XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  They did, too. A party went over from the Heron, led by Buzz. It was no dress occasion. The Fourth had been told that miners took a perverse kind of pride in being scruffy and rough mannered, and that turned out to be very much the case, even amongst senior management. There was no culture of formal entertaining, here, nothing like a VIP hospitality suite or any kind of elitism. Senior management ate in the canteen along with everybody else, and lived in just the same kind of quarters, too.

  Miners had quite a lot in common with spacers, spending much of their lives in wild, remote places. There were big differences though. Miners were not, generally, superstitious, and they prided themselves on a rougher, tougher lifestyle than that of spacers, regarding spacing as a soft job compared to mining. Miners were also known for being fiercely egalitarian, and that was certainly the case here at Tolmer’s. They would not even put Buzz, as the senior officer, at any ‘guest of honour’ place, though Roby did bagsy him to sit at his table. Their guests were expected to get their own food and to clear their own plates away. It was a rough, industrial environment, with no attempt made to pretty it up. The whole station had a slightly rank smell about it, too, like a locker room after a particularly sweaty game, and every now again there was a waft of something that smelt like eggy flatus. When Buzz asked about this, roars of laughter went up.

  ‘That’s the smell of money, bob!’ Roby told him, taking a deep breath, himself, and pounding his chest. ‘Reminds us what we’re here for!’

  Buzz was addressed as ‘bob’ by several other people as well, and slapped on the back and shoulder several times, too, in matey greeting. Calling people bob or bobbin, they soon discovered, was a Novamasian idiom meaning just the same as ‘mate’.

  Harry Alington, for sure, would have loathed every moment and every aspect of that evening, from the horrible canteen to the rough, loud-voiced people punching his arm and calling him bob, the crudely flavoured, high-fat food and the foaming mugs of beer that were served whether you asked for them or not. Mining stations did not operate dry, and found it hilarious that many starships did. Understanding, however, that Fleet personnel were not allowed to drink at all on short leave, they provided ‘dry billy’ for them, though Roby told Buzz frankly that non-alcoholic beer was an abomination he should be embarrassed to put anywhere near his mouth.

  Roby, Buzz gathered, was only going to be the chair of the board of directors for the next four days. On the tenth of each month, at ten in the morning, the multi-company board all shifted one place round the table, giving all the companies fair turn at being in the boss chair. Not, according to Roby, that that was any kind of coveted status.

  ‘It’s just a month of having everybody nark at you,’ he said, but beamed, then. ‘I get to do the spokes-thing for you guys, though, yay!’ He grinned hopefully. ‘Do I get an invite to the ship?’

  He did, along with an invitation to the board of directors. They held a buffet for them in the gym, bringing them aboard through the secure zone. Alex hosted that, apologising for not being able to allow them to see more of the ship, which they assured him they understood.

  ‘All that topsy secret stuff,’ Roby observed, and tapped his nose, wisely, ‘And we’d know what we were lookin’ at, too.’

  Alex didn’t smile – he was in public with strangers, and even his most cordial social manner in that situation did not include more than the most fleeting curve of his lips. The miners, however, did not find his cold manner offensive. On the contrary, they were fascinated by it, curious to find that what they’d heard from spacers was true, that he couldn’t smile in public. Several of them tested this by attempting to surprise him into smiling – one such attempt involved a guest getting so close in his face, staring at him, that for a moment Alex was rather afraid she might kiss him.

  ‘Amazing,’ she said, finding that even going nose-to-nose with him, staring right into his eyes, she couldn’t see even a flicker of emotional response. ‘Is everyone on Novaterre like you?’

  ‘In public conduct, pretty much, yes,’ Alex said. Strangers visiting Novaterre often found it an alarming world, with people so very unemotional. You didn’t see people laughing in the streets, talking loudly or displaying emotion in any public setting. It was all very calm, orderly and dignified. It was a common misconception that Novaterrans were like robots, or that they were rigidly authoritarian, all personality drilled out of them from birth. In fact, anyone invited into a Novaterran home would find that they were, in private, every bit as emotive as people on any other world, family life just the same. It was simply that they had very definite views, culturally, about what kind of behaviour was appropriate for private and public occasions. For Alex, laughing, grinning or showing strong emotion in public would be as horrifying as it would be for someone from another world to find himself in a public place wearing nothing but underpants.

  ‘Wee-urd,’ said the miner.

  Alex did grin, later, over that.

  ‘You’ve got to like them,’ he observed, when the miners had gone off, noisily delighted with their entertainment on the frigate.

  ‘There is a certain child-like honesty in the way they just say what they think,’ Buzz agreed, chuckling. ‘And I find their exuberance endearing, too, though I imagine it could get rather wearing after a while.’

  Alex agreed, giving a sigh of relaxation, then, as he settled at the command table with a well earned mug of coffee. He smiled, too, as he saw Shion approaching.

  ‘So – how was leave?’ he asked, once they’d all exchanged greetings.

  ‘Oh, wonderful,’ Shion said. They were being given full-day passes, here, from 0700 to 2450. Shion had gone off that morning with Martine and Hali. They hadn’t needed to lay on any security, or to organise any shoreleave party into big groups. There were no journalists here, no activists, no tourists. There were just spacers and miners, neither of whom believed what they saw on the news. The spacers had given the Fourth the good word, and that was good enough for the miners. Security evaluations here confirmed that this was, indeed, a system where their people could go about freely, without fear of abuse or attack. The only danger they were in was of coming back bruised from all the matey arm-punching. ‘I love it here!’ Shion said, beaming. ‘Everyone’s so amazingly friendly, and the mining operation is just incredible.’

  There was no provision for tourists at Tolmer’s, so no guided tours of the system or visitor information centres. Miners would, however, show spacers around if they liked, and had offered to do that for anyone on the Heron who was interested, too.

  Every single one of them would take up that offer, even Alex himself. It was not every day, after all, that you got to go up close and personal with industrial process on this scale, and Alex was as fascinated and impressed by it as any of his crew.

  ‘They took us right up to the Beast – that’s what they call the processing units, there, that pulverise the rock,’ Shion told him, indicating them on the screen. ‘It made my hair stand on end – there’s an asteroid, wham, gone! And those grav-sats they use are amazing. We could have done with some of them, cleaning up after the Ignite. Maybe we could get some, in case we need to do stuff like that again.’

  Alex and Buzz grinned in the same moment, and for the same reason. Shion had learned huge amounts about human society, but she had a curious blind spot when it came to money. She understood it well enough, and could, indeed, manage a budget very efficiently. But it didn’t enter into her consciousness to think of money as a factor when she was thinking about other things. Seeing their amusement, though, she was quick to work out the reason for it.

  ‘Oh – are they expensive?’

  ‘A few million dollars apiece, yes,’ said Alex, with a chuckle. ‘Sorry, not the kind of kit they let us have just in case it might come in handy sometime.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ Shion grinned, letting that go with a shrug.

  They sat on the command deck together for a while, just chatting, though Alex was keeping an eye on operat
ional screens, too.

  The spacers kept asking, of course, what ‘the thing’ was that the Fourth had going on here. Buzz and Martine had told them that Skipper von Strada would do ‘the thing’ when he was good and ready, and had promised them that it would be worth waiting for.

  In the meantime, the Fourth was having open house – well, open gym, anyway. They’d set the gym up as a social venue and were welcoming spacers there for ship visiting. Spacers, too, understood that the Fourth really couldn’t allow them access to the rest of the ship, and since even this was unprecedented access to the Heron, they were making the most of it. They were, in turn, inviting Fourth’s people to visit their ships, and strong, friendly relationships were already being established. The news that the Fourth had Van Dameked a new route through the Crown to get here had already been ‘leaked’, though they would not say why, beyond dropping intriguing hints that they weren’t allowed to go through the central section of Abigale any more. There was keen interest in the new route they’d taken. Alex had made both the chart and selected log entries from their traverse available, and every other ship in port had already uploaded it. Two more ships had arrived, too, one an ore-carrier running in empty from Novamas and the other a freighter bringing a few hundred more crates to add to the Freight Yard. Both had been given the new chart by other ships and told that the Fourth was up to something, that they were all waiting for ‘a thing’.

  In fact, Alex himself was waiting for the arrival of news. Timing was complex, here, with a number of variables entirely out of Alex’s control, but if he’d worked it right and things had gone as planned, they might expect the mail courier carrying the news of the Alari Tablet’s discovery to come in anytime from today. The earliest possible it could arrive had been around eight that morning, but it might, indeed, be several more days yet.

  In the event, though, the ship had just settled down to nightwatch when the shuttle-sized craft arrived. It had come direct from Penrys, passing through Abigale – they were, obviously, trying to stop ships going through that way but Alex had felt that one more or less wouldn’t make any difference, and that it was justified, too, in the interests of what they were hoping to achieve here.

  The courier was still doing a teeth-rattling L36 as it came into port, though it had slammed down to L3 in a couple of orbits, dropping in off the Heron’s port side and flashing a salute, followed immediately by ‘carrying dispatches’

  This was a Fleet courier, nominally part of the Canelon squadron. This particular courier had been put at Alex’s disposal, one of the resources he had asked for in the list sent to Dix all those weeks ago.

  The officer commanding it lost no time in reporting aboard the frigate, bringing the sealed bag that contained tapes, messages so classified that they were not allowed to be transmitted even over encrypted comms. Fleet couriers were a Sub’s command. Their crew consisted of a petty officer engineer and an able star deckhand, the three of them living in a flight deck three metres long by two wide.

  ‘Sir!’ The Sub had the characteristic jelly-legged walk of someone who’d spent the last two and a half weeks aboard a ship that was vibrating like a jack hammer the whole time. He pulled off a creditable salute, though, even if his attention-stance swayed a bit. It was normally Buzz who went to the airlock for such handovers as this, but Buzz had gone to bed and Alex had still been on the command deck, so he’d come to sign for the dispatch bag himself.

  ‘Thank you,’ Alex took the bag from him and handed the Sub himself into Shiny Sugorne’s care, as he was currently junior officer of the watch. ‘Mr Sugorne will look after you, and we’ll send a relief crew aboard so your crew can have a rest, too.’

  As the Sub thanked him and staggered off, Alex took the bag into his cabin, broke the ‘Skipper’s Eyes Only’ seal and looked quickly through the contents. When he came out of his cabin a few minutes later, he was smiling.

  The news item he put up on the screen for the crew had come in as part of the massive news and entertainment update flash-mailed by the courier, routinely, not only to them but to all the ships there, and indeed to Consortium Tower.

  This particular item was a three minute feature – quite a long story by intersystem news standards – about the discovery of a stone plaque in excavations being made to build a new car park.

  ‘I were about to chuck it aside, like, not thinkin’ nothing of those marks on it,’ the site worker explained, with the rabbit-in-headlights look of someone not at all at ease with a media interview, ‘then I saw there were like a picture of a person, like, an’ I thought it might be sommat, you know, ’istoric, so I talked it over with the lads and they reckoned I should call that Prof Garaghty off the holly. So I sent him a picture of it, so, not thinkin’ to hear nothing, only about I dunno, ten minutes later, like, ten minutes, he’s on the comm, is this for real, who are you people, you’re not students doing a rag, are you? And when we were like, no, no, it’s for real, like, he was like, don’t you move, don’t touch it, don’t breathe on it, I’ll be there in five minutes!’ And he was, like, and all these other guys came, too – loads of ’em, just parking all over and running to come and see. They were all, like, putting this forensic stuff on, too – people thought we had a murder or sommat.’

  Professor Garaghty was shown, glowing with delight, holding the precious tablet in a protective casing as he explained at media-level how incredible a find it was, that it would revolutionise their understanding of a period of history they had previously known very little about. He had identified it as a memorial plaque, written by the ancient Alobi to commemorate some disaster that had befallen another people, on another world.

  ‘Anyone who still believes that there was no intersystem travel or communication pre-Dark Age,’ he said, thrusting the tablet forward with an in your face, bozo attitude, ‘Take a look. This tablet is of Canelonian stone, found on Canelon, commemorating a disaster on a world a hundred and sixty eight light years away – the world we now know as Novamas, yes. We have believed, ever since discovering it, that there was some earlier civilisation on Novamas, but we’ve never discovered any written texts or artefacts to tell us what it was. Now we have, and I can tell you, this is evidence that that world was called Alar. Its people, the Alari, died out in the catastrophic climate change that we know plunged Novamas into ice-age – no, we don’t know why that happened, we can only speculate and I’m not a climatologist, myself. All I can tell you is that we do know that Alar – Novamas – went through a massive, catastrophic climate change estimated at around ten and a half thousand years ago, and my analysis of this tablet dates the text to the same period, or slightly younger. And the text says, it actually says,’ he was nearly bouncing with excitement as he pointed it out, ‘The petals fall’ or ‘The petals are falling’, and what does that suggest but that plunging temperatures were killing off the flora?’

  He was, he announced, taking it to Novamas, himself, in person.

  ‘Yes, straight away!’ He declared. ‘We’ll be publishing on it properly, of course, further down the line, but this is the most important ancient-artefact discovery ever made about Novamas, so yes, of course I am taking it straight to them, to my colleagues at the university there. They will want to authenticate it for themselves, of course, and we will, yes, certainly be working and publishing on it together.’

  ‘A remarkable find, professor,’ the journalist commented. ‘And not the first major discovery you’ve made, either – is that luck, do you think, or do you have some particular treasure-finding ability?’

  Professor Garaghty guffawed. ‘Luck!’ he said. ‘And a good eye! The cameras were with me, filming that Lost Archive feature for the History channel, when I found the Janor pot. Four museum staff, right there, including a curator, and an entire film crew, and that pot was just sitting on a shelf, sitting there in plain sight. So yes, luck that I was there, but a good eye to notice it and recognise that it was not, in fact, the telathic era domestic pot that it said it was on the label
. In this case, though, neither luck nor eye was needed, at least not mine. The people who found the plaque deserve all the credit for spotting that it was unusual. We owe them a great debt, we really do, for not chucking it aside or just taking it home as a curiosity. They did exactly the right thing, calling the university. I feel honoured, really honoured, that they called me – good to know that people do watch the History channel, and luckily one or two of them know, as they said, that I’m ‘into this kind of stuff’. He hugged the protective case a little, gleefully. In answer to the next, inevitable question, he shook his head.

  ‘Oh, priceless, priceless! You couldn’t put a value on something like this. It can’t be sold, of course, it’s a protected antiquity, no question, no question but that it falls into the protected antiquity law, so it will remain the property of all of us, to be cared for and displayed in a museum – oh, on Novamas, I’d think, wouldn’t you? It’s far more significant a discovery for them than it is for Canelon.’

  The news item concluded with images of the site workers popping bottles of fizz and spraying it all over each other, celebrating the confirmation that they would be entitled to the protected-antiquity finders’ fee. This was very generous on Canelon. Their history was, in many ways, also their major industry, and they did not want historical artefacts being slipped offworld, sold illegally to private collectors. So it was made worthwhile for people to report such finds to the authorities, and the site-workers would be sharing a lottery-sized payout.

  There was more to the story – subscreens to more in depth written features, related clips from other stories, a profile of the professor himself, and reaction to the discovery from various officials and groups. A spokeswoman for Canelon’s most prestigious museum gave congratulations and a speech on how important it was for any members of the public finding anything that looked old and unusual to contact their local museum or university about it. A spokesman for one of the more rabid preservation societies had a rant about it being taken offworld – ‘It’s Canelonian, the stone is Canelonian, the text is alobic, it is part of our heritage and shouldn’t be allowed to be shipped off to Novamas!’ – and finally there was the comic ‘and also’ element that they put on any news story like this. In this case the requisite chuckle was supplied by representatives of an edenist cult called the First Peoples.