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  He created a spherical zone between the distances of the thirteenth and fifteenth world on the list, centred on Pirrell.

  ‘There are no known inhabited worlds in this band,’ said Alex. ‘So either the colony failed or we just haven’t found it yet. And look, it goes right through Sector Seventeen, covering the whole of this region. So it may be that we’re looking for an Olaret Nesting which has developed superlight travel in a radically different form from our own. It is also possible, of course, that it’s a world we know absolutely nothing about – like I said, things were chaotic back then. On the whole, though, it seems most likely either that it’s the Thelae or Carrea Rensis. And whoever they are, it is clear that they are not willing to make contact with us of their own accord. The most probable reason for that, obviously, is fear of infection, but we can only speculate about that. If we do find an inhabited world, we’ll have to evaluate their level of civilisation and their attitude towards us and make a decision about attempting contact then.’

  Harry swallowed. The unspoken word, here, hovering in the air, was Marfikian. Early in the days of its foundation, the League had explored the cosmos with a sense of joyous discovery which was now called the Golden Age of exploration. All that had ended when a League ship discovered Marfik, unleashing a species which had become the terror of humanity. The risk of finding another such enemy, or perhaps something even worse, hung over every first contact exploration.

  ‘Security,’ said Alex, ‘will of course be paramount. But I believe that if they were hostile to us, we would know about it by now.’

  Harry looked at him with bewilderment resurfacing as his primary response to this.

  ‘But…’ he said, and after a brief hesitation, ‘you’re talking as if it’s real, I mean, as if it’s already been proven that there really is something out there.’

  ‘It is, it has,’ said Alex, positively. ‘Look, we’ve known for centuries that there is an exo-vessel being spotted in this sector. Despite all the yarns, there is no life form that size capable of living in space and certainly not one which can travel at superlight speeds, so we can discount the ‘giant space amoeba’ theories out of hand. I am not even prepared to discuss the possibilities of any supernatural phenomena, so let’s not go there. We have ample evidence of something very big and fast being seen and recorded by credible witnesses over the last seventeen hundred years. Until recently it was believed to be a civilisation coming into our space from beyond the Firewall, and at that, assumed to be periodic survey visits perhaps checking to see if we’re sufficiently developed yet for direct contact. The Solarans, though, said that they didn’t know of any world doing that. Well, actually,’ he amended, in the interests of accuracy, ‘they said the usual ‘Many things are possible, many things are unknown, we are helpless in this matter’, but that has been interpreted as them not knowing anything about it.’

  For the first time, Harry perked up. He might not have anything like Alex’s other exodiplomatic experience, but he did have considerable experience with Solarans. Alex had had a couple of encounters with them early in his career, but Harry had served a tour of duty at the Solaran embassy on Chartsey.

  ‘The ‘possible, unknown, helpless’ response is generally interpreted as ‘we can’t tell you’ rather than ‘we don’t know,’’ he informed Alex.

  ‘Debatably,’ said Alex. ‘As with any Solaran statement, it can be interpreted several ways and there is no way to pin down exact intention. But in this case it has been accepted by the Diplomatic Corps as ‘We don’t know.’ But the crucial point here is that the Gider have told us, clearly and specifically, that they do not recognise the design of the ship and it is not coming from any of the worlds beyond the Firewall, that nobody out there knows anything about it. So, we know there are ships. We know that they are not coming from across the Firewall. That means that they’re originating from a world within our own space, as yet undiscovered. Which isn’t such a leap given how little of the space within the Firewall we’ve even explored yet, even space around our own borders which we haven’t been able to navigate till now. Anyway, we have to proceed on the basis that there is such a world, and it’s our job to find it. It may well be that it is far beyond our ability to reach at current levels of technology, but we have to try. And we are the people with the best chance of that, with the combination of the technology we have, and our experience.’

  Harry couldn’t argue with that. Alex had always had a close relationship with the Second Fleet Irregulars, the Fleet’s R&D division, even before his own ship had been moved to irregular terms and become the Fourth. Since then, the Second had established a lab aboard the Heron and used the frigate for field testing the very latest tech. Crucially for this mission, they were field testing navigation tech known as the Naos system, an innovation which enabled them to traverse space previously regarded as non-navigable. The Fourth had used it to navigate through nebula, pioneering a route right past Marfikian space all the way out to remote Samart. Now they were being tasked to use it in the hope of finding an unknown civilisation rather closer to home.

  Harry looked back at the chart of the Sector Seventeen region, and his expression became very thoughtful. It wasn’t nebula there, but what spacers called dirty space. It was a region of interdimensional turbulence on a massive scale, with energy fluxes, currents and vortices which could rip starships apart. Finding a way through it, even with the Naos system, would be difficult, dangerous, a gruelling ordeal. Dan Tarrance was still making little yip and heeyar! noises to himself as he was reading. Alex, too, had an air of contained delight. His officers and crew, for sure, would go wild with excitement when he confirmed that they were going to Sector Seventeen. Not for the first time, Harry suspected that he was serving with a bunch of maniacs.

  Still, he nodded soberly, accepting at least that this was what they were going to do, regardless of how he might feel about it.

  ‘And the, uh…’ he indicated the final point in their orders, the weirdest instruction of all; Do not use the M word. ‘Is that, uh, humorous?’ he asked, knowing that Alex and the First Lord were rumoured to exchange jokes in their memos to one other. It was a highly controversial rumour in the Fleet as the First Lord was supposed to be far too elevated for anything as undignified as joking with subordinates, but the rumour persisted and Harry had learned that that, at least, was true.

  ‘No, not really.’ Alex considered that, and grinned. ‘Admiral Harangay did tell me at first briefing that if I used the M word he’d put me in front of a media call.’ His tone made it clear that this, for him, was synonymous with being put up against a wall to be shot, and Harry, knowing his relationship with the media, gave a little wince even at the thought. ‘Yes, right,’ Alex agreed. ‘He was joking, of course – he wouldn’t be that cruel even to journalists – but the point was serious. In all seriousness, Harry, this is beyond sensitive. There is no authority in the League prepared to go on record as sending us on this mission and I honestly cannot say that I blame them. If the media even got a sniff of the Fourth being sent on a hunt for the Space Thing of Sector Seventeen, can you imagine the political carnage? Careers – political and Fleet – have been ruined over far less. It’s not even as if they’d be in a position to go public with an honest explanation.’

  He didn’t have to explain that to Harry. The general population of the League knew that there were other species out there far away somewhere, but the vast majority of them wanted the aliens to stay far away out there somewhere. Rumours that aliens were secretly visiting League worlds were believed only by conspiracy theorists. Spacers knew all about it, of course, but exodiplomacy was conducted at a high level of secrecy from the general public. Without that level of knowledge and understanding, there was just no way to construct any kind of reasonable explanation for why the Fourth was being sent to look for a space monster. Even with that background and full briefing, it was difficult to see past the mythology to treat this as a legitimate mission. Alex was right. If thi
s went public, anyone with their name on it would have committed career suicide.

  ‘This is just a reminder of that,’ Alex commented, with another gesture at that emphatic instruction. ‘Not to take this lightly, to remember even amongst ourselves to refer to it as the Phenomenon, partly to minimise the risk of the media latching on to what we’re doing but mostly just to be sensitive to the fact that if this does get out there will be hell to pay.’

  ‘Hmmn,’ said Harry, and cast a glance at him, at which Alex grinned again, knowing very well what the corvette skipper was thinking. He was remembering, no doubt, the incident at Karadon in which the highly classified presence of Kate Naos on their ship had been busted by an alert ten year old kid.

  ‘We can keep things to ourselves when we have to,’ he assured Harry, who didn’t look entirely convinced but was polite enough not to argue the point.

  ‘Well, you can count on the Minnow not to breach security,’ he said, in a tone which made it clear he had no such certainty about either the Heron or the Whisker. The little look he shot at Dan, especially, conveyed that he didn’t believe that the Whisker’s skipper had the professional discretion to keep this confidential.

  Alex smiled. He had thought things were difficult enough when he just had the Minnow to deal with, given his history with Harry Alington and the delicacy of the situation. But now Dan Tarrance had turned up, bursting with youthful enthusiasm, taking ‘difficult’ to whole new levels. It was great to have Dan back with them, of course, both for his operational skills and his tremendous expertise as a computer specialist. But it was inevitable that Harry would resent him, both professionally and personally, as Dan was not only the brightest rising star in the Fleet but a friend of Alex’s, too. Getting these two and their respective crews to weld together with his own ship into an effective team was going to take a great deal more than merely putting them in Fourth’s uniforms and painting the emblem on their ships. Alex, though, had never been one to hold back from a challenge.

  ‘We’ll all pull together on that,’ he said, in tones which did not admit of any doubt about it. ‘And by the time we get to Kavenko, even we’ll have got tired of the jokes.’

  Harry ignored the reference to the spacer habit of milking any joke to the uttermost scrap. He was looking back at the star chart with glances at the point of their orders which told them to make their way to Kavenko off-route.

  That was unusual. Warships were an expensive resource and Fourth’s ships cost more than twice their Fleet equivalents to operate, so the authorities were generally concerned to get as much active service out of them as possible. That normally meant that the Fourth ran along established shipping lanes, conducting routine patrol and assistance to other shipping. That route would normally take them via the largest and most central Independent Space Station in the League, ISiS Karadon.

  ‘Is that why we’re being told to run dark?’ Harry asked, with a certain reserve in his voice as he looked at the point of ISiS Kavenko, where so many shipping lanes converged. Kavenko had been the scene of his disastrous mishandling of what should have been a routine operation. He was still technically banned from the station, and though no doubt Alex could persuade his friends there to lift that ban now that Harry was serving with the Fourth, any return there would be humiliating.

  ‘Possibly, in part,’ said Alex, considering. ‘Though primarily, of course, it’s operational. Nobody believes that we’re actually going to Telathor on anti-piracy operations, of course. Announcing that we’re going there and even when we’re expected to arrive would be absolutely insane if we really were on law enforcement ops there, so the public announcement of it has been taken to mean that we’re going anywhere but there. Our vanishing at this point will add fuel to that and while everyone is speculating madly about where we’re actually going the Fleet and Customs will have a grand time convincing pirates and smugglers across the League that we’re coming after them. The Diplomatic Corps is going to make use of it, too, I believe, by pretending that we’re going back to Sixships. It’s felt that that might act as a spur to negotiations.’

  Harry, remembering the media coverage of the Fourth’s destruction of the Amity Moonbase, actually managed a little smile, at that.

  ‘Clever,’ he observed.

  ‘Hmmn,’ Alex agreed. ‘Anyway, our maximum value on this mission clearly lies in staying off radar. Then, when we pop up at Kavenko, the last place anyone is expecting us to go, it will be seen as a double-bluff, announcing that we were going there so that nobody would think we would. It’s hoped that people will then believe that we really are on law-enforcement ops there.’

  Harry’s brow furrowed. ‘But…’ he said hesitantly.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Alex said. ‘There is no piracy issue at Telathor, or at least, nothing which would warrant the assignment of a task force to it. But that’s not what it looks like to the public. There is a high rate of ship-loss there, mostly due to idiots trying to take short cuts, of course, but also because security services use Telathor to change the identity of their ships. The authorities there are happy to cooperate with that, carrying out mock-investigations on ‘lost’ ships and providing paperwork for the ship’s new identity. Which is fine, but it does mean the route has acquired a reputation for piracy it really doesn’t deserve. So we are, yes, on a cover mission to hunt for non-existent pirates – there’s a certain elegance to that, don’t you feel? Pretending to hunt for something that doesn’t exist?’

  ‘While we’re actually hunting for something that nobody believes in,’ said Harry, and then corrected himself as he saw Alex’s patient look. ‘The general public, I mean.’ He looked back at the star chart. ‘And Customs, I suppose, are going to maintain the law-enforcement cover?’

  ‘That’s the idea,’ Alex confirmed. ‘They’re sending one of the Seabirds – it’s on the usual ‘full cooperation’ basis as they won’t put one of their ships directly under our command, but effectively they’ve committed to following our lead in order to maintain the illusion that we’re patrolling the region. The Excorps ship, too – officially they’re being tasked to assist us with navigating the space around Telathor.’ He grinned as he said that, as it would actually be the other way around. ‘In fact they’re coming with us. The Senate hasn’t decided yet whether Excorps can have the Naos system but they have agreed to one of their ships coming with us. So we’ll pick them up at Kavenko, head part of the way towards Telathor and then shift off-route to head straight out on explorations.’

  Harry looked surprised. ‘Not to Telathor?’ He indicated the second point of their orders, referring to them paying a courtesy visit. That would certainly be the normal procedure when Fleet ships were operating in the vicinity of a League world, and particularly so when, as here, their presence was at the direct request of that world. It had been the Telathoran president who’d made formal application to the League Senate to have the Fourth assigned to this mission, beating off all the other demands for their services.

  ‘Not to Telathor,’ said Alex, with a definite note. ‘Oh, they’ve offered, of course, they could hardly do otherwise, but I’m sure they’ll be relieved when the Sub-Committee tells them that it’s operationally inadvisable. Which it is, obviously, far better for us to just get straight on with the job. And what world, honestly, would want us to visit if they could avoid it?’

  Fresh from the furore which had accompanied the Fourth’s launch from Therik, Harry could only agree. Any world they visited would have to contend with a storm of anti-Fourth demonstrations by an astonishing range of protest groups, howling controversies, media blitzing and terrorist threats.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Alex, cheerfully confident and a hundred per cent wrong, ‘we won’t be going to Telathor.’

  ‘Aww!’ Dan had evidently been paying some attention to what the captain was saying, and looked up at that with a quick, instinctive protest. Visiting any new world was a thrill, and Telathor was exotic enough to merit the term ‘adventure’ even for spac
ers. Even as he protested, though, he realised that duty, of course, must come first. ‘Sorry, skipper,’ he said, seeing Alex’s surprise at that rather childish exclamation, and giving an even more boyish grin. ‘Couldn’t resist,’ he said, pretending that it had been a joke, and Alex grinned back, knowing very well that it hadn’t.

  ‘It’ll be a long haul, though,’ Harry observed, with an eye to the seven weeks it would take them to get to Kavenko, and the seven months they were due to spend exploring. Running off route, they would not even see any other ships on the way to Kavenko, and once on their explorations would be entirely isolated again. The only point of human contact would be the few days they might spend at the deep space station.

  ‘Yes,’ Alex said, with the voice of experience. ‘And long haul missions like this are extremely challenging – the biggest challenge we’ll have over the next few months, exodiplomacy aside, is maintaining both morale and mission focus. But we do,’ he smiled at both of them, ‘have the benefit this time of being a squadron. Last time we were out on our own – it makes a huge difference, psychologically, just being able to see another ship, besides all the operational advantages.’

  Harry managed an answering smile, though it was taut and unconvincing.

  ‘And will we,’ he asked, as delicately as if he walked on the edge of razor blades, ‘be supported by the Stepeasy, this time?’

  Alex laughed. There was no mention of the Stepeasy in their orders either, but Harry had evidently brought himself up to speed on that situation, at least. There were standing orders, issued officially by the Senate Sub-Committee responsible for Fourth’s affairs, but countersigned too by the League President and the First Lord. Those orders required Alex to cooperate with Davie North Delaney on any exodiplomacy matter in hand, and authorised him, too, to include Davie’s ship, the Stepeasy, in Fourth’s operations, at his own discretion.