Quarus

by S J MacDonald

  ‘No problem,’ he said, and reached for another of the little savouries which Silvie had brought as part of the picnic. Considered fiery by quarian palates, they had a mildly spiced ratatouille-type mix of vegetables wrapped in a crunchy leaf.

  Silvie smiled. She had chosen the site for their picnic and brought the food for it, both with a view to what she knew Alex would enjoy. So they were sitting on an iceberg a kilometre or so off the great southern ice-sheet.

  It wasn’t actually that great as ice-caps went, just a few hundred kilometres across and shrinking rapidly as the southern pole moved into summer. It was pretty enough for a picnic, though, with the strangely lucid water and the weird abstract shapes of the floating bergs. Every now and again there was the drama of another calving, too, as a berg crashed off the ice-face with a terrific splash and a surge billowing out into the bay.

  Alex, satisfied that the berg they were parked on was stable and not likely to turn turtle on them, was happy to sit there in the shelter of the parked car, sharing the picnic and enjoying the view. He was treasuring the moment, building a full sensory memory of everything he was experiencing. He wanted this to be another ‘happy place’ memory, an experience he could revisit any time when he needed to feel this majestic isolation. He was oblivious to the fact that Blaze Tyler and his cameraman were filming the two of them from eighteen kilometres away, using a combination of high resolution long range and tiny spy-drone cameras.

  ‘There is something,’ said Silvie, after a long, companionable silence, ‘which needs to be said.’ As he looked at her in some surprise, she smiled at him. ‘I am fully grown up, now,’ she observed. ‘And quarian custom is that once a person is fully adult they are no longer looked after in the way that we parent our children.’

  Alex understood. Silvie had bonded with him at a time in her life when she, still maturing and feeling very lost and very far from home, had needed a parent to care for and comfort her. Now she was an adult, such a parenting role from him would be inappropriate.

  ‘Humans, of course, continue to nurture and look after their children throughout their lives, even after the children themselves have become parents,’ Silvie observed, and after just a very slight pause, looked sideways at him and grinned. ‘I think I like the human custom better.’

  Alex felt a rush of feeling he found it hard himself to identify. Relief was in there, relief that their bond did not have to be broken, relief that he did not have to try to stop loving her as he did. Gratitude was in the mix, too, that she understood how hard that would be for him and was making it easy. And there was, perhaps, just a tang of guilt at his own selfishness in wanting to keep things the way they were because he enjoyed their relationship so much.

  ‘Me too,’ he said, and toasted her with a mug of hot coffee she’d gone to some trouble to acquire for their picnic.

  Yes, he thought, looking back out over the crystal bay with a coffee mug cradled in his hands and his heart singing with joy. This was definitely going to be a happy place.

  Twenty Seven

  It was just a week later that they left Quarus, having finalised all the arrangements. They were not leaving any personnel at Quarus. The Amity and Falcon were already on their way, and would arrive just in time to be able to snare all the supplies from the incoming leviathan. They would stay, then, taking over diplomatic role and awaiting the arrival of the first of the liners which Davie was having converted for them. In the meantime, and for as long as they wanted him there, Davie himself would be on hand with the Stepeasy to run back and forth between Serenity and Quarus.

  It was fortunate that Shion brought the quarian passengers out to them some time after the actual launch. Alex was far from being the only member of the squadron to feel twinges of regret as they accelerated to the launch tunnel. Feelings were mixed, even with all the effort which had gone in to reminding people of their duty and focussing their minds on going home. Their time at Quarus had been magical at so many levels, getting to know such an amazing people, exploring that strange and beautiful world, and enjoying themselves tremendously, too, living and working in that free and easy off-schedule style.

  Now they were going to have to adjust back to normality, and to re-engage with all the politics, media frenzies and complexities of life on human worlds.

  For Alex, that return would be immediate and would hit him like a ton of duralloy crashing down from orbit. Right up till then, the Embassy at Serenity had done exactly as he’d asked, sending out only personal mail and official mission-related dispatches. The agreement had been that, subject to the Geminax link continuing to work, the Embassy would send out other news and correspondence once the Fourth was on their way back to Serenity. Alex had asked for that so that he would have time to deal with it on the journey.

  What he hadn’t expected, though, was that the Embassy would send it all at once as soon as they knew that the squadron was in superlight orbit around the system.

  Technically, it was true, they had now left Quarus, though they were remaining in superlight orbit for at least an hour or two, letting things settle before the quarians came aboard.

  ‘We’re getting an enormous signal, skipper,’ Bonny drew his attention to the mass of data pouring through the Geminax stream.

  Alex took one look at it and knew exactly what it was. File after file, thousand upon thousand of them, were blitzing out from Serenity.

  He knew exactly what to expect, too. He’d been under this kind of bombardment before, at Carrearranis. That was why he’d asked the Embassy at Serenity to protect him from it, leaving him free to concentrate on what he was doing at Quarus.

  There would, he knew, be innumerable communications from people whose status got them past the mail-handling at lower echelons. There would, for sure, be many letters from system presidents offering him the benefit of their advice. There would also be a morass of legal papers, many of them relating to court cases filed by activist groups. Far more massive than either of these, though, would be the media files. Given the amount of time they’d been away, there would be tens of thousands of hours of those, from all the worlds across the League. Even just looking at the precis analysis would take Alex a solid three weeks of work just to come up to speed on how the Fourth was being reported. Perhaps that was why the Diplomatic Corps felt it was imperative to get the information out to him as quickly as possible.

  It was a rude recall, though, hitting him just at the point where he was already dealing with a lot. He had his own feelings of regret at leaving Quarus to deal with, and his crew to settle down amid the slightly nervous anticipation of the quarians coming aboard. At the time when Bonny called him to point out the incoming data, Alex was doing a walk around the ship.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. Even at the rapid speed of transmission it would take nearly three minutes for the files to arrive. And, given their scrambled state, few could be constructed with any degree of confidence until the second transmission. That gave him about ten minutes before the deluge hit his desk. He would have help, of course – Rossy Ross, his adjutant, would answer all the presidential and other VIP mail for him, giving Alex only a list of correspondents and key points of anything he needed to know. Hetty Leavam, too, would review the legal documents and advise him on anything he needed to take action on himself. Ultimately, though, he was going to have to plough through masses of wearisome, depressing material.

  It was entirely typical of Alex that his reaction to the impact of that lot landing on him was to groan inwardly, say a word or two in the privacy of his own head that Fleet officers were not supposed to know, and then, accepting the inevitable, give a rueful grin.

  ‘Back to reality,’ he observed, and there were smiles and chuckles from the crew.

  When the deluge was decoded, though, at least some of it turned out to be very welcome news indeed. Alex had accepted the First Lord’s decision that he was not to be kept informed about the progress of the other Fourth’s mission taking place at Dortmell. Whatever problem
s they might be encountering there, telling Alex about them would serve no purpose other than to distract and worry him to the detriment of his own higher priority mission. He had, therefore, been receiving only infrequent assurances that the Minnow and Whisker were still on station at Dortmell and that there was ‘no cause for him to be concerned.’

  Now, though, he got the full reports, including both official dispatches and private correspondence from Milli Walensa

  The first news was that they were doing very well. An equivalent offworld Customs and Excise mission had been assigned at the same time, equipped in fact with one of their converted Seabird frigates and a swarm of patrol boats. It was apparent that a highly unofficial competition had arisen between this and the Fourth’s team as to which of them could capture more ships carrying drugs. At the time of writing, the score was standing at five to the Fourth and three to Customs – eight significant seizures each of several tonnes and adding up to the biggest seizure of drugs in the history of the League. All eight ships had been destroyed in spectacular fashion, too, within the Dortmell system. Rather than simply blow them up, Milli had allowed her gunners to come up with novel ways of carving them up before they were finally finished off with a missile. The freighter which had been sliced up like a loaf of bread would enter spacer legend and become the most-watched footage of the entire operation. Milli, it was apparent, was having a great time.

  Her official reports and personal letters confirmed this. Lt Commander Bentham was highly praised for his conduct in a particularly fierce dog-fight which had left the patrol ship somewhat battered. An attempt had been made to poison the Minnow’s crew, too, by adulterating supplies destined for them with a toxic chemical.

  ‘I regard this,’ Milli wrote, ‘as proof positive that we are really peeing them off…’ ‘They’ in this context, of course, meant the drug lords. Intelligence suggested that they were finding the combined Fourth and Customs operations to be so damaging that the various competing cartels had temporarily suspended hostilities amongst themselves in order to deal with the offworlders who were messing up their shipment routines. ‘Which is great, obviously,’ Milli enthused.

  Alex grinned as he read that. He couldn’t help feeling proud that the Fourth’s other ships were doing such good work at Dortmell. And he was reassured, too, by the efficiency of the security lockdown they had in place there. The poisoned cookies had not got anywhere near the ship, despite the best efforts of the drug lords to slide them past security checks. The Minnow and Whisker, Alex could see, were safe and well and having the time of their lives.

  There was good news, too, in reports that a long-drawn out legal case involving Jok Dorlan had finally been resolved at a court of appeal which had granted him compensation for effective and unlawful arrest. He had, to Alex’s fury, been accused of masterminding a major theft-by-fraud from his homeworld’s stock exchange purely on the basis that he was a known super-hacker and had been on the planet at the time. Alex had flatly refused to question him about it under caution, which was what Fleet skippers were required to do when sent such allegations by system police forces. It had needed considerable tact and even more professional ability for Jonas Sartin to ensure that the allegations were withdrawn and that Alex himself did not have to face charges of dereliction of his own duty in the matter. Now, finally, it had been resolved with an apology from the police personnel responsible for the ludicrous charges and a hefty payment to the charity of Jok’s choice. Everyone was happy about that and Jok himself was celebrating, while Jonas too was quietly jubilant.

  Not all of the news was pleasing, of course, but even some of the bad news turned out to be helpful as they departed from Quarus

  ‘I like this,’ Salomah observed, strolling onto the command deck. Quarus was, by then, more than three hours behind them and already feeling remote. ‘There’s a lovely sense of unity and focus. But what is this about Jimmo Towitz?’

  Alex raised his eyes briefly heavenward, at which there were bursts of laughter from the command deck crew.

  ‘Oh, Him,’ said Alex, with an audible capital letter.

  Salomah sat down, looking intrigued. Points of interest were flying onto the notice boards across the ship as Alex and other officers began sorting through the overwhelming mass of news and other information which had landed on them. The story which had caught Salomah’s attention had made headlines on most of the League’s worlds. It wouldn’t have normally even made it to the specialist offworld news channels, but in the wake of the Beeby Disclosure anything about the Fourth was headline news and this, it turned out, had been dynamite.

  Jimmo Towitz, a former member of the Fourth himself, had sold his story to the media. There were already talks about mini-series and movies, and he was being raced around the central worlds doing the talk-show circuit.

  ‘That one’s come at us sideways,’ Alex said, seeing that Salomah wanted a full explanation. ‘Mr Towitz was a member of the Fourth for a while and, like anyone granted nine ack alpha clearance, he has signed confidentiality agreements which bind him not only while he is serving but for the rest of his life. So when he first tried to go public with his version of ‘life inside the Fourth’ the only channel he could get to pick his story up was a fly-by – an opportunistic channel running scandalous and defamatory stories for as long as they can get away with it. At the point where they’re being slammed with injunctions and compensation claims from all directions they shut down the station and its editors vanish into the mist, only to reappear shortly afterwards as a new set-up doing just the same thing. The normal procedure when someone like Jimmo Towitz breaks a confidentiality agreement by selling a story to a gutter channel like that is to slap Security of the League injunctions on them, stat, and if classified material was being disclosed, to arrest the person responsible.’ He paused and sighed ruefully. ‘Unfortunately,’ he said, ‘someone made the decision at that point that the story he was selling was so ludicrous that even to bother slapping a stop onto it would give it more credibility than it deserved… a reasonable call, I have to admit, without taking into account the enormous suction for any kind of stories about us in the wake of the Beeby Disclosure. So, there it was, allowed to go on air unchallenged, and as soon as other channels saw that it wasn’t being slapped down with Security of the League injunctions they grabbed it too and bang, there it was, out in the public domain and heading intersystem as fast as couriers can fly.’ He spread his hands out, helplessly. ‘And as ludicrous as his story is, it has to be acknowledged that either he or his agents or someone has produced an entertaining media-friendly narrative which viewers are lapping up by the billion… tens of billions,’ he corrected himself, at an apologetic murmur from Nyge Tomaas, currently the junior officer of the watch. ‘And he has become, on the strength of that, an intersystem celebrity.’ Alex shook his head again, incredulous. ‘He was always a fantasist, of course, but really, who’d have believed…?’

  ‘Mr Towitz is the only person to have failed in his placement with us,’ Buzz came in as Salomah could see he wanted to join the conversation and looked at him, too, enquiringly. ‘He had issues with emotional maturity which we did our best to help him with, though it was pretty obvious right from the start that he had no real interest in changing his behaviour. We coped with all his acting out, attention seeking antics, hoping that he would settle down, but ultimately, sadly, he did something which left us no choice but to remove him from the ship. It is an absolute rule in the Fleet, a rule as old as the Fleet itself, that if any member of the crew asks to leave the ship either before or during the launch, they must be taken off at once. That’s a safety rule, you see, nothing to do really with concern for the welfare of that individual but a recognition that heading out into deep space with a crewmember who really doesn’t want to be there is a recipe for disaster. Under the same rule, any member of the crew showing signs of mental instability before or during launch must be removed from the ship straight away. So when Mr Towitz was crying and screami
ng hysterically that he wanted to get off the ship as we were leaving Telathor, we really didn’t have any choice but to send for a shuttle to come out and get him.’ He looked rueful, too, as he remembered that, and those who’d been present on that occasion grimaced at the recollection. It had been horrible. Jimmo Towitz had not gone quietly. He’d clung on to everything he could grab, raging and panicking and finally begging as he was carried off the ship in handcuffs.

  ‘I did ask the port admiral there to do whatever could be done for him,’ Alex said. ‘But there really wasn’t very much, and since he chose to leave the Fleet and reject all post-discharge support services, I’m afraid that he just vanished off our scopes.’ He glanced at a screen showing some of the headlines Jimmo Towitz had generated across several of the central worlds. ‘Only to come blasting back at us again right out of nowhere.’

  Salomah considered the headlines. Fourth Worships Lizard was certainly an eye-catcher, but the biggest one of all, which had made the top three accessed stories across eighteen worlds by the time this report had been sent, was headlined Alien Lizard Cult.

  ‘It’s possible,’ Buzz observed, ‘that someone in the Diplomatic Corps decided that stories like this would generate amusement and therefore reduce anxieties in the wake of the Beeby Disclosure.’

  He and Alex looked at one another and there was much communication without the need for words.

  ‘All right,’ Buzz conceded, with a chortle. ‘It’s a cock up.’

  Alex nodded. ‘A mistake,’ he told Salomah. ‘They should have stopped it from the start.’

  She was still looking at him with fascination. ‘But you don’t really mind,’ she commented. ‘You think it’s funny.’

  Alex conceded the point with a chuckle and a light shrug.

  ‘Well, it is amusing,’ he admitted, with another glance at the headlines and a surge of hilarity as he recalled some of the footage he’d sampled. In one interview, Jimmo Towitz had explained earnestly how Captain von Strada led his crew in a ritual ‘Dance of the Lizard’ as part of their ‘preparation for battle’. ‘You have to laugh,’ Alex said. ‘And I think that ninety nine out of a hundred people will recognise it for the fame-grabbing nonsense it is. But when you’re looking at an audience of tens of billions, even one in a hundred giving such stories even the slightest credibility means huge quantities of cack heading our way at high speed.’