Carrearranis (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 5)

by S MacDonald

  For a moment, Commander Mikthorn thought that the boat which was overturned in the water there had been capsized by the descending shuttle. It was one of the outrigger sailing boats the Carrearranians used for island hopping, long and narrow, carved from the trunk of a tree with a stabilising float to one side and a slender, flexible mast from which was rigged a triangular sail. The boats looked suicidally flimsy to League eyes, held together with cotton-woven rope and with a sail made from the same fabric from which they made their clothes. Ropes could break, sails could tear, a sudden squall could swamp a boat. The islanders themselves accepted that accidents could happen, it was part and parcel of their world and accepted as such.

  It wasn’t clear exactly what had gone wrong here – like most of the people watching, Commander Mikthorn would only piece it together later, watching back footage which showed a rope giving way, the outrigger spar breaking off at one end, an ill-judged attempt to grab for it by the islander at that end of the boat, and a moment of disaster as he fell overboard, the outrigger wrenched off and the boat capsized, all so closely together and so intertwined that it would take close analysis to work out which had caused what.

  The result of it, though, was a broken and capsized boat, with the two young men who’d been in it thrown into the water. The one who’d fallen in appeared to be all right, at least for the moment, as he’d surfaced and caught hold of the upside down boat, spluttering and shocked but not in immediate danger. He was doing the very human thing of yelling for his friend, as if the mere act of hearing his name being shouted would make him stop drowning and come to the surface. The other man, though, had disappeared. All the islanders could swim – being unable to swim for them would be as weird as being unable to walk – but there was no sign of him around the boat.

  Silvie knew where he was, though. While those on the Heron were still catching their breath and in many cases swearing at the petrifying speed of that crash-descent, the airlock opened and a slender, silver-haired figure leapt out, diving in a graceful arc that plunged her into the water. She was not wearing a survival suit.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Alex von Strada.

  There was a long, long, breath-holding silence.

  ‘All right – got him!’ Silvie’s voice came back over comms, shockingly happy and relaxed.

  She surfaced as she was speaking; supporting a figure with an air mask clamped over nose and mouth. He was limp, unconscious.

  ‘Ah.’ Silvie had looked up, and it was apparent that it was only now that she became aware of the difficulty of the position she was in. She’d piloted the shuttle alone, and had jumped out of it while it was five metres above the ocean. It was still there, hovering. There was of course, an emergency ladder which could be dropped from the airlock. There was quite a lot of other emergency equipment there too, come to that. All of it, though, relied on there being somebody on the shuttle. Silvie looked up at it, as far out of her reach as if it had been in orbit. ‘Oh.’ She considered for a moment and then suggested, quite politely, ‘Help?’

  ‘If you hadn’t overridden the security…’ Alex was irritated, but then changed his tone, ‘Ah – thank you, Mr North.’

  Remote control had evidently been established on the shuttle, as it was dropped gently the last few metres, hovering so that the water was lapping underneath.

  Silvie swam over to it, supporting the casualty and lifting him into the open airlock as easily as if he weighed nothing. Silvie was small and lightly built herself, but the Carrearranian looked no bigger than a child of six or seven in comparison with her. As she lifted him into the shuttle she was looking over at the other islander, still hanging on to the capsized boat and staring at her in slack-jawed silence.

  ‘Hi,’ Silvie called over. ‘How are you doing there – all right?’

  The islander nodded.

  ‘Not hurt?’ Silvie queried.

  The islander tick-tocked his head sideways in the Carrearranian negative.

  ‘Okay – just hang on there a minute.’ Silvie put one hand on the floor of the airlock and lifted herself into it with such easy grace that it was as if she was levitating. The young man she’d already lifted in was already starting to choke, and she took his mask off as she turned him over into the recovery position. He was a pathetic figure on the floor of the airlock, sodden and convulsing.

  Silvie had never taken any official training. Even if she’d wanted to, she was not yet old enough to undertake any form of military training – she was, after all, a year younger than Davie North. Unlike him, though, she had no interest in taking any training, still less working as an honorary Fourth’s officer. She hadn’t come here to join the Fourth, after all.

  Faced with a casualty, though, she did everything that a trained paramedic would have done, other than for dismissing Rangi Tekawa’s attempt to intervene and instruct her in what to do.

  ‘He’s fine,’ she said, and he evidently was – a certain amount of water had been vomited and he was coughing, but some breaths from a medical mask Silvie held to his face restored his lungs to normal function. Within a few minutes, he was sitting up, breathing a little fast and looking dazed, but evidently safe.

  ‘All right – just sit there a minute and get your breath back,’ Silvie instructed. The young man looked at her with wondering eyes, and nodded.

  ‘Hmmn.’ Silvie turned and surveyed the capsized boat with an appraising eye. It was evident that the mast was broken, jutting sideways from under the boat with the sodden sail tangled on it. Debris was bobbing in the waves all around – there were a lot of gourds, some wood, tangles of floating rope, as well as the broken-off outrigger. ‘Ohhh-kay,’ she said, and looked over at the young man holding on to the upturned hull. ‘Got an axe?’ she asked.

  The islanders didn’t use knives, or work any metal. They worked axes from flint or from volcanic glass, according to the local geology, and always from rocks which were found on the surface. A well-crafted axe was a prized possession, handed on through generations.

  The islander said nothing, but he held out a hand and pointed downwards.

  ‘Ah.’ Silvie stood up and was poised in the sunshine for just a moment, a gleam from her silver hair and her sapphire eyes alight as if the sunlight sparkled in them. Then she leapt up, somersaulted neatly and dived like a dolphin.

  ‘Silvie!’ Alex von Strada’s voice held a note of despair, not a tone his crew heard from him very often.

  ‘It’s all right, I can see it,’ Silvie assured him, swimming straight down through the sunlit surface waters into the murkier depths below. She had still not put on a survival suit and had no breathing gear. She was breathing the water, using the internal gills which were engineered into her lungs. Her voice had a richer resonance underwater, a faint trace as of echo or harmony. She looked, and was, entirely at home. Very little of the ocean on Carrearranis was deeper than a couple of kilometres, and it was much less than that here, just sixty metres or so to the silt laden bed. Darting down to it, Silvie snatched up a small gleaming object, then looked around and saw some of the other things which had come out of the boat and sunk. One was their anchor stone, a small boulder encased in a net of woven rope with a long rope attached to it. It had been this, in fact, which had tangled around the unfortunate sailor and been dragging him down to the bottom. Silvie retrieved this too, disentangling the rope as she carried it up – boulder and rope were popped onto the airlock floor with a smile for the casualty who was still sitting there, then she kicked over to the capsized boat, handing the other man his axe. ‘There you go.’

  The islander nodded, then stared at the axe in his hand as if trying to remember what he was supposed to do about it. Then, quite suddenly, he seemed to come to himself and took a quick, powering breath before ducking under the water with the axe in a purposeful grip.

  It took about forty minutes to get the boat set to rights. Silvie helped, and it was clear that her superhuman strength made the job faster than it would have been otherwise, but it was
also very clear that the two young men could have managed perfectly well without her. After a couple of minutes, the one who’d nearly drowned slipped off the shuttle and swam back over to help out with the boat. Neither of the Carrearranians spoke. They did not seem to be frightened – a little dazed, perhaps, but working together with quiet intent. Silvie, too, worked with them as if they were a team which had done this kind of thing so often that no commands needed to be given. All three of them worked together to roll the capsized boat back upright, then, while Silvie held the outrigger in place, the young men used lengths of rope to tie it back into position. The boat was still full of water, but Silvie swam about retrieving gourds, finding one which had been carved into a bowl and using that to bail the boat out while the men chopped the splintered ends of the mast into rough diagonals. The obsidian-bladed axe worked well in expert hands, and by the time Silvie had got the boat more or less clear of water, one of the young men was holding the mast in place while the other bound rope in a tight weave, building up a heavy thickness. It wouldn’t take much strain and it wouldn’t hold for long, but it would be enough to get them to the next island.

  Silvie, meanwhile, darted about, gathering the rest of the scattered debris. The boat had been carrying gourds – about fifty of them, loosely piled in the stern and the bows. They were actually from the island which had been hit by the storm a couple of weeks earlier. The islanders had gathered hundreds more of the fallen gourds than they needed for themselves, so they were sending them out to other islands which could make use of them. A team on the Heron was tracking where the gourds went, moved on from island to island till they reached where they were wanted. It wasn’t trade – the gifting islanders did not ask for anything in return for the gourds and no such reciprocal gesture seemed to be part of their culture. It just seemed natural to them that anything they had surplus to their own requirements was shared out to other communities. These particular gourds would end up, weeks from now, half way round the planet. The Carrearranians used them extensively as storage jars, and for cooking and eating utensils. The husk, when dried, was as tough as wood. If the top was cut correctly while the gourd was still fresh from the tree, it made a plug-in lid for carrying water and food for journeys.

  Silvie found the two water gourds and the one which had contained a cold stew for their lunch. All three had lost their lids, and their contents.

  ‘Sorry.’ She brought the empty gourds back to the boat and asked them, ‘Will you be able to manage?’ She glanced past them as she spoke, looking at the nearest island. It wasn’t inhabited, though it had a tree-lined lagoon. Boats stopped often at such atolls, sometimes for water, for an overnight stay or to make running repairs to the boat. Even with a fished mast, it would not take them more than a couple of hours to get there.

  The islanders themselves looked at the island, looked at each other, and nodded.

  ‘Okay then.’ Silvie swam back to the shuttle, returning with the anchor stone which she carried tucked under one arm and passed up to them one-handed. The man who took it did so with both hands and it suddenly seemed a whole lot heavier as he lifted it on board. Silvie was already swimming back to the shuttle, kicking back easily with her upper body half out of the water, still facing the islanders. ‘Have a good trip.’ She slid up into the shuttle and got to her feet, waving to them. ‘Bye!’

  They waved back, sitting there, watching as the airlock closed and then, moments later, the shuttle began to drift upward as lightly as a leaf on the wind.

  It had got maybe sixty metres up before the two young men looked away from it to stare briefly at one another, and then both of them started to scream.

  It was, fortunately, screaming with excitement rather than terror. They scrambled to their feet so rapidly that they were in some danger of capsizing the boat again. Both of them were yelling at the tops of their voices up towards the shuttle, waving both arms so energetically that the boat rocked and bobbed. They were just shrieking the same word over and over again, frantic to make Silvie hear them.

  ‘Gralus! Gralus!’ And again, yelling in lung-tearing unison, ‘GRAAAAA-LUSSS!’

  It meant ‘thank you’. Then, as the shuttle accelerated to no more than a bright point in the sky, they waved with one hand, thumping their hearts with the other, ‘Bye! Thank you! Bye!’

  The bright dot disappeared and, having waved and called for a couple more minutes, the sailors embraced one another, laughing and shouting still, before settling back down and making a start on rigging a reefed, waterlogged sail.

  Up on the Heron, there was a mass exhalation of relief, and some anticipation, too, keeping an eye on the skipper and watching to see how he reacted to this. For the first time, Commander Mikthorn noticed that one of the Fourth’s fighters was hovering just above the atmosphere, poised to have raced down if it was needed. The fighter was a great sleek black dart, dwarfing the little shuttle. It was Firefly, being piloted by Shion, but she didn’t either wait for or chat to her friend. As soon as she saw that the shuttle was clear of the atmosphere and got the stand-down from the Heron, she span Firefly about and raced it through superlight launch at a pace with which the shuttle couldn’t compete. By the time Silvie had put the shuttle through its launch run and set course back to the Heron, Firefly was already swinging around to come in to its docking bay.

  ‘I know what you think you ought to say,’ said Silvie, now on screen-comms with Alex and giving him an unrepentant grin. ‘But you are not going to tell me that I should have let him drown.’

  There was a moment while Alex considered this, then he too broke into a grin – wry, reluctant, but still, a smile of sorts.

  ‘No,’ he admitted, because there was no point even trying to be anything less than entirely open and honest with Silvie. He might, if he tried, get away with lying to her on comms at this distance, but she’d know the truth the moment she clapped eyes on him. ‘I’m not going to tell you that.’

  ‘Good.’ She said, then gave him a look that was more than a little accusing. ‘You shouted.’

  ‘I was frightened,’ Alex said simply.

  ‘Tuh,’ said Silvie, but evidently accepted this. ‘No need,’ she said, ‘I had it all under control. Although,’ the accusing look was back, and the tone became reproachful, ‘you really should have voice or comms control of the emergency gear on these shuttles.’

  ‘They are not designed,’ said Alex, with a touch of irony, ‘to be left in mid-air without a pilot.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Silvie said, as if this merely confirmed her own complaint. ‘These shuttles need an upgrade.’

  Alex did grin at that. Silvie had stolen that shuttle, overriding the most sophisticated security systems in space in order to do so. She’d then carried out an unauthorised operation on a planet still in quarantine, and hadn’t even put on a survival suit. The fact that that then ended up as a complaint from her about the facilities on the shuttle was just the sort of thing which made diplomacy with quarians so challenging.

  ‘We will,’ he said, ‘talk about that later – debriefing in an hour.’ The shuttle was approaching the ship and was being directed to dock at the quarantine airlock. ‘It will take you that long,’ he observed, as she looked surprised, ‘to get through decontam and medical.’

  Silvie didn’t argue about that, just gave a chuckle and aimed the shuttle at the designated airlock. She did not in fact have so much as an aircar pilot’s license, though that was a minor consideration in the enormity of what she had just done.

  As soon as the shuttle had docked, Alex stood the ship back down from action stations. The initial alert had been triggered by the unauthorised launch of the shuttle, and he had maintained it in case Silvie brought the ship back to a regular airlock and the frigate itself had to be put through full decontam. As it was, any contamination was safely contained, so he thanked everyone and touched the control which allowed them to de-suit and go back to what they had been doing.

  Silvie did spend the next hour going thro
ugh full decontam and the most rigorous medical Rangi and Simon could carry out. She wasn’t even allowed through the airlock until she and the shuttle had been through primary decontam and the medics were already doing tests on her while that was going on. She had breathed Carrearranian air and sea water, had been exposed to contact with local people and their goods, had even touched ocean-floor silt which they hadn’t begun to sample as yet. The testing, therefore, was ferocious, both to check Silvie herself and to ensure that she was not bringing anything on board which was a hazard to the rest of them.

  When she was eventually released, therefore, it was with absolute certainty that she was not infected or infectious. She came to the command deck still reeking of decontam chemicals and with a good many little spots where wires or tubes had been attached. She was cheerful, though, no issue with having had to pass through quarantine.

  ‘Do I not get a cookie?’ she asked Alex, sitting down at the command deck and looking at him with a bright, hopeful gaze. ‘I’m not asking for, ‘Thank you, Silvie; you’re wonderful, what would we have done without you,’ but a cookie would be nice.’

  Alex took a mini-pack of choc-cherry cookies from his pocket and handed it over, at which Silvie gave a little cry of glee and tucked in, munching happily.

  Alex looked at her, feeling a rush of affection that he would have had to have described, honestly, as love. It had been like this between them since the moment they met. All the feelings he had thought had died with his infant daughter, the overwhelming love, the need to protect, had been rekindled in his relationship with Silvie. In response, the trust she had in him was total.

  ‘All right,’ he smiled at her. ‘Debriefing.’ His gaze flicked momentarily to where the command deck cameras were recording them, ‘Certain things we need to establish, understand?’