‘Twelve hundred of them?’ The normal VIP visit they provided took between one and two hours, depending whether the VIP concerned had the necessary clearance to be given a tour of the ship or whether they were just treated to hospitality on the interdeck. The protocol for such visits required both Alex and Buzz to be involved throughout, along with representatives of the officers. It was a routine feature of time spent in port, something they might well undertake once or twice a day. At really busy times they might even have three VIP visits in one day, and on one memorable occasion they’d managed to pack in five.
At that rate, they would be stuck in port for eight months. ‘It’s not possible!’ Alex said, appalled.
Buzz took pity on him and laughed, putting a reassuring hand on his shoulder.
‘Don’t worry – we’ve got it in hand,’ he said. ‘Actually, I say we but what I really mean is that Mako has it in hand. He’s taken on the organising, bless him, and is coming up with a tour.’
Alex looked at him in mixed relief and surprise – relief that the problem was already in hand, but considerable surprise, too, that Buzz wasn’t dealing with something as important as this himself.
‘I’ve been run off my feet,’ Buzz explained. ‘This is the first minute I’ve had off-comms since you left.’ As if to support his claim, his wristcom was beeping even then with the insistent tone of a priority override call. Buzz glanced at it and shot an apologetic look at Alex. ‘Sorry – have to take this.’ He activated a comlink using his headset and indicated that it was going to take a couple of minutes. ‘Good afternoon, sir.’
Alex went through into his sleeping cabin and changed out of groundside uniform into the dress rig he’d have to wear to head back for the reception in a few minutes. As he did so he was looking at the contents of his desk. It felt as if he was caught up in an avalanche – the sheer number of calls and messages awaiting a response were staggering, but these were not just routine calls. All the messages which had made it to his desk for personal response either carried VIP status or urgent, highest priority. More than ninety of them carried the coding which indicated ‘respond to this first’. If he did nothing else for the rest of the day, he still wouldn’t get through the list, and more were arriving all the time.
They were mostly operational, under four categories – there were messages related to the ‘piracy’ issue which was their cover for being here, messages related to Silvie and Shion, messages about their actual mission and messages which fell under the general heading of public relations. That was operational too, as the two weeks they had agreed to spend here were an official courtesy visit, with orders to foster positive relationships with the Telethoran authorities and services. It was vital, in that, that they avoided giving offence by such things as snubbing VIPs and members of other services.
By the time he emerged from his cabin, Alex had already recognised that there was no way he could deal with all this by himself. He couldn’t expect Buzz to help – he was not only dealing with a PR blitz of his own but with a deluge of issues relating to supplies and academia. The person he was talking to as Alex came back into the daycabin was actually the dean of a university college calling to make a case for involvement between the Fourth and his college. The dean was calling in person because mail from lesser personages such as department heads had already got a courteous but automated refusal, explaining that while Commander Burroughs was deeply honoured to be invited to guest-lecture or whatever else it was the college was asking for, operational demands meant that on this occasion he would have to decline.
As with many, many other organisations, this had promptly been pushed up to the level at which Buzz could not, with any courtesy, refuse to take a personal call. The dean was in charge of a national college with more than fifty actual campuses under his direction and more than a million students. The college was regarded as one of the most prestigious of Telathor System University, too, so the dean had every right to expect that a Fleet officer would take his call.
Buzz’s estimate of two minutes was obviously on the optimistic side, too, as the dean was perfectly prepared to spend as long as need be to debate and persuade until he got what he wanted. Buzz’s attempt to stand firm and insist that he really couldn’t spare the time to guest-lecture at the college, at least during this visit, just could not stand up against the dean’s irresistible determination that this was going to happen. The dean hardly let him get a word in edgeways, explaining how quick and easy they could make this for him and what a great honour it would be for the college, such an inspiration to the students – at the point where he showed Buzz that fourteen thousand students had already put their names down for a guest lecture to be given by him, it became clear that refusal really wasn’t an option, or at least, not one compatible with their orders for a courtesy visit.
It was hardly the first time that Buzz had been asked to guest lecture – he did so routinely at Fleet Academies and had been a frequent speaker at civilian universities, too, before the forming of the Fourth. Since then, few student bodies would have attended any lecture given by a Fourth’s officer for any other reason than to demonstrate very loudly against them, so Buzz had dropped off the academic circuit.
Ordinarily, though, it would be no unusual thing for an officer of his academic credentials to be asked to guest lecture at universities. Having an offworld speaker was kudos for any college, after all. Buzz was well respected in his field of social psychology with a particular interest in in-group/out-group psychology. Most colleges wanted him to talk about the kind of closed-group psychological issues which could occur on starships, and the dean here made just that suggestion, too. Buzz could have given that talk in his sleep, complete with illustrative research and amusing anecdotes.
On this occasion, though, he felt that if he was going to give a talk it should be about something which really did enthuse him.
‘I’m conducting research into how groups and individuals respond to high-impact information,’ he said. ‘I gave a talk for our Mindful society which I’d be happy to share – it’s called Making Friends with Aliens: Normalisation and Compliance.’
The dean agreed to this with great enthusiasm, so Buzz sent him a precis for the talk and arranged a time, grinning ruefully at Alex as he came off the call.
‘It is really hard to say no,’ he admitted. Alex nodded heartfelt agreement.
‘I think,’ he said wryly, ‘that we may be here for a bit longer than a couple of weeks.’
Ten
Two weeks later, on the day that the Fourth was supposed to be heading out on their mission, Alex felt himself no closer to escaping from Telathoran hospitality.
It did feel like an effort to escape, too. He was spending his days being rushed from one event to another, fitting in meetings between dinners, receptions and parades. On one particularly harrowing day he had to attend four dress dinners one after the other. Since he obviously couldn’t eat four full banquet meals in the course of nine hours it was agreed beforehand that he would be served only with tiny, token portions of food.
This, however, did not work out as hoped. His hosts at each of the events were understanding of the fact that he had other dinners to attend that day, but that did not prevent them urging him ‘just to taste’ a little of this and a little of that, and since it had obviously been prepared in his honour courtesy required that he at least accept a sample of each dish. He was so uncomfortable by the fourth dinner that it took a real effort of will to put every morsel in his mouth. Never had he been more grateful for the Novaterran upbringing which enabled him to maintain dignity even in the most difficult circumstances. And never had he been more grateful for the Fleet training which enabled him to get through the interminable socialising on a kind of autopilot.
By the end of week two he had, by his own reckoning, been introduced to at least six thousand people. Thousands more – tens of thousands – had gathered everywhere he went to see him get out of a car and walk a short distance. He w
as used to that, at least, although it took a little getting used to the fact that the roaring noise the crowds made wasn’t yelling and abuse, but cheers and whoops of excitement. The public here did not know about Silvie or Shion. There were some drifts of rumour that the very big expensive yacht which had arrived with the Fourth had brought alien visitors with them, but ninety nine per cent of the people who heard that just laughed. The odd one per cent who believed it tended to be students or conspiracy theorists with no great credibility. A story did rip through the Alien Truth network that one of their members had encountered a silver haired woman with gills swimming around a reef in the Amber Sea, but the story generated rather more irritation than excitement. It was claims like that, one of them observed in their Alien Truth chatroom, which brought the whole campaign into disrepute.
Alex von Strada, though, was undeniably real, and for many Telethorans, the most exciting celebrity to visit their world in decades. If tourists were thin on the ground, here, VIP visitors were even rarer. They got an occasional visit from the president of Kenso, their nearest neighbour world, but that was routine, a presidential summit which happened every eight years. The arrival of the Fourth, therefore, and especially of Alex von Strada himself, really was a thrilling event.
It took Alex a while to understand why that was so, and why they were cheering. He had, it turned out, the previous incumbent of the Port Admiral’s office to thank for that, and fair to say, the Telathoran media, too. On most worlds when news arrived from Chartsey offices it was just slapped out to broadcast with whatever local angle they might be able to put on it. So on most worlds news about the furore erupting at Chartsey over the Fourth being founded had been put on broadcast with no more than a local link if they could find that any member of the Fourth or anyone else involved was from their own world. Then, if the story had sufficient viewage to maintain interest, they would go to the Port Admiral’s office for an official Fleet response.
On Telathor, however, they had done it the other way around. Receiving a story about the Fleet creating a highly controversial unit employing prisoners, the media had asked the Port Admiral about it before it went to broadcast. Such was the relationship between Fleet and media here that the press conference had been long, detailed and amicable. They had accepted the Port Admiral’s explanation, so the story that had gone to broadcast had not been that the Fleet was up to no good, but about how daft all those protesters were at not recognising what was really going on.
Ever since, all the stories about the Fourth had gone through the same process of clarification and revision. So people here had not been told that the Fourth had destroyed a moonbase at Sixships out of wilful vandalism. They had been told the truth, that the moonbase had become a battle trophy the warring nations there were fighting over and as such was now not only useless but a dangerous liability. Its destruction would cause such outrage amongst the warring nations, though, that none of the peacekeeping organisations at work there wanted to be held responsible for it. The Fourth, therefore, had destroyed it as a peace-keeping task. In other missions they had seized the biggest drugs haul seen at Chartsey for decades, put a stop to drug smuggling and piracy at Karadon and done tremendous work in getting spacers to take their ships to Novamas. They had also carried out some impressive rescues, including the tracking of a lifepod and snatching the survivors out of it with barely an hour of life support remaining, a rescue calculated to have been achieved at odds of about eight million to one.
As far as the Telethorans were concerned, therefore, Alex von Strada was a hero. When they saw footage of demonstrators mobbing and screaming abuse at him they were inclined to get quite indignant. So now he was here they were very keen to show him their support.
It was lovely, in a way, but the sheer scale and demand of it all was so overwhelming it was almost more difficult to cope with than the rabid hostility Alex had come to consider normal. He was whisked about in a hypersonic limo which bounced him out of atmosphere and back in again so fast that it felt like he was being pinged about the planet on a giant spring. It didn’t help that Telathoran notions of timekeeping meant that his schedule got changed at least ten times a day, rocketing him about to wherever they happened to be ready for him. Half the time he didn’t even know what city he was in. It was difficult enough just keeping track of the time, as he might easily be in seven or eight different time zones in the course of one day. If it wasn’t for the fact that his schedule always had him back aboard the Heron between midnight and six in the morning, he could hardly have kept track of the days at all.
It wasn’t even the social demands on him, either, though they in themselves would have been a more than full time job. He still had to stay on top of squadron command, sign paperwork and make decisions. There were many mission-related meetings, too, with the Port Admiral, the Diplomatic Corps, system authorities and academics. One evening was spent at a university think-tank discussing theories about where the possible lost world might be found. Alex could have happily spent a week just talking to them, both for professional benefit and personal interest, but he was taken away after just a few hours – yet another city, yet another parade.
Telethoran parades, he soon discovered, were a very different experience to the kind of parades he was used to on the central worlds. There, when the Fourth was invited to parade it meant that they were expected to turn up in sufficient numbers to make a show at a marching or parade-ground event where VIPs sat on a dais. There would be a military band, long speeches and a post-parade reception with lukewarm wine and limp canapes.
Here, when you were invited to a parade it was an event being laid on to entertain you. The first few he attended were actually quite enjoyable, too. The parade itself was a walk along a decorated route with stands along it on which people would give performances showcasing local culture and honouring their guest.
Alex soon became familiar with the format. At some point or other during the parade there would inevitably be at least one group of schoolchildren demonstrating traditional Telethoran dancing, at least one spectacularly costumed tableau telling a story from Telethoran folklore, a food stand where they would cook him a local delicacy, a military stand where representatives of the local military forces would go through as complex evolutions as the space allowed, several stands where people were dressed up in flamboyant glamour costumes representing local wildlife, and ultimately, a sound and light show with lots of whizzing holographic starships and loud bangs. They had to be loud to make any impact over the already deafening volume of the parade. There was loud music at every stand with live bands and dancing, the cheers of the crowd lining the route, who often burst out singing favourite songs as well, and the air-throbbing buzz of military aircraft doing low altitude acrobatics overhead. Alex often found his ears ringing from the sheer volume blasted at them for hours on end. It was exhausting, and would have been even if that was the only thing he had to deal with.
As it was, though, he was obliged to pull out of a couple of events when incidents with Silvie took priority.
There were many, many incidents with Silvie. Social incidents, of course, were to be expected as Silvie encountered so many new people. Shion and Davie handled that with the assistance of the Diplomatic Corps, and they didn’t bother Alex with it. They certainly didn’t feel the need to call him when Silvie had words with a System Senator at an Embassy Reception – the Senator was there but didn’t really want to be, as his child was in hospital. Silvie had strong things to say about prioritising coming to such an event over the welfare of a child, and some pretty strong things to say, too, about a culture which considered such an act as commendable devotion to duty. Incidents like that with Silvie were regarded as routine, however, so when they did call Alex it was a case of him dropping everything else to respond.
The first time that happened it was because Silvie had slipped her escort and been stung by jellyfish.
‘She’s all right,’ Davie assured him. ‘She’s had medical treatment
and she’s fine. The problem is she thinks it’s funny.’ His voice had a hint of the desperation he’d been showing by the time he caught up with the Fourth. ‘Neither Shion nor I can get her to see sense – any chance you could come and have a word?’
Alex changed cars, getting out of the very recognisable official limo which had been put at his disposal and into a very much more discreet Diplomatic Corps car. That took him to a waterside facility where he changed transport again, this time boarding a high speed submarine which took him to the temporary quarian embassy.
By the time he arrived he’d read the reports and knew what had happened. Silvie was being taken anywhere she wanted to swim, with several yachts and submarines on standby around the oceans to provide a base for such expeditions. On this occasion she’d been swimming in the southern hemisphere, exploring an ocean current known for its rich biodiversity. Neither Shion nor Davie was with her. Shion didn’t enjoy swimming and fish held no interest for her. She would have gone along with Silvie anyway but Silvie knew very well she wasn’t enjoying herself and that, as she pointed out, meant that Silvie couldn’t really enjoy herself either. As for Davie, Silvie spent five minutes with him on an experimental swim and told him to go away because he was being even more annoying than usual. Davie had no experience of wildlife and no confidence in it either. Even the smallest fish only had to be making a move in their direction for him to be alert to it, just in case it might bite.
It had been agreed after that that Silvie could swim as she asked ‘by herself’, which meant with a team of professional divers on security escort a discreet distance away and either Davie or Shion keeping an eye through monitors back at the base for that day’s outing.
Silvie was not, by quarian standards, a fast swimmer. She had gills of a sort, but they were internal, part of her lungs, and as such far less efficient than the neck-gills normal for other quarian adapts. That meant she got ‘out of breath’ quite easily if swimming as fast as she could. Since her adapt, or genome, was based on Davie’s template, she had human-style musculature too, better adapted for walking than swimming. On her own world, she was such a slow swimmer that she often resorted to using wrist-jets to keep up with her friends.
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