Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘It is beautiful,’ Janai Bennet repeated, and smiled at them all. ‘Gratitude.’

  When she’d gone, Jonas had to sit down for a minute, feeling just a little dizzy. Suddenly, all the headaches and grief of attempting to unravel the Fourth’s nightmarish accounts seemed entirely unimportant. He had the odd feeling that everything in his entire life had been building towards those four minutes, perhaps his only opportunity ever to represent his people in such vitally important diplomacy. His own contribution was very small, he knew that. But there was no such thing as a trivial contribution when the prize at stake was alliance with a people who could fight off the Marfikians. There was extensive cultural information in the first-contact pack they’d given the Samartians, naturally, but it might take them months to work through that and real experience right here and now was liable to weigh much more heavily. Who knew how significant it might be for the Samartians, the discovery that the aliens, frightening and incomprehensible as they were in so many ways, sang songs like theirs?

  Not everyone got that buzz, the thrill of feeling that they’d managed to make a real cross-cultural connection. The people playing handball in the studio next door had to accept, philosophically, that their effort to establish common ground there was wasted effort. Janai Bennet was mildly perplexed by it – the concept of playing team games for pleasure was evidently not part of the Samartian culture. Fitness training, she explained, was a duty, and their idea of sport was one of individual competition.

  She was equally dismissive of the academic aspect of life aboard ship. When they told her how unusual their ship was because of the amount of training and academic studying they carried out, she considered for a moment and then observed, ‘We don’t do that on-ship. But I suppose you have to, since you are on-ship for such very long times.’

  She wasn’t interested when they offered to take her to see Lucky, either. The fact that they had a lizard on the ship did not appear to be very important, to her, at least not in comparison with the far crazier thing of allowing civilians to work on the ship.

  She was, however, profoundly impressed by being taken to meet the captain. He had been pointed out to her early on in the tour, as Buzz drew her attention to the open comms screens throughout the ship and told her that was Captain von Strada. As recommended by Davie North, Alex had remained on the command deck throughout, watching unobtrusively and conducting himself with full formal, public-manner protocols. There was no joking or laughing from him while she was aboard. Alex understood that he could not afford to lose face by being casual with her. She had already had to cope with the discovery that Buzz, so friendly and relaxed, was actually the second in command aboard ship, or as she put it, second captain.

  They knew enough, by then, to understand what she meant by that. One of the things she had told them, as she’d observed a watch changeover, was how different organisation was on Samartian ships.

  There was no such thing as a permanent crew on a Samartian ship, for a start. They worked a system under which there were two crews on every ship – two captains, two quite separate crews who alternated in being on watch. One of these was the ‘senior’, but this had nothing to do with the relative experience of the captains. Each crew served a two week assignment – for the first week, they were the junior crew, then there’d be a crew changeover and the crew which had already been aboard for a week would assume seniority till they handed over, in their turn, returning to ground-base for training until they were called up to be on-ship again. When they were called up, they were unlikely to find themselves working with the same captain or shipmates. There was clearly no ethos of forging a united crew or of individual shipboard culture, there. All captains were expected to be the same – calm, impersonal, doing everything strictly by the book.

  There was another significant difference, too. Samartian ships were rarely more than a few hours from port and, vitally, were never out of contact with their homeworld. So captains aboard ship had nothing like the kind of responsibility and autonomy that Fleet skippers had, working out on their own for weeks at a time. Every ship was controlled from ground-base by senior officers who, from what the Fourth could gather, seemed to function as a cross between flight-control and the admiralty, directing patrols and giving operational orders. Above them was another rank which organised defence on a regional basis, and beyond that, the highest ranking, eight-officer Dakaelin, a junta which combined the functions of Lords of the Admiralty and Presidential office. It had been decided by the Samartians that Captain von Strada carried the same kind of status on their worlds. Janai Bennet, by comparison, was of a rank equivalent to that of officer-cadet in Fleet service. A cadet invited to share a car with the First Lord and the League President could not have been more over-awed than Janai Bennet was, when she was taken to the command deck and introduced to Alex.

  She held up her hands as soon as she came to a halt near the datatable. They had learned about that, too, during the course of her visit – as Buzz had guessed at the time, it had turned out to be a Samartian salute. Formal etiquette was for the subordinate to raise their hands first and keep them raised till the salute was acknowledged. Informally, amongst friends, it was acceptable to touch hands, briefly, but the kind of grip-and-shake the Fourth used was considered as intimate as being given a hug.

  Alex had learned a great deal, watching her progress around the ship and absorbing the analysis coming in from the monitoring team. So he knew better, by then, than to offer his hand to such a junior officer, or to smile. Instead he raised his own hands briefly in an echoing gesture.

  ‘I hope that your visit has been to your satisfaction,’ he said, with a cold, appraising look. In fact, he had a high degree of respect and admiration for her. He knew from experience how overwhelming and exhausting it was to be in first-contact meetings. He and his team had been stood down for two days after their encounter with the Gider, and that had only lasted half an hour. Janai Bennet had been going strong for more than five hours, now, dealing with a relentless barrage of very high impact information, and she was still looking alert, keeping it together, even enjoying herself. Not that she was showing that now, of course. Anyone seeing her only in her encounter with Alex would have felt the Samartians to be a remarkably intimidating, unemotional people. Only having seen her so relaxed, chatting and smiling with other people around the ship, made it clear that this was no more than the ‘public manners’ which was normal for Novaterrans, too.

  ‘Have my people shown you all that you wanted to see?’ Alex queried.

  ‘Confirm, Captain. Gratitude. Honoured.’ Janai Bennet responded, standing very straight and barking out the words in a tone reminiscent of the Academy Yap.

  ‘Satisfaction.’ Alex continued to study her for a few seconds with an air of icy, analytical interest. ‘Your conduct has been to our satisfaction,’ he told her. ‘You bring honour to your service.’

  Janai Bennet betrayed her youth and junior status by the rapid flush which rose through her neck and turned her ears bright pink.

  ‘Predeo, Captain,’ she managed, but gave a tiny little flicker of relief at Alex’s nod of dismissal.

  ‘You may show her the Ignite,’ Alex told Buzz, as if that was something which Janai Bennet had earned through her conduct, during the visit, and not the planned highlight of the tour.

  ‘Sir,’ Buzz acknowledged, and duly led the Samartian off the command deck. ‘The Ignite is our most powerful missile,’ he told her, as he took her to the missile room. ‘It is the one we demonstrated in our salute to your people.’ They had decided to call their flamboyant combat display a ‘salute’ as if that was the normal way their people greeted other worlds.

  ‘The planet killer?’ It had evidently not escaped the Samartians that the missile explosion which had been the climax of that display had, indeed, had the force and range to wipe a planet out of existence.

  ‘Indeed,’ Buzz said, comfortably. ‘Though we would not, ourselves, fire it at an inhabited world.
We have engineered it to attack large scale ship and arms manufacturing. It is very new, the latest and most powerful weapon we have. We have only one prototype remaining on the ship. You are permitted to see it, but not, please, to touch.’

  Micky Efalto had the Ignite ready for them, displayed on its maintenance cradle. He would have had it in a darkened room with bright spotlights on it, if he could, giving the missile the dramatic ambience he felt it deserved. Failing that, he had had to settle for polishing it till every millimetre of it shone.

  Janai Bennet gazed at the missile while Micky explained, in very general terms, what it was capable of. She seemed more puzzled than impressed.

  ‘It is enormous,’ she observed, when they were obviously looking at her expecting some kind of reaction. ‘But…’ she hesitated, but the relationship she had built up with Buzz over the last few hours gave her the confidence to speak frankly. ‘An ordinary engine core detonated on a planet would achieve the same thing,’ she pointed out. ‘And for attack, flying a ship, even a small ship, at a planet, and triggering dephase.’

  Buzz conceded the point.

  ‘That is why nobody we know will allow superlight mix cores to be stored anywhere near an inhabited world,’ he said. ‘And all our starships have failsafe devices, and our worlds defence systems, so that any ship or shuttle approaching a world has to shut down its mix cores while still a safe distance away, or it will be instantly destroyed. The power of the Ignite lies in its stealth capability and long range – it may be released hours outside a system, far beyond detection, and once inside a system, for the last two, vital seconds it runs cold, undetectable to normal sensors.’

  Janai Bennet made a thoughtful, courteous sound of acknowledgement, but she was still regarding the Ignite with a slightly dubious air.

  ‘Why is it red?’ she asked, and gazing at the dark, glittering blazon, ‘Are the jewels part of the technology?’

  ‘Er… no.’ Buzz couldn’t help grinning as he saw Micky Efalto’s look of stiff dignity. ‘The casing is decorative,’ Buzz admitted, which got an astounded look from the Samartian. Clearly, the idea of a missile with a decorative casing was one which her people would consider utterly bonkers. ‘The paint, the jewelled emblem and the design of the casing, with fins, evokes our feelings about the stealth and power of the missile, a visual metaphor for its similarity to a stealthy, deadly ocean predator. There is an alternative casing which we also use.’

  He brought up an image of the grey, boxy casing the Devast team had designed, and Janai Bennet looked relieved, her nod and manner conveying quite clearly, ‘That’s more like it!’

  The Devast team, Buzz realised, was never going to let them hear the end of that one. It didn’t seem, though, that they were likely to have many other crowing rights about it. If Janai Bennet’s reaction was anything to go by, the Samartians might not be particularly interested in acquiring the missile. As the visit came to an end, anyway, it appeared that the things Janai Bennet had been most impressed by, at least in terms of things that they could provide as diplomatic gifts, were their artificial gravity and their combat suits.

  There was, however, a far more important gift they could offer than either of those, as Tina Lucas would tell them very soon.

  Twenty Two

  There was an audible sigh of relief throughout the Heron as they saw the signal coming from their shuttle, confirming that they had Sub-lt Lucas safely aboard and were returning to the ship.

  Buzz had taken the shuttle back, repeating that morning’s docking procedure and saying goodbye to Janai Bennet, with the warmest of courtesies, both ways. Then she and Tina had exchanged places again, passing one another in the airlock tube with frankly delighted grins.

  The first priority now was to get Tina to sickbay, through strict quarantine procedures, a medical check and a psych evaluation. Only then, when Rangi said she was ready, would they begin debriefing. She had, after all, been through an incredibly intense experience. The physical and emotional stress of first contact encounters was treated as medical trauma, however thrilling it might have felt at the time. And, as Alex could testify, the physical and emotional come-down from that overwhelming rush felt rather like being hit by a train. So, however ‘up’ Tina appeared to be when she came back aboard, the first priority would be quarantine checks and medical care.

  Alex, however, was there at the airlock to meet her, as she and Buzz stepped out of the freshly decontaminated shuttle. He meant only to welcome her back, but it was clear as she came aboard that she was bursting with news.

  ‘Go on, dear girl,’ Buzz was grinning hugely, too, a proprietorial hand on the young officer’s shoulder. ‘You tell him.’

  ‘Sir!’ Tina’s eyes were gleaming with excitement, her whole body almost quivering with the urgency of what she had to say. She paused just for a second, taking a breath, making sure she had the captain’s full attention, and then told him the game-changing words. ‘They don’t have siliplas!’

  Alex looked at her blankly for a couple of seconds. Siliplas was so fundamental to the League’s economy that it was impossible to imagine not having it. There was not a building, or a vehicle, without siliplas in the construction. Starships, factories, domestic goods, everything from superlight mix cores to tableware used siliplas. It had been around for thousands of years, too. Though the technology to refine, engineer and recycle it had developed over the centuries, a basic form of siliplas had been manufactured on Chartsey even before they’d embarked on space exploration. Several other worlds had discovered it independently prior to first contact, too. It was actually one of the discoveries used to ‘peg’ a culture on a continuum of technological development. Being ‘pre-siliplas’ was an Early Industrial indicator.

  ‘But…’ Alex said, putting all his incredulity and bewilderment into that one syllable.

  ‘I know!’ Tina declared, half laughing, half still reeling, herself, at the enormity of that discovery. ‘But it’s true, skipper! They make plastics out of fluorocarbons!’

  She saw Alex’s jaw drop, at that, and nodded rapidly.

  ‘Yes, I know, I know!’ she said, seeing all the protests rising in him at such a preposterous idea. ‘But it’s true, honestly, I swear, their plastics are all fluorocarbon based and they have no siliplas tech, at all.’

  Alex experienced, then, one of those rare moments in which it was possible to catch a glimpse of what it was like to be inside Davie or Shion’s head, as his brain worked so fast the thoughts felt simultaneous. It was as if one part of his mind was evaluating the implications of that news in diplomatic terms, while another was lost in sheer wonder at the discovery of a superlight society using Early Industrial plastics. At the same time, or at least, so quickly that it felt like the same time, he was thinking back across Janai Bennet’s visit.

  No, he realised, they had not shown her any of their siliplas tech. That had just not been something they had felt would be of any interest, it was so basic. She had not asked any questions about what things were made of, either, so the subject of siliplas had just never come up.

  Then, after that one hyper-aware moment, his thoughts collided back into a normal state of consciousness, forming one burning question.

  ‘Did you tell them about siliplas?’

  ‘No sir!’ Tina laughed, waving her hands helplessly. ‘I don’t know how, but I managed not to react – I think I managed not to react. Didn’t say anything, anyway, just, you know, ‘polite interest’, say no more. But I’ve been busting to tell!’ The glance she gave Buzz, and his affectionate chuckle, made it apparent that she had blurted that out the moment the airlock sealed behind her. ‘There’s more, too!’ she told the skipper. ‘They don’t have artificial gravity. And they don’t have intersystem capability, either – their ships aren’t intersystem capable, no way, no how. And their food,’ she spoke with an undertone of horror, as she told him, ‘Donavet Six.’

  Those words conveyed a wealth of information to Alex, and to everyone aboard the ship
. Even the civilians had taken exodiplomacy training, and part of that was learning about the Donavet continuum. Critics might call it ‘League-centric’, even imperialist, but it was the best tool they had for assessing where a culture was at, in terms of comparative development.

  Controversially, the innermost rings were regarded as Dark Age indicators – controversially because the League had, historically, considered that to be the difference between forging an economic relationship with a world or, upon deciding that it was Dark Age, sending in ‘Aid and Development’ missions which were occupying forces in all but name. Pegging the Samartians at level six in food production put them well within the Dark Age zone.

  That meant that the Samartians were eating organic, with only the most basic food processing and preservation techniques. It was far below the level of biovat production which was regarded as a baseline for civilised worlds.

  ‘No!’ Alex exclaimed, not because he didn’t believe her but because it was just so incredible that a society which had created higher levels of nano-tech than the League should still be at a Dark Age level in their food production.

  ‘Honestly, sir!’ she assured him, and would have said more – much more – but for the fact that Rangi intervened at that point. He was waiting there, too, and had been using a scanner to confirm that Tina’s survival suit had not been breached or unsealed during her time off the ship. Now, he stepped in with a hand on Tina’s arm, as if physically trying to take her away from Buzz and Alex.

  ‘Later,’ he said, with a look which reminded them all that, junior officer or not, he had the authority, here, as medic in charge of a patient. ‘Sickbay, Tina – come on!’

  Alex nodded instant agreement, guiltily aware that he had allowed his own curiosity to override the priority of looking after Tina herself. Buzz gave her a pat, too, releasing his hand from her shoulder in a clear expectation that she would go with the medic.