XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  The rather more technically challenging side of completely reprogramming the system’s traffic control computers to work with the new configuration was accomplished in even less time. No traffic control staff were allowed to stay on the premises while the Fourth’s team ran classified software through their computers. It was actually the software they used in ship arrests, enabling them to monitor and even control another ship remotely. On this occasion it linked the system’s traffic computers with the far more powerful ones aboard the starship, enabling them to do a complete sweep, reprogram and system checks in just about a quarter of an hour.

  ‘What’s wrong, what’s the problem?’ the new head of traffic control asked, seeing the Fourth’s team coming out of the control room, tech kits already packed up.

  ‘No problem,’ Very said, cheerfully. ‘All done.’ He nodded to her. ‘All yours.’

  It would be another two days before the traffic controllers finished their own testing and allowed the freighters to start coming in to port. None of the spacers objected to that, though. They could see on system comms when the Fourth started moving satellites around, even before the official announcement that the president had approved a temporary relocation of the parking orbit pending full and proper procedures. Freighters were rolling their ships and flashing their lights in pure jubilation. They sent a barrage of thanks to Alex, too, but he was fast asleep by then.

  ‘It really is an extraordinary accomplishment,’ Captain Alladyce commented, two days later. Alex had finally been able to accept his invitation to dinner, with the freighters now in port and cargo being unloaded as fast as it could be. ‘I’ve been here for nearly two years now and I’ve never seen more than five ships in port at any one time – to see so many freighters here is just amazing. And with every possibility, I gather, that they’ll return, and many others, too. This could, it really could, be the start of Novamas beginning to develop properly as a port. And you did that, single handed.’

  Alex looked shocked.

  ‘Hardly single handed!’ he protested.

  ‘Well, yes, your officers and crew, of course,’ Captain Alladyce conceded.

  ‘No, I don’t mean that,’ Alex said. ‘Though we’re a team, obviously, and I’m pleased with the way that everyone’s pulled this together. What I meant was that we, the Fourth, we don’t do things like this on our own. We’re under orders from higher up – Fleet high command, of course, but under political direction, too, and working very closely with a whole range of other agencies, pooling information and ideas, and all of them providing practical assistance, too. We see ourselves as the point of delivery for a very much bigger team, carrying out coordinated action.’

  ‘Hmmn,’ said Call Alladyce, knowing very well who was doing the coordinating, there, but letting that go. ‘And this thing,’ he asked, delicately, ‘tomorrow? The ceremony? Is that something that came from your ‘much bigger team’?’

  He was asking, Alex understood, whether the discovery of the Alari Tablet was a set-up to allay the superstitious fears of the spacers, and if so, whose idea it had been.

  Alex just smiled.

  It had been the League Ambassador who’d announced that they were going to erect a memorial to the Alari, long before the Fourth had come into port, and as far as anyone at Novamas knew, that idea and the nature of the ceremony itself was entirely down to them, in consultation with the famous Professor Garaghty. The Fourth had merely been invited to take part on the same basis as the other Fleet ships.

  Whether it was a ‘full Fleet honours’ ceremony, though, was debatable. Nearly all the Heron’s own officers and crew would be going, leaving only a skeleton port-watch team aboard. All of the ships in the Homeworld Squadron were sending representatives, too, the carrier and frigate sending sizeable groups while even the patrol ships were sending an officer, petty officer and two crew apiece. The Fourth had been asked to do the fly-by with their fighters, and there would be, indeed, a full honour salute. Since Admiral Vickers had refused to have anything to do with it, though, and had declared that it was not and could not be an official full-honour ceremony without his approval, it remained a semi-official, primarily civilian event.

  That certainly did not affect the high degree of formality with which the ceremony was carried out, though. Buses and minibuses shuttled between the spaceport and the memorial site, bringing more than a thousand people there by the time they were done. More than half of them were Fleet personnel. There were personnel from the base, too, even some members of Admiral Vickers’ own staff who’d taken leave in order to be able to attend here today.

  That was more, Alex understood, about showing their support for the Fourth in the shocking way that Admiral Vickers was treating them, than of any particular desire to honour the Alari. It made a good showing, though, even if the army would snigger and groan at the sight of the Fleet’s notions of getting into ranks.

  The other spacers did not even attempt to get into ranks. They were all there – their ships were sublight and in stable parking orbit so they’d all just left them unmanned, heading down to the planet en masse for this. They made for an eclectic bunch, Novamasian ore-carrier crews mixing with merchant spacers from all corners of the League. The Fleet themselves, come to that, displayed a tremendous variety of genetic and climate-induced variations, from the squat bull-necked physique of CPO Martins to the spidery long-limbed figure of a crewman from Elsace, with every conceivable variation of skin colour, hair type, eye shape and other genome features. Spacers tended not to notice that themselves. As Shion had once observed, they saw people, rather than species or genome, and any other spacer you met was a mate, regardless of physical or cultural differences.

  For the Novamasians, though, this was the most extraordinary assemblage of offworlders seen on their planet in living memory. So few offworlders came here that the majority of Novamasians had never met one in person. This was such an event, indeed, that they’d even rustled up some outside-broadcast units to come and report on it for the news.

  The journalists were, however, standing well back, just remarkably well behaved, at least remarkably so to anyone used to the frenetic hysteria with which news reporting was filmed on the central worlds. They had no shortage of interesting things to film. Quite apart from the fascinating array of offworlders in the Fleet and Merchant Spacer groups, there were quite a number of other notables. The League Ambassador was there, leading the event along with a number of her staff. Three senators represented the system senate, Colonel Matravers and a small contingent represented the SDF, and the newly appointed System Logistics Manager and a handful of her staff represented traffic control. There was even an army colonel, looking as if he wasn’t quite sure what he was doing there, but showing willing. Once it had been known that the League Ambassador would be leading this ceremony, it had been perceived as both serious and prestigious. Attendance was by invitation only, and all the organisations invited had felt that they had to send at least one person to represent them. So it was, indeed, a very good showing, as big and official a presence as could be managed at the venue itself.

  Professor Garaghty was there, too, along with colleagues and students from the history department at Novamas SU. They’d brought all the students in the history department, in fact, all thirty six of them. History was not a popular choice at degree level. Archaeology, Anthropology and Ancient Languages were even less so, with only four students taking courses in those fields. Coming from Canelon, a world which had more history students than any other world in the League, it must have come as a tremendous shock to Jayforth Garaghty to find that the entire history department of Novamas SU consisted of a senior lecturer and a TA, subsumed within the Humanities department and occupying one small office in an inconvenient corner of the campus. The museum would have come as a shock to him, too, finding that they had no exhibits older than the first exploration of Novamas by humans. They were going to have to create an entirely new ‘ancient artefacts’ department and display roo
m for the Alari Tablet.

  The final two remaining organisations represented were the Novamas Historical Society and, to their absolute delight, the Novamas version of the First Peoples group.

  There was no concept of ‘getting back to nature’ here on Novamas, but there was a fringe belief in an ancient lost civilisation. Many of those who believed in the lost civilisation of Novamas would, at some point, access the infosite run by Lost Worlds. This was a member-run interest group dedicated to the belief that many worlds had once had long-lost civilisations, pointing to similarities in genetics and even culture that could only be explained if there’d been an ancient people capable of interstellar travel. Serious believers referred to these as the ‘Pan’, as in ‘pan-human civilisation’. The Lost Worlds group on Novamas had named their particular believed-in lost civilisation ‘Panmasia’.

  Their delight was quite touching to see, in itself. They had been transformed, with the discovery of the Alari Tablet, from a society viewed as silly kids and nutters into a respectable mainstream belief. They were managing to contain their ‘Told you so, told you so!’ to within polite limits, given the solemnity of the occasion, but they were beaming with as much happy pride as if they’d made the discovery themselves.

  There were no crowds of onlookers. There would not have been room for them, even if the venue had been open to the public that day. They were all packed in to a clear-view dome perched on the edge of a vast ice chasm. The Diplomatic Corps had made a very good choice in that, Alex felt, in response to his request for a memorial to be placed at some quiet, scenic spot.

  The site they had chosen had actually been built by White Star, many years before. It was part of their and Red Line’s unsuccessful efforts to generate a tourism market here. The liner companies were obliged, under a very long standing agreement with the Senate, to provide a minimum service to all League worlds, based on their population. This meant that they had to run a monthly service to Novamas whether it was profitable to do so or not. It wasn’t, even running it with their smallest and oldest liners and charging as much as the market would bear. Most of their passengers on that route were Novamasians on visits to Canelon. Novamas had a special relationship with Canelon – most of them could trace their ancestry back to settlers who’d come from there, and as their nearest world, even if it was more than five weeks travelling away, it was far more important in their eyes than the even more remote Chartsey. It was quite a common thing for miners, once they’d made their money, to take their families to Canelon for ‘the big trip’. Even that, however, rarely filled liners to more than half capacity.

  In desperation, White Star and Red Line had set about marketing Novamas as a tourist destination, themselves. This had not been easy. There weren’t even any hotels on the planet. Not one. Why would they need hotels, after all, the Novamasians pointed out, when they were never more than half an hour’s bus ride away from home, and if they did stay in another city for some reason, they’d stay with family or friends. They didn’t see sufficient market for setting up hotels for offworld visitors, either, and they were right. The current provision for offworld visitors was met by a hotel aboard the Gateway space station, which had just a hundred and forty rooms.

  Finding that even the few adventure-tourists they were able to lure to Novamas on month-long ice safaris complained about the absence or poor quality of tourist provision, however, the liner companies had also invested in tourism facilities groundside. Several of these, including the Stervak Canyon viewing platform, were intended to meet the demands of tourists for sightseeing venues with the kind of facilities they expected. So there was an all-weather dome with a tiny visitor centre, providing lavatories, informative displays, just enough cafe seating for a coach load of visitors and of course the obligatory gift shop. Any hope that this would either prove a magnet to intersystem tourists or develop as a sightseeing venue for the homeworld market, however, had been short lived.

  Novamasians saw no appeal whatsoever in going to look at big holes in the ice. They used big holes in the ice for waste disposal, both for industrial and domestic waste landfill. This canyon had itself been exploited for mining, centuries before, with a load of industrial waste dumped into it. Most Novamasians had no issue with this. As they pointed out, the glacier would grind everything down, even grinding out the ugliest open-cast mining sites to be as smooth as natural valleys. After more than four hundred years since this site had been worked, indeed, there was no visible sign of the devastation that had been caused. For Novamasians, though, it was still an industrial waste dump.

  To offworld eyes, though, the scenery was truly spectacular. It was one of the biggest ice-chasms in the northern hemisphere, nearly three hundred kilometres long and up to four kilometres deep. The viewpoint had been well chosen both for safety, at a point stable enough for a platform to be built right on and even out over the edge of the canyon, and for dramatic views. The ice here had a high mineral content and the exposed cliff faces were a clear, beautiful aquamarine, frosted with snow wherever it could settle and drift. Even around the viewing platform itself, a covered walkway enabled visitors to walk amongst the high wind-sculpted ice towers. Someone from White Star had even given some of the more notable ice-towers names, like The Lady, one that looked vaguely like a female figure in long skirts, and The King, one that looked as if it had a spiky crown. Standing there, with the chasm at your feet and the ice figures evoking a sense of mystery, it was indeed a beautiful and appropriate place for a memorial.

  And then there was the noise. The wind was always strong on Novamas, and it was never silent on the glacier. Wind moaned and whistled through the ice even on the calmest days, rising to howls in stormy weather. It was a mild day, for the ceremony. The sun was pale in a milky sky, with an air temperature of -58 and wind speed of 74 kph. The wind produced an almost orchestral combination of sounds – the rushing sound of the gale blowing through the chasm itself, the rustle of ice-flakes pattering against the lower edges of the dome, and a full range of whistling sounds as gusts blew amongst the ice towers. One of these, named ‘The Flute’, actually did make a flute-like noise as wind blew through a hole in it, adding a sporadic, eerie note to the music of the wind.

  That became much more audible as the last of the participants arrived and the ceremony got under way, with the Fleet and other uniformed contingents forming into ranks in the middle of the dome with the spacers to one side of them and the rest of the civilians on the other.

  The ceremony did not take long. Professor Garaghty had been asked to carry out the official unveiling of the Alari Memorial, which he did after a brief speech about what an honour it was to be able to share this moment with them. The memorial was a two metre sized enlargement of the Alari Tablet itself, reproduced in fine white marble and mounted on a black marble plinth.

  They stood for a minute’s silence, the Fleet and other military personnel at attention while everyone else just stood still, some of the spacers with their hands on their hearts. At the end of the minute’s silence came the fly-past. The Heron’s fighters came in low and slow, cruising past the platform, it seemed, almost at eye level. They were an impressive sight, seen up close like this. They seemed so tiny out in space, but they were, in fact, bigger than the coaches that had brought out a hundred passengers at a time. Big, but elegant, too, with their sleek arrow design and swept back wings. The stubby pyramids of laser cannon and recessed missile tubes gave them a powerful, slightly menacing air. As they flew past for the first time, Alex heard low wondering murmurs from the Novamasians. As they curved up, looping over to come back for the salute, there were more quiet ‘wow’ noises coming from the spacers. They knew very well what superb piloting they were seeing, there – nothing flashy, no stunts or joyous display piloting, here, but rock steady, perfect wingtip formation in difficult atmospheric conditions.

  Shion was not one of the pilots. She wasn’t attending this ceremony, and would not be coming to Novamas at all. As the League Ambassad
or had explained and apologised for, it was not possible for her to visit any League world unless with the permission of its president, and that just wasn’t something the Diplomatic Corps felt to be something they could ask, here.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ambassador Tari Snowden said. ‘I really am. But these people are xenophobic to a man, and none more so than President Tanaya. Their minds are so closed they won’t even discuss exodiplomacy matters, and there is just no possibility that they would agree to any non-human visiting their world.’

  Shion had assured her she understood perfectly and bore no grudge against the Novamasians, either. Her own people, as she observed, were even more isolationist, so she had no grounds to complain about that. She could pay her respects to the Alari, too, without having to set foot on the planet. So Shion had been left in command of the Heron, and it was Very Vergan in lead-pilot position, the others taking their mark from him as they fired the formal blank-fire salute.

  Then the fighters came around for the third and final pass. This time they used their missile tubes, filled not with explosives today but packed solidly with flowers. Thousands of white roses scattered from the fighters as they moved slowly past the platform. Petals would just have been blown away by the wind, but the roses were heavy enough to fall, spinning and tumbling into the depths of the chasm, there to lay amongst the shattered ice that covered the floor of it like great crystal shards.

  That was not quite the end of it. Ambassador Snowden stepped forward then, taking a single white rose from the display of them set to one side of the venue. All eyes, and all cameras, were on her as she walked over to the memorial and placed the rose into one of the many hundreds of holes drilled into the black marble plinth. They were, intentionally, just the right size to support a long-stemmed rose. The ambassador placed hers in the central place directly in front of the memorial. Then she stood up, put one hand briefly onto her left shoulder then onto her right, and spoke the words.