XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  Standing in their homespun robes in their self-sufficient organic garden-farm, they declared their belief that humans were walking in the footsteps of the First Peoples, great ancient long-lost civilisations who’d lived on garden worlds in perfect tranquillity.

  That was all the funnier, to the Fourth at least, because they knew that the hairy nutters up to their knees in compost were actually right, about that if not about their more esoteric beliefs and practices. That they had ‘long known about the Alari’ was actually not an unreasonable claim, as there were indeed vague but persistent myths of a lost civilisation on Novamas. Claiming that the spirit of the Alari spoke to them in telepathic communication, however, took them way out of the reality zone.

  Alex turned off the footage at the point where First Peoples were urging all human civilisations to abandon their cars, cities, space travel and industrialisation and go back to nature.

  ‘Excellent,’ he said, and there was a chorus of agreement from the officers. Professor Garaghty had obviously adapted the detail of the story they’d agreed, perhaps on the advice of the Diplomatic Corps people who’d helped him set it up. But it was, indeed, excellent. Alex himself would not have questioned the veracity of the report, or the discovery, for a moment, if he’d just seen it on holovision amongst hundreds of other news items. ‘Let’s see how long it takes for the spacers to pick up on it.’

  It took several hours, in fact. It was, indeed, just one item listed amongst hundreds of other headlines. Spacers tended to be more interested in news of particular interest to them, and the Alari Tablet wasn’t even in the top hundred stories accessed. The miners were even less likely to notice it. They were almost all of them Novamasians, themselves, but even news from their homeworld was rated very low interest out at Tolmer’s Drift. The only thing they took keen interest in was sports coverage. There were yells of delight from the miners when it was discovered that the courier had tapped a liner heading out from Novamas, shortly before turning into Abigale. That meant they had news from Novamas that was less than three weeks old, including, all-importantly, the last three games of the Ice Bash world series.

  It was starting to get to the point where Alex felt they might have to nudge things along a bit with ‘hey, have you seen that thing about that tablet they found on Canelon?’ when exactly that question came in to them, from a crewman on an ore carrier asking one of their ratings.

  She handled it perfectly, just as they’d all trained for and rehearsed. She grinned and said ‘yeah’, in a tone that gave away that she knew more about that than was on the news, but then, when questioned, laughed and refused to talk about it. Within an hour, other spacers were calling mates on the Heron. Nobody, unusually, had already had mates on any of the ships in port here, but they’d made friends very fast with the ship-visiting, and established a very open, chatty relationship. People started calling them, asking what they knew about ‘this tablet thing’. And it was not long, in that, before someone made the leap, as Alex had known they would.

  ‘It’s the jinx, it’s about the Novamas jinx!’ one spacer demanded, ‘Isn’t it? Come on! What do you know?’

  Another, a skipper, called Buzz and asked him, straight out, ‘Look, are these Alari the ones who put the curse on Novamas?’

  ‘I can’t talk about it, sorry,’ said Buzz, and held up his hands apologetically. ‘Look, the skipper doesn’t want it talked about. You know what he’s like about superstitions.’

  ‘It’s no superstition!’ The skipper of the ore-carrier told him, fiercely defensive. ‘That planet is cursed.’

  Buzz looked at him thoughtfully. The skipper of the ore-carrier Mineral Prize was, himself, Novamasian. He was intelligent, well qualified, a rational man working in an environment of high tech and hard science. Yet even he had come to believe that the world he had been born on was cursed, jinxed, dangerous to starships.

  ‘Stuff happens,’ the skipper told Buzz, ‘you don’t know, you can’t know what it’s like till you’ve been there and experienced it yourself. Hatches open themselves, Buzz, I swear to God, I’ve seen it myself. Our for’ard ‘tween decks hatch between four and five, right in the heart of the ship, we’d dogged it and it just opened itself.’ He paused impressively. ‘And what’s more, when we ran diagnostics, it had recorded manual opening, and there was nobody there! That happens all the time, there’s hundreds of times that’s happened, to all sorts of ships, and that’s just the start – bad, bad stuff happens there, gear in perfect working order suddenly fritzes out, cargo pods burst, whole ships like, groan, shiver and groan like they’re in launch, but they’re not, they’re just sitting in orbit. This stuff is real, it happens, and it only happens when the ship is at perihelion with Novamas itself. You can say what you like about ‘abnormal topography’ and ‘unusually strong magnetosphere’, nobody has ever, but ever, been able to come up with any scientific explanation for the stuff that happens there. That planet is cursed, any starship that goes near it gets jinxed. So don’t give me ‘superstitions’, and if you know anything about this, anything, you have to give!’

  Buzz looked sympathetic, but remained firm. So did the crew, though dropping hints that were designed to wind interest up rather than turn it away.

  Alex left them to it. He was catching up with other news, himself, and amongst it was an item that made him groan aloud.

  There’d been another rescue, out at Karadon, about a month after the Heron had left. This particular rescue had been carried out by Customs and Excise, though, one of their patrol ships passing through the same region where the Fourth had saved the Levets.

  According to reports, the Customs ship had been on the route to Telfa and had come across the Majuika, a starseeker, flashing urgent distress call. As the patrol ship had approached, the starseeker had fired its lifepod. There’d been a great deal of panic, shouting and confusion, but the Customs crew had managed to grapnel the lifepod and bring the rescued pilot aboard. It had been apparent that the starseeker was dephasing, tell-tale lines of arcon plasma crawling on the hull, so Customs had done exactly the right thing, staying a good safe distance away. Once the starseeker blew itself up, a few minutes later, they’d turned around to take the survivor back to Karadon.

  That was all very dramatic stuff, to be sure, though with distinctly suspicious similarities to the Jolly Roger incident. Very suspicious similarities, in fact, as the owner had claimed that as the engines went out of control there’d been an ‘unearthly howling’.

  The more superstitious spacers might well believe that the banshee was back, trying for another victim since the Heron had denied it the Levets. Most of them, though, would give that one a sceptical hmmn.

  That hmmn would become a yeah, right! when further investigation revealed that the starseeker was very old, and that the pilot’s wife and children had remained behind at Karadon. This was said to be because the children hadn’t enjoyed the long trip cooped up on the yacht, so it had been decided that they and their mother would enjoy another couple of weeks at the station and then go home by liner, while the father took the yacht home by himself. That was just about plausible in itself, but looked suspicious when the yacht had had such an accident. As it became apparent that the family was expecting the same kind of support that the Levets had received, suspicions rose even higher. They’d been hugely indignant when Customs had only given them a hundred dollar emergency credit and a travel warrant for the father, pointing out that the others had not lost any of their belongings and already had liner tickets to get home. ISiS Corps had not leapt in to make any fuss of them, either, leaving them in the low-grade hotel they were staying at, not so much as an upgrade to five star, let alone a VIP suite. They hadn’t even been given complimentary leisure cards. Jon Quilleran was no fool, after all, and had recognised at once what was going on.

  The family’s complaints about the shabby treatment they were getting compared to the Levets, had been a dead giveaway. The insurance claim, though, was the clincher. With the Cus
toms officers able to certify themselves that they had seen the engines in dephase, there was no question over unjustified ship abandonment. The only question would be, for the insurance company, whether the dephase was the fault of the pilot. And, given that all the evidence relating to that was now streaming through space as sub-atomic particles, the only things they could go on, for that, were the pilot’s own statement and circumstantial evidence.

  He was not, of course, the first owner of an old and deteriorating starship to try the lifepod fraud. It was as old as the hills, that one. Claiming that a banshee had dephased the engines added something of a twist, but the chances of any starship dephasing right when a patrol ship was there to catch their lifepod were so remote, people had been convicted on that basis alone.

  The news that a starseeker owner had scuttled his own ship and subsequently been arrested for insurance fraud, though, would barely have made the local news on his homeworld. What had made it intersystem news was the row that it had caused between the Fleet, Customs and ISiS Corps. Or, to put it another way, between the skipper of the Customs ship, Harry Alington, and Jon Quilleran.

  The report could only infer that, and cite unspecified sources, since none of the parties involved would make any public statement about it whatsoever. It was, however, felt to be something of a giveaway that while reiterating their commitment to developing strong working relationships with the Fleet as a whole, an ISiS Corps representative had confirmed that Skipper Alington’s boarding privileges at Karadon had been withdrawn. He had, in fact, been banned from the station.

  ‘Idiot!’ Alex said, with as much despair as exasperation. He knew very well how insulting Harry Alington would have had to be to prompt that kind of response from Jon Quilleran. Reports from Fleet Intel and the LIA, too, filled in the detail that the media report could not give.

  Harry had been furious over the Majuika rescue. He’d been highly critical of Customs’ handling of it, particularly the decision to bring the pilot back to Karadon instead of going on to Telfa.

  Worse than that, though, much worse, he had blamed Jon Quilleran for the incident. According to intel reports, he’d told the Karadon Leisure Director that it was his fault, for giving the Levets a yacht and treating them like VIPs. Jon had not taken kindly to that at all, by all accounts, but the real stinger had been when Harry Alington said something along the lines of, ‘If you’d only listen to me, and do as you’re told.’

  Jon would not, for sure, take that kind of crapola from anyone, certainly not from a twerp like Harry Alington. True, Jon himself had left Fleet service after coming sixty second in his year’s class of sixty four, but he had had a successful career in White Star and was now holding one of the most prestigious jobs in space, earning more money a month than Harry Alington did in a year, and with more than two thousand staff under him.

  ‘He’s got the magic touch,’ Buzz remarked. ‘He should publish a book – ‘How to turn a glorious success into a stupid mess in five easy moves.’

  Alex grimaced wryly. Now that Harry had turned a routine low-profile mission into an embarrassing failure, a much higher profile skipper with superb diplomatic abilities would be needed to sort out the mess. Reports were that the Admiralty was going to send out a raptor class destroyer, possibly the Buzzard or Hawk.

  Alex felt for Sam Barlow, knowing that he would be doing his utmost, out there, to repair the damage Harry had caused. It wouldn’t reflect well on him, either, however unfairly, when the Minnow was pulled off the assignment.

  ‘By rights, they should be pulling Alington off tagged and flagged,’ Martine said, but in a tone that made it clear that she knew this wasn’t going to happen. Harry Alington was too well connected, lots of friends in very high places.

  ‘No, they’ll just reset him,’ Alex confirmed, meaning that Harry would have to carry out this particular operational experience requirement again before he could move up the tagged and flagged ladder. It would slow his career down and certainly add some blots and question marks to his record, but he would rise again, for sure, on his inexorable progress to admiralcy.

  There were strong feelings about that on the Heron, that day. Even though it was technically nothing to do with them, all of them felt that it was. The Minnow was their old ship, after all, and the relationships that Harry Alington had been trashing had been the ones forged by the Fourth themselves in their own operations there. Such was the strength of feeling expressed, indeed, that Buzz was obliged to ask the crew not to use language like that about Skipper Alington while they were on duty.

  ‘I’m not saying I disagree with your evaluation, dear boy,’ he observed, to Able Star Trevaga, who’d been rather more forthright than even the Fourth would allow, ‘but there’s a time and a place.’

  Jon Trevaga showed just how far he’d come since joining the Fourth by giving an abashed grin at that.

  ‘Sorry, Buzz,’ he acknowledged, and mimed zipping his mouth shut, which got a chuckle and nod of approval from the exec.

  Outrage over Harry Alington’s disastrous mishandling of things at Karadon, though, gave way to enjoyment that evening, as they watched Ali Jezno in action.

  He was in a bar, not aboard the Consortium Tower but the preferred spacer hangout at one of the moon bases. It was typical of spacer hangouts everywhere, including the customary place on the bar, with well-placed spotlight, for people to sit when passing on news, goss and stories. By the time Ali hopped up to sit there, the assembled spacers asking him to tell them what was going on had worked up into all of them chanting give, give, give. That became a cheer as he finally gave in and jumped up to sit on the bar, and another cheer as someone thrust the traditional mug of beer into his hand.

  They did not fall silent, then. It wasn’t in the nature of spacer audiences to stand in silence – a good storyteller was expected to handle questions, comments and even heckling without breaking the flow. There was a microphone above the story-teller’s place, and sufficient amplification to make the speaker audible over ordinary levels of voices. Mostly, though, holding the audience was about keeping to the thread while working the room. Ali did that superbly. He was always a knockout at open-mic events on the ship, and even spacers here had heard of his reputation for spinning a good story.

  He was on his best form tonight. It took him nearly a quarter of an hour to talk them through from cheering enthusiasm to wide-eyed horror. He had sound and lighting controls on a little panel next to the seat on the bar, and was working them unobtrusively. By the time he told them about the Alari’s final message, the bar had been darkened so that only Ali stood out in the spotlight. He had given this a bluish tinge that gave him an unearthly pallor, and he had dropped his voice to barely more than a murmur.

  ‘They’re still down there, boys,’ he said. ‘The ice closed over them and there they lay, lost and forgotten. A thousand years, a thousand years, another thousand years went by, and there they lay, peaceful in their tomb of ice. Thousands of years. And then what?’ His tone sharpened. ‘People came. Explorers, miners, settlers. They shattered the ice, strip mined, polluted the air, the water. They built their cities on ancient graves. And did they remember the Alari, as they’d asked with their last breath on that world? No, boys, they did not. If you want to know where your curse is coming from, there it is – the dead of Alar, the unquiet dead.’

  Reaction ranged from ooohs of satisfaction to one young crewwoman who was so scared she had to ask a mate to go with her to the lavatory. That was not the end of it, though. The spacers had already decided that the lost Alari must have something to do with the jinx, and Ali was only confirming that.

  ‘And,’ said Ali, ‘thing is, boys, this is not news, this is not any kind of news, to the Novamasian government. They’ve known about it for ages – maybe the whole time, I dunno. But I do know they found a body, an Alari body, more than a hundred years back. They covered it up, hid it away, shipped it off to Base Nineteen, didn’t want it freaking out the groundhogs. But they know, bo
ys, they knew about this, and in all that time they still haven’t done the decent thing, no memorial, no honour, just trying to make out that the Alari never even existed. Only then this professor finds proof they did, on Canelon, and has gone public with it before they even know, see?’

  ‘Thing is, boys, think about it,’ he urged them. ‘The courier arrived with the Alari Tablet story yesterday, right? Only yesterday, and it happened way after we left. But did it strike you that it came as any news to us? Use your noggins, boys. Put it together for yourselves.’

  ‘You had something to do with it?’ One of the spacers managed to make themselves heard above the clamour.

  ‘Can’t tell you that.’ Ali said. ‘von Supernova will rip my guts out with his bare hands even for dropping a hint – you know what he’s like about jinxes, gets him right on his hobby horse, that does. Any jinx comes up against von Supernova, he will take it on. I mean, just look at what he did to the banshee! Everyone else is like come on, skipper, sorry, but they’re gone, it’s over, and he’s, like,’ he adopted a ferocious glaring manner, ‘either help, or get out of the way.’ And he grabs little Katie Naos, she’s shaking like a trembler switch, and he grabs her and looks straight in her eyes and says, ‘Come on, you can do this, just close your eyes, think about it, breathe, tell me where they are,’ and she does, she’s, like, doing this stuff...’ he gestured with his hands, curving and twisting, ‘and muttering equations, like she’s doing some kind of spell, then she picks up her pen and puts it in the chart and says there, they’re there. So off we go, and there they are, and as we snatch ‘em out of the mouth of the banshee itself. von Supernova just sits there and smiles, quiet like, but boys, he kicked its arse. So when he hears, you know, that there’s a curse on Novamas, stopping ships from going there, messing up trade, do you think he’s just gonna go oh, okay, never mind? Not him! He’s gonna do right by the Alari, to make things right and lay their spirits quiet again. And boys?’ He grinned at them, suddenly and fiercely challenging, ‘You can either help,’ he said, ‘or you can get out of the way.’