‘We’re okay!’ she said, and as the g-force eased off and Alex was able to peel himself off the ceiling, she glanced up at him, concerned, ‘All right, skipper?’
‘Yes,’ Alex said. The survival suit had protected him from the impact, so there were no bones broken. He could see that Murg was hanging on to her seat, wide eyed with shock but otherwise unharmed. Rangi was clutching Lucky’s carrier, gasping with fear. Shion had the shuttle under control, now, though there were several red lights on the console. Alex pulled himself into his seat and clipped in. ‘What happened?’
‘The bubble imploded,’ Shion told him, still working to resolve technical issues. They had, Alex could see, taken some damage to their belly thrusters and scanners.
Are you okay? The signal came in over comms. Are you going to explode?
‘We’re okay,’ Alex signalled back, seeing that Shion had it under control. ‘We have sustained minor damage but we will make it safely back to our ship.’
Good. The Gider signalled, and then, demonstrating their newly acquired grasp of colloquialisms; Whoops.
Whoops, Alex thought. They had detonated or imploded their encounter vehicle so close to the Heron’s shuttle that it had ripped off their belly thrusters and thrown them into such a mad spin that they’d been flung around inside it by four gees of centrifugal force. Alex had a horrible feeling that if that bubble had imploded just a fraction of a second earlier, this shuttle would not even be here right now. And the Gider said whoops.
‘Strongly advise and request,’ Alex signalled, with really impressive self control in the circumstances, ‘that you allow our vessels at least a fifty million kilometre safety zone in future disposal of encounter vehicles.’
Okay. Happy you did not explode.
And with that, the Gider and their ship were gone.
Chapter Twenty One
It took the Heron just nine days, at top cruising speed, to reach the site where the Diplomatic Corps had sited their first-contact efforts.
Alex and the others spent the first two days of that stood down from their duties. Buzz insisted, and since Alex was entirely in agreement with him for the other three, he was not in a strong position to argue that he should be an exception.
It had, after all, been one heck of an experience. It wasn’t over, even when they made it safely back to the frigate. They had been aboard an alien vehicle and the Fleet had very definite quarantine protocols for that. They also needed to be thoroughly debriefed, professionally, and to have personal counselling on the enormous impact of the experience, too.
So, they spent a couple of days in sickbay, having medical tests, writing up full reports and coming to terms with what had happened.
Strangely, a lot of this involved them watching the footage they themselves had been filming throughout the encounter, both with suit cams and full scan-range sensors recording on the shuttle, and from an external view, from the Heron. Watching the footage again, particularly slowing it right down and pausing it to discuss it, enabled them to understand more than they’d been able to see and take in at the time. Being able to listen in detail to Shion’s discussions with them about their choice of language was hugely informative in itself – that footage would, for sure, keep Diplomatic Corps linguists busy for years. The ‘no big’ comment that had shocked Alex and the others turned out to have been, indeed, exactly what the Gider wanted to say, with the question from Tinikehki ‘How do we say casual-colloquial that it is not important?’ and Shion offering the choices, ‘not a problem’, ‘not an issue’ and ‘ancient history’ before Tinikehki’s request for more emphatic idiom had produced, ‘no worries,’ ‘no big deal’ and ‘no big’.
For Alex, though, the footage that he had to watch a few times with a quiet cup of one of Rangi’s calming teas was the filming from the Heron of the bubble implosion that had so nearly killed them.
It was nothing at all to see at normal speed. On normal playback the bubble was gliding away below them and then just winked out of existence, at which point the shuttle was yanked into a wild spin with bits of its belly gear scattering off.
Slowed down a thousand times, though, it was possible to see the moment at which the encounter vehicle imploded. The bubble shrank inwards to a pinpoint and just vanished.
They knew there was solid matter inside that bubble. They’d been standing on a solid floor, measuring a real atmosphere; Lucky had even been breathing air, there. Even without taking into account the hidden tech there must have been there somewhere to generate the outer bubble forcefield and process the atmosphere, there had to be hundreds of tons of solid matter in the floor and air.
And yet it all just shrank into nothing and vanished. There was no out-pouring of energy as when a superlight dephase converted matter into highly energised subatomic particles. There was no debris, no energy, no heat, no radiation, nothing. They could not even determine, with any certainty, the force that had acted on their shuttle with such frightening intensity – according to the readings from the shuttle and from the Heron, it looked as if the shuttle had been subjected to a massive gravitational pull, just for a tiny fraction of a millisecond. They were calling it a micro-singularity, but they all knew that that was just a label for something they had no chance of understanding.
It gave Alex the cold horrors, watching that. He had been so caught up in the moment, so focussed on everything he needed to be thinking about, he had forgotten just how dangerous a thing it was they were actually doing.
That, he realised afterwards, was because of the dancing. The Gider were so friendly and accommodating, it was easy to just assume that good, friendly intentions were enough to keep them safe. Even when the Gider had shown such a basic lack of understanding of human technology that they’d landed the shuttle upside down, Alex had not understood how dangerous that lack of understanding could be. And the dancing, especially, had just been so funny, so absurd, that they had not felt that they could really be in life-threatening peril, there. Now they realised that they had escaped being killed by no more than a millisecond. It was no consolation, either, to realise that if the implosion had taken the shuttle with it, the Gider would not have grieved about it overmuch. It was an accident, they’d say. Whoops. No big.
Alex was, as Rangi pointed out, experiencing the inevitable emotional payback after an event of such overwhelming impact. Or, as he put it, having the collywobbles.
He was far from being the only one. Buzz said that it had been the longest forty seven minutes of his life, that being the length of time the shuttle had been out of view inside the encounter bubble. Then, just as he’d been heaving a sigh of relief at the sight of the shuttle emerging, the implosion had happened.
‘It’s weird,’ Alex said, having lunch with him after he the others had been released from sickbay. ‘You’d think that something so wonderful, so amazing, such tremendous success, we’d all be on a huge high, celebrating. But it’s like we’re all just shattered.’
Buzz nodded.
‘We put everything we had into this mission,’ he observed. ‘Heart and soul, training for months, putting ourselves on the line out there, all of us, with such commitment. And now it’s over – very probably the biggest thrill of our lives – of course we’re going to feel shattered.’
Alex looked searchingly at his second in command. He was wondering whether Buzz had decided that this was it, now, the high point on which to end his career, or at least his shipboard service. He already had fifty three years of service in the Fleet behind him, and at sixty nine was the oldest officer in the Fleet still on shipboard posting. He was only middle aged by groundside standards, but the Fleet had always felt that deep space service was for the young. Buzz saw his concerned look, though, and smiled reassuringly.
‘We’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘All we need is a few days’ rest, and...’ he picked up his mug, ‘some decent coffee, and we’ll be raring to go again. And whatever it is they’ve got lined up for us next...’ he clinked mugs with Alex,
and they both grinned. ‘bring it on!’, they said, together.
They did get their few days rest, on the way to the comms array. There was some anticipation building, too, as they approached. It was, the crew felt, going to be quite something to tell the diplomats that they’d succeeded.
In the event, though, they were to be disappointed. The Gider had already been to see the diplomats. They’d turned up there within three hours of having made first contact with the Fourth, and had been back there twice more, since.
‘Congratulations.’ The Diplomatic Corps ambassador on station here was an extremely dignified gentleman, soft spoken and courteous. ‘You did very well, considering.’
‘Sir,’ Alex acknowledged, with the stone faced manner that served him so well at moments like this.
It was more than a bit disconcerting even arriving at the Diplomatic Corps ship. They had known it would be big, and they knew that there would be a big comms array there, too, but none of them had really been prepared for the scale of the Diplomatic Corps operation going on there.
Their ship, named the Embassy III, was actually more like a superlight space station. The hull was that of a deity class carrier, though it had neither fighters nor cannon. It did have a crew of eight hundred and thirty six. Two hundred and forty two more Diplomatic Corps personnel worked in the on-board Embassy. They had some of the League’s top experts in exo-sciences, languages and anthropology. The ship was kept supplied by Diplomatic Corps freighters, plying back and forth between Novamas, Tolmer’s Drift and the site they called ‘The Jeynkins Array.’
His Excellency League Ambassador Jeynkins had a splendid office on the Embassy III. He had been living out here for thirteen months of what was expected to be a two year tour of duty before they were relieved by the Embassy II.
Ambassador Jeynkins had been doing everything right, all according to the latest Diplomatic Corps thinking on the best way to approach first contact. Millions of dollars had been spent, millions, both on sustaining this ship out here and on the staggeringly huge comms array that had been installed. The cost of the probes they’d fired off ran into more than a million dollars just by itself. More than a thousand people had been involved in this effort for more than a year.
It was hardly to be expected, really, given human nature, that they would be utterly thrilled to hear that a frigate had succeeded in just two months when they’d failed. They’d said all the right things, of course – how wonderful, excellent, well done – but true enthusiasm had been notable by its absence. The feeling was being conveyed, subtly but definitely, that the Gider had been on the verge of making contact with them anyway, that the Fourth had just got lucky, and that it had been, if anything, rather regrettable that first contact had been made by such rank amateurs.
The diplomats certainly weren’t interested in the Fourth’s own analysis of the data they had gathered. They thanked them for it but told them, quite kindly, that they would do their own analysis, thanks. And they had, indeed, already obtained what they considered to be far higher quality data of their own, including a data pack the Gider had provided giving enormous quantities of information about their world, its culture and its environment.
‘For future reference,’ the Ambassador said, with a slight, thin smile that made it clear that the Fourth would not be undertaking any more first contact missions if he had any say in it, ‘I’m not convinced that it was necessary to pound your ship against the Firewall quite so frenetically. That was a very high risk strategy, skipper, both in terms of your own ship safety and diplomatically, as that could so very easily have been perceived as aggressive. And you should not, of course, have agreed to a meeting yourselves. I understand the temptation, but that should, properly, have been left to trained and experienced professionals. You should have referred them to us when the request for a meeting was made. Nearly getting yourself and your team killed because of lack of clear communication about the vulnerabilities of our technology highlights, I believe, how important it is to leave this things to people who are qualified and trained for them.
‘And, though I appreciate that you were doing your best with the resources available to you at the time, your decision to allow Shionolethe to undertake the role of interpreter was particularly flawed. By allowing her to make suggestions to them based on her own guess at what they wanted to say, she was quite literally putting words into their mouths. You cannot, you just cannot, assume compatible meaning in body language or tone. Until such time as there is sufficient understanding to interpret tonal cues and body language as emotional intensifiers, it is essential to maintain communication at a formal, emotionally neutral level. The translation matrix we have here, developed especially for first contact with the Gider, has been far more successful in facilitating calm, high-reliability communication.’
Alex looked at him. He wanted to say that he would back Shion’s understanding against any computerised matrix, any day of the week. He wanted to say too that even he felt he’d recognised emotions like surprise, curiosity and happiness from body-language and tones. He wanted to point out that if Shion was right and the Gider really had wanted to give a casually dismissive ‘No big’ about the Abigale disaster, then restricting them to such formal neutral comments as ‘we do not feel it to be of significance to the current context’ was not improving communication, but on the contrary, holding it back. Truthfully, he wanted to say that he felt the ambassador was being ungracious and patronising.
‘Sir,’ he said.
The Heron departed a few minutes later. Any hope they’d had of ship-visiting leave aboard the Embassy III had been crushed with an immediate refusal. They were, the captain commanding the ship observed, far too busy with data analysis and preparing for the next Gider visit to have sightseers aboard.
They didn’t get any coffee, either. The Embassy III gave them a crate of bread, since their supplies of rolls were running low, but a request for coffee beans was turned down. They had none, said the Embassy III, that were surplus to their own requirements.
‘Not quite the celebration we were hoping for,’ Alex observed, as the frigate sped away. They were heading back to Novamas, to report back to Ambassador Snowden and take on supplies for their run back to Therik. Only the most optimistic believed that the order they’d sent to ISiS Penrys for two crates of coffee to be shipped out to Novamas as fast as possible would have arrived there by the time they did. Most of the crew were resigned to the prospect of having to carry on drinking the vile powder-tab stuff all the way back to their home port.
‘Never mind, skipper.’ Alex had been talking to Shion, with that, in a comment that was regretful and slightly apologetic. He felt that her efforts had been belittled, there, far more even than their own. It was, however, Shion who consoled him. ‘Just think,’ she said, ‘how we would feel, if we’d been beating our heads against a brick wall mission for more than a year and then a Customs patrol ship swept in and scored it.’
Alex grinned at that, and gave her a look of warm appreciation. That ‘we’ was completely unconscious, natural, identifying herself entirely as a member of the Fourth. And that was how they felt, too. She was one of them now, beyond doubt, beyond question. The crew would only be mildly surprised these days if anyone even commented on how bizarre it was that one of their Subs was an alien aristocrat from the mysterious Veiled World. To them, she was just Shion, a good officer and great pilot.
The journey back to Novamas was uneventful. With no specific mission training in hand, Alex suggested that they make best use of the time by concentrating on personal goals, courses and training opportunities. There would, as Buzz observed, be a lot of promotions and qualification bonuses to be confirmed, by the time they got back to Therik.
They were all thinking about Therik, now, looking forward to going home. Novamas was just a stop on the way, and not even a stop they were looking forward to.
They were in for some surprises, though.
The first of them came as they approached
the system. It was pleasing to see that there were nineteen freighters in port, orbiting in the parking orientation the Fourth had established. There were at least ten yachts there, too, ranging from a glitzy millionaire-special to a couple of starseekers. In pride of place, though, orbiting in glittering state, was Davie North’s superyacht, Stepeasy. They could see at once, too, that the Fleet squadron had changed. Both the Braveheart and their sister frigate the Albatross had gone. In their place was a larger carrier and a raptor class destroyer.
That in itself was no great surprise to the Fourth. They all knew that the first reaction of the Admiralty to receiving the news that a port admiral had been relieved of his post by the captain of the home squadron would be to send out relief ships and recall everyone concerned to Chartsey. Chances were that the Braveheart and Albatross would have left Novamas a week or two ago. And there would, by now, be a new port admiral too.
They were surprised, though, as they approached the entry port station. They got a very different reception this time, picking up a broadcast that hailed them with ‘Welcome to Novamas – Ancient Alar.’ It was accompanied by images of glacial scenery which included a holo of the Alari Memorial, and followed up with visitor information promoting tourist attractions and events, including a Discovered World exhibit at the museum.
It was immediately obvious from that that a lot had been happening here. The Discovered World exhibit didn’t just have the Alari Tablet. The Alari Tablet had been knocked into second place by the Ice Giant exhibit, displaying reproductions of the actual remains found in the glacier more than a century before, and reconstructions of what forensic archaeologists believed the man, now identified as an Alari, would have looked like.
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