Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘I have no idea about these four,’ she said, indicating a side-panel with four names listed. ‘They’re mentioned in the record but there’s no known world they correlate to. It’s possible that they failed, or that they are further out across the Gulf and have yet to be discovered. I’m pretty confident about Zamarat, though.’ She indicated the star system now known as Samart. ‘Though I have no information beyond that; everything I say from this point is pure speculation. I can say that it is likely that they are humanoid. The genetic code created by the Cartash was used extensively with only minor variations, obviously, because the Cartash had produced a genome which could survive the plague. The Olaret certainly used that basic genome for all the other Nestings I do know about. This is what the Olaret looked like, themselves.’

  She put a still image up on the screen of a statue set amongst a cloud of pale, delicate flowers. She had already put that image on the notice board, as people had been asking if she had any pictures of the Olaret, so it caused no surprise. The statue was of a very thin figure, arms set low on the body, large flat eyes set almost on the sides of the small oval head, a tiny chin merging with the long narrow neck. They were not, to human eyes, beautiful. But they were fascinating, and everyone gazed at the image. The Olaret civilisation had been around for longer than the human mind could really comprehend, a history that stretched back over millions of years. Then, in the space of what was in comparison no more than a heartbeat, they were gone, wiped from the face of the galaxy.

  Alex looked at the face of the people who had created his own ancestors, and felt a deep sense of humility. Would humanity, he wondered, have the grace to do anything like that, if they were facing their own inevitable extinction? To give life, and hope, to some other species which would replace them? It was, he felt, pretty unlikely. If a species arose which could survive what was killing them, the humans would regard them as an enemy. Thank you, he thought, in a silent acknowledgement of the gift the Olaret had given them. And then, since he was after all human, a small part of his mind added, irreverently, And thank you for not making us look like that.

  ‘It is a fair guess that the Samartians will be like you, similar in lifespan, intellect and physiology, with a high metabolic rate to support an immune system.’ Shion went on, after a brief pause to allow them to study the image. ‘Though exactly what they look like is beyond the realm of reasonable speculation. If they’ve gone down the same bioengineering route as Quarus, indeed, they may no longer even be humanoid. On balance, though, my guess would be that they are, at least, basically human shaped and within the genome range you consider to be normal.’

  Her glance rested briefly on Chief Petty Officer Martins, who was from Chielle. His squat, thick-boned physique was not all due to Chielle being a high gravity world, any more than Angas Paytel’s gangling height was solely due to his upbringing on Korvold, one of the lightest-gravity worlds in the League. There were, indeed, significant differences in their genetic code, the definition of ‘human’ embracing a wide range of genomes.

  ‘As for communication,’ Shion went on, ‘What little we know of their language indicates that it should have shared roots with both ancient Prisosan and Quarian, but language is so rapid in its evolution that I can’t give you any reliable idea of what their language is like now.

  ‘Culturally, it is likely that they share certain fundamentals that are found in all the other known Nestings. If we take Novaterre, Shanuk and Quarus as examples, there – on the surface, they have very little in common. Novaterre is an industrial world, with a people known for their unusual degree of formal reserve in public.’

  She grinned briefly at the skipper, and he grinned back as that got a quick ripple of amusement in the audience.

  ‘Shanuk, on the other hand, is a gaian spiritual culture whose people still live in tribal communities. And on Quarus, of course, they bioengineered themselves into aquatic life-forms with a high degree of empathy. If you were asked what these three worlds have in common, you’d have to say, really, not much. But if you look a bit deeper, you’ll find that all three of them are rooted in similar social principles. There is a strong sense of individuals having a duty to society, an ethos of service which puts the needs of society higher than that of individual aspirations. On Novaterre, that manifests in people controlling their own behaviour in public so as to keep their cities the calm, orderly places they value. On Shanuk, it means that people maintain their traditional lifestyle, the spiritual values that are more important to them than modern conveniences. On Quarus, they have evolved a fully cooperative society in which all decisions are made by a process of ongoing referendum, and in which necessary tasks are carried out by individuals as an act of social generosity, for the greater good. There is no culture on any of these worlds of individual striving for achievement at the cost of other people. They are highly ethical societies, with little interest in material gain – the quarians have abandoned money altogether, the Shanuk operate a trading culture with the purpose of ensuring that everyone has what they need, and Novaterre, too, has a notoriously low level of consumerism.’

  She looked at Davie, with that, and he laughed, nodding confirmation.

  ‘Deeply frustrating to the corporate community,’ he observed. ‘No status-goods market at all, and barely any luxury market to speak of. It looks like it should have – pretty much the whole planet looks like typical central worlds suburbia both architecturally and ethnographically – but they just don’t have the normal suburban psyche of wanting to outdo the neighbours with bigger cars or better gadgets.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Shion agreed. ‘My belief is that the shared roots of social responsibility are still fundamental to each of those cultures, and those of the other known Nestings, and on that basis it is reasonable to speculate that the Samartians will also have some elements of those characteristics. That tallies with what little we do know about them – their high sense of honour, the principles of service inherent in a military culture. Beyond that, I really can’t speculate, though I would like to make one final point before we go to questions.

  ‘Clearly, there is another aspect to the Nesting cultures which I’m sure some of you have already spotted. They are, essentially, conservative, quite static societies. Novaterrans tend to know their ancestry right back through generations, in far more detail than is common on other worlds, and they prize history, preserving old buildings, taking pride in the continuity of customs and traditions. Shanuk is all about preserving their traditional way of life, and nothing much has changed on Quarus for centuries, they’re not an innovative or exploring people. I would expect, therefore, that the Samartians would also be conservative, traditionalists. But the point should be made,’ she looked pointedly at Alex, ‘that even the most conservative society may throw out dynamic, radical individuals.’

  That got laughter, as well as applause at the recognition that this had brought Shion’s prepared lecture to an end. It was fairly brief applause, though, because they all knew that she would move on now to take questions. They all had to be considerate about that, as a rule, in not bombarding Shion with questions all the time, so this was a treasured opportunity.

  Questions came, therefore, thick and fast. Few were about the Samartians, as most people recognised that she had already told them everything she knew and could speculate about. Most of the questions were about the Olaret, and she had to answer most of those with an apologetic, ‘Sorry, I really don’t know.’ And if she didn’t know, as everyone understood, none of her people had that information. It was possible that the Solarans might know more, but communication with Solarans was so slow and confused that it might take years to get any kind of comprehensible information from them. It was possible that they’d learn more from the Gider, but that relationship was still in primary diplomatic contact and it wasn’t clear, yet, even how well they were understanding one another.

  Just occasionally, though, there was a question she could answer, and even more rarely, that a
nswer gave them astonishing new information. That could happen even after all these months aboard ship. It wasn’t that Shion was holding back. She would talk freely and answer questions whenever she could, as well as frequently writing information files to be shared with the Diplomatic Corps. Even she, though, could not be expected to write down absolutely everything she knew about every possible subject, and she sometimes just hadn’t realised either that the humans didn’t know something already or that it would be of interest to them.

  ‘Was it the Olaret who sealed off Defrica, Point Zero, after the plague?’ The question came from Tina Lucas. She’d been studying the Firewall since she was a child, in increasing depth as she gained access to more classified sources of information. She knew now that it had been the Cartash who had first proposed that all infected worlds and those in a barrier zone around them should be sealed in quarantine.

  It was logical, as all the worlds involved had accepted. Shion had assured them that it had been no forced imposition, but a sacrifice made by each of those worlds as they recognised it was the only way left to stop the inexorable spread of the plague across the galaxy. Individual world quarantine simply hadn’t worked – it might hold for a while, but even the most rigorous decontamination of shipping had failed to prevent infection spreading. So each of the worlds within the Firewall had destroyed their own shipping, and their own ship-building capacity, too, creating a fire-break so that it would be generations before any of them went back into space again. Others beyond had created the Firewall itself, a quarantine barrier that encompassed all infected space, with the automatic turn-around technology against which the Fourth had banged their ship to make contact with Gide.

  Tina was far from being the only one to feel a cold horror at that decision, though. It felt brutal, particularly when you were one of the species abandoned in the plague zone. Their worlds had plunged into Dark Age barbarism, and they had had to claw their way up to their current stage of development while the ancient and mighty civilisations beyond the Firewall held themselves aloof.

  For Tina, it seemed incomprehensible, inhuman cruelty that the response of the ancients to the news of the plague had been to quarantine the infected world, sealing it off so that nobody could get out, or go in to try to help them.

  ‘I believe it was, yes, though I have no definite information on that. It seems likely, though, given that the records say that a star was moved to block the gateway to the Hall of Gathering. The Olaret were terraformers, as I said – not the way you terraform worlds, but landscaping whole systems, moving planets around, that kind of thing.’

  She looked a little surprised at the incredulous reaction to that.

  ‘I’ve mentioned that before, I’m sure,’ she said, glancing around at various people in the audience with an enquiring look.

  ‘We thought you were joking.’ It was Buzz who answered, though speaking for all of them. ‘Sorry, but that’s…’ he gestured to indicate that it had gone over their heads. ‘Our current level of understanding is that you can’t just move planets around, even given a means of propulsion to move something that big. Even if there was some way to do that without causing catastrophic damage to the planet, solar system physics are very well understood. If you change a planet’s orbital position you would also have to adjust its speed, of course, but the law of orbital resonance would also mean that the planet would have to be in, or would shift back into, a resonant orbit relative to other planetary bodies.’ He had Mako Ireson sitting next to him and, glancing at his look of bewildered incomprehension, grinned. ‘That’s high school science,’ he pointed out. ‘Astro mechanics.’

  Shion giggled. There was no other way to describe it, as her attempt to maintain public-speaking decorum dissolved into a merry little spurt of laughter, her eyes sparkling with mischief.

  ‘I do love the way humans decide they know all about something and call it a law,’ she observed, with another trill of mirth. ‘As if it’s not just something they’ve discovered, but the rules, which the universe had better comply with, or else!’

  ‘Are you telling us we’ve got that wrong?’ A voice rose above the excited clamour of reaction.

  ‘Oh no,’ Shion assured him, readily. ‘You’ve understood celestial mechanics, no problem with that. I was just commenting on you calling it a law, that’s all.’

  ‘But astro mechanics makes it clear that moving planets around is impossible!’ The speaker was Jate, typically forthright.

  ‘Clearly not, since the Olaret did it,’ Shion replied, with a light shrug. ‘Don’t ask me how in any detail because my people abandoned that kind of technology a long time ago. But I do know, for sure, that the Olaret moved planets around, and my understanding is that they did that by adjusting the gravity produced by the star.’

  There was a moment of silence while the spacers considered that, then another babble of incredulity, which made her laugh again.

  ‘You’re talking about stellar engineering.’ Morry Morelle spoke up, with that, an amazed look on his face. He was their engineer, a very able physicist in his own right who had been on secondment to the Second several times and been involved in many R&D projects even while in regular service. Alex had headhunted him way back when he was putting his first crew together. ‘But that’s so far beyond our ability, it’s in the realms of fantasy.’

  ‘Is it?’ Shion looked mildly surprised. ‘But you yourselves have undertaken some pretty impressive stellar engineering, blowing up Ignition One in such a way that most of the debris would fall into the goldilocks zone. And you saved Pellar, too, with the use of grav-pulse weaponry. And I saw, at Tolmer’s Drift, that you have developed artificial gravity satellites capable of collecting megatons of dust and debris. Is it really so difficult to make the leap into theorising that the gravity of a star might be adjusted either by pushing a gas giant into it, or by blowing off significant quantities of its own mass, or by some deep-star technology along the same lines as your own grav-generators?’

  ‘The calculations, the forces involved, the timescales,’ Morry said, and shook his head. ‘Way beyond us.’

  ‘Well, for now,’ Shion conceded. ‘but I dare say you’ll work out how, one day. Anyway, yes, the Olaret could do that, and it seems logical to me that they would have been the ones who moved the star to block the entry to Point Zero.’ She looked at Tina, who’d originally asked that question. ‘Is that important, who did it?’

  ‘I’m just trying to understand,’ Tina admitted. ‘Not so much how they did it, but how they could. I understand the logic, of course, all spacers do. You can’t open an airlock hatch in a blowout, even if people are dying, if opening that hatch means killing everybody else. But to lock the hatch on an entire world, for ever – I struggle with that, I can’t understand it.’

  ‘Everyone on Point Zero was already dead, though,’ Shion pointed out. ‘The Red Death has a hundred per cent mortality. There was no chance for any of them there, and no time, even, to attempt any kind of rescue, removing survivors to quarantine or anything like that. They would all have been dead before news even got to other worlds.’

  ‘But they didn’t all die, did they?’ Tina said. ‘Because Van Damek found a populated world.’

  There was a hum of reaction to that, some interested and some a little shocked, though it was clear that this was a friendly discussion.

  ‘Well, I see two possibilities, there,’ Shion said, considering. ‘One, that the world Van Damek found was not Point Zero, but another world we don’t know about – perhaps even one of the missing Olaret Nestings. Or, two, that Van Damek’s account of finding that world was not true. Sorry.’ She grinned again at the little ruffle which ran through her audience at that. They were big fans of Van Damek, in the Fourth. ‘But without in any way subscribing to the theories that he was a nutter, a con-man or delusional, it has to be acknowledged as within the bounds of possibility that he made up his stories of discovering Defrica in the hope of stimulating greater funding for exploration
. There have always been myths around there being a Lost World in the Carotis, and how better to engage public enthusiasm for exploration, at a time when neither governments nor corporations were willing to fund even near-border explorations? Van Damek had to fund his own voyages, remember, and he made desperate efforts to ignite public interest and support. On balance, I’d give it a fifty-fifty bet between him having discovered a world we haven’t identified yet, or having made it up. I don’t for one moment think that there are, or can have been, any survivors on Point Zero. They were sealing a grave, you know, not burying living victims.’

  Tina accepted that, giving a nod of thanks that held some relief. She hadn’t wanted to think of the Olaret being that ruthless.

  It had been a very good question, though, and generated another. Seeing that Shion was happy to discuss even controversial issues, Misha Tregennis asked if there was anything that she could tell them about the Marfikians.

  ‘About their origins, I mean,’ she clarified.

  Shion looked doubtful.

  ‘I have been asked not to talk about that,’ she said, and looked at Alex, explaining, ‘Ambassador Dolan said it was highly sensitive. Which it is, I’ve seen. If anyone even says the word Marfikian there’s an immediate tension, a comment or two and a quick change of subject. And I’ve been told that if you say it in a spacer bar, everyone will stop talking and stare at you.’

  ‘True enough,’ Alex confirmed. ‘It isn’t something we joke or gossip about, so if someone is talking about them it’s usually because they have some news. And news about the Marfikians is very rarely good. But that’s, you know, socially sensitive. Did Ambassador Dolan mean that, or did she mean that it is diplomatically sensitive?’

  Ambassador Dolan was the Exo-Ambassador at X-Base Amali, who had looked after Shion during her first months in human space.