Quarus

by S J MacDonald

  Not, perhaps, a world with obvious potential as a colony, although with due care people could certainly adapt to life here. Had adapted to life here, some of them loving it here so much that they’d effectively moved in to become permanent residents. Even if it was mooted as a colony, though, Alex knew that there would be very few takers. Quite apart from the dramatic nature of the tidal environment and its remote location, there was the psychological factor. This might be a relatively young planet but its star was fading out, and even though this world would be habitable for at least another million years, people wanted to feel that they were building a colony with a longer use-by date than that. And there was, besides, something quite sad about looking up at a pale and fading sun – no bright sunny days here to gladden the heart.

  It made Alex happy, though, to see all that natural drama rolling beneath him, and happier still when he came in sight of the X-base itself.

  It was dark there by then. This planet rotated fast – once every 6.87 hours, shipboard – and since it was obviously impractical to adapt to local time, the people at the base just stuck to Chartsey clocks. There would be three short bursts of daylight today, but for now the sky was a murky black and the landmass below a barely visible, dark undulation.

  And there was the base. He had known just how big it would be but even so he was surprised, as seeing it lit up made it seem even bigger than it was. He’d thought of it as being roughly the same as the Fourth’s base on Therik in terms of size, a cluster of buildings about two kilometres across, bigger if you included things like parking zones. But it was, he saw, a lot more than that. There were buildings here, real buildings, not domes or prefabs, but structures built using local materials to minimise what the ships had had to bring with them. Some were stone, but many used sheets of metal for walls and rooves. It wasn’t as if you’d have to work very hard to get them, after all – such fragments, known as ‘flakes’, could be found in many places on the surface of one of the inner worlds, flaking off from the exposed core of the shattered planet. They were a striking green-copper colour, giving the base a strangely sculptured look, as if the whole thing was a massive art installation.

  Alex took his bearings as he came in to land at the spaceport, exchanging ritual confirmations with traffic control. Over there, yes, the Admiralty offices, his own destination. That long sprawl of buildings with the mass of hangars behind them was Excorps. Over there was the Embassy, the biggest of the stone buildings, and those striking shard-built towers were the university complex, with a big antique telescope on the plaza before them. To the other side of the spaceport were neatly laid out streets of prefab housing and leisure facilities referred to by the residents as ‘town’. The current population of Serenity was one thousand, eight hundred and sixty four, not counting the crews and passengers of ships in orbit, nor the couple of hundred people who lived on the space station.

  It must be, Alex mused, as he shut down the shuttle’s systems, the least secret secret-base in history. Pictures of this place had even appeared on the news, from time to time, though always angled carefully towards the university and with no hint that there was very much else here. As far as the public was concerned – the very small number of them who were interested at all – this was Research Base Serenity, predominantly an astronomical array. The even fewer people who looked into it would discover that Serenity was funded jointly by League universities and corporate sponsorship. Occasionally, it might be admitted in a casual kind of way that there was also an Excorps base here which they used as a jumping off point for exploring into the Gulf. But that made it sound like little more than some portacabins and a shed, not the major exploration base it actually was. More than five hundred of the people here were Excorps personnel, and eight of the ships currently in orbit were theirs, too. They even had a small but very well equipped spacedocks.

  It was the fact that it was an X-base, with an embassy staffed with exodiplomatic specialists, which was the real secret being kept from the public. And that too might change, if the disclosure about the reality of Quarus went as well as they were hoping for.

  Not allowing himself to daydream about what things might be like here in a couple of years, though, Alex left the shuttle to find that he was being saluted by an eager-beaver young officer who’d obviously come racing to meet and escort him into the Admiral’s presence.

  It felt good to walk – not in a suit, not needing grav boots, just walking in the open air. It was quite chilly and the air was thinner than he was used to, with a damp, ferny scent on the breeze. They were not actually walking on the surface of Serenity itself, but on broad walkways which had railings either side. Beyond them were gardens, more dimly lit, which merged into fern-forest within a hundred metres or so. Beyond that was dark, though Alex knew that the base occupied a plateau, the ground rolling away gently in all directions.

  He knew why, too – planting a building on any kind of slope, here, or in any place close to a hill, was just asking for it to be slammed and buried by rock avalanche or mudslide. This was the safest place to be in an earthquake, and far enough from the coast, too, and high enough not to be inundated even by the biggest tsunami this planet could produce.

  Even so, all the buildings and even the walkways were on stabilising gimbals, with every protective system there was.

  And yet, even amongst all that strangeness, Alex found himself instantly at home when he stepped into the Admiralty building. He almost laughed out loud just at the smell of it, that familiar scent of pine cleaning gel issued to all Fleet ships and premises. And yes, there was just the same décor, same furniture, same pictures on the walls, everything just the same as if he’d stepped into any admiralty offices, anywhere.

  And, very soon, Terrible Tennet. She had an office on the third, uppermost floor of the building and welcomed him into it with a handshake.

  ‘Would you like some refreshment?’ she offered, as near to hospitably as she ever came.

  ‘Water would be good, thank you, ma’am,’ said Alex, knowing that she drank little else while on duty and feeling that he didn’t really want coffee at the moment, anyway. This planet had a relatively low bioshock index – the measure of how much it would impact the average person when they stepped out into its environment for the first time. There were no unfamiliar pollens or allergens here, gravity was near enough to shipboard standard for a spacer to find it comfortable, the air was thin but sufficient so long as you weren’t trying to sprint, and the magnetosphere was not particularly powerful.

  Even so, Alex was feeling a little off-balance. He would not have said that he had much of a natural bump of direction but things just felt wrong here. This planet had a retrograde rotation so the sun rose in the west and set in the east. The magnetic poles were all over the place, too – fourteen of them scattered around the planet and in a constant state of flux as the planetary core was also subjected to intense tidal forces. It messed with your senses at first, making you feel as if you’d been turned around and around in a blindfold game. Alex knew that his body would adjust and that he’d feel better soon, but for right now there was a slightly queasy disorientation that said an emphatic no to the idea of coffee.

  Terrible provided a small bottle of chilled water and took one for herself, then as they sat down at her desk, asked how the inspection had gone. And that was it, for small talk. Terrible was all business, no chat whatsoever, no catching up with what they had been doing since they’d last met, no talk of mutual acquaintance, no goss. But Alex rather liked that. Terrible Tennet was one of the straightest people he knew, honourable to the core, and he valued and respected that far more than a pleasant social manner.

  She did have a human side, though, which she demonstrated an hour or so later, taking a break from their meeting.

  ‘Ergonomics recommend that you take a five minute break for each hour at screens,’ she reminded him, with a very tight, thin little smile.

  This was a Terrible joke, which Alex recognised. One of
the few criticisms Terrible herself had made when inspecting the Heron was that Alex himself did not appear to take even a fraction of the recommended rest-breaks, which was inadvisable for him and a poor example to his crew.

  ‘Ma’am,’ Alex acknowledged, with a suitable smile, and got up as she did, wondering if she was expecting him to leave for five minutes. Instead, though, she led him over to one of the windows with which the office was liberally endowed, indicating the view beyond. ‘You might like to see this.’

  ‘This’ was dawn. It did not creep with rosy-fingered grace. It erupted. As they went to the window a pale light was rising at the horizon. As a grey light washed the landscape he could see that they were in a region of low, roundly eroded hills, almost obscured by fern forest. They could see for about eighty kilometres from this elevation, the horizon melting into a vaguely hilly blur.

  Then the sun came up. It surged over the horizon at tremendous pace, though it was no more impressive to look at than it had been when Alex had seen it earlier – pallid, as if obscured by mist. And mist was rising, too, so thick and fast that for a moment it looked as if the tree-ferns were on fire. The mist didn’t rise like smoke, though, but rolled over the forest in curling waves. And then, just as Alex was about to make a polite comment about how pretty it was, it happened.

  Birds exploded up out of the trees – thousands, tens of thousands of them, swarming out of the mist with an eerie whisper of wings and high, piercing calls. They were vibrantly coloured, too many different species to see at this distance, but a fabulous sight, en-masse. It was as if the forest had suddenly launched a rainbow of mobile flowers through the mist.

  Then the trees shuddered. The whole landscape seemed to twitch and ripple, with a low, deep rumble which went on for several seconds. Here and there a tree came down, with a creak and a crash, while the birds fluttered, swooped and swirled above.

  The rumbling seemed to pass under them, like an unseen freight train passing close underground. There was no shaking of the building they were in, but Alex could see the gardens around them with all the plants vibrating like a ship in turbulence.

  And then, just as quickly, it was over. The rumble died away, the birds began to flap and settle back into the trees, and the mist began to drift and dissipate under the rising sun.

  ‘I do enjoy,’ said Terrible, ‘the morning earthquake.’

  ‘Uh,’ said Alex, just for the moment unable to think of any more intelligent response than that. Terrible seemed satisfied, though, allowing herself a tiny little smile which in anyone else would have been a licked finger, a score in the air and Gotcha!

  He managed to pull himself together as they returned to the meeting, anyway, and they worked through all the things they had to talk about in brisk time, parting with another cool handshake.

  His next destination was the Embassy, for an equally important but probably much longer meeting. As he left the admiral’s office, though, he found that another man was waiting there, obviously hovering to pounce on him as soon as he emerged.

  One look at him told Alex that Byl Fox had heard all about Barney Barnardt. This, at least, was the person he had been expecting to see here – Byl Fox was the Second Irregulars’ Admin Officer at Serenity, a major assignment since many of the projects being undertaken at the university complex here had some degree of funding or involvement from the Second. Byl had retired from regular Fleet service a couple of years before and was now employed as a civilian admin officer.

  ‘Please do not,’ Alex greeted him, ‘apologise.’ He went straight over to him with an outstretched hand. ‘Good to see you, Byl.’

  ‘Alex,’ Byl replied, wringing his hand with relief at this friendly manner. It would have been putting it too high to say that he and Alex were old friends – they had never actually served together and had only exchanged letters since Byl knew that Alex would be coming out here. But their paths had crossed several times at social events. In the Fleet, that was enough to make someone a mate. ‘Good to see you too,’ Byl gabbled, in the rapid way Alex remembered now was normal for him, ‘But oh lord…’

  ‘Honestly, it’s fine,’ Alex remembered, too, that once Byl got talking he was as difficult to stop as a jet from a high-pressure pipe. ‘But I have to go, sorry – I’m expected at the Embassy. Can you walk over with me?’

  This, however, didn’t work out. Byl had barely got warmed up into the subject of Professor Barnardt by the time they reached the lobby of the Admiralty building, and there they found two other people who were waiting for him. They were unmistakably senior Diplomatic Corps people. Alex didn’t know either of them but he recognised the style, the tailored suits, the quiet but expensive grooming, the manner of slightly aloof dignity. They were a man and a woman, both in their fifties, who introduced themselves as AWB’s – Attachés Without Brief, meaning that they were attached to the Embassy but not actually working there.

  ‘We’ll be travelling on the Harmony,’ one of them explained, but for right now their only function appeared to be to welcome him and to escort him over to see the Ambassador.

  ‘I will see you later,’ Alex promised, and left Byl looking a little disconsolate.

  The meeting at the Embassy was, as Alex had expected, grindingly slow. It was slow even by Diplomatic Corps standards, which was saying something. The Ambassador here – also new in post since Silvie’s first stay had ended the career of the former incumbent – was known in the Corps as ‘thoughtful’. This was diplomatic code for moving at a pace which would make a snail look hyperactive. It was no great surprise, really, with the long, long pauses while he collected his thoughts, often mid-sentence, that the Ambassador had spent much of his career working with Solarans. Alex was obliged to possess his soul in patience, though the meeting which dragged on for three hours could easily have been concluded in thirty minutes flat. It had got dark again by the time he emerged.

  Still, he thought, trying to find something with which to cheer himself up after that maddening waste of his time, at least there are no media here…

  ‘Captain von Strada!’

  Bang on cue, there they were. Two people, one wearing a high-vis media vest, operating four flying cameras and slung about with tech and gadget bags, while the other was clad in the kind of contrived-casual look affected by news journalists.

  You have got to be kidding me… Alex stopped and stared at them. To his amazement, he knew who they were – the journalist, at least. He was one of Chartsey’s best known news reporters and cropped up like a recurring decimal on news channels right across the League.

  ‘Blaze Tyler?’ He said it just as he might exclaim, ‘A giraffe – here?’ but Blaze Tyler would never, ever let it be forgotten that Alexis von Strada had recognised him on sight and greeted him by name.

  ‘Captain von Strada!’ The journalist was bustling towards him, a little breathless as he tried to walk and call out at the same time, but clearly very determined, and bizarrely cheerful, too. Journalists did not normally look cheerful when they were approaching Alex. ‘Thank you!’ he said, evidently interpreting Alex’s standing there as tacit agreement to give him an interview, whereas in fact it had been no more than Alex gazing at them in astonishment.

  As the reporter came close, Alex glanced around instinctively. No riot police. No bodyguard. No escort. He was on his own. His fault, he realised. The two AWBs had wanted to escort him back to his shuttle, but he’d had enough of diplomatic company by then and had left the embassy by himself.

  Oh, he thought, and considered his options. Running wasn’t one of them, though that was what instinct was telling him to do – beneath his dignity as a flag officer and not possible in this attenuated air. So he could turn and walk away, ignoring them, calling for help if they wouldn’t get out of his way, or… shocking thought… he could stay and see what they wanted.

  It hung in the balance for a moment, but then Blaze did something which had won over even tougher propositions than Alex von Strada. He looked into Alex�
�s eyes, his own warm, frank and friendly, and did the smile.

  Blaze’s smile was legendary in media circles. Others might imitate, but he had the patent. It really was a tremendous smile, too – broke just a little hesitantly onto his face as if he wasn’t entirely sure it would be well received, then upped the charismatic wattage into a completely trusting, boyish charm tinged ever so slightly with hope. Turning it down would feel like shoving away a small child.

  ‘Please?’ he said.

  Well, there is only one of him, Alex found himself thinking. And he seems like a decent enough guy.

  So he stayed where he was, though with the coldly rigid expression which came naturally to him when media cameras were around.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ It came across as challenging, asked in his curt formal tone, though in fact it was just amazed curiosity. He glanced warily around again, too, suddenly concerned that there might be hordes more of them just about to surge out of buildings or jump up from behind every bush. ‘Are there more of you?’

  ‘No, just us!’ Blaze gave him a beam of pure, innocent delight. ‘We’re embedded with the Harmony – on an exclusive.’

  Alex spared a moment for a rude thought about the Ambassador. At no point during the three hours he’d been droning on had it occurred to him to mention that the Diplomatic Corps was taking a journalist along with them. Possibly he hadn’t thought it important. More probably he’d felt that Alex would find out soon enough and that the tactful, conflict-avoidance thing to do was just pretend it wasn’t important.

  ‘Oh,’ said Alex. He knew what ‘embedded’ meant. It had been suggested several times as a possibility for the Fourth, though Alex had stuck to his determination that no journalist would bring a camera aboard his ship unless over his dead body. True, he had compromised that at Therik by allowing Ungeline Beeby to come aboard and interview him, but that was different, she was twelve.

  Embedded journalism was different, too. It meant that the journalist would live as part of the crew, integrating himself as closely as possible to get a candid, insider’s view of events. Since this was clearly not something many services would be happy with, it always involved some degree of censorship either in prior agreement about what could and could not be reported, or the right of redacting footage to delete or blur any material deemed too sensitive for broadcast. In the Fourth’s case, as Alex had pointed out, so much of any such material would have to be deleted or blurred that it would do more harm than good.