New Title 2 Page 4

  Davie gave a merry little hoot at that, recognising that she had been irritated by the human tendency to confuse quarians with their own mythology of mermaids.

  ‘Absy,’ he acknowledged, and held out his hand. ‘I’m Davie, obviously.’

  She took his hand – she’d learned to do that when humans offered it – and in the next moment jumped back with a yelp. ‘Owww!’

  Davie felt a momentary disorientation, himself – a faint echo of the cacophony she had experienced at that physical contact. It felt as if he was being tumbled in freefall with a clamour of deafening voices and a blast of strobe lights.

  Any romantic hopes he might have indulged in about the possibility of love between himself and his genetic cousin died in that moment. Physical contact between them evidently magnified her empathic awareness tenfold and made the brilliant multi-cognitive dazzle of his mind acutely uncomfortable.

  ‘Oy!’ she pointed at him with an indignant expression. ‘Shut up!’

  ‘All right – sorry.’ He was feeling an inevitable emotional reaction, disappointment and anxiety that this was just not going well and even that he’d hurt her, but he tried to be as calm as possible. ‘We won’t do that again,’ he assured her, indicating his hand and the distance between them. ‘But please,’ he said, becoming aware that he was keeping her standing at the airlock. ‘Do come aboard.’ Then he noticed the absence of any bags. ‘Do you have luggage?’

  ‘Is that important?’ she queried, recovering herself and venturing through the airlock, though keeping her distance this time. ‘They said you’d provide everything I need.’

  Davie felt a surge of admiration for her. This girl, just fifteen years old, had come into League space completely alone – the Solarans had brought her from Quarus to Serenity aboard one of their ships, and Davie knew that she had arrived there, too, without luggage, no money of course, just the clothes she’d been wearing. And here she was now, cheerfully prepared to come aboard his ship with complete trust in him to provide for her and keep her safe. Her courage was extraordinary.

  ‘Oyoyooooy!’ she protested, and scolded, ‘You are the loudest person I’ve ever met in my life! And just…’ she waved her hands around her in a rapid blur of chaotic movements. ‘Fzzzzt!’

  ‘Sorry,’ Davie said. ‘I will try,’ he promised, and genuinely did attempt a quiet inner serenity, though this in itself just made her laugh.

  ‘How can anybody be that noisy about trying to be quiet?’ she wondered, but with that, as if able to notice them for the first time, she turned her attention to his retinue. ‘Oh – fear!’ she identified the predominant emotion amongst them as if it was something she had learned to name even though she didn’t understand it. ‘What are they afraid of?’

  Davie glanced over his shoulder, taking in every detail of stiff postures, rigid expressions, rapid breathing, sweating palms and widened eyes.

  ‘You,’ he said, turning back to her.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she recognised that in their gut-wrenching reaction to her paying attention to them, but continued to look at them with more perplexity than concern. ‘That’s silly,’ she told them, quite firmly. ‘Quarians are a non-violent species and I am no threat to you or your people.’ She held up her hands in rather absurd solemnity. ‘I come in peace.’

  Davie couldn’t help it, he cracked up laughing. But to the evident relief of his attendants, he drew her attention back from them by indicating the interior of the ship with a hospitable gesture.

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘allow me to show you to your quarters.’

  He had every reason to hope that she’d be pleased with them. The Stepeasy provided the ultimate in luxury accommodation anyway, of course, but Davie had gone to some trouble to ensure that the quarian was comfortable. The most radical change had been the creation of an airlocked water tank, which had tested the resources of his ship and crew to their limit. Davie had insisted that the tank must mimic the composition of quarian ocean precisely, and he didn’t just mean a generic sampling but every kind of ocean water from shallow arctic to deep tropical waters. Currents, too, had to be created, as well as the usual body-resist flows which would enable her to swim freely, and extremely detailed high definition VR of quarian environments.

  His crew had worked flat out on that, solving the many engineering problems involved in creating a water tank of that size aboard a starship, and using considerable ingenuity, too, in creating all the parts needed for it and constructing it while the ship was in transit. All told, it had taken more than three thousand work-hours to create. And it was all a total waste of time, unless the objective had been to make her laugh.

  ‘That’s horrible!’ she exclaimed, when Davie showed her the swim tank, and burst out laughing at the most sophisticated VR the League had to offer. ‘Weird!’ She poked a finger at, and right through, one of the shoal of fish swimming past them at the time.

  Davie had put on a survival suit in order to show her the tank. To his surprise, she’d put one on too – to avoid getting her clothes wet, she commented, as human clothing was uncomfortable underwater.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Davie, and felt it necessary to explain, ‘Best we can do. That’s not an interactive character – the fish. Most of them are, they’ll react to you. But that’s, you know – just scenery.’

  ‘But it’s not there.’ Absy gazed around her in perplexity. ‘Nothing is! It’s just light effects – illusion.’

  ‘True – but humans, we have the ability to suspend disbelief, to engage with a VR scenario even when we know it is VR,’ Davie explained. ‘You, I take it, don’t.’

  Absy gave an emphatic shake of her head.

  ‘Bonkers,’ she said, as if making a profound judgement upon the whole of humanity, and Davie couldn’t help but grin.

  ‘Can’t argue with that,’ he admitted. ‘But I thought you might want – or even need – to swim sometimes, and I’m afraid this really is the best we can provide on a starship.’

  Absy gave a little shrug. ‘I don’t need to swim,’ she assured him. ‘I’m a walker adapt, internal gills. And,’ she cast a glance around her, ‘I can’t imagine anybody wanting to swim in this. No need to be sorry, though,’ she grimaced a little at the force of his regret and disappointment. ‘I’m fine, I don’t need it and your yelling that you want me to like it isn’t helping one little bit.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Davie, again, and followed her through the airlock, where they discarded their survival suits. ‘I’ll show you around the rest of the ship,’ he offered, hopeful that she might find that more impressive.

  ‘No,’ said Absy, very definitely. ‘You yell all the time,’ she pointed out. ‘I’ll go look around by myself.’ She was already walking away as she spoke, raising a hand in casual farewell. ‘See you later!’

  They had their first Incident eleven minutes later. The Diplomatic Corps had recorded such events as Incidents, the capital letter conveying at least some part of how appalled they were by them.

  This particular Incident was relatively minor. Absy made her way into engineering – incidentally walking straight through an airlock with a supposedly impenetrable security system – and told off one of the engineering hands there for bad manners.

  ‘I am not a freaky monster,’ Absy told the woman, who was staring at her goggle-eyed, ‘that’s just rude.’

  It took some time for the Incident to be resolved. Absy herself merely walked on as if it was so trivial she gave it no more thought, though she left engineering soon afterwards with the comment that she’d come back when they were a bit calmer.

  In her wake, though, there were angry words, accusation and denial, a rush of senior personnel attempting to figure out what the heck had just happened, and within a few minutes, Davie himself.

  ‘Do you think that Ambassador Absy is a monster?’ He put the question to see the answer in the involuntary micro-expressions which would flick across her face and body language before she got conscious control. And he saw it, too, the
unmistakeable defiance that answered yes before she said no. And in the same look, he knew that she felt the same way about him, too.

  Davie felt a little spurt of irritation. The engineering hand had only joined the ship at Chartsey, and they had left in something of a hurry, but all the same his officers were supposed to screen candidates much better than this. There were only two reasons someone with those opinions about engineered genomes would be likely to want to work for him, and neither was good. Weighing the probabilities, he gave his officers the benefit of trusting that they would have ensured that she was not a member of a Human Frontier group or anything of that sort. And it wasn’t hard to figure out which organisation she was most likely to be part of.

  ‘LIA?’ he queried, and saw the tiny giveaways, the shock in the dilation of her pupils, the almost imperceptible twitch of her shoulders as she braced herself, the mortification on her face in the moment before she assumed a look of confused incomprehension.

  Davie sighed, turning away from her while she was protesting that she didn’t know what he was talking about. His attention had fixed on the ship’s executive officer, who was responsible for employing crew.

  ‘She,’ Davie pointed a finger at the deckhand without looking at her, ‘is an LIA agent. You,’ he looked steadily at the Exec, ‘are supposed to screen them out, to protect my constitutional right to privacy.’

  The Exec was turning scarlet. He had no idea how Davie had figured out that the engineering hand was an LIA agent, but it never occurred to him to doubt it. It was hardly the first time that the League Intelligence Agency had tried to sneak an agent into their crew, after all. From their point of view that was, no doubt, entirely legitimate. Their remit, after all, was to ensure League security and their whole endeavour, all day every day, was to find out for themselves what was really going on. Davie North was at the forefront of exodiplomacy, developing relationships with other species which the LIA at least believed might have the potential to be a threat to League security, so it was only natural that they would want an agent on scene. Davie, however, had constitutional objections to being spied upon, and when Davie used the word ‘constitutional’ it meant far more than an indignant assertion of his rights. For him, for every member of the Founding Families, the League Constitution was a sacred document, enshrining everything the League was, and to violate it was a betrayal of everything the League stood for.

  ‘I am extremely…’ the Exec began, but Davie gave him a friendly pat on the arm. He had made his point, and knew without needing to be told that the Exec would not allow this to happen again.

  ‘Just get her off my ship, Mike, okay?’

  The Exec nodded. They had left Serenity by then and it was already half an hour behind them, but that was not a problem – even as Davie was strolling away, the Exec was giving orders for the ship to move into a holding pattern and for one of their high speed shuttles to be prepped for launch.

  The LIA agent was still protesting furiously as she was bundled aboard the shuttle with her gear, but Davie took no notice. Even Absy was only mildly interested.

  ‘Did you send her away because she was rude to me?’ she enquired, meeting Davie some time later on the command deck.

  ‘No,’ Davie said. ‘Though I would have anyway – I generally prefer not to have people working for me who think I’m a freak or an abomination, and I certainly don’t want people who think like that around you. But as it happens, she was an LIA agent so I’ve ditched her on that basis.’

  Absy gave him a questioning look. ‘LIA?’

  ‘League Intelligence Agency,’ he told her. ‘Tiresome people, though they do good work in counter-terrorism. It’s a secret organisation – I mean, they actually try to keep even the fact that they exist a secret, as opposed to people like Fleet Intel who are open about who they are even if not about what they do. The LIA tends towards paranoia and they are very scared of genetic engineering.’ As he spoke, he called up multiple screens and flashed a wealth of information about the LIA and his own experiences with them, which she took in with a shake of her head.

  ‘That’s just wrong,’ she said. ‘This lying, deception…’ she gave him a troubled look. ‘It’s the hardest thing for us to understand about humans, or to accept. If you do that to one another, how can we trust that you’re not doing it to us?’

  ‘Well, that’s why you’re here,’ Davie pointed out, ‘to learn enough about humans so you can see when people are trying to deceive you. And I can’t say I’m sorry about the LIA thing, because it is all part of learning about us. But I will say thanks,’ he grinned at her. ‘If you hadn’t picked up on her feelings it might have been a while before we realised she’s LIA.’

  ‘I didn’t ‘pick up’ on her feelings,’ Absy said. ‘She yelled them in my face.’ But she’d lost interest by then and was looking at the command screens spread in front of Davie. ‘Can I fly it?’

  Davie got out of his skipper’s chair, gesturing her to it with a chivalrous bow.

  ‘All yours,’ he said, without hesitation. And that, at least, was not a problem. Absy spent eleven seconds familiarising herself with the controls, the ship’s specifications and performance, then took the conn as if she’d been handling ships of this size for years. They had already picked up their shuttle by then, along with a complaint from Ambassador Tellis at having an irate LIA agent dumped on them so unceremoniously. They were back en-route, heading back into League space in the direction of Cestus.

  This had been Davie’s suggestion, at the point where they were leaving Serenity. It made perfect sense – Cestus was only a few days from here, and ideal as a first port of call for exo-visitors. It was a peaceful world, though often mocked by other central worlds as Suburbaterre. Its culture did, undeniably, have a quiet suburban style, a plain boxy architecture, drab clothing, no street festivals or loud music allowed. Cestarians themselves described their world as being painted in pastel colours. Even nature there seemed muted, with the most vivid flora a dusky lilac and the most dramatic fauna a species of small brown bear – a herbivore which spent most of its time asleep. It wasn’t, perhaps, the most thrilling of destinations, but it was safe, and an ideal, low-impact introduction to human culture.

  Most importantly, the authorities on Cestus were already so used to hosting Solaran visitors that the arrival of another exo-visitor would be almost routine. They had already indicated that they would be delighted to welcome the quarian ambassador, which was essential given that all League worlds retained the right to decide for themselves if and when they would allow alien visitors. The Diplomatic Corps were standing by on Cestus, ready to work with the authorities there to provide everything necessary for the visit, and Absy had seemed happy to agree to Davie’s suggestion that they might head there first.

  Now, though, without any apparent reason to do so, she changed her mind. Having conned the ship for a while in experimental manoeuvres, she reset their course towards Chartsey and increased their speed.

  Davie recognised the serious intention and looked enquiringly at her.

  ‘Chartsey,’ he observed, ‘is very high impact.’

  Absy gave a blithe shrug.

  ‘Cestus,’ she retorted, ‘is boring.’

  Davie’s eyebrows lifted slightly.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘You.’ She grinned at him. ‘When you look at Cestus on the chart you’re going…’ she mimicked his manner and slight Flancerian accent with uncanny accuracy, ‘Jeeks, I’ll be glad to get that out of the way, can’t stand the place, rather watch paint dry.’

  Davie couldn’t deny it, so he just laughed.

  ‘It would be a good first experience for you, though,’ he said.

  ‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘I want to go to Chartsey.’

  Davie didn’t attempt any further persuasion.

  ‘Chartsey it is,’ he agreed.

  That would turn out to be one of the biggest mistakes of his exodiplomacy career. But even with the benefit of hin
dsight, it was hard to see what other decision he could have made at this point. He had committed, after all, to taking the quarian ambassador wherever she wanted to go, and it was perfectly reasonable for her to want to go to the League’s capital world.

  Within a few days, though, Davie was coming to the realisation that ‘perfectly reasonable’ were not words which could really be applied to Ambassador Absy. Or, as she had become by then, Vampy.

  That metamorphosis had been as sudden as it was astonishing. The quarian had gone into her quarters with the comically chaotic look they’d come to know as Absy, only to emerge nine minutes later wearing a skin-tight black garment with a dark, shimmering cloak

  . She had adopted, too, a pancake white makeup with heavily outlined eyes and blood red lips.

  ‘Vamparelladon,’ she introduced herself with a languid, seductive air. ‘Mistress of the Stars.’

  Davie grinned. ‘Vampy okay?’ he queried, and at the gracious inclination of her head, transmitted a message to everyone on the ship advising them of the ambassador’s change of identity. He did not need to ask where she’d got the costume – one of the facilities on the Stepeasy was a range of siliplas extrusion units, one of which was geared specifically to produce textiles. She had evidently designed the outfit for herself.

  He did not need to ask her why she’d changed her identity to this, either, because that was obvious to him. Despite their best efforts, most of his crew remained nervous around her, with frequent muttered conversation about what had happened at Serenity. The quarian was simply responding to that anxiety by adopting a persona in which that felt more natural… becoming, in effect, the sensual, mysterious, dangerous figure so many of them felt her to be. It was, Davie understood, a defence mechanism, like a chameleon adopting camouflage in an effort to blend in. It also, he felt, showed a very endearing, child-like naivety. At the same time, he was aware of concern – he didn’t like to see that the feelings of his crew and staff towards her were so edgy and uncomfortable. They were all recruited and trained to take part in exodiplomacy, so he’d have expected better of them than that.