Carrearranis (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 5)

by S MacDonald

  They did not, in fact, need to come to full action stations just because a Solaran ship had appeared. It presented no kind of threat to them, after all. But Alex allowed the alert to continue. For one thing it was evident that the Solarans’ arrival must have something to do with that terrified yelling and severing of broadcast from the planet, and for another it would be a useful start in the process of running full decontam throughout the ship, which would be necessary if the Solarans were going to come aboard. They had the quarantine zone, of course, which would be run as a sterile area while the Solarans were visiting, but Fleet protocol was for the entire ship to be run as close to clean-room rules as possible while they had Solaran guests. And Alex was already thinking in terms of having the Solarans aboard, working patiently through communications difficulties to establish what had happened at Carrearranis.

  Then a call came through. That was a surprise. Exodiplomacy etiquette in these encounters was for the humans to await first call from the Solarans, which generally meant waiting for several hours while they decided exactly what they were going to say. This time, the call arrived just four seconds after the Solarans’ appearance – unheard of, unprecedented haste from a species notorious for their agonisingly slow pace. As always with them, communication took the form of a brief statement from each of the three, intended to be understood as one message. It was a text transmission, the Solarans’ favoured method of inter-ship comms.

  Alex looked at the words which appeared on the comms screen, and felt as if someone had reached into his body with an ice-cold hand, clenching it hard on his gut.

  Fear has been caused. Deep sorrow. Your help is required.

  A brief burst of data followed, and with that, they were gone. Just gone; the ship vanishing as swiftly and mysteriously as it had appeared.

  There was a slight hiatus in the ship’s coming to action stations, as people realised at varying speeds that the reason for that alert had gone before they’d even got all the hatches secured. There was a ragged, bewildered stumbling, even a slight sense of indignation that the Solarans hadn’t even stayed long enough for them to secure to stations. Mostly there was confusion. What had just happened? And why was the skipper sitting there like he was carved out of granite?

  The skipper was sitting there as if he’d been carved out of granite because he was, for the moment, utterly incapable of movement or speech. He had just seen the data sent by the Solarans. Mind and body had gone numb, as if that was the only way he could begin to cope with the shock of it.

  The data was brief and brutal. It appeared to be footage taken by the Solaran ship as it entered the Carrearranian system. There was no defensive blast from the Guardian, no warning to them to keep away. They were allowed through the quarantine. Just as Shion had observed, they fulfilled all the criteria for the ‘clean ship’ specified by the Guardian, as their world had never been infected. Solarans who ventured into human space returned to a second world within their system where they remained in self-imposed quarantine for the rest of their lives. This ship must have come directly from Solarus Perth. At any rate, it was allowed into the system, where the Solarans transmitted identification of themselves to the Guardian and a greeting to the people of Carrearranis.

  What happened next was so fast and so terrifying that it was hard to take in.

  The Guardian accepted them. There was the briefest acknowledgement to the Solaran ship, no more than recognition of their ID. And there was, simultaneously, a broadcast to each of the comms devices which the Carrearranians called singing stones. The network was open. The Solarans heard the same message being sent to all of the devices, and then the panicking reaction of the Carrearranians in response.

  The message was simple; clear and unemotional.

  The clean ship has arrived. The purpose of the Guardian has been served. May the people thrive in the Rule of Life.

  And that was it. With those few words the ship which had protected the people of Carrearranis for thousands of years, guiding and guarding them, stepped down from its role and its purpose. There was no delay, no hesitation. It was as if a trigger had been touched, initiating an inevitable and automatic sequence. There was no chance for negotiation. In almost the same moment that it transmitted that blunt farewell, it flicked around, tentacles gleaming, and shot itself straight into the heart of the Carrearranian star.

  Alex tried to tell himself that he didn’t understand what had just happened. He watched the image of the Olaret ship vanishing as a tiny dark fleck into the raging temperatures of the star, and he tried to tell himself that he didn’t understand. There were all kinds of possibilities. The Guardian might simply be relocating, either elsewhere in the system or perhaps somewhere nearby. Even if it had gone into the star, he knew that some alien technology was actually designed to operate within the mantle of stars, even to draw energy from them, so perhaps the Guardian was simply withdrawing into the star for some obscure safety or technical reason.

  In his thudding, leaden heart, though, Alex knew the truth. The Guardian had been programmed to protect Carrearranis until such time as a clean ship arrived, when it was evidently considered that it would no longer be necessary. And the Olaret, it seemed, had decided long ago that when the Guardian was no longer needed, it would self-destruct. Who could guess what reasons they might have had, whether for the welfare of the Carrearranians or perhaps merely tidying up after themselves. But there it was, the Guardian no sooner received that signal from the Solarans than it span about and dived into the star.

  Alex would never, as long as he lived, forget the image of that beautiful ship, so strange and wonderful, shining in the moment before it was engulfed in solar flares. It was like watching the death of a living thing; a great, ancient and marvellous living thing. The Space Monster of Sector Seventeen was no more.

  Nine

  It took a while for everyone to understand what had happened. Alex let them complete coming to action stations more to give himself a few seconds to deal with his own shock than anything. By the time he touched the control which authorised them all to stand down he was able to draw breath, though his chest felt so tight it was like trying to breathe when his ribs were being crushed by duralloy bands. He could feel a dull ache in his chest, too, and nausea churning his stomach. It was such a physical blow, the shock was visceral. His mind was still struggling to make sense of it. It felt like a hallucination. Could the Solarans really have just appeared, announced such devastating news and then just vanished again? If he’d been on his own, Alex might well have doubted his own sanity.

  As it was, he saw his own incomprehension, or unwillingness to understand, reflected on the faces of everyone around him. Everyone was asking questions they had to know the answers to as well as Alex himself did.

  ‘What’s happened? What’s going on?’

  Not for the first time in his career, Alex looked at his second in command. If nothing else, that would feel like touching base, a moment of calm security when everything seemed to be whirling around him. Buzz was a rock. Nothing ever fazed Buzz.

  Buzz was gazing at the image of the Guardian vanishing into the heart of the Carrearranian sun, a look of anguish in his eyes as he saw it and all the hopes they had invested in it flash, flare and burn. Then he gave a quiet sigh and muttered a word under his breath which Alex had never heard him use before. Then he raised his eyes and looked back at Alex, in a moment of total understanding between them. And Buzz Burroughs smiled. It was a painful smile, wry and brave in the face of calamity, but that Buzz could raise a smile at all in such circumstances put new heart into Alex himself. With an answering twist of his mouth, he squared his shoulders and looked around, taking in the situation.

  There was hubbub on the command deck and throughout the ship. Someone on the interdeck was having a fit of shouting, swearing hysterics – a passenger, Alex recognised, and dismissed that as Mako Ireson’s problem. The skipper’s own concern was with his own ship’s company and those of the ships under his
command. Their squadron right now consisted of the Minnow and a waiting courier, with the LIA ship Comrade Foretold lurking balefully at the edge of comms range. There was no way to tell how the LIA were reacting to the sudden appearance of the Solaran ship, as they were not part of the Fourth’s open comms network. Alex could see Milli Walensa on her own command deck, already calming things down there with a brisk and sensible manner. The Sub in command of the tiny courier looked as if he was on the verge of a panic attack, though, and was staring desperately through the comms link. Alex looked directly back at him for long enough for the Sub to register that the skipper really was looking at him, then gave him a nod.

  Later, the Sub would struggle to put into words how much that moment had meant to him.

  ‘It was just an absolutely overwhelming situation,’ he wrote in his personal journal. ‘A Solaran ship just coming out of nowhere just isn’t something that any amount of Academy training can prepare you for. I had no idea what was going on, I don’t think anybody did. But there was a lot of shouting and it all sounded really panicky, just total chaos and confusion. And in the middle of it all the skipper looked at me, just me, out of everyone, just looked at me as if to say I know I can count on you to hold it together there, like he had total confidence in me, without even saying a word, it was amazing. Just amazing. I don’t know, somehow it just felt then that everything was going to be okay.’

  Seeing that his reassuring nod had had its effect on the young officer, Alex left him to steady the PO and rigger who made up the crew of his tiny command. His own next priority was to quieten things down aboard his own ship, as rising noise levels indicated that people were becoming increasingly emotional.

  ‘All right,’ he used the PA and spoke with a calm, mildly irritated authority which conveyed that he considered they were over-reacting and should be demonstrating a little more self-control. ‘Thank you.’ The four words acted like a chill of arctic air on the rising emotional temperature. The noise level dropped immediately and quite a number of his crew looked a little embarrassed at this rare rebuke from the skipper. In the next breath, most of them were attempting to look as cool as they could. What, them, shout and swear just because an alien ship had come out of nowhere and trashed their mission?

  Alex gave a slight nod, satisfied, and made himself take another steadying breath against the tight bands clenching his ribs. It was, he knew, only his own muscles which had seized up in the chemical blast of shock and horror pumping from his own biochemistry. He could feel the rush of it, too, a dizzying combination of adrenalin and neurochemicals. The only way to stay on top of it was to control his breathing and force his brain to focus.

  ‘Breathe, people,’ he said, advice to himself as much as to his crew, and managing a note of desiccated humour, ‘Bad language,’ he observed, ‘will neither remedy the situation, nor assist in our ability to respond to it.’

  Leaving them to absorb that, he turned back to Buzz, taking another breath before he addressed him.

  ‘Do we agree that we accept this,’ he indicated the recording provided by the Solarans, ‘as a true record?’

  Buzz nodded. ‘I see no basis on which we can refute it, sir,’ he said, for the record.

  ‘So,’ said Alex, ‘we have to go to Carrearranis.’

  There was a shocked silence. Everyone was still reacting emotionally and seeing the situation as it pertained to them, reeling from the shock of seeing that glorious technology going up in flames. The skipper, however, was looking at the bigger picture. It was only then that many of them registered what the Solarans had said… Fear has been caused. Your help is required.

  Fear has been caused. However appalled they themselves might be at what had happened, it had hit the people of Carrearranis immeasurably harder. They too had seen the Guardian dive into the sun. They had been screaming with panic. And then the comms had cut off, leaving them alone.

  Your help is required. The Solarans themselves could not even begin to deal with a crisis like this, so they had come to ask the Fourth to help. Right here, right now, they were the only people who could. And that meant that they had to set aside their own feelings, step up and do everything they could.

  Even so, it took some effort to grasp the idea of going to Carrearranis right now. They had spent the last three months in parking orbit at the comms buoy. To most of them, psychologically, it was as if the ship had become a fixed point, unlikely to move anytime soon and certainly not without warning. But here it was, the skipper just laying it down flat that they were going to Carrearranis right now.

  ‘I intend,’ he spoke into the hushed bewilderment, ‘to take the ship to long orbit, outside the system.’ His words were clear and deliberate, intended as much for the civilian authorities who would review this decision as for the Fourth themselves. ‘Now that the quarantine border has been removed, we can regard the physical system boundary as the customary sovereign border which we will, naturally, not cross without permission from the Carrearranians themselves. I believe that both the distress evident in the recordings provided and the direct request for our assistance from the Solarans justifies us in responding at once.’ He looked around the officers gathered at the datatable, and glanced to include those on the Minnow’s command deck, too. ‘The Minnow,’ he said, ‘will remain here. Does anyone wish to register any objection to this course of action?’

  There was absolute silence for three seconds, a few people shaking their heads but nobody speaking. Then Buzz spoke up, calm and resolved.

  ‘You have my full support, sir,’ he said, and as if his words broke the breathless tension, there was an immediate rush of people attempting to put on record their own support for the skipper’s decision. There was even a ragged cheer, quickly hushed, from engineering. Over on the Minnow, Milli Walensa inclined her head in acknowledgement.

  ‘For the record,’ she said, ‘full support.’

  Alex found himself dealing with an odd combination of gratitude and exasperation. On the one hand, it was heart-warming to see that he had the wholehearted support of his team, without question or debate, even in the face of such an overwhelming situation as this. On the other hand, he had not been asking for such declarations; on the contrary, he had been giving anyone who had reservations about his decision the opportunity to distance themselves from it when it came to the inevitable Admiralty and Senate investigations into what had happened here.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, with a dry note in his voice. ‘Though, if it needs saying, the decision is of course entirely mine and all responsibility for it rests on me.’ He glanced around. ‘So,’ he said, ‘prepare to break orbit – T minus five minutes…’ he looked at the command screens and tapped in a countdown. ‘Mark.’

  There was no technical necessity for that, as they could have broken out of their endless circling in a moment and headed directly for Carrearranis. Giving them five minutes, though, would enable everyone who wanted to do so to flash mail over to the courier before they left, as well as enabling Alex to complete a report and send it over to be taken back to Oreol and beyond.

  ‘Keep the next courier here,’ he told Milli Walensa, transmitting orders to her as she was now to take on manning the comms point. Milli nodded, but she had been glancing through her orders as he spoke, and indicated one of them, giving him a startled look. The order stated that if the Heron was to drop off comms and remain so for more than twenty five hours, Milli was to withdraw the Minnow and any other ships on station with her to Oreol at best speed, reporting to the authorities there. Under no circumstances was she to approach Carrearranis herself if the Heron went off comms, or permit anyone else to do so. It wasn’t the nature of the order itself which had surprised Milli, but the fact that the captain had considered it necessary to state it at all, let alone specifying it in direct orders.

  ‘You think I need telling that, skipper?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Alex said, with a patient note, as he’d expected her to understand why he’d done tha
t without him needing to explain it. ‘But civilians, you know, may not appreciate how fundamental such regulations are with us, and need to see them expressly stated.’

  ‘Ah.’ Milli really understood, with that, that even in the midst of this stunning crisis, Alex had an eye to the intense review every aspect of this would be put under in future months, far away on Chartsey, mostly by people who had no understanding of what was going on. It would indeed be much simpler to have the position clarified like that than to try to explain core Fleet regulations and how absolute they were. ‘Okay,’ she conceded, and looked at him then with an intense, searching gaze. ‘Anything you need.’ It was not a question, or even an offer, merely a statement making sure he knew that she and her crew would do their utmost for him, whatever and whenever he asked. Alex gave a brief nod, but his attention was already being claimed by another developing situation.

  ‘I’ll keep you informed,’ he promised, and with that, broke off the call in order to address a decision which needed to be made.

  At no point in the preceding few minutes had either of the Fourth’s ships paid any attention whatever to the signals being received from the Comrade Foretold, other than their automated response of ‘Your message has been received and will be forwarded to the relevant officer.’

  There would be no prizes for guessing how the LIA were reacting to the sudden appearance of the Solaran ship or the appalling news it had delivered. If the Fourth was stunned, deeply shaken and upset by it, the LIA would be frantic. And so, indeed, they were. They had been able to read the Solaran signal and see the images of the Guardian star-diving at the same time the Fourth saw them. And while the Fourth, after staggering a bit, had pulled it together to respond decisively, the LIA’s instinctive reaction was to want to withdraw. They would want time to analyse and consider what had just happened, inevitably suspecting the worst. A glance at some of the signals they’d been sending told Alex that they were not about to accept what the Solarans had told them, for a start. They appeared to be of the view that it was some kind of misinformation, perhaps even some kind of trap.