Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4)

by S J MacDonald

  They got to see that at the same time the Fourth did. Fascination with watching the aliens was at such fever pitch that the dakaelin were obliged to put out a request on the media, asking people on the night-side of the planet to turn off lights and all unnecessary appliances, as the burden on their global power grid was unprecedented.

  In the dome, however, they were oblivious to that. The first pictures that went out showed them still busy setting up, though Tina called everyone over as the link went live.

  Misha did the official greeting, with due gravitas, but it was Jermane who set the tone – while Misha looked authoritative and Murg looked solemn, Jermane Taerling was beaming all over his face, giving the camera a happy wave and ‘Hi, hello!’

  Jace Higgs’s friendly grin and ‘How do?’ went down a storm, too – both he and Tina were already familiar faces to the Samartians, from previous reportage of Tina’s visit to their contact ship and Jace’s role as pilot, bringing people back and forth. For some unaccountable reason, Jace’s casual ‘How do?’ had caught the public fancy. One of their top entertainers had made a joke about it and it had swept the planet as a comedy catchphrase. Seeing him actually there, in their system, saying it, thrilled and delighted the Samartians in about equal measure.

  ‘This is just extraordinary,’ Buzz marvelled, seeing from the coverage the Samartians were sending them that pretty much the whole planet was glued to holovisions, either at home or gathered in public places to watch on giant screens. The mood was very definitely celebratory, with quite a lot of crowds wearing weird ‘alien’ make-up and waving home-made banners with a welcome from whatever their city or town was called. There were official banners, too, distributed by the Dakaelin and prominently featured in the coverage, announcing We no longer stand alone!

  ‘If this was happening on a League world,’ Buzz observed, ‘we’d be looking at pandemonium, right now – supermarkets being looted, cities in gridlock, riots breaking out. And these people have far far more reason than our own worlds to be afraid of aliens – just incredible, that they’ve gone from ‘all aliens are hostile invaders’ to ‘Hicksburg welcomes the Revellin’ in just a couple of months.’

  ‘We can learn a lot from them about information management, that’s for sure,’ Alex said. ‘Though it’s different, of course, on our worlds – no way to hide an alien ship turning up on our scopes. Not even the most ferocious media slap-down would prevent that getting out by word of mouth. The authorities here have total control over what the public gets to see and hear about.’

  Buzz gave him a teasing look.

  ‘You sound as if you approve,’ he observed, and chuckled as Alex gave him a speaking look.

  ‘I am, of course,’ Alex said, much on his dignity, ‘one hundred per cent committed to the principle of a free media, and I have every respect for the independent challenging role they play in our society.’

  Buzz grinned, but said no more, seeing that Misha Tregennis was about to speak to them, chivvying everyone back to work and then looking into camera with the manner of an officer making a report.

  ‘All green, and as per schedule, skipper,’ she said, and Alex smiled, though he had already been able to see that for himself.

  It took them just under two hours to finish setting up the dome, organising all the supplies within it, and to load up the supplies the Samartians had left on the lunar surface. Only when they had done all that did the two parties separate, with handshakes all round and several hugs. Tina, Martins and Jace headed back to the shuttle. Then they took off, with no more ceremony than a flash of salute, and headed away leaving Misha, Jermane and Murg in sole possession of their castaway base.

  Twenty Eight

  Eleven days later, the Heron carried out another salute to Samart, and departed.

  It felt like wrenching themselves away – not just from the people they were leaving behind but from Samart, too. Everything they had been working for ever since Alex had opened their orders on departure from Therik, felt as if it was coming to an end.

  Of course they knew it wasn’t. They were still deep within Marfikian-controlled space and had a difficult navigation through nebula to accomplish before they would even be safely back across League borders. They had a great deal of work to do, too, finessing the translation matrix and writing up analyses of the masses of information the Samartians had provided.

  And they had the Samartian delegates aboard, too, with a great deal that could be learned from them during the journey, as well as a great deal that needed to be done to prepare them for arrival on Chartsey.

  All the same, it felt like the end of something wonderful. Even Alex gazed at the scopes with regret. He knew they couldn’t stay any longer. They had achieved everything his orders had authorised him to attempt, and had gone as far as the Samartians were prepared to go, too, at this first stage of the relationship. There was nothing to do, now, but head home. And they were cutting it fine on supplies, as it was. They were already down to a very restricted choice of prepack meals, all the least popular options which got left until last, and they would certainly need to go onto emergency rations before they met up with the Stepeasy.

  After that one longing look back, though, Alex turned his attention to checking on their passengers. This had to be an overwhelming moment for them, after all, as the first of their people to leave the vicinity of their system in thousands of years.

  The eleven days they’d spent aboard had not been without problems. For the Fourth, perhaps the stickiest moment had been when Rangi had taken them to meet Lucky. Their interested response of, ‘How do you cook it?’ had given Rangi palpitations.

  They had come to understand that this was in fact an entirely reasonable question from the Samartians’ point of view. They had no concept of domestic pets, only of domesticated animals kept for food, and they were appalled at the very idea of keeping an animal which would consume rationed food and take up valuable resources for no reason beyond the pleasure of its company. The Fourth was fairly sure that they’d managed to get the concept across, but all the same, Rangi had installed an extra lock on the gecko’s habitat door, just in case the Samartians decided that they fancied a snack.

  For the Samartians themselves, the stickiest issue had undoubtedly been that of personal hygiene.

  Their quarters had been organised as a self-contained unit within the exosuite. They had a shared working space and two separate sleeping cabins, each provided with the usual lavatory/shower. They had had to be taught how to use these, something that had turned out to be rather more challenging than expected as the whole idea of taking a shower was entirely new to them. They didn’t wash in water, even in areas of the planet which had an abundance of fresh water resources. It was something they considered to be wasteful, either of water, the power used in heating it or the space such a device would take up in their tiny apartments. At any rate, they used what they called bio-wipes, chemically impregnated tissues which were issued as part of their rations. Standard practice aboard ship was for one whole-body wipe each day. Groundside, they might use two.

  They had had to be told, however, that this would not be acceptable if they wanted to move out of biohazard containment. Irrespective of the social issues, the biowipe simply didn’t meet the standards of hygiene necessary to keep themselves safe outside their quarantined quarters. It was also the case that the biowipes they used set off shipboard alerts, as they were alcohol-based and with several other volatile chemicals detected by the ship’s sensors as airborne contaminants.

  They had, therefore, not only to be shown how to use the showers but asked to get used to using them, too, as people did aboard ship, routinely, at least five or six times a day.

  This would not have been a problem if they liked taking showers, but as it turned out, they didn’t. The kind of flash-shower everyone took after using the lavatory was a particular issue – it took just five seconds and was considered absolutely basic, essential personal cleanliness. For the Samartians, i
t was such an issue that they were hanging on till they were absolutely desperate for the lavatory, bracing themselves to face the ordeal.

  It was a couple of days before they admitted to that, though, as they were determined not to complain about anything. It was Murg who spotted that there was an issue with toileting, and Rangi who sorted it out for them.

  As it turned out, after some very sensitive discussion, it was the sheer speed of the flash shower which was causing them distress. It was a rapid blast, dry and puff of deodorant spacers were so used to that to them it was as routine as washing their hands. For the Samartians, though, it felt like an assault, something they had to grit their teeth through and endure.

  That understood, Rangi had adjusted the shower to be very much slower and more gentle.

  Other than that, the problems had mostly been minor ones of cross-cultural confusion, readily resolved with goodwill on both sides.

  There had always, though, until now, been the safety net of knowing that if they changed their minds they could leave the ship at any time.

  Now they were on their way, the Samartians were entirely cut off from their homeworld, their people, from everything they knew. It would have been surprising, even worrying, if they weren’t finding that a major event.

  Alex could see, though, that they were being well taken care of. Each of them had been provided with an ‘oppo’ in the humane Fleet tradition. Dakael Sennet’s was Martine Fishe, while Caldai Genave’s was Jonas Sartin. For the civilians, Teabreak Li was mentoring Dr Jebrin, while Tina looked after Citizen Cerale. Their oppos were all with them then, supporting them through the departure.

  Over the next few days, though, it became apparent that Mako Ireson was going to be front and centre in building that relationship.

  As had been agreed with the Samartians, the area outside the self-contained exosuite had been restored to its function as a lounge. To begin with, everyone who went in there was required to be in survival suits, but that requirement was dropped once Rangi had confirmed that the Samartians were no longer at any risk of infection from any pathogen they might have aboard.

  He had not needed to provide them with the same kind of artificial immune system which enabled Shion to live amongst them. The Samartians had very effective immune systems already. All that was needed, as Rangi and Simon had been confident about from the outset, was a full understanding of the dangers of previously unknown infections, both ways. It had not taken them long to achieve that, both from the medical data provided by the Samartians and from blood tests conducted on the visitors themselves. Rangi was able to provide them with medibands, lightweight devices worn on one ankle. They conducted continuous blood tests and had supplies of every necessary anti-pathogen for immediate delivery, as well as a datafeed to sickbay for medical monitoring. All four had accepted that, on Dr Jebrin’s own determination that it was both safe and necessary for them if they were to move beyond a state of quarantine.

  So, equipped with medibands, they took their first cautious steps outside quarantine – Sennet and Genave did that first, then, after they’d survived it, the others were allowed to join them.

  It was a very tentative step, to begin with – the interdeck lounge was maintained to clean-room standards and everyone who went in there either had to be in a survival suit or to have gone through full decontam procedures. As the Samartians gained confidence in the medibands, however, that level of decontam was dropped back gradually to normal shipboard standard.

  Nobody was more pleased about that than Mako. He spent much of his time in the interdeck lounge and going through full decontam every time he went in there was a miserably uncomfortable experience. Getting to the point where he could just walk into the lounge, sit down and have a coffee with the Samartians was as much of a pleasure, personally, as it was an achievement in the diplomatic process.

  The Samartians clearly liked and trusted Mako right from the outset. It might have been a factor that he was, without doubt, the least intimidating person on the ship – the archetypal civilian, boyishly thrilled by learning to cook when even civilians on Samart regarded the ability to cook as barely more demanding than the ability to walk. They might not understand what a pet was, still less a pet civilian, but they understood well enough that Mako was what they would call an innocent. That made him very easy to talk to, and it wasn’t long before they started to ask him about things that they felt a little awkward or embarrassed about raising with more senior members of the crew.

  That did put Mako front and centre, in key diplomacy role, but Alex told him not to stress about that, just be himself and talk to them openly and honestly about anything they wanted to discuss.

  That took him, on the day that they were approaching Chatterbox Ridge, to sitting in the lounge with them, talking about the Samartians’ relationship with nature. They had been aboard the ship for more than three weeks, their time, and had admitted that they were missing being able to go outdoors, seeing sky, being out, as they called it, ‘in the green.’

  ‘It’s something that’s so basic about who we are, it is a human right,’ Cerale said. ‘All our children are taught by their families and at school, to take care of themselves in the green. To be able to build a shelter, hunt and fish, to survive by your own skill, is so important to us that it is something you need to get – what would you call it? A high school certificate. It is basic citizenship, with us.’

  Mako chuckled. ‘We had to have nature trips at school,’ he recalled. ‘But they were just for a few hours to parks – there’s very little green on Chartsey and nothing you’d recognise as wilderness, for sure. It isn’t that way on other worlds – I remember my daughter coming home very excited after we’d moved to Therik, telling us about a camping trip that’s on the high school curriculum there. But even that is, you know, to a set-up campsite with everything they need, and a bonfire just for fun. We were worried at first about the idea of her sitting near a fire and breathing in the smoke, but they put a smoke-dome over it that cleans the smoke up, so we agreed to let her go. The kind of experience you have – surviving in the wild by hunting and building your own shelters and stuff – wouldn’t be allowed for kids on any of our worlds. Even for adults, it would be considered an extreme adventure activity.’

  That made them laugh, with an air of tolerant superiority.

  Within a couple of hours, though, the superiority was all on the other side.

  ‘Honestly, it’s fine,’ Mako assured them. ‘It’s just a patch of wave-space instability, like turbulence. We came through it just fine on the way out here, it’ll only take us about six hours to get back through.’

  They had been told that, already, by people far more qualified to explain it than Mako Ireson. It had come as quite a surprise to the Heron’s crew to discover that the Samartians didn’t have anything like the level of understanding of wave-space physics that they took for granted in a society which had such advanced superlight ships. The reason for that was that no Samartian ships ever went further than a few days from their own world, all their navigation within what the League would consider to be near-system space. That meant that they had never encountered dirty space – or if their early exploration ships might have done so, they had never returned to share the information. As far as the Samartians were concerned, therefore, wave space was a steady-state condition. It had been quite a leap of understanding for them, being told that it was actually energetic and in a state of flux with patches of such intense distortion that they bent time and space and dephased starship engines.

  It was another level of understanding again, a whole other level of experience, to actually be aboard a ship passing through the kind of turbulence the League defined as a Ridge.

  ‘But it’s…’ Dr Jebrin protested, actually holding on to the arms of his chair and looking around fearfully, ‘shaking the ship apart!’

  Mako gave a little hoot.

  ‘If you think this is bad,’ he said, ‘you wait till you go through launch!
’ Then as his brain caught up with what he’d said, and their bewildered looks, he asked, ‘Don’t your ships shake and judder during launch and deceleration?’

  No, they said, quite emphatically, they did not. Their ships had enough engine power to take launch and deceleration in one smooth graceful dash, just as shuttles did in the League. It was inconceivable to them to set out into space aboard a ship which couldn’t even decelerate or launch itself under its own power. As for doing so aboard ships so fragile that they practically shook themselves to pieces being shot through launch tunnels, there were just no words for how insane that was.

  ‘Well, I think our guys feel pretty much the same about some of the things on your ships,’ said Mako, philosophically. ‘Still, maybe if we can combine the speed and hull strength of your ships with the safety and systems we have aboard ours, we can come up with something really amazing, huh? But in the meantime, honest, trust me on this, this kind of Ridge is perfectly normal navigation in intersystem space. Even ships a lot smaller than ours would go through this, no problem.’

  He had to pause then as a particularly energetic thrum pulsed through the ship with teeth-chattering force. The Heron’s engines had a tendency to grumble during turbulence like this, and as the clatter of the vibration died down they could hear a mutter like a couple of hundred old ladies mumbling crossly to themselves. As the civilian Samartians looked alarmed and the military ones became stone-faced dignified, Mako chuckled.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said, ‘it’s good,’ and with the voice of experience, ‘I expect they’ll put some music on in a minute. Spacers think it helps to keep the engines calm.’

  The Samartians exchanged looks which held much communication, and Mako grinned. It would be a while, he knew, before they could get past the stage of seeing one another’s culture as bonkers, but with effort and goodwill on both sides, they would get there. And, as soothing music began to play loudly enough to drown out at least some of the more disturbing sounds, he saw their passengers relax a little, even if the engines didn’t.