‘Tough time,’ Silvie said, ‘Which we just have to get through.’ From the way she said it, Alex understood that this was advice Shion had given her. ‘And yes, I know,’ she said, ‘you’re sorry. And yes, I know…’ she reached out a hand and they touched fingertip to fingertip, a quarian intimacy. ‘And I love you too.’
Alex felt his whole being aglow with love and sympathy and admiration. This mission had been extremely difficult for Silvie, keeping her cooped up on the ship, taking very little active role and so left hanging around. She had been generosity itself in her support of the mission, from giving up much of her aquadeck to Lady Ursele to just keeping quietly out of their way when there was nothing else that she could do to help. And there was no prospect, even, of her being able to get away anywhere she could go for a swim, not for all the months it would take them to get back to Therik.
Fortunately for Silvie, the atmosphere aboard the ship did brighten as they approached the rendezvous coordinates. They were going to see Trilopharus again, which would be wonderful in itself, and they had good news for him to share with his own people and with the Pirrellothians, which was even better.
Their route took them out into the wilds – beyond League space but outside the realms defined by the Marfikian border, too. This was unclaimed space, though mapped by previous explorers. As with their last rendezvous out beyond Serenity, there was nothing at all remarkable about the appointed place. There was no system there, no wave-space feature. It was just an apparently arbitrary point in a huge expanse of nothing.
All the same, there was a sense of excitement aboard the ship as they approached it. They had barely entered a tight orbit about the coordinates when Eldovan reported that the ship was ready.
‘Chethari encounter protocols secured,’ she stated, for the benefit of the log. Alex could see for himself that everything was in readiness, with the ship at stand-by alert and space cleared on the command deck for Trilopharus to appear.
‘Thank you – everyone ready?’ Alex glanced left and right along the command table and got nods and smiles from everyone from Shion at the one end to the junior officer of the watch at the other. ‘Good.’ Alex nodded himself and his fingers flickered over a control screen. ‘Activating hail.’
They had been prepared to wait there for as long as it took for Trilopharus to appear and given their previous experience most people had put their money on that taking between one and two days. As it turned out, the optimists who’d put their dollar on an immediate response would be scooping the pot.
TA-rah, ta ra RAAAA!
‘Hi Alex!’ Seconds later, Trilopharus flashed into the command deck as casually as if it had been only a few hours since his previous visit, rather than months. ‘How are things?’
‘Excellent, thank you.’ Alex felt a thrill as the angelic figure materialised in front of him. Even the familiarity of this happening every day during the month they’d spent at the Library had not made it feel routine and after so long, it was like making first contact again. Trilopharus had dialled down both the brilliance of his image and the volume of the fanfare, but he was still an astonishing vision in his filmy, flowing robes of light and the perfect androgynous beauty of his features. ‘It is good to see you again,’ Alex said and even as he said it was aware that they were back to a situation in which only he could see and hear the Chethari. Everyone else on the command deck was looking at him, the glances to where Alex’s own attention was focused just hopeful or puzzled. Ah, Alex thought. So the improved communications they’d enjoyed at the Library, enabling everyone to see and hear Trilopharus, did not apply here. Still, everyone was being very still and quiet, enabling them to talk.
‘You, too,’ said Trilopharus, in the brisk manner of someone aware that he had limited time. He had rarely been able to sustain comms for more than a few minutes even at the Library, so this call was liable to be even shorter. ‘Did you get Lady Ursele to Lundane all right?’
‘Yes – Lady Ursele and her attendants are all safe and well,’ Alex said. ‘They have established their embassy and made a significant, very encouraging start on the diplomatic…’
‘Great, I’ll tell the Pirrellothians,’ Trilopharus interrupted cheerfully. ‘And I guess you’re ready to go home now, right?’
‘Yes,’ Alex said and in that moment felt a yearning for home that overrode all his foreboding about the post-mission enquiries and the impending doom of that courtesy-tour. Right then, he felt, he would have given anything to be walking up the path to his parents’ house on the base, to hug and be hugged, with his father insisting on cooking him a meal while his mother fussed about how tired he looked. They would, he knew, be rather more excited about showing him what they’d done to the garden while he was away than in hearing about whatever weird stuff he’d been up to. Though they would, of course, tell him how proud they were, they wouldn’t even want to try to understand it. It was enough for them that he’d been far away doing brave and clever things and even more important that he was home again, safe and sound.
Realistically, Alex knew, it would take about three days before their treating him like a ten year old began to feel more chafing than comforting and about three weeks before it was driving him nuts. But for right then, right in that moment, he wanted nothing more. ‘Yes,’ he repeated, with heartfelt sincerity. ‘Very much!’
Trilopharus beamed. He had been learning a lot about humans, both directly through his contact with Alex and the Fourth and indirectly through contact via the Gider.
‘Thought so!’ Trilopharus sounded satisfied, as if there’d been some kind of debate and he’d found himself the winner. In fact, as would emerge much later, he had picked up what amounted to gossip amongst the Embassy III’s personnel, shared with their Gider visitors, commenting on how exhausted the Fourth would be after such a long mission. The Gider had then asked Trilopharus how they were coping, so the Chethari already expected to see that they were worn out.
Now he could see that for himself in the weary, wistful look which crossed Alex’s face at the very thought of home. It was only there for a fraction of a second, hardly visible at all, but it was more than enough for Trilopharus. ‘Well, no problem!’ he declared, with a beneficent smile and raised a hand in beaming, radiant benediction. ‘See you again soon!’ he said and with that, everything went…
Thirty One
‘You have got to be kidding me…’ Alex heard Eldovan mutter as he raised his own head in bleary, momentary disorientation.
Trilopharus was gone. Everyone on the command deck was picking themselves up unsteadily, clearly recovering from an unexpected Turnaround. A glance at the screens told Alex two important things. The first was that just over an hour had elapsed since he’d been talking to Trilopharus. The second was that they were no longer at those coordinates.
It took him just a couple of seconds to figure out where they were. This was not difficult since the ship’s systems already had charts for this region and were locating them even as Alex looked.
It took perhaps a few seconds longer to make sense of the data he was seeing, though. According to the astrogation screens, they were at a point outside League borders but directly above the system of Therik, just eighteen days away at top cruising speed.
They were home. Or as near to home as Trilopharus had been able to bring them.
‘We’re home,’ Buzz said, quite dazed.
‘He did it again,’ Eldovan said, sounding annoyed. ‘He zapped us again!’
Alex made a small noise of assent as his eyes scanned over screens.
Everything was fine, he saw. The ship was in perfect working order and there were no injuries, everyone coming back to themselves with bursts of laughter as they realised what had happened. And then there was cheering, a lot of cheering, when they saw where they were.
It broke off, though, with comical abruptness, when Alex got to his feet and activated the bright-light alert to announce that he had heard the Chethari fanfare.
&nbs
p; Or at least, he thought he’d heard it. It had been so faint that with all the laughing and cheering he wasn’t sure whether it might have been some background noise he’d misinterpreted. But just in case, he called everyone to silence and they all waited and watched.
The faintest of ghostly figures appeared in the space left clear for Trilopharus on the command deck. It was translucent, wavering, with an odd kind of geometric flicker in the light which surrounded it. Fractals, Alex thought and realised he was getting a glimpse there of the way that Davie and Silvie perceived Trilopharus. And when the Chethari spoke, his voice was not only remote but slightly distorted, cracking consonants and hooting vowels. Alex leaned forward instinctively to listen, struggling both to hear and to understand. And then as he did understand, he laughed – held up a hand, started to speak and burst into laughter again.
‘He’s gone!’ he told them and as everyone looked at him in the keenest expectation, reported, ‘He said, ‘Point Six: Cruddy comms, best we can do for now. Enjoy your leave.’ And then he was gone before I could say anything.’
He chuckled and there was another outburst of laughter, applause and delirious cheering. It needed no discussion for everyone to understand that the Chethari had established another of their comms and transit points here, as close to Therik as they could get.
It was Davie who was the first to realise the problem with that situation, though – or at least, the first to voice it aloud.
‘We are so in the poop,’ he said, as the ship’s company began to quiet down and as Alex and the others looked at him in some surprise, he pointed it out to them, slowly and patiently as he often had to do with minds so much slower than his own.
‘We are supposed,’ he said, ‘to be at X-Base Sentinel. So for one thing, when we don’t show up they will consider us missing. And for another, everyone knows, or will know, what date we left Lundane. And for us to turn up at Therik before its physically possible for us to have made that trip will kick off a superstorm.’
He was right, Alex knew it. There would be some surprise at the Venturi’s reappearance, since most people believed that they were on a mission to Quarus. If that was true then people would have expected to hear news of their return to Serenity before they returned to their base and there would be some puzzled calculations as to how they could have made it out to Quarus and back without touching at any intervening port.
This, however, would be nothing to the uproar which would explode the moment it was known that they had been at Lundane and when they’d been at Lundane. As Davie said, it was physically impossible for them, at their current levels of technology, to have made this journey in that time. And that would be obvious even to people with only the vaguest understanding of interstellar distances.
There would be questions. A lot of questions. And answering them with ‘We were transported by aliens using technology beyond our understanding.’ was just not possible. The League population was only just getting their heads around the existence of Quarus. And the decision had already been made by the Senate that they would not reveal any other exodiplomacy matters until people had got so used to alien affairs being on the news that further announcements could be made without risk of panic.
‘What are we going to do?’ Eldovan asked the question that was on everybody’s face and everybody in that moment turned and looked at Alex.
He took his time, thinking about it. It was obvious that they had three options. The first was to wait it out, hanging around outside League borders until such time as they could plausibly turn up back at their base. That in itself would raise questions about why and how they’d managed to get right across the League without stopping anywhere and without anyone seeing them, but it was at least faintly possible that they might have made the trip entirely off route, dark running, for some mysterious reasons of their own.
The second possibility was that they could try to get back in contact with Trilopharus and ask him to put them back where they’d been, but that was not a choice Alex considered for more than a moment. Transporting them like this had clearly involved a great deal of effort on the Chethari’s part and it would just be plain rude to throw that gift back in their faces.
Which left the final option, to head back into port and simply brazen out the impossibility of their arrival. They could prevent the media from broadcasting on it and laugh off all the bewildered demands to know how the heck they had made that journey faster than any ship could possibly travel. People would inevitably come up with their own ideas about them having access to some kind of super-science tech and there would be conspiracy theories galore.
So, Alex thought. Wait it out, or brazen it out.
The decision made itself, really. He hardly needed to look at the hopeful expressions on so many of the faces turned to his, awaiting his decision. He did glance momentarily at the screen which showed Silvie, back in her garden. Could he even consider asking her to spend weeks more aboard this ship, when they were so close to an ocean she could dive into and swim to her heart’s content?
He could not. He just couldn’t do it. For her sake, for all of them, he had to take them home. And there was, besides, a gleam of mischief in his eyes. He could justify it and would justify it, on multiple grounds. Quite apart from Silvie’s welfare and that of the rest of his people, it was important to get news of what was happening to the authorities as quickly as possible. And it could be worked operationally, too, as a mystery which would add to the legend of the Fourth Fleet Irregulars… the people you sent for to do the impossible. And if that reputation helped them to solve future problems, all to the good.
As he looked at Buzz, though, both of them knew that Alex was bubbling with delight at the sheer absurdity of the situation they were in. Trilopharus, with the best of intentions, had dropped them right in it. Exodiplomacy, Alex thought. Always full of curve balls. And so much fun.
‘Set course for Therik,’ he said and as he entered an order into the log to confirm that, more cheers bellowed around the ship.
Eldovan laughed too, as she got the ship on course and cruising fast towards their base. But there was a thoughtful expression on her face, too and as the ship settled down into a cheerful hum, she got Alex’s attention again.
‘Skipper,’ she queried, ‘What are we going to tell people?’
Alex grinned. It was a moment he would treasure, one of those moments of pure happiness in which no problem seemed insurmountable or even that important. They would be fine, whatever happened, they would cope. And for now, for right now, they were riding home on a wave of joy.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘We’ll just tell them we came the pretty way.’
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