Quarus

by S J MacDonald

  ‘Yes, Ab?’ She was a little surprised, since she only knew Ab as the rigger who brought hot trolleys to the lab on days when he was doing galley duty.

  ‘It’s harmonic with D17,’ said Ab.

  There was an immediate dismissal from many of the people around him – tolerant in the Fourth, a little impatient amongst some of the civilians.

  ‘Everything is…’ two people said simultaneously, and Oti herself adopted the kindly look of an adult about to commend a child for a really clever idea, good boy, but evidently feeling, from the general reaction, that they’d heard enough.

  ‘Oi! No!’ The interruption was unexpected both in its force and its origin. The speaker was Ali Jezno, normally the most easy going of men, but now emphatic in defence of his friend. ‘Ab is smart!’ he declared, as people gave him startled looks. ‘Listen to him!’

  Oti looked at Ab, who was going rather red. He was the most junior, least qualified person on the ship, his only claim to fame being that he was a spacer with a phobia of spaceports. In this room full of brilliant and extremely well qualified people, it seemed unlikely that he could have anything of worth to contribute.

  ‘Go on!’ Ali was speaking to Ab, now, shoving him to his feet with a hand in the small of his back. ‘Tell them!’

  Oti gave way, giving a slightly helpless go on, then gesture and resuming her own seat. Seminar protocol was that the person standing had the floor, though this did not prevent everyone else interrupting them or breaking into side-conversations of their own, with Oti calling them all back to order when the babble became too much. Now, though, there was a silence as they all looked at Ab.

  ‘I know – D17.’ Ab admitted. ‘It doesn’t have the glamour of D9 or D5 and people tend to overlook it, but D17 is kind of my thing… anyway I was listening to the SEP trigger in engineering and I found that it is core resonant with D17.’ He fumbled with his wristcom and used it to project an image onto the big screen. ‘See?’

  Very few of them did see, only the engineers and the wave space physicists. Even they took a few moments, many of them sitting forward with intent expressions as they studied the familiar D17 signature and the frequency of the SEP trigger.

  Kate was the first one to see it.

  ‘Jeeks!’ she said, and was on her feet as if her chair had fired an ejector spring. ‘It’s chromatic!’ she was speaking to Ab, her expression one of astonishment. ‘Brilliant!’

  By the time she said that every other engineer and physicist was on their feet, too, and bursting into spontaneous, noisy, enthusiastic applause. Their engineer, Morry Morelle, stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled admiringly, which wasn’t something a senior officer normally did to a junior rating.

  The rest of the people at the seminar either looked on at this in bewilderment or, like Alex, kept looking at the data in the hope that staring at it long enough might reveal the discovery which had the wave-space people on their feet and cheering.

  ‘Excuse me – excuse me,’ a voice from the back of the theatre cut through as the seminar was about to descend into excited or mystified babble – Oti herself was looking blank but hopeful, while her team merely looked confused. ‘If I may…’ the voice was evidently used to making itself heard in a noisy crowd, and had an officer’s trick of quietening things down, but it was not an officer. ‘Please, I don’t understand.’ The speaker was on his feet, too, hand raised. ‘What’s D17?’

  Alex turned in his seat and looked at him, as did everyone else there. Alex, though, had particular reason to be shocked. The speaker was Blaze Tyler, the journalist embedded on the Harmony.

  ‘How did you get in here?’ Alex asked, since he hadn’t known even that the journalist was on the ship. Even as he asked it, though, he realised what must have happened. Agreements had already been made for ship visiting, with the Heron making their interdeck available to anyone from any of the other ships. A regular shuttle, in fact, had been established, moving around all four ships to carry people amongst them. Blaze Tyler and his camera guy had been included in this agreement, on condition that they brought no cameras and anything they saw or heard was not for reportage. It would have seemed petty to refuse them permission even to come aboard for a coffee or to use the gym.

  ‘Slipped in at the back,’ Blaze admitted, but held up both hands. ‘No cameras! And I don’t want to interrupt, but it seems to me…’ he gestured broadly, ‘that I’m not the only one who doesn’t understand what the D17 thing is, so if someone could, perhaps, bring us up to speed…’

  He had a point, and Alex acknowledged that by turning back round with no further comment and looking at Oti, who was running the seminar.

  ‘Well,’ said Oti, relieved not to have to admit that she didn’t know what D17 signified, herself, ‘I think perhaps that Ab should be the one to tell us that… if you could keep it brief and simple, Ab..?’

  Ab goggled a bit at the idea of trying to keep something that complicated ‘brief and simple’, but did his best.

  ‘D17,’ he said, as the seminar quietened and sat down to listen to him, ‘is also known as the cosmic constant. You know that our engines make noise when we’re superlight, and that that noise is an expression, in our environment, of the energies of twenty four dimensional space? Well, each of the dimensions has a distinct harmonic, a frequency and modulation unique to it – that’s one of the ways we know there are twenty four dimensions. All of the others are reactive – that means that they change their tune, if you like, as we run through wave space contours. You can hear it in the engines, generally noisier and higher pitched when we’re running through higher energies, though that isn’t the case for all dimensional signatures. Anyway D17 is unique because it isn’t reactive. It makes the same sound, same frequency, same modulation, same signal strength, regardless. All engines, everywhere, detect exactly the same signal – the D17 harmonic. Here, I’ll play it for you.’

  There was some wincing amongst the more musical as the sound was played quite loud and in isolation.

  ‘It approximates,’ said Ab, ‘to D flat through to F flat below middle C, in our chromatic scale, though it’s rather more complex and subtle than that and the tonal values are believed to be infinite – okay…’ he responded to a rustle amongst some of the physicists, ‘I believe they’re infinite, others have different ideas. But not many people really study D17 because they think that once you’ve said it’s a constant you’ve pretty much said everything and there are much more energetic, dramatic and mysterious Ds to study. Most people think of D17 as a flat line, too, which is wrong, it isn’t a line, it’s a band. See…’ he went back to the wave space signature, which bore some resemblance to a DNA chart with its complexity of thin lines. ‘And people say that everything is resonant with D17 because the harmonic range is so wide that any other sound will be in harmonic resonance with some part of the signature. But if you look at this… the three points here…’ he used a pointer on the SEP trigger signature, ‘these are the strongest tones in the trigger sound. When you play them together by themselves you get this hoot.’ He played it. ‘It is two octaves higher than D17 and sounds quite different, but when you play them together, see…’ he paused for a moment to allow them to listen. It wasn’t a pleasant sound on the ear – more like something which a radically experimental composer might produce than actual music. ‘The three key tones in the trigger and the three strongest semitones in the D17 harmonic. And if I just isolate those for you…’

  Suddenly, they were listening to a six-note discord.

  ‘D flat, E natural, F flat.’ Ab pointed out the lower three notes. ‘A natural, C natural, D flat.’ He identified the upper register. ‘The important thing is that they are chromatic, actual tones and semitones, two actual chords, not just random noise. This is core resonance, the two sounds are basically the same, three note chords in different keys but with the same structure – note, three semitones, note, one semitone, note. That can’t be a coincidence, or if it is it would take probabi
lity to odds way past astronomical. So basically what it means is that your SEP is firing up because of the combination of D17 and the trigger sound.’

  ‘Really?’ Oti had to look for confirmation around the seminar before she believed it. ‘Well, that’s excellent,’ she said, since it was apparent at least that they were homing in on the problem. ‘Thank you, Ab, that’s…’ she sought for a word and settled on ‘amazing’, though it was clear that she didn’t get the thrill of this discovery as the wave-space people had. ‘So, does that mean,’ she went on, reverting to her own over-riding obsession, ‘that now we know it’s D17 we can provide some shielding for the SEP?’

  There was some amusement amongst the seminar and it was Morry who got up this time, as Ab resumed his seat, obviously relieved to have got through his bit and be able to sink back down again.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said the engineer, ‘that that isn’t possible. We’re in a superlight field – everything, every particle and sub-particle in the ship and even in ourselves, is resonating in twenty four dimensional space. We can’t feel it and it doesn’t do us any harm, but we’re in a strange state while the ship is superlight, falling through the cosmos more or less on the verge of exploding, so, no, there isn’t any way to shield against D17 because the shield itself would be inside the superlight bubble and therefore resonating D17. All our tech, starship tech, has to be able to operate while it is being dropped through the cosmos at impossible speeds and being warped in twenty four directions at once. So you’ll have to focus on blocking the trigger sound.’

  The SEP team looked variously disappointed, frustrated and resigned.

  ‘Which we can’t do,’ their engineer observed, ‘until we know how the trigger activates it.’ He looked hopefully at Kate, but Kate had turned to look at Jonas Sartin, seeing that the finance officer was buzzing with discovery, himself.

  ‘I know that chord,’ Jonas said. ‘Or discord, rather. Now… where…’ He’d pulled out a comp and was tapping away busily. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Detorro’s One Oh Three AM. Believed,’ he added helpfully, for those who were not familiar with that avant-garde composer, ‘to represent the yowling of cats.’

  After some discussion it was agreed that this was probably not significant, but it was the only concrete observation made during the rest of the seminar. The seminar broke up about half an hour later anyway, as Kate excused herself.

  ‘I have prep,’ she explained, and went off to get changed and go back to being a cadet again. Her departure seemed to signal the end of the seminar, as they realised they were unlikely to get any further today and had already run over the scheduled time anyway. Oti thanked them all for coming and for their contributions.

  There was, Alex saw, quite a crowd around Ab as the seminar broke up. He’d been intending to go over and congratulate him, but he could see that Ab was already a little overwhelmed by all the attention, and that Ali was standing by him protectively. That made him smile. Ali was not Ab’s ‘oppo’, the officially appointed friend assigned to look after newcomers to any Fleet ship, but a genuine friend. He had walked up to Ab just a couple of days out of Therik, plonked down a mug of tea in front of him and declared, ‘I’m a zombie – you’re a weirdo. Reckon we ought to be mates.’ And Ab, once he’d managed to stop laughing, had agreed.

  Alex left them to it. He would give Ab a ‘well done’ later, when he was in a position to appreciate it. And Ali, too – though he’d acted as a friend, it was apparent to Alex that he was well on his way back to regaining his petty officer role.

  Kate was at work on the command deck when Alex got back there, jumping to her feet with a brisk ‘Sir, good afternoon, sir!’ at the captain’s arrival.

  ‘As you were, Ms Naos.’ Alex sat down, and smiled thanks to the rigger who signalled willingness to bring him coffee.

  Kate was not brought coffee. She was in prep, an aspect of cadet training which Alex had genuinely enjoyed and excelled in. It was the period between the last class of the afternoon and the summons to dinner, an hour and a half in which cadets did preparatory work for forthcoming classes and homework assignments. It was supervised though not taught, with strict rules – no eating or drinking in prep and no talking, either, unless cadets had paired or group exercises. But it was more than just a time to do preparatory study or homework. It was a time management exercise, too, as the workload was supposed to be just achievable if you kept your head down and really put the effort in. And this was the only time you could do this work – no sneakily doing homework in the middle of the night. Even if you wanted to, prep files were locked out other than for this period so anything you didn’t get done in the allowed time would not get done… leaving you to explain to the instructors next day why you hadn’t done the reading for a class or why a homework assignment was incomplete.

  That had never happened to Alex. He was one of the swots, the cadets who not only got all the assigned work done but raised their hands and asked for more. There were extension tasks, always, an unlimited number of them so that even a superhuman cadet could not beat the system and sit there with nothing to do. Most cadets, though, even the able ones, paced themselves so that they got their last task finished just in the final minute. Only those fighting it out for the top few places in the class would be blasting through and asking for extension work.

  Alex had loved that. After the painfully slow pace and monotonous delivery of most of their classes, the opportunity to work at full pace was like stretching his intellectual legs after a day spent cramped up in a little box. Prep had always been his favourite part of the day. And he’d enjoyed the increasing challenge with each year, too. First years were allowed to do prep in a classroom with a pastoral instructor, generally quite kindly and supportive when cadets went into a panic at the realisation that they weren’t going to get everything done.

  Year two stepped things up a gear. The year two prep venue was ‘the library’. Anyone who imagined that ‘the library’ was a peaceful place to work, though, had not visited an Academy. The library in Fleet academies was also a major thoroughfare, a place of continuous comings and goings. There were no privacy-shielded study booths, either, just open datatables which the cadets sat around just as they might on a command deck. And every time an officer walked through, the cadets had to jump to attention and greet them respectfully. Becoming so absorbed in what you were doing that you failed to notice an officer passing through was a cardinal sin, as an officer must always, always keep some awareness of what was going on around them.

  In final year, things got even more distracting. Third years had to do their prep in a training simulator rigged to be like the command deck of a warship. In the elite Class of 64 they had had at least ten instructors on the prowl during prep, and deliberate distractions like loud conversations, comcalls and alerts. It was his ability to keep his focus and get everything done and still be asking for extension work which had got Alex his Top Cadet graduation. Whether Kate could do that too was debatable – she had a tendency to lose herself in her work which had already cost her some ‘failure to recognise the presence of an officer’ demerits.

  She was totally into what she was doing right then, too, as Silvie observed when she wandered onto the command deck a few minutes later in search of something interesting going on. The chief topic of conversation around the ship was still the D17 discovery, which did not interest Silvie one iota. Seeing Kate’s bright mind focussed with such enthusiasm, though, she brightened herself and came over.

  ‘What are you … oh,’ she stopped as Kate sprang to her feet and came to the Fleet’s attention stance, feet slightly apart and hands clasped at the small of her back.

  ‘Ma’am, good afternoon, ma’am.’

  ‘I wish you’d stop doing that,’ Silvie complained, but Kate merely looked respectfully at her and Silvie sighed. It had been explained to her that Kate had only been allowed to come on this trip on condition that she kept up both her classes and the protocols which she’d have been living under
at the Chartsey academy. Since Silvie was an ambassador Kate had to acknowledge her arrival in the same way as she would that of a senior officer. ‘Okay, yes, I know ‘As you were’.’ She gave the order ironically, and sat down beside her. ‘What are you doing, though? Fun, yes?’

  A flicker of a grin crossed Kate’s face.

  ‘Starship Recognition, ma’am.’ She indicated the assignment she was working on. ‘Whalebelly Class Freighter, Describe and Discuss.’

  Silvie stared at her. ‘And this is fun?’

  ‘It is for me,’ Kate said, and added, quickly, ‘ma’am. It’s a timed assignment – thirty five minutes to research and write an essay.’

  ‘I could do it in three seconds,’ Silvie said, and slapped a picture of a whalebelly onto the screen in front of her. ‘They look like this, they’re slow and they’re ugly and they’re used to carry cargo. Who needs to know more than that?’

  She picked up not only Kate’s amusement but the strong disapproval coming at Silvie herself, most notably from Commander Leavam. Commander Leavam was the officer supervising Kate’s prep today and while she was happy to see her briefly interrupted from time to time she wasn’t going to allow her to be seriously distracted from her work.

  ‘It is a timed assignment,’ she pointed out, and with a nod at Kate, sent her back to work while she answered Silvie, herself. ‘Starship Recognition is the traditional Fleet description for the study of starship types, their history and development. Anyone can recognise a picture of a whalebelly and by year two any cadet should be able to identify all classes of ship by their heatscan signature. But exercises like this look at the class of ship in much more detail, putting the current evolution of the ship in a developmental context, evaluating performance on a range of criteria, identifying the kind of problems which a ship of that design might experience and evaluating its role and usage. And if Cadet Naos wishes to get more than an F, she will have to do a great deal better than ‘They’re slow and they’re ugly and they’re used to carry cargo.’’