Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6) Read online

  Ungeline looked disappointed.

  ‘So – you are denying it then?’

  ‘Well, I was teasing a bit, I admit – sorry about that,’ Alex said, with a grin that showed he wasn’t sorry at all. ‘But all right, I’ll come clean. We do have a non-human member of our crew, a visitor from a world beyond the League’s borders. She came to the League because she wanted to be a space pilot – it was her dream, you know? And she couldn’t be that on her own world because they don’t have their own space fleet, so she came to the League. The regular Fleet couldn’t let her join because she wasn’t a League citizen, but she was allowed to join us because we’re an irregular unit. She’s been with us two years now and has been given League citizenship in recognition of her service on our operations, saving lives and training our own pilots to a very high standard. The name she chose for herself when she came to serve with us means ‘Free Spirit in Flight’ in her own language. I was, admittedly, pulling your leg with the alien princess thing, that’s kind of a joke aboard ship. But she was an aristocrat on her homeworld – her name there was Lady Ariel Mgwamba et Savurai and one of her titles was Grace of a Noble House. She gave all that up, though, when she came to serve with us – these days she’s called Sub-lt Shionolethe, or just Shion to her friends. And she is…’ he looked across at the two women, and Shion grinned back, ‘sitting over there.’

  Shion gave a friendly salute to the girl who was staring at her with deep suspicion. Ungeline continued to stare for several seconds, then looked back at the captain with angry reproach.

  ‘You’re having me on,’ she said, and pointed out, ‘You said there weren’t any aliens visiting our worlds!’

  ‘Well, they’re not, are they?’ Alex returned. ‘They’re sitting right there. Not on any world. And they are, as far as I know myself, the only non-humans in League space.’

  Ungeline gave him the kind of look a twelve year old gives an adult attempting to be tricksy.

  ‘Ha ha ha,’ she said, and with a tone which said now stop messing about, demanded, ‘So, are there aliens on your ship or not?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alex, ‘there are.’

  There was a short silence while she stared at him and tried to make sense of this. She wanted to believe him, and did believe it to be true, but at the same time she doubted whether he’d admit as much to any camera, let alone hers.

  ‘If it is true,’ her next question went right to the heart of the matter, ‘why would you tell me?’

  ‘Honestly?’ Alex said. ‘Because you’re twelve.’ As she looked at him with rising outrage, he held up a hand to keep her quiet while he explained. ‘You’re right, you see, there are just so many rumours and stories about us having at least one non-human member of our crew that it has become stupid to keep on denying it. And yet at the same time, it is difficult. See, a lot of people have problems with the idea of allowing non-humans into our space, so just announcing that we have an exo-human crew member might cause panic. This way, the authorities have what they call rescue deniability. It is, of course, a very strange thing to do, to give such a major exclusive disclosure to a twelve year old reporting for a high school channel. But that is the reason, so that if people start to panic the authorities can just say that it was me pulling your leg, not real, not true. And if they don’t panic then the authorities can confirm it officially, see? And yes, I did just explain that on camera,’ he added, as she stared at him in bewilderment, ‘because I credit journalists with enough intelligence to work that out for themselves and if I say it first then that too becomes part of the ‘was he telling the truth’ debate. But between us two…’ he gestured to her and back to himself, ‘trust me on this, it is true.’

  Ungeline looked dubiously back at Shion, who had gone back to her game of triplink.

  ‘She doesn’t look like an alien,’ she said.

  ‘Well, no.’ Alex conceded. ‘But her people are quite different inside. Her heart is here,’ he put a fist over his midriff, ‘and instead of beating buh-bum like ours, hers beats buh-buh-buh.’ He flexed his fist as he spoke, illustrating the slow triple beat.

  ‘Huh.’ Ungeline considered this, and looked even more suspicious. ‘Can I feel it?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Alex. ‘That would be evidence on camera, see, which the authorities don’t want to risk at this stage. I’m not allowed to say which world she’s from, either, only to assure you that they are a very peaceful people and no threat to us in any way.’

  Ungeline appeared to assess the threat posed by a woman sipping at a mug of tea, and accepted the assurance far more readily than an adult journalist would have done.

  ‘And the mermaid?’ she asked, with disbelief dripping from the word as she glared at the platinum-haired girl.

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Alex smiled. ‘That’s the real disclosure. Frankly, the media has known about Shion for so long, it’s no kind of news as far as they are concerned. They, you see, have investigated her background and discovered that it’s hollow – a paper trail of official records saying what school she went to and that she graduated from the Fleet Academy on Altarb, but only a few officers primed in the Fleet to say that they remember her. None of the people she allegedly went to school with remember her and she isn’t in any of the yearbooks. Perfectly obvious, really, that her background is a fake, and not even a very good fake. But the media haven’t been allowed to report about that because the authorities have made it a Security of the League matter in the interests of public order. Which is, by the way, why the media has been tormenting poor Mr Sartin by reporting him as the exo-officer. They know perfectly well that he isn’t, but it’s the only way they can report that we do have a non-human officer while putting the pressure on the authorities to come clean about who it really is.’

  Ungeline revealed her journalistic credentials with her reaction to that – there was no exclamation of how unfair that was to the hapless Mr Sartin. On the contrary, she looked impressed.

  ‘That’s clever,’ she observed, and Alex chuckled.

  ‘Journalists usually are,’ he commented, with the air of one saluting a worthy foe. ‘Though they are,’ he couldn’t resist adding, ‘very difficult to convince when they’ve got things wrong. But never mind that. The thing is that we – the Fourth, and the authorities – find ourselves with a bit of a situation. We’re about to go on a mission, you see, which will take us out of the League for at least a year. That’s a very difficult thing to hide especially when your ships are as well-known as ours and when journalists are all over wanting to know where we are all the time. So the decision has been made that we’re going to tell the truth about where we’re going and why. But this is even more sensitive, because it’s a world which the authorities have been saying for some time now isn’t actually real … only it is. Having to admit that they’ve been covering up the truth is obviously hugely embarrassing. So that, again, is why we’re doing it this way, me telling a twelve year old so that if people do start to panic about it the authorities can just say I was having you on. Because the world we’re going to visit, see, is Quarus.’

  Ungeline looked uncertain again. ‘That’s a made-up place,’ she told him. ‘It was a hoax.’

  ‘Well, that’s what the authorities have been saying,’ Alex admitted. ‘But it has been kept a secret for a very good reason, you know. There was an attempt to go public with the discovery of Quarus about seventy years ago; it was broadcast just as the discovery of Carrearranis has been. Only back then, people weren’t as open minded as they are now. Some worlds were fine with it, but others only had to hear the word ‘alien’ to go into a flat spin – riots, panics, financial crashes, a lot of very scary stuff was going on. So the authorities decided it was best to pretend that the discovery had been a hoax, in the interests, as they say, of public safety. Quarians were not allowed to visit our worlds, and all our ships going there since have done so secretly.’

  ‘But now… you’re saying it’s true, and you’re going there?’
r />   ‘Yes, it’s true, and yes, we are going there,’ Alex said calmly.

  ‘So…’ Ungeline looked slowly from him to the platinum-haired girl, and back again. ‘Mermaid?’

  ‘Quarians live in the ocean,’ Alex said, his manner so matter of fact that he might have been talking about ordinary people living next door. ‘That’s where we get our lareen word from for water – aqua, and words like aquarium. They’re not really mermaids – sorry, that’s another joke on the ship – they live in cities and have cars and technology just like ours. But they’ve adapted their bodies to be comfortable living in different environments, from the shallow stormy reefs to the pressure of the deep oceans. They’re all humanoid, but some of them have scales and others have a dense skin like dolphins. If you look at the history of the alleged hoax, you’ll find that there are pictures. And those are real, that is actually how quarians look.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Ungeline, and looked back at the platinum-haired girl again, deeply suspicious. ‘She doesn’t look like a dolphin.’

  ‘Well, no,’ Alex conceded, with a rueful shrug, ‘As you can imagine, the quarians have not been at all happy about us pretending that the discovery of their world was a hoax. They want to be our friends, and you can’t be friends with people who are pretending you’re not even real, can you? They want to be able to visit our worlds, and for us to visit them, too, openly, treating one another with respect, as equals. And the fact that all the ambassadors we’ve sent out to them have to say, essentially, ‘Sorry, we can’t do that because our people can’t cope with people who look as weird as you and they’ll just panic,’ well, you can see, that isn’t going to make things any better. In fact, it’s got to the point where the quarians are so fed up with us that they’re this close…’ he held out his finger and thumb slightly apart, ‘to telling us to go away and come back when we are ready to make friends. But they don’t want to give up on us yet, so what they did, you see, was to create a child, part quarian, part human, someone who could learn to understand both sides of that problem and find some way to bring us together. They called that child Ambassador, and when she was old enough she came to the League so that we could help her to understand us, humanity.’

  ‘Ohhhh,’ said Ungeline, eyes wide and awed, but still with the instinct of a journalist. ‘Really, part human, part alien?’

  ‘Really,’ said Alex, feeling that this was close enough to the truth for him to say it with a clear conscience. Silvie’s DNA was indeed a hybrid between that of quarian and human. What he wasn’t saying was that the quarians had borrowed that design from a human who’d had the idea first and asked them to engineer his own design for the perfect human-quarian ambassador. ‘Silvie looks human – she’s Ambassador Silver, but we call her Silvie – but she has quarian traits, too. She has internal gills so she can breathe underwater, and she’s empathic, too, like all of her people. She isn’t a member of our crew – even if she wanted to join us, which she doesn’t, she’s still only fifteen so wouldn’t be allowed to. So she travels with us as our guest.’ He indicated the aquarium over his left shoulder. ‘That’s what the aquarium is for. It’s Silvie’s garden, a place for her to swim and relax.’

  Again, Ungeline’s eyes tracked between the captain, Silvie, the aquarium and back to Alex again.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and again revealed her ability to go straight for the important question, ‘So – if that’s true, then –why is she here?’ She gestured to indicate the ship. ‘And not on Chartsey, meeting the President and all that?’

  Alex gave a spluttering little chuckle, and as he did so, knew that Silvie was giving him a look of stern reproof even though she did not turn her head towards him. They had a very close, clear resonance and he was as aware of her feelings as she was of his.

  ‘Well, things were a bit difficult,’ he said, and knew as he said it that ‘difficult’ was far too small a word for the trail of chaos Silvie had generated. ‘Quarians, you see, are empathic. That doesn’t mean that they read minds, but it does mean they’re very sensitive to other people’s emotions, can always tell how people are really feeling however hard they try to pretend otherwise. Some of the things that are totally obvious to them, for instance, are if someone fancies somebody else or if somebody needs to go to the lavatory. And they don’t, you see, have any concept of tact or personal privacy, so when they see something like that they don’t think, ‘oh, that’s private’, they just go right ahead and say something, like maybe, ‘Why don’t you just kiss her, she fancies you too,’ or ‘Don’t stand there being uncomfortable, go and have a poo.’’ He looked at her significantly. ‘I’d like you to just think for a moment about what it would be like to have someone like that going around your high school, commenting on how everybody feels about everybody else.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Students and teachers.’

  ‘Ohhhhh!’ Her eyes stretched very wide, then she started to laugh.

  ‘Yes, absolutely,’ Alex agreed. ‘Hilarious! Until it happens to you, of course, and then it can be utterly humiliating. But that’s how it was, see, Ambassador just didn’t understand about privacy or being tactful. Those were things she had to learn. And after a while, when things were really not going very well, someone thought it might be a good idea to bring her out to us for a visit. We’d already got Shion serving with us, you see, and there was a feeling that our experience in working with a non-human crew member might be helpful, and a hope that Shion’s own experience in learning to work with us would be helpful to Silvie, as well. It was only an idea, one of lots of suggestions being made to try to help her understand us, but it turned out that she liked being with us and we very much enjoy having her with us, too, so she’s been with us… oh, nearly a year, now.’

  ‘And – for real?’ Ungeline was breathless, staring at Silvie now with an entranced expression. ‘Has she been to Therik?’

  ‘Well – to our base there,’ Alex said. ‘And for a few escorted swimming trips to the deep oceans.’

  He spoke with a little reserve, at that, the only indication of his outrage at the way the Therik authorities had treated Silvie. It was understandable, of course, after the disaster of her visit to Chartsey, but even after the relatively successful visit to Telathor they were still not prepared to risk any kind of high-level encounters or official events. It had really brought home to him, that, how much work there was to do on the human side of the human-quarian relationship. Silvie, though, had just laughed off his indignation, and his embarrassment. She didn’t want to do any of that formal stuff anyway, not her thing, and Therik’s oceans were pretty horrible to swim in, so she wasn’t missing much.

  ‘Sweet!’ Ungeline said, and went to change her camera angle so as to be able to film the two women. To her surprise, though, the camera wouldn’t shift.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Alex. ‘You have permission to film me on a fixed angle. You can’t film them or interview them either. And yes, I know,’ he interpreted her indignant glare correctly, ‘totally unfair. And mean, too, to let you get so close but not to film or question them. I can only say I’m sorry, but those are the rules and it has to be that way, no on-camera evidence so that if things go bad this whole thing can be dismissed as a wind-up and a nasty rotten thing to do to a kid, too. And I am sorry about that, Ms Beeby, I really am. If things don’t go well here then you’ll go down on record as the kid who was suckered by the Fourth, and the last thing I want is for you to suffer any distress or upset over this, now or any time in the future.’

  Ungeline gave him a look of blank incredulity. She might as well have exclaimed aloud, ‘Are you kidding?’

  ‘But…’ she said, ‘I’ve got…’ she took a breath and exhaled it with rapturous joy, ‘the Story!’

  ‘Yes,’ Alex observed, relaxing a little and breaking into another grin, ‘You’re a journalist, all right.’

  He’d been promised that Ungeline was up for this. She’d been selected for this interview by the Diplomatic Corps in a process which had screened tho
usands of potential candidates. The process had been managed under the guise of a competition for high school stations, first at national, then regional, then at global level. Ungeline Beeby, who’d already won several Young Journalist awards at national and regional level, had emerged the clear winner. Her prize had been to interview Therik’s system president. Only after that had been accomplished had they suggested that it might be possible to arrange an interview with Captain von Strada. They were, Alex knew, taking very good care of her. Caitlan Smythe-Wildon, the Embassy’s Media Attaché, had prepared her carefully for the interview and would support her through the aftermath no matter how it turned out. Alex still did not like making use of a child like this, though, and had protested against doing so till the order was slapped down, you’re doing it, no argument.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ said Ungeline proudly. ‘And whether it’s true or it isn’t, it’s the Story. If it is true,’ she clarified, ‘then I get to break the biggest story of the century, aliens are real and they’re visiting our worlds. Sweet! And if it isn’t true, then you’re being really mean, telling lies to a kid like me, and that’s a story in itself.’ She spoke with the bliss of a journalist who really understood now what Cait had meant when she’d told her that there would be major intersystem coverage about this. Either way, it was a story which would resonate for years. And if it was true… she would be breaking a story that would force the government to admit that they had been lying. No investigative journalist could dream a greater heaven. ‘So,’ she went straight on, ‘if it is true, why are you going to Quarus, then?’