Carrearranis (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 5)

by S MacDonald

  Four

  The next few days were a bustle of tours and talks for the new arrivals, as a programme of visits was organised for them to go aboard each of the squadron’s ships and the X-base, while a series of talks was given and streamed live across the squadron.

  It was a busy time for the Fourth, dealing with the pressure of hospitality both in terms of hosting visits and in the insatiable demand for them to attend twenty social events a day on the various other ships. The only ones taking no part in that whatsoever were the LIA on the Comrade Foretold, who kept themselves aloof and exchanged no more than routine signals with the rest of the flotilla.

  Besides that, though, the Fourth had a great deal of work to do. They had replaced much of the damaged tech on their hull with makeshift parts made in their own workshops, which did the job well enough but were nowhere near as resilient as the duralloy normally used for hull systems. Now they had proper replacements there was a lot of hull work to be done, stripping off and replacing every scanner and most of the comms array. The flotilla had also brought quantities of supplies for extending the X-base, which Excorps was relying on the Fourth’s techs to construct. Alex himself had also to continue with the routine work of skippering his own ship and commanding the squadron, much of which involved inordinate amounts of Admiralty paperwork.

  There were also more personal concerns. One of the things the incoming squadron had brought them had been all the mail which had been piling up for them at Telathor, both official and personal. For Alex, that meant a stack of mail from friends, which he set aside to read when he’d have time to enjoy it, and three letters from his parents, who wrote every month. His parents were fine. The extensive security provision around them was working so well that they were entirely oblivious to it, leading their quiet little lives in their quiet little house. Only the third letter betrayed agitation, as they had seen the footage of Alex being shot in the attempted assassination at Telathor. They had by then received his letter telling them about it and assuring them that it was absolutely fine, but it had evidently shocked them to see it on holovision. Alex could only sympathise – it had shocked him, too, to see the slo-mo footage of the bullet impacting his face shield, and he still felt a certain chill around the spine when he thought about it even now. He wrote back at once, though the mail would have to wait until a ship returned to Telathor, reassuring them again that he was absolutely fine and that every care was being taken of him.

  That, however, was the only personal time he took. He was so busy that Rangi Tekawa, their medic, signed off on an exceptional circumstance permission to work past normal health and safety restrictions, only requiring Alex to make all possible efforts not to work between midnight and 0600 and to eat regular meals. He was not the only one, as many of the officers and crew were pushing at the limits of what they were allowed to do and, genuinely, what was safe for them to do. You wouldn’t have to pull many eighteen hour days before you were working tired and making mistakes, after all, and making mistakes on a starship could get you or other people killed. These days were, for the Fourth, a drive to get as much done as they possibly could in the time that they were allowed to work, with such a fizzing energy that the days were flying by.

  Alex was, therefore, astounded when Joy Arthas asked him to help as the journalists and observers were starting to get restless.

  ‘Restless?’ He queried.

  ‘Yes – I know you’ve told us that there was no reason to expect an immediate reply and that we might be waiting for weeks, or even get no response at all,’ she said, ‘but we are two days now past the earliest possible response and people are becoming… well, restless. A little anxious, perhaps, prone to bickering amongst themselves. There isn’t really very much, you see, for people to do, and now that the initial excitement is over there’s a real danger that they’ll get bored… yes, I know,’ she grinned at his appalled incredulity. ‘But they’re civilians, Alex. And as observers with nothing much going on for them to observe, they’re starting to get a little fractious. They have nothing else to do, you see, but worry about when we’ll get an answer and if so what it might be, and if I may say so, the blithe unconcern shown by you and the rest of the Fourth is not quite as reassuring as you might think.’

  Alex considered that and shook his head.

  ‘When we made first contact with Gide,’ he observed, ‘we spent weeks banging against the Firewall being rendered unconscious twenty eight times a day. With Samart, we could wait up to three weeks for an answer to a signal from ships actually sitting within visual range. If I’ve learned anything at all about exodiplomacy it’s that you have to be very calm and patient about it. And these people are freaking out because the Carrearranians are taking time to respond to the most important and astonishing event in their history?’

  ‘Yes, well, like I said,’ Joy gave an elegant and eloquent little shrug, ‘civilians. And I know, yes, I’m sorry, I brought them here and I did say I would keep them off your back. But the trouble is that there really isn’t anything to really keep them occupied, Alex. It’s all very well for your people, they’re trained and experienced in this kind of situation and they’ve plenty of work to keep them occupied. But many of these people have never even been on an intersystem trip before and the stress of it all is getting to them. So I was wondering – would it be too much to ask, too much of an imposition, to ask if you could provide some kind of training? Perhaps in exodiplomacy or basic spacer skills, something which will keep them busy and give them a sense that they’re at least making useful preparation for whatever might happen.’

  Alex didn’t need to think too hard about that, and a grin crept onto his face.

  ‘We do have a pack of courses suitable for civilians,’ he told her. ‘The Fleet has always had a few short courses open to passengers, of course, but we’ve developed them into a bundle with a Space Competence certificate for our civilian consultants. And basic level exodiplomacy training too, yes, of course, though I would have thought the Diplomatic Corps would be…’ he broke off as she gave a decisive shake of her head.

  ‘It would be much better coming from you,’ she said, and Alex recognised that this was something that had already been extensively discussed and decided upon before she had approached him.

  ‘As you wish,’ he said, because for all the informality between them he did not forget that she was a system president. ‘As long as,’ he added, ‘they won’t mind the bulk of the training being provided by ratings – I can’t spare much officer time for this, I’m afraid, not with everything else we’ve got going on. Unless you want me to slow down on the base construction…’

  ‘No, no, not at all, I wouldn’t ask anything that would impact on the mission,’ she assured him quickly. ‘Just that you help us out, if you can without that being too onerous. If it helps,’ she added, at his nod of polite assent, ‘try to think of them as an exodiplomacy task, too, engaging with civilians, a whole different kind of life form from anything you’re used to dealing with.’

  That made him laugh, and he guessed that she had saved that up in case he was unhappy with the additional burden that would place on him. As it was, it was the kind of minor irritant he and the rest of the Fourth considered more surprising than annoying. How could anyone, the Fourth asked one another, be bored out here with everything that was going on and all the thrill of waiting for the Carrearranian response? Civilians really were beyond understanding. But, that said, they got on with providing the training as requested. It was Milli Walensa who took that on, in fact, organising the schedules and handling the inevitable fusses that arose from working with members of the public.

  And then, eight days after the earliest time they could have expected a response, the Carrearranians sent a message.

  It arrived at 02.37, a time when only the nightwatch crew was up and about.

  In the Fourth, on all three of their ships, the incoming signal triggered a standby alert. This was not because of any concern about what the messag
e might contain, but because nobody wanted to sleep through such a momentous event.

  Alex, of course, came straight to the command deck, fastening the collar of his shipboard rig as he walked through the airlock. His heart was beating faster as he took his place at the datatable, but only a medical monitor would have revealed that. His outward manner was one of pleased but calm interest.

  ‘Signal received, skipper!’ Very Vergan had been taking the nightwatch, as on operations like these there was always a command rank officer holding the conn. The third lieutenant was looking rather flushed and thrilled at the message having arrived on his watch, as he and the command deck crew had been the first people to hear it. ‘It’s a clamour!’ he told Alex, and laughed, ‘but at least it didn’t fry our comms this time!’

  Alex soon saw what he meant. The first signal they’d received from Carrearranis had been a bewildering tangle of comms. At their peak, there had been three hundred and sixty nine of them all transmitting on the same frequency, a chaos it had taken some sophisticated algorithms to detangle. The second message had been a single broadcast in which it had appeared that the people of Carrearranis had chosen one man to speak for them.

  Now they were back to the tumult again – the computer had identified and separated five hundred and ten audio-visual strands varying in length from twenty five seconds to nearly fourteen minutes, all compacted into a signal less than a thousandth of a second long and so formulated that without the ability to sort it out their end, replay would have been a hopeless, incomprehensible blurt of white-noise.

  Since they did have the ability to sort it out their end, though, along with a translation matrix, they were able to play each of the signals on auto-translate, with coded subtitles indicating how confident the matrix was about the translation and what alternate meanings some words might have.

  Alex looked straightaway for a message from Arak and found it – nine minutes eighteen seconds of footage which he played straight away, openly, on the datatable’s central projector.

  Other people were arriving as he started the message, with officers scrambling to their places. Shion was amongst them, slipping into her seat and donning a comms headset, all her attention on the screens before her.

  Shion had been with the Fourth for so long now and was so much accepted as one of their officers that it often surprised them when other people reacted to her as ‘an alien’. She was, however, an alien, both in that she came from an almost unknown world far beyond League borders and in that her DNA and physiology was far outside that defined in the Homo Sapiens Identification Act. But she looked human, an attractive lady with high cheekbones, fine features and a graceful manner. Neither her richly dark skin nor the fashionable geometric cut of her hair marked her as in any way unusual, and for most of the time she behaved just like any other officer, too, and a steady responsible officer at that, with none of the wild and alarming unpredictability of the quarian ambassador.

  Behaving like a human, though, did not mean that Shion concealed her capabilities. One of the reasons she’d come to the Fourth in the first place was that Davie North had told her that she would find a warm welcome and complete acceptance here. He had been right, and she had settled very happily into the role of pilot instructor, junior officer and exo-linguist.

  It was this latter role she was undertaking then, as she put on the headset which would enable her to listen to several strands of audio simultaneously without that disrupting others at the table, whilst assembling screens to play at a speed far too fast for human eyes to process. She would have finished watching all of the messages by the time Alex and the others had seen this first one, and would have detailed translations and summaries ready for the skipper and command team. She was, in fact, dealing files onto the central screens like a croupier as fast as she viewed, double-checked auto-translation and prepared a precis of the contents.

  Within two minutes, Davie North was there too. He’d flown over from the Stepeasy, already watching the footage and accessing the messages as he came. A seat had been left free for him and he slid into it as naturally as any of the officers; like them, entirely focussed on his work. On his part that meant that while he was watching the message from Arak play out at real-time speed, he was also watching others much faster on subscreens, his fingers busy recording a preliminary analysis.

  This, however, did not mean that the rest of the officers sat there and let the superhumans get on with it. Able as they were, there were limits to what Shion and Davie could do, and no member of the Fourth worthy of the name would want to be a passive observer in this. Right across the squadron, every officer and member of the crew right down to the newest rating was watching the command deck feed and already starting to comment and exchange opinions. This would have been unimaginable in the regular Fleet, but Alex, besides broadcasting everything that happened on the command deck across the ship around the clock, actually had operation screens to which any member of the Fourth could contribute analysis and suggestions. Old School Fleet personnel had been known to feel physically sick when told about that, but for Alex, it was one of their strengths. It was one of the things that made them such an effective team. And it also drew on a far wider range of experience and skills than he would have found if he’d only consulted his most senior officers.

  So, he watched the message along with everyone else, relaxing a little as soon as he saw that Arak was looking happy.

  The first couple of minutes were taken up with expressing pleasure at Alex’s message, which had been, he said, most interesting and heart-raising for all of them to see.

  ‘All of the…’ the translation matrix was stuttering a little at that point, with seven potential meanings to the word used and no obvious definition from context. Shion, however, slipped in a manual override and the word which could have meant anything from fireplace to population was read as ‘communities’.

  ‘All of the communities wish to send their greetings and friendliness,’ Arak informed them, which explained the multiplicity of signals. ‘It is a heart-raising time for us; a time we thought might only come in the days of our children’s children’s children, if at all. But here you are, and our hearts are raised to the skies.’

  He turned, then, and indicated the people who were clustering behind him. The background to the village was the same as in the previous message, from exactly the same angle, which was already being noted as an indicator that the ‘singing stone’ which was their comms system might be a fixed feature rather than portable tech. This time, though, it was night. Some stars were visible in the uppermost range of the camera. There was a yip of delight from their astrogator as he succeeded in matching these to starmaps which would, within a few minutes, enable him to pinpoint where exactly on Carrearranis the call had originated. As he got to work on that others were focussed on their own areas of expertise, noting everything from changes in clothing to hints of nocturnal wildlife.

  Alex, though, was concentrating on what Arak had to say. Which was, then, a series of introductions to the people who had been chosen for this honour and who had evidently been practising for it before they came on camera. They were those the Fourth had already decided were some kind of village elders from the previous message, distinguished by embroidered sashes and the fact that they stood apart from the other villagers. There were more people present this time – a hundred and thirty four, where there’d only been seventy six in the first broadcast. The newcomers were almost all young adult men and women, delighting those who had been arguing that men and women in their twenties were under-represented in the initial group they’d seen. They didn’t look any different from the other colourfully clad villagers, but Davie immediately drew a ring around one of them, a watchful face in the crowd. Up at the front of camera, village dignitaries were responding to introductions with rather awkward nods and greetings. It would probably have been very warm and natural if they hadn’t rehearsed it until every movement was acutely self-conscious. As it was, the three
minutes Arak spent naming them was uncomfortable all round. It concluded with a general presentation of the rest of the villagers as ‘the community of 327242’, at which there was a rather more excitable burst of waving and calling out hellos.

  This accomplished, Arak turned back to the camera and spoke to Alex himself.

  ‘We are very happy to be your friends,’ he said. ‘We want to learn about you. You understand that you cannot come to our world. If you come here, we will die.’ He gestured to indicate all of those present. ‘The Guardian must protect us until the clean ship comes. But we can talk, and the Guardian says that there is no danger if your ships come no closer than the singing stone you left to talk to us. So yes, you may come back there and then we can talk more easily.’

  A cheer broke out across the Heron at that, a celebration mirrored in Alex’s own happy grin. But the noise was stilled almost at once as people saw that Arak was speaking again and hushed one another to listen.

  ‘It is the morning of a new world,’ he said, in an obviously prepared statement, ‘and we rise to meet it with boldness and joy.’

  Then they sang a song. It had evidently been carefully chosen, no doubt after much debate. Alex’s initial impression was that they were not a particularly musical people. Perhaps half of them could hold the tune and project their voices effectively, though the general effect was of a modified droning. Others were either bellowing or mumbling and there were some odd off-key squeaks from an elderly woman who launched herself at the high notes like a crow being hit by a golf ball. But the sentiment was friendly and both the tune and lyrics would provide much data for social analysis. It was a ‘song of the morning’, with many references to fishing boats and fresh breezes.

  When the transmission had ended with smiles and waves from the villagers, Alex turned his attention to the other messages stacking up on the table. They were all very similar, no more than greetings, introductions and expressions of goodwill. Some were more excited than others, but all were keen say a friendly hello. The range of data the messages contained, too, was like treasure trove to the analysts.