Quarus

by S J MacDonald

  Quarus

  S J MacDonald

  Copyright © 2017 S J MacDonald

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-1974076963

  ISBN-10: 1974076962

  DEDICATION

  For everyone who has said

  ‘Oh, I’d love to write a book.’

  Go to!

  One

  ‘Ms Ungeline Beeby, sir.’

  Lt Allison, a newcomer to the Heron, did not understand why the Exec had told him to be cold and curt in all his dealings with Ms Beeby. She was only a kid, and he would normally have given her the friendliest of welcomes. At Buzz’s request, though, he had greeted her with chilly hauteur, gone through security protocols with unnecessary severity and brought her through to the interdeck lounge with the air of a guard escorting a particularly smelly prisoner.

  Ungeline Beeby was trying very hard not to look intimidated. She had a reputation as a fearless investigative journalist to live up to, after all.

  Hold your nerve, girl, she reminded herself, and consciously straightened her back.

  All the same, she had to fight against an instinct to step back a pace or two as Captain von Strada stood up to meet her.

  She was acutely aware that while her own much-prized reputation had, until a couple of days ago, extended no further than her high school, Captain von Strada’s was League wide. And while her reputation was that of a feisty young journalist, his was monstrous.

  He didn’t look like a monster, she had to admit. But it was difficult to know what to believe where Captain von Strada was concerned. His established public image was that of a frozen-faced robot. A journalist had once compared his personal charm – unfavourably – with that of a car park ticket machine. It was said that he was quite different when you met him in private, in circumstances where he would relax. There had even been, in recent weeks, carefully edited release of footage from aboard his ship showing him in brisk professional mode and in casual, laughing conversation. This had been an attempt by the Admiralty to show that his infamous public manner was just that, together with explanations about his Novaterran heritage which tried to show how difficult it was for him to show any emotion in formal situations.

  None of this had worked. As always with Admiralty efforts to redeem Captain von Strada’s awful reputation, it had backfired on them with many regarding it as yet another whitewash and a feeble, unconvincing one at that.

  Ms Ungeline Beeby, aged twelve and a quarter, had an open mind about it, as she considered to be her duty as an investigative journalist. Even so, actually meeting the man was a little bit daunting. He was not much taller than she was herself, but stocky in his build, good looking in a way with his regular features and clear grey eyes, but without the charisma that would get people calling him handsome. He was thirty three – quite old to Ms Beeby’s eyes, technically old enough to be her father.

  ‘Ms Beeby…’ Alex didn’t smile – he looked serious, perhaps a little concerned. He was making a mental note to have a word with Mr Allison, as the Lt made a crisp about-face and marched himself away. It was quite understandable that the Fourth would resent the imposition of an investigative journalist on them. When that journalist was twelve years old, though, Alex would have expected a kinder reception. ‘Welcome to the Heron,’ he said, and held out his hand.

  Ungeline had been taught how to shake hands as part of her preparation for this visit, and stepped up bravely to the challenge.

  As she put her hand into his, hesitantly, Alex felt the tremor of nerves. Damn Mr Allison, he thought, how could he be so brusque with a child like this? And as he thought it, the reserve on his own face dissolved into a warm, reassuring smile. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said, and indicated the chairs behind him. ‘Please – do come and sit down.’ He gestured towards a wall-hatch and counter which was set out with snacks and fruit. ‘Can we offer you some refreshment?’ Trying to think what kids on Therik were most likely to drink, he ventured, ‘a milk soda?’

  Ungeline gave him a sharp look for that. Investigative journalists, she felt certain, did not drink milk sodas. If she had accepted anything at all it would have been coffee, black. Admittedly she loathed the stuff and could barely swallow it without grimacing, but image was important.

  ‘Not,’ she said, ‘while I’m working.’

  A flicker of amusement crossed Alex’s face and he surveyed her, then, with as much interest as concern. She was a rather skinny kid, not yet filling out with the rounding influence of puberty. Her hair, ruthlessly glossed into a scrunchie on top of her head, looked as if it would normally be a fluff-ball around her angular, determined little face. She was wearing an absurdly grown-up outfit, a brand new jacket and pants suit in a grown-up grey along with a yellow silky top which looked as if it might have belonged to her mother. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see that she’d borrowed her mum’s shoes, too, but a glance at her feet showed that Ungeline had complied with shipboard safety rules and was wearing soft-soled deck shoes. She had on no makeup at all, which Alex would have recognised as odd if he’d been slightly more up to speed with the habits of girls in high school. As it was, he merely accepted it as appropriate for a child of her age, fresh-faced and amusingly dressed in an outfit too mature for her.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, and sat down himself with a courteous gesture to the seat that was waiting for her. ‘If this will suit you?’

  Ungeline looked around. The interdeck lounge looked more like the lounge on a liner than anything she’d expected to find on a warship. It was stylishly fitted out with club-style sofas and chairs in conversational groupings around the outside and small tables in the middle. The décor was pale grey, dominated on one side by a wall-sized holoscreen and on the other by a twenty metre aquarium. The holoscreen was currently showing a real-time view of the Therik system, just as if there’d been a magnifying window there. Therik itself was hanging in the top right corner of the screen, a predominantly green and brown world where it was visible through bands of cloud. The larger of the near-orbit space stations was over on the left, with streams of traffic moving to and from the planet. Alex had positioned himself so that she could film him with this screen as the background, but Ungeline hesitated. Twelve or not, she had a keen eye for a visual cliché. Interviewing a starship skipper with a space-view background was as trite as interviewing a sports personality with a stadium behind them. And besides, there was something far more interesting here.

  ‘Is that real?’ She’d been told that the Fourth had an aquarium aboard their ship, but had imagined it to be something like the fish tank they had in her primary school. This was enormous, and looked like an actual reef, full of beautiful vivid corals and fish she’d never seen before.

  ‘Yes,’ Alex admitted, because it was a bizarre thing to have on any starship, let alone a frigate. ‘It’s a living reef aquarium.’

  Ungeline’s eyes narrowed slightly, then she gave a little nod.

  ‘I want to film with that behind you,’ she stated, and gave him a look which challenged him to refuse.

  Alex, however, raised no objections at all. In fact, he had a word with a couple of people sitting at a table which would be in shot.

  ‘Ms Beeby wants to film this way… would you mind…?’

  ‘Not at all,’ the taller of the two women assured him, and they got up and moved obligingly, taking their drinks and the game of triplink they were playing to another table. Ungeline said thank you – as her granny always said, good manners cost nothing. Neither of the women struck her as at all remarkable. The taller one was wearing the overall-style outfit that they called shipboard rig, with the half-stars insignia Ungeline knew meant that she was a Sub-lt. She had deep blue-black skin, fine-boned features and eyes like melted chocolate, her hair in a tre
ndy geometric crop and her manner very easy. The other woman was not much older by the look of her than Ungeline herself. She was a pixy-faced, mischievous looking girl with a hairstyle Ungeline categorised as ‘stupid’. Dying your hair metallic shades was so old-fashioned on Therik that even her granny would think it outdated, and that silver-platinum look was just so… well, her granny would say common, and Ungeline herself, proud of her more extensive vocabulary, would be tempted to say vulgar.

  At any rate, the women moved out of the way, and Ungeline got to work setting up her camera. They had only allowed her to bring one camera aboard, though she was already proficient at managing three or even four while conducting an interview. They had inspected her camera, too, before she came and then again at the airlock, putting some sort of security lock on it so it could not interface with shipboard systems. She was only allowed to film here, in this room, at an angle approved by Captain von Strada. But that – even that – was more than any journalist had ever been allowed to do.

  It did not take her long to set the camera up, floating at the point from which she could film both herself and Captain von Strada with the aquarium behind him.

  ‘All right,’ she said, settling herself with a purposeful air and making a well-practised declaration. ‘Ungeline Beeby, reporting for Wellerton Net.’ Wellerton High School was one of eight high schools serving the city of Anthel, population 0.83 million, claims to fame… having an old-fashioned street where a famous advert had been filmed in the previous century, and being the home of the Anthel Potteries. It was also, if Ungeline Beeby had any say about it, going to be known as the birthplace of one of the League’s foremost investigative journalists.

  ‘Captain von Strada,’ she addressed him with elaborate courtesy, ‘thank you for agreeing to speak with me.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ said Alex, who had not actually been given any choice. Orders had been given by the First Lord in person. Alex had protested on multiple grounds, the first of which was the welfare of Ungeline Beeby herself. First Lord Dix Harangay had overruled him, though, pointing out that these orders were part of a very much bigger decision coming from the Senate and that neither of them had any choice.

  So, here Alex was, sitting on the interdeck wearing – as instructed – the tech overalls which were normal, casual wear for everyone aboard ship. He would have liked to ignore the camera, but that was difficult. Ungeline had set it to shine a day-bright spot on him for clarity of filming, so he sat in a circle of brilliance like a specimen on a brightly lit slide. She had set the camera low, too, so the dazzle of it was niggling at the corner of his eye.

  ‘So,’ said Ungeline. She had already decided what her first question would be, and had practiced it many times, ‘Did you really not know where Carrearranis was before you went there?’

  Alex gave a slight, rueful smile. He had expected some degree of conspiracy theory to arise over the unexpected discovery of an inhabited world just four weeks over their borders. He had not, though, had any idea how widely those theories would be believed by the public.

  ‘No, we really didn’t,’ he said, and at her encouraging nod, explained, ‘The people of Telathor have believed for a long time that one of the four living worlds they could see in that region was inhabited. That belief is part of their oral history, stories which have been told since there were people on Telathor. There have been eleven expeditions in the last century alone, trying to reach them. But the space is so highly energised it was impossible for starships to traverse it safely. When the Telethorans heard that we were testing a new kind of technology which would enable us to explore that region, they asked for us to go there, so we did. We went to Oreol first, because that was the closest, and then we looked at which of the other three we thought would be most likely to have people living on them. A maths student from Telathor, Janil Caldova, helped us with that, working out the probabilities. He said that the most likely world was one called Aseltor, and we thought so too, so that’s where we went.’

  Ungeline looked searchingly at him. ‘Was it hard to get there?’

  Alex remembered; days upon days of tentative astrogation, probing blind alleys and finding their way mostly by instinct.

  ‘Quite hard, yes,’ he said. ‘It needed a lot of care and patience, having to turn around and retrace our route very often.’ Recalling that they were supposed to have sustained impact damage on their way out to Carrearranis, he added, ‘and we brushed through the edge of a radioactive storm which did some damage to our ship.’

  He was astonished, even as he said that, how readily the public had accepted that explanation for the damage which the Heron had sustained. Groundsiders rarely had even the most basic understanding of superlight physics, of course, but even so, the ‘radioactive storm’ story would barely have passed scientific muster even in a movie. Ironically, they would not have believed the truth, not for a moment. Reports about ancient alien tech which had blasted their comms would have been dismissed at once as ludicrous.

  ‘Were you scared?’ Ungeline asked, with some concern.

  Nobody had ever asked Alex that before and he was entirely unprepared for the question. He took a moment to consider, though, thinking back and trying to be honest.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he admitted. ‘But mostly I was just enjoying it. Exploring where nobody has ever been before is a wonderful experience, a real adventure. And then of course we found Carrearranis, which was…’ he smiled, ‘such a joy, and such a privilege to represent the League, too, in making contact with them.’

  Ungeline could feel her heart thudding hard and her own stomach fluttering a bit as she ventured on her toughest question yet, the one she’d thought of as The Big One during rehearsals, ‘But you declared war on them, the Carrearranians, didn’t you?’

  Alex gave a smile, then, which was outwardly patient but with a twinkle of mischief the young journalist spotted at once. ‘I did that, yes,’ he said. ‘My call, and I stand by it, absolutely. It was the best thing I could do for them, the right thing to do, to declare hostilities and accept their surrender. Doing that made them a League Protectorate, giving them all kinds of rights, just the same as if they were one of our own colonies. It was, I promise you, a technicality – something we agreed between us. There was never any actual war, no kind of fighting. The ‘hostilities’ lasted, I think for about three and a half minutes, and the biggest problem we had with it was getting them to stop laughing while they stated their terms for surrender.’

  ‘So it was a fix,’ Ungeline said, with evident satisfaction.

  ‘Well, I would prefer to describe it as an amicable solution to a complex problem,’ Alex said. He would have gone on to explain just how complex the political and legal problem had been, and how the declaration of hostilities had cut through all of that like a laser-blade through a tangle of rope, but Ungeline was already moving on.

  ‘A fix, then,’ she said, with pride in her ability to reduce politico-speak to everyday language. ‘So,’ she fixed him in another gimlet stare, ‘Did aliens help you to find Carrearranis?’

  ‘Aliens?’ Alex looked mildly surprised.

  ‘Aliens,’ said Ungeline, with emphasis, and then went straight on, ‘You’re not going to deny it, are you? Aliens are real.’

  ‘Well,’ said Alex carefully, ‘we believe that there are civilisations beyond the barrier we call the Firewall, but we know so little about them that we don’t even know whether they’re human like us, or not. In any case we tend to say ‘exo-civilisations’ rather than ‘aliens’.’

  ‘But there are aliens.’ She was not giving up on this one. ‘And,’ she stressed, ‘and they visit our worlds, don’t they?’

  Alex gave her a look of bland innocence.

  ‘To the best of my knowledge,’ he said, ‘there are no exo-visitors on any of our worlds.’

  And that too was true, in its way. All the Solarans who had been visiting League worlds had withdrawn in distress after the debacle at Carrearranis, saying nothing but ‘Fea
r, Pain, Grief’ as they retreated from humanity en-masse. The only other two non-humans Alex was aware of in League space were not on any planet, either, but sitting about three metres away. He didn’t glance in their direction, but he was acutely aware of them both – the tall dark woman at the nearby table was the first of her people ever to visit the League, a traveller from the mysterious Veiled World. The impish young woman she was playing at triplink was Ambassador Silver, genetically engineered by her people specifically for the purpose of diplomacy between themselves and humans.

  ‘But they say,’ said Ungeline, ‘that there are aliens on your ship.’ She stared fixedly at him. ‘Is that true? Are there aliens here?’

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ Alex countered.

  ‘I think there are,’ she faced him down boldly. ‘I know there are. Everyone knows,’ she gave him an accusing look with that. ‘It’s really stupid for you to keep on denying it.’

  ‘Hmmn.’ Alex said. ‘Well, suppose I was to tell you,’ he lowered his voice a little, conspiratorially, ‘that the ladies over there…’ he indicated the two women quietly playing triplink, ‘that one of them is an alien princess and the other is a mermaid?’

  Ungeline’s expression set hard. ‘I’m twelve,’ she pointed out, with cold severity. ‘Not five!’ Alex grinned, but before he could say anything she went straight on, ‘Anyway, the alien’s a man – I’ve seen footage!’

  She undoubtedly had, too, as the media had been pursuing Jonas Sartin with a fervour that would have been a credit to them if he had been the much rumoured non-human member of the Fourth.

  ‘Oh – you mean Commander Sartin?’ Alex couldn’t help laughing at that. ‘Sorry, Ms Beeby, but no. Mr Sartin is not an alien, he’s just a very hard working, dedicated officer. I’m afraid that people got the wrong end of the stick with that one when they heard that we were calling him ‘Super Sartin’ here in the Fourth – which is just a nickname, you see, because he is extremely hard working and up until recently has been managing somehow to do three jobs at once, being a watch commander, our finance officer and the Internal Affairs officer all at the same time. If you investigate, honestly, you will find thousands of people who have known him right from nursery through to all the ships and bases he’s served at throughout his career. He’s human, I promise you that.’