Hilarity had broken out amongst the crew almost as soon as they came aboard. It was common knowledge by then that Tass was a member of First Contact, and there was already some amusement on the ship, anticipating how she would react to being introduced to Shion.
Both she and Chantal had to sign the XD agreement first, though. An additional level of secrecy required a whole new set of paperwork, which they were asked to sign as part of the official process of bringing them on board. Tass had evidently felt that the Fourth was taking the mick, with that, but Chantal had assured her airily that there was nothing to it.
‘It’s just a Fleet thing,’ she told her, ‘they make everyone sign it just in case they meet an alien ship.’ She gave a trill of laughter. ‘They’ve been asking people to sign it for hundreds of years, but still, I suppose, we live in hope.’
Tass scowled at that. She was a dark, intense young woman of the long hair and vivid makeup variety. Her attitude towards the Fourth was a combination of cold politeness and deep suspicion. She signed the XD secrecy agreement with obvious reluctance, commenting even as she did so that she still thought it was taking the mick.
Then she and Chantal were taken on the mandatory orientation tour of the ship. It was obvious that Chantal really wasn’t paying attention, while Tass’s eyes darted everywhere, watchful and wary. She gave particularly hard looks at every officer and petty officer she was introduced to, reserving her brief smiles and warmer greetings for the lower ranks.
Once the tour was over, Alex made time to welcome them aboard, meeting with them briefly in his daycabin. It was then that he broke the news to them that they had an alien visitor aboard the ship.
‘Well, not actually aboard ship at the moment,’ he added, ‘She’s gone shopping. But you will get a chance to meet her later. Her name is Shionolethe and she’s a first contact visitor from Pirrell – the Veiled World, you know.’
Neither of them believed him. Chantal just looked at him with tolerant amusement and said, ‘Yes, of course, skipper, and I need to keep holding this switch to prevent a power surge, and there’s been an accident in supplies so we’re all going to have to live on porridge for the rest of the trip.’
Alex recognised at once from that that the crews aboard the other Fleet ships she’d travelled on had been exercising their wit in traditional Fleet jokes. Before he could say anything, though, Tass was even more vehement in her response.
‘I suppose you think that’s funny!’ she told him.
Alex did, rather, but held up a hand to stem the indignant protests from the post grad.
‘Honestly, I am not having you on,’ he said. ‘This ship is under XD orders, exodiplomacy service, and we are currently hosting a first contact visitor. I will provide you with a copy of the Diplomatic Corps briefing, and you can talk to your colleagues in the Second’s unit about it, too. They were with us when she came aboard and are fully up to speed on the situation.’
Tass glared at him. It was a fundamental tenet of faith amongst the First Contact fraternity that if the government found out that people like them had evidence of alien visitors, all manner of sinister things might happen. There was just no way, she knew, no way, that the authorities would ever allow someone like her access into that top secret realm. And while she did believe in principle that aliens were being smuggled onto their worlds, she had a healthy dose of scepticism when it came to people claiming to have actually met them and even showing holos they claimed to have taken.
‘And this alien visitor,’ she retorted, with heavy sarcasm, ‘has gone shopping.’
‘For shoes, yes.’ Alex said, deadpan.
He was speaking nothing but the truth, there. Attaché Djembo had given in to Shion’s repeated request and had come to collect her that morning, to take her shopping. Both of them were wearing the kind of clothes that would blend them in with the thousands of visitors currently pouring off the Ruby Queen. The liner had arrived that morning and would be here for four days on layover before returning to Chartsey. Most of the passengers were in transit to other worlds but some hundreds, indeed, had just come for the cruise and would be heading back with the liner when it departed. Either way, they would not want to waste one moment of their time aboard the station. They’d be heading out in droves the moment they’d checked into their on-board hotels; a perfect time for Shion to be taken on a very carefully planned visit to the shops.
There would be a major security operation going on around her every moment she was there. That would be covert, though, allowing her to go about the shops as normally as possible, with the attache’s discreet escort. Shion had expressed a particular interest in shopping for shoes, since she’d gathered that it was something of cultural importance to women in the League. Several of her female friends aboard ship had spoken with keen enthusiasm about the bargains you could get at Karadon, designer shoes and bags at duty free prices. Shion was curious to find out what the excitement was about, so Attaché Djembo, entirely in role as a reluctant male, was going to take her to the shoe and accessory outlets.
‘Ptchah!’ said Tass, with awful scorn, getting to her feet. ‘You’ll have to do a lot better than that!’ she told the skipper, and with that, walked out of his daycabin.
‘Not much sense of humour, bless,’ Chantal commented, mildly apologetic but mostly indulgent. ‘You’ll have to forgive her if she’s a bit anti. I have told her that the things she’s seen on the news aren’t true, but they’re so certain of things at that age, aren’t they?’ She too got up, and held her hand out to the skipper in gracious farewell. ‘We’ll try not to be a nuisance, skipper.’
Alex let it go at that. They would realise the truth at some point, and in the meantime he had more pressing things to do than trying to batter through their disbelief. Buzz was off the ship at the time, enjoying his own shoreleave pass, and there were, again, more than twenty files on Alex’s desk, flashing for immediate attention. One of them, indeed, was about Tass Curlow. Harry Alington had evidently only just discovered that Alex had given the post grad security clearance to come aboard his ship, though it had been amongst many routine bits of information shared with the corvette the previous day.
Harry was not, as he was careful to state in his written expression of concern about that, challenging Alex’s rightful authority. He was merely – Alex did appreciate the merely – putting on record his official concerns about the decision to grant clearance to someone he believed to be a major security risk. Ms Curlow did not have clearance, and not the kind of background that would get her clearance, and Skipper Alington did not trust Dr Jeol to respect that in keeping information from her assistant.
Idiot, Alex thought, with a tight look around his mouth as he scrawled a curt note to acknowledge that he’d read the official notification of concern.
The next message he opened made rather better reading. It was from one of Carvor Djenbo’s assistants. In amongst everything else, the diplomatic team had found time to handle the situation with Candra Pattello for them. They had, the assistant reported, made contact with her in a discreet and sympathetic approach. After some discussion she had accepted the offer of a ride aboard a courier. These tiny, super-fast ships hurtled back and forth along all shipping routes, carrying official and urgent mail. They rarely carried passengers, though there was some very limited capacity with a couple of bunks in an airlock. It certainly wouldn’t be comfortable, since couriers were notoriously noisy, rattling and vibrating at high speed, and there’d barely even be room to stretch, aboard.
For speed, though, there was nothing out there to match them. The courier that was leaving for Chartsey at lunchtime today would overtake the White Star liner Stellar Princess in just a couple of days, though it had been five days since the liner had left port. The Diplomats would put her aboard that to complete her journey in comfort.
Alex didn’t care about that one way or the other, but he did smile with relief at the news that she’d be off the station and gone within the hour. He wrote
a quick but sincere note of thanks to the Diplomatic team, and memoed the LIA and Fleet Intel, too, to keep them in the loop without actually mentioning the Diplomatic Corps. It was a bit like spinning plates on poles, working with other agencies, particularly when even the presence of one of those agencies had to be kept from the others. Alex, though, had no problem with that, or with juggling exodiplomacy, anti-drugs intelligence gathering and shipboard command. He had separate screens for them all on his desk, keeping track of everything he needed to just as a watch officer had navigation, engineering, life support and other key information on the conn screens.
Much of that came together, too, in the briefing he gave Martine over a working lunch in his daycabin. She was going over to the station to handle a scheduled media conference at 1500. It wasn’t to give any particular press release, but had been offered to the journalists aboard the station as a rare opportunity for open questions with a Fourth’s officer.
They would be disappointed that that officer was Martine. None of them could have hoped, realistically, that Alex himself would turn up, but they would be expecting Buzz. Martine was relatively unknown. She tended to be passed over in media coverage because she was neither important nor controversial enough to be newsworthy. Carvor Djenbo, however, or at least the assistant responsible for media handling, had suggested Martine specifically for this because she was so unimportant and conventional. Background investigation, should the journalists feel inclined to pursue that, would also readily turn up the fact that she was known in the Fleet for her mischievous sense of humour, playing jokes on yacht owners and so on.
Her face was certainly alight with laughter when she came out of the skipper’s cabin. She looked totally professional and composed, though, when she took to the podium a couple of hours later. Just as Alex had expected, there were noises of disappointment from the assembled journalists when she introduced herself. The first question, indeed, was a complaining, ‘Why haven’t we got von Strada or Burroughs?’
‘Commander Burroughs,’ said Martine, ‘is otherwise engaged this afternoon. And Skipper von Strada...’ the slightest of pauses, and a poker-face control, ‘does not do live interviews. So,’ she glanced around at them, briskly, ‘you’ve got me. Of course, if you don’t feel it’s worth your while to ask me questions, we can end the interview right here...’
As uproar ensued, she held up a pacifying hand and smiled. ‘All right. You’ve got me for half an hour,’ she said, and ticked off on her fingers, ‘No classified, no personal, no time wasting.’ She pointed at one of the journalists who was waving a holo-flag with the number 1 on it, signalling that he’d drawn first question. ‘Go.’
The first questions were entirely predictable. They were variations on the theme of ‘What are you doing here, no, what are you really doing here?’ though they focussed in very quickly, too, on the Fourth’s recent operations at Sixships.
‘You blew up a space station valued at sixty four million dollars,’ a journalist reminded her. ‘Against the pleading, the pleading, of the governments of Sixships to hold your fire. Now the Admiralty says they’ll hold an enquiry – do you have any comment on that?’
‘Not with the matter subject to official enquiry, no,’ Martine replied. There were hisses and disgruntled noises, but all the journos knew that she could not, in fact, make public statements about something that was in the process of official review. They accepted that, then, and moved on. The next questions were about their forthcoming operations at Novamas. When Martine began to recite the official Admiralty press release about that, there were noisy interruptions. Martine held up her hands.
‘I’m sorry, but you can’t seriously be asking me to tell you our operational intentions,’ she pointed out. One of the journalists called out cheekily, asking, ‘Are you going to blow up anything expensive?’ but Martine just pretended not to hear. Instead, she focussed her attention on the next journalist, the one who’d drawn question eight. ‘Go,’ she told him.
The journalist concerned worked for a channel more noted for the entertainment value of its broadcasting than for any kind of depth or indeed accuracy.
‘Jonno Grate,’ he announced himself, as journos usually did, ‘Spotlight. Can we have your reaction to reports of a riot and mutiny aboard the Heron just about three weeks ago?’
‘I’m fairly sure that if we’d had a riot or a mutiny, I would have noticed,’ Martine observed, with a slightly weary note. ‘We did have some rather lively training exercises and drills, which I think perhaps is where this rumour may have originated, but there was certainly no kind of riot.’
‘So rumours that you had a rumpus because you’d crossed League borders and visited a secret base out there are entirely unfounded then, are they?’ The journalist was not restricted to just one question, but could continue to press questions till Martine herself drew a line and moved on.
Martine gave a little chuckle, then adopted a mock-earnest manner, even leaning over the podium a little.
‘All right,’ she said, confidentially, ‘just between us, actually, we did cross the border. We went out to a top secret base where we picked up an alien ambassador – actually, an alien princess. She’s around here somewhere, I believe, shopping for shoes.’
Aboard the Heron, Sub-lt Arie McKenna dropped her pen.
‘Did she just say that?’ she gasped, and Alex saw that colour had drained out of the young Sub’s face. There was a horrified reaction going on around the ship, too, at least till they saw that Alex was laughing.
They were laughing in the media suite, too – gales of laughter, along with a good deal of shouting, mockery and scornful garrrrrn! reactions. They were taking that as a joke against the Spotlight journalist, taking the mick of the kind of stories that the channel put out.
‘Well, then,’ Martine grinned, ‘Don’t ask stupid questions.’ She looked at the journalist now jumping on his chair to wave a number 9 flag. ‘Go.’
‘It’s called proactive subversion,’ Alex told Arie, though explaining it for the benefit of the crew, too, as Martine resumed a professional manner in answering a sensible question from a hard news channel. ‘One of the Diplomatic Corps’ favoured means of handling exodiplomacy situations, I gather – if you can get in there first and make people think that it’s a joke, nobody takes any subsequent rumours seriously, see?’
‘That’s brilliant,’ Arie said, recovering a little composure herself, now, and looking a little embarrassed as she scooped up her pen from the deck. ‘Scary, though – I mean, what if they believed her, sir?’
‘Well, the skill is in the presentation,’ Alex observed, with an appreciative glance at the screen showing the news conference. Martine was now responding to the question ‘Is the granting of the freedom of ISiS to the Fourth a political manoeuvre intended to fob off Senate attempts to gain more jurisdiction on these stations?’ Martine sounded crisp and intelligent as she answered that seriously, in marked contrast to her playful manner in handling the previous question. ‘And I believe Ms Fishe has pulled that off brilliantly,’ Alex said.
He told Martine that, too, when she came back aboard to a spontaneous burst of cheers from the crew.
‘Excellent job, Lt,’ Alex commended, shaking her hand.
That was an opinion shared by Carvor Djenbo. He asked to see Lt Fishe when he came back aboard with Shion. She was in the lab at the time, but came to the command deck when Alex called. There, the diplomat shook hands with her, telling her ‘First rate, Lt, that could not have gone better, thank you.’
Shion thanked her, too, though admitting that she’d found this aspect of human culture just baffling.
‘You told them the truth because you knew they wouldn’t believe it, and now when other people hear the truth, they won’t believe it either,’ she observed, and shook her head, perplexed. ‘Just when I think I’ve come to understand your people. And what is it with the shoes?’ She looked at Alex with remembered amazement. ‘Why would anyone,’ she asked him, ‘buy sh
oes that hurt to walk in?’
Alex laughed helplessly. ‘You’re asking the wrong person there!’ he told her, confiding, ‘I’ve never understood that, either.’
‘It’s a girl thing,’ Martine told her, kindly. ‘I’ll explain it later, okay?’ She glanced significantly at the time, and Shion grinned.
‘Shower,’ she agreed, answering the reminder rather than the offer to explain fashionable shoes. All crew were expected to have an anti-pathogen shower immediately upon coming back aboard ship. It wasn’t a full decontam, with all the discomfort of jets and choke-inducing gases that entailed, but a disinfectant wash with a mild inhalation. That was all the more important for Shion, reliant as she was on her artificial, implanted immune system. ‘Thank you, darling,’ she added, to the attaché who’d taken her shopping. ‘So kind.’ She deposited a light kiss on his cheek and headed off to quarters.
Carvor Djenbo watched her for a moment, his manner betraying just a little regret. He was, he knew, doing everything right, here. He was even following Alex’s advice, being as informal with Shion as he could be. Somehow, though, he’d failed to make the same kind of connection with her as the Heron’s officers and crew so obviously had. She spoke to them in an entirely different tone, easy and open. He was depressingly aware that she only called people ‘darling’ and kissed them like that when she felt that the relationship between them was ‘social-cordial’ rather than genuinely friendly.
Unbeknown to him, however, Shion really was considering the possibility of leaving the Heron. Some of the things Carvor had said in the course of trying to persuade her to come to Chartsey had worried her. When her offers to help with the work going on around ship had been turned down by several people, too, she went to see Alex.
Unusually, she asked to see him privately. He agreed to that immediately, of course, taking her straight to his daycabin and asking what was wrong.
‘I have to ask you something, skipper.’ She said. ‘And I want you to be totally, totally honest – I know you always are anyway but please, no being kind, here, I really need to know.’
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