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The great Last Stand at Cherque was legendary. It had all the elements of a mythical battle – the valiant few standing against the mighty horde, the desperate few holding the bridgehead against impossible odds, incredible acts of personal heroism and finally, miraculously, the day saved – Cherque defended, the Marfikians pulling away.

  The Fleet commemorated these events even now, more than eight hundred years later, on Cherque Day. There was a parade to honour the ships which were lost and a dinner to honour the Victory of Cherque. It had been that victory which had defined where the League had stopped running and turned to defend their border. So the League existed in the form it did now because of that battle. A cynical but possibly accurate view was that they had turned and fought right there at Cherque because, unlike all the other systems they’d abandoned to their fate, Cherque was a tremendously valuable source of an extremely rare mineral used in the production of superlight fuel.

  Whatever the reason, Cherque had remained their defended border ever since, with nearly half the Fleet’s forces concentrated in the region, immense barricading of Cherque itself and a ferocious commitment to keeping it out of Marfikian hands.

  ‘So,’ Alex said, zooming in the map. ‘What I believe that most of you have realised already is that there are two sides to every border. From our side of the border it is perfectly clear. The Marfikians are obviously the aggressors, we are the task-force going to the aid of worlds they are attacking. When they force us back, we take a stand, defend Cherque, we define where that border is and we’ve held and defended it ever since. We had absolutely no idea – how could we? – that the Marfikians considered all that territory to be rightfully theirs and I don’t see it would have made any difference, really, even if we had. We were hardly just going to just leave them to tyrannise over those worlds, were we? So I do believe we’d have sent the fleet in, even if we had known about their historical sovereignty. But it does change the picture, doesn’t it, when you look at it from that side of the border. Setting aside for a moment the obvious fact that they have no sovereign rights there any more, in their minds we are the aggressors entering their space, they are the defenders driving us out of it again. And once we are over what they consider to be their border, they break off their pursuit. And yes, that does mean that ever since then we have seen them as the aggressors trying to get into our space and they have seen us as the aggressors trying to get into theirs. Which does, I’m sorry, raise the profoundly disturbing question of whether they really do have, or ever had, any intention of or even interest in invading our space and conquering our worlds.’

  ‘But Cherque!’ A crewwoman burst out, half desperate and half outraged. ‘They keep trying to invade Cherque, skipper!’

  Alex knew that Cherque was her homeworld and so nodded, giving her a sympathetic look.

  ‘That’s what we have always believed,’ he said. ‘And there are constant border skirmishes, of course, with raids on convoys… we have lost a lot of ships over the years and Cherque has endured a great deal, under siege. We have to defend it, of course, we can’t do otherwise, no way we could, or would, back off and leave Cherque exposed. But the question is there, has to be asked, whether the Marfikians would be attacking if it wasn’t a militarised zone pushing right on what they think of as their border. Remember, there was always a neutral space between borders before, but our warships routinely patrol right up against and even across what the Marfikians would no doubt consider to be their historical border.’ He looked back at the rating, seeing how ashen and pinched-face she was.

  ‘People say that the Fleet winds it up,’ she said tautly. ‘People on Cherque, lots of them reckon the Marfikians would back off if it wasn’t for the Fleet buzzing their borders and banging off missiles – some guy said that once to me in a bar and I threatened to deck him. And now you’re telling me that’s true?’

  ‘I’m afraid I think it is, yes,’ said Alex. ‘But before you – before any of you – start getting upset about this, do please remember that nobody is saying for one moment that we were wrong to go to the aid of worlds under attack, or that we were, or are, wrong to defend Cherque as we do. Like I said, we could not do otherwise. And couldn’t now. Nobody, seriously, is going to consider even for one second any possibility of moving back our border and leaving Cherque the other side of it. Not going to happen. Not in this reality.’

  She nodded, giving a gruff, half-grunted ‘Skipper’.

  ‘And in terms of looking back with the benefit of hindsight,’ Alex said, ‘I honestly don’t think we could have made any other decisions than we did, even if we had known about the historical border. The only difference that it might have made is in our understanding of the situation – that rather than defining the Marfikians as rabidly insane marauders, we would recognise them as acting on predictable and logical parameters. And when you know how your enemy thinks and what they will do under given circumstances, you stand a very much better chance of figuring out how to deal with them. That is what I want you to take away from this, tonight. As disturbing and challenging as it is to have to try to understand a monstrous enemy and see things from their point of view, doing that is enabling us to see the situation in a new light and that light is bringing us a glimmer of hope. So do, please, consider this analytically – bring your mission skills to bear. In the light of what we now know about the Marfikians’ motives and the factors governing their actions, what do we think is the best way to move forward? And let us not, please, start talking about Ignite missiles. Genocide is not an option.’

  There was a little grim laughter at that and though the mood on the ship was subdued, it was more thoughtful than traumatised.

  ‘Thank you, Buzz,’ Alex said, hours later when he and Buzz could finally meet for a quiet coffee after going about the ship separately, talking to and reassuring people.

  Buzz smiled. He had been largely responsible for the disclosure plan, bringing together his academic skills as a psychologist, his professional skills as an officer and his personal understanding.

  ‘You’re doing the hard bit,’ he observed, which was true, since Buzz could only provide a framework which Alex was having to feel his way through, watching all the time to gauge reactions, trying to talk to hundreds of people with the same responsive sensitivity as he would with an individual. ‘Rather sad about Mister, I thought.’

  ‘Ye-es.’ Alex said and sighed, knowing that Buzz was nudging a confidence, there, seeing that he was more upset over this than he would want to admit. ‘I do feel bad,’ he gave a wry look. ‘I shouldn’t have let him come aboard.’

  ‘It was a perfectly legitimate decision,’ Buzz said. ‘As you said at the time, if the LIA need a pair of eyes on our mission, fair enough, their perspective as critical outsider might even be useful… and we can always chuck him in the brig if he’s getting in the way.’

  ‘Ohh.’ Alex groaned, remembering that he had indeed made that flippant remark.

  ‘Well, we all thought it was funny,’ Buzz consoled. ‘The LIA, honestly – Sub-lt Jones, who did they think they were fooling? And it was, seriously, out of order, too. They tried to push an officer on us with falsified qualifications and that’s dangerous on any warship, let alone ours and on operations. If they’d asked us if they could put an agent aboard, we’d have fixed that up with them, no problem. But pulling that stunt…’ he shook his head. ‘I think we were being pretty magnanimous really, dear boy, in allowing him to come aboard and having a little fun busting his cover. We could have – what was Eldovan’s suggestion? Sent him back to them stripped naked with Not Required On Voyage written on his backside.’

  Alex gave a reluctant little grin. ‘I’m fairly sure he’d have opted for that, given the choice. But honestly, Buzz. I know what the LIA’s like. I know how crazy exodiplomacy can get. I know they can’t handle it. But I still let him come.’

  Buzz looked at him with fond amusement. Typical, he thought. With everything that he’s got going on at the moment, first contact with the Ch
ethari and preparing for a mission of terrifying sensitivity, he still finds time to feel guilty about the LIA agent who was, after all, sent to spy on him.

  ‘Allow me, dear boy,’ he said, knowing Alex would understand that he was offering to take personal responsibility for Mister himself. It wasn’t the first time he had made that offer and seeing that Alex started to give an automatic no, it’s my problem and I’ll deal with it, he added, coaxingly, ‘Please.’

  Alex hesitated.

  ‘Come on,’ Buzz said and with a winning smile. ‘Let me try.’

  ‘All right,’ Alex conceded and there was some relief on his face at not having to worry about the LIA agent any more. ‘He’s all yours.’

  The next time he saw Mister, he was with Buzz. Which was where he would be, right at Buzz’s elbow, for at least the next month. The alternative, as Buzz had made clear to him, was to be confined in the brig.

  ‘But you don’t even have a brig!’ Mister protested, having made due note of this for one of his earliest reports.

  ‘Oh, we do,’ said Buzz. ‘And you’re already living in it.’ As Mister stared at him, ‘The interdeck is a multi-functional space. The cabin we moved you into is guest quarters, but it would only take ten minutes to change the door for one with a lock and a surveillance camera. So, you can either be on parole, under my escort and following my rules, or you can be logged in as a prisoner. Your choice.’

  Mister scowled. Buzz had already made it clear to him that his second outburst and attempt to physically assault the commodore was more than sufficient grounds for them to arrest him. They could have done so at any time, purely for being aboard the ship with falsified documentation. And they had, when offering him a guest cabin and a seat at the Ops table, made that conditional on him being courteous and not in any way hindering or disrupting the mission.

  Even he had to acknowledge that interrupting a briefing to shout abuse at the commodore and going at him with clenched fists had breached those conditions. They had let it go the first time, putting it down to the stress of the moment. But Simon had confirmed that Mister was not so stressed as to be medically incapable, he was fit enough to be responsible for his own actions.

  ‘My employers,’ Mister said, with an air of cold menace which would have sent shivers down many a spine, ‘will not be tolerant of the manner in which I am being treated here.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Buzz said, with a warmly amused chuckle. ‘Your employers,’ he told him, ‘will not give a damn. You’re not exactly one of their top agents, after all, are you?’

  Mister drew himself up to rather more of his full height than was really comfortable.

  He had been with the LIA now for four years, recruited by them straight out of university, where he’d taken a degree in accountancy. This was, the recruiting agent had told him, just the kind of meticulous data-handling ability which would serve him well in a career in the security services and his genuine accountancy skills would provide him with excellent cover. And he had, the recruiter had said, the Right Stuff. He was a patriot and a sensible man, no truck with liberalism or any of that nonsense.

  It said a great deal about the LIA that the recruiter had been an acquaintance of Mister’s family through the right-wing Republican Club they all belonged to and that it had been in the lounge of that club that the first approach for recruitment had been made.

  Six months later, the trainee agent had been allowed to undertake his first observational role, monitoring the activities of a police officer suspected of having associations with an anarchist society. His most important mission since had been the undercover role he’d undertaken at Admiralty HQ, posing as Sub-lt Jones and working in admin in order to investigate a Lt Commander. Her daughter was an active member of Liberty League, one of the scruffy, yelling activists waving placards in Senate Square. And instead of being properly embarrassed by this, the Lt Commander had said that she was proud of her daughter for standing up like that for the things she believed in. The LIA had regarded this as compromising to Fleet security, even if the Fleet didn’t, themselves. And even when their investigation failed to uncover any evidence that the Lt Commander was sharing official information with her reprobate daughter, they had kept her on a watch list for the future, just in case.

  Mister had been commended by his boss for the thorough work he’d done on that investigation, so when they’d told him that he was being assigned to observe Commodore von Strada, he had seen that as a promotion earned by his good work in a Fleet cover role. It was a step up - and a very big step up - from the kind of routine monitoring he’d been undertaking, to going undercover with the Fourth and observing the commodore through a first contact mission. But they had assured him that the work itself would be completely routine – monitor and record, no active investigation methods involved, just watch and keep notes. And they needed somebody, they said, with his cover skills, his Fleet experience and just the right age and background to slide in as a junior officer. Mister, now aged twenty four, felt that his career was on a ballistic trajectory.

  ‘I am…’ he started and then remembered that he was not allowed to tell them what seniority or pay grade he was on.

  ‘You are,’ said Buzz, ‘a DA.’

  Mister stared at him. DA was LIA-speak for Disposable Asset. He wasn’t sure which was more shocking; Buzz’s use of LIA in-group terminology or the fact that it was Buzz, the kind grandfatherly Buzz, who was tearing him down like this.

  ‘After what happened at Carrearranis,’ Buzz observed, ‘they were never going to risk sending one of their top guys. You are what the Diplomatic Corps calls a pawn sacrifice, a junior person sent in to a sensitive situation so that if things go bad the organisation dumps all the blame on them. When the Diplomatic Corps does that, of course, it is with the full knowledge of the pawn and on terms which ensure that the worst thing that will happen to them is a quiet transfer to another posting. The LIA, however, has a rather more robust attitude to their DAs. If you are compromised, you’re out.’

  Mister already knew that. The LIA would not continue to employ you once your identity as an agent became compromised, known to outsiders. But he had still not made the leap of understanding that the LIA had sent him here in the expectation that he would fail, or was very likely to fail, and had chosen him because he was expendable.

  ‘You can’t… you don’t know…’ he blustered.

  Buzz leaned forward and put a paternal hand over his and as he did so, looked significantly into his eyes.

  Mister froze. Since LIA agents carried no sort of ID and weren’t allowed to disclose the fact that they were agents to anyone, they had had to come up with more subtle means of identifying themselves to one another. The ‘secret handshake’ was a misnomer. It was a secret finger-press, a combination of light, quick pressures of the finger tips such as someone might give playing chords on a musical instrument.

  ‘Uh…’ Mister felt his world spin around him and come back into a rather different focus, staring at Buzz then with all resentment transformed to incredulity. ‘You…?’

  ‘I have,’ said Buzz, ‘a lot of friends.’

  Oh my God… Mister swallowed, drew a breath, composed himself and nodded. ‘Sir.’

  So the next time Alex saw him, he was not only walking at Buzz’s elbow but behaving himself with surprising docility. He even apologised to Alex for his outburst, not with any great degree of grace, admittedly, but without the surly glare of a man forced to apologise against his will.

  Alex was glad to see that he was all right and that he didn’t have to worry about him anymore. And he had, after all, rather more important things to think about.

  Trilopharus’s visit that day turned out to be one of the most informative of the whole encounter.

  It began oddly, for a start, with a second attempt at introducing Silvie. She felt, she said, that she ought to step up on behalf of her people and offer greetings as their ambassador, however dumb it felt trying to talk to a bunch of fractals.r />
  When it came to it, though, her diplomatic skills were not up to the challenge.

  ‘Hell-ooooh!’ She called, not to Trilopharus but as if she was attempting to hail someone at the end of a long tunnel. ‘Hi!’ she shouted and waved, looking straight through him. ‘I’m Ambassador Silver – can you hear me?’

  ‘Uh – yes?’ Trilopharus said, but Silvie couldn’t hear him, either. What was audible to human ears as a clear and musical voice was to her just a static crackle with what she described as distorted mooing and hoots broken up in it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Alex said, laughing. ‘I don’t think this is going to work – Silvie can’t see or hear you as we do. Is there any way you can adjust your projection to be compatible with quarian senses?’

  ‘Not on this call,’ Trilopharus said. ‘It took us ages to figure out the configuration to be able to call you.’

  He meant, Alex realised, him, personally. The call which Trilopharus had mentioned before as ‘person to person’ had been configured somehow to focus on what Trilopharus had called his biocode.

  ‘Sorry, Silvie – he says no, he can’t.’ Alex told the quarian, who shrugged philosophically.

  ‘Well, tell him I said hi,’ she said, already walking away.

  Alex let it go. Time with Trilopharus was precious and he was already talking again, anyway.

  ‘So – what’s the big question this morning, then?’ The Chethari asked, with an air of cheerful anticipation.

  ‘Ah.’ Alex grinned. ‘There is,’ he said, ‘a situation – an area of space in which ships, for a long time now, experience Turnaround events, although it’s far from the Firewall, and find when they come to that their cargo is missing. When we’ve asked the Perithin about this they withdraw. When we asked the Gider they just made a strange noise and laughed and said it was nothing to do with them. But it is a concern and I am hoping that even if you can’t tell us about it yourself, you might be willing to help us by taking…’

  He broke off as Trilopharus made a very peculiar noise indeed. It hardly sounded as if it could be a noise produced by any throat. It reminded Alex of the kind of seismic rumble you got as earthquakes passed under the base at Serenity, but there were high pitched squeaks and rattles in it, too.