Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4)

by S J MacDonald

  Murg had, in fact, already made that suggestion, pointing out similarities between the Samartians’ culture of military elitism, and that of communities with religious beliefs. Their military personnel, particularly the space-going serving personnel, were regarded as above and outside normal society. The higher their rank, the more removed from normal life they became, to the point where they gave up their rights to having children, showed little or no emotion in public, and lived lives of total dedication to their service. Jermane had been adamant, too, that the matrix was correct in translating the customary form of address between military personnel as ‘beloved’, suggesting a possible alternative as ‘soul-sibling’.

  ‘You can’t just jump to that on the basis of one civilian calling an officer Mother,’ Shion objected.

  ‘Bet you a dollar,’ said Murg. ‘They’re like monks and nuns, bet you, call each other beloved like brother and sister, and are called mother and father by civilians, they’re like, holy, not just respected, revered.’

  Davie joined in the debate at that point, contributing an analysis of what the Samartians had told them about their ancient religious beliefs, how touchy they had been over thinking that the Fourth was claiming to have a goddess on board, and the extreme deference with which they treated the dakaelin.

  ‘See?’ Jermane crowed, seeing that Davie was on his side in this, and Shion laughed.

  ‘All right, we’ll call it a working hypothesis,’ she conceded, and tagged it as such on the ops screen.

  Alex saw that appear on the screen, though he wasn’t listening to the discussion in the lab – he was on the command deck, watching from there, and his attention was mostly on Davie and their visitors. He was struck, himself, by how petrified Bavore was – he’d seen some anxious civilians come aboard ship over the years, but never anything like the Samartian. He was actually quaking, hanging on to Bennet as if she was his lifeline.

  Of course, it had to be quite something for any Samartian to come aboard an alien ship, but it occurred to Alex that if Bavore was the most able and confident chemist they’d been able to find, that really made sense now of how appalled they had been to discover that the Fourth had civilians at work aboard their ship. To them, it really was as if the Fourth had said cheerfully that they let six year olds work there.

  Davie, however, knew just what to do. He didn’t talk to Bavore about plastics for at least half an hour, or for that matter talk to him in any way that required a coherent response. Instead, he brought Mako in, using palm-com to brief him as to what was required.

  ‘Mako is a civilian too,’ he said, when introductions had been made. Then he took a step back, leaving Mako to do his guided tour of the exosuite. Bennet had already seen it, of course, but she followed patiently, smiling often at Bavore and adding occasional explanations.

  By the time they went into the exosuite galley, Mako was chatting and laughing as he told them that he was learning how to cook, showing them the rudiments of the chef station there.

  ‘I’m not very good, yet,’ he admitted, ‘but hardly anybody in our culture can cook from scratch, using different ingredients to make things, so it’s quite something for me to be able to make anything at all.’

  Bavore was so amazed by that that his incredulity overcame his fear. He had been subjected to intensive briefing about everything the military thought he should know about the Revellin, which in itself had been so fast and overwhelming he hadn’t taken in more than half of it. They had not, however, felt it important to talk about food.

  ‘Your people don’t cook?’ Bavore exclaimed, and looked at him as if not at all sure that Mako could be serious. ‘But how do you eat, then?’

  Mako showed him a prepack and a flash oven, explaining as he did so that almost all food on their worlds was created artificially, in vats, and processed so as to only need heating. Bavore was appalled, turning a horrified, appealing look at Bennet, as if begging her to tell him that it wasn’t true. When she gave him a look of sympathetic confirmation, Bavore almost gagged, making an ‘errgh!’ sound which the matrix did not need to translate.

  Janai Bennet’s expression became reproving.

  ‘Social responsibility,’ she said, or at least, that was how the matrix translated her words. Jermane, with a more intuitive grasp of tone and context, substituted a rather more parental, ‘Manners!’

  Bavore lowered his eyes, looking mortified.

  ‘It’s all right – it’s good,’ Mako assured them quickly. ‘It’s good, important, necessary to be honest. We don’t like the things that you eat, either. But that is something we just have to get past if we want to be friends.’

  ‘To respect the otherness of the other,’ Bennet agreed, and reminded Bavore, ‘They are aliens, Citizen. We can not expect that they will be in every way like us.’

  Bavore sneaked a glance at Mako’s hands – he was rather obviously fascinated by the fact that Mako had five fingers, curious to see how that worked, but not wanting to be caught staring at what to him was a deformity. Catching the direction of his look, Mako wiggled his fingers in the air, then held out his hands, palm down, for the Samartian to inspect.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he told him. ‘You can touch them.’

  ‘Mother?’ Bavore looked to her for guidance, and she gave a smile of encouragement.

  ‘They don’t take offence,’ she said, ‘You can ask any question you like, they never take offence. They are very gentle beings, and kind.’

  Mako had never thought of himself as a ‘gentle being’ before, but then, he’d never really considered himself as an alien, either. Of course they were the aliens, here, but Mako still couldn’t help thinking of himself, his kind, as ‘normal’, and the Samartians as the ‘other’.

  With some encouragement, Bavore nerved himself to feel Mako’s hand. He could see through the glove of his survival suit how the ‘extra’ little finger fitted onto the hand, and feeling the knuckles and tendons as Mako flexed his hand obligingly, exclaimed in wonder.

  ‘Doesn’t it hurt?’ he asked, comparing his own narrow palm and three slender fingers with Mako’s broad hand.

  ‘No, not at all – this is normal, for us,’ Mako assured him.

  ‘Amazing,’ Bavore breathed, and looked at him with awe. If he’d said aloud, ‘You really are an alien, a real, actual, live alien!, his feelings could not have been clearer.

  ‘Right back at you,’ Mako said, using an idiom they had learned from Bennet during her first visit aboard. Mako grinned, indicating the Samartian, and his hand. ‘Just as amazing, to me,’ he said, and asked, in a joking imitation of Bavore’s own question, ‘Does that hurt?’

  ‘No, of course…’ Bavore broke off, as realisation dawned, and Davie smiled, scoring a point for himself as he saw the Samartian and the prisons inspector gazing at each other. That was the moment, he recognised, when Bavore saw past ‘terrifying alien’ and understood that for all their differences, he and Mako were essentially the same.

  So, seeing that Bavore was now calm enough to be able to take in information, Davie moved him through from the galley to the locker beside it.

  ‘I didn’t see in here, before,’ Bennet observed, looking around alertly as Davie led them inside.

  ‘We weren’t keeping it secret,’ Davie told her, amused. ‘As we said at the time, it’s just a storage area – see, we use it to keep all the furniture in which we use in the lounge, here. And we just didn’t realise at the time that this would be of any interest to you.’ He indicated the machinery which occupied a corner of the locker. ‘This is an SEP,’ he said, ‘A siliplas extrusion plant. It is a very small kind for use aboard starships – our industrial SEPs are enormous, bigger than this ship, in factories which may cover many square kilometres. And this,’ he indicated the bigger machine next to it, ‘is a recycling unit, like a miniature refinery. Our siliplas refineries are almost all space plant – not a ship or a station but technology built to operate in space. A basic refinery for industrial use wo
uld be at least sixty times bigger than this ship. But this will do, to show you the principles of it.’ He saw the awed look coming back onto Bavore’s face, and smiled.

  ‘It really is very simple,’ he assured him. ‘If you can handle fluorocarbons, you can certainly understand this. And the operation of it, honestly, is so simple that a child could do it. It wouldn’t even have to be a clever child.’ A glance at Mako. ‘If you would do the honours…’

  ‘Hey!’ Mako protested, and then laughed as Davie quirked an eyebrow at him. ‘Fair enough,’ he conceded, and told Bavore, ‘I’m the last person on this ship anyone would ask to explain anything technical. But I will do my best.’

  He did just that, explaining the principles of how an SEP worked in terms that would have made any technician laugh themselves sick, and demonstrating the procedure for manufacturing one of the mugs they used on the interdeck.

  ‘You can see, there, that it says to make a mug will need forty eight grammes of gel, take 0.6 seconds and cost 8.6 nk of power.’ He pointed out this information on the SEP’s control screen. ‘I don’t really know what the nk stands for but it’s all right as long as the power consumption thing isn’t red – that green light there just tells you that there’s enough power in the system to make what you want. So we just touch here – do, go ahead, you can’t hurt anything.’ Within a second of Bavore’s tentative touch on the ‘go’ button, the delivery tray slid out, presenting the mug.

  Bavore didn’t believe it. He just stood there looking extremely dubious.

  ‘That was not in there already?’ He queried.

  ‘No, I promise!’ Mako laughed, and seeing that the Samartian wasn’t convinced, ‘Look, I’ll show you. We’ll make a holo-mug, okay? Here, let’s have a picture of the two of us, together.’ He posed next to Bavore, asking Davie to take the holo of them doing ‘the finger-touch thing’. Bavore complied, looking acutely self-conscious, then watched with slightly suspicious interest as Mako went back to the control panel.

  ‘You can put holos on things really easily,’ he said, calling up the same mug design and demonstrating. ‘You just upload the holo, wrap it around, you can do all sorts with it but we’ll just leave it as-is. See, same amount of gel but this is a 1.2 second make and the power is nearly twice as much. I think that’s because holos need a lot of layers to get the 3D and it takes longer to do it all, pixel by pixel. But the power light is still green so no problem, just touch the start button again…’ the briefest of pauses, and a triumphant grin, ‘And there you are. One mug with us on it.’

  He handed the mug to Bavore, who turned it in his hands, looking at Mako like someone trying to figure out how a magician had carried out a trick.

  ‘We use this mostly to make stuff for the interdeck,’ Mako said. ‘Mugs, plates, cutlery. There’s other SEPs in the artificer workshop they use to make parts for the ship, but this is like, a commercial one. And this is the good bit – starships don’t normally have one of these, see,’ he indicated the recycler, ‘this is new, Davie lent it to us. Usually when you’re done with siliplas you have to send it to a refinery to be recycled, which means having to keep it as trash till you get into port, but this does it for us. See... you put the stuff you’ve finished with into this hopper, here – it can’t be anything too big, of course, but this is only used for small stuff.’

  He put the plain mug he’d made into the hopper, closed it, and fastened the seal. ‘That’s a safety thing, it won’t work unless you lock the hopper. There’s a load of technical stuff on this panel but it’s not important – as long as this light’s green it’s okay, you just press go. The siliplas gets shredded and drops through into like an oven, here, which heats it up till it melts, and I think the colour gets taken out then, or it might be a bit later. Anyway it goes through a lot of tubes inside and gets heated up and cooled and there’s forcefields and they push electricity through it to make all the atoms line up how they want – oh, something like that, anyway, they do a lot of stuff to it and after about ten minutes it will go back to being gel, which fills up a cartridge you can use in the SEP, see? Round and round, make and recycle, you can use the same gel thousands of times. And you can make it as soft or as hard as you like. We use siliplas for just about everything in the League. You can use it for fabrics or for all kinds of plastics, soft and hard, right up to nearly as hard as steel, so we use it for everything from clothes to materials for building, food packaging, furniture, appliances, toys, just about anything, really. And it’s cheap – really cheap. On our worlds, siliplas is like, the cheapest thing around, so if we want high status stuff we buy, like, woven fabrics or things made from metal. The very highest status stuff, the most expensive, is made from natural materials like wood, or glass.’

  Davie saw the look dawning on Bavore’s face, and smiled.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, and indicated the door, hospitably. ‘Let’s go somewhere we can talk.’

  He took them to the cabin which had been fitted out for Samartian use, thinking that Bavore might feel more comfortable there, in a smaller enclosed space and with mats to sit on. It was unlikely, though, whether Bavore would have noticed even if Davie had led him into a cathedral. He kept turning the mug Mako had given him around in his hands, staring at it, and when Mako told him that he could keep it he got so excited that he squeaked.

  ‘May I, Mother?’ He asked Bennet, who’d been very quiet and rather expressionless while watching the demonstration. She smiled then, though, giving a nod, at which Bavore clutched the mug as if it was an olympic trophy. ‘Thank you,’ he said, first to her, and then to Mako and Davie. ‘Thank you!’

  Within a very few minutes, he and Davie were deep in chemical formulae and processes. They had lost Mako almost instantly – he vaguely recognised the term ‘covalent bond’ but he couldn’t even have begun to explain it, and most of the things they were talking about made no sense to him in any language.

  It didn’t make any more sense to Bennet, either, come to that, but the two of them sat quietly, watching as Davie convinced Bavore that it was, contrary to received scientific opinion on Samart, entirely possible to polymerise silicate.

  When they left, Bavore still clutching his mug, Davie gave Mako a crushing hug and kissed him on the forehead.

  ‘Way to go, kid!’ he said.

  Mako attempted to remember that he was a senior League Prisons Inspector on special assignment to liaison with the Fourth, and should, therefore, conduct himself with appropriate professional dignity. But as the comms opened back up and he heard the laughter and applause from round the ship, he just gave up, spluttered a laughing ‘Gerroff!’ and was left there, chuckling, as Davie gave him a grin and vanished up the nearest hatchway.

  Dakaelin Jurore and Tell were back aboard the ship next morning, keen to negotiate a deal on the siliplas. They had actually requested a meeting for what would have been shortly after four in the morning, shipboard time, but Buzz, on Davie’s advice, asked if they could make it a couple of hours later.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Buzz was doubtful – the relationship was so important to them, it felt wrong to be refusing any request for a meeting, and risky, too, potentially damaging if the Samartians felt that they were being dismissive.

  ‘Totally,’ Davie said, and met Buzz’s searching look with a steady, professional gaze.

  He and Buzz were not friends. They got along just fine but there were limits, in that, tacitly understood by them, and clear to everyone else, too. Buzz had never once called Davie ‘dear boy’, nor had he put so much as a paternal hand on his shoulder. Davie, for his part, called him ‘Mr B’ or ‘Commander’ and never teased or bantered with him. A shrewd observer might have noted that there was just a trace of rivalry in that, at least on Davie’s side. Right back when he’d first made friends with Alex, Davie had joked, ‘Consider me your sidekick.’ And for whatever reason, he had never quite got past a guarded courtesy with the man who actually held that role.

  ‘And what reason do we give
them?’ Buzz asked, with real concern. Alex was currently having his six hour sleep, as insisted on by Simon. Buzz could wake him if there was an emergency, but for nothing less, Simon had said, than a Marfikian attack.

  ‘The truth,’ Davie said.

  ‘But isn’t that status-lowering, showing weakness?’ Buzz queried.

  ‘It would have been, early on,’ Davie said. ‘But we’re trying to move past the posturing stage, now. Sooner or later, we are going to have to admit to human limits, they can’t expect an ambassador to be available for them on demand at all times, there has to be an understanding of reasonable expectation. I believe the time is right, that it would be beneficial, healthy, to set some boundaries.’

  It took a few minutes, but he did eventually persuade Buzz to reply to the Samartians with an explanation that Captain von Strada was on a mandatory rest break at the moment and could not be disturbed, so they could offer either Buzz in his place or a meeting at a later time.

  Perhaps a little unflatteringly, the answer came back immediately; they would wait and meet with the captain.

  The first thing Alex did, once they were settled in the conference room, was to apologise for having kept them waiting.

  ‘There are rules about how long we are allowed to function without sleep,’ he explained, ‘regardless of how important what we are doing may be.’

  The Samartians accepted that, and Jurore commented, revealingly, that it was reassuring to find that they did need to sleep. It was apparent, though, that they were keen to get to the purpose of this meeting, and got straight to it. They wanted to know what the Revellin wanted in return for the siliplas technology.

  ‘In return for what we have already shared, nothing,’ Davie said. With the formulae he had given Bavore, and the sample plastic he had taken with him, the Samartians actually had enough information to figure out siliplas manufacture for themselves. It would take them many years of R&D to bring it even to prototype production, though. ‘That is information freely given, freely available on all the worlds we know – you could look it up on any system datanet. What we can offer, for research and development, is the SEP and recycling plant which we showed Citizen Bavore, yesterday, together with a supply of two hundred kilos of base gel. We will exchange this for the nanotech package.’