Carrearranis (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 5) Read online

  ‘All right,’ he gave his Exec a look of affectionate amusement. ‘Have it your own way.’ But he got in the last word on the matter, too. ‘You’re the one who’ll have to live with him in the wardroom, after all.’

  Even as he spoke, though, his comm was buzzing. Arak was on line. There was nothing in particular he wanted to talk to the captain about, but it was rare for him to go more than a couple of hours without calling. It was as if he felt the need to reassure himself that Alex was still there. Alex understood that, and was as easy and unhurried with him as if he’d be happy to sit and chat all day. Which, indeed, he would. There was nothing more important to him right now than calming and settling the situation on Carrearranis. And that was not, as they had all come to appreciate, going to be as quick or simple as just assuring them that everything would be fine. The people of Carrearranis were dealing with and expressing their profound sense of shock and loss in all kinds of ways. They were, in fact, as Alex himself had said, dealing with grief and trauma on a global scale.

  Today’s expression of that grief and trauma from Arak came in the form of worries about fishing.

  ‘The fishing has been very poor, today and yesterday,’ he confided, and with an anxious look, ‘Do you think that the loss of the Guardian may have affected the fish?’

  It was symptomatic, Alex recognised, that they were developing irrational ideas about what the loss of the Guardian might mean for them. They had never had superstitious beliefs before this, because they had always been secure in the knowledge that they knew how their world worked. Now the most fundamental cornerstone of their culture had been ripped away, that certainty was crumbling.

  ‘No,’ Alex said, giving this due consideration because Arak deserved no less than that. ‘I can’t imagine any way in which the fish could have been affected by the Guardian’s absence. I can, however, imagine that the people doing the fishing might not have had their minds entirely on the task. Do you think that’s possible, Arak? That they were distracted, upset, not as good at the fishing as they usually are?’

  Arak looked surprised. ‘Well,’ he admitted, ‘they did come back early, and said they couldn’t find the fish. But I think you’re right, probably they just wanted to be with their families. We all want to be together.’

  ‘Well, that’s a good thing,’ Alex said. ‘And I really wouldn’t worry about the fish.’ The grief counselling guidelines they were all working to said that it was important to keep reassuring them that their world was continuing to work just as it always had, as this was clearly their biggest concern. ‘The fish will be there,’ said Alex, ‘when your people are ready to go catch them.’

  Arak gave a brief, unhappy smile.

  ‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘It would be good to hear the fishers singing again. It does not feel as if there are any songs of joy left in the world.’

  ‘I know,’ Alex said, with gentle understanding, and left it at that. He was a man who understood grief. He had lost Etta, his three year old daughter, to a senseless, preventable accident. There was nothing you had to tell him about the loss, guilt, anger and devastating pain when your world came crashing to ruin around you. And for Arak, for all the Carrearranians, that was what they too were going through right now. There had been, so far, surprisingly little anger. What there had been had been directed at the Solarans. Very few seemed to be blaming the Fourth, though they remained braced for a very natural outpouring along the lines of If only you hadn’t come here, this would never have happened. For now at least, they were the people the Carrearranians were holding on to for support.

  Arak sighed, and there was a moment of quiet between them, as companionable and comforting as it could be given that it was taking place via comscreens and that Arak himself was standing in the middle of his village with several people listening in. They weren’t gathered in the way that the entire community came together for important calls, but all calls were, by the very nature of the Singing Stones, on public view.

  ‘Ah, the wind blows,’ said Arak, a Carrearranian expression meaning ‘What can’t be cured must be endured.’

  ‘Rivers will flow,’ Alex agreed, an equally trite saying from his homeworld. There was something oddly soothing in exchanging these clichés, as if they were being supported by the time-honoured wisdom of their societies. It had already become a little ritual between them, too, with a look of anticipation on Arak’s face.

  ‘Life goes on,’ they said together, an expression they had found to be common to both, and with that, Arak gave him a friendly nod.

  ‘Talk to you later,’ he said, indicating a villager who was clearly waiting to speak with him. ‘Tatta.’

  ‘Tatta,’ Alex replied – the informal goodbye was one of the words which had crept into everyday use aboard the Heron. They had been speaking Carrearranian throughout, Alex needing only a little help occasionally from the translator matrix projected via his eyepiece, but ‘tatta’ had become a cross-over word. There were more and more of these; so much so that newcomers could be disconcerted by the amount of Carrearranian being spoken around them.

  It was, however, in League Standard that Alex reverted to his conversation with Buzz. The exec had gone on quietly with his lunch while the skipper was talking to Arak, and was now waiting politely for Alex to catch up before embarking on dessert.

  ‘I think,’ Buzz spoke reflectively, almost to himself, as Alex finished his spicy rice dish, ‘that we may be ready for the Lights of Hope.’

  Alex responded with a look of pained reproach.

  ‘Must you call it that?’ he implored, at which Buzz chuckled.

  ‘These people have spent millennia looking up at their Guardian,’ he pointed out. ‘They’re traumatised by its loss. I’m afraid ‘Lights of Research Sats’ doesn’t cut it as any kind of surrogate.’

  ‘Even so…’ Alex held his fork above his plate, gesturing helplessly with it. ‘It feels…’

  ‘I know,’ Buzz assured him, since they had already had this discussion, not just between themselves but in full command team meeting at which many officers had expressed their views. ‘And I agree entirely, of course we can’t and mustn’t assume any kind of controlling role. But this is not that, this is just a gift, a beacon they can look to as a symbol of security. And it will be a fully informed decision on their part, in the full understanding of what use we will be making of it; a decision I believe they are now in a calm enough state to make for themselves.’

  He was right. Alex knew he was right. Buzz was their expert in social psychology and Alex would have taken his professional opinion on that anyway, but he had seen for himself how Arak and many others had moved, now, from their first emotional response into trying to make sense of the disaster. They were certainly calm enough now to make decisions for themselves. Alex had no issue in itself with the notion of providing the Carrearranians with beacons they could look to as a symbol of friendship. It was just the rather embarrassing Lights of Hope aspect he would rather not have to put his name to in official reports. But this was not, he reminded himself, about him.

  ‘All right,’ he conceded, ‘we’ll add inform and explain at the next briefing.’ Then, setting his fork down with his main course finished, he gave his second in command a slightly hunted look. ‘So, anything else you want to twist my arm over before we have pudding?’

  Buzz laughed, giving him a look which was as consoling as a hand on the shoulder. ‘No no, dear boy,’ he assured him. ‘That’s all.’ He swapped the skipper’s plate for a dish of icefruit frappe with a pinberry sauce. ‘Relax,’ he passed him a spoon. ‘Enjoy.’

  Twelve

  The next day, the Heron’s crew began the process of telling everyone on Carrearranis about the research satellites the Fourth wanted to put in orbit round their world. This required extensive explanation about safety issues, what they would be used for and how they would be seen from the ground.

  The ensuing discussion took four days before Alex was satisfied that everyone on the p
lanet had been given all the information they needed, honestly and at their own level of technological understanding, with every opportunity to ask questions and consider before they gave their views.

  In fact, he was being unnecessarily cautious with that. The Carrearranians had only one question – ‘Is it safe?’ – and having been assured that the satellites would be completely clean, entirely sterile, their reaction was overwhelmingly positive. There were, of course, a minority who didn’t want it – a few old people in every community inclined to grumble at the smallest change, and a few so fearful that they dithered in case the alien tech brought the sky down on their heads. On the whole, though, the decision was in favour.

  ‘We have 23.74% in bands 7 and 8,’ Very Vergan reported at the command team meeting, ‘extremely positive, 46.32% in bands 5 and 6, strongly positive and 8.42% in band 4, positive, a total of 78.48% polling in favour. There are 18.32% in bands 1 to 3, recorded as unsure to negative, 2.3% in band 0 as a definite no and 0.9% whose views could not be obtained.’

  He did not need to tell them that. They had all seen the poll data. It had been analysed, of course, in far more detail than that, geographically and ethnographically, and all that data had been on the board, freely available to everyone. It was, even then, spread out in multiple files on the datatable for them all to see. But there was a protocol to these things. The Fleet expected key data to be stated for the record at official briefings, making it explicit on what basis the ensuing decisions had been made.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Vergan,’ said Alex, just as if he really had found that recitation informative. Then he too went through the required convention for the benefit of the log. ‘As per the mission policy established in Resolution CA/1/329, we will accept a global, direct opinion poll as sufficient evidence of the views and wishes of the people of Carrearranis, in the absence of formal or confidential voting capacity. Are there any objections to so accepting the results of this particular poll on that basis?’

  He waited the three seconds necessary to establish that nobody had any objections, a pause in which even the crew fell silent in case any conversation of theirs might be construed as a protest. Not, of course, by the skipper, they all knew that this was pure formality and if any of them had had concerns they’d have raised them long before this. They were all, however, aware of the intensive scrutiny that recording would be subjected to in the years to come. The Admiralty would review it with an eye to correct procedures being followed. Politicians and other civilians, however, would interpret it in the light of their own views, looking for even the tiniest ‘evidence’ to support their opinions. Parts of it, even, would be released to the media with anything classified blurred out, and how they would interpret and present it to the viewing public was limited only by their own imagination. The Fourth, therefore, had learned to be careful in their handling of such decisions. Alex himself, conscious that this was just the sort of footage which would be given to the media, was coldly impersonal.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We will accept this as consensus from the people of Carrearranis and proceed with the deployment of four research drones, two in geostationary orbits and two in swinging ellipse.’ He looked at the Subs who’d been tasked with modifying and preparing the drones. The biggest modification had been the addition of several extremely powerful lights of the type used in starship comms arrays, which would make the drones visible from the ground at night. That was how they had been used to seeing the Guardian, as a fixed light in the heavens, a lodestar by which they had navigated their world.

  Now, they would have other lights to steer by. Though it was not until the next day that the drones, duly certified as completely sterile, were loaded into a fighter airlock. The fighter was Firefly, itself decontaminated to such a standard that there was no possibility of a single virus remaining aboard. Shion, who was to pilot it, had gone through rigorous decontamination herself, a deeply invasive and uncomfortable procedure. She was wearing a survival suit, of course, which doubled as clean room gear. The fighter was depressurised, too, so that there was no possibility of even the sterile atmosphere escaping through any failure at the airlock.

  ‘Green, all green skipper,’ she reported, with Firefly hovering alongside the frigate. ‘Permission to engage.’

  ‘Permission granted; engage,’ said Alex, and just managed to stop himself from adding any variation of ‘good luck’ or ‘be careful.’ Shion did not need either from him, she only needed Go.

  Firefly flicked around in a tearing dash which left a rainbow arc of light tail in its wake. It was, indeed, already decelerating as it span about and dived into the system, plunging from L28 to go sublight precisely at the point where the drones were to be deployed. With the fighter holding steady, the outer airlock was opened and the four drones gently ejected. As soon as they were clear the airlock slipped shut and the fighter accelerated away, surging straight back superlight. A second bright rainbow marked the curving path it took to pass through the system and swing back alongside the flagship.

  ‘Drones deployed, skipper.’

  The entire operation had taken just twenty three seconds, of which only eleven had been spent within the system and three of those sublight while the drones were released.

  ‘Well done,’ Alex said, and though his tone was formal she knew that there would be a handshake and a cookie, later. Good practice, however confident they were in their sterilisation procedures, was to minimise exposure by manned craft spending as little time as possible in the quarantine zone. Shion had volunteered for that task and been the obvious choice for it, too, since their best human pilot could not have achieved that flight in anything under a minute.

  ‘Thanks.’ Shion was already flipping the fighter over for docking as she brought it into the bay on the frigate’s belly. ‘You wouldn’t believe,’ she added conversationally, ‘how much I want to get these plugs out.’

  Every member of the Fourth who’d been through full decontam – and that was all of them – flinched a bit at the memory, with a surge of laughter round the ship. Full decontam meant that every orifice was not only jet-blasted, sprayed with decontaminants and sealants and fitted with micro anti-pathogen devices, but physically plugged, too, with high pressure suppositories. Shion was more sensitive to that than humans were and the seals were so uncomfortable for her that it bordered on pain. She wouldn’t complain about that and wasn’t complaining about it, the comment no more than a joke she knew the watching crew would enjoy. And so they did.

  Commander Mikthorn, however, wasn’t amused. He was all the more annoyed because he had been on the verge of conceding – reluctantly and silently – that Shionolethe had performed a useful task there with impressive skill. Not, of course, that this in any way justified the mind-bending amounts of money which had been and continued to be spent on her, but it was something, he told himself, that he had seen some slight indication of return for that profligate spending. And then she’d gone and spoiled it all with a vulgar crack that no officer should make at all, still less on ship-wide broadcast.

  Commander Mikthorn made the complex little snorting noise by which he allowed himself to express his contempt for all things Fourth Fleet Irregulars. Then he made it again. The research drones, deposited close to the planet, had popped out of their sterile containers and moved themselves into their assigned positions. As the first one came on line, a roar of cheers, whoops, whistles and stamping exploded simultaneously from every area of the ship. Those on the interdeck joined in with enthusiasm, even the current crop of civilian observers applauding and punching the air.

  Commander Mikthorn reached for his notebook. It had become generally agreed around the ship over the last few days that Mr Mikthorn was losing the plot. His writing things down in his notebook had shifted from being his only means of expressing disapproval into an almost fevered recording of all the insanity he saw going on around him. He had even, the day before, started doing something that many of the older hands recognised. He was d
arting – seeing something on the comscreen and racing there to see it in person, not out of interest but evidently checking to ensure that what was being shown on the comscreen was what was really going on.

  The only other person they’d ever had on the ship who’d behaved in that particular way had been a young Liberty League activist. Tass Curlow had been allowed aboard the ship as a post-grad student assisting a Second Irregulars researcher, and for the first few days had shown just exactly this kind of paranoid suspicion.

  There weren’t to know it, but Commander Mikthorn himself had also been thinking a good deal about Tass Curlow, lately.

  His suspicions had first been aroused when he had seen one of the observation party shaking hands with a group of crew, laughing and congratulating them.

  The member of the observation party concerned was an army general. There was a long history of rivalry and some culture clash between groundside armed forces and the Fleet; it was rare for their people to be friends. General Akade was of the rigid, crusty old-school type, as well, highly unlikely to approve of the highly irregular Fourth.

  In fact, Commander Mikthorn had known very well that the general did not approve of the Fourth. They had met at Oreol, during the time when the commander had been battling with the authorities there to be allowed to come out to the Heron. General Akade, already chosen for an observer’s place, had been making it very clear to everyone that they weren’t to expect any happy-clappy nonsense from him. Everyone who went out to the Fourth’s flagship, it seemed, sent back reports raving about how fantastic it was. On their return to Oreol, they were like evangelical converts, bursting to tell everyone, especially the media, how wonderful the Fourth was and what a terrific job they were doing out here. They would not, General Akade had told the media, get any of that nonsense from him – the journalists had actually applauded, hopeful of getting some really good controversial stuff at last.