And here he was, now, doing it. And doing it remarkably well, too. His by-the-book Fleet ethos meant that he would never be carried away by enthusiasm into taking any risks, but that thrill meant that he wouldn’t back off from discomfort, either. So he forged straight ahead and everyone followed, with a burst of laughter on the Heron as an unwary crewman took a mug of fruit juice straight in the face at the first stomach-lurching jolt.
Brief as it had been, though, the open space of Tranquillity Flats had gained them considerable distance towards their objective. They were now, given their average progress through the roughest space, just two weeks away from Oreol.
In fact, it took them rather less than that, as they were able to run inside a helpful current which, while not actually sweeping them along, enabled them to run in the same direction for some time without much turbulence.
And so it was that ten weeks and three days after leaving Telathor, the Fourth arrived at Oreol.
Twenty
Their arrival was a triumph, though the system held no surprises. It was a mature system with fourteen planets, just as remote observation had predicted. One of the planets was a super-giant so vast that it had only just fallen short of the mass required for it to ignite into a second star. Of the five inner, rocky worlds it was the second which had shown up as having green world indicators from spectral analysis. That analysis had been typical of the kind of primitive biospheres commonly known as slimeworlds. Some optimists, even within the scientific community, had refused to accept this as definitive and there’d been a good deal of speculation about the possibility of a richer undersea biosphere or even simple forests. The more imaginative were even prepared to speculate about a species so advanced that they did not produce any of the industrial indicators which might be seen on remote analysis of systems inhabited by humans.
Few in the Fourth, though, had held much hope of any such thing. Oreol was just too close to their borders and too well observed, albeit remotely, to be the legendary undiscovered world. So it was with no great disappointment that they saw it confirmed at first scan that the system was, indeed, uninhabited, with nothing but a dark green algae on Oreol Two.
Still, it was an Event. They were the first humans ever to visit the system and it had life in it. It was just possible that that unimpressive looking world might have forms of life as yet unrecorded by science.
First Footing, therefore, did not happen on Oreol Two. Excorps took ownership of Oreol Two, sending their specially designed sterile probes to take samples of everything from upper atmosphere to deep rock. They would not even land there themselves until that sampling and analysis had been completed. First Footing, therefore, the ritual first landing and first steps within a system, was carried out on Oreol Four.
It was not a pretty world. It had an atmosphere of heavy gases and it was not tectonically active. The combination meant that no mountain ranges were being thrust up by moving plates and what few had been formed during the early, active phase of the planet had been eroded by the eternal wind into a landscape so flat that the highest thing on the whole world was a sand dune. There were basically three types of terrain – sand, mudflats and icefields. Landing a shuttle in the middle of one of the biggest mudflats, the First Footing party stepped out into a landscape that was beyond bleak. The land stretched all the way to all horizons without so much as a rock or hillock to break the monotony. It was possible to believe that you could actually see the curvature of the world. The ground was dark red, dry, baked hard and cracked, with skittering dust near the surface. Above, the sky was a brooding, murky orange.
Still, Silvie enjoyed it. Alex had offered her the honour of taking the first step out of the shuttle, which Silvie agreed to without much interest until just before the shuttle left the Heron. Only then, when she could sense the excitement of everyone else aboard, did she really understand what an occasion this was.
So, when the shuttle had landed and sensors confirmed the conditions outside, Silvie stepped out of the airlock onto the concrete-hard tundra. She was the first of her people ever to first-foot on a previously unexplored world. It was a moment which, for a human, would have carried immense gravitas, requiring conscious dignity and the utterance of some phrase intended for the history books.
Silvie, though, jumped down from the airlock with casual grace, glanced around and commented, ‘I like the colours.’ Then she span around with her arms outstretched, giving a wordless whoop of pleasure at the sense of immensity around her. She never complained, but they all knew that she found life on starships rather confining, and the last few weeks had been particularly uncomfortable. This vast plain and big sky might be a little intimidating to the humans to step out into after so long aboard ship, but it was very liberating for Silvie.
Alex watched as she danced away from the shuttle, spinning and leaping with her arms out like wings, as if she might take to the sky at any moment. Then she took off, not flying but running, heading for the remote horizon at superhuman speed.
Alex just smiled. One of the reasons he had chosen this landing site was that there was nothing within a thousand kilometres with which Silvie might hurt herself – not so much as a hole she might fall into or a rock she might trip over. He understood that she wanted to put some distance between herself and the rest of them, to get so far away that the constant clamour of their minds faded out and she could enjoy a rare moment of total peace.
He had been standing there watching her for some time when one of the party edged up beside him, clearing her throat apologetically.
‘Should we, uh, carry out the ceremony, sir?’ Luci Field ventured.
Alex gave her a quick grin through his suit com, without actually turning his head.
‘We can’t yet,’ he pointed out, and seeing her confusion, explained, ‘since Silvie set foot on the planet first, we have, technically, to get her permission before we claim it for the League.’
It was several minutes later that Silvie, by then just a dot on the landscape, turned around and loped back towards them. As she approached, she engaged her suit com.
‘What’s so funny?’ she asked Alex, and gesturing towards the rest of the landing party, ‘And what are they so worried about?’
Alex chuckled. ‘They’ve just realised,’ he told her, ‘that by setting foot on the planet first, you now have the right to claim Oreol for Quarus.’
Silvie looked startled. ‘The whole planet?’
‘The whole system,’ Alex clarified, and both of them laughed.
‘You mean – all I have to do…’ Silvie was still giggling as she flung up her right hand in a theatrical gesture and declared, ‘I claim this system on behalf of the people of Quarus!’
‘Yup,’ said Alex, laughing as waves of dismay emanated from the rest of the group. ‘That’s done it! So now we have to negotiate…’ he gave her a bow which looked ridiculous in a spacesuit, ‘Your Excellency.’
Silvie gave a peal of merriment which took several seconds to subside to the point where she was capable of speech.
‘Oh – you’re welcome to it!’ she told him, and gestured in a way which dismissed the entire solar system. ‘All yours!’
‘No, no!’ Alex protested, laughing but with a sense of purpose which caught her attention. ‘I’m trying,’ he said, ‘to give you a workshop in practical diplomacy here. You now hold an ace card, ie, an asset which you know we want very badly. So now you, as the chosen representative of your world, have to consider what it is that your people might want in exchange for this, and ask for it.’
Silvie looked quite shocked. ‘But we would never try to withhold something that other people need,’ she said. ‘That’s just wrong.’
Alex put a hand over his visor in a gesture of mock despair.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘this is diplomacy 101, all right? It’s not about either side being mean or exploitative. It’s about dignity, negotiating on a basis of equality and with mutual respect.’
‘Oh, I see!’ Silvi
e beamed with enlightenment. ‘It’s a game!’
‘In a way, but serious,’ Alex said. ‘I really am standing here prepared to negotiate with you for the sovereign rights over this system – and that’s big league stuff in diplomacy, let me tell you.’ He grinned at her. ‘So,’ he prompted, ‘the idea is that you either name a price or turn it back on me and ask me to make my best offer.’
‘Oh.’ She looked relieved at that. ‘So, what’s your best offer?’
Alex shook his head. ‘I’m not going to do that,’ he said. ‘Because I know you’d just say ‘fine’ to whatever I suggested and the idea is that you haggle, all right? So try to think of something – some technology of ours, perhaps, that your world does not yet have but which might be useful for them, which you can ask for in exchange.’
Silvie looked dubious.
‘If we want different technology,’ she commented, ‘we could develop it for ourselves. But we’re happy with the way things are.’
Alex was disconcerted for a moment, but he was nothing if not determined.
‘You wouldn’t even want,’ he suggested, ‘the latest developments in nanotech?’
Silvie shook her head decisively.
‘What would be the point?’ She asked. ‘It would mean changing a lot of things, building new factories and machinery and a lot of people having to learn a lot of new stuff, just to make our technology smaller. And we’re happy with it the size it is right now, so why would we want to go to all that fuss and effort?’
Alex gazed at her, feeling that he had never heard a clearer exposition of the gulf that lay between human and quarian psychology. Then he laughed. His attempt to give Silvie a lesson in practical diplomacy had ended up teaching him a great deal more than it had taught her.
‘All right,’ he said, abandoning the effort to engage Silvie in high level negotiation. ‘I’ll give you a dollar for it.’
Silvie looked at him doubtfully. ‘Is that what it’s worth?’
‘No!’ Alex chuckled. ‘It’s worth billions for the strategic value alone, not to mention potential mining rights. But offering a dollar is what we call a peppercorn fee, a trivial amount which makes the deal legal and binding.’
‘Ah!’ Silvie said, and adopting an air of shrewd bargaining, squared herself up to him. ‘Two dollars,’ she demanded.
After some haggling and considerable hilarity, they settled on a price of one dollar sixty four cents, which was duly entered into a contract and signed right there. Then, finally, Alex was able to carry out the ceremony which claimed the Oreol system as League territory.
That was celebrated across the squadron with a delivery of cakes from the Stepeasy. They’d been baked by Simon Penarth, who had of course come with them. He wasn’t travelling on the Heron, though – his latest wife had been hurriedly put through positive vetting and given security clearance to travel on the Stepeasy, but Alex had declined a request to allow her to travel as a passenger on the frigate, so Simon had stayed on the Stepeasy with her. Since there’d been so little opportunity for visiting between the ships during the exploration, they’d hardly seen anything of him. He hadn’t had any opportunity to bake for them, either. Their self-imposed restrictions on treats after they left Telathor had become the norm aboard all the Fourth’s ships as they settled into a regime of healthy food and exercise. Shifting the kilos they’d piled on there was taking a good deal longer than it had to acquire them, particularly since Rangi Tekawa wouldn’t assist the process with fat-busting meds. Such meds, he said, could have side effects, and in any case he was not going to have any part in promoting a culture of binge and purge, so they would just have to shift the weight the hard way.
They had done so – most of them at least – but cakes and desserts had come to be seen as an indulgence rather than everyday eating, so the crates of fresh baked cakes which came over from the Stepeasy were greeted with double delight. Simon, unleashed, had baked enough treats to send a squadron five times their size into a massive sugar rush. As a result, it wasn’t long before Silvie was racing about the ship on a manic high, fritzing on the sheer joyous energy of all the people around her. This did at one point necessitate them dissuading her from taking a fighter for a joy ride, but that was a trivial matter as far as the Fourth was concerned.
They remained at Oreol for six days, taking a rest break while Excorps carried out their tests on Oreol Two and they carried out their own first field tests of the nanotech scanners Professor Parrot’s team had developed. The first tests were very encouraging. They had about an eight per cent failure rate but by laying the scanners in the pattern recommended they were able to function as a network even if as many as half of them failed to operate correctly.
‘It is astonishing,’ Buzz observed, seeing the results from the test on day four. They had, by then, laid a trail of scanners around the system and for a couple of hours back down the route they’d already traversed. Each scanner was no bigger than a single celled bacteria but it could scope for a range of eleven billion klicks and maintain a comms signal with other scanners up to eight billion klicks away. Laying them in a 3-D pattern in which each scanner was in constant contact with eight others around it meant that the whole functioned as a web, with data from each probe being constantly transmitted through the whole network. That meant that you only needed to tap one probe to get data from all of them.
That was something they had seen in action around Samart, though the Samartian scanners were rather more robust and faster in data transmission.
‘If we could get the speed up,’ Buzz observed, ‘it might be possible to consider laying trails of these between worlds, for messages to be transmitted directly, faster than any courier.’
Alex smiled. ‘One day, possibly,’ he agreed. ‘It’s certainly one heck of a step up, technologically. Once this hits industry…’ he gestured to indicate a rocket taking off. ‘Pow!’
Right now, though, they had to focus on conducting field tests, and on the thorny issue of picking a name for the new technology.
Normally that would not be a problem. Something this big would customarily be named after its developer, like the Naos navigation system they’d used to get out here. Professor Parrot, however, did not want to claim the credit for the scanner because it was very much a team effort. The Second’s team themselves had a very limited imagination when it came to naming things – as far as they were concerned the new scanner was called P317, because it was the three hundred and seventeenth attempt at a working prototype.
Suggestions, therefore, piled up on the notice boards and were the subject of extensive discussion on all the ships. The final decision would be Alex’s. He soon found that he couldn’t even go around the ship without people attempting to persuade him that their particular favourite was the best, and there were so many sweepstakes going on that Buzz was obliged to remind them that while ‘dollar sweepstakes’ might be tolerated, any more serious gambling was strictly against regulations.
‘There’s been less fuss made over the naming of planets,’ Alex complained. And there had, indeed. Alex had allowed each of the ships in the squadron the privilege of naming a couple of the planets in the system, which they’d done within a couple of days after the skippers took suggestions and made a choice. Oreol Four was now on record as Flatworld – a choice Silvie had made when Alex gave her the honour of naming the world she’d been the first to set foot on. Oreol Two was now officially recorded as Haven, chosen by Excorps with an eye to the name of the X-base which would be sited here. More informally, though, it was known to the rest of the squadron as Stinkworld.
Oreol Two – now Haven, aka Stinkworld – had proven to be a disappointment even as a low-grade biosphere. Its algae were almost all methanogens and the atmosphere was so toxic to humans that they would have to wear spacesuits there, too. It wasn’t even as if there was anywhere much to walk, as the surface was mostly slimy bog and shallow algae-dense seas. There were much prettier places in the system to go for a suit-walk,
which all of them did during the days that they stayed there. Even the civilians were suited up and taken on escorted trips, experiencing all the thrill of being the first people to explore the system.
But still, the debate over what they should call the new technology stormed on, assuming an importance far beyond its actual significance. Alex recognised this as a sign of isolation intensifying trivial matters to unreasonable proportions – Excorps called it Expedition Fever. It was, therefore, essential that they not only take the opportunity to get off their ships and go for claustrophobia-busting walks groundside, but that they socialise as much as possible to break down the insular mind-set that was starting to develop.
The six days they spent there, therefore, were a riot of sporting tournaments, social events and performances. It was a strange burst of fun, far out there in the wilds where no humans had ever been before. But it was necessary, and Alex knew that he had been right when his decision about the nanotech on the afternoon of day five got no more than cheers from the winners and groans from the losers. He named it nanoweb, the name which Professor Parrot was known to have favoured from the many suggestions made. And they would, from now on, be laying trails of nanoweb everywhere they went, no longer just testing it but using it for operations.
The big question, though, was where they were going to go. There were three more systems with green-world indicators which were within their range, but they were so far apart that they would only have the time and supplies to reach one of them. Which one they went to was Alex’s decision, and one of the hardest calls he’d ever had to make.
Each of the three had their supporters, keen to put their case.
The first and perhaps most obvious choice was Burdai, the closest and easiest to reach – just five weeks away at their average rate of progress so far. It had atmospheric indicators which, from long range observation, suggested a rather more sophisticated oxygen-based biosphere than they’d found at Oreol. It would be a very hot world, though, with a best guess of being predominantly desert with pockets of rainforest in the wetland around mountains. There were no indicators of any kind of industry.
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