Davie felt it, too – a sudden welling up, a prickling at his eyes and an aching sense of grief. He was suddenly reminded that he had never had a mother. The anonymous donor of the egg used in his procreation had been selected for the excellence of her genetic health, though that seemed scarcely relevant since all her genes had been removed from the egg anyway and the only genes used in his creation had come from his father. There had been strong, loving female influences in his childhood but he had often felt he’d missed out on not having a biological mother. He’d got over that, of course, years ago, and now, at seventeen, would have said he was long past feeling any childish need for a mother in his life. But in that moment he felt it so acutely that it was like a physical pain. I’ve never had a mother. I’ve never known a mother’s love.
At the same time, though, he was using his multi-cognitive intellect to analyse the situation, recognising that this emotional upsurge was being caused by Vida herself, clearly broadcasting sorrow at a level which had overwhelmed everyone around her.
Davie took charge, firmly suppressing that part of him which wanted to burst into tears and hug someone.
‘All of you – out!’ he said, and when they didn’t appear to hear him, raised the volume slightly and the emphasis considerably. ‘Out!’
His retinue, some of whom were starting to cry already, responded to that order and started getting the distressed people out of the room, calling on support to help them. Davie knew that he could leave that to the officers and medics to take care of. His priority had to be helping Vida.
He went straight to her, crouched in front of her as she’d sunk down into a chair, and looked at her with all the force of his mind focussed on one objective.
Vida’s head snapped up and she gasped as if he’d thrown cold water over her, a look of shock before she got herself together. ‘Hey!’
‘Sorry.’ Said Davie. He wanted to take her hand, but knew that doing so would only add to her emotional turmoil. So he kept a little distance, and focussed instead on supporting her with a sense of strong, steady control. ‘You’re freaking out,’ he told her, with a gesture to the distraught staff now being ushered out of the suite. ‘Take a couple of deep breaths, okay?’
Vida did so, and managed to get herself under control, her anguish turning into amazement at the intensity of her own emotions.
‘What just happened?’ she asked him, still tearful but bewildered.
‘At a guess, I’d say some kind of positive feedback,’ Davie replied, keeping his manner cool and analytical. ‘A kind of group hysteria. But just focus on breathing for a moment, okay?’
She gave a little nod, and within a few seconds had recovered sufficiently to dry her eyes and compose herself, though she still looked upset.
‘It was the child,’ she told him. ‘It was just such a shock…’
It didn’t take Davie long to work out what had happened, partly from what she told him and partly from what he could see on the desk. She’d come here to talk to one of the legal executives about compensation claims against the company which she now owned. Many of them related to an incident some months before. Compensation claims were very difficult to make on Carpania because the levels of pollution were so high that it was difficult to target one particular producer as being responsible for injury caused by that pollution. In this case, though, the claimants had a good case as there’d been an accident at the plant resulting in the release of a cloud of poisonous gas. There’d been eleven fatalities and more than a hundred other casualties – a minor incident in Carpanian terms but one for which the company was clearly responsible. Even the notoriously disinterested Health and Safety Authority was making noises about punitive fines. That was why one of Davie’s executives had been able to pick up the company at a bargain price, on condition that they also assumed all the company’s current legal liabilities.
Vida had taken Davie’s advice on this and had come to tell the legal exec to settle all such claims out of court and without argument. She had, however, disregarded his advice just to give such directions and leave it to the staff to deal with. Vida wanted to be involved, to know everything that was going on. So she’d asked to see the compensation claim files.
The one which had distressed her so was a claim being made by a mother over the death of her eight year old son. They’d been on their way to visit a neighbour when they’d been overwhelmed by the poisonous gas cloud. She had survived, though her lungs had been badly damaged. Her son had died. The company’s legal team, prior to Davie’s takeover, had been defending the claim on the basis that the child’s lungs had been damaged and weakened by existing pollution anyway so they could not be held wholly responsible, and on the basis that the mother should take some responsibility too as neither she nor her son had taken gas masks for the short walk across the road. It was not without reason that Carpanian lawyers were regarded as the most ruthless, unprincipled members of their profession.
For Vida, though, reading the file, there had been all the distress of seeing the details of the child’s death and the brutal dispassion of the autopsy report, together with the awful grief and fury of the mother at the company refusing even to acknowledge and apologise for her loss.
‘These people are monsters,’ Vida said. ‘I felt so sorry for that poor mother, I started to cry. And then everyone else did, too. And that just made it worse, because they were thinking about people they’ve lost and their own mothers and kids and it was all just…’ She made a gesture to indicate that emotions had spiralled up and out of control, and Davie nodded.
‘Positive feedback,’ he confirmed. ‘Your distress triggered memories and feelings in them which then made you even more upset and that just fed into a cycle that ended up with you all breaking down. My bad, sorry.’ He gave a rueful grimace. ‘I knew Carpania would be high impact.’
‘You told me that – but I chose it,’ Vida reminded him. He had, indeed, offered her several choices of companies, but she’d insisted that she wanted that one. ‘Anyway, it’s good,’ she declared. ‘We can do the right thing now – nothing can ever make it right, of course, but at least we can say sorry and stop Ecoplaz insulting people on top of their injury and loss.’ She gave him a suddenly fierce look, challenging. ‘Can’t you buy all the companies on Carpania and make them clean things up there?’
‘Unfortunately not,’ said Davie, with real regret but with a tiny twinge of amusement, too, as he remembered asking his father exactly the same question. ‘There are laws against one person or corporation owning too much of any world’s economy, for one thing, and for another, the issues on Carpania are far too deep and complex to fix like that even if I could buy the planet.’ He gave her a sympathetic look. ‘We’ll discuss it later,’ he promised. ‘But for right now we need to make sure you’re okay.’ He indicated the medical team who’d come running and were now on tenterhooks, just waiting for the nod from Davie.
Vida rolled her eyes and sighed, because that was how Davie himself always reacted to medics wanting to examine him.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, and commanded the medics, ‘Go and look after the people I upset.’ She turned back to Davie with a remorseful look. ‘Sorry about that.’
‘You couldn’t help it,’ Davie said, and smiled, wanting so much for her to feel better that he knew he must be yelling that at her, emotionally. ‘And they are being looked after, don’t worry about that. So just let the guys,’ he indicated the medics ‘give you a quick check, okay?’
She was fine and very soon restored to a cheerful equilibrium, which was more than could be said for everyone involved in that emotional storm. Two more of them handed in their notice over that – one said that he just had to go home and spend time with his family while the other announced her intention of going to Carpania to offer her legal services to the victims of pollution while volunteering on environmental clean-up projects. Davie gave both of them a year’s paid sabbatical in the hope that they’d come back to work for him, but that s
till meant he was going to lose them at Chartsey.
‘It’s going to be difficult,’ said Marl, meeting with Davie privately the following day. Marl was officially Davie’s senior business executive, his right hand man in the running of his intersystem business holdings. He was a minor member of another of the Founding Families, a wealthy man in his own right. Unofficially he stood more in the role of an uncle – he had been Davie’s business proxy from the age of seven until he was legally able to sign documents for himself at fourteen. There had been no difficulty in making the transition to working for Davie as an adult, as he had always followed Davie’s directions in business and had great respect for his entrepreneurial acumen. At a personal level, though, he had a deep parental affection for him and had always been ready to sympathise with his troubles and give him a word of advice or a hug. ‘I think we’ll have to ask the Diplomatic Corps to lend us some staff, at least in the short term.’
Davie nodded. He understood that it would be problematical to find and train suitably qualified people in anything under a month, or more reasonably, two. ‘Suitably qualified’ in this sense didn’t just mean having the business or legal qualifications and experience, after all, but also required an in-depth vetting process to establish suitability to work at the highest levels of confidentiality, essential for direct employment by any member of the Families. Where Davie was concerned there was the additional requirement that they must be prepared to work for a genetically engineered boss with superhuman capabilities, a requirement which had stalled several promising recruitment processes in the past. They would also need to be trained in exodiplomacy, and prepared to join the team even on the understanding that this might well expose them to considerable personal embarrassment in their contact with the quarian. The Stepeasy’s executive officer had already expressed his own concern about the difficulties of finding suitably qualified crew to replace the people who were leaving, and Davie was not surprised to hear the same thing from his chief of staff.
‘The Diplomatic Corps and the Fleet will help us out,’ he observed, with a slightly rueful grin as he was not usually in the habit of asking anyone to help him. Then he saw that Marl was still looking troubled, and a horrible thought arose. ‘Not you too?’ he exclaimed, and saw the guilt on Marl’s face before indignation covered it up.
‘No, of course not! Davie! How could you even think I’d leave you?’ Marl’s manner was reproachful, but Davie wasn’t fooled.
‘You want to, though, don’t you?’
Marl looked at him and sighed, recognising the futility of trying to hide anything from Davie.
‘I can’t deny that I’ve felt, at times, that I’m out of my depth in all this,’ he admitted. ‘I’m thrilled to take part in exodiplomacy, you know that. I’ve loved it all, meeting Solarans, working with Shionolethe, doing business with Samart. But this…’ he shook his head. ‘I don’t know how to cope with this – the disruption, the chaos, the sheer emotion of it all. I was in tears, Davie. Me!’ He shook his head again at the enormity of that admission. ‘I haven’t cried since I was a kid, even in private. Breaking down in the office like that was… well, I would never have believed it possible of myself. But there it is. And it’s – well, it’s the uncertainty of it all, never knowing from one moment to the next what might happen, everyone and everything so stressed. I’m not sleeping properly, and that’s never happened to me before, either, other than when you went off with the Heron.’
Davie understood what he meant by that – he had ‘gone off with the Heron’ several times, but only once leaving his own ship behind. Marl had begged him, at the time, to allow him to go too, but Davie had refused. He was not taking a retinue, and there was no operational justification for taking a business executive along. So Marl had had to wait aboard the Stepeasy with everyone else, stuck in holding orbit around a remote uninhabited system for the three months until the Heron had returned. He had worried himself sick during those weeks, with no way to know what was happening and a very real danger that the Heron would never come back.
‘Well, if you want to take some time out…’ Davie said, and got the reaction he had expected.
‘No!’ Marl really was indignant now. ‘I am not leaving. It’s only that I do have to be honest and admit that I feel out of my depth with it all at times and I can’t deny it is rather stressful. But if you think I’d quit on you, Davie, you don’t know me half as well as …’ he broke off and grinned, relaxing as he saw Davie’s quizzical look. ‘But you do know that, obviously.’
‘Obviously,’ Davie agreed. ‘You’re in for the duration, come hell or high water.’ He smiled warmly at the man who’d helped to bring him up, his loyalty beyond any question. ‘And I know it is stressful.’ He spoke with some feeling. ‘Certainly the most challenging exodiplomacy we’ve ever undertaken. But so, so important, Marl. And I don’t mean for me personally, though obviously it’s amazing to be working with someone of the same genome as me. I mean this is so important for the League. The quarians really are this close,’ he held his thumb and forefinger very slightly apart, ‘to closing their borders against us, which would not only be a disaster in terms of the technological benefits from that contact but would be a massive setback in developing other relationships, too. You know how sensitive that is, and what people out there,’ he gestured widely, to indicate the civilisations beyond the Firewall, ‘will consider us ready for contact if we can’t even sustain contact with a friendly world within human space? This is one of those turning points in history, a point where the consequences of what we do right here and right now will determine the future of humanity. And you know I’m not exaggerating.’
Marl did know, and gave a sombre nod. This was the last ditch effort by the quarians to establish a workable relationship with them. If it failed, they would close their borders and tell humanity, kindly but definitely, that they could come back when they were more mature as a species. If that happened, other civilisations currently evaluating whether or not to make contact with them would certainly hold back. If they succeeded, on the other hand, demonstrating that they could resolve even difficult exodiplomatic issues, other species out there might well take that as an indicator that they were ready to engage in relationships, with all the incalculable benefits that would bring to humanity. This was indeed a turning point, and right here and now they were the fulcrum on which the future was wavering.
‘I know, it’s vital,’ Marl agreed. ‘I keep reminding people of that, trying to keep them motivated and to keep it in perspective, too, that this is far more important than any of our personal feelings. But we are, after all, human, and we can’t help but find it stressful when things are just so far outside our experience and so emotionally charged.’
‘I know,’ said Davie, and with an assurance that would come back to haunt him, later, ‘Hang in there, though, Marl. We’ll get all the help and support we need at Chartsey.’
Three
In fact, they were only at Chartsey for seventeen hours.
It should have been fine. Davie had sent shuttles ahead with warning of their arrival and couriers had been flitting back and forth with preparations for a well-planned, safe and enjoyable visit. Davie could find no fault with any of it and Vida had agreed to it all, too, expressing happy anticipation as she saw that the authorities on Chartsey had made plans for everything on her wish list of things to see and do there. She had said she understood, too, the need for compliance with the slow, dull procedures they would have to go through on arrival in port, from quarantine to the official welcome.
In the event, though, she didn’t even wait for the Stepeasy to reach parking orbit. They were barely ten minutes into the system and still cruising away from the deceleration tunnel when she took off in one of their shuttles.
‘I did try to stop her!’ the security chief told Davie, with a frantic note, as the shuttle peeled away and shot straight towards Chartsey at maximum speed. ‘But she was just laughing and then – she’d gone!’
>
Footage of the Incident would show that he had been attempting to physically block her access to the airlock, but that she’d ducked around him with superhuman speed, closing the airlock against him before he’d even started to turn round. She was laughing, too, obviously just so excited by everything she could see that she just couldn’t wait to get out there and explore.
The next four minutes were extremely hectic even for Davie. She was heading straight across the system direct to Chartsey with no regard at all for any of the laws or authorities involved. For a start, no shuttle was allowed to leave an incoming ship until it had concluded port-entry procedures including quarantine and Customs clearance, so both the quarantine authority and Customs were signalling protests and calling for the SDF to intercept the shuttle even before it started cutting across traffic lanes.
Chartsey was the most densely populated system in the League, and by far the busiest port. There were thousands of ships in orbit and millions of small craft making their way around the system. Every useable planet and moon was covered with industrial complexes, bases and ‘offworld living’ settlements, along with several thousand space stations. Chartsey itself was the convergence of so many traffic lanes, constantly shifting with it as it moved in its orbit, that the planet itself could hardly be seen for the constant midge-like swarm around it. System traffic was so high volume here that they actually had to use the equivalent of traffic lights; traffic control satellites which put lanes into holding patterns as needed and imposed speed directives on every vehicle in transit.
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