Alex was at the airlock to meet them, along with Rangi Tekawa. He was feeling both curious and thrilled. But he was feeling quietly confident, too. This was hardly, after all, his first experience of exodiplomacy. He was, he felt, pretty much prepared for anything.
He was not, however, prepared for the quarian.
He never even got to give his official welcome aboard the ship. Davie had signalled him again on the way over, informing him that the ambassador was now known as Ambassador Silver, or Silvie amongst friends. Alex had the words ‘Welcome aboard, Ambassador Silver’ poised to utter, but they were never given voice. As she came through the airlock those jewel-bright eyes fixed on him and her expression became one of wondering delight.
‘Oh, you’re gorgeous!’ she exclaimed.
This was not something anyone had ever said to Alex von Strada, at first meeting or otherwise. He was reasonably attractive, at least in private when he was relaxed and smiling, but gorgeous? No.
He didn’t, however, even notice what she said. He was in a whole other universe.
Later, when he was in a state to try to make sense of what had happened, he thought that it had been like stepping inside a brilliantly lit prism. He was surrounded by sparkle and gleam, with everything and everyone beyond it in a dim and distant fog. The only thing in this gleaming, coruscating universe was a child who stood gazing back at him. She was radiating light – not brilliant or dazzling but soft waves of light which pulsed out around her in a gentle aureole. There was a wonderful sensation of harmony, coupled with intense, overwhelming emotion.
The only other times he’d experienced anything like that profound sense of connection and overwhelming love had all involved his daughter. Since her death, he had never expected to feel anything like it again. Now though, he felt as if he was reliving the moment when they’d put his baby daughter into his arms.
He had no awareness of time and was only vaguely aware of an increasing interference from the fuzzy blobs outside their crystal universe. Gradually, though, they forced their way back into his attention and he became aware that Davie North was laughing hilariously.
In a moment, Alex came back to a sense of where he was and what he was doing – standing there just staring at their VIP guest like a gawpy kid with his mouth hanging open. Some instinct told him that he’d been like that for a while. Part of him knew he should apologise, but as he and the quarian looked at one another they both just laughed. Then she glanced aside, turning her attention to the others around her. She looked at Rangi Tekawa with startled confusion.
‘You are not a tree!’ she told him, with a combination of scolding and concern. ‘You can’t be a tree, that’s just silly.’
Alex knew that Rangi was in the habit of using a visualisation exercise when he found himself in danger of being emotionally overwhelmed – the exercise involved visualising himself as a tree, deeply rooted into the earth, standing strong but bending with the wind. He was evidently doing that now. But before the stunned medic could even begin to react, the quarian gave a cry of delight and ran straight past them onto the command deck.
Alex followed and saw that she was actually running towards Shion, who was laughing too and holding out her arms. In a moment Shion had enfolded her, hugging her close and kissing the top of her head while Silvie clung to her like a child to her mother.
‘Seren, akali,’ Shion comforted her. She rarely spoke in her native Pirrellothian and yet it didn’t seem strange that she did so then. The words meant quiet, child but the tone in which they were spoken made it rest now, my little one.
Silvie murmured back in quarian – Alex didn’t hear the words, but Shion made a comforting noise and kissed the top of her head again.
‘Thank God,’ said Davie, with truly heartfelt relief. ‘Thank God.’ As Alex glanced at him he saw that Davie had almost collapsed down onto one of the chairs at the datatable, the weariness now very evident not just in his face but every drooping line of his body. He looked quite emotional, too – almost close to tears.
Alex was about to tell him he really needed to go and get some rest when it occurred to him that he had no right to do that. Even when Davie was signed aboard as a passenger, the most that the skipper could do in this kind of situation would be to refer the matter to the ship’s medic for him to intervene. He might give him advice, of course, as a friend, but he knew how Davie North would respond to such unsolicited advice from anyone, even him.
Still, his expression showed concern and Davie responded to that just as if Alex had spoken aloud.
‘Don’t worry, I’m going!’ he said, and levered himself to his feet with the aid of a hand on the table, which he then raised in farewell. ‘We’ll talk later,’ he promised, and with that, made his way back towards the airlock. Alex would have offered him a bunk, but Davie had the look of someone who knew exactly where he wanted to be – heading for his own bed, Alex guessed, to enjoy the peace and quiet on his own ship now that the quarian was no longer aboard.
Thinking that, Alex realised that Davie hadn’t even said goodbye to her. Turning, he saw that Shion and the quarian ambassador were already heading off the command deck in the other direction. Just as they were about to go through the hatch, it seemed to occur to Shion that she ought to have the skipper’s permission to take their VIP passenger away like this. She turned her head and gave him a warm, happy grin. He grinned back and gave her a nod. No words were necessary. She would take care of Silvie better than any of them.
Alex was busy, then, first with calming down the blitz of excitement which had surged through the ship. They were all speculating madly over what had happened on the Stepeasy to reduce the superhuman Davie North to that state of exhaustion, and wondering too, obviously, what kind of impact her arrival was likely to have on them. They were also laughing uproariously at the footage of her meeting Alex at the airlock. Her exclamation of ‘You’re gorgeous!’ would have achieved that in itself, but the fact that the two of them had then stood staring at one another for an unmoving, unspeaking fourteen seconds with a look of mutual rapture had everyone hooting with glee. Nobody had ever seen the skipper behave like that, and speculations were running wild about that, too. Was it – could it be – that the skipper was in love?
Alex knew that he was not. That he loved her, yes, without a doubt, at first sight and with a joy that had swept him away. But it was as if she had filled the void within him, the aching loss of having once been a father. He loved her as he had loved his daughter. And that, he knew, made her feel very safe with him, a knowledge that made him glow with contentment.
After he’d gone round the ship, calmed everyone down and got them back to work, he settled on the command deck himself. He had a lot to catch up with.
One of the first things he learned was that they had Tina Lucas to thank for the quarian apparently now having settled into an identity. He was pleased to see that Tina was aboard the Stepeasy, and smiled to see the report of what had happened. Tina had been doing her own analysis of the quarian’s frequent changes of persona, and had spotted something even Davie had overlooked. In all her various costumes and outlandish make ups she had never once changed the colour of her hair. Asked why not, the ambassador had responded with some surprise, ‘If I did that, I wouldn’t be me any more.’
At which Tina, looking at her very thoughtfully, had broken into a slow smile.
‘I know who you are,’ she’d said, with a feeling of absolute conviction, and reached out to turn a strand of silvery hair around the end of her finger. ‘You’re Silvie – Ambassador Silver for formal, but… Silvie, yes?’
And Silvie had looked back at her, at that, as if someone had shown her own face in a mirror for the first time, a kind of wondering searching look which had turned into recognition and a huge, happy smile.
She had been Silvie ever since, for more than six weeks now. Silvie wore whatever clothes she felt like and used whatever kind of vocabulary she wanted at the time, too, changing her look and her m
anner of expression both according to mood and circumstance.
It was, Alex recognised, a tremendous breakthrough – she had learned, with that, the very human ability to represent herself in different ways according to the situation. That was not something any normal quarian could do; they had fixed personas and would turn up for a formal event or a celebration in just the same clothes and with just the same manner, vocabulary and behaviour as they would if they were hanging out at home. Silvie’s bioengineering gave her the ability to develop a more complex social identity, and it was clearly a huge step forward in that that she’d learned to adjust peripherals without going to the extremes of adopting a whole new persona.
Davie, however, was unusually pessimistic. Next to the part of Tina’s report where she’d said that she believed that Silvie had now established a core identity, Davie had written Don’t count on it. And it was apparent, too, from the long list of Incidents which had continued after Silvie’s adopting of her new name, that Silvie was every bit as disruptive as any of her other incarnations. Their visit to Karadon alone had generated eight Incident reports.
Davie had not wanted to go to Karadon. Davie, in fact, had flatly refused to take her there, pointing out that the Empress of Cartasay incident proved that he couldn’t rely on her to keep to her word, and that this was a civilian, commercial station, too, in no way geared up to handle exodiplomacy and certainly not the kind of chaos she would create. So they would, he said, change course and bypass it.
Silvie, however, had been every bit as stubbornly determined that they were going to go there, as Davie, she said, was just being silly and rather childishly sulky, too, in refusing to take her.
Matters had come to a head when Silvie had hacked the Stepeasy’s conn and turned the ship’s heading to Karadon, at which Davie had promptly accessed it himself, changed their course back and slapped in a security encryption he’d been working on for just such an eventuality. It had taken her nine seconds to break it, after which, having changed their course back to Karadon again, she’d encrypted navigation systems herself so Davie then had to hack her block to get control of his own ship.
They had continued doing this, back and forth, arguing the whole time, for more than two hours before Davie had finally given up. An agreement had been struck that they would go to Karadon but stay only long enough for Silvie to do her ‘must do’ list on the space station. It was a very short and not unreasonable list, Alex felt. She wanted to go to the Panorama Deck to watch the ships coming and going at the League’s busiest deep space transit hub, and to dine at the Temple, Marto’s restaurant, having heard so much about the League’s most famous chef. Finally, she wanted to visit the duty-free shops in the famous, cathedral-like Atrium. She wanted, in fact, to do what any tourist wanted to do when passing through Karadon. And Davie did own the station, after all, so in theory at least he should have been able to organise things there for her.
Reading through the list of Incidents, Alex learned about, amongst others, the hysterical scenes and the woman who’d attempted to slap her on the Panorama Deck, the screaming meltdown of the systems controller who’d seen one of the transit pods kick out of the system and tear across the station at bullet speed, dodging around other pods sometimes with only centimetres to spare, and the pan-throwing rage at the Temple. Marto had been fishing for compliments, telling Silvie that he was sure the meal he’d created for her had been the best thing she’d ever tasted. But he’d been fishing in dangerous waters, there, as Silvie had responded truthfully – of course, truthfully – that while his food was very nice, the best thing she’d tasted other than the food on her homeworld were the little cakes the street vendor had made on Chartsey.
Even Alex caught his breath slightly at that one.
Since Karadon, there’d only been two situations serious enough to be put on record as Incidents. The first had involved Simon Penarth attempting to teach her how to make the griddle cakes she had enjoyed so much. Fortunately, the ship’s fire suppressant systems had kicked in very fast. Silvie had got impatient waiting for them to cook so she’d turned up the heat level a hundredfold.
The second Incident had occurred just four days previously. They had been passing a whalebelly freighter converted to carry passengers. That wasn’t unusual; many freighters of that class carried a conversion rig so that they could take on what spacers called, not very politely, human cargo, when that was more profitable than the crated kind. They were always at the budget end of the market; basic bunkrooms with low grade prepack catering and no more entertainment on offer than could be provided by a holoscreen. Backpackers tended to prefer them to the economy class on liners – they were significantly cheaper, for a start, and there was far more travel-cred in having shipped on a tramp freighter than aboard a liner. This particular tramp freighter was a perfectly ordinary, respectable ship, with a space worthiness certificate just a few months old and all their paperwork in order. It was, if anything, a little on the dull side, rarely engaging even in the mildest kind of smuggling.
Silvie had been interested in it, as she was in all the ships that they encountered. Interested, that was, until she saw how many passengers the whalebelly was carrying, at which point interest turned to horror.
‘Thirty two of them?’ she exclaimed. ‘On that tiny ship?’
Davie grinned. ‘It’s only students,’ he said.
This turned out to have been the wrong response. That made it even worse as far as Silvie was concerned.
‘They’re young and poor and crammed on that ship because they can’t afford any better, and you think that’s funny?’ She demanded, and before he could answer, she was striding off with an air of purpose.
They were disembarking the back-packers from the Stepeasy, now. Silvie had taken one look at the squalor of their quarters and had told them all to gather up their gear, there was no way she could leave them there.
‘It’s inhumane,’ she told the skipper, with much the same force that Representative had laid it on the line with the President. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, keeping people in such terrible conditions.’
The skipper had attempted to assure her that the quarters were perfectly adequate and that they had been newly furbished and very neat, too, when the passengers had moved in.
‘But what can you do?’ he said, half defensive and half imploring. ‘I mean, teenagers, you can’t get them to tidy up after themselves and no matter how much you jack up the aircon it always smells of beans and socks. All we can do after week three is keep the hatch closed as much as possible.’
‘That’s only because you’ve packed too many of them in there,’ Silvie told him, ‘even animals get treated better than that, it’s disgraceful.’
He looked at her with a rather piteous appeal. He had no idea on what basis this platinum-haired young woman had turned up on his ship or with what authority she was scolding him like this. But he felt, obscurely, that she did have the authority, irrespective of the fact that she’d come over from the spectacularly beautiful superyacht. He felt very strongly that he didn’t want this strange but compelling girl to have such a bad opinion of him.
‘But…’ he said, ‘they’re students.’
Silvie told him crisply that students were not a lesser sub-species of homo sapiens, and took his passengers away. Davie, she told the Stepeasy’s owner, could easily find room for the students on his ship.
He could, of course, though that was not really the issue. He had attempted to explain this to her, though without much hope and not for very long. Silvie was not interested in hearing about security concerns, and nor was she the slightest bit convinced by Davie’s attempt to assure her that students actually enjoyed the adventure of travelling like that.
‘Nobody could enjoy being trapped in that stinky box for weeks at a time,’ she declared. ‘We have to rescue them, Davie.’ She’d fixed him with a Look. ‘I insist.’
Davie had capitulated on condition that when they were aboard Silvie would
keep her distance from them, avoiding any chance of any of them realising that she wasn’t human. She had done that, too, though she had kept an eye on how they were faring and scored a ‘told you so’ over her cousin.
‘See? They’re very much happier here,’ she pointed out, and with a note of triumph, ‘and they are tidy, and they are not smelly.’
Davie could have pointed out that this was partly because the students were in a state of awe at finding themselves accommodated on the superyacht, hardly daring to touch anything in case they damaged it, and partly because he had a team of stewards cleaning their cabins and doing their laundry. He might also have pointed out that her philanthropic act had cost him some effort to resolve. The skipper of the freighter had been appalled – not that he was sorry to see the back of his human cargo, but he knew very well the kind of damage it would do to his reputation if it got around that the Stepeasy had taken his passengers off his ship because they felt he was treating them badly. Davie had been obliged not only to give him some crate cargo he could take back to Karadon as a face-saving exchange, but to pay him five times more than he’d have got from merely carrying the passengers to Kavenko.
He said nothing, though. Nothing he could say would change her opinion that looking after the teenagers was more important than any of those other things, and it had made her happy, too, so fair enough.
New Title 2 Page 21