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  ‘So now I’m too stupid or weak-minded to cope?’ Mister was outraged. ‘You’re going to be telling ratings, even civilians this stuff, but it’s too much for me?’

  ‘Honestly?’ Alex said. ‘I think it would be too much for any LIA officer. And I don’t mean that with the slightest disrespect,’ he added, as Mister drew breath to tell him what he thought of that. ‘Like any organisation, the LIA has a particular profile they recruit for. The Diplomatic Corps recruits steady, reliable bureaucratic types, Excorps wants adventurers, the LIA wants worriers. That’s what you do, I get that, you imagine every terrible thing that might possibly happen and you worry about it, feel responsible for preventing it, for you, every worry is a very real and present danger. The LIA recruits people with those personality traits and then trains them to an acute pitch of what you yourselves call professional paranoia. And there are certain things, certain core beliefs, in that, which are facts beyond challenging, fundamental things like your definition of a terrorist and how you think and feel about them, yes?’

  ‘Is this about terrorists?’ Mister asked, suddenly on the alert.

  ‘No.’ Alex said, very patiently. ‘I’m just using that as an example. What I’m saying is that if you got a whole bunch of people together in a room – the LIA, say, Liberty League activists, sociologists, all sorts of people with different ideas, the LIA point of view on ‘what is a terrorist and what should we do about them’ would be very clear, rigidly defined and every other point of view would be rejected out of hand. Right?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Mister conceded. ‘But what’s this got to do with…’

  ‘Bear with me,’ Alex requested. ‘Those are core beliefs – and we all like to think that our core beliefs are unshakeable. So when something comes along that challenges and does shake those beliefs, it is traumatic. I’ve seen it, you know? Just an example, a university professor who was with us to do research, joined the ship with full clearance so was told about Shion. She flatly refused to believe it, even though she was told many times by many people and given full information, even given Shion’s medical profile. Her core belief that ‘aliens aren’t real’ was so rock solid she rejected every effort to inform her, dismissing it as wind up. She got pretty angry with us too, at times. When she did eventually realise that everyone had been telling her the truth, the shock was so great that she passed out and had to be taken to sickbay with trauma.’

  Mister was looking daggers at him.

  ‘I don’t believe,’ he said, evidently thinking this was a dig at his own outburst on the command deck, ‘it was unreasonable for anyone to be traumatised by finding themselves knocked out and stranded on an alien planet!’

  ‘No,’ Alex agreed. ‘If you took a thousand people and put them in that situation, most of them would be having panic attacks and perfectly understandable, too. But the point is that you were the only person on the ship who was traumatised, because the rest of us, even the civilians, have been trained to cope with overwhelming and crazy stuff and you haven’t. Which means, with no discredit to you whatsoever, that you are already operating pretty much at the limit of what you can cope with. So these briefings…’ he shook his head. ‘I can tell you now,’ he said. ‘Furious denial, incredible stress as you see everyone else accepting things that you can’t and won’t believe, arguments, anxiety – and if it does hit you that the briefings are true, trauma. And I’m not, really not, winding you up or trying to exclude you, here. I consider myself to be a pretty open minded, flexible thinker – adaptable, you know?’

  Mister LIA felt that was a massive understatement. It had taken, by his reckoning, less than three minutes for Commodore von Strada to get from the shock of waking up from Turnaround to beaming with delight at the discovery that his ship had been parked on an alien planet.

  ‘When this was put to me,’ Alex said, ‘I can tell you that I came close to being physically sick. So I speak, here, with real concern for your welfare should you insist on following these briefings.’

  Mister took that in and looked wary.

  ‘I can insist, then?’

  ‘You can,’ Alex said. ‘Because for all my duty of care I do recognise that it would also be extremely stressful for you to be excluded from information which you know is important and which everyone else on the ship knows but you. So while I have to offer and advise a step-out opportunity, I will respect your decision if, knowing the impact and the risks, you choose to take part.’

  ‘Then I am in,’ said Mister, in a tone which made it apparent he would have fought tooth and claw if Alex had insisted on excluding him. ‘But what is it?’ he asked. ‘What is so terrible that you’re worried even your own people won’t be able to handle it?’ His eyes widened. ‘Are we stranded here? Are they keeping us like lab rats?’

  Interesting, Alex thought, to see what his worst and immediate fear was – that the Chethari would treat them the way the LIA would have wanted to treat any aliens who came into their hands.

  ‘No, nothing like that.’ Alex said and got out a comp, flicking up a screen but keeping it concealed from the LIA man. ‘Sneak preview,’ he told him. ‘Tomorrow’s briefing will involve a shock drill with figures appearing throughout the ship. The readings we will generate will set off bio-hazard alerts. The species we’ve created for this – and I do assure you they are not real – exude a toxic slime to their skin, they have sphincters on their chests which puff out faecal matter and they are breathing out an unknown viral pathogen. We aren’t using holographics for this, but volunteers who’ll be wearing convincingly revolting suits. Their task will be to try to hug and kiss as many people as they can.’ He turned the screen to show the LIA agent the image. ‘Meet,’ he said, ‘the Urr.’

  Mister grimaced slightly, but was looking even more suspicious.

  ‘This is like the ghosts,’ he said, referring to some of the Fourth’s more out-there drills, ‘and the zombies?’

  ‘Similar,’ Alex said. ‘though they’re mostly holograms, we do all kinds of startle training and this won’t seem much different. The point is that I know how people will react to the Urr and what they will do about them. And that, then, will be the introduction to the first briefing, to reflect on that from the Urr perspective, with some discussion points for people to talk about amongst themselves. That’s entry point and we will be coming back to that as the briefings progress. I don’t think you’ll have a problem with that – in fact,’ he gave a little grin, ‘I’m rather hoping that you’ll help us out by being one of the volunteers.’

  Mister LIA straightened his back in mighty dignity.

  ‘You are asking me to dress up in that…’

  ‘Hoping,’ Alex said. ‘I haven’t asked anyone else – the costumes are being produced in secret and I’ll only be calling in the people I want for it a few minutes before the drill starts. So you are being told this in confidence. And I do hope you will consider pitching in. It is undignified, of course, but it is genuinely important if people are to understand the later briefings. Think of it as deep-cover exercise.’ He flashed a quick but mischievous grin. ‘And,’ he added, ‘you get to splatter people with stinking slime.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Mister. ‘And the others … will they be officers?’

  Alex nodded. ‘Command school class,’ he confirmed.

  That made a difference. Mister LIA was extremely sensitive about the comments which had made when his cover was blown, to the effect that since he wasn’t the officer he’d claimed to be he should really be housed on a mess deck with the crew. They’d been pulling his leg, but Mister LIA didn’t get jokes.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I might consider it.’

  ‘Good.’ Alex said. ‘I’ll message you tomorrow when it’s time and you can come along to join us if you’ve decided to pitch in.’ He got up, casually. ‘Now, I’m going to walk out of here looking like I’ve had a right go at you. So you may want to wait a minute or two and come out looking pretty fed up, yourself.’

  The LIA
agent was about to protest that he didn’t need any instructions in field craft from the Fourth, thank you, but then realised that Alex was holding out his hand to him. So he got up too, a little uncertain, but shook it.

  ‘And – you won’t tell me what the whole thing is about?’

  ‘If I did,’ Alex said, ‘that would rather undermine the point of a phased exposure briefing, wouldn’t it?’ He regarded the LIA agent thoughtfully and taking out his comp, called up another image. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Have this.’ He transferred it to Mister’s desk under clearance for his eyes only and Mister, promptly accessing his desk from his wristcom, stared at it in confusion.

  The image Alex had given him was a geometric shape. Just a shape, a white 3D shape with translucent sides so that its full structure could be seen, on a plain background with no data. It had, Mister counted quickly, twenty faces, though there was an odd cone-shaped dip on one of them.

  ‘What is this?’ He asked, raising his head to look at Alex.

  ‘You’ll find out in briefing four,’ said Alex and as he went to the door, paused and looked back. ‘Fair warning,’ he said. ‘I had nightmares.’

  He went out, leaving the LIA agent to ponder on what could possibly be so terrifying that it had given Alex von Strada nightmares.

  Nah, he thought, staring at the shape and finding nothing in the slightest bit disturbing about it. Nah.

  It just had to be a wind up.

  Eight

  The Invasion of the Urr went off just as Alex had planned it with his co-conspirators, Buzz, Davie and Eldovan. Rather to Mister’s surprise, it was considerably more focussed than merely dressing them in daft suits and sending them out to run around splatting slime at people. They were given a deep-cover profile and mission objectives in a format the LIA agent was familiar with, even if he’d never been given a profile to undertake the role of a slime-splatting monster before. The others took the role-play challenge seriously and as he soon realised, the running around splatting slime phase was the least important part of it.

  Though it was, admittedly, somewhat liberating… he would never use the word fun… to pursue people, squirting brown spray from his sphincter and oozing slime through the gloves. People fled, yelling and making gratifyingly disgusted noises. And he managed to get a young Sub who’d been particularly snarky with him down on the deck and covered in so much slime that the guy was retching at the stench of it.

  After the crew had managed to overpower them and lock them in a quarantine zone, though, the fun moved into a more serious phase.

  Well, slightly more serious. The Urr, still in costume, were brought to the command deck where they were seated at the command school table and debriefed by Buzz. They remained in their roles, using the names and the backgrounds provided in their cover profiles, expressing their profound dismay with how brutal and horrible the humans had been. They only wanted to be friends, they said. There was plenty of room on the ship for them all and their families, too, who’d be along later – how many? Oh, not many, they only had two to three hundred children at a time… yes, they were sure that they could be very good friends with the humans, if only the humans would be reasonable about it. Yes, admittedly, some humans would die from the toxins and diseases that they carried, but that was hardly anything to make a fuss about, was it? Nine out of ten of their own kids would die before they were adult. They just ate them, they said. Didn’t the humans do that?

  ‘All right – thank you.’ Alex appeared as the half laughing revulsion round the ship reached the level he’d been waiting for. ‘Well done,’ he told the role play group, ‘but please take those suits off now…’

  Riggers appeared, helping them off with the suits and cleaning up the mess around the table. Mister did not miss the rumble of surprise when he emerged from his own suit – and he didn’t miss, either, the grins and nods from people as he went to sit down in his accustomed place at Ops. They were pleased, he could see, just pleased to see that he’d been joining in with something and letting his hair down a bit.

  Things settled down, though, as Alex asked for the crew’s attention and explained that the purpose of the Urr Invasion had been to kick off a series of phased exposure briefings.

  ‘Things may get challenging over the next few days,’ he said. ‘The concepts we will be exploring are high impact and will be so, even for us. So I would ask all of you to be mindful of the symptoms of overload both in yourselves and in the people around you. I know I need not ask you to support one another. But I will ask that if any of you start to feel that you know where the briefings are going that you keep that to yourselves – we are phasing the exposure for a reason and we don’t want anybody jumping ahead. So – to start with. I’m going to ask all of you to do a thought experiment. Take a moment, here, to think about your homeworld. Get a mental picture of the system in your minds…’ he paused for a few seconds. ‘Now pick a planet in the system – one that isn’t occupied or used for industry. Visualise it and its relationship to your world. Hold that thought. And now imagine it’s a perfectly ordinary day, everybody going about their normal business, when suddenly, out of nowhere, a billion little dots appear on long range scopes and before you even know what’s happening they’re raining into the system, converging on your unoccupied planet, landing on it, bobbing out, popping up instant housing, raising a flag… ladies and gentlemen, the Urr have arrived.’ He grinned at the ripple of laughter that went through the ship at that. ‘Amusing, yes,’ he said. ‘But I want you to consider it, think about it – what would you do? What would the authorities do? What happens when the Urr won’t leave? It’s their planet now, they say, you weren’t using it, they’ve settled it, it’s theirs. Nothing you can say will make them leave. And they are so, so keen to be friends, buzzing out into the system in their toxic ships and heading for your world – they want to come visit, see the sights, meet people… yes, laugh, but I want you to think about that and discuss it amongst yourselves. What would happen? What would the authorities do? And ultimately, at what point and under what circumstances would you feel justified in declaring war?’

  He left them to think and to talk about that and they did so, with all the verve of intelligent, confident, opinionated people. It became, indeed, an extremely lively debate, frequently veering into heated argument.

  Mister found himself in on that, too – he, predictably, would have declared war almost before the Urr had touched down and declared that he would have no hesitation whatsoever in firing missiles at them. They were invaders and even if not intentionally hostile, too dangerous to be tolerated and couldn’t be tolerated anyway, on principle, invading system space like that.

  He stuck to his guns, utterly immovable against all the arguments put forward by more liberal thinkers. By the time Alex told them that they should drop the subject now and settle down for the rest of the evening, Mister was feeling quite invigorated. He had been able to argue his views and had held his position. And what, he wondered, was so challenging about that?

  Three things happened the following day – three of significance, at least. The first was that Jim the Holy Moley made its way around to the back of the Cartash Stone – it did have two sides, after all – and found that the markings on the front of it were all it had.

  The second thing was Trilopharus’s visit, in which Alex asked for information about Chethari.

  ‘Is it far?’

  ‘L to the power of 34,’ Trilopharus answered promptly and beamed at Alex as the skipper’s jaw dropped. ‘If you had a picture of the galaxy I could see, I would point it out to you,’ he said.

  Alex did the math in his head and stared. If the Venturi set off now at its maximum cruising speed, they would all be dead of old age before they’d even got even a fraction of the way there. And Trilopharus was talking to them, live. Real time. No delay in transmission. He might complain about the quality of signal, but to humans, the thing was miraculous.

  Alex didn’t ask how they were doing it, thoug
h. He already knew what the answer to that would be.

  ‘What’s it like?’ He asked. ‘Is it a big world? Do you have cities?’

  ‘Chethari isn’t one planet,’ Trilopharus said. ‘We live on many planets, across many systems. Don’t ask me how many – who counts? Oh.’ A chuckle. ‘Two hundred and seventy three at the moment,’ he reported. ‘Someone does count. When we say ‘our world’ we mean all the planets we live on. And no, Alex, we do not have cities. I don’t know anyone other than humans who has – well, you can’t count them… sorry, Alex, getting my lines crossed again. Bit of debate here over whether super-hives built by an insectoid species qualifies as a city, or not. Generally, we think, not. Anyway, humans are the only people we know who huddle themselves together in the kind of density you do. The planet I am on right now, for instance, is considered to be fully occupied and there are just… around thirty four thousand of us. Just around a million Chethari altogether – that suits us, it’s been a stable population for oh, four or five million years, I think. We’re not a colonising people, see, quite happy with the world we’ve got. Though we do like to pop about visiting, obviously.’

  ‘Yes,’ Alex said. ‘We think that some of your people may have visited some of our worlds, at the time of the Falling. Most of our worlds have folk-myth belief in beings who resemble your people.’

  ‘Yes! Angels!’ Trilopharus sounded highly amused. ‘The Gider told us! Good thing we’re not easily embarrassed! But that could be a problem, do you think? If we appear on your worlds, people will think we’re angels and freak out?’