Quarus

by S J MacDonald

  He smiled at Davie in a way that clearly meant and that includes you, and Davie looked back at him attentively.

  ‘That’s not just skipper-talk, is it?’ he said. ‘You really mean it.’

  ‘From the heart,’ Alex confirmed. ‘You choose your company with care when you’re leaping into the void, and I can’t think of any better company than this.’

  Davie gazed at him, a look of astonishment coming on to his face.

  ‘I just realised,’ he admitted. ‘This jittery thing… that’s nerves!’ He was amazed at himself. ‘I’ve never been nervous about anything. But when you said that… leaping into the void…’ He gave an exaggerated shiver. ‘It shouldn’t actually make that much difference, should it? I mean, we’ve been on runs nearly as long as this before.’

  It was Alex’s turn to look surprised. ‘We’ve never done anything like this.’ He said. ‘Even on our run to Samart we were never that far away from systems where we could land, if we had to, and set up survival domes, and we were seeing new features every day, too, all the time. This is entirely different. We’ll have hit visually static starfield by about three in the morning and the psychological impact of that is enormous. Gulf crossings may not be any more dangerous than regular space – in fact, statistically they’re a great deal safer – but the psychological factors are enormous and should not be denied. Anyone – anyone – leaping into this void without a touch of nerves just has no understanding of what they’re getting into. And yes, I do include myself in that.’

  ‘Oh.’ Davie looked relieved. ‘I kept telling myself,’ he admitted, ‘that it’s no different from any other long run, but it already looks…’ he gazed at the astrogation scopes, ‘weird.’

  Alex nodded. Travelling at high superlight speeds, spacers were accustomed to a constantly changing starscape, with nearer systems flashing past. Shipping routes rarely went in a dead straight line for long, either – there were wobbles, little diversions which spacers had taken since they first began traversing those routes. Sometimes the side-step was to a slimeworld where crews took the chance to stretch their legs, sometimes it was simply to pass by an unusual or particularly scenic system. Only couriers and others in an unnatural hurry punched straight from one system to another.

  Here, though, there was no option – no other systems to visit, or to skim past. The near-field already contained only a handful of stars moving slowly over their scopes, and beyond them the starfield looked strangely fixed. There were no other ships on their scopes, either, and would not be. Other than for the few couriers which would chase out to them in the first couple of weeks, they would not see another ship. There were the leviathans, one about three weeks in and the other about the same distance heading back, but they hardly counted as ships – no people aboard, not even any living space that you could go over to visit. Rumour had it that there was an old abandoned space station out there somewhere, too, but if there was, it did not appear on any chart. They would be out here alone, and they would be in the biggest open space mankind had yet traversed.

  ‘Doesn’t look that much on charts, does it?’ Alex observed. League space occupied a blob which lay close to one of the galactic spiral arms, touching it at Serenity. The Marfikian dominions, a considerably bigger area, sprawled across their inner borders. On any chart big enough to show the whole of the League, the distance between Serenity and Quarus did not look especially huge – not much bigger, really, than the distance across the League itself. It was simply that between them lay the empty region of the gap between spiral arms. It was not especially wide at this point but it was remarkably empty. ‘But there it is,’ Alex identified a small yellow star which was almost lost in the brilliant sprawl of stars far ahead. ‘Quarus, dead ahead. That’s what we focus on.’

  Davie looked at it and smiled.

  ‘That feels weird, too,’ he said. ‘I was conceived there, created. It is my point of origin, and I’ve spent my whole life wanting to go back and see what it’s like, meet the people who made me. And now we’re actually on our way it feels surreal.’ He looked back at Alex, half serious. ‘If you see any sign of me getting Gulf Happy,’ he told him, ‘you have my permission to do the cold shower thing.’

  Alex laughed – forcing people into a freezing cold shower was a rough and ready Excorps trick for dealing with what they called Gulf Euphoria.

  ‘Oh, I hope we can do better than that, both in prevention and remedy,’ he said. ‘But for now…’ he called up a triplink board with a partially completed game, and gestured invitingly for Davie to make his next move.

  Davie relaxed, settling into the familiar, comfortable habit of playing triplink with Alex. They hadn’t been playing for long, though, when Jonas Sartin came to the command deck and asked the skipper for a word. He made no apology for interrupting their game – it was clear from the fact that Alex had not pushed back his chair that he wasn’t taking a break, just playing triplink with Davie while the ship settled down after the launch.

  ‘What can I do for you, Mr Sartin?’ Alex enquired, leaving Davie to await his next move as he looked attentively at the finance officer.

  ‘I would like your permission to set up a charitable trust, skipper,’ Jonas told him. ‘I have been asked – unanimously – to organise the donation of certain bonus monies to good causes, and I believe that the best way to go about that would be to establish a charitable trust.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Alex had been off the ship a good deal while they were at Serenity, and this had passed under his radar. ‘Unanimously?’ That sounded organised. It was always a concern to the skipper of a warship if someone was organising crew outside the normal hierarchy.

  ‘Spontaneously,’ Jonas said, and understanding Alex’s concern, explained, ‘I gather that there was a conversation between a few members of the crew about the advanced gunnery situation, to the effect that they wished now that they’d never done it. The discussion arose, I understand, because they had received the bonus payments in their salary notifications. Anyway one of them remarked that they would give theirs to charity and the others immediately responded that that was a good idea and they would do the same. I did actually see the dynamic which followed, skipper, and I can assure you that there was no organisational aspect to it. It just ran through the ship, as conversations do quite frequently with the open comms network, with people catching the topic, asking ‘What’s a good idea?’ and being told that some people were giving their gunnery bonuses to charity, responding ‘Good call, me too.’ I got so many request forms to give the gunnery bonuses to charity that I circulated a memo and discovered that that is, indeed, unanimous. It is a trivial amount in itself, of course, but I have been asked to collect and donate it on behalf of the ship’s company and it is, on principle, good practice to do that through the establishment of a charitable trust. I have the papers here,’ he transferred files to the skipper’s screens, ‘with a briefing outlining the key principles. With your permission, I will notarise the necessary paperwork and send it to Serenity on the courier.’

  Alex read through the briefing, though he was really thinking about the motivation behind that ship-wide gift. The crew, evidently, still felt some remorse over having got so caught up in the desire to score a hundred per cent advanced gunnery, for no better reason than boasting rights, that they had reduced one of their shipmates to feeling a failure and a burden. The bonus payments, in that light, would be coals of fire on their heads. It was a trivial amount, around eight dollars a month, just one of many bonuses the Fleet paid out for higher level qualifications. With everyone chipping in, though, it would make a useful contribution to a good cause. Precisely which cause had been left blank.

  ‘I agree, it is a good idea,’ said Alex. ‘Count me in, too.’ He also received the bonus for having an advanced gunnery certificate, which, for a flag rank officer, was more than a little ridiculous. ‘Which charity is to be the recipient?’ Alex asked.

  ‘I believe it is felt,’ Jonas said carefully, ‘tha
t that is a decision most appropriate for you to make, skipper.’

  Alex understood.

  ‘How very... thoughtful.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Jonas and Alex gazed at one another with the wordless understanding they’d developed through working together so closely. They were not exactly friends – Jonas didn’t think it was a good idea to be friends with fellow officers, at least not while serving with them – but the respect and understanding was mutual. Both knew very well what the crew wanted, and why they would not ask. Alex understood, then, too, why Jonas had brought this to him right now rather than waiting till the morning.

  ‘Mr Abnedido,’ he addressed the duty rigger, who was going about with a surface scanner ensuring that the command deck was still spotlessly clean. ‘A moment,’ Alex requested.

  ‘Skipper?’ Ab came over, looking enquiring, evidently expecting an order for coffees.

  ‘The ship’s company,’ Alex informed him, ‘are donating their gunnery bonuses to a charitable trust. I believe that it would be… appropriate… for you, in your capacity as most junior ranking member of the ship’s company, to nominate the charity to receive that funding. You don’t have to answer right now, if you’d like some time to think about it.’

  ‘Oh.’ The fact that everyone was giving their gunnery bonuses to charity was evidently not news to Ab. He’d been mightily embarrassed when he’d realised that that was because they felt bad about taking the money when their motives for doing that training had not been very professional and, at that, had left Ab feeling so low and so desperate that he’d actually asked to have brain surgery in the hope it might bring him up to their standard. The shock of that, the guilt of that, would resonate through this crew for a very long time, and be passed on, too, to future incomers with ambitious ideas about scoring boasting-right triumphs. It was, in that light, entirely appropriate that Ab himself should nominate the charity to get that funding, and that was what everyone wanted. They couldn’t just say that, though, or organise it amongst themselves. There was an etiquette to such matters. ‘That’s very kind, skipper, thank you,’ Ab said. ‘And I think – if it’s all right with you, of course, that I’d like the money to go to the Help Foundation. I did my volunteering with them for Citizenship, during Basic,’ he explained, ‘and I think they do great work, helping people.’

  Alex smiled. Because Ab had never graduated high school he had had to take the equivalent Citizenship course during basic training. It included a requirement to undertake some volunteering or fundraising of benefit to the community. The Fourth’s base had established, very quietly, a close relationship with the Help Foundation… quietly, because anything the Fourth got involved with had a tendency to make the news, and not in a good way. But members of the Fourth working at the base were encouraged to make some contribution to their host world, and one of the ways they did that was volunteering, out of uniform, with the Help Foundation. They did a lot of work in inner city deprivation areas, with volunteers tackling everything from environmental clean-up through sport and activity centres to anti-drugs and life-skills programmes. Ab had been part of a group which had redecorated a community centre.

  ‘Excellent choice, Mr Abnedido,’ Alex wrote Help Foundation into the recipient box, signed the forms and passed them back to Jonas. As he did so, though, Davie was speaking up.

  ‘Wait a minute…’ he waved a hand quickly as if he thought they might not hear him. ‘I’d like in, too,’ he said. ‘I know I don’t have the gunnery but I like to feel that I’m a part of this company and the philanthropy thing, well,’ he grinned, ‘in at the bone. No swamping,’ he assured Alex, who evidently understood this, ‘but may I, please, be permitted to match contributions to the trust?’

  Alex smiled. Davie was not being mean, with such a paltry contribution when he could easily hand over millions and not even notice. He was being sensitive, as he said, not swamping the contributions being made by the others, simply matching to double them up. It was a considerate, ethical offer and Alex didn’t hesitate.

  ‘Fine by me,’ he said, and looked at Jonas, who smiled too.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘We’ll do the paperwork.’ He looked at the other end of the datatable where Commander Leavam was working on some files of her own. ‘And perhaps Commander Leavam might like to review the agreement before we send it off?’

  Hetty Leavam looked up.

  ‘Certainly not,’ she said crisply. ‘For me to do that would imply that there is some possibility of misconduct in the matter and I do not believe for one moment that there is.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Jonas agreed. ‘But we are in the habit, here, of having financial matters involving, uh, corporate financing subjected to the most rigorous review.’

  ‘Yes,’ Hetty gave Alex a hard look, showing that she knew very well that he was more than a little paranoid on that subject. ‘But with all due respect to Captain von Strada’s extreme caution in financial relationships with the business community, I have to go on record myself as stating that these rigorous reviews and counter-signatures do have a tendency to make even the most routine supplies contract appear unusual and even potentially dubious. I would recommend, strongly recommend, that standard Fleet practice in financial matters is entirely appropriate and is all that is necessary.’

  ‘That’s told you,’ Davie said to Alex, with evident glee.

  ‘Yes, okay, I know, I’m hyper-cautious,’ Alex said. ‘But I cannot take even the smallest possible risk of even the most minor financial irregularity. And after everything I’ve said and stand by on the topic of corporate payments to serving Fleet personnel, you have to know that if I took so much as a box of doughnuts without it being properly recorded I would be slaughtered for accepting bribes. So I want everything double checked and countersigned by people who really understand the details of such matters.’

  ‘You really are completely clueless, aren’t you?’ Davie was regarding him with the same kind of wonder that spacers often had when groundsiders were being particularly moronic.

  ‘Where high finance is concerned, yes,’ Alex admitted.

  ‘But this isn’t…’ Davie started to protest, then realised the futility of even attempting to explain this to Alex von Strada and grinned resignedly instead. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It isn’t important.’

  They settled down quickly to routines. The ship would remain on autopilot for most of the crossing, at least for the duration of the Geminax experiment. They were already laying a comms stream – had been doing so, indeed, from the moment they had left Serenity orbit. Fortunately, a research team had come up with a much better way to deploy the pods than the method the Fourth had used at Carrearranis. There, they had had to rely on Shion’s superhuman piloting skills to deposit every pair of pods in precise sublight positions. Now, they were able to fire them out of a deployment unit which decelerated them through a long tube, depositing them outside the ship’s superlight field. It didn’t look very elegant, a great thick pipe sticking out from the hull, and there’d been some phallic joking about it, but it worked very well, popping out a stream of pods which came on line as soon as they were in position. This meant that they were, for the first time ever, a ship heading out into the Gulf still in contact with Serenity. That contact was increasingly time-delayed as they moved further away, but still an extraordinary achievement. It amused Alex to note how long it took for his crew to stop being amazed by it and to start treating the comms link to Serenity as routine. That took, in fact, just about two days.

  There was nothing of any great importance coming out from Serenity, though, and would not be until the next mail ships arrived from Cestus and Quarus. In the meantime, therefore, Alex turned his attention to the problem of the malfunctioning siliplas extrusion plant.

  The SEP had started malfunctioning again the moment they went superlight. They knew that because Oti and her team had been playing the trigger sound at it continuously right through launch and the very moment the superlight field for
med around them, the SEP kicked joyously awake and produced four hundred and eighty six egg cups as if in celebration.

  After three days in the Gulf, they had a new dataset, too, to add to the collection. Wave space had flattened out as they’d left the stars behind, with barely a contour on the scopes and barely a ripple in their engine noise. If wave space variations had been a factor in the SEP’s malfunctioning, they should have seen a change in the way it responded to the trigger out in these flat calm conditions. There wasn’t, though – it was working just exactly as it had before.

  On day four, the SEP team held an open seminar. It was the kind of project meeting which would normally be held in the lab, but such was the level of interest amongst the crew that it was held in the gym, instead, set up in its lecture theatre mode. It was scheduled so that Kate could attend, wearing Second Irregulars rig to mark this as ‘directed study time’. Alex went, too, hoping that the seminar would lead to some insight, and willing to bet, too, that if it did, it would be Kate who’d come up with it.

  He’d have lost that bet, but he was right about the first part. The seminar began with a ‘back to basics’ review, listing everything they knew for a fact. This took some time and involved a great many contributions, but eventually they got around to Ab. Ab was sitting with his hand raised in the tentative manner of one not entirely sure that he had something worth contributing, but at the same time, he kept his hand up through all the time that other, more confident people were having their say, and Oti, at last, got to him.