had proved useful to collate the data gathered by the crew and interesting to see where their suspicions were tending. They had, by then, gone outside the squadron, some focussed on Serenity and others with various ideas, some of them going right back to Carrearranis. One small but determined contingent was even ‘sure’ that it was the LIA on Telathor who were responsible. All of them had cases weighing means, motive and opportunity of their chosen suspects, but it was all theory, no evidence whatsoever. And they were all, too, asking to see the footage of the incident as seen by the skipper himself, asserting – correctly – that it would help them in evaluating their theories.

  Hetty wasn’t giving any more credence to the crew’s detective efforts than that of ‘members of the public calling in’, but she had, as she’d warned Alex, intended all along to release that footage if the investigation stalled, and it had. So…

  ‘Commander Leavam,’ said Alex, ‘is going to release the witness statement I made showing a reconstruction of what I saw and heard. I would ask you, please, to remember that
this is a projection, an ill-considered and dangerous stunt, and to put no further construction on it than that.’ He would have liked to say more, but knew that it would be counter-productive. So he handed over to Hetty. ‘Commander Leavam.’

  After a preamble reminding them that they were potential witnesses and not detectives, Hetty played the footage.

  There was stunned silence. Most of them had assumed that the nature of the image was pornographic, seeing how firm the skipper was in refusing to discuss it and how closely the nature of the thing was being guarded. Now they saw, and they were… awed.

  It was Owun Glyn who said it, voicing what so many of them were thinking but hardly dared to say.

  ‘That’s an angel…’ his voice breathed out, and his face was that of a man witnessing a miracle.

  Alex didn’t close his eyes, drop his head into his hands and groan, because he had braced himself for this, the inevitable recognition – the beautiful, noble, genderless face, the blinding halo, the robes of light which swirled like wings… any kid, shown that picture, would know it for an angel.

  ‘It is,’ said Hetty crisply, ‘an infantile prank.’

  She used the word infantile deliberately, hoping to steer the crew into accepting that the image was just daft, someone’s silly construction. But she knew, just looking at their faces, what proportion of them was accepting that and how many were gazing in wonder. The awe and wonder contingent were rather stronger than she’d hoped for – undoubtedly, as she realised even at the time, because of Owun’s own reaction. He was known to have religious beliefs, though he played them down, mindful of Fleet regs against proselytising and of spacer custom in keeping such matters to yourself. He had even, himself, expressed doubts about the nature of the ‘angels’ said to have brought his people to their world, and was firm, or would have said he was firm, as a sceptic on the subject of modern-day angelic visitations.

  Now, though, he saw, and he believed.

  ‘Usbrith Galan.’ The words, and the gesture that went with them, were an unthinking expression of what he was feeling. With two fingers of his right hand, he drew a circle about his heart, brought the fingers briefly to his lips and then touched them to his forehead, ‘Dio, dio vur.’ Holy spirits… thanks be. The gesture symbolised heart, soul, mind. It was a prayer of word and movement that almost every child on Camae learned from the cradle, adamant unbelievers being in a tiny minority.

  A lot of eyes were on Owun in that moment. Faced with something which made them doubt their own beliefs, they looked instinctively to someone who seemed not only to know what was going on but to know exactly what to do about it.

  ‘Usbrith Galan,’ one of the engineering techs who was arguably the most superstitious member of the crew, copied Owun immediately, words and gestures. ‘Dio, dio vur.’

  From that moment, the possibility that the skipper’s experience had been of a supernatural nature was also on the table, and remained so despite every effort to assert that it was a trick, no more than a high-tech magic trick in which the figure of the so-called ‘angel’ was neither original nor even very convincing. It looked all right, fair enough, with the blinding light and ethereal wings, but the tooting fanfare trumpets were ridiculous and its dialogue had hardly been of an elevated spiritual nature. Hello Alexis Sean von Strada, my name is Trilopharus and I wish to be your friend.

  A seven year old, Alex felt sure, could have come up with a better angelic dialogue than that. Which was, admittedly, one of the more puzzling aspects to the thing. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble – and expense, too, a lot of expense – using classified tech to pull off a stunt which had, in the event, said no more than ‘Hello, I want to be your friend’ and then accepted refusal at once and shut itself down. Alex could not understand, himself, why it hadn’t been programmed with a much more sophisticated interaction. But perhaps that was just the first move in a stunt intended to develop over time.

  If so, it was evidently not in a hurry. Alex’s quarters were so stuffed with all manner of sensors now that he could hardly use them. The techs, assisted by people from the lab, said that they had his cabin covered in such detail that if a virus broke wind they’d know about it, and Alex, climbing through the various equipment to get to his bunk, could well believe it. Nothing happened, though. The only possible technological explanation was that it was nano-tech which had either deactivated or destroyed itself after the broadcast. And this, at least in the minds of some of the crew, was no more likely than that they’d had an angelic visitation.

  Then, a week later, another hat was thrown into the ring – a suggestion so outlandish that none of them had given it a moment’s credibility.

  Shion, though, had been doing some detective work of her own. She came to the command deck on a quiet afternoon, seeing that Alex was just chatting with the officers there. She brought Owun with her, too, the crewman looking self-conscious.

  ‘Skipper,’ he acknowledged Alex, pausing for a moment for the skipper’s nod of permission to sit down at the command table, then doing so, next to Shion, with stiff dignity.

  Owun had apologised to Alex when it became clear that his exclamation of prayer had been taken up by so many other people. Alex had told him not to worry about it and that he understood that it had been inadvertent. He had, however, asked pleasantly that Owun ‘be careful’ in how he talked to people about his beliefs, which Owun had assured him that he would. And he had been, too, refusing to discuss religious beliefs with anyone even privately.

  ‘There’s something I want to talk to you about,’ Shion told Alex, and asked, ‘Half an hour?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Since she evidently wanted to talk on the command deck he shut down the other screens he’d been half working on and gave her his full attention. ‘What is it, Shion?’

  ‘I am wondering,’ she said, ‘whether it has occurred to you that the incident in your quarters might have been real – a genuine exo-visitor making first contact.’

  Alex felt his brain fuse in that ftttz! way which Silvie found so hilarious, but after a moment he pulled it together.

  ‘It occurred,’ he said, ‘but only to be dismissed immediately.’

  ‘Because…?’ Shion queried.

  ‘Because…’ Alex knew why, but he paused to gather his thoughts, seeing that Shion was serious about this and feeling that she deserved a serious, considered response. ‘Because of the way it looked, the fanfare, how it spoke and what it said,’ he told her. ‘Why, Shion?’

  ‘Please, bear with me,’ she said. ‘Can we take those one at a time? The way it looked?’

  ‘Like an angel,’ Alex said resignedly. ‘I know that angels are a mythology common to many worlds and yes I know too that some of our myths are a distorted collective memory of ancient knowledge, but you’ve said yourself that not all of them are and things like angels, fairies, gremlins – they’re a construct of explanations for the operation of blind chance. Your people have no memory or record, do they, of any species matching our mythology of angels?’

  ‘No, we don’t,’ Shion said. ‘But it is important to remember that our Gardens of Memory only commemorate the peoples who were lost in the Falling and that our knowledge of other worlds, other peoples, is very limited and incomplete. We know nothing, for instance, nothing whatsoever, about the Chethari.’

  ‘Oh,’ Alex suddenly realised where her thoughts were tending, and gave her a startled look. ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘I’m not saying it is,’ Shion said. ‘I’m only saying that I think it’s possible. I’ve been going back through the Gide Disclosure – as much as I can, anyway – and I have seventeen references, none direct and not conclusive but, I would say, indicative.’

  Alex looked attentively at her. The Gide Disclosure had now reached such epic proportions that it was believed to exceed the sum total of human knowledge. It had long since passed being bigger than the sum of all the contents of every university library in the League, and measured in sheer volume
of data was now bigger than datanet.

  How much of it was actually information of any use to them at all, however, was still a matter of academic speculation. Even with tens of thousands of people working on it round the clock they could not even keep up with the constant influx of new data, let alone make any inroads on the backlog. So far, the Gider had not been able to figure out, themselves, how to make their data uploads compatible with human systems, so what they handed over when they came to visit the Embassy ship fronting up contact with them were terabytes of incomprehensible jangle, as if the data of a billion files had been thrown into a pot and given a good stir. Piecing together the bits which belonged together was like trying to do a planet-sized 3D jigsaw when you didn’t even have a picture of what it was supposed to be. Algorithms looked for data on what were considered to be the most important subjects; other than that the data was just stacking up in warehouses full of high security tapes. It was part of Shion’s job as their linguist to keep track of how things were going with the Gide Disclosure, which she found fascinating anyway and would often be working on when no more immediate duties required her attention.

  ‘Go on,’ Alex said.

  ‘Okay, but you first.’ She gave him one of her warm smiles, a gleam of amusement in her dark eyes. ‘The fanfare?’ she prompted.

  ‘Oh – yes, all right. The fanfare.’ Alex shook his head. ‘Ridiculous, B-movie history flick stuff. You can’t take anything seriously when it pops up with a ‘ta daa!’, really. Then, how it spoke – it spoke in Standard which is not what experience leads us to believe is how exodiplomacy goes. Even if they know something about our language it’s always garbled and up to us to figure out how to communicate. And it had, now I come to think of it, a slight Chartsey accent which is not what I’d expect from an exo-visitor. And then, what it said… frankly, it might just as well have said ‘Hi, I’m an alien, take me to your leader.’’