Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6)

by S J MacDonald

  Shion looked at Alex, her own expression rueful, as this only confirmed what she had feared would happen when the crew found out what had happened. It had drawn a line between her and the rest of them, a line between human/non-human which had, until that moment, been irrelevant.

  Alex smiled back, quietly assured.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘in the circumstances, I would be very happy to give you leave of absence so that you can undertake a diplomatic role here on behalf of your own people.’

  Shion looked shocked. ‘Certainly not!’ she said, in a crisp tone which held more reproof than respect. Apparently realising that herself, she added, ‘Skipper. I never have and never will take on any official diplomatic role in representing my homeworld. I do not have the authority to do that and it would be entirely inappropriate.’ She fixed him in a stern gaze. ‘I am a citizen of the League now,’ she reminded him. ‘And sworn to service in the same way as every other member of this ship’s company. So whatever I do here, or anywhere else, will be done as a member of this crew, and I would not have that any other way.’

  Alex smiled again, quietly satisfied now as the cheering broke out again, a good deal louder this time and a great deal more prolonged. Shion herself looked a little surprised for a moment. Then she realised what Alex had meant when he’d assured her that the crew would be fine with what had happened, and why he’d made that offer in the way he had and at the moment he had. Provoked into a firm statement of her position as a member of the Fourth, Shion herself had overcome the unease which her very different reception by the quarians had generated. Now they were expressing their pride and solidarity with her, too – alien princess, yes, but their alien princess.

  Shion saluted the skipper with an acknowledging grin and he returned both salute and smile with warm appreciation. Then he moved right on, looking around at the rest of the officers in a way which brought their own applauding to an end, pleasantly but bringing them back to focus. ‘So – any more questions?’

  There were none, so he dismissed the briefing and authorised the transmitting of the recording to the Embassy at Serenity. The signal had deteriorated further as they made their way from Brava to Quarus and was now barely operating at between forty six and forty eight per cent accuracy in transmission. They were still, however, able to decode signals if they were sent twice with a short break between, so remained, amazingly, in contact with the world so far across the Gulf. Signals could cross the distance in just seventeen hours which it had taken them two and a half months to accomplish – a historic achievement in the development of comms technology but something which the Fourth themselves was just taking for granted by then. Geminax was performing slightly better than expected, which was great, but the trial of the comms system had only ever been a side operation.

  And as the next wave of goodwill ambassadors left the ship at 0800 and the first wave of visitors from Quarus signalled their desire to be picked up by Fourth’s shuttles from various locations, they settled down to their first full day of full-on exodiplomacy.

  It was full-on, too. The ship was hijacked for the first time that day, with a group of quarians keen to take it for a spin around the system. It was, of course, only a technical hijacking. They didn’t ask because they didn’t need to. They could see very well that nobody minded them taking the frigate for a little cruise around the planets. It was only when they started steering it towards the launch tunnel that people became alarmed, at which they turned it away again, accepting that the humans wouldn’t be happy with them taking the ship superlight.

  ‘Sorry – it’s just that we have to do very thorough preparations before we’re happy to go through a launch,’ Alex explained. ‘And we usually start those at least twenty five hours beforehand.’

  The quarian who was holding the conn at the time grinned back at him merrily. Her name was Karist and she was a bright, chatty reef adapt with vivid orange hair and iridescent green and copper scales. Alex and everyone else on the command deck found her stunningly beautiful and she, of course, was very well aware of that.

  ‘Why do you say sorry when you’re not?’ she queried. ‘Why don’t you just say ‘Relieved’?’

  Alex chuckled. His overwhelming feeling when Karist had turned the ship away from launch-tunnel approach had indeed been one of relief that that had been so easily avoided.

  ‘Social etiquette,’ he explained, since Silvie had informed her people of the various categories of deception humans practised. It was a tribute to her that quarians could now distinguish between the kind of untruth called ‘tact’ and that which the humans themselves would consider a deliberate lie.

  ‘Weird,’ Karist observed, and then, as she steered the ship towards a gas giant, commented, ‘you’re enjoying this, though.’

  Alex admitted as much with a grin. ‘We’re never allowed to do this kind of thing,’ he explained. ‘There are very firm rules about navigating inside systems, especially for warships. Mostly, we just have to go straight to our assigned parking orbit and stay there. We are also,’ he glanced at astrogation screens, ‘travelling a lot faster than we’re ever allowed to normally.’

  They were, by then, approaching half the speed of light, a velocity they were only normally allowed on the tightly controlled lift and run to the launch tunnel. The Heron, in fact, was quite often within system limits whilst superlight, but those were uninhabited systems. Alex was having fun. And so were the crew, loving the freedom and skill with which their ship was being handled. It was, perhaps, key to their confidence in that that they were already accustomed to seeing the ship put through extraordinary high speed manoeuvres with Shion at the helm. With the skipper obviously happy about Karist’s piloting, anyway, so were they.

  Karist skimmed them into a beautifully looped slingshot orbit around the gas giant, slalomed through four moons and arced the ship up out of the orbital plane.

  ‘It’s very strange,’ she said, chuckling herself at the surge of enjoyment from everyone around her, ‘I don’t see what pleasure there is in this, at all. I know it is faster but it doesn’t feel as fast as piloting an aqua car, the planets don’t look as good on your screens as on our holos and the ship manoeuvres like a pregnant whale. But you’re all loving it, which is so nice.’ She beamed benevolently at the skipper, who’d taken that description of his ship without a flicker of resentment. ‘And surprising.’ she gestured around, indicating not only her own piloting but the other quarian visitors all over the ship, many of them very hands-on with the tech. ‘The humans on the Embassy panicked if we touched any of their tech.’

  Alex knew it. The Diplomatic Corps kept saying how much they wanted quarians to visit their ship, pointing out that they kept a shuttle at the spaceport on standby ready to bring up any visitors who wanted to come, and that they stood ready to receive them at any time.

  The Diplomatic Corps, though, had their own notions about welcoming visitors to the Embassy. That had meant welcoming them into a designated exodiplomacy zone, security sealed and quarantined, surrounded by the powerful electro-magnetic screens which interfered with quarian senses. Such encounters were handled by the ambassador in person, too, with an escorted tour, offers of refreshment and attempts at discussion all of which were held at a high degree of formal courtesy. Quarian visitors were strongly discouraged even from using drinks dispensers for themselves, after an incident some forty years before involving a quarian starting to take a dispenser to bits in order to improve the quality of the product it was dispensing. It was not surprising, really, given the rigid protocols and miserable, desperate atmosphere aboard that ship, that no quarians had been there for more than two decades.

  ‘We have had Silvie with us for more than a year,’ Alex pointed out. ‘And we’ve been learning from her as much as she has been learning from us.’

  Karist nodded. ‘We’ve been learning too,’ she said, and they smiled at one another in happy understanding.

  Things went well, all day. Or at least, as well as could r
easonably be expected. There were several minor incidents, including one in which an over-confident member of the crew attempted to eat shellfish. He had not appreciated that it would be served raw, and at the first feeling of the texture in his mouth he introduced the quarians to the human response of projectile vomiting. There was mass reaction; news and dismay which rippled right throughout the population, not just at the spectacular vomiting episode but at the feelings of utter horror which had gone with it so powerfully that several nearby quarians had needed support in dealing with the shock. Consensus was very rapidly achieved, after that. No humans were to be allowed to eat shellfish, a decision Alex for one greeted with more relief than regret.

  It was an incident which the Diplomatic Corps would have considered very definitely a ‘crash and burn’ by the person involved. According to their own protocols the individual would be immediately withdrawn from front-line contact and removed from the Embassy by the next available transport.

  In the Fourth, Able Star Tonos Trevaga got a medical check over, some leg-pulling consolation from his mates, and his name went straight back on the list for groundside visiting. The Corps policy of pulling anyone out of contact roles if things had gone wrong was entirely typical of them as an organisation and, in itself, entirely opposite to the way the Fourth approached things.

  And it was fine. The quarians had shied away from further contact with other ‘crash and burn’ individuals simply because they came back to them with such feelings of guilt, failure, anxiety and desperation to make amends that they were really unpleasant company. A/S Trevaga on the other hand was just fine with it. For one thing he’d come around to seeing the funny side of it by the teasing of his mates, and for another he’d been helped to get the incident in context by officers in debriefing. There’d been no sense of ‘addressing failure’ from them. On the contrary, they’d been supportive, amused, reminding him that such incidents were only to be expected in exodiplomacy.

  A/S Trevaga went back, therefore, wanting to apologise to the people he’d been sick over but by no means torn up with angst. His offer to help with any clean-up work they could let him do was very well received, too, as a very quarian response to having made demands on the generosity of others. There was nothing that needed doing right then, or at least, nothing he was considered qualified for, but the quarians said that they’d call on him if there was anything he could help with at some future time. And that, as Buzz noted, was a major step forward in itself.

  ‘He’s been accepted into the social nexus, theoretically at least, as a potential contributor to society and not just a visitor receiving hospitality,’ Buzz told Alex, having filed a far more extensive report about that into the log. ‘The next, critical step in that is of course for members of our crew to be allowed to make social contributions. But it is a positive step, and all credit to A/S Trevaga for turning around a concern incident into such a positive achievement.’

  Alex agreed, though even as he was noting a commendation for A/S Trevaga for his handling of the matter, he was distracted by a further incident aboard the Heron, right then. A group of quarians had discovered Kate in the daycabin, having a class in policy and procedure which was being taught by Hetty Leavam.

  They were evidently entranced. At the surface level, there was Kate’s clear, brilliant mind and the valiant warrior qualities of Hetty Leavam which Silvie described as ‘pretty’. Visually, too, any observer would say that Kate was paying close attention to the module she was working through while the commander was monitoring her with a firm, exacting authority.

  Quarians, however, could see the reality. Kate could have worked through the material in this module in fifteen minutes, had she been able to access the lecture through reading the text and worked through it at her own pace. This, however, was a lecture-based module in which the cadet was obliged to follow the lecture as given, making notes, just as they would one day be expected to follow a briefing.

  Back on Chartsey, Hetty would normally deliver such classes with a live lecture, being of the view that this was of far more value than using a recorded holo. Today, though, she was using one of her own recorded lectures and merely supervising while Kate watched it and worked through the tasks.

  In reality, neither of them was giving more than a fraction of their attention to that task. Hetty was busy with mission-related analysis and so absorbed in it that Kate would have had to stick her feet on the desk before her supervisor would have noticed any inattention. And Kate, for her part, was just going through the motions in completing the module while the greater part of her mind was soaring through multidimensional space. Hetty was perfectly aware of this and tacitly complicit in it. She had, in fact, chosen to deliver the module via recording on the unspoken understanding that this would enable both of them to get on with more important things whilst superficially fulfilling the requirements of the class.

  For quarians, this was enthralling. The consensus between instructor and cadet was one of perfect harmony, a collusion in which they were working together to give the illusion of doing one thing while in reality they were both doing another. To quarians it was like coming across some bizarre avant-garde performance art, as baffling as it was engaging.

  ‘No, no, don’t stop!’ One of them asked, as Hetty would have set aside her work out of courtesy to the visitors. ‘Please just carry on, this is amazing!’

  Hetty and Kate both did just that. Kate found it easy to switch off all external distractions when she was thinking, anyway, and Hetty could have focussed her mind even in the midst of a tornado. So as more and more quarians came in to view the phenomenon, instructor and cadet really did just carry on as they had been, disregarding their audience.

  Seeing that they now had fourteen visitors packed into the daycabin, though, Buzz gave a little chuckle.

  ‘I think perhaps, dear boy,’ he drew Alex’s attention to what was going on, ‘that we will have to note another credit for Cadet Naos in coping with disrupted study.’

  They looked at the screen which showed the commander and cadet serenely continuing at their work while fourteen quarians clustered about them, buzzing with admiring exclamations and comments amongst themselves.

  ‘Yes,’ Alex said, straight-faced. ‘I believe that the circumstances would justify rating that as a disrupted class.’

  Buzz gave him a look which surprised Alex a little by the warmth of its affection. Their mild, good-humoured exchange had not contained anything which Alex felt could have triggered such a moment, yet the paternal feelings Buzz had for him were very evident. Buzz chuckled, too, a long rich gurgle of amusement.

  ‘Just thinking,’ he said, as Alex looked interrogative. ‘You really are in your element.’

  Alex thought about that. If Buzz meant that as ‘being happy because he was doing what he could do best’ then he was right. This mission was a dream for him, meeting a people he’d been longing to get to know since he was a child. All normal restrictions on him as a Fleet officer had been pulled away, giving him a sense of freedom he had never experienced before. He had an amazing team with him, too, people as dedicated to this mission and loving every moment of it just as much as he was himself. It felt as if they were surfing on joy.

  Buzz could see that in him, too, a zest and energy which came from the heart. Silvie had known exactly what she was doing, first when she attached herself to Alex as her guide in human space, and second when she’d chosen him as ambassador to her people. What he was achieving here sprang not from what he did but from who he was. Training and preparation had helped, for sure, reducing the shock of encountering a culture so very different from their own, but that wholehearted enjoyment could only come from the spirit of a true adventurer.

  ‘Well, yes?’ Alex said, still slightly perplexed as to Buzz’s feeling the need to comment, since it was self-evident that he was indeed having the time of his life.

  ‘Never mind, dear boy,’ Buzz broke into a broad grin. ‘It isn’t important.

 
As Alex burst out laughing at having the exodiplomacy rescue deployed on him, the subject was dropped.

  Twenty Two

  Five days later, Alex met Salomah.

  He was visiting a deep water city – so deep, indeed, that he used a quarian car to get there. He could have swum the two kilometres down from the surface to the city, but there was a heavy algal bloom in that region at the time. Quarians didn’t swim through algae on that scale any more than humans tended to go for strolls in swamps. The algae was extremely dense, a cloud of it hundreds of kilometres long, a lurid red streak even from space. Up close, it was like a vast slop of broken jelly, a red fog which felt greasy on your skin and so blinding that you couldn’t see your hand even centimetres in front of your face. Since diving into that really didn’t appeal, Alex landed at a nearby shallow water city, breezed through it exchanging greetings with the people who came to see him, and helped himself to a car.

  It hadn’t taken long to establish that the quarians were happy for suitably qualified pilots to use their transport system. And there were, indeed, many such qualified pilots. One of the preparations aboard ship had been the setting up of an aqua car simulator. Those who already held advanced pilot’s licenses, a high proportion of the crew, had been able to train for independent aqua car piloting just in case they got the opportunity at Quarus. With that permission having been given, every pilot qualified to do so had raced to enjoy that experience.

  It was not the first time Alex had used a car here, but it was still sufficiently new to him to be thrilling. Quarians were laughing as they watched him go through a terminal, as excited as a child looking forward to a treat.

  Alex laughed too.

  ‘So much fun,’ he said, and walked through one of the airlocks into a waiting car.