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  Dedication

  For Andrea, the original Eldovan, with thanks for making our own training group so lively and enjoyable.

  One

  ‘Alex!’

  The Vice-President of the League bobbed through the airlock and grabbed Alex with both hands.

  For one awful moment Alex actually thought that the Vice President was going to kiss him. In the event, he merely gripped hold of the skipper’s hand and his forearm, pumping an over-excited handshake.

  ‘Sir.’ Alex had been about to salute, but that was clearly not going to happen. And he wasn’t, just as clearly, going to be allowed to get a word in edgewise.

  ‘Such a pleasure – a delight – such a privilege to welcome you home…’

  Others were already crowding through the airlock behind him. The frigate Heron was just a couple of days out from a triumphant return to Serenity and this was the welcome party… a small part of the welcome party, at least. Behind the Vice President was the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Chief of the Diplomatic Corps, the General commanding the League’s groundside forces and a couple of other VIPs Alex didn’t know. A second shuttle, already en route, was bringing six Senators to represent the League’s government. Behind them again was a similar delegation from Cestus, the nearest League world to Serenity. And behind them came the unofficial flotilla, more than a hundred ships which had surged out from Serenity just to escort them into port.

  Vice President Mich Derenanik, though, was not making way for any of the people crowding behind him. He was holding on to Alex like someone who’d secured the biggest bargain in a sale, a white-knuckled grip on his elbow and a fiercely possessive determination: Mine!

  To be fair, as Alex understood, this was the VP’s big moment. The Vice President was largely invisible in the League. The nature of the election meant that the Vice President was the person who’d been the President’s main rival, so it was accepted that they would have a purely ceremonial role and very little actual involvement in government affairs.

  In this case, however, the quarians had sent a message announcing that they did not want President Tyborne to come to Serenity and meet them, as he was intending to. He was, as they said, an idiot, and annoying, and would only upset people. Vice President Mich Derenanik, however, could come if he liked, since he was generally considered to be inoffensive.

  It wasn’t the quality Mich Derenanik would have chosen to be recognised for, but it was, in fact, accurate. He was inoffensive, a rather grey gentleman with a quiet voice and a habit of speaking in platitudes. But the quarians had asked for him and people were saying now, to his delight, that they’d made the wrong choice, that he should have been President after all.

  ‘My heartiest congratulations,’ he beamed at Alex, greatly daring in the face of Alex’s frozen granite expression. Dix Harangay, First Lord of the Admiralty, had been helpful on the way out here, getting all of them to understand that Alex genuinely could not overcome his cold, intimidating manner in formal situations. They should, Dix had said, not be put off by his manner but just speak to him normally.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Alex, making subtle efforts to disengage himself from the Vice President’s grip, and failing. Nothing short of an unarmed-combat breakaway was going to make Mich Derenanik let go of him until he’d had his say.

  Nothing, at least, other than the sudden arrival of a quarian. The moment Silvie appeared on the arrivals concourse, Alex fell off the Vice President’s radar instantly. He let go of Alex’s arm and abandoned what he’d been about to say, gazing instead at the silver-haired woman who was looking around at them.

  All eyes were on her. The babble of voices stilled, and there was a rush of amazement, mingled with a frisson of fear. Some of these people had met Silvie before. All of them had heard the stories. And suddenly, all the training and rehearsals they’d been having on the way out here seemed totally inadequate.

  Silvie, as always, filled the room. She had been bioengineered by the quarians specifically to undertake the role of ambassador to humanity. She was small and slightly built, with light bones and a bird-like poise to her head. In theory, she had been created to look like a human so that she might go amongst them without attracting attention. In fact, she had such powerful charisma that it was as if she moved in her own spotlight and left a trail of sparkles in the air. Even people with no idea who she was would stop and stare after her if she flitted past them in a crowd. Walking into a group like this, she was like a living stun grenade.

  ‘I….’ said the Vice President.

  ‘No,’ said Silvie, completely disregarding him, and eyeing the rest of them with an air of decision. ‘Definitely not.’

  And with that, the quarian ambassador was gone.

  Everyone looked at Alex, who grinned inwardly.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘that the situation – with so many people they don’t know and emotions somewhat elevated – is simply too high impact for them, so Silvie has done the sensible thing and will keep the others in a quieter environment.’

  They had to accept that, though there was a sense of crashing anti-climax. Some of them had been travelling for two months to get here, and the last two days of that hurtling out from Serenity, unable to wait even a moment longer than they had to for the thrill of welcoming the quarians. And now they’d just gone, without even so much as a passing hello.

  ‘Human-quarian diplomacy,’ said Ambassador Gerard, ‘is always challenging, unpredictable and disconcerting, wouldn’t you agree, Captain?’

  He was, Alex realised, the only person there actually happy with the way Silvie had rejected them all. At least now, his manner conveyed, they would all have some little taste of the frustration the Diplomatic Corps had been battling for decades.

  ‘Indeed, Your Excellency,’ Alex affirmed, and kept to himself the thought that that was what made it so much fun.

  There wasn’t much fun to be had though, at least for Alex, as the ever-increasing flotilla made its way to Serenity. Everyone wanted a piece of him, with hardly a minute he could call his own.

  ‘You’ll have to get used to it,’ said Dix, as they made their way from one event to another. ‘You’re a public figure now, Alex – a public hero.’

  Alex laughed, but over the next few days it was borne in upon him that Dix really hadn’t been pulling his leg.

  It was understandable, even perhaps inevitable. All the while the Fourth had been making their way out to Serenity and then on to Quarus, the story had been coming out; the discovery of Quarus by the Exploration Corps, the first delighted hopes, the first Diplomatic Corps mission, and failure. Contact had stalled at primary level, never getting past the phase of limited contact in a restricted encounter zone. Ninety years of failed endeavour, ninety years of quarians regarding humans as so insane and horrifying that they’d come close, many times, to severing the relationship entirely.

  Silvie had been their last effort before they closed their border to humans with a regretful but firm Come back when your species has matured to a civilised level. Bioengineered to go amongst humans, to learn all she could about them, she had been named Ambassador at birth.

  The story of how she’d ended up travelling with the Fourth had been told, too. All those people who’d happened to be in Chartsey’s Senate Square on the day Silvie landed a stolen shuttle there and emerged in movie-alien get up were now in hot demand for interviews, most of them declaring that they’d known it wasn’t a movie being filmed, as the authorities had said at the time, it was real, a real alien landing right there in front of the Senate doing the ‘I come in peace, take me to your leader’ thing, for real! It had even been admitted that the sudden improvement in the efficiency of the traffic control systems at the capital world, which many motorists had remarked upo
n at the time, was due to Silvie having noticed it could work better than it was and reprogramming it for them.

  Nothing had been said, in that, about the tornado of chaos, panic and screaming hysteria which had followed Silvie’s happy wanderings in the six hours she’d spent at liberty around the system. Nothing had been said, either, about how close the authorities had come to shooting her down, or about them trying to lock her into an Embassy suite. It had simply been said that Silvie had been taken out to meet the Fourth, having heard that they had a non-human officer, and had stayed there with them, entirely of her own choice.

  The question of why she had stayed with them, and what was so special about the Fourth, had required some very agile flick-about reportage by the media. After years of reporting von Strada as a ruthless villain running a sinister black ops unit, they had had to bring it around to explaining that he was, in fact, a highly honourable officer commanding the Fleet’s premiere taskforce. Equipped with the most advanced technology, the highest ability personnel and more operational freedom than a regular Fleet ship could have, the Fourth Fleet Irregulars really were the people you sent for when all other options had been exhausted.

  And in that light, their apparently outrageous behaviour now had to be reinterpreted as solving problems no-one else could find solutions for.

  The media had made the switch – largely by blaming the authorities for having misinformed and misled them as cover for the Fourth’s real activities. Quite why the authorities should have felt it to be preferable to have the media and public railing at them for what they believed the Fourth was up to rather than simply telling the truth was not gone into. There was just a period in which the media ranted at the authorities for the stories the media themselves had produced over the years, and then a glide into exposing what they now triumphantly declared to be The Truth.

  For most people – ordinary people, across the League – stories about the Fourth had been no more than occasional shock-horror headlines they absorbed with their cornflakes and gave no more thought. Now, though, they were fronting up for humanity in what was being treated as a first-contact mission; they were news.

  Alex had received, every day, updates from Serenity telling him how well people in the League were responding to news about Quarus, so he knew that the reaction had been generally positive, shading into excitement. But that had been figures, graphs, a remote and analytical view.

  He didn’t really appreciate what it meant until they reached Serenity.

  ‘People have been watching it unfold, day by day, in their homes.’ Port Admiral Pearl Tennet, known as Terrible to the Fleet, handed Alex a small bottle of chilled water, with a thin smile.

  They were standing at a window in her office at what had once been the Serenity X-Base. The windows looked westward over a landscape which fell away from the plateau on which the base had been built. It was thickly forested with the fern-like, flexible trees which had been engineered during the first terraforming project here more than a thousand years ago; a forest rich with the colourful bird life which had been developed in subsequent waves of using this planet as a terraforming research station. Since Serenity had a retrograde spin, the sun rose in the west, with the morning earthquake rippling around the planet as it was stretched by the massive tidal forces of its pallid, super-dense star.

  Alex never got tired of watching the dawn on Serenity, which thanks to its frantic rotation happened every 6.87 shipboard hours. Dawn here meant the sun tearing over the horizon, the ground trembling and the forests swaying under the pressure of that horizontal pull, with tens of thousands of birds launching into the air in a living rainbow.

  Dawn, however, had been more than half an hour ago, and the birds had long since settled back into the trees. The sky was the usual Serenity haze with a pale, dim glow indicating the position of the sun as it hurtled across the sky. Even so, the rolling waves of green stretching all the way to a distant horizon would have been a tranquil sight. Now, though, the view was ruined by the new walkway which had been constructed for the thousands of visitors flooding the base every day. It was on gimballed stilts, of course, keeping the walkway still even in the most violent earthquakes, with viewing platforms, interactive information panels, seating, refreshment kiosks and lavatories. It was twenty metres wide and branched off into curved platforms covering more than a kilometre. To Alex, it was as if a pristine environment had become a tourist hotspot overnight. There were a couple of thousand people there right now, many of them wearing the transparent pop-overs the liners provided. They were not strictly necessary, since the environment here was chilly but tolerable with normal outdoor clothing. The liners, however, knew very well that providing special gear for groundside visits raised the sense of adventure their passengers were paying for. So there they were, in their plastic capes, munching hot sweet pastries, taking endless holos and telling one another excitedly just how amazing it all was.

  Alex took a sip of his water. It would be churlish, even hypocritical, to complain that development here had spoiled what had been his favourite view on the planet. They were here, after all, because of his mission. And that was the whole point of having given Serenity to Quarus in the first place, so that it could be developed as an encounter zone.

  ‘I have,’ said Terrible, ‘been watching it myself.’ She was gazing out of the window, her manner cool and detached as always. ‘The reportage,’ she explained, ‘as it went out to our worlds, not just the official reports. It was…’ she paused for a moment, considering. ‘Remarkably absorbing,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you can appreciate how engaging it was, seeing footage come back from a first-contact mission; not live, as such, of course, but in real time, day by day. The footage of your visit to Feyor was virtually a global-stop event, even here.’

  Alex was amazed, looking at her to see if by any miracle Terrible had acquired a sense of humour and was making a joke. But no. She was, as always, completely serious.

  He had known, of course he had known, that everything he and every other member of the mission team had done at Quarus was recorded, constantly, by the body-cams which were part of their swim gear. And he had known, too, that the Fleet and Embassy here would decide, between them, what footage they would release to the media. But he had never seen any of that, himself, and it astonished him to realise that people – billions of people – had been watching his visit to Feyor.

  ‘How much of that,’ he asked, ‘was released?’

  ‘Oh, all of it,’ Terrible told him. ‘Two and a half hours of footage, which all the stations put out as real-cam in its entirety, as well as highlights and analysis. And that was… truly remarkable, Alex.’

  Alex said nothing. It had been one of the most profound experiences of his life, and his own most treasured memory of all his adventures on Quarus. It was disconcerting to realise that it had been watched by other people like a movie.

  ‘It was,’ Terrible observed thoughtfully, ‘the essence of exodiplomacy – the exploration, the adventure, the wonder of it – even the fear. I am not ashamed to admit that when you were being drawn down into that chasm, I was holding my breath. Almost everyone here was watching it, simply enthralled. It went out with a global-stop warning, the most powerful footage of the whole mission. I doubt there are many people across the League by now who haven’t at least seen edited highlights.’ She gave him a moment to think about that.

  Trillions, he realised. Not billions watching him. Trillions.

  ‘You cannot appreciate,’ she said, judiciously, ‘the impact. Cosmos Parks are already advertising VR swims at Feyor as their next big attraction. And the biggest selling souvenir here is a t-shirt with your face, the wonder on it, looking out at Feyor.’

  There was just something in the way she said that which made Alex turn his head and look at her, stunned and then increasingly suspicious.

  ‘You didn’t…’

  ‘Not for myself, obviously.’ Said Terrible, avoiding his gaze. ‘But I do have nephews an
d nieces.’

  Alex made a choking noise, turned back and stared out of the window, unseeing, taking the couple of minutes needed to process the fact that his face was now on merchandise. He had been told that he was being compared with Van Damek, the League’s most famous explorer, and that his personal publicity profile was extremely high. But still… t-shirts?

  ‘It will take some adjusting to,’ Terrible conceded. ‘But we will protect and support you as much as we can.’ The we, there, he understood, meant both the Fleet and the Diplomatic Corps, working together as they had been throughout the handling of this mission. ‘It will not be easy for you,’ said Terrible, with a glance at him which might perhaps have held a glint of sympathy. ‘But I have no doubt,’ she said, resuming her gaze out of the window, ‘that you will rise to the challenge.’

  It was, at least to begin with, more bewildering than challenging. It was as if he’d come back to find that the universe wasn’t quite working as it always had before. Instead of mobs of banner-waving activists yelling and chanting abuse at him, there were tourists cheering and whooping and clamouring to take holos with him. There was no frenzied media pack, either – at least not here. Though there were by then nearly eight thousand journalists at Serenity, they were all very much aware that their visas depended on them complying with conditions under which only a few of them could be filming at the base at any given time, and even they were not allowed to approach Alex unless prior agreement for an interview had been secured.

  In return, he was obliged to spend an hour every day on a media call, answering questions on his usual basis of giving yes/no answers or indicating a strength of response on a scale of one to ten. It wasn’t, of course, as forthcoming as the media would have liked, but they seemed to understand that it was the best they were going to get. And they were, disturbingly, full of smiles and compliments.

  Rather more disturbing, for Alex, was his appearance in front of the Senate Committee. It turned out that the Senators who’d come out to meet him were not a random group, but had been appointed by the Senate as a Special Purposes Ad Hoc Committee, sent out to represent them in meeting the quarians.