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  Sector Seventeen

  S J MacDonald

  Copyright © 2016 S J MacDonald

  All rights reserved.

  DEDICATION

  To Karen, for listening.

  You’re a great friend.

  CKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to Digital Donna for the cover design

  One

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Alex greeted the skippers, and then looked thoughtful as he saw that his steward, Banno Triesse, was hard on their heels with a tray and an air of happy satisfaction. The satisfaction was because he had anticipated this meeting and had the tray ready, scoring himself a point in the ongoing game he had going with the captain. ‘You,’ Alex pointed out to him as Banno whisked in with the tray and set it on the desk, ‘are off duty.’

  Banno performed a very well-practiced look of innocent surprise.

  ‘Less than two minutes, skipper,’ he said, and whisked himself out again to make that true.

  Dan Tarrance chuckled. It was rare to see anyone get the better of Alex von Strada, and all the funnier when it was one of the lowest ranking members of his crew. Alex’s decision that he did not want the services of a personal steward had been battered down by Banno’s determination that he was going to be the captain’s steward whether he wanted one or not. Even this, the ‘less than two minutes’ rule which allowed crew to carry out brief tasks while off duty without logging them as extra work, left Alex with nothing to say.

  ‘You’ve got to admit, he’s good,’ Dan observed, and Alex gave a resigned grin.

  Harry Alington, on the other hand, did not look at all amused. Captain was a flag rank in the Fleet and it went against all Harry’s beliefs about the dignity of that rank for Alex to refuse the services which came with it. At the same time, he felt that if Alex really was going to refuse to have a personal steward then he ought to have the authority to stop the crewman carrying out that role.

  This, however, did not stop him reaching for the tea which Banno had brought for him.

  The three of them were meeting in Alex’s daycabin aboard the Heron. They were very nearly an hour out of their home port at Therik, reaching the point at which their top secret operational orders would be released.

  Their destination should not be a surprise. The First Lord had told Alex about this mission personally and there had even been a media release announcing that they were going to Telathor. Still, the details of the mission with full briefings and specific orders were unknown and could not be accessed until the security system recognised that they were, as required, a full hour away from port with no unauthorised ships on their scopes.

  But now here it was – a buzz, a click, and the files popped open, pouring files out onto the screens in front of the captain.

  Alex needed only to glance through them to see that they confirmed what Lord Admiral Dix Harangay had already told him. Then he glanced right and left to see how Harry Alington and Dan Tarrance were responding.

  Harry Alington looked stunned. He was the skipper of the corvette Minnow, recently assigned back to service with the Fourth. Harry and Alex had a long history and none of it friendly. So far, they were being unnaturally cordial with one another.

  ‘But…’ Harry had read through the orders and was now reading them again, even checking to make sure there were no other pages in case there was something he’d missed. Operational orders, in his experience, came with a wealth of specific instructions both as to what was required and how the Admiralty expected you to achieve it. He’d heard rumours that Fourth’s orders amounted to little more than the First Lord giving them a destination and a budget, but it was hard to believe that they really could have that kind of operational freedom.

  Now, though, he was looking at operational orders which consisted in their entirety of seven bullet points.

  Proceed to ISiS Kavenko off-route, avoiding ISiS Karadon. Rendezvous with Customs and Excorps vessels on 37.5.39.

  If requested to do so by the Telathoran government, pay appropriate courtesy visit.

  Maintaining cover of anti-piracy patrols, attempt cross-border exploration of potential route to Oreol.

  If route successfully navigated, survey Oreol system for X-base installation.

  Proceed to further exploration at your discretion.

  Should discovery be made, evaluate and attempt contact at your discretion.

  Do not under any circumstances use or allow any member of your squadron to use the M word.

  The orders concluded with a handwritten addition from the First Lord, which read Best of luck – Dix.

  ‘But…’ said Harry again, with an air of rising indignation now as if he suspected that this was a leg pull, ‘this can’t be our …’

  He was interrupted by Dan Tarrance, who could contain himself no longer and let out a whoop of delight. He was past reading the orders and was already delving into the briefing files which accompanied them.

  These made it absolutely clear that they were, indeed, going out to look for the Space Monster of Sector Seventeen.

  It was a legend, of course, as familiar to spacers as the Banshee of Kennerman’s Ridge, the Novamas Jinx or the Shadow Raider. There had been stories told about it right back from the earliest days of exploration of the space beyond Telathor; stories of something very big, very fast and very strange that was glimpsed on the edge of scopes only to vanish again.

  ‘Brilliant!’ said Dan. He was just twenty four, a skipper only by courtesy as the insignia on his uniform was that of a commander. He was in command of the tiny patrol ship, Whisker, which had joined the Fourth’s squadron very unexpectedly just a few days before.

  Harry gave the younger man a scandalised look, though he said nothing. Alex had decreed that such meetings between the three of them were to be informal, an atmosphere in which they could all speak freely. Harry had no objection to that in principle. He just felt very strongly that the youngest and most junior of them should conduct himself with due humility. Humility, however, was not one of Dan Tarrance’s characteristics. He was one of the most brilliant young officers in the Fleet, and he knew it.

  Alex grinned at Dan’s enthusiasm, a light of excitement in his own eyes which Harry saw with some sense of foreboding. Neither of the other two, he felt, was approaching this with the right, serious, professional attitude he expected. Or perhaps they were in on the joke… he looked back at the orders again, dubiously. Surely the First Lord could not have actually issued mission orders to the Fleet’s most expensive task force in that blasé fashion? And that last point, too, just had to be a joke – Do not use the M word? What was that supposed to mean?

  ‘Yes, that’s it,’ Alex said, responding to Harry’s protest and tapping the screen displaying their orders with a confirming gesture. ‘Those are our orders.’ He gave Harry a look which held some sympathy as well as amusement. ‘That’s generally the kind of orders that we do get,’ he observed. ‘They can’t be any more specific than that because figuring out what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it is actually the challenge, you know?’

  Harry did know that, really, having been told several times that the Fourth was deployed as a wild card in operations, sent in with a broad remit in the hope that they could come up with some kind of solution to a problem nobody else could resolve. Even so, he had not expected that the remit would be this broad, the orders this vague.

  ‘But…’ he said. It was his favourite word and he could make it carry a lot of meaning, in this case a rather angry incredulity. ‘It doesn’t even say anything about taking on supplies.’

  Alex reminded himself that he was talking to a relatively inexperienced officer who’d spent most of his career in the Chartsey homeworld squadron. Harry had actually graduated from the Academy a year befor
e Alex but had long since been outpaced by him in their career progress. Alex was now a Fleet Captain, elevated to squadron command with a base of his own and tremendous achievements to his credit. He had twice been a Presidential Envoy and had recently been granted Ambassadorial status by the Diplomatic Corps.

  Harry, on the other hand, despite impeccable social position and connections, had only achieved Shipmaster rank the year before and had made a disastrous hash of the first and only operational assignment he’d been sent on. Alex had Sub-lts on his ship with more front line operational experience than Harry Alington. And, knowing how the Chartsey homeworld squadron was run, he should not have been surprised that Harry’s first concern would have been with routine administrative issues.

  ‘We’re an Irregular unit,’ Alex pointed out. ‘We manage things like supplies for ourselves – that’s covered in our standing orders.’

  ‘Oh – yes,’ Harry was a little embarrassed, then, because he did already know that, of course, but had forgotten it in his bewilderment over those bizarre orders. ‘But – that’s it?’

  ‘Well, it is pretty straightforward,’ Alex observed. ‘We’re to try to find a route to Oreol.’ He pulled up a star chart as he spoke, indicating their objective. The chart showed a region which was almost entirely hatched out with a haze of reds, indicating various levels of navigation hazards. Within it were several hundred star systems, including the only inhabited one, Telathor. The League border lay a few days beyond Telathor, at the point where the reds deepened into the ruby which declared the space to be non-navigable. Beyond that, in the huge zone marked as unexplored, were hundreds more star systems. One was highlighted, and Alex drew attention to it with a dab of his finger.

  This was Oreol, just two weeks journey from Telathor if it was possible to cruise direct from one to the other, yet no League ship had ever succeeded even in getting a quarter of the way there. Four Exploration Corps vessels had been lost in various attempts, and nine more forced to turn back after suffering significant damage. The reason so many efforts had been made to reach it was that remote observation showed it had a planet with green-world indicators, a living biosphere. Based on what information could be obtained by long range scans, it was considered almost certain to be a primitive biosphere of the kind spacers called slimeworlds. Until anyone actually went there and checked, though, nobody could be certain. Three more systems with green world indicators were shown on the chart, too, considerably further away and buried even deeper in the non-navigable zone that sprawled across the region. This was Sector Seventeen, the wildest and most dangerous space around League borders.

  ‘Depending on how long it takes us to get there, if we can get there, and what our supplies situation is at that point, I’ll make a decision about what further explorations we can undertake.’ Alex said. ‘With the ultimate objective, obviously, of finding the origin of the Phenomenon.’

  ‘But,’ said Harry, ‘it doesn’t say anything about that! Just ‘If discovery is made’.’

  Alex chuckled.

  ‘Nobody,’ he said, with a note of certainty, ‘wants to be any more specific than that. I mean, would you? I mean, would you want to be the one who went on record as having deployed a Fleet squadron to go look for… It? The Thing?’

  ‘Well, no,’ Harry admitted, reluctantly. ‘But they are sending us out there to look for it, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, because there is good and credible evidence that there is an inhabited world out there,’ Alex said. ‘Historically, of course, multiple credible glimpses of something in the region. More recently, information from Pirrell and now the Gide Disclosure.’ He flicked another amused look at Dan, who was deep into the Gide Disclosure document itself by then and making little happy noises as he read. ‘I believe,’ said Alex, ‘that there is a very good chance that we are looking either for a Thelae lifeboat colony or an Olaret Nesting.’

  He saw the incomprehension on Harry’s face, and sighed inwardly. He had given Harry a reading list to work through while he and the rest of the Heron’s crew were on long leave at Therik, so he should have had the basics, but clearly did not.

  ‘They’re in the history section of your briefing,’ Alex said, allowing himself just the faintest trace of patience in his tone to let Harry know that he really should be familiar with that material by now.

  ‘Sir,’ said Harry stiffly, recognising the rebuke. ‘I have to admit that with everything else I’ve had to deal with, I haven’t prioritised the history reading list. I did look at it,’ he added, with a certain amount of defensiveness, ‘but much of it seemed to be, well, more myth and legend than actual history.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Alex. ‘You’ll find we often discuss mythology in the course of our operations – we do find that very often myths and legends are the ways in which society has remembered and distorted real events through Dark Age retelling. Many things which we believed to be pure myth, like the Lost Library of Cartasay, have actually turned out to be fact. That doesn’t mean that we believe every myth we come across, of course, but we do evaluate them in the light of other evidence, particularly information Shion has given us, or from the Gide Disclosure. In the case of the Thelae and the Olaret, we have strong, credible information.

  ‘The Thelae…’ he drew Harry’s attention to the Telathor system on the star chart, ‘were the ancient people of this world. We know quite a bit about them, and we’re learning more as fast as information about them comes up in the GD translation.’

  Harry nodded to show his understanding of that. It had been Alex von Strada himself who had undertaken first contact with the Gider, a mercurial species who lived far beyond the barrier known to humans as the Firewall. Since then, the Gider had overwhelmed the Diplomatic Corps with their gifts of information, flooding the computers on their contact ship with yottabytes of data. Unfortunately it was not in a format which could be accessed directly by human technology. It had to be converted and translated first, using algorithms which they weren’t sure even now were really conveying meaning correctly. Since the data they’d already received was more than twice the size of the combined libraries of every university in the League and less than a quarter of it had even been auto-translated yet, getting useful information from it was rather like trying to find a handful of oat grains in a global wheat harvest.

  ‘Basically, though,’ Alex told him, ‘the Thelae were a remarkable people – nature loving, artistic, known for their warmth of hospitality, the beauty of their world and their very relaxed lifestyle. Thela was also known, back then, as Etaterras, which has been translated either as The Eternal World or The Timeless World. The origins of modern Telathor are obvious, as much of that culture has survived. Which was, after all, the intention. When the plague came the Thelae chose to create a survival genome as close to themselves as was possible with a functioning immune system – modern Telathorans, of course. Most of the species which did that then died out when infection reached their world, but it is apparent that the Thelae left before that happened. Telathoran legend and indeed religious belief speaks of the ancient, or gods, gifting them their world and going into the heavens. Shion and the Gider say that they left Thela but there’s no record as to where they went or what happened to them. Things were just so chaotic back then, records dying out with the people who had them, and the Thelae just disappeared. We do know, though, that many worlds were attempting lifeboat colonies at the time, sending out groups to live in total isolation in the hope that they would survive, and it is possible that the Thelae established such a colony and the Phenomenon which has been glimpsed are ships of theirs, perhaps monitoring the progress of their descendants. That’s what the Telathorans believe, anyway, and is the basis on which they are pushing so strongly for the region to be explored.

  ‘It is, however, just as likely, if not more so, that we’re looking for one of the Olaret Nestings. The Olaret were unique amongst the ancient species – everyone else tried to create a survival genome on their own world
s and made them as much like themselves as possible, but the Olaret colonised as many worlds with survival genomes as they could, adapting each one to give them the best possible chance of thriving in that particular world’s environment. We know that they created thirty six of their colonies or Nestings. We’ve been able to identify thirty two of them.’

  He called up a screen with a list of the thirty six known Nestings and the names by which they were now known. One of them was his own homeworld, Novaterre. The fourteenth world on the list, however, was highlighted in red and indicated as Modern Identity Unknown. Its original name was given as Carrea Rensis. The final three names on the list were also highlighted.

  ‘This,’ said Alex ‘is the list that Shion gave us when she told us about the Olaret. It is recorded in that order in the monument they call the Gardens of Memory on Pirrell. I find it amazing, myself. I mean, just think of it. Some official on Pirrell, ten thousand years ago, was recording the colonies the Olaret had founded. There are so many ways that could have been done – alphabetically, in order of founding, in order of size, any number of ways, but that official, that day, made the decision to put them in this order. And there they are, giving us vital information today.’ As he spoke, he began plotting the list onto a star chart expanded to show distant Pirrell, tagging them in one at a time with a light-line to Pirrell and a note of the distance.

  It didn’t take Harry long to spot the sequence.

  ‘They’re in order!’ he observed, as Alex tagged in number five.

  ‘Exactly.’ Alex confirmed. ‘And since we know that thirty two of them are in order of distance from Pirrell, it’s fairly safe to assume that the others are too. Which means that the last three are somewhere out beyond Quarus.’ He indicated the vast unexplored space across the Gulf which lay between the galactic spiral arm occupied by the League and the one where Quarus had been found. ‘Excorps is out there now, of course, looking for them. But number fourteen, Carrea Rensis, should be somewhere in this zone.’