Venturi

by S J MacDonald

  ‘Well, that’s a tad obvious,’ Eldovan observed. The freighter with the obsolete airlock hatch wheels had no sooner taken in that yes, that really was the Fourth’s destroyer with its guns stripped off, heading for Lundane, than they’d begun a 180 turn to head back in pursuit. It would take them a while and the Venturi would be long gone by the time they’d completed the turn, but they were coming after them with a near-frantic pushing of their ship to its operating limits. ‘Prisos Defence Agency,’ Eldovan wondered, ‘or Araki Federal?’

  ‘Araki,’ Alex said and as she looked at him in enquiry at his tone of certainty, he smiled. ‘The Prisosans,’ he observed, ‘never can resist insulting any League warship they encounter – so, since the ship neither rolled its belly at us nor vented garbage tanks, I’d say it is Araki. The Feds,’ he observed, ‘will be making rude gestures at us and calling us names as we go by, but at least they do it privately.’

  The ‘Federals’ were the Araki’s intelligence service, at least the one which operated out here, at Lundane and beyond. Its actual name translated as ‘The Honourable Araki Federal Association for the Preservation of the Homeworld’, but they were always known as Federals or Feds in the intelligence community.

  ‘I think, on the whole, I prefer the PDA,’ Eldovan said, conversationally. ‘At least you know where you stand with them. So, okay, they call you a ratfink and spit on your shoes, but there’s an honesty to that you have to respect. But the Federals, huh, never really know what their game is.’

  Davie leaned forward slightly and regarded Eldovan with a thoughtful gaze.

  ‘Really getting the hang of this diplomacy thing, uh?’ he asked, with such obvious sarcasm that Eldovan looked quite taken aback for a moment.

  ‘Mr North…’ Alex was startled too, until he realised what was going on. ‘We’re just chatting,’ he said, pleasantly, but making it clear he was supporting Eldovan, here, in her right to express such an opinion. ‘Perhaps,’ Alex went on, in conflict-resolution mode, giving a friendly smile, ‘you might need a cookie.’

  Davie opened his mouth to retort indignantly, realised that Alex was right and nodded, instead.

  If there was anyone on this ship more stressed than Mister about taking this ship into Lundane, it was Davie North. He had agreed to it, accepted all the arguments and been quietly supportive throughout. But all the same he had done his best to persuade Silvie to stay at the cache site. It would have been a major undertaking to build her an aquadome there and to transfer all her plants and fish to it, but still Davie had pressed her to do it. There was nothing for her at Lundane, he’d insisted, the oceans were a toxic soup she wouldn’t want to swim in even in a suit and the environment there was very much that of a rough, tough, highly insalubrious frontier world. She would, he had assured her, hate it and she’d be very much happier staying at the temporary base.

  Silvie, though, had seen straight through that to the blatant fact that he was worried for her safety, for all of them, in going into Lundane like this, but especially for Silvie, for whom he felt a very personal responsibility.

  It hadn’t taken her long to figure out, either, that behind his very real concern for her welfare in going about the squalid dives of Darvo, Lundane’s capital, he had a lurking dread that if she went about unprotected there, either the LDA or the Federals might snatch her, perhaps even race her off the planet aboard one of their intel ships. She was, after all, from an advanced tech culture that neither Prisos nor Arak could even consider sending ships out to themselves, so the only chance they had to get knowledge of that tech was to grab Silvie herself and question her about it.

  Silvie had told him not to be so silly. She was staying on the ship and Alex would take care of her at Lundane just as he did anywhere else.

  Davie had capitulated, because he didn’t have any choice. But his stress levels were extremely high – higher than he’d realised and compensated for with an increased calorific intake. His blood sugar levels were low, which was why he was so irritable.

  ‘Box of cookies,’ he acknowledged, with a nod to Alex and a glance of apology at Eldovan. ‘Sorry.’

  Eldovan smiled back. ‘I’ll have a cookie too,’ she said, recognising that her own jitters might have something to do with the fact that she’d hardly eaten any dinner the night before and had not been able to swallow more than a mouthful of breakfast. For all her apparent insouciance, Eldovan was more apprehensive over this than any operation she’d ever been on before.

  And rightly so. Their arrival at Lundane was going to be very hard work.

  Twenty

  Lundane was a busy system and from a distance at least appeared to be prosperous. There were a couple of thousand ships in port, around a third of them painted with the green livery of the Terris Transport Company. Most of the rest were League freighters, independent traders here to buy and sell at this most cosmopolitan of trading posts.

  Cosmopolitan, but not modern. As the Venturi approached it became apparent that the port entry station was in fact a defunct mining ship and at that, using an old style of comms array which would entail a delay in signalling even when the ship was in close range.

  As they got closer still it was even more apparent that the apparent prosperity was an illusion. The launch tunnel was at least fifty years old and at that it was one of the newest parts of the system infrastructure. Traffic control was virtually non existent and what comms there were had been patched together from several old systems and second hand parts. This was evidently not a system which had invested anything in its system infrastructure for a very long time.

  Lundane itself looked pretty, though – again, from a distance. It was a warm amber world, glowing in half-crescent under the light of a red sun.

  ‘My respects,’ said Alex, recording a greeting to be transmitted to the port entry station along with the usual request for clearance to enter the system and all the normal documentation, quarantine certificates and the like. ‘This is the Fourth Fleet Irregulars vessel Venturi, under the command of Commodore Alexis Sean von Strada. We are on diplomatic service and entirely unarmed – repeat, the ship is on diplomatic service and we are entirely unarmed. We are carrying the Embassy of Her Grace Lady Ursele Mgwamba et Savie, Grace of a Noble House, Purest of Blood, Hand of the Karlane, Ambassador to Humanity from the people of Pirrell. We seek permission to enter the system for the purpose of facilitating Her Grace establishing her embassy here.’

  They had to wait sixty seven minutes before they got a response and when they did, it wasn’t helpful.

  ‘You’re the Fourth?’ the message came back from the port entry station, anonymous but authoritative. ‘What the hell are you doing here? And what the hell do you mean, you’ve got the Pirrellian Ambassador on board? Are you insane or taking the mick, or what?’

  Alex exchanged philosophical glances with Buzz. This was going to take some time.

  It did. Despite transmitting details of their route from Pirrell to Lundane and medical files on Lady Ursele and her attendants, the Lundanians were extremely resistant to the idea that the Fourth could have an ambassador from the fabled Veiled World aboard their ship. That sort of thing, they insisted, just didn’t happen.

  ‘Pirrell,’ they declared, seventeen hours later, ‘is a myth.’

  ‘So was Samart,’ Alex responded, ‘till we went there.’

  A long silence ensued, after which the Lundanians came back with, ‘Your embassy here says they don’t know why you’re here and they won’t confirm if you have a Pirrellian working for you.’

  Alex stared at the message. ‘But that’s…’ he said and shook himself slightly.

  He had been assuming that the League embassy on Lundane was backing him up. He was unable to communicate with them directly, or with anyone other than the authorities on the single link with the port entry station, but he had imagined that the embassy would be working hard to reassure the Lundanians and persuade them to allow the Fourth’s ship into port.

  If what
the Lundanians were saying was true, though, then the embassy was being downright obstructive.

  ‘The fact that I’m from Pirrell is still classified, skipper,’ Shion pointed out, seeing his perplexity.

  Alex nodded. The fact that Shion’s physiology wasn’t human and that she came from a world outside the League had been released to the media more than a year ago, but the fact that she came from the Veiled World was still considered so sensitive that it was classified. So the Embassy was, indeed, sticking to procedure in refusing to confirm it when the Lundanians asked if it was true that the Fourth had a Pirrellothian officer. Or, as they put it, Pirrellian.

  ‘I hoped they would pick up our cue,’ he said, but recognised even as he said it that the Diplomatic Corps was playing things strictly by the book. ‘Oh well.’ A request for comms to be passed to the League Embassy had already been refused, but Alex felt that it might be worth trying another tactic. So he transmitted, unsealed, an authorisation from him to the Embassy to confirm the now declassified information that Shion was from Pirrell, requesting that it be conveyed to the ambassador.

  This, however, was emphatically refused.

  ‘No, we won’t pass your coded instructions to the League lot,’ the answer came back. ‘What kind of fools do you take us for?’

  Alex looked at Buzz, who smiled wearily.

  ‘We just,’ he advised, ‘have to keep repeating our request for authorities to come out and confirm what we’re saying for themselves.’

  It was late the next day before the Lundanians agreed to this, notifying them that the Lundanian Ambassador would be arriving in a further three hours.

  And so, three hours later, a shuttle emerged from the system. Attempts to smarten it with bright paintwork and a lot of hull lights did not conceal the fact that it was an old liner shuttle, its bulbous design indicating that it was between sixty and eighty years old.

  The Ambassador himself was scarcely more distinguished. The Lundanians maintained an ambassador of their own on Embassy Avenue, officially their ambassador to everyone beyond their borders. In effect, though, he was a site manager, dealing with the inumerable quarrels and complaints of the Avenue’s residents. The current ambassador was a world-weary gentleman who only survived his post by allowing all the complaints directed at him to pass smoothly in one ear and out of the other. If you actually listened to them all, as he said, you’d go mad. He was also in the habit of stating that after forty years on Embassy Avenue, he had seen it all.

  But he had never seen anything like this.

  His shuttle docked, as agreed, at one of the Pirrellothian airlocks, where they were met by Coru. No member of the Fourth would be present and the ambassador would not, technically, be boarding the Venturi at all since the embassy area was Pirrellothian territory.

  The ambassador boarded with six aides. The arrangements had specified that he might bring six attendants with him – two to remain aboard the shuttle, two in the atrium outside Lady Ursele’s suite and two who might enter with him. This was clearly intended as a reassurance that he could keep his exit route protected by his own security people and he had certainly done that. The six people with him were the Lundanian version of ‘suits and shades’ security, wearing bulky padded gear and belts laden down with gadgets. Some of them would definitely count as weapons, too, but as the airlock scan confirmed, they were all non-lethal, also as Lady Ursele’s invitation had specified. They could bring whatever they liked with them, she’d said, so as to feel safe and comfortable, but it must be for their personal protection only and not capable of causing death to others. So they had, all of them, stun pistols and a whole variety of anti-personnel gadgets, but nothing capable of lethal fire.

  The group was processed unhurriedly, establishing a pattern which would be repeated many times in the days and weeks to come. Two of them did remain aboard the shuttle, guarding it. Two more were gently separated at the atrium, led to a seat on a carved bench and offered cups of water, which they declined. The other two followed the ambassador into the ante-room where they were asked to shower, to cleanse themselves and their clothing, before proceeding further. This too had been specified in the invitation and they complied, though it was clear they didn’t like it. Neither of the escorts would have their hands rubbed with the fragrant cream, either, perhaps suspecting that it was some kind of skin-absorbed psychoactive substance.

  Finally and aggressively, the ambassador insisted that he was going to keep his pipe and walked into the encounter room with it stuck defiantly between his teeth.

  This was a studied discourtesy. Just about everyone on Lundane used pipes and you didn’t have to be long in that arid atmosphere to realise why. On a planet where a litre of water cost an hour’s pay for a labourer, slaking a parched mouth with gulps of liquid really wasn’t an option. Pipes provided a relatively cheap relief – short, stubby tubes with a globe at the end, they could contain anything from pure water to narcotics which would be illegal in the League. Either way, sucking at the tube delivered a fine diffused mist sufficient to alleviate dry mouth and moisten the tongue. The richer and more important you were on Lundane, the more you could afford to use your pipe. The only times it wasn’t considered appropriate to be using one were in especially formal circumstances, during a wedding or funeral ceremony, during a job interview, or in meeting someone considerably your social superior. So in walking into the encounter room with his pipe stuck between his teeth and taking pointed sucks at it, the Lundanian ambassador was making it very clear indeed that he wasn’t buying the Fourth’s ‘fake Pirrellian’.

  Four minutes later, the pipe was taken sheepishly out of his mouth and put into a pocket, with humble apology for his rudeness. This was no actor, no hologram, no fake. The sheer presence of the lady was compelling. And she confirmed what the Fourth had already told them, that a people called the Chethari had brought her and her attendants out through the Veil and had asked the Fourth to collect and bring them here. She knew of them, as she said, from her niece’s messages home and knew that as the League’s top exodiplomacy unit, they would be best equipped to assist her. And she confirmed, too, that they had removed all the weapons from their ship at her request, as hers was an embassy of peace.

  When he got back, telling everyone that it was real, it was true, there was a Pirrellian ambassador, the Lundanians insisted on having him tested for drugs before they would believe him. But by then he had already given Lady Ursele diplomatic accreditation as a visiting ambassador, upon which a reluctant consensus was eventually reached that they might as well allow the Fourth to bring their ship inside system limits so they could connect to the comms network directly. And there were, too, obvious benefits to allowing them to decelerate their ship – they wouldn’t be able to leave without the Lundanians’ consent, for a start, which would bring them very directly under Lundanian control.

  It was an anxious time for all concerned. Everyone on the Venturi knew what a vulnerable position they were putting themselves into as they ran through the deceleration. There was a strong sense of tension, too, watching all the other ships in port as they established parking orbit. Were they going to be pounced on the moment they were unable to flee?

  No, it turned out. They weren’t. None of the ships in port moved a fraction out of their own parking orbits and no shuttles approached them. There was a wary kind of atmosphere all round, the creatures at the water hole not at all sure what to make of this strange new arrival.

  Comms were much better from their parking orbit, though. They could now contact their own embassy and others on the planet, with signals reaching Lundane in around twenty minutes.

  Alex transmitted a lengthy message to the League Ambassador at Lundane, giving the necessary security codes to identify himself, explaining the situation and requesting the ambassador’s assistance in liaising with local authorities.

  Forty eight minutes later, what they got back was a formal request for confirmation that the Fourth was here under the orders or wi
th the authorisation of either the Senate, the Admiralty or the Diplomatic Corps.

  ‘Huh?’ Eldovan betrayed both shock and indignation when Alex, without comment, shared the memo with both her and Buzz, while Buzz himself gave a regretful sigh and ‘Oh, dear.’

  ‘But you already told them,’ Eldovan pointed out, ‘that this is an exceptional circumstance…’ she broke off as Alex looked patiently at her and she realised that she was telling him something he already knew. This was, indeed, an exceptional circumstance, something nobody had considered as anything more than a vague possibility for some time decades in the future. Alex, therefore, was acting on his own initiative, in line with what he believed the authorities back on Chartsey would want him to do in this situation. In doing so, he was right on the edge of the limits of his powers both as a Fleet Commodore and as Presidential Envoy. His status and the obvious potential benefits of bringing a Pirrellothian ambassador to Lundane should have secured the support of the League Embassy here. But they were, indeed, within their rights to withhold such support if Alex couldn’t prove that he was here legitimately.

  ‘I’d better talk to him,’ Alex said and sent a message asking the ambassador to come up to the ship.

  While they were waiting for a response, however, three further messages arrived from other embassies. The first was from the Prisosans, evidently aware that the League Embassy was entirely failing to roll out the red carpet for the Fourth.

  ‘I do not believe for one second that you have a real Pirrellothian on board.’ The Prisosan Ambassador, Berrtra, was heavily overweight and her bulldog features had an unhealthy pallor. Holo-comms here were so expensive that she’d chosen to send a still image of herself at her desk to accompany the audio, portraying a fixed sneer. The tone of her voice was scathing, with undercurrents of powerful aggression. The Prisosan Ambassador had been selected to represent her people with that kick-arse attitude and Berrtra did the job superbly. ‘And whatever trick you pulled to con the Lundanians, even your own embassy isn’t buying it, so you’re not pulling any kind of fast one on us.’