Alex took the mug and drank a little. It was almost too hot for comfort, just the way he liked that first invigorating sip. But he put it down on the grav-safe ring to leave it for a minute or two. Marny whisked away, taking orders for drinks from the rest of those at the command table as he went.
‘Word,’ said Shion and Alex glanced over as the command deck crew settled into a comfortable hum.
‘Hah.’ Davie looked at the compilation screen on which Shion had displayed the word she’d found in the Gide Disclosure. It was ‘sepal’ and she’d already tagged it with all its potential meanings.
This was an achievement. The Gider had, now, thankfully, stopped flooding the Embassy III mission ship with yottabytes of data every time they came to visit – and they might turn up for visits several times a day. The data they had already given was so vast that it was estimated as at least twice as big as the combined university libraries of the entire League.
And none of it was readable. The Gider’s data handling systems were incompatible with the League’s and they apparently didn’t know how to make them so, either, saying breezily that the humans would have to figure that out themselves.
They were doing so, with universities and research teams across the League working on it as a code-breaking problem. The Fleet had several teams working on it, too, of which the Fourth was just one. But it was agonisingly slow. The task had been compared to attempting to put together a jigsaw puzzle when there was an entire solar system full of tiny pieces and you had no idea at all what the billions of pictures they formed might be. Even the best algorithms they could come up with to sort through the code on the biggest capacity computers they had might hunt for a week before finding two bits which matched one another. And that in itself would be only a fragment. The figure on the compilation screen indicated that ‘sepal’ had been compiled in six hundred and four bits.
Davie hitched forward a little in his seat, flicked open a fourth research screen and picked up the pace. Game on.
Alex smiled and was just wondering whether Buzz might like to have a game of triplink when it happened.
TA-rah, ta ra RAAAA!
The fanfare blazed like twenty trumpets letting rip and in the same moment the command deck was filled with dazzling light.
A figure had appeared in the small open space between the Astrogation and Ops tables and the training table beyond.
It was very tall – hard to judge exactly, since it was surrounded by a constantly shifting light, but easily more than two metres thirty. It was humanoid, but the face was strange – what could be seen of it against the blinding glare. It didn’t look real – just too perfect. There was, as before, no sense of gender. There was, disturbingly, no sense of presence, either, none of the instinctive awareness of another living being. This was a projection, Alex knew, some kind of holoprojection way beyond their own technical ability and with no ship visible that it might be coming from, just as before.
‘Alex!’ the figure hailed him cheerfully. And, just as before, Alex could see that nobody else was taking the slightest bit of notice. Nobody else was seeing this, hearing this.
But they had practiced for this. They had planned and practiced for every eventuality they’d been able to come up with, over and over again until the Chethari Appearance alert was as routine as a fire drill.
Alex stood up and as he did so, touched the screen which turned all the lights on the command deck to their maximum brightness.
Silence fell at once, all eyes on him, nobody moving. Out of the corner of his eye, Alex could see Marny Marner standing, comically frozen, with the tray of teas and coffees he’d been bringing for the others. It was as if everyone on the command deck was playing musical statues.
‘I…’ Alex started to give the first contact greeting as scripted for the occasion by the Diplomatic Corps, but broke off as he saw that the figure was already speaking.
‘Thanks for coming.’ The voice was loud but musical, with a resonance no human throat could produce. Alex guessed this must be the same person who’d appeared before, introducing themselves on the first occasion as Trilopharus. They were certainly speaking to Alex as if they already knew one another. And speaking fluent, colloquial Standard, too. ‘Would this be a good time for a chat?’ they enquired.
‘Yes,’ Alex said, managing to speak calmly and not shout with exuberant joy, ‘of course…’
‘Great!’ said Trilopharus. And everything went black.
Two
That’s odd, Alex thought. I’m sure I was in the middle of…
He was confused. He was, for some reason that made no sense at all, sleeping on the command deck. His head was sideways on the console, with a slightly stiff feeling. He was blinking, finding it difficult to process the colours and shapes in slightly blurred vision.
Buzz, he recognised. That’s Buzz, waking up too.
But he couldn’t understand. This wasn’t the Heron. They weren’t at the Firewall. And something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.
He lifted his head, fighting to get his brain to work, to think. And saw his coffee.
It was still there, right where he’d put it a minute before. But there was a circle of oily pallor on the top of it, the scum that formed from marin essence if the coffee went cold.
Cold, he thought. My coffee has gone cold. In that moment it seemed like the most profound of discoveries, as if some active part of his brain was telling him that this was important.
But then someone swore – a high pitched, terrified oath which jerked Alex’s attention away.
He sat up. When he reviewed the log footage afterwards he was amazed to see how quickly he did that and how alert he seemed after just a couple of seconds. At the time, it felt as if he was moving incredibly slowly, with so much impacting on him all at once that he couldn’t even begin to make sense of it. Even afterwards, he couldn’t figure out how he’d worked things out or in what order. But slowly, some realisations emerged from the sensory chaos.
He was on the command deck. Not the Heron, but the Venturi. Everyone else there had been out too and he could see them starting to come around, dazed and bewildered just as he was. And that was familiar. Yes, that was familiar. The moment of disorientation after a Turnaround.
They’d been hit by a Turnaround, Alex knew that. He didn’t know how or why or what else was going on, but some part of him recognised this sequence of events. He ought to, after all. He’d spent weeks on the Heron, flinging his ship at the Firewall in the hope that doing so would trigger a signal the Gider would pick up. Every time, he and everyone aboard had been rendered unconscious while the ship was rotated an instantaneous, impossible hundred and eighty degrees, turning them away from the barrier. Neither ship nor crew had suffered any harm from that. They’d got so used to it, in fact, that they’d pick up conversations right where they’d left off.
But this was different. They had not been expecting it.
Turnaround, though. At least he had some inkling now what had happened.
Then he saw the time. His brain was so foggy it could hardly cope with the simplest computation, but the chronometer on the command console appeared to be telling him that it was 1482. Which meant, if he was figuring it out right, that they’d been out for more than an hour and a half.
Turnarounds lasted seconds, normally. The longest Alex and his crew had experienced at the border with Gide had been three minutes. An hour and a half? No wonder he felt stiff and dizzy.
‘Everyone all right?’ The words came out automatically. He could see that everyone was picking themselves up now, Marny Marner climbing to his feet from where he’d been lying next to the dropped tray of drinks. Trilopharus had gone, he realised. And there was something else… something that his spacer instincts had been screaming about even before he was fully awake.
The engines weren’t working. The ship felt eerily still and the acoustics were those of a ship in sublight parking orbit. It was subtle, but obvious to any spacer, the
change in acoustics when you took the faint but pervasive threnody of engine noise away. Had the ship been decelerated?
Alex looked at conn screens, but could make nothing of them. The readings were haywire, meaningless. According to them, for a start, the ship was in freefall – artificial gravity was off. But if anything, it was set higher than it should be.
We’re in trouble, Alex thought. We are in serious trouble.
He was not the only one coming to that realisation. More voices were rising, swearing, asking what was going on. That would be happening all over the ship. And if he didn’t do something right now, there was going to be panic.
Action stations. That was the thing. Get everyone in suits, get them focussed, get started on damage control.
He was still forming the intention of putting his hand on the action stations alert when it went off anyway – Eldovan, he realised, later. It had been her first clear thought.
And it worked. Spacers responded to that alert with an instinct which overrode everything. And in the Fourth, they trained for this so intensively that the crew could come to action stations in 1.86 minutes or less, regardless of fires, blowouts, explosions, equipment failure and every other impediment drills could throw at them.
It was slower than that today, but Alex didn’t hold that against them. They were groggy and scared and nothing made sense. The ship had taken massive damage, must have, there were so many things which weren’t working or were giving completely impossible readings, but the damage control systems were refusing to diagnose any problems beyond an inability to open the hangar bay doors.
Alex, though, was looking at Silvie. Incredibly, she was still pottering in her garden as if nothing had happened. She didn’t even take any notice of the action stations alert. She was at her station already, safe on the aquadeck.
All the same, Alex sent her a message: Please stay there. He didn’t want her walking out into the emotional blitz that was kicking off through the rest of the ship. For answer, Silvie raised her bio-pot tray at the camera, indicating that she had every intention of staying there, finishing the job of collecting the polyps. Apparently, she had no idea that anything unusual had happened.
Clamour was rising everywhere, though, as people tried to report all the things that weren’t making sense. Of these, the voice from engineering was the most strident, yelling at the command deck.
‘Engines are down! Engines down! Repeat, all engines down! We are sublight! All engines…’
‘All right.’ Alex worked controls and the clamour died away as comm screens across the ship showed the commodore addressing them. ‘Attention on deck.’ The familiar order, requiring not physical attention but quiet attentiveness, would help to calm people in itself. ‘We are,’ said Alex, ‘in a perplexing situation, but shouting about it isn’t going to help. We have evidently been through a prolonged Turnaround incident, which is disorienting, but no casualties are reported. Clearly, we have technical issues but the ship is structurally intact with no fires, blowout or visible damage.’ He could see the reports coming in from all around the ship and a pattern was starting to emerge.
Other than the gravity, which appeared to be stuck on 1.2 gee, it was the hull systems which were haywire. None of the scopes at the bottom of the ship were giving any readings at all. Others were giving ludicrous impossibilities, like reading a hull temperature of 24 degrees Celsius. Heatscan had them docked on to an enormous mass but visuals were just a near-black blur with scatterings of lighter pixels. Astrogation screens showed them on a sublight ellipse, travelling at 24132 klicks per hour, but spinning, too, on a tight arc, at 872 kph. Attempts to correct this with thrusters were having no effect.
‘So – let’s get to work,’ Alex said. ‘Full diagnostics.’
It was Davie who worked it out first. He had worked it out, in fact, while Alex was speaking, but waited till he’d ended his address to the crew. And then, politely, raised his hand as was customary at briefings when you wanted to speak. Alex, though, was busy with Eldovan, trying to figure out the reports as they came in.
‘Ah hem,’ Davie said and pitched that so expertly that Alex glanced around, saw his lifted hand and raised an eyebrow. ‘We are,’ Davie said, ‘on a planet.’
Alex stared at him. The words don’t be daft and a rebuking this is no time for jokes were rising to his lips but went unspoken as he saw that Davie was serious.
‘Lookit,’ said Davie and kicked a foot down to indicate the gravity plates under the decking. ‘Gravity is off,’ he said. ‘There is no power to it. And yet…’ he had a pen in his hand, let it go above the table and picked it up again when it had dropped. ‘We are on an orbital vector with planetary rotation,’ he said. ‘We can’t open hangar bay doors because the ship is sitting on them. We are, in fact, on a planet.’
‘It isn’t possible,’ said Alex, as everyone else around went very quiet, staring at Davie. ‘It isn’t possible for a ship this size to land.’
‘I know,’ said Davie, with rather studied patience – he did, after all, own the shipyard which had built this ship, so he knew as well as Alex what it could and couldn’t do. ‘But we are,’ he said, seeing that he really did have to say it again before they’d start to grasp the reality that was so very obvious to him, ‘on a planet.’
‘Uh…’ said Alex.
‘Trust me on this,’ said Davie. ‘I have three hundred and forty two points with which I could convince you, but just trust me, okay? Or go stick your head out an airlock and take a look for yourself. We are on a planet.’
Alex looked back at the data and saw… yes. A hundred things which made no sense at all if you were thinking the ship was in space were perfectly sensible if you could get your head past the enormous leap of imagination to visualise it being on the ground. If this was a shuttle parked on a planet with systems ticking over, those were just the kind of readings that you’d get. But this wasn’t a shuttle. It was a ten deck destroyer.
Oh, he thought and had a sudden, striking memory of the encounter bubble the Gider had created as a safe place for them to meet. It had engulfed their shuttle. And since the Gider had insufficient understanding of human tech to understand that it might be a problem, they had landed their shuttle upside down. That bubble had been big enough to enclose the ship.
Trilopharus. The Chethari. They had used a bubble or something like it to bring them to a planet and landed their ship. Impossible. Insane. But that was what they’d done. Alex was as sure of it now as Davie was. And he could only hope that they could – and would – get them safely back into space.
‘I think,’ Alex said, ‘we’d better pop a recon shuttle…’
He looked at Shion and as she started to get up, held a hand up quickly to prevent her. ‘No!’ he said and as she looked as if she might protest, ‘Nobody leaves the ship!’
Understanding dawned. If anyone was out there and the Chethari took the ship away in another Turnaround, that person might find themselves stranded.
‘RP,’ she confirmed. ‘On six.’
Shuttle six was equipped for planetary surveys, with ground-penetrating geology scans and some hot-tech bio-sensors they were trialling for the Second.
Alex nodded and Shion left the command deck, walking fast. She could have remote piloted the shuttle from here, but Alex knew she would prefer to do it from a simulator, handling it just as if she was aboard.
‘Mind the trees!’ Davie called after her, as Shion departed. She didn’t respond, but everyone else stared at Davie again. ‘Trees,’ he insisted and gestured with his hand, indicating height above his head. ‘Big trees. That’s why we can’t see sideways. And the stuff above us, I believe, is cloud.’
Alex nodded. He didn’t ask how Davie had worked that out. Instead, he turned to Eldovan. ‘Perhaps we could try…’
But she was already ahead of him. She had understood that if they were on a planet then the scanners set to be looking at maximum range were just not going to focus on anything closer than a co
uple of million klicks away. So she was pulling in the range on the visual scopes, dragging the scale down from millions, to thousands, to tens and down into metres.
‘Well, I’ll…’ she started, as a skyline began to emerge, with dark rounded masses against a lighter sky.
TA-rah, ta ra RAAAA!
‘Hi Alex!’ Trilopharus popped back right where they’d been before. But with spectacular difference, this time. This time, there were yelps and swearing and a mad scramble amongst those sitting at the tables.
Aha, Alex recognised. Other people can see them now, too. He felt quite ridiculously pleased about that, though he would only work out why, later. The result, though, was immensely frustrating.
‘Oh, sorry!’ Trilopharus saw the panic and raised a hand cheerfully to Alex. ‘Not a good time!’ they observed, ‘give me a shout when you’re ready!’
‘Wait!’ Alex cried out, but it was too late. Trilopharus was gone again. Though not, this time, with the flash of electrostatic discharge which had accompanied their departure in previous visits.
Alex had leapt to his feet and stood there for a moment, hands on the console, head down, composing himself. He was fighting back an impulse to shout with rage at the idiots who’d driven Trilopharus away again. That would not, he knew, be fair. Not at all. When a figure like that appeared so close that folds and swirls of light were moving around you, you’d be an idiot not to jump to your feet and move yourself to a safe distance. He was annoyed with the situation, with Trilopharus for vanishing again when Alex needed to talk to them, even with himself for not having realised what would happen.
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