Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6)

by S J MacDonald

  My God… thought Alex, and in his mind he was transported back ten thousand years. In that vision was the Olaret ship – an amorphous shape, but vast, and the Olaret themselves very much clearer in his mind. Their form had been preserved in the Gardens of Memory on Pirrell. They had been extremely thin, with arms set low on the body, a small oval head with large flat eyes and a tiny chin. In his mind, Alex could see several of them standing together on some orbital platform, looking down upon the primordial ocean.

  It had been a frozen ocean, then. Geological surveys revealed that Quarus had formed and orbited just beyond the range at which liquid water could exist at the surface. The Olaret had moved the orbit of this planet closer to its star and, as it thawed, seeded it with a rich diversity of oceanic life. It was estimated that this process had taken between two and three hundred years. Only when it was established had the Olaret engineered a survival species, founded on their own DNA. As with all their survival colonies, the offspring they’d created had not only been provided with a functional immune system to resist the plague which was wiping out civilisations, but had been adapted specifically for conditions on their homeworld.

  Alex, descendant of the Olaret himself, knew that he owed his stocky physique and high degree of stamina to their design for the colony on Novaterre. And in that moment he felt almost as if he stood alongside them, listening to them discussing the species they would create for the ice-bound world in which they’d seen such potential. Water breathing, yes, and since verbal communication might be hampered by deep water and fast currents, strongly empathic. Physique, right down to the nature of their hair, had been designed for optimum ease and comfort in their aquatic world.

  The quarians remembered that time. They remembered the Olaret. They still had records of that first colony. It was not a wonder or a marvel to them, just a fact about their history that they learned about as children and rarely troubled to think about again.

  Now, though, Alex felt the wonder of it. This beautiful world teeming with life; a unique sentient species, created by the Olaret as their gift of hope for the future as they faced their own extinction.

  He wasn’t the only one feeling the moment. There were happy exclamations and some whoops of delight as the shuttle ran into the turbulence of the upper atmosphere. Alex looked around at their excited faces and grinned. He was making no effort at all to impose either Novaterran or Fleet dignity on himself. On the contrary, he was being as honest and open as humanly possible.

  The shuttle descended. There was no traffic control. Quarians relied on skilful and considerate piloting for the avoidance of accidents – took them so much for granted, in fact, that they couldn’t understand at all why humans felt the need to impose traffic lanes, flight control, speed limits and landing zones. Here, the shuttle could go anywhere they liked, as fast as they liked, with no reference to any authority whatsoever. It was pilot heaven. Their pilot, Jace Higgs, certainly thought so, as he was singing the bass part of the Gloriatzi.

  Then, as the shuttle came down through the lower levels of cloud, they saw the ocean. It took Alex’s breath away. This was a powerful atmosphere, with almost no land projecting above sea level. Even in the calmest conditions, waves built massively and surged across the oceans tens of metres high. In stormy conditions the waves could mount to staggering height and ferocity.

  They had come in on a trajectory which kept them away from storms and out of the worst of the jet-streams, but even so the ocean below was terrifying. Under the thick cloud, the water looked more like ink than sapphire. Waves were powering over it, twenty, thirty metres high. White foam and spray hurtled from their tops, and where two currents met the waves tore one another apart and tumbled in a violent white-water maelstrom.

  Even with all the training he’d had, even with his experience of swimming with Silvie, Alex felt a momentary qualm at the prospect of hurling himself into that. Physical instincts kicked in, warning him, that’s suicide! It was the same feeling he’d had, he recalled, the first time he’d stood in an airlock with the outer door opening upon the immensity of the cosmos. Stepping outside, trusting in his suit, had needed a good deal of resolve. Here, too, it would take some nerve to leap out of the shuttle into those tumultuous waves.

  There was no question of him not doing it, of course. The thought that he might back out, might revert to a more conventional landing at the human-built spaceport, never even crossed his mind.

  ‘Ewern ETA thirty seconds, skipper,’ Jace informed him, and there was a cheer from the other passengers.

  There was a list on the navigation screen – a list of twenty cities selected at random from those on the daytime hemisphere which were currently experiencing relatively calm weather conditions. The first of these was Ewern. It was a shallow-water conurbation of 1.3 million inhabitants, built in the lee of an island at an average depth of forty metres. Though ‘island’, Alex corrected himself, was hardly an appropriate term, really, for a rocky outcrop which was submerged ninety per cent of the time. As they approached, slowing, he could see the ‘island’ as a crooked crescent of white foam and spray arcing a hundred metres into the air.

  As he got nearer, too, Alex saw a quarian car leap out of the ocean above where he knew the city to be, arcing up on a ballistic trajectory. Quarian vehicles could travel faster in air than in water so it was a fair bet that it was heading some distance. It was certainly heading there at speed, a little craft which shot upward and was supersonic and gone almost before Alex had glimpsed it.

  Feeling almost giddy with excitement, Alex went to stand at the airlock as Jace brought the shuttle to a hover. The waves here, directly in the shelter of the island, were no more than a cross-rippling remnant of the mighty forces exploding against the rock a couple of hundred metres away. Even so, it was a daunting prospect.

  ‘Good luck, skipper!’ one of the crew called out, while the rest gave him encouraging cheers.

  Alex grinned at them. It felt as if he had lived his whole life waiting for this moment. His heart was thudding, every sense keenly alive.

  ‘Have fun,’ he reminded them, his last words of advice to the first contact party before he stepped into the airlock himself, the door closing behind.

  The moment it had done so, the outer hatch opened. Sound roared in. The thunder of breaking waves, the gusts of wind around the shuttle, the hiss and splatter of cascading spray.

  Alex, already breathing through his swim mask, was not affected by the oxygen-rich atmosphere, and his bodysuit kept him from feeling the chill of the wind. Even so, there was a moment of disorientation at sudden exposure to an outside environment after months aboard ship and only one visit to the equally artificial environment of a space station. It felt overwhelming, the sheer scale and space and noise of it all. Behind him, he could feel the warm, safe, familiar cocoon of the shuttle. Ahead of him, one step beyond, was a flying tumult of air and water, a terrifying sense of leaping into the wild unknown.

  Alex stood looking at the ocean several metres below. Jace had brought the shuttle, as directed, to hover two metres above the reach of the highest waves, but the height of them was such that at times Alex was looking a good ten metres down to the surface. This was higher than they had been able to train for a dive-entry in the restricted facilities aboard ship. Silvie, though, had been insistent upon them making that leap, that dive. Creeping down a ladder or being lowered on a line, she’d said, looked ridiculous to quarians, as if adults were crawling like babies. So if they wanted to be taken seriously, they must be confident enough to dive and swim. Psychologically, too, that moment of leaping out of the shuttle was so thrilling for humans that they’d be bubbling with excitement on arrival, which would be very much more attractive to quarians. And if they hadn’t, she’d said, got the nerve to jump, then they shouldn’t be going at all.

  Alex took a breath or two, just to steady himself, then took two steps back from the brink of the airlock – measured, steady paces, one, two.

  Then h
e paused. He could sense the focussed attention of every member of the Fourth, watching through his suit cam. As he raised onto his toes and swung his arms as Silvie had taught him, he could almost feel them all holding their breaths, willing him on.

  One step, pushing forward. The second, pushing up. There was a moment… a moment Alex would remember for ever, in which he arced through the air, curving neatly into a classic dive entry. He could feel the wind pushing at him, hear the pounding of the waves, see the ocean surface racing up at him. It was one of the most perfect moments of his life; freedom, adventure, exhilaration. It was a moment of pure joy.

  And then he hit the surface, plunged through it and arrived on Quarus.

  Nineteen

  It took a few seconds to orient himself, to make sense of what he was seeing. Despite the fact that he was breathing suit-air, there was a degree of bioshock in the sudden change of gravity, the unusually strong magnetosphere and the disorienting leap from gusting wind into dark water.

  Only, as his eyes adjusted and he got his bearings, he realised that it wasn’t dark at all. The sea around him was clear, fading to a twilight blue. Above, the surface was a bright, rolling, churn of waves and foam. Below…

  Oh, below. Alex hung suspended in the water, drifting on a current as he surveyed the city which sprawled across the seabed. As he had expected, much of it looked to his eyes like a reef garden, brilliantly colourful and swarming with multitudes of fish. Buildings, many of them the size of sports stadiums, curved amongst the gardens. They looked as light and delicate as bubbles, with windows and domes ranging from sheer transparency to dazzling rainbow brilliance. Lights sparkled here and there, some from distant windows. Vehicles, mostly the little aqua cars, darted about, as agile as the fish. Tiny figures could be seen, too, swimming about the city with their bright metallic hair floating about them.

  Alex had been prepared for that, or thought he was. What he had not been prepared for was the sheer scale of the place. At some level in his own head he’d been expecting this city to be on the same kind of scale as the human settlement on Serenity. Instead, it spread off to the horizon, kilometre after kilometre of gardens and buildings, fading into the blue.

  1.3 million quarians lived here, and this was just a small, ordinary city. Gazing at it, Alex truly understood the scale of the dilemma the Diplomatic Corps had been wrestling with for decades. Where did you even begin to make contact with a population of more than two billion, without any political or social hierarchy, not even any media in the human understanding of the term? Right now, and for the next few minutes at least, Alex was the only human on the planet. The sheer enormous size of the challenge was so overwhelming that for several seconds he just floated there, trying to take it all in.

  Then he looked down and saw, below him, exactly where he was. Tenkalé Gardens… the gardens created in the quietest, most protected waters of the city.

  They were glorious gardens. There were more than forty square kilometres of them over an undulating ground. The higher areas were reef, the valleys filled with dense, swaying kelp forests. Here and there throughout it all were domes; pink, green and blue in their solid structure and pure transparency above. These, he knew, were air-domes.

  He could see people down there. There were hundreds of them, some alone but mostly in groups, playing with the fish or swimming about apparently in leisurely conversation. There was some kind of very energetic chase game going on amongst the kelp, he noticed, with a horde of figures pursuing a ruby-haired leader.

  Alex adjusted his wrist jets, aimed himself downwards and cruised towards a plateau where he could see several groups moving slowly about, chatting amongst themselves. As he got closer he could see that many of them were interacting with the giant clams which were a feature of the plateau. The clams had fine tendrils floating from their half-open shells, snatching at any unwary tiny fish which might supplement their filter-feeding. Silvie had mentioned once that it made the clams happy if you gave them a finger to tug at – basic creatures as they were, they were sufficiently emotionally responsive to be regarded as pets, not food. People were tickling their tendrils, letting them tug at a finger, as casually as people on another world might pet small furry animals.

  As he drew nearer, though, people turned to look at him in evident surprise. None of them, it would turn out, had ever actually met a human before, though they recognised what he was and even realised who he was as he got close enough for them to see both his features and the crystal quality of his mind.

  None of them fled. They had been told that humans were horrifying, like screaming lunatics stinking with fear and bewildering deceptions. This human, though, was singing with joy and a very attractive, intriguing sparkle of mischief. He was having fun, which wasn’t something quarians had seen much before in any human. It was enough, at least, to keep them where they were, watching him with interest as he picked out a particular group and swam up easily to join them.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, and beamed at them, giving full rein to his sense of humour and to his pleasure in the moment. ‘My name is Alex.’ The laughter in his voice was so evident that it hardly needed empathic senses to see it bubbling in him. ‘I come in peace,’ he declared. ‘And I don’t want to be taken to your leader – just want to hang out here for a bit, if that’s okay?’

  They laughed too.

  ‘Fine,’ one of them said, and Alex understood that they spoke for all.

  Introductions ensued, and as more and more people swam over, curious about this human who’d dropped into their midst, they went on for quite a long time. And then – not coincidentally – precisely at the point where Alex started to feel a bit crowded by all the people around him, most of them simply flitted away with cheerful goodbyes and good wishes.

  He was left with three guides, the three he’d felt most keenly he wanted to get to know better. There was no rationale to that, just a sense of connection, a spark of mutual fascination as their eyes had met and fingertips touched in the customary quarian greeting. One of them – the most vocal – was a queenly woman with the most vivid green eyes Alex had ever seen. He was aware of other features; the flow of amethyst hair, a broad smooth brow and rounded chin, the shapely curves of a slightly plump figure. He took due note, too, of the brightly coloured garment she wore wrapped around her, and was aware of the steady pulsing of the gills above her shoulder blades. Her eyes, though, were mesmerising, like living, liquid emerald lit from within. Her name was Marteyl, the name which she had chosen for herself as she entered adulthood.

  Alex knew better than to ask her, or any quarian, what she did. Quarians did not define themselves in that way, nor did they have any culture of specialist professions. People might well have particular fields of expertise – usually did – but that would not define them into any specific role.

  ‘What are your interests?’ Alex asked.

  ‘Robotic engineering, poetry – gardening, of course.’ Marteyl answered readily, and with just as much curiosity, ‘You?’

  ‘Exploration,’ Alex answered, with the happiest of grins, and that made them laugh again, not at what he said but at the sheer rush of joy in him at being here, at meeting them.

  ‘Captain Gorgeous!’ one of the others teased – word had evidently got about already that Alex von Strada was a little embarrassed by Silvie’s description of him. Alex said nothing, just gave him a rueful grin at which all of them started laughing again.

  The teasing one was Aleth, a man who appeared to be about Alex’s own age though he could be anything between twenty and eighty. He had strong bony features and a dense, rubbery skin – a deep water adapt with the huge eyes designed to make the most of the light in those shadowy depths. He wasn’t, it turned out, a resident of Ewern but had, as he put it, come up to the shallows for a swim. His interests, he said, were in vehicle maintenance and medicine.

  The third member of the trio who’d remained with him was the most physically striking, though. His name was Othol and he
was a shallow-water reef adapt, his skin protected by fine coppery scales, his hair a riotous tumble of kelp-like strands. He didn’t speak much but there was a keen intelligence in those darkly glittering eyes, and a quality, too, which Alex would have found it more difficult to define. This was someone he knew he could be at his ease with, quiet and companionable in that wordless way he often was with Buzz or Davie North. It was as if, in this most alien of adapts, he recognised a friend.

  ‘I like to learn about things,’ Othol said, when asked about his interests. This made him an academic, in human terms. His status was in no way equivalent, though. There were no universities on Quarus, nothing so structured. Othol could study whatever he wanted, obtaining whatever resources he needed from the social generosity of others. In his turn, he would pay his way in society by undertaking all manner of chores. In that, he was more akin to a student doing part-time work to support themselves through college than a full-time academic. He might well, however, be an expert in his field and someone others would touch base with when a high level of knowledge was needed to resolve a question. Right now, though, he was keen to learn about Alex, and through him, about humans in general. He was fascinated for a start, by Alex’s swimming gear.

  ‘This isn’t what humans normally wear,’ he observed, touching a finger to Alex’s arm, feeling the material of his swim suit.