Mister told him why at some length and with considerable force. And after having considered for a speechless minute or two, Mako managed to say that he would inform the commodore.
It took him a few minutes to get Alex to step out of the command deck. There was obviously a lot of catching up going on as they were reunited with Bonny Bonatti and the people they’d left at the base and were at the same time being greeted by the captain of the Apollo.
Alex, though, recognised that Mako would not be asking for an immediate meeting unless it really was imperative and so went with him into his daycabin just a few metres away.
‘I think you’d better sit,’ said Mako, gesturing towards the seating nearest the door, a semi-formal space with sofas and a low table.
‘Oh.’ Alex sat down, looking anxiously at him, a note of horror resonating in his tone. ‘Don’t tell me he’s…’
‘No – no!’ Mako realised that Alex thought he’d come to tell him that Mister had committed suicide and interrupted hastily. ‘Alive and well!’ he said, at which Alex let go a breath of relief. As much trouble as Mister was and had been throughout the mission, he was still Alex’s responsibility. ‘The thing is,’ Mako sat down beside him, looking at the commodore with earnest apology, ‘he is seeking asylum – protective custody.’
Alex’s alarm had barely finished modulating into relief before it had to morph into bewilderment. ‘Uh?’ he said, unconsciously echoing Mako’s own reaction.
‘Yeah, I know!’ Mako said wryly. ‘But he has come to the conclusion – and he should know, after all – that when the LIA gets him back into their custody they will subject him to ‘hot interrogation’.’
Alex continued to look at him expectantly. So much was obvious. The LIA would naturally want to give their agent a thorough debrief through an extensive series of interrogations, to establish to their own satisfaction exactly what had happened and how it had all gone so embarrassingly wrong.
‘And he has decided,’ Mako told him, condensing several minutes of legalese and jargonistic declaration into one simple sentence, ‘that this constitutes torture and he is claiming the right to be protected from that.’
Alex, in his turn, was left speechless.
‘Uh…’ he said again, after a good ten seconds of sitting there with his jaw hanging slack and his eyes staring at Mako in helpless confusion. ‘What…?’
‘I know,’ said Mako, with sympathy. ‘The irony!’
That, Alex felt, was too small a word. The man who had been perfectly prepared to take part in such interrogations himself and to defend that vehemently as essential for the security of the League had turned tail in a moment when it was going to be done to him. The hypocrisy of it was breathtaking, as was the cowardice. And that he was asking them to protect him from his own people, after everything he’d done to them over the last few months, was beyond words.
‘Tuh!’ said Alex, expressing all this in one embittered monosyllable and then, taking a quick breath, looking alertly at the prisons inspector. There was something in Mako’s manner, a look of regret, which told him that this was not going to be something he could resolve with a brusque dismissal.
‘I am sorry,’ Mako said, seeing that realisation dawning on Alex’s face. ‘But when a prisoner invokes human rights legislation…’
‘You’re kidding!’ Alex said, understanding more from Mako’s tone and grimace than from his words. It was apparent to him that Mako was saying that they would have to give Mister the asylum he was now demanding. ‘No!’ he implored.
‘Sorry, Alex.’ Mako grimaced again, adding a helpless shrug. ‘There has to be a process,’ he explained. ‘A formal process with a hearing and rights of appeal and all that. It isn’t quick – I’d have to say rightly so where human rights are concerned – so I’m afraid I do have to advise you that to transfer Mister to the Apollo under these circumstances would be a violation of his rights under law.’
Alex allowed himself a small groan of despair before his concern for his own people kicked in and he looked back at Mako with rising dismay on his behalf. It was all too obvious who was going to bear the brunt of this.
‘I’m sorry.’ Alex shook his head in self-reproach. ‘I should never have let him on board,’ he observed.
Mako gave a philosophical shrug. ‘I had no problem with it at the time,’ he said. ‘And if we end up having to keep him as a pet, perhaps he can be house-trained.’
Alex gave him a stunned look and then cracked into laughter, as Mako had intended.
‘All right,’ he said, with a look of gratitude for the civilian, not only for handling this with such good humour but for putting it into perspective. There were a lot more important things going on than the latest episode of hassle from Mister LIA. ‘Thanks, Mako. I’ll put a hold on his transfer.’
He did so right then, instigating the process which would lead to a human rights tribunal. This would mean having to take Mister back to Therik with them and keeping him at their base until the formalities were concluded – a wearying prospect, but there was nothing to be done about it. So Alex left the problem in Mako’s hands, returning to the command deck.
Brief as his absence had been, by the time Alex got back a flotilla of shuttles was already starting to return their weaponry, whilst a locust-like swarm was packing up the temporary base to bring everything but the domes back aboard. Most of the shuttles and the people were from the Apollo, not so much assisting them as taking on the work themselves.
‘Our pleasure,’ the captain of the Apollo responded, when Alex called to thank him for that. He was a genial, broad-faced man Alex had been corresponding with for years, though the vicissitudes of service meant that they had never actually met. Captain Mart Emmet was a fierce campaigner within the Fleet, demanding the same advantages for the regular Fleet that the Fourth had shown to be so beneficial. Because of this, he had a reputation for being almost as much of a pain in the backside to the Fleet establishment as Alex himself. First Lord Dix Harangay had joked once that he tried to keep the two of them apart, since he feared for the stability of the known universe if they were to come into direct, purposeful alliance. ‘You’ve been working,’ Mart observed, ‘and we’ve had nothing to do but hang out here having fun.’
Alex laughed. Despite the fact that this was their first conversation, he’d been on friendly terms with Mart Emmet since both of them had been corvette skippers and felt no sense of reserve with him.
‘Having a lot of fun!’ he commented, at which Mart laughed too, nodding agreement.
‘Having a blast,’ he said, a pun which Alex dutifully groaned at.
As he had recognised the moment the system came into focus, the Fourth’s contingent here had not been idle. Many of the smaller masses within the system had vanished entirely, while the bigger ones were all on different trajectories. It was immediately obvious to a spacer’s eye that the system had been subjected to massive forces on a scale which could only be described as stellar engineering. Millions of bodies within the system were now on decaying orbits which would bring them into collision with the star within a few years. The only objects of any mass still in their original orbits were the one planet they’d been using as a base and the largest remaining planetoid, an object like two lumpy potatoes roughly stuck together.
‘Please – come to dinner?’ Mart asked hopefully, at which Alex smiled. Etiquette would have required him to invite the lower ranking captain to dinner with him, so this was a suggestion that they set aside protocol and simply have a meal together as friends.
Before that, though, Alex had to welcome his people back aboard and debrief both ways, finding out what they’d been up to as well as telling them how things had gone at Lundane.
‘We called it Project Shine,’ Bonny told him, sitting in Alex’s daycabin with a mug of spiced tea. ‘I was looking for something to give the guys a focus and Ali Jezno commented that if all the small objects in the system were dumped into the star it ought to be enough to trig
ger it into red dwarf main sequence.’ She grinned mischievously. ‘So I thought, why not? Interesting science and lots of gunnery practice, what’s not to like?’
Alex gave an appreciative snurge. He had already seen the report, with an original intention just to carry out a series of experiments on moving increasingly larger objects into star-dive trajectories. Then the Apollo had turned up, with a combination of mighty firepower and enthusiasm which had made the bigger project possible. Possible, of course, but bonkers. It had taken extraordinary effort to pound away at millions of asteroids with gunfire targeted to push them at the star and extraordinary effort, too, to blast away at lumpen planetoids in order to divert them into star-dive spirals. If the costs were calculated as civilians would inevitably calculate them, the cost of the experiment would run into billions. And for what? To turn a dull brown lump of stellar material into a dim main sequence star, right out here in the middle of nowhere where it could be of no significance to anyone at all. There was no conceivable practical advantage, either to this project or for future usage, since there were so many tens of thousands of main sequence stars with life-bearing planets already, humanity would certainly not have any need for the foreseeable future to engineer brown dwarfs for any practical purpose. Nor was there anything revolutionary about the science involved, since the process of stellar formation was already well understood. It was the equivalent, really, of a high school experiment carried out purely for the benefit of the students. But it was an experiment on a stupendous scale. And as word got out through the spacer community and into the media that the Fourth had amused themselves by turning a brown dwarf into a red dwarf, just for fun, their reputation for staggering achievement would only be enhanced. Which, in turn, might be of material benefit to them in future operations. As Bonny said, what was not to like?
‘Brilliant,’ said Alex and looked at her with mingled admiration and just a little regret. After this, there was no chance at all that he was going to be able to keep Bonny. She would be moving on to her own command. And that was good and right of course and something Alex would celebrate too. But he was, on a purely selfish level, going to miss her. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘And – how were things?’
Bonny grinned, understanding that he was inviting her to confide rather more to him personally than she had felt to be appropriate in her official report.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘okay, generally – there was the mutiny where I had to shoot a couple of them, but apart from that…’
Alex laughed with her, recognising at once that that was a joke.
‘Seriously,’ she said. ‘They were amazing – every one of them, even the civilians, pitching in, hanging together. They made me very proud.’ She smiled, took a sip of her tea and continued as she set the mug down, ‘And I have to say, too, how much I appreciate Captain Emmet. It would have been so easy for him to come in and take over, pulling rank. But he treated me just as if I really was the port admiral.’ She smiled again and Alex remembered the jokey sign which had been pinned to her office door at the temporary base. ‘He and his people just couldn’t have been more supportive,’ she said and Alex nodded.
‘I can see that,’ he said. It was obvious from the practical help that the Apollo was giving with the packing up of their base. Whatever the Fourth wanted, the Apollo stood ready to provide. Alex had experienced so much hostility and obstruction from people in the Fleet who were supposed to be supportive, it felt really wonderful to find that kind of genuine backup.
Alex told their captain so, too, when they were having dinner that evening. It was a private meal – celebratory meals were being held on both ships, with an exchange of guests in the wardrooms and on all the mess decks, but Mart Emmet had claimed the commodore for the evening. It was a thoroughly enjoyable time out, chatting away like old friends, serving themselves delicious food from a hot trolley so that they were not interrupted even by a steward.
This would be, they knew, their only opportunity to talk like this. They would be leaving the system early next morning and heading in different directions. The Venturi would be heading up to the rendezvous Trilopharus had specified, while the Apollo would be heading back to X-Base Sentinel. By the time the Fourth got there the carrier would be long gone, heading over to the Cherque sector for a tour of duty there. Alex and Mart might not meet again for years, if ever. But they enjoyed that evening very much, kindred spirits united briefly in the whirl of their journeys.
And they certainly parted with a bang. The last thing to be done before they left the system was to send the remaining planetoid on a collision dive towards the star. Data-gathering sensors were being left to monitor what happened here, as it would be five years before all of the objects completed their suicidal spirals. If the experiment went to plan, in fact, it would be the impact of this last lump of rock which should trigger ignition into main sequence activity.
This, it had been agreed, was something they would all do together. The Venturi and the Apollo would pass through the system, rolling to bring all their cannon to bear, while all their fighters would come in behind, adding their blast to the effort.
It was actually very precise, both in the targeting and the force to be applied. There would be no world-shattering impact. The aim was to nudge the planetoid out of its orbit, not blow it up. And the force required had been exactly calculated to shift it three degrees.
It would take eighty seven minutes of sustained fire from more than two hundred cannon firing at an ever-moving point just ahead of the planetoid to push it out of orbit. The forces involved were phenomenal, but the force even a single cannon generated was sufficient to blast the surface off a planet from half a system away, so they had plenty of power at their disposal.
Power, allied with accuracy and superb teamwork. As the ships flashed around and around through the system on tight arcs, chasing one another, squadrons of fighters flitted in closer to the target, hitting it again and again in a continuous blast of repulsive force. And in amongst it all was Firefly, spinning and dancing faster than any human pilot could ever manage, blasting away at the target with flamboyant delight.
There wasn’t much left of the surface by the time they’d finished. Being hammered like that had burned away what little there was of its tenuous atmosphere, causing massive earthquakes and an outpouring of magma in the directly affected area, while much of the rest of the surface was heaving in subsidiary quakes and spurting plumes of gas and dust. Seeing that it was curving onto the desired trajectory, both the Venturi and Apollo crews cheered themselves hoarse. They were still yelling delightedly as the ships exchanged salutes and shot away from one another… a most satisfying end to the mission, all round.
Except, of course, that it wasn’t the end. As tired as they all were, now and longing to go home, Alex had to keep his people motivated for one last task before they could set a course for Therik. Trilopharus had asked them to come to the specified coordinates at the end of their mission, to tell him how things had gone. And that was essential, not merely as a courtesy to the people who had enabled that miracle but to further relationships with the Chethari themselves. Which was, after all, the mission they’d been sent on in the first place.
So they headed up to the coordinates, Alex trying to set a balance between keeping the crew in work-mode whilst allowing them some time to rest after all the high-demand situations they’d been working in. It wasn’t easy. If ever a crew was going to drop their standards and start getting negative, it was just this stage where the excitement was over but the work had to continue. But Alex had a superb team, every one of them fully aware that this was a danger-point where morale might drop and every one of them making the effort to overcome that.
‘Wouldn’t it be better,’ Silvie asked, by the fifth day of the run, ‘if people were just honest about how they’re feeling? All this pretending not to be grumpy is very wearing, you know.’
‘Sorry,’ Alex understood entirely what she meant, as even he could detect the for
ced cheerfulness which would be as annoying to Silvie as screeching fingernails. ‘But it’s necessary – professional discipline, you know? We really can’t give in to the grumpy and start grumbling and bickering, that wouldn’t help at all.’
‘It might not help you,’ Silvie said. ‘But people bottling their feelings up like this and faking the happy isn’t doing me any good.’ She gave him a long, hard look with that and Alex found himself laughing even as he apologised.
‘Yes, sorry!’ he admitted, holding up his hands in surrender. ‘I am the worst offender! And yes, all right! Strictly between ourselves I am grumpy, fed up, tired, conflicted. Want to go home, so much, to see my parents and see everyone so happy being back with their own families, but at the same time I know what’s waiting for me, all the enquiries and fusses and then, oh, lord,’ he sighed, ‘the awful prospect of a tour of courtesy visits.’
‘And if you could do whatever you liked…?’ Silvie prompted.
‘I’d be heading straight back to the Library,’ Alex replied, without having to think about it. It had tormented him just as much as anyone else to have to leave that amazing planet without so much as going for a walk. Just the thought of being able to go back there with time to explore, to swim in those oceans with Silvie, awoke feelings of longing. ‘But that,’ he said, ‘isn’t going to happen.’
Silvie smiled agreement. ‘Perhaps another time,’ she said, hopeful that the mission which would be put together to go back to the Library might include the Fourth. ‘But can’t you do anything to un-conflict yourself?’ It was clear that her concern was not with her own comfort, really, but with his. ‘It’s horrible when you’re unhappy. And don’t say ‘Sorry!’ again!’
Alex chuckled, remembering Trilopharus telling him that he apologised too much.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, Silvie. But I’m afraid this time it’s just something we’re all going to have to put up with. There is no way for me to change either the situation or my feelings about it.’
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