It was certainly spectacular – footage which the media ship which had trailed them from Kavenko could have sold for a fortune, had they been filming it exclusively. The flotilla did not move as one block of ships all turning at the same time, but as a shoal of fish curving in turn. The Whisker signalled the course they were to follow to each ship’s autopilot so they each turned at the right point.
The effect was amazing, at least to spacer eyes. Nearly seventy brightly lit ships, many of them flashing lights in their excitement, were moving through space like a glittering shoal dancing through a maze. Even civilians might pause to look at that footage and comment on how pretty it looked. To be there, to be part of it, felt like something very special indeed.
Alex was enjoying it too – delighted to see Dan Tarrance pulling off such a feat, pleased at the wonderful warmth of their reception and amused, too, by Silvie’s reaction.
She was curious as to why the buzz on the Heron was so happy, and came to the command deck to see what was happening. Going through all the many messages of welcome from various Telathoran authorities she only commented that they seemed a very chatty kind of people. Watching the spectacle of the flotilla’s graceful dance she turned away, uninterested, after just a few seconds. And, having gathered that the point of the exercise was to lead all the ships through without them experiencing Ridge turbulence, she observed with mild regret that that was a pity.
‘I rather like the juddery bits,’ she said. ‘It’s fun, like swimming in rip currents.’
Alex, at that, would happily have taken the Heron out of formation and run the frigate deliberately through the wildest vortices their navigation systems could find, but Silvie saw that before he suggested it, and laughed.
‘No,’ she assured him, ‘I’m happy to go along with consensus.’ Then she turned away from the amazing feat of navigation showing on the screens, looking at Shion instead.
Shion, too, had received a blitz of messages of welcome. Prior to Silvie’s appearance, indeed, her own visit to Telathor had already been regarded as the biggest exodiplomacy event in their history. No Solarans had been to Telathor. Shion was, therefore, the first non-human visitor they’d had. And now, after centuries of hoping, they had two of them coming at once. Their welcome just could not have been more warm or enthusiastic, and Silvie was puzzled as to why Shion herself was feeling more resigned than pleased. An enquiring look from her, and Shion grinned.
‘It’s a bit…’ she said, and did not need to articulate that she meant ‘tedious’. ‘I prefer when I can just go about privately, without all the fuss.’
It was just about at that point that the journalists who’d followed them all the way from Kavenko were told by their colleagues that they had missed a major aspect to the story.
‘There are Solarans on the Stepeasy,’ one of the journalists on another ship informed them.
They were wrong about that, of course, but it was a reasonable conclusion to have drawn on the evidence available to them. For one thing, they knew very well that the authorities on Telathor were gearing up for an exodiplomacy visit, because it was impossible to keep that kind of thing secret from the media. They had been issued with the usual exodiplomacy notices, too, reminding them of the laws about broadcasting and the penalties for any journalist, editor and station which violated them.
Putting that together with the fact that they knew Davie North was involved in exodiplomacy, that the Diplomatic Corps often used Founding Family residences and other facilities for Solaran visitors and that his ship had come from Chartsey, it was a fair assumption that Davie North had brought a party of Solarans on a visit to Telathor. Quite why that was being timed to coincide with the Fourth’s visit was a matter of debate, but it was generally accepted within the media that there were Solarans on Davie North’s yacht and that the Fourth was providing some kind of escort or cover for their visit.
As the journalists on the Newsgen ship gave way to an extended outburst of profanity, Colonel Sungh was also being informed that there were exo-visitors aboard the frigate.
Actually, he wasn’t so much informed about it as asked by a senior colleague aboard one of the welcome ships to provide whatever information he was able to, subject to whatever confidentiality agreements he’d signed with the Fourth or Diplomatic Corps. It was only when he expressed himself at a loss as to what they were talking about that they realised he had not been told there were alien visitors aboard the frigate, at which he was duly enlightened.
He had actually met both Silvie and Shion, of course, and his incredulity when he was told that they were respectively the quarian ambassador and a visitor from the Veiled World left him first speechless, then spluttering. Even a minute’s reflection, though, made him realise that he was in no position to protest that the Fourth should have told him. Alex von Strada had actually offered to give him full security clearance and Colonel Sungh himself had interrupted and practically begged him not to. Mortified, he could only tell his superior that he had done his best to stay out of Fourth’s affairs out of courtesy, as a passenger. And there was, clearly, nothing he could do about it now. The time for that was up, as they were on their final run to Telathor.
Nine
Passing by Welcome Point was an event in itself. Telathor replaced the station far more often than technologically necessary – each time, they would hold contests on their holovision for artists and architects to produce designs for Welcome Point. The winners, chosen by viewer vote, would see their ideas brought to fruition, though the station was unlikely to be in place for more than a decade or so before the Telathorans decided that it was time for a change.
Just now, the Welcome Point station was in the form of a rainbow twisted into a Mobius strip, signalling ‘Welcome to Telathor – Our Hand, Your Hand’ on a continuous loop of a million recorded voices saying it one after another. This, however, was completely outdone by the pyrotechnic light display. This was followed up by a full-band broadcast of a song which had been composed in their honour by the current Songsmith Laureate, an official and important post on Telathor.
Alex had known there would probably be a song, and had braced himself for it. In the event it was every bit as bad as he’d feared. The Songsmith had made play with the meaning of his name. In the most ancient languages known to man the various forms of Alexis meant ‘helper or defender’. In his own ancestry his family had acquired the name von Strada, meaning ‘of the stars’ when a many-times great grandmother had had a child by one of the first offworlders to visit Novaterre and registered the baby with that name. It wasn’t an unusual name on Novaterre, and few people even knew its meaning.
The Songsmith, though, had used this as the basis for the song, Man of the Stars. As soon as he heard the line Born to help and defend, like the heroes of old…’ Alex knew that his crew would fall about laughing, and that he’d be having his leg pulled about it by mates in the Fleet for years to come. Making a mental note to ask Jonas Sartin not to add it to the choir’s repertoire, Alex tried not to mind as the sniggering started.
Then shuttles burst out from the station in a choreographed swarm. They were decked out with light show arrays which appeared to scatter flowers into space. It had already been arranged that they would bring gift baskets to the newly arriving ships, as was traditional. Alex, though, waited until he’d got the all clear from Yula Cavell, confirming that all necessary security checks had been made, before granting the shuttles permission to approach. And he thanked, too, the Comrade Foretold for providing the same assurance. It might be a little ridiculous to have both Fleet Intel and the LIA providing security for them, particularly when both were pretending not to know about the other, but Alex had to accept that neither organisation would abandon their protection of him so there was nothing he could do about it.
The gift baskets, anyway, were much enjoyed. They were individually packaged, one for every person on each ship with no distinction made between the skipper and the humblest crewman. Each was a deco
rative box dressed with real flowers and an organic yuna. The yuna was a cultural emblem of Telathor, their official global fruit. Even those not inclined to eat organic fruit could enjoy its vibrant colours and sweet scent. Also in the basket was a little kit containing insect repellent and a sachet of herbal tea which was supposed to help visitors cope with bioshock.
This was the real reason that liner companies did not market cruises to Telathor. It wasn’t really the distance or the discomfort of passing through ridges to get there. People travelled a good deal further, after all, to visit Chartsey, Canelon and other high-demand holiday destinations, and would go even further to visit the remote, highly exotic primordial world of Ferajo.
Telathor, though, did not have dinosaurs like Ferajo, nor the romantic history of Canelon, nor the glamour of the capital world. What it did have was a tremendous range of insects, including the infamous midgies which swarmed by the million. It had, too, one of the highest bioshock indices of any inhabited planet. On most worlds, experienced spacers could expect to step off a shuttle and walk away with no more than a slight sense of disorientation until they got their ground legs. On Telathor, even well-travelled spacers might find they experienced nausea or panic attacks.
On the whole, liner companies had found that there was not much of a holiday market for a destination where passengers were likely to spend the first hour or two on the planet throwing up or hyperventilating, and the rest of their visit contending with clouds of biting insects. There was, therefore, only a trickle of visitors, but they were all the more warmly welcomed for that.
The Telethorans certainly could not have put on a more enthusiastic welcome, which only intensified as they went into the system itself. It was a remarkably attractive system, even seen from outside. The comet cloud was unusually dense and diffuse, more dust than rock. Viewed from the right distance and angle, it appeared that the entire system was surrounded by a delicate, translucent shell, insubstantial as a phantom. All four of the outer gas giants had spectacular ring systems. There was then an even more stunning five-ring asteroid belt, known as Aseltor’s Necklace. There were only two rocky worlds close to the star – the outer was Telathor itself, a vibrant blue, green, orange and pink. The inner world, Endar, was only just too close to the sun for liquid water to exist at the surface, and was used by the Telethorans as an industrial site. Nobody lived there, at least not on a permanent basis, but all the mining, manufacturing, and messy or unsightly industries were sited on Endar. Spacedocks and space stations were in orbit around Endar, too, so as not to spoil the view of the night sky on Telathor itself.
They had two deceleration tunnels and only one for launch – an indicator, they said themselves, that they were twice as happy to see visitors arrive as they were to see them go. In fact the deceleration tunnels were angled in different directions – one, for liners and yachts, would take the arrival into a parking orbit between Aseltor’s Necklace and Telathor itself. The other, for Fleet and freighter use, led to a junction which would either take freighters deep into the system, inside the orbit of Endar, or out into what they called the Militarised Zone, between the orbits of the fifth and sixth planets.
It was not, it had to be said, much of a militarised zone. Most League worlds were bristling with defences in the outer region of the system, with defensive stations, missile arrays, System Defence Force fighter bases and patrols, minefields and, of course, the Fleet’s Homeworld Defence Squadron.
Telathor did not have any defensive stations in its outer zone. There was only one SDF base, tucked away discreetly on one of the outermost world’s moons. There were no minefields at all, and only two token missile arrays which the Telathorans had painted with orange and pink flowers to make them less intimidating.
What they did have was an enormous pyrotechnic system which greeted ships as they came out of deceleration. There was a personalised ‘Welcome…’ burst of holographic fireworks with the name of the ship. So the Heron, fresh from a deceleration run which had as usual felt like it was tearing the ship apart and had caused some very worrying cracking sounds from deep within engineering, was faced with a gigantic flare of ‘Welcome FFI Heron!’ which promptly burst into riotous tumbles of flowers and stars.
Several of Alex’s crew gave involuntary ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ at that, and as many other people cracked up laughing, the frigate fired their salute to the system and to the Homeworld squadron.
The Fleet assigned ships to worlds strictly on the basis of their population. Telathor had a population of 4.7 billion so they were entitled to missile capacity equivalent to that of a carrier. In this instance the admiralty had kept things simple and just given them a carrier, along with a couple of patrol ships for the look of the thing. The Anubis was a Deity class carrier of the generation before the mighty Zeus – it was nearly sixty years old now but still impressive, with fifteen fighters carried on slender bristling tethers and four enormous guns dominating the hull outline.
The Anubis and patrol ships, the SDF and the port authority all replied to their salute, instantly and as simultaneously as if it had been rehearsed. Nobody here, clearly, was going to have any repeat of the scandalous debacle at Novamas, where both the Fleet and SDF had failed to respond to the Fourth’s salute for nigh on five minutes.
Welcomes came from all directions, too. Within the space of one minute, Alex was looking at messages on his comm screen from the system president, the port admiral, the captain of the Anubis, the colonel commanding the SDF, an army general and the League Ambassador, all giving him personal greetings and assuring him that he had only to ask for anything he might require. Davie was fielding the same calls coming in to welcome Silvie and Shion, reminding everyone that it had been agreed that they wouldn’t be bombarded on their arrival but just allowed to go groundside quietly.
For Alex, though, there was no such protection. On top of all the official and VIP rated calls, their comms were going berserk, not only with signals from other ships in port but from groundside callers, too, sending them messages.
It was not the first time they had faced such a barrage. They had had more than eighteen million calls in five minutes on their return from Chartsey to Therik, all of them along the theme of ‘Go away, we don’t want you here.’ That had been an organised protest, of course, spearheaded by Liberty League. Seeing the number of incoming messages clicking up from groundside callers – ten thousand, a hundred thousand, whirling past a million – Alex wondered if the same thing was happening here, despite all assurances that Telathor would make them welcome.
Then he saw that he had the wrong end of the stick entirely. Their Comms sub was running software which sorted calls according to origin and content, and was highlighting two of the codes as he turned to Alex, a wondering look on his face.
‘Skipper!’
Alex looked, and saw that two particular kinds of message were outstripping the others, with the numbers sweeping up so fast you could barely even track it counting by the hundred thousand. One type of call was from private individuals sending them a ‘my hand, your hand’ greeting. There were 3.4 million of those when Alex glanced … 3.5, 3.6…
The other kind of call was from businesses – all kinds of businesses, which the Comms sub was now trying to sub-categorise in order to make sense of it. By the look of it there were hardly any leisure facilities on Telathor which were not offering some kind of comp to Fourth’s personnel.
Alex spared a moment to give an acknowledging Wow! look, but he was obliged to give his own attention to responding to the VIP calls.
He did this, very correctly, in order of precedence, so he spoke first to the system president.
Yula was right, he thought, as soon as the holo-link was made, he was going to like President Arthas. He’d already learned as much as he could about her by then and her appearance came as no surprise – tall, distinguished, dark hair a mass of curls, her skin like dark honey and her eyes a clear lilac. He had learned enough about Telathoran culture to
recognise her outfit as formal-wear, equivalent to a business suit on other worlds. It was a gorgeously embroidered robe of the female style, which meant that it was quite closely fitted. She wore an extraordinary confection on her head, too – not quite a hat and not quite a headdress, it had flowers and curling leaves, with a jewel in the form of a glittering insect.
From the background, it was apparent that she was taking his call out of doors. On another world he might have assumed that she was in some park or garden, but it was hardly possible to take a holo on Telathor and not have vibrant foliage dominating the background. As he’d noticed with other holos from the planet, the colours were intense – so intense, indeed, that at first he had tended to look to see if the colour balance on the holo really was giving true-colour image.
It was, as this was the reality on Telathor. Telathor’s sun produced a redder light than that of any other League world, so every cloud was tinged with pink and things which would be yellow on any other world were seen here as orange. The sky was purple, green was dark and reds intensified.
‘Captain von Strada!’ the president had the lilting accent of her people, with the a sound extended and a hint of extra r slipped in, so his name came out as Carptane vorn Strardar. It was accompanied by a warm smile, as if they were old friends being reunited rather than meeting for the first time. ‘How lovely to see you here – welcome to Telathor. Have you been given everything you need?’
‘Uh – yes ma’am, thank you,’ Alex said, ‘We have never,’ he assured her, ‘been made more welcome anywhere.’
That might be arguable in the sense that almost the whole population of Samart had watched the arrival of their shuttle at the exo-base on the outskirts of their system, and millions of them had gone into the streets, too, waving banners to welcome the allies they had named the Revellin. That had only been after several weeks of difficult and sometimes conflictual diplomatic effort, though, and the Samartians’ initial welcome had consisted of paint-scorching missiles and the warning leave our space or be destroyed.
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