‘May I ask Agent Mister a question?’ The Samartian officer said and without waiting for more of a response than Alex’s look of assent, turned to address him directly. ‘If it was down to you, the LIA,’ she said, ‘Would you have taken me, or my colleagues, to one of your hot interrogation facilities?’
She could see the answer on his face, even as he made an attempt to deny it. It was as if all his usual poker-face cover skills had been stripped away by Silvie’s exposure.
‘Ah,’ said Bennet and having considered that dispassionately, ‘I don’t think I like you very much, either.’
‘All right, thank you.’ Alex was trying not to grin, then, his anger at Mister upsetting Silvie fading out as he saw the man flinch. Lots of the others there were nodding and muttering agreement with Silvie and Bennet’s judgement, too.
‘In the interests of…’ The LIA man began, hardening his manner and his tone.
‘Thank you,’ Alex repeated, in a tone which shut that down. ‘I believe,’ he observed, ‘that we have gone somewhat off-topic.’ He looked back at Silvie, now dry eyed again and bouncing back, as quarians did so rapidly even from the most profound grief or anger.
‘Sorry.’ Silvie picked up the subtlety of his feelings – the overriding concern for her, but that particular kind of patience which she recognised meant that she was being disruptive. ‘I’m going for a swim,’ she said and with a quick smile to assure him that she was fine, she went out.
‘So,’ said Alex, once the door had closed. ‘Returning to the topic in hand – as I was saying,’ he fixed the LIA man in a glacial stare, ‘I do not believe there are any grounds to suspect that the barrier is there for any other reason than for our or the Chethari’s safety. So…’ he broke off again as he saw that another hand was raised and this time, it was Shion’s.
‘Contribution, skipper,’ she said, as he looked at her enquiringly and at his nod, ‘I believe,’ she said, in her usual calm, matter of fact tones, ‘that what we’ve found here may be the same kind of tech we discovered at Alar.’
‘Oh.’ Alex said and as the implications of that sank in. ‘Oh.’
‘Hmmn.’ Shion smiled slightly. ‘I believe,’ she said, ‘that this may be what it looks like, when functional, from the inside.’
‘Ah,’ Alex said.
‘And I would like,’ she said, ‘with your permission, skipper, to explain that.’ She indicated the group, most of whom were trying not to be too obviously mystified.
‘You’re sure?’ Alex was surprised, since Shion had only confided in him under conditions of absolute secrecy.
‘Yes, I’m sure,’ she said. ‘If we are to ask about this – and I do think we should – then it is something that should be discussed openly. And I have felt for some time that it was something I would be willing to share when the time was right.’
‘Very well,’ Alex agreed. If Shion had come to that decision, he knew, it would only have been through giving it a tremendous amount of thought and reflection. ‘Do…’ he gestured for her to take over and sat down, himself.
‘Thanks.’ Shion gathered them with a brief smile. ‘I’m sure you all know,’ she said, ‘But just to recap – the Fourth was asked to address issues of spacers refusing to take their cargo to Novamas and one of the factors we identified in that was the refusal of the authorities there to take spacer concerns seriously. Their own investigations into alleged incidents of ships experiencing strong vibrations and unnerving noises whilst in orbit there had not found any scientific cause, so it was dismissed as a combination of spacer superstition and hoaxing. In the light of our knowledge that Novamas had once been the home of an ancient race called the Alari, though and with information I was able to share, we worked out that there was a remnant of ancient tech there, a quarantine barrier which had once extended far around the system but was now so weak that it was only emitting occasional and tiny pulses. Since there is no way that we could access that tech, we got the Novamas authorities to let us reorganise the system so that ships were kept out of the influenced zone and there haven’t been any problems with it since. And you can, I am sure, put that together for yourselves with what’s known about my own world – the barrier that vibrates ships attempting to approach us with increasing force until they have to turn around. The Veil, yes,’ she nodded, as someone murmured that.
Pirrell, also known as the Veiled World, had defied every attempt to get through to the system. They didn’t respond to any kind of signals either and probes were destroyed before they could get anywhere close. The only knowledge people had of it were two or three semi-mythical appearances of Pirrellothians on other worlds, way back in history. ‘And this,’ she said, ‘is what the Veil looks like from the inside – a Turnaround barrier.’
She looked around at their enthralled expressions and saw the hope rising.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It is no good asking me how it works. No good asking any of my people that. We destroyed all our knowledge of such technology a very long time ago.’ She gave an apologetic look to those who made little anguished noises at that. ‘I know. Inconceivable to you. But that is the decision that was made at the time of the Falling, that our people would give up all the high powered tech we relied on at the time, adopting a way of life which would be sustainable for the survival genome we ourselves had created. We – the ancient species of karee– fully expected to die out ourselves, you see. But our quarantine held and we have lived together ever since, old and new genomes, sharing our world. We live a very simple, low-tech lifestyle, nothing more sophisticated than hydrogen engines.’
‘You really don’t know how it works?’ That was Bennet, quietly amazed.
‘No, none of us do.’ Shion affirmed. ‘When it stops working, which we know it will do one day, our world will be as vulnerable as any other. More so, as even the slightest infection will wipe my people out. And even if we wanted for some reason to access it and try to figure out how it works, we can’t, we’ve lost the technology that would have made that possible. Because, as I told the skipper in confidence when we were at Alar, you can’t access that tech because of where it is located. It isn’t, as we allowed people to believe, buried deep within Alar.’ She called up the chart Eldovan had been using and drew their attention to the fact that the sphere was centred on the larger of the stars. ‘It’s there,’ she said. ‘Inside the star. And we don’t have any tech, do we, any of us, that can get past the corona?’
Regretful acknowledgement of that.
‘Duralloy,’ Davie observed, ‘melts.’
‘But your people have left Pirrell in the past, haven’t they?’ Eldovan asked, curiously.
‘Very occasionally,’ Shion agreed. ‘Solaran ships can come and go freely and have been doing so for some time – way before they made contact with you, yes, they’ve been visiting us for a couple of thousand years. So when I decided to leave I was able to get a lift aboard one of their ships which was going over to the Amity X-Base. But you’re right, I am not the first of my people to leave Pirrell. It’s very rare, but it has happened. The last time anyone left was three and a half thousand years ago.’
Davie was looking at her with keen attention and perhaps with a little hurt, too. It had been Davie who’d gone racing to the Amity X-Base to help Shion when she arrived and his suggestion, even, that she might like to serve with the Fourth. He would understand if she’d been keeping secrets from him in order to protect her world, but some part of him would still feel that she could have trusted him. ‘Are you saying you have a ship,’ he asked, ‘like the Guardian?’
‘No.’ Shion looked amused, but a little reproving, too. ‘Don’t you think I’d have said at Carrearranis if I’d seen anything like that before? I tell you everything I can, Davie, anything that might be helpful. And this, until today, hasn’t been something I felt would be at all helpful to tell you about. Utterly pointless, in fact. But here,’ she said, ‘we are, inside what looks very much like a Veil and I’d be wrong not to share
everything I can with you, as little as that is. So if this is the same system, then it is possible that there may also be the same means of exit. Which is, very simply, to go through it very, very slowly. And I don’t just mean getting past the initial barrier, you have to do the whole thing sublight. Less than one tenth light speed, in fact.’
‘That would take years,’ Davie said.
‘Uh huh.’ Shion confirmed. ‘Eight years in a ship which could cruise at that speed. But with the best tech available to me at the time – hydrogen motors – the best ship I could have built would have taken around three hundred years. Which was what my predecessors had done.’
‘But…’ Inga, the biologist, was amazed. ‘How could you survive that?’
‘In stasis,’ Shion told her. ‘Basically, zip yourself into a body bag and hope.’
Every spacer in the room shivered a bit at the thought of that, knowing all too well what the chances of survival were.
‘It doesn’t work the other way around,’ Shion said. ‘Things can leave if they’re going slowly enough. But nothing, not one speck of dust, gets through the other way. Total quarantine, see? Even Solaran ships are only allowed in if they come directly from their own world and have not so much as brushed through potentially contaminated space. So, stasis for three hundred years just to get through the Veil, then potentially thousands of years before you reach the world you were aiming for and hope that they will find and restore you – you can understand, really, why so few of my people have been willing to leave.’
‘But the Solarans…’ someone started to say and remembered. ‘Oh.’
The Solarans had left League space, en masse, within hours of the disastrous attempt to involve them in the Fourth’s mission at Carrearranis.
‘Yes,’ Shion said. ‘I don’t know if they’ve stopped coming to us as well, but from what the Gider have said about them being incommunicado, well, it seems likely. So if the Chethari are able to mediate and get the Solarans to come back, that would be good for my people, too. But I am also wondering, skipper – if this is a Veil system, I’m wondering if that might also be the ‘transducer’ that Trilopharus mentioned. Some kind of comms transmission facility?’
‘Well, we do know that such systems broadcast transmissions,’ Alex said thoughtfully. ‘So it is possible, yes – interesting, Shion. I’ll add it to the list.’
He did so, but it was low down, along with all the other ‘advanced tech’ questions which the Diplomatic Corps considered a no-no at this stage of a relationship. First Effective Contact was all about gathering primary information and establishing a reliable degree of understanding, not trying to grab the other party’s stuff.
Alex, therefore, had a long list of questions about the Chethari themselves. But even before he got started on that, there was the burning issue of the Solarans.
The Diplomatic Corps had written him a speech for this, too, which they’d gone to great lengths over, but Alex was ditching the formal approach. So when Trilopharus appeared later that morning in response to a full-bandwidth signal, Alex got straight to the point.
‘The Gider tell us that you help them to communicate with the Solarans – the Perithin,’ he said, correcting himself as he remembered that the Gider had explained that everyone else found it ridiculous that the humans kept calling the Perithin ‘Solarans’ from a misunderstanding more than a century before. ‘And we are hoping, very much, that you will be able to help us in that way too, to tell the Perithin how very sorry we are about what happened at Carrearranis and…’
‘Oh, the Perithin aren’t talking to anyone just now,’ Trilopharus interrupted him, as Alex was coming to expect. ‘They are singing songs of sorrow,’ the Chethari said cheerfully. ‘They will sing a treforul – three hundred and thirty three thousand, three hundred and thirty three songs – before they’ll talk to anyone.’
There’s no talking to them, the Gider had said, when they’re off on one of their dirge-singing jags.
‘I am so sorry,’ Alex said and felt shame as he said it – shame for himself, though he knew very well that none of it was his fault, but shame on behalf of his people, too, to have caused such grief to the Solarans. ‘From my heart, I am so sorry.’
Trilopharus chuckled. ‘Perithin,’ they said, with a gesture which sent wings of light floating around the command deck. ‘They do this. It is just…’ they paused and seemed to be considering, ‘yes – just taking a time out to recover their composure.’
‘Oh.’ Alex said and almost hating himself for asking, ‘And, uh – how long…’
‘Chartsey time? Another year.’ Trilopharus spoke breezily. ‘Don’t worry, Alex, they will come back. Your people have been slaughtering their ambassadors for millennia and it’s only been one generation since you stopped killing them in secret labs. So they’re not going to quit on you just because you scared them half to death. What? No.’ They appeared to be momentarily confused. ‘Sorry. Lot going on this end,’ they said. ‘So many people talking all at – okay! See you later!’
And they were gone.
There was a long silence on the command deck.
‘Does anyone else,’ Simon Penarth said, ‘feel that our revered President is a downright bloody liability?’
‘We are not allowed to say,’ Eldovan said, indicating her Fleet insignia. ‘But hmmn.’
‘Well,’ said Buzz, ‘It’s good news that they are coming back in a year or so, isn’t it?’
Alex looked sideways at him.
‘Three hundred and thirty three thousand, three hundred and thirty three songs of grief, Buzz.’
‘Yes.’ Buzz conceded, with a heavy sigh.
‘I had to sit through one, once,’ Eldovan said. ‘It went on for four hours. The same few words, the same few notes, over and over and over again.’ She broke into a low, keening, lamenting noise, stretching syllables, ‘ahhheeeannnaaalll…I can’t sing it like them, obviously, don’t have the vocal chords for it, but I can tell you, I was pretty much ready to hang myself by the end of it.’ She thought and her face brightened. ‘Wouldn’t it be good,’ she said, ‘to play a recording of that to President Tyborne, on repeat? Non-stop? For the next year?’
‘Skip.’ Alex reproved, but he couldn’t help grin, albeit fleetingly.
President Marc Tyborne did have to take, absolutely, full personal responsibility for that situation. He had overridden every protest, dismissed all advice, so convinced that he knew best there’d been no reasoning with him whatsoever.
The problem was simple, as he saw it. The Fourth was stuck outside the Carrearranian quarantine zone being maintained by the drone-ship known as the Guardian. The Guardian had confirmed that it would only drop the quarantine when a ship arrived which met very specific criteria – it must not come from a world which had been contaminated by the plague, must never have entered system space around a contaminated world and must never have had contact with any other ship which had, either. That had ruled out every ship in human space. But the solution, at least as far as President Tyborne was concerned, was equally simple. The Solarans had ships which met that criteria. How easy, then, to ask them if they’d help out by just dropping in to Carrearranis and seeing if they could persuade the Guardian to drop the quarantine. They wouldn’t be able to go and tell Alex first what they were doing, obviously, because that in itself would constitute contact with a contaminated ship, but the President had no doubt that Alex would be delighted.
Alex, in fact, would never forgive him. The Guardian had no sooner accepted the Solarans as a clean ship than it had said goodbye and star-dived itself. The sight of that magnificent ship vanishing into the star before they’d had time even to get close to it had all but broken Alex’s heart. And the cries, the screams of terror from the Carrearranians as they saw their Guardian abandon them, would haunt him the rest of his life.
All’s well that ends well, the President had said. It had got them past the quarantine anyway and if the Solarans were off in a huff, well, it wasn�
��t as if they were any use for anything, was it? And they were in contact with the Gider, now, a far more upbeat and forthcoming people.
There were times, Alex felt, when it was quite a challenge to represent the League with any sense of proud, untarnished integrity.
‘Well,’ he said, feeling that it would do none of them any good to dwell on that disappointment. ‘Let’s take a break,’ he said, and getting up, ‘I’m going for a swim.’
He didn’t have far to go to get into the water. The Defender class destroyers had an internal transit system which was the one thing Alex himself considered to be a design error. This ship wasn’t big enough to need a pod-transit, spacers could get around very nearly as quickly using zero-gee ladders and there were both physical and psychological benefits to people walking around the ship. So one of the first decisions Alex had made as commander of this ship, even before it had come off the slips at the spacedocks building it, was to have the pod transit converted to swim tubes. The various parts of the aquadeck, too, had been placed around the ship so as to maximise the sense of space for Silvie. It was still as confining for her as it would be to expect a human to travel for months in a cabin the size of a wardrobe, but it was still a good step up from the aquarium garden which had been the best they could do on the Heron.
If anything had reconciled Alex to moving up to the Venturi command, in fact, it was the aquadeck facilities, knowing that it was so much more comfortable for Silvie. And he enjoyed them, too, especially at times like this when he was feeling the need to destress.
So, he went aft from the command deck and through an access hatch, picking up a swim mask before flooding up the aqualock.
Even just swimming out into the tube made him feel better, as if he’d stepped from one world into another and this one so peaceful. Four decks above him was the swim-tank, a full VR infinity tank where members of the crew could swim. Four decks below him was the aquadeck itself.
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