Ignoring all that and just breezing across the system jinking around other traffic was, of course, illegal. So was breaking the system speed limit, which Vida was also doing as she piloted the shuttle at its maximum speed. The System Defence Force fighters on patrol in the outer sector could not intercept her – they were too far away and even at their best speed Vida would have reached the planet before they could get to her. The SDF, therefore, were firing up defence arrays, preparing to destroy the shuttle if it continued to head straight for the planet at superlight speed.
They would have no choice. With the shuttle not responding to hails and hurtling at an inhabited world, they would have to assume that this was a terrorist attack or the act of an insane individual. Either way they would have to protect Chartsey. There was a line. If the shuttle crossed it still superlight, the defence arrays would fire.
Davie managed to issue the codes which shut the defence arrays down and sent out a ‘Hold Fire!’ order just sixteen seconds before the shuttle crossed the security line. As it happened, the arrays would not have fired anyway, as right at the last possible moment Vida put the shuttle into a slam deceleration and crossed the line sublight. She was still, however, busting speed limits for the inner part of the system and completely ignoring both traffic lanes and signals from Traffic Control.
It was at this point that the army and police became involved. The air-division of the army had been alerted by the SDF and they launched fighters from several bases while the police mobilised every available patrol to aerial intercept.
Vida giggled as she dodged a trio of fighters with a hypersonic somersault, adding ‘Woohoo!’ as she slalomed her way down through the thirty six levels of streaming traffic which swarmed through Chartsey’s skies. She was avoiding collisions by a hairsbreadth, terrifying the people in those lanes as she came out of nowhere and skimmed right past. The police were converging with howling sirens, the army fighters had spun around and they too were in hot pursuit. As it became clear that she was heading for the middle of the capital city, too, both army and police were now threatening to fire if she didn’t pull up, slow down and follow their directions.
Davie slapped the ‘Do Not Fire’ priority codes at them, too – they were exodiplomacy codes, carrying presidential authority to allow the identified craft unimpeded passage. The army pulled back at once, with an order given to disengage. The police, however, carried right on, telling Vida that she had five seconds to comply with their orders or they would open fire. Davie had signalled the code to the senior officer in operational command. Perhaps they didn’t believe it, but more probably they simply hadn’t understood it and someone, somewhere, was currently looking up the code to find out what it meant. Seeing that, Davie followed up that signal with one the police would recognise, telling them that the vehicle concerned carried diplomatic immunity and was not to be stopped.
There was some slight delay while that message got through, and a tense moment when he feared they might just fire anyway, but they did hold back. They were still howling their sirens, though, with garish flashing lights and an imperative signal to every other vehicle in the vicinity to get out of the way.
There was a massive rush and a good deal of shouting and screaming on the ground, too, as the shuttle came down to land. It was far bigger than an atmospheric aircar, clearly a space vehicle which were not allowed to land anywhere other than at designated spaceports, and it was being pursued by eight police cars by then, with the army fighters still circling overhead. In the circumstances, it was not unreasonable for people to run away.
And that meant a lot of people. She landed in Capitol Square, the most famous landmark on the capital world. To one side was the President’s official residence – facing it across the great square was the imposing frontage of the Senate building itself. Mighty towers surrounded it, the most impressive and expensive real estate on Chartsey. Even at its quietest, in the small hours of the morning, there would be thousands of people in Capitol Square. Today, in the middle of a weekday morning, there were around three hundred thousand people milling around, taking holos, buying junk food from the famous street vendors and generally marvelling at the fact that they were in the heart of the capital city of the League’s capital world.
Vida landed the shuttle neatly, not far from one of the street vendors. With typical tourist mentality, the people who’d been running away yelling in alarm as the shuttle descended now stopped, looked back and evidently decided that it presented no threat to them. The crowd began to draw back in around it, taking holos as the police cars attempted to surround the shuttle, four of them hovering above it while the other four landed around it. People were starting to take a keen interest in the shuttle, quite apart from the drama of its arrival and the police surrounding it. It was, like the Stepeasy itself, a radically new design, with the same kind of internal bracing which made the superyacht so fast and manoeuvrable. Even those who didn’t recognise the different engineering, though, could see that it was unlike any shuttle to be seen around the system. It looked more like a missile with wings than any conventional shuttlecraft. And it was a brilliant, shining white, without insignia other than for a very discreet panel hidden underneath.
Vida got out of the shuttle. Only she wasn’t Vida any more. Vida had worn casual clothes, like Davie, and had tried to fit in by looking and acting human. Evidently she’d decided that that wasn’t how she was going to do things here. She was wearing a dazzlingly white outfit of an extraordinary, futuristic design, with her platinum hair sculpted into a cone and a metallic sheen of makeup on her face. Oddly, she seemed not even to notice the police who were by then either staring at her in disbelief or shouting at the crowd to stay back. She went through three separate but very rapid reactions to her first steps on Chartsey.
‘Woah!’ she wobbled slightly and exclaimed, with pleased interest, ‘Bioshock!’ It could take humans several minutes to get their ‘ground legs’ even on a world with such a low bioshock index as Chartsey, as people responded to the overwhelming influx of unfamiliar sensory data, from a sense that the sky looked weird, the physical impact of different air, different gravity, unfamiliar pollen and spores. Even the subconscious awareness of the difference in the planet’s magnetosphere might make people feel disoriented.
The quarian, however, shook all that off in an instant, going straight to her next reaction. ‘Errgh!’ she said, with a wrinkle of her nose that indicated she was commenting on the quality of Chartsey air and the distinctive city smell. But then in the next moment her head snapped around and a look of pleased surprise came onto her face.
Her attention was on the food vendor in his hut a few metres away. Until her arrival he’d been standing there making griddle cakes for the tourists with all his usual panache. He was, indeed, an intersystem celebrity of sorts, since virtually every customer wanted to take holos of the cakes being made and he’d appeared in several documentaries as well. It was normal, in fact, for there to be professional camera crews in the square, even hordes of them at busy times. There was a news team there right then, in fact, hardly able to believe their luck as they’d been filming an extremely boring ‘Senate Steps’ interview with an unimportant Senator which would barely make it into the subscreens of a political story their station was covering. And now there was this – not only Drama, but an exclusive scoop. They had abandoned the Senator without ceremony and were even now racing across the square, filming as they came.
Vida, or however she identified herself now, was just as oblivious to them as she was to the police and even to the gathering crowd. All her attention was on the food vendor and the smell of warm, spiced griddle cakes floating from his open-sided hut. As their eyes met, he held his spatula frozen in one hand, all his tourist-pleasing prattle silenced in a moment of absolute wonder. Vida grinned back at him. ‘Yummy!’ she observed. But at that point she became aware of the approach of a police officer wanting to see her ID in order to confirm that she did have diplomatic immunity.
‘Oh, hi.’ Vida greeted him. ‘I am an alien ambassador,’ she informed him, and gave him a big, beaming smile. ‘Take me to your leader.’
They would have taken her to the nearest police station if Davie had not, at that point, hacked the police comms system in sheer desperation and told the officers on scene that it was a secret service drill. It was a lousy explanation but the best even he could come up with at the time, and it confused the police enough to give the Diplomatic Corps time to get their people there. They were already arriving, in fact. There were several people in very smart suits running in a way that people in smart suits were never normally seen to tear around, already flourishing official ID cards at the police as they raced towards them. A dark limo was pulling into the square, too, which was also causing a sensation as it was a pedestrianised zone. Many people thought that it might even be the President.
Davie would have heaved a sigh of relief, seeing that Vida was getting into the limousine under the rather breathless guidance of the diplomatic security team. He was, however, rather too busy handling multiple comcalls as well as issuing Security of the League Orders to prevent the media broadcasting about this.
His own heart was thudding hard, which took some doing since he had a very low adrenalin reflex, giving him the ability to stay calm even in extremely frightening situations. This, though, was both terrifying and appalling. The progress of it, indeed, could have been tracked by the nature of the signals he’d been sending to Vida. To begin with, he’d been amused, even indulgent.
‘Hey – hold up there, Sis!’ That had been when he’d first seen her cutting straight across traffic lanes. At the point where he’d had to prevent the SDF from firing at her his tone had become serious, ‘Vida, please! Stop!’
Her response had been to laugh and tell him, ‘Don’t worry, I’m fine.’
Then, when he was pulling the army and police back from shooting her out of the sky, his tone had become really urgent, ‘Vida, please! I need you to come back or go land at the Embassy! Do not land in … oh…’ as he saw that it was too late and she was already dropping into Capitol Square. ‘Oh my God!’
And there he was, responsible for an Incident in which hundreds of thousands of people had witnessed her hurtling across the system and into atmosphere with the SDF, army and police in howling pursuit, and tens of thousands more had filmed her landing in Capitol Square and announcing that she was an alien ambassador. And he was responsible – he was the ambassador with direct, official responsibility for her as an exo-visitor and everyone was already shouting at him, including a very alarmed League President wanting to know what the seven levels of Hades was going on.
‘Sorry, Mr President.’ Davie was handling all the other calls with text response, as his fingers could flash messages back far more quickly than he could speak to them all, but he took President Tyborne’s call directly, as courtesy required. ‘She’s gone off plan.’
Even as he spoke, he was watching the coverage groundside and could see that things were not under control, even now. The limousine had started to pull away but had now stopped again. It had been standing for several seconds and now the door opened. A young man scrambled out – identified on a subscreen as a junior member of the Trade and Industry division in the Diplomatic service, but about to make himself something of a reputation as an exodiplomat. Under the close scrutiny of the news crew, tens of thousands of tourist cameras and huge fascination from the crowd, he ran over to the stall selling griddle cakes. There, he flashed his personal credit chip over the payment point and swept up the entire stock the man had ready for sale.
‘Thanks,’ he said, and ran back to the limo. The moment he had leapt in, the limo resumed its journey.
From somewhere, Davie felt a grin breaking out, uncontrollably, onto his face. As shocked as he was, as hard as his heart was pounding, as serious as he knew this situation to be, he just couldn’t help laughing. Vida, clearly, had refused to be taken anywhere unless she was given some of the cakes which had smelt so good.
‘I will get things under control,’ he assured the President.
‘Please do!’ Marc Tyborne said fervently, echoing the words of Ambassador Tellis as he added, ‘This is a nightmare!’
It only got worse after that. Though there were isolated patches here and there when Davie felt that he might actually have brought the situation back under control, those brief moments of relief only made the next plunge into chaos even more disheartening. To begin with, Davie was feeling quite confident. He called Vida in the limo and she told him she was happy to go the Embassy.
‘I’m K’pah now,’ she informed him. ‘It’s more alieny.’ She flourished a griddle cake enthusiastically. ‘These are really good.’
‘Okay – stay at the Embassy till I get there, okay?’ He said. ‘I’ll be there in ten minutes.’
He was, too, with special dispensation from the port authority to leave the ship even though it was still on its way to parking orbit, and a diplomatic clearance, too, which had Traffic Control clear a route through for him with a high speed SDF escort. They handed him over to police escort as his shuttle entered atmosphere and they took him the quickest way through the traffic lanes to the Embassy spaceport. This was actually just a rooftop landing pad with room for two shuttles, with vehicles only allowed to land there for pickup or drop-off. As soon as Davie got out of the shuttle a chauffeur hopped in to take it over to the nearest real spaceport – an unwise move, as it turned out, since he was shortly going to need it again.
K’pah had, by then, already left the Embassy.
‘It’s horrible there,’ she told him, when Davie called to ask what she was doing. ‘All those people flapping about. And it felt like they were trying to put me in prison or something – they took me to a suite and locked the doors. They said it was for my own safety, but…’ she gave a derisory noise, ‘pvvvv! I could see that was a lie. So I left.’
The Diplomatic Corps security people were still at that point trying to come to terms with the fact that she had waltzed right through every barrier they had put in her way, including a steel guard over the lifts secured by physical bolts. They knew that she could override any technological lock, but there was no way, they’d thought, that she could overcome steel bolts. K’pah, however, finding herself effectively imprisoned, had had no hesitation in tearing that guard off its hinges to get past it. ‘You said,’ she reminded him accusingly, ‘that your people don’t imprison ambassadors any more. What’s next, the secret lab?’
‘I’m really sorry,’ Davie said, and genuinely was infuriated with whatever idiot at the Embassy had felt that it was acceptable to try to detain her by force. ‘They shouldn’t have tried to lock you in – they were just panicking, I expect. It won’t happen again. So - you’re going to the Senate?’ He could tell that both from the desperate efforts of the various authorities to track her movements and from the background in the call.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m going to see the Constitution.’
Davie smiled. She had picked up from him his very strong belief that the League Constitution was the most important document ever written and that if she saw nothing else on Chartsey, she really ought to see that.
‘All right,’ he said, and was already on his way after her, hoping that they could pick up and ease back into the planned programme. ‘Wait for me, okay? I’m just a couple of minutes away.’
By the time he got to the monument where the Constitution was displayed, however, K’pah had already gone.
‘There was a mean little man at the door who said I couldn’t go in!’ she told him, when Davie called to ask why. There was, indeed, door security whose job it was to maintain the atmosphere of quiet solemnity considered appropriate to such a great treasure. They would not allow rowdy groups, protestors or those they considered to be inappropriately dressed to enter the monument. ‘I told him I’m an alien ambassador, but he said if I didn’t go away he’d have me arrested.’ She gave Davie a severe look through t
he comlink. ‘It’s not a friendly world, is it?’
‘No,’ Davie admitted, reflecting that of all the words which might be used to describe the capital world, ‘friendly’ was way off the bottom of the list. ‘But you’re not dressed or behaving appropriately for this culture,’ he pointed out. ‘And please stop telling people you’re an alien ambassador - you did agree to this visit being confidential.’
‘I haven’t told them where I’m from,’ she countered. ‘And it’s important to me to find out how your people react to alien encounters. So far,’ she observed, ‘it’s mostly contempt.’
‘That’s because they don’t believe you,’ Davie told her. ‘They think you’re a nutter. Look, please,’ his manner was becoming urgent again as he could see through the comm that she was just about to get on a bus. ‘Just stay there, or come meet me – you really shouldn’t be going around here by yourself. You said you’d comply with the arrangements, right? You gave your word, and people expect you to stick to that.’
K’pah gave a chuckle, disregarding the fact that she was in a public place with a good many people able to hear her end of the conversation. ‘Humans!’ she observed. ‘You’re all crazy. Why can’t I get on this bus? Oh, I see.’ She’d realised that she needed some kind of transport access and had bought herself a Freedom of Chartsey transit pass, giving her unlimited use of all public transport facilities across the system.
Davie did not waste time attempting to stress that they had had an agreement, or that she had given her word to cooperate with the plans that had been made. One of the most frustrating aspects of working with quarians had turned out to be that they had a radically different view of what a deal or a promise entailed. Whether it was as minor as agreeing to meet with a diplomat at a specified time or as important as the negotiations for a trade agreement, they regarded it as temporary and conditional and wouldn’t hesitate to break it if it didn’t happen to suit them.
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