Venturi Read online

  Alex looked up at the ceiling and smiled. The holopanels which had lined the swim tubes had been brought into play here, creating an impressionist sky, a subtly shifting cloudscape with no attempt at realism but a very tranquil ambience.

  ‘Try the bed,’ Shion requested. ‘See what you think.’

  He got onto it cautiously, expecting it to be as hard as it looked, and found that he was not lying on the platform at all but was cradled above it as if on an air cushion. When he turned over experimentally he found that it supported him with a luxurious feeling of floating on a cloud of feathers.

  ‘Grav plates?’ he queried and Shion nodded.

  ‘Hooked to biosensors and micro-forcefields,’ she said.

  Hot tech, then, still on field trials. Which made this the most advanced bed currently achievable. And possibly, also, the most expensive.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Alex and refrained from saying ‘I want one’, because his crew might think he meant it and a million dollar bed would be an embarrassing thing to have to explain to the Admiralty Audit Office. ‘And the chair?’ he asked, getting up.

  ‘Micro-sculpting,’ Shion nodded and led him past what was presumably the dining area, through a sliding panel-door at the end. ‘This is the bathroom,’ she said, with a note of satisfaction.

  It was more quarian than human, though the lavatory was a seated one and there was a water shower as well as the spa facility. A further sliding panel on the other side gave access to another room, completely empty.

  ‘For the wardrobe,’ Shion explained and in the next room, also empty, ‘for storage. All the things Her Grace uses will be kept in here. And here…’ she led him through the final panel, ‘the attendants’ room.’

  It was very like a mess deck, with tables and chairs at the near end and bunks and showers further on. Three six-seater tables, six three-tier bunks with their built in lockers, six shower units. The space had been widened out here, so this room felt airy and comfortable. There was a galley hatch too, linked directly to the galley’s sterile food production unit so that anything ordered could be put through a series of quarantine locks and delivered here safely. The décor here, Alex noted, was a lot more informal, with cosy bedding on the bunks and picture-window screens at the mess deck end, currently showing the command deck and the star view. These were standard bunks, too, with their privacy screens, holovisions, display units for trinkets and all the little homely details of a miniature cabin.

  ‘I hope this will be all right for them – comfortable and not too scary,’ Shion said, looking around.

  Alex smiled. He understood how responsible Shion felt for the welfare of the chamlorn and her attendants.

  ‘We will take the greatest of care of them,’ he said and in the same reassuring tone, ‘and embarrass you mightily, of course.’

  Shion blinked at him. He made that sound like both a good thing and intentional.

  ‘That is,’ Alex observed, ‘what families do.’

  Shion broke into a grin, picking up the rueful undertone in his voice, there and understanding at once the reference he was making.

  ‘Your parents,’ she said, ‘are delightful.’

  She had met them at Therik, where they’d come for a visit. In fact they had decided to stay, at least until Alex came back from his next mission. The house they had there was lovely, the base was lovely, the people were lovely and there were many hundreds of places around Therik which they’d decided they would like to visit, most of them the kind of scenic tourist spot which had tea rooms. It was, his mother had said, really a lovely world. And with the Embassy sending supplies of Novaterran tea and food for them, they were lovely and comfortable there.

  They had enjoyed meeting Shion. She was, they had said, lovely. But they had spoken to her slowly and carefully, as if they thought she was deaf, and Alex had felt that all too familiar sensation of embarrassment and guilt at being embarrassed by his parents.

  ‘They are,’ Alex agreed, since he did love them dearly and had huge admiration for them, too, for the courage with which they were adapting to coping with life as the parents of a Hero of the League. ‘They are darlings. And they do their best, too, just as we will, trying to cope in a culture far beyond our understanding. And when we embarrass you – as I have no doubt we will – you can console yourself with the knowledge that that is what families do.’

  Shion smiled, nodding at the obvious you are not alone in this and we are your family too.

  ‘Thanks, skipper,’ she said.

  They were as ready, Alex knew, as they were going to be.

  Twelve

  The day of their departure from the Library came quickly – too quickly for those who felt that it would have been worth delaying even just a week to have a few days physically exploring there.

  It would mean the end of their encounters with Trilopharus, too. He might be able to visit them briefly while their ship was outside Pirrell, he said, but he would be out of contact with them after that.

  ‘We are in the process of setting up another contact point near Lundane,’ he told Alex, ‘but you’ll be there under your own power long before we’ve got that ready.’ His tone became hopeful. ‘Perhaps you’d come up to Point Five when you’re done at Lundane?’

  It took Alex a moment to realise what he meant. Point One, evidently, was the Gulf where Trilopharus had first made contact with Alex. Point Two was the rendezvous at which they’d met on the edge of the Gulf, Point Three was right here at the Library. Point Four would be at Pirrell, where the Chethari would transport them. So the location as near to Lundane as the Chethari could go would be Point Five.

  ‘Of course,’ said Alex, and reached for a pen, writing down the coordinates as Trilopharus rattled them off. Point Five was some three weeks above Lundane, in the midst of a stellar nursery.

  It was going to be a long haul. Even with Trilopharus taking them to Pirrell, it would take them four months to make the circuitous Van Damek around Marfikian space to reach the Lundane Ranges and navigate down to X-Base Sentinel. Then, after however long it took them to equip a suitable civilian ship, there’d be a two week run to Lundane itself, however long it took them there to support Chamlorn Lady Ursele in setting up her embassy. Then the three week lift up to the coordinates Trilopharus had given them and however long they were to spend there. After that, they would have to make their way back to X-Base Serenity and pick the Venturi up again for the three month journey back through League space to Therik. Even a conservative estimate of all that made it a year.

  Alex nodded. ‘And – I have to ask,’ he said. ‘You will return us to space with the ship superlight and everything in working order?’

  ‘Alex,’ said the Chethari, ‘go wash your mouth out with soap.’

  And as Alex guffawed at this Novaterran idiom, just what his parents had scolded him with as a child when he said things they considered dirty-mouthed, Trilopharus chuckled too.

  ‘See you tomorrow.’

  The next day, the day before they were due to leave, Alex asked if it was possible for the Chethari to drop the Veil from around the Library after they had left, or if not, to assist Excorps with getting an expedition through it when they arrived.

  Trilopharus laughed.

  ‘If we turn the transducer off,’ he observed, ‘we will lose comms. And once it’s turned off, we could not activate it again. But I don’t think we need to worry about what might happen in twenty years!’ he was laughing again. ‘We will be talking to you,’ he pointed out, ‘from now on. So that kind of thing can be agreed when it is a thing that needs to be discussed. For now it is enough that we have said hello and understand a little better than we did before, yes?’

  Alex nodded. ‘First Effective Contact,’ he confirmed and his face showed all the joy he felt in that. ‘Such a pleasure, Trilopharus.’

  ‘Likewise,’ Trilopharus smiled happily back at his human friend. ‘Call me when you’re ready tomorrow!’

  They were ready for some
time before Alex called. The ship had been completely sterilised, every one of them had taken full decontam showers and were now in uniforms laundered to clean-room standards. This meant that all of them felt as if they’d been scrubbed down with gravel, eyes and noses still stinging with chemicals, throats sore and stomachs, intestines, bladders and bowels uncomfortably purged, wearing uniforms which felt stiff and irritatingly scratchy against the skin. And that was without even thinking about the plugs they had stuffed up in places which made it quite awkward to sit.

  Everything was ready, as ready as it could possibly be. Everyone was suited up and at their transit stations. Sickbay had everything ready for their anticipated patients. Shion and a snatch team were already aboard Firefly, with Buzz commanding a second team on Bluebottle and the third fighter, Wasp, being piloted by Jace Higgs.

  Before they left, though, Alex held a reflective moment. It wasn’t a memorial, they had already done that. But what had happened here had been important and the significance of it should not be overlooked in their focus on the next phase of their mission.

  They were leaving the domes here, though they’d been stripped out of all the leisure gear and left merely as well equipped survival domes. Excorps would find them useful when they arrived. And it wasn’t as if they would collapse them back down and keep them to be used again – spacers never did that. Superstitious it might be, but there wasn’t a spacer on that ship who’d have been happy at using a second-hand survival dome and Alex was one of them. So the domes were staying. And so was their own memorial, a slab of rock cut in the same proportions as the Cartash Stone, placed on the surface of the planet where they’d sited their domes. It recorded, in the same kind of pictorial style, the arrival of the Venturi, their ship on the planet surrounded by enormous brassicas, their discovery of the deep buried Chambers and of the memorial stone. At the end of it they showed figures standing to attention and beneath, in the same kind of script, Res Memenor Cartash and below that, Res honori. We remember the Cartash. We honour them.

  There had already been a ceremonial placing of that stone, with a full parade of everyone who could be allowed off the ship.

  Now, though, Alex was asking them just to take a moment and consider where they were.

  ‘Twenty six days ago,’ he said, ‘we arrived at the rendezvous coordinates with no idea what to expect. It is fair to say that the transit event placed even our resilience to shock under some strain…’ a little laughter at that as they thought back to how bewildering that awakening had been and some wit in life support said, ‘Engines down!’, which got more laughter again.

  ‘Not a moment, I am sure,’ Alex grinned too, ‘that we will forget. And there have been so many other moments, since – the discovery of the Library and of the Cartash Stone, our exploration of this amazing biosphere and all the things we have learned from Trilopharus. They have been, for all of us, days of wonder. And we have, at the same time, been training for a mission with preparations which have challenged us both technically and in radical rethinking of difficult, emotive ideas. I could not be more proud of you, of every single one of you, for the way you have stepped up to every one of those challenges. You will all, of course, get mission-honour commendations on your records and well deserved, too, you are a credit to your ship, to the Fleet and to the League. But I wish to make a rather more personal acknowledgement of the pride I have in all of your achievements, here. So this ship, so long as there is even one person remaining aboard it who was present on this mission, will celebrate the anniversary of our arrival here as Library Day, with an issue of candy to commemorate it. And on that day, too, mushrooms and cabbage will be served at dinner.’

  Laughter, rising to roars, cheers, a thunderous applause and thumping on walls and tables.

  ‘All right…’ Alex let them cheer for a while, then quietened things down again. ‘I would like to be able to tell you,’ he said, ‘That from here on out our mission will be routine – merely picking up passengers and making a long but uneventful Van Damek. But we all know the mission ahead will bring challenges we can’t even anticipate. If this frightens any of you, makes you want to run home and take up a cosy posting on a ship on homeworld defence assignment…’ he was obliged to pause at the uproar of protest and grinned. ‘No,’ he acknowledged. ‘None of you are on the wrong ship.’ More cheers. ‘So,’ he said. ‘Everyone ready?’

  As the crew assured him at the tops of their voices that they were, yes, definitely ready, Alex nodded to the comms officer. Make the signal.

  TA-rah, ta ra RAAAA!

  ‘Hi Alex.’ Trilopharus appeared, glancing around and then looking at the commodore. ‘Good to go?’

  ‘Ready,’ said Alex. And everything went…

  Thirteen

  All right, thought Alex, doing the instinctive self-assessment that people did when returning to consciousness. I’m all right.

  It was different this time. They’d been expecting it and that made all the difference. So there were no dropped trays or cold coffee this time and with everyone having been in suits and tethered into seats, nobody left sprawled on the deck, either.

  Two hours, eighteen minutes, Alex noted, with a glance at the chronometer. He still felt disoriented, but that was normal for the first few seconds after a Turnaround and he was already shaking it off.

  ‘Everyone all right?’ he asked, focussing his eyes on conn screens and doing the essential checks.

  Yes, the ship was fine. They were superlight, cruising at L-basic, engines in balance, no technical issues flagging up on diagnostics. The medibands they were all wearing showed that there were no casualties, just some dizziness and nausea they knew would soon pass off. And Silvie – yes, Silvie was fine on the aquadeck, giving him a wave over the comm screen.

  Location took a little longer to confirm. Again, Shion got there first, matching stars to the charts prepared for the coordinates Trilopharus had said he would be taking them to.

  That confirmed that they were indeed exactly where he’d said they would be. They were in the cone of space indented into the ancient Marek sovereignty, moving slowly towards Pirrell. They were still far enough away from it so that the Veil was not affecting them adversely, but even so hull systems were detecting a very faint tremor. It was no more than the ship might experience with their own engines belting at full power, but their engines weren’t at full power, nothing like it. They were brushing at the fringes of the Veil, as close as they could get to Pirrell without risk to their ship.

  TA-rah, ta ra RAAAA!

  ‘All good?’ Trilopharus bobbed up, looking perhaps just a little distracted, a busy man making a very quick check-in call.

  ‘All good,’ Alex confirmed.

  ‘You’ll be able to see them in four minutes,’ Trilopharus said. ‘Good luck with it all, Alex. See you!’

  And with that he was gone.

  Alex didn’t have time to regret the parting from a being who so fascinated him and whom he too had come to consider a friend. He was fully occupied with double-checking that everything and everybody was all good and watching on scopes, as they all were, for the ship bringing the chamlorn and her attendants out to them.

  Only, there was no ship. Most of them had been at least half-expecting a glorious ship like the Gider’s. Their ships were extraordinary, not even fully visible to human eyes as they seemed no more than a huge glowing blur. Only when footage was slowed down millions of times did it become apparent that their ships were winking between two states, one of them much smaller than the other, though even the smaller one was the size of a small moon. They appeared to be both energy and matter, huge iridescent rainbow bubbles indecipherable to human scanners. And they could, as Alex had witnessed, extrude secondary bubbles which functioned in much the same way as shuttles.

  Most of them were anticipating, hoping for, something that spectacular. So when the reality showed up on their scopes, it took a little while for them to actually believe it.

  ‘What is that?’
Buzz was sitting forward like the rest of them, peering at the object as it came within the edge of their visual range. Heatscan hadn’t shown it. It was, apparently, the same temperature as space; no engines, no active tech, no life support operational.

  ‘That,’ said Shion’s voice, sounding unexpectedly grim, ‘is an airship.’

  They could see it, now. It was an aerodynamic ovoid of around forty three metres in length. And it was, very clearly, a vehicle designed for atmospheric flight. It had a dark copper metal hull, but readings were showing that it was nothing more than a thin metal skin around an internal framework. It had windows, too, diamond-shaped windows all along both sides and doors, midway, which were adequate perhaps for atmospheric pressurisation but nothing like as solid as airlocks.

  Firefly had already launched and was speeding towards them with Bluebottle and Wasp in slower pursuit.

  Nobody needed to comment on the fact that the airship had depressurised, that it was open to the vacuum and freezing temperatures of space, that there were no life signs reading aboard it. The only hope was that the people aboard it were in stasis. And the only thing that they could do was watch.

  Shion did not attempt to dock her fighter to the airship. Its fragile skin would have buckled under the force of docking clamps. Instead, she dropped her fighter sublight and brought it up alongside, edging it nearer and nearer until Firefly’s starboard airlock was less than half a metre from the airship’s portside doorway. The fact that she accomplished this in under two seconds was due to her extraordinary piloting skills; she certainly wasn’t in a panic.