Venturi Read online

  Venturi

  S J MacDonald

  Copyright © 2019 S J MacDonald

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 9781090283122

  DEDICATION

  Dedicated to everyone at Pineshield.

  You don’t have to be light years out in space to be

  making difficult journeys, solving unexpected

  problems and making life better for others.

  Such a great team!

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Cover design image by:

  ID 28761938 © SpinningAngel | Dreamstime.com

  One

  ‘T-Point Achieved!’ The astrogator yapped. ‘Ma’am!’

  Skip Eldovan sighed.

  ‘Can you not,’ she asked, ‘just say, ‘Hey, skip, we’re here!’?’

  The astrogator stared back at her, affronted.

  The skip, he felt, had no sense of occasion. Here they were at the culmination of a five-month journey, arriving at coordinates given to them by a mysterious alien race inviting them to a first contact meeting. Whatever happened here, he knew, the logs of this would be studied intensively, even perhaps centuries into the future.

  ‘No,’ he said coldly. ‘Ma’am.’ He contrived to convey in a mere three syllables that he would not consider ‘Hey skip, we’re here!’ to be an acceptable command deck report at any time, that he regarded her flippancy with profound disapproval and that he knew perfectly well she was winding him up. Then he flicked a glance at the flag officer’s chair. Not that he expected any support from that quarter. Commodore von Strada and Skip Eldovan described themselves as a command tag team and he had never yet seen them have any difference of opinion.

  And yes, there it was, a quick but appreciative grin from the commodore, triggering more grins and even a few sniggers around the command deck.

  Astrogation officer Lt Lionard tightened his lips into a thin line and pretended to re-check, unnecessarily, that they were circling the coordinates provided.

  Eldovan left him alone. There was a difference, after all, between stress-busting humour at a time of high tension and winding up the astrogator for no good reason. Not, she mused, that winding up Lionard wasn’t a constant temptation, but still…

  She turned to the commodore, looking hopefully at him.

  ‘Anything?’ She could see that the answer was no. Alex’s two previous encounters with the apparition which had given these coordinates had been dazzling bright and rock-concert loud. To him, anyway. Nobody else had been able to see or hear anything at all and nothing had been recorded on cameras or any other kind of sensors, either. The only hard evidence that he wasn’t hallucinating was the electrostatic discharge which had flashed like a small lightning bolt at the point where he said the figure disappeared.

  So, here they were. It was more than a year now since the apparition had issued an invitation to Alex to come to these coordinates. Alex had been sent on other operations while the Senate decided how they would respond. And then the Fourth had upgraded to this, their new ship.

  And it was new, too. The Venturi had come out of spacedocks only seven months before, the latest of the revolutionary Defender design. All the other Defender class destroyers had been named after piercing weapons – the Arrow, the Assegai and so on – but the Senate had felt that to be inappropriate for a ship intended primarily for diplomatic missions. So they had after much debate named it the Venturi, Adventurer in the ancient Cartasayan tongue.

  The Venturi was already living up to its name. Alex had had his crew going aboard it within days of the handover at Therik five months before and had launched it just three weeks later. Eight weeks after that he’d reported the ship ready for inspection. With the inspection team already aboard, they had been certified as operational by the end of the following week. Many in the Fleet were still spluttering at that as unseemly haste, quite undignified. But then, what could you expect from the Fourth Fleet Irregulars? They were always doing that kind of thing, setting impossible standards and leaving the regular Fleet looking slow and barely competent.

  They had, since then, been to Cestus and to Serenity. It would have been quicker by far to simply head straight out to these coordinates, but the Senate Sub-Committee in charge of the Fourth never could resist throwing in side-missions even when that sent them zig-zagging all over the place.

  So they had, as Eldovan had put it, come the pretty way.

  ‘Patience…’ Alex said and reminded her, ‘We may be here for months.’

  The reminder was for the crew, really, not for Eldovan, just as her asking the unnecessary question had been speaking on the crew’s behalf. It annoyed Lionard, this habit of theirs of having contrived conversations to answer questions the crew couldn’t ask directly, themselves. A red light above the primary board indicated that the command deck feed was live right now, broadcasting footage of the raised datatable at which the command team was seated. Lionard himself was at the astrogation table set below and out of the camera field, but anything he reported for the log would be included in the broadcast right across the ship.

  Alex’s reminder, though, did not have much effect. Everyone aboard was watching both the command deck feed and long-range scopes, hoping and waiting, waiting and hoping, counting the seconds till the aliens arrived.

  As seconds turned into minutes, it became clear that there was not going to be an instant response to their arrival at the coordinates.

  ‘Weird feeling, huh?’ Eldovan remarked. ‘Wondering if they can see us.’

  ‘It is,’ Alex agreed, with an easy, happy grin. ‘But safe to guess they’ll be having a very thorough look at us before they approach. When we met the Gider, they’d counted the number of dust mites on the ship.’

  ‘They wanted to know,’ Buzz recalled, ‘if we were keeping them as pets.’

  Alex chuckled at the memory, casting an amused glance at the man seated on his left. He had been prepared to fight to keep Buzz as his executive officer when the Fourth upgraded to the destroyer. The Fleet, after all, had been pressuring him to retire for a good ten years now and Buzz did not have the big-ship experience to justify making him exec of the destroyer. Nearly all of his career had been spent serving on corvettes.

  Alex had not, though, had to fight at all. The First Lord of the Admiralty had forestalled him, promoting Buzz to shipmaster rank and appointing him as flag exec. That meant he was here to assist Alex with operational matters, leaving day-to-day command of the ship to Eldovan as its skipper.

  They made an interesting trio, sitting there. Physically, they could hardly have been much more diverse – there was Buzz, who’d recently turned seventy five and looked like everybody’s favourite grandpa. Alex, still in his thirties, already had a few streaks of grey in his short-cropped hair. His Novaterran genome had given him early-onset greying as well as his sturdy physique, clear grey eyes and a face which could set to granite immobility. Eldovan was two years older but looked younger, with her athletic physique, extrovert manner and sporty look, her long hair clipped up in a high pony tail.

  But however different they appeared, there was something – a gleam in the eyes, a zest for adventure, a sense that all three were having the time of their lives. It was reassuring, that, even inspiring, for the many on the ship who were riding the line between excitement and fear.

  First contact missions, after all, did not happen every day. True, they were happening with increasing frequency, largely thanks to the efforts of the Fourth. But this was only the third time humanity had met one of the great, ancient civilisations from beyond the Firewall. It was a huge moment with tremendous implications for the future of humanity as they moved into a whole new era of discovery and development. And it was all, right now, on the shoulders of the man sitting in the middle chair of t
hat wing-shaped console.

  ‘At least,’ Alex said, ‘We didn’t have to do the Dance of the Dust Mite.’ First contact with the Gider had been enlivened by the discovery that they expressed themselves with dancing modelled on nature. Since the first contact meeting had involved the Fourth’s mascot, Lucky the gecko, the Gider had promptly created a special dance in celebration of the occasion, modelled on the bobbing movement of his head. Footage of Alex and the other members of the contact team attempting to do the Dance of the Lizard was still so highly classified that you needed nine ack alpha clearance even to know that it existed. Which made it quite astonishing, really, how many people had seen it.

  They sat there, chatting, casual, as an hour went past. The ship was at full alert, everyone at stations and in survival suits. Alex had said that they would remain at stations for an hour after arrival and if nothing had happened by then, step down the level of alert to stand-by.

  As the end of that first hour approached, Alex took a moment, taking stock of how people were coping.

  From where he sat at the blunted apex of the wing-shaped console, he could see everyone on the command deck. Eldovan, to his right, had her own exec seated next to her. Beyond him was the watch commander, with red-bordered conn screens in a tiered array and right out on the end, the junior officer of the watch. All of them were fine, calmly getting on with routine tasks. To Alex’s left was Buzz and beyond him were Davie and Shion, exodiplomacy consultant and exolinguist respectively.

  They were keeping themselves occupied, Alex could see, working on the Gide Disclosure. Their end of the console had been provided with additional tiers of screens upgraded to function much faster than any human would ever have need for. Davie, though a League citizen, was gehs – a genetically enhanced homo sapiens bioengineered to be an exodiplomat. He looked like a pixyish twelve year old, though he was in fact nineteen and had been functioning as an adult, effectively, since he was seven. He was working three research screens simultaneously, mostly through optics and an unhurried tapping of tactile controls. He was, Alex could see, only half engaged in what he was doing, just filling in time like a man idling away an hour with a puzzle.

  Shion, beside him, was much more focussed. The first non-human ever to serve with the Fleet, she had been brought to their space by a Solaran ship from her own homeworld, Pirrell. She was primarily a pilot and was mostly to be found either out flying her beloved fighter or on the hangar deck training others. Her secondary role, though, was that of exolinguist and it was in that capacity that she was at the command console. She had four primary research screens open in front of her and at least thirty subsidiary ones processing code, her fingers moving with rapid purpose from screen to screen, keeping it all in motion. Working on the GD, the Gide Disclosure, was her default activity when she had nothing else that she needed to do. She was completely absorbed, Alex saw, content to just sit there and work.

  In front of the console and set around half a metre below it, were the two long tables running lengthways onto the command deck, with a third, smaller, set horizontally at the end. The port-side table was known as Astrogation. Everyone there was keeping quiet, doing routine checks and maintaining the composure expected of Fleet officers.

  Over on the starboard Ops table things were a little more eclectic. The two officers with white hair and vivid blue eyes were Samartians. Despite their striking appearance and their slender, three-fingered hands, Samartians were genetically human. They were, in fact, genetically very close to Alex’s own Novaterran genome and shared many cultural similarities. Having considered the matter carefully, though, the Samartians had decided they would not define themselves as human. There was more to a sense of identity than mere genetics, after all. They were The People, entire unto themselves and quite separate from those they called The Other, The Revellin, the Backwards People.

  These particular Samartians, Jarlner and Bennet, were on secondment to the Fourth from their own military service, following up on the success of their previous exchange visit. They were in Fourth’s uniforms now, as Lt Commander Ordnance and Lt Gunnery. They had nothing to do at all other than to keep confirming that all weapons were on total shut-down, but this they did conscientiously every five minutes.

  Also at Ops were three civilians. Simon Penarth, the Fourth’s self-appointed Medical Director, was wearing creased-up chinos and a t-shirt under his survival suit, his shaggy hair uncombed. Simon was restless, poking at screens with aimless impatience and looking irritated when he tried to scratch his ear, forgetting that he was in a suit. Next to him was Cultural Attaché Jermane Taerling.

  He was talking. Of course, talking. Jermane, too, was a linguist and an exodiplomat. He’d spent a year at Samart, helping them to get past their fixed belief that it was not possible to learn to speak any other language than their own. He was, Alex and Davie aside, the senior ranking member of the Diplomatic Corps team on board and had, as such, a place at the Ops table by courtesy. Looking rather like a cheerful hamster, Jermane’s chief characteristic was his non-stop volubility. Even when he had nobody else to talk to, he would chat, as he was doing now, into his sound-baffled headset, recording his thoughts and observations to a personal diary.

  The third civilian was only known to them as Mister. He had given up trying to get them to call him Sub-lt Jones and wouldn’t tell them his real name, so Mister it was. He was LIA, a League Intelligence Agency officer sent aboard under cover to monitor any security issues the first contact mission might throw up. His attempts to pretend to be a Sub-lt Admin Officer hadn’t fooled anyone though, and he’d been exposed as an LIA agent immediately upon coming aboard. He sat there now, stiff backed, grim faced, doggedly writing notes.

  Beyond them, at the small cross-ways table, the command school class was also making notes. This was a group of seven officers here not to work but to study. They were, Alex knew, watching him, analysing every move he made.

  Beyond them, in the shallow angled bays around the sides of the command deck, departmental teams were working. They were quiet, not because they were busy but because they were watching and listening to Alex with rather more attention than they were giving to their screens.

  This would be the case, Alex knew, with most of the people on the ship. Twenty seven officers and three hundred and fifty seven crew made up the Venturi’s company, with the command school class, Diplomatic Corps team and Second Irregulars lab housed up on the interdeck. More than four hundred people, all told, all watching him, most of them as scared as they were excited and needing to see, to be reassured, that Alex wasn’t worried.

  And then there was Silvie, who wasn’t even interested. She was on the aquadeck, doing some gardening. She didn’t even have the command deck feed on screen. It wouldn’t engage her, as Alex understood. So much of quarian communication was empathic, holoscreens were as flat and frustrating to them as it would be for humans trying to follow a distorted screen with half the sound-track missing. Silvie had agreed, though, not to come to the command deck while the ship was on alert. She was vulnerable to emotional overload and there were not many more high-energy situations than first contact, really. So she had gone to the aquadeck, which besides being a self-sufficient pod within the ship was surrounded by the heavy insulation and electromagnetic fields which worked as empath-barriers. Alex could see on his screens that she had that set to maximum, so she wouldn’t be disturbed even if the whole crew was in a state of screaming hysteria. She was on the upper, air-filled level of the aquadeck, taking polyps from a plant which was in its reproductive cycle. She was putting each one carefully into a tray of tiny bio-pots, perfectly happy and absorbed in the task.

  Alex smiled, watching her for a moment. Silvie was with the Fourth on her own mission to learn about humanity, was only mildly curious about the Chethari and would only be interested in them if they turned out to be people she could connect with. And it would be more accurate to say, really, that she was with Alex and Shion rather than the Fourth as such. The
bond she had with them was so deep that all three just took it for granted that she would go with them wherever they went.

  Silvie was fine, Alex noted, and so was everyone else, keeping it together however nervous they might be.

  ‘Right,’ he said, as the hour ticked over. ‘Coffee, I think.’

  There was an exhalation through the ship, half release of tension and half disappointment.

  ‘Move to stand-by,’ Eldovan said and as the signal for that fleeped through the ship, pulled off her survival suit as casually as a groundsider might take off a jacket.

  Everyone else did the same. Even the civilians were quick and competent in such matters – Alex had made it clear that anyone who wasn’t at least as capable in alerts as a member of the crew would not be coming any further than Serenity, so they had all put in the effort.

  Mister, the LIA agent, redoubled his note-making with emphatic movements of his pen as hatches were opened and half the command deck crew and many of the officers there got up and left. Stand-by meant that the normal routine of the ship was being restored. If he had had his way, for sure, the ship would have stayed at full action stations and with missiles hot in tubes, too and all their laser-cannon charged for firing. The LIA, Alex felt, were not fully on-side with the concept of ‘We come in peace’. In the LIA version, he felt sure, it would be, ‘We come in peace but make one move we don’t understand and we’ll blast you to atoms.’

  Mister, though, had been told that he could sit on the command deck to watch and make his notes, but not speak. Nobody took any notice of his scowl, anyway. Certainly not Alex.

  ‘Coffee, skipper.’ The mug materialised over his left shoulder almost before the stand-by fleeping had stopped.

  ‘Thank you.’ Alex glanced round with a quick smile as the aroma of rich, marin-spiced coffee wafted past his nose. Able Star ‘Marny’ Marner was one of just three members of the Venturi’s crew who were not on the Fleet’s able and talented list. Up until five months ago, the only ways to join the Fourth were either to be offered a place with them on a rehab scheme for high potential but underperforming personnel or to be seconded in on the high-flyer scheme. Either way, you had to have been rated sufficiently above average to get what was now coming to be known as a ‘blue docket’, the status on your file needed even to be considered as an applicant. Marny, though, was part of a trial to see how perfectly average crewmembers coped with the pitch of training and operations that were normal for the Fourth. So far, he was doing just fine.