The second choice was Apellar, nine weeks away. Its supporters pointed out that it was exciting because it had two worlds within the system which had green world indicators. Both, admittedly, seemed quite primitive but supporters pushed the argument that two green worlds doubled the chances of finding something there.
And then there was Aseltor, right at the limit of how far they could hope to get, this trip. It was more of a blue world than a green, as remote indicators suggested that it was an oceanic biosphere, perhaps with very little landmass or little life on the landmass. Based on their rate of progress so far it would take them nearly four months to get out there, pushing their supplies right to the edge. They would be relying on the belief that they could get back a lot quicker than they were going out, following already known routes which they could navigate confidently at much higher speeds. Even then, and with the additional supplies which the Stepeasy was carrying for them, they might well have to resort to emergency rations before they got back to Telathor.
It made more sense, clearly, to go for Burdai or Apellar this time. Excorps would certainly be setting up an X-base here, and with a supply base here they would use this as a jumping off point for much further exploration than the Fourth could attempt. Their ships had small crews and could be supplied for anything up to three years. Warships were just not designed to be out in space for so long. But with an X-base here, any Fleet ships equipped with the Naos system could explore the region at their leisure. There was no desperate urgency about this, in fact, no urgency at all.
Aseltor, therefore, was by far the long odds outsider, with only a handful of people arguing that it would be their best choice because it was the furthest they could go. Even the most fervent supporters, though, found it hard to muster arguments for the ocean world to be the most likely to support an advanced civilisation. With the notable exception of Quarus, all other advanced worlds were based on land-dwelling, and with no industrial indicators either, it was a long-shot in every respect.
It was, however, a system Alex had found himself looking at many times during quiet hours in his cabin. He had very little to go on, little more than gut instinct and the tenuous fact that the name of the Olaret Nesting they thought might be in this sector translated as ‘Place of the Islands’. That might mean anything at all, might even be a mistranslation, and there was no evidence for Aseltor even being a sophisticated biosphere, let alone for it supporting intelligent life.
All the same, Alex kept being drawn back to looking at it, both in studying the data obtained from remote observation and looking at the star on their own scopes. He was even considering Telethoran mythology and ancient religious beliefs. In that mythology Aseltor had been the goddess who created their world, sprinkling people around it like seeds in a garden and blessing them with all that they needed to thrive. She had then departed, though leaving her necklace in the sky to sparkle for them and remind them of her love. Aseltor’s Necklace, the asteroid belt, was visible to the naked eye from Telathor, though only on the clearest of nights, as a fine thread of glitter woven through the stars.
It wasn’t, Alex felt, a tremendous stretch to see Aseltor as a personification of the Thelae who had created a human genome and then departed, gifting them their world. And perhaps it was just coincidence which had made the Telathorans name a rather unremarkable star in their own night sky ‘Aseltor’, identifying it as the new home of their god. But then again, perhaps it wasn’t mere coincidence that that system had later turned out to have living biosphere indicators. Mythology was always uncertain, of course, but Alex felt drawn towards Aseltor, time and time again, wondering.
He found himself playing what he knew to be a highly unreliable kind of game, too, looking at the territory and wondering ‘If I was the Olaret looking for a world to seed a colony, which would I choose?’
This couldn’t be any more than the wildest kind of speculation. There was no way in the universe that he could actually put himself into the minds of an alien people who’d died out ten thousand years ago. Nor could he even see the sector in the same way they had, from a very much bigger perspective in which travel between worlds was a matter of hours, not weeks, and such dirty space as this, so very difficult for their ships to navigate, did not hinder Olaret ships at all. They could guess that, at least, from observation of how quickly Solaran ships travelled today, and how little heed they took of passing through space considered non-navigable for human shipping.
Even so, Alex felt that he had come to as good an understanding of the Olaret as any human was likely to achieve. They were his own ancestors, after all, had created his genome on the world they now called Novaterre. They had gone about creating their children of the plague in a radically different way to all the other ancient species which had engineered a genome to survive them. Instead of attempting to create a species which was as close to them as the demands of a strong immune system allowed, they had engineered genomes adapted for the colonies they were scattering across a thousand light years. So if the lost Carrea Rensis was somewhere in this sector, the Olaret would have looked for the most suitable world and then engineered a species adapted to thrive there. And if he was choosing a world to host a lifeboat colony, Alex felt, he would not have left those people on either a bog or a desert.
Janil agreed. Just two hours before they were due to hold the all-skippers meeting at which they’d discuss their choice of destination and Alex would make his decision, Davie asked for a meeting with him and the student mathematician.
Alex agreed, though a little surprised that Davie wanted to bring the student to a formal meeting. It was unusual for Davie to ask for a formal meeting in the first place, as he was far more in the habit of just going to find Alex if there was something he wanted to talk to him about. Today, though, he was asking to speak to him officially, on the command deck, with the proceedings on record for the log.
Janil came aboard looking half thrilled and half petrified. He stumbled in the airlock and had to be pretty much propelled and pushed into a chair on the command deck. He looked anything but impressive, his hair so over-glossed that it looked as if it had been stuck to his head with a handful of oil, and his shirt so tight around the neck that he kept fidgeting a finger into it to relieve the pressure.
‘You really need to see this,’ said Davie, passing Alex a copy of a probability analysis. It was presented in the same format as an intel report, and though the mathematical arguments were rather beyond Alex in their details, he understood enough to follow the trend of the calculations and their interpretation.
‘All right – just give me a couple of minutes,’ the skipper said. They sat quietly while he read the report, Davie amusing himself watching conn screens while Janil sat absolutely still and tried not to look at anything in case he wasn’t supposed to. When Alex looked up, his expression was interested, but questioning.
‘Trust me on this,’ said Davie, and jerked a thumb at Janil, ‘this guy is good.’
Alex gave the student a thoughtful look. He knew who Janil was of course; the young man who’d worked out that there were quarians on Telathor and even calculated, correctly, where he would be able to see them. But his report could be dismissed, on the face of it, as pure speculation, even the fantasy of an alien-obsessed kid.
Alex, however, had a very high regard for Davie North’s judgement. And Davie would not be taking up his time like this unless he really believed that this analysis was reliable.
What it said was, essentially, that the most probable of the three systems to support intelligent life was Aseltor. The arguments for that were many and complex, combining elements of astrophysics, astrobiology, Telathoran mythology and the latest data from the Gide Disclosure. None of it was in any way concrete, but the probabilities stacked up at every little step, giving Aseltor a definite edge over the competitors. Janil had given Aseltor, in fact, a 22.1% possibility of having intelligent life, while Apellar came in at 7.4 and Burdai just 0.3%. It was a massive analysis, of whic
h Alex had read only the key point highlights, but he had no doubt that Davie had read and understood every twist of calculation in it.
‘Interesting, Mr Caldova,’ Alex gave the student an appraising look. ‘Do you think,’ he asked, ‘that you might give a brief presentation on this to our skippers’ meeting later today?’
Janil managed to nod and say ‘yes sir’, though it came out as a shaming bleat and colour rushed up into his face.
Davie put a hand on his shoulder, gripping it in a way which both comforted and braced the man who was, in fact, two years older than himself. ‘Come on, Janil,’ he coaxed. ‘You had no problem presenting it to me and arguing it through.’
Janil gave him a sidelong glance which attempted to convey that that was a whole different ball game. Davie was, well, Davie, a man he felt very comfortable around and could have a laugh with. True, he was a genetically enhanced form of homo sapiens and unimaginably wealthy, yes, he was a very high powered exodiplomat and owner of multiple intersystem corporations. But somehow Janil never thought of that now that he’d got to know him. Alex von Strada, on the other hand…
He looked back at the captain, and gulped.
‘Well,’ said Alex, quite kindly, ‘perhaps you could be on hand in case we have any questions.’
Even that was a severe ordeal. Janil spent much of the intervening two hours dashing to the lavatory. He’d showered three times and changed his clothes another five times before Davie brought him back to the frigate. Fortunately the last time had been supervised by one of Davie’s own valets, sent to ensure that the student was presentable, so at least this time he came aboard impeccably groomed and wearing a shirt that fitted.
The all skippers’ meeting was a major event for the whole squadron. Everyone knew that it was the point at which the captain would announce their destination, though most people took it as read that he had already made that decision.
In fact, Alex had not yet decided where they were going, and would have been shocked by the suggestion that he had already made up his mind before hearing what the skippers had to say. This was nothing like a democracy, of course, and no form of voting would be tolerated by the Fleet, but it was a forum at which each skipper would be required to give an account of their ship’s readiness and in which they could be invited, too, to contribute advice to the captain.
Before they spoke, though, Alex told them that he had invited Silvie to be present at the meeting, her wishes being paramount, but that she had declined.
‘For the record,’ he said, officially, ‘Ambassador Silver has declared that she’s perfectly willing to go along with us wherever I decide.’
What Silvie had actually said was that she was happy to go with them to the ends of the universe, as travelling with them was so lovely, and such fun. But Alex left it at that, then asked them to confirm that they’d received Janil’s report and if they had any questions they wanted to put to him before they began their discussion.
Harry Alington’s hand went up at once.
‘Not complaining, sir,’ he said, ‘but … an hour and three quarters before the meeting is cutting it a bit fine to throw a whole new major analysis like this onto the table.’
‘Agreed,’ said Alex. ‘Which is why I’m making it open to questions, as major new intel, before we begin discussions. So – Mr Caldova,’ he looked at the student who’d been squeezed in beside Davie in the tight cluster around the command datatable. ‘Can you tell us when exactly you completed this report?’
Janil gulped, conscious of all the eyes on him. Even those of the people around the table were intimidating enough. Besides the Fourth’s skippers and Davie, there were also the Excorps skipper and Harard Perkins from the Comrade Foretold. Harard could no longer attempt to pretend that the Comrade Foretold was a corporate yacht following them just for the fun of the thing, but even so he was not prepared to admit that they were LIA. So his presence at the meeting was officially unexplained. Even so, he was looking at Janil with sharp interest. Janil might not look like much but Harard knew how keen the LIA had been to recruit him, and both Davie North and von Strada were evidently putting quite a lot of store by his report.
‘This morning, sir,’ said Janil, and at an encouraging look from the captain, explained, ‘I’ve been working on it since Telathor, but there was a lot of data to work through.’
‘That’s because,’ said Davie, ‘I didn’t give him any of the previously worked analyses, only access to raw data so he’d come at it with no preconceptions. And you may take my word for it; he has not been loafing around – more than one night we’ve had to put him to bed as he’s fallen asleep at his desk.’
‘You worked this completely from scratch?’ Dan Tarrance queried, ‘By yourself?’
When Janil gave a quick, embarrassed nod, Dan whistled with amazement and flicked him a salute, at which Janil couldn’t help but grin a bit, swinging his shoulders like a self-conscious child.
‘It is a very impressive piece of work,’ said Skipper Florez. ‘But difficult to comment on it, frankly, since I’d want to give a team of forensic analysts at least a week to check it thoroughly before I accepted it as valid.’
‘Well, I’m not prepared to sit here for another week while we check Mr Caldova’s maths,’ said Alex. ‘We just don’t have the time. I believe that we should accept it as credible…’ he put one hand lightly on the screen which displayed the report. ‘We all know that Mr Caldova is a very talented analyst, and that is always about much more than plugging data into calculations. Any computer can do that. A probability analysis like this is as much about instinct as it is about the math, weighting data and deciding what assumptions to make in order to fill in the gaps. Recognising that Mr Caldova has an exceptional talent for this type of analysis gives this high credibility in itself. I am also happy to acknowledge Mr North’s expertise in this and accept his validation.’
‘Too kind,’ murmured Davie, raising some grins. It was apparent that Davie stood prepared to defend his protégé against anyone who might question Janil’s abilities. Given Davie’s own off-the-scale IQ and eidetic memory, it would need a brave man to argue any kind of academic issue with him, even without the captain’s own endorsement.
It was unsurprising, then, that Janil’s report was accepted without further debate – unsurprising to anyone but Janil himself, that was. Janil had come prepared to explain and justify every single point at which he’d made leaps and links in the data. So when Alex asked if there were any further questions and got silence and head shakes in response, Janil was left bewildered.
‘Thank you, Mr Caldova,’ Alex said, with a nod to him which was evidently a dismissal. Janil, though, didn’t know what to do or where to go, so just sat there staring at him. Seeing that, Alex smiled briefly at the duty rigger, who came over at once. Something was said about Mr Ireson, then Janil responded to a polite hand under his elbow and got to his feet in a scramble. He retained just enough presence of mind to say ‘Thank you, sir,’ then was ushered off the command deck.
A couple of minutes later, he found himself comfortably seated in the interdeck lounge, provided with a mug of Telathoran tea and the company of a friendly man who said to call him Mako.
They had no more conversation than that, though. Everyone in the lounge was watching one of the big screens on which the command deck feed had been put to maximum scale and the volume turned up. There was intense interest across all the ships, come to that, with the meeting being broadcast across the squadron. Quite apart from the fact that they had a natural interest in where they were going to explore, and everyone had their own particular favourite, there were quite a number of sweepstakes on this. They weren’t just on the choice of destination, either, but on which destination each of the skippers would support and even on how long the meeting would last. Most of the dollar stakes were clustered around the one hour ten to one hour forty mark.
In the event, the meeting lasted only twenty three minutes. There was very little disc
ussion. Each of the skippers seemed to just accept that the choice here came down to heading for Burdai because it was the nearest, or following Janil’s recommendation and attempting to reach Aseltor. The division of opinion on that fell into predictable camps. Harry Alington and Dan Tarrance were united, for once, in their views.
‘We’re here to try to find a lost civilisation,’ Harry observed. ‘And since Aseltor gives us the best chance of that, that is where we should go.’
‘Absolutely,’ Dan agreed. ‘And I see no reason why we shouldn’t.’
‘It is at the extreme range of our safe limits,’ Skipper Florez said, dubiously. ‘Personally I believe that it would be better – more sensible – to concentrate on mapping the routes towards all three systems, without actually attempting to reach them at this stage. Reconnaissance, you know.’
‘Leaving it,’ Dan said, ‘to the Exploration Corps to use those routes to go there later.’
Florez blushed just a little, but held the younger man’s gaze.
‘That is what we do,’ he said. ‘And now that we are equipped with the Naos system, no reason why we can’t continue with explorations in this region.’
‘You forget,’ said Harry, with a stern note, ‘that our mission here is a dual one, both explorative and diplomatic.’ He gestured towards Alex with pointed deference. ‘And unless Excorps has an ambassador of Captain von Strada’s standing and experience that we don’t know about, this is our best shot at both finding the civilisation and making successful contact with them.’
Skipper Florez looked indignant at this slur on his and Excorps’ diplomatic abilities, and was about to remind the corvette skipper of all the many times, historically, that Excorps had made first contact, and very successfully too. He would even have mentioned, with biting courtesy, that it had actually been an Excorps ship which had discovered Quarus, and that they still had ships out there across the Gulf now, chasing down possible inhabited worlds. He might even have said that this was what they trained for, every member of his crew just as highly trained in exodiplomacy as Alex von Strada was himself.
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