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  ‘We daren’t do it,’ he said and as voices were raised in protest, ‘Those Chambers are sealed,’ he pointed out. ‘And the first thing any spacer thinks when they see a sealed system like that is that it is pressurised.’ He paused for a moment to let them think about that. ‘Mr North’s analysis,’ he pointed out, ‘indicates the presence of a heavier gas concentration than would be normal given the geology and atmosphere here. So we are, then, looking at a pressurised containment system. The smallest probe, puncturing that, may have devastating consequences, damage or even destroy whatever it is that the Chambers contain. And we, we do not have either the equipment or the expertise to justify us making any such attempt. Whatever is in there is important, so important we cannot take any risks. So, until or unless we have a much better idea what we’re dealing with, we will leave them alone.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Davie approved. ‘Though we are recommending that a micro-probe be sent to investigate the Artefact. It appears to have been placed directly above the Chambers, so it may provide us with more information about what is in them and we can access it safely.’

  ‘I am happy to proceed with the probe,’ Alex agreed. ‘Conditional on discussing it first with Trilopharus.’

  Davie nodded. That was the first step identified on the investigative plan, the obvious move to ask Trilopharus about it first, both to get consent and any information they might have about it. And he did not, either, object to the relatively low place Alex put that on the ‘Ask Trilopharus about…’ prioritisation list. As amazing as the discovery of the Chambers was and as impatient as Davie was himself to see if the buried stone would give them any clue about their contents, he would have put it in just the same priority himself, relative to such questions as, Will the Solarans come back? And, Can you help us to decode the Gide Disclosure?

  When it came to ‘Any questions?’ there were only two from the mission team. The first was from Silvie.

  ‘Am I,’ she asked, ‘going to have to stay on the aquadeck whenever Trilopharus is here, now, or can I just hang out like normal?’

  ‘Oh, hang out as normal,’ Alex said, with a smile. ‘Sorry, Silvie – I only asked you to stay on the aquadeck because things were all up in the air for a while.’

  Silvie grinned. She had experienced the blackout of the Turnaround as nothing more than a momentary passing dizziness, which she’d thought nothing of.

  ‘Literally!’ she said. It appeared that the ship had been in freefall during their transit. And it appeared, too, that their recovery had been simultaneous with their arrival here. Silvie, with her superhuman reflexes, had come to just in time to catch the tray of bio-pods which had slipped out of her hand. So consciousness and gravity had happened at the same time. ‘But thanks.’ She was mindful of briefing protocols and gave Alex a playful salute.

  Alex grinned back, but moved straight on to Eldovan, who had raised her hand. ‘Skip?’

  It was Eldovan herself who’d cut through the sensitive issue of Alex’s preferred form of address. The promotion to commodore had been forced on him along with the upgrade to the Venturi and a rigid expectation that he would now conduct himself as a flag officer should. He’d been removed from direct ship command and pushed into a flag officer’s daycabin. But Eldovan knew, everyone knew, that he would still like to be seen here as the skipper, part of the ship’s company and not so elevated above them they’d be saluting and sirring him everywhere he went. Most of those who’d been serving with him in the Fourth before they’d upsized to the destroyer were so much in the habit of calling him ‘skipper’, too, that it was awkward. So Eldovan had made it simple, declaring that for shipboard purposes she would be ‘Skip’ while Alex was ‘Skipper’.

  ‘I would like,’ Eldovan said, ‘to run a complete system survey.’

  They had only done a partial one, Alex realised, with Shion’s remote-piloted shuttle orbiting this planet for a few minutes while carrying out scans. These had shown that no other planet or moon in the system had any indicators of life or of active technology, which had been enough for Alex at the time. Now, he realised that Eldovan was right. However backwards it might be to be doing this after they’d landed, they should follow their own routines.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said and logged a consent for her to organise that and carry it out on her own authority. He did not, evidently, feel it to be necessary to get Trilopharus’s consent for that, as a non-invasive observation. Then, seeing the hand that the LIA agent was holding up in the air like a stop-sign, he turned to him, patiently.

  ‘One question, sir.’ Mister LIA had had time to think and to compose himself. It would, he had recognised, be counter-productive to rail at these people with all the myriad things he considered to be criminally irresponsible in the way that they were conducting themselves. Their cheerful acceptance, for a start, of Trilopharus’s assurance that the Chethari would take them home. He had already had a forthright discussion with Simon Penarth on that topic and knew he would be wasting his time trying to point out to these people that they knew nothing about the Chethari and had no reason whatsoever to trust them. As if that should need saying, when the entire crew had been knocked unconscious and abducted!

  He would need, he had decided, to be strategic. Pick his battles.

  ‘This is an alien world!’ Mister said, as if they weren’t already well aware of that, ‘With alien technology we can’t even begin to understand – who knows what that thing is in those caves? It could be anything! It could be a weapon! Even going near it could trigger something off! And that thing…’ he pointed an accusing finger at the radar image of the deeply buried block, ‘could be some kind of trigger or control device. You don’t know, you can’t know! So how can you possibly say you can access it safely?’

  ‘Mr North?’ Alex looked at Davie, who sighed, but obliged, dumbing it down to the level necessary for the LIA agent to understand.

  ‘It is a block of solid rock,’ he said. ‘It is a volcanic rock, obsidian, sometimes known as volcanic glass. We have identified the area it came from.’ He put a global geological map on the screen and highlighted it. ‘Just eight hundred kilometres from the site. It was cut and placed there some ten thousand years ago, at the time of the plague. There is no indication of any kind of technology associated with it. All our scans show it to be no more than a stone cut from the hardest, most durable rock type available at the surface. To me, that looks like some kind of sign that they wanted to last for a very long time – whether it holds a warning or a memorial or no kind of inscription at all we won’t be able to tell until we get closer to it. But our probe will follow just the same process of careful step-by-step approach and analysis as the Exploration Corps uses to investigate unknown buried objects. It’s their protocol we’re using and their tech too, come to that.’

  ‘We are,’ Alex said, ‘following Excorps procedures in all of our investigations here. Excorps would normally spend several weeks working from orbit, of course, but given that we had no say in the landing, the best we can do now is to implement pristine-environment protocols both to safeguard ourselves and to prevent contamination.’ He pulled up, as he spoke, the series of extremely detailed manuals Excorps trained their people to use, flicking through them to give the LIA agent a glimpse of how deep-down analytical and totally prescriptive they were. ‘This is our guide,’ Alex said. ‘Which we are following meticulously.

  Mister was not reassured. His own evaluation of the situation was such that one of the better outcomes would be if the device triggered an explosion which destroyed the planet and took them with it. That, after all, would be preferable to unleashing some terrifying alien force threatening the safety of every world in the League. It was, therefore, with extreme self control that he kept his manner calm, knowing that was his best chance of getting them to listen to him.

  ‘You said yourself,’ he reminded the commodore, ‘that you have neither the equipment nor the expertise to attempt to access the Chambers. But you are proposing t
o excavate an alien artefact – which, in my view, should be undertaken with the utmost caution by highly trained and experienced professionals. You say that you are following Exploration Corps protocols, but I have to ask, Commodore, on what basis you believe yourself and your personnel to be qualified to undertake tasks Exploration Corps personnel spend years and years training for?’

  ‘That is a fair point,’ Alex said, silencing those who were glaring at the LIA agent. ‘None of us are qualified in the same way as Excorps’ people.’ Then, as Mister started to look relieved, ‘They have, however, provided us with training. We worked with them very closely on the Carrearranis mission, in particular. We followed their lead in surveying the Oreol system, with full pristine-world protocols followed there in surveying Oreol itself. And we used their kit and their methods when we were surveying Carrearranis. We do, now, routinely, train all our personnel to carry out full system surveys according to Excorps procedures, right from preliminary evaluations of potential stellar engineering to deep-bore geological probes. That and first-footing expeditions, are a standard part of our work-up training for missions. That and in-system combat exercise. This is what we do – go off charts, taking a route which enables us to work up our skills at a series of previously uncharted systems – survey, planned entry, first footing, combat exercises over a few days and on we go again. We have, in the last five months, visited eleven previously uncharted systems and done that. Every member of this crew has had the experience of being the first person to set foot on a planet or moon so often that that too has become routine. Which is the point. We are an exodiplomacy unit and being able to cope with huge, overwhelming experience is an essential skill.’

  He gave the LIA man a faint smile. ‘We were all overwhelmed by the transit event,’ he said. ‘We didn’t know where we were, readings made no sense, it was extremely disorienting. But we, you see, we are trained and experienced in dealing with massive disorientation. We can function automatically, doing the necessary safety checks while we figure out what’s going on. And as we realised that we’re safe and saw where we are… well, that was just a moment of pure joy. Which, I guess, you have to be a spacer to understand. But now we are settled, working to well-practiced routines, taking it one step at a time. I do appreciate that for you, it seems that there is so much going on all at once, it is all happening way too fast. But that is because you’re trying to follow everything that’s happening and with all due respect, you do not have the knowledge or experience to do that. My advice is to pick a project you have concerns about and focus on that, ask the team for all the relevant documentation, bring yourself up to speed and shadow them, making every effort to disrupt them as little as possible. And then if you still have concerns, you can bring them to me, all right?’

  Mister LIA eyed Davie warily and Davie bared his teeth in a wolverine snarl. He could bear fools when he had to, but his project was too important to him to be hindered by this paranoid, clueless civilian.

  ‘Um.’ Mister LIA looked from Davie to Inga, the mild-mannered professor who’d be running the bio-sampling survey. ‘I’ll, er, observe the bio-sampling,’ he said and tried not to notice the wincing and resigned looks amongst the biology team.

  ‘Good,’ said Alex and with a final glance around, nodded. ‘Briefing dismissed.’

  Four

  They had another briefing next morning, primarily to confirm preparations and plans for the day. Eldovan, though, had news to report.

  ‘We carried out the system survey last night,’ she said.

  Last night, in fact, had been the early hours of the morning, Eldovan appearing on the command deck shortly after 0450. Simon was giving her a brooding look for that, but he didn’t say anything. Eldovan had logged the minimum six hours asleep that he’d insisted on everyone getting and the two pilots involved had been on nightwatch duty anyway.

  Neither pilot had left the ship, of course. They’d been remote-piloting, just as Shion had done and the same shuttle, too, the survey-equipped shuttle six.

  It should have been routine, a mere run-through confirming what they already knew. Eldovan had only asked to do it at all because she knew that there were people back home who’d complain at the absence of a full routine-format system survey.

  So shuttle six was sent off and launched superlight once it was clear of the planet, directed to go outside the system in order to turn around and come back in for the standard format sweep.

  ‘We decelerated to slip through the comet cloud,’ Eldovan explained, showing them a chart of the system with the shuttle’s path marked. ‘Rather than punch holes in it.’

  It had taken nearly an hour to take the shuttle out through the fine mist of gases and dust blown out to the edge of the system. They had picked a spot which had a low density of the chunks of ice and rock floating about out there too and the shuttle’s auto-pilot, programmed by Shion, had glided it smoothly around what obstacles they were. Once beyond it and in clear space again, the shuttle had been told to accelerate back to superlight speeds, head out twenty minutes from the system and then turn around for the standard survey sequence.

  Only it hadn’t got as far as twenty minutes out of the system. It hadn’t even got five.

  ‘Watch this…’ Eldovan put a visual image of the shuttle on the screen, as observed by their own scanners on the ship.

  It was instant. The shuttle was going one way, then it was going the other, right back along its previous line of flight.

  ‘Turnaround!’ several voices exclaimed, in immediate recognition.

  ‘Turnaround,’ Eldovan confirmed and ran it again, this time at super-slow motion. In this, it could be seen that the shuttle slowed as if it was running into something like jelly, not a hard impact but a soft resistance. It was brought to a halt, held there for a nanosecond and rotated precisely about its centre of gravity. Then, it was fired back out just as if it had bounced off a trampoline, though with no loss of velocity.

  ‘We tested nine other locations,’ Eldovan said and put the results up on the screen. Joining the dots created a spherical barrier, centred on the bigger of the binary stars and enclosing the whole system. ‘It looks,’ she said, ‘like a Firewall.’

  ‘Quarantine?’ Simon wondered.

  ‘Possibly.’ Alex agreed. ‘We’ll put it on the list for Trilopharus, anyway.’

  ‘Uh?’ Mister LIA was doing his best, he really was, but it was utterly beyond him to let that one go. ‘Isn’t anyone,’ he asked, with a desperate note, ‘the slightest bit concerned that the aliens who knocked us all out, abducted us and took our ship years out of our own space are now keeping us prisoner inside a massive forcefield?’

  The answer, from the looks on the faces all around him, was that no, they weren’t.

  ‘Poor thing.’ Silvie was sitting in on the briefing, regarding him with soulful compassion. ‘I wish I could help you,’ she said. ‘It’s awful for you, being so scared.’

  The LIA agent gave her a look and a blast of keep out of my mind resentment which might have been painful for the quarian, back before she’d learned to recognise the signs and block such emotional punches.

  ‘All right.’ Alex gave Silvie a look which checked that she was unharmed, then spoke to the LIA man himself. ‘If that was what was happening,’ he said, ‘then it would, of course, be deeply concerning. But that isn’t our perspective on what is happening here, Mister. We were invited to a meeting and brought to an encounter zone, that’s all. The Turnaround, of course, is disconcerting, but we know it isn’t harmful – quite the contrary, we believe it to be a kind of stasis imposed to keep us safe while our ship is being handled by systems which might otherwise damage it and us. The distance they’ve brought us is irrelevant, since we have their assurance that they will take us back. And while there is, yes, a Firewall-type barrier around the system, the obvious reason for that is that it is there either for our or their protection, keeping the system in quarantine. I do not consider it to be keeping us prisoners, n
or do I expect that the Chethari will keep us here against our will.’

  ‘It isn’t a secret lab,’ Silvie assured him, with an evident intention to soothe. ‘They’re not going to turn up and do horrible experiments on us.’ She saw his reaction to that and her eyes jolted wide. ‘Oh!’ Both Shion and Alex were signalling to her don’t go there, but Silvie was too astounded to take any notice. ‘That’s why you think that, because that’s what you’d…’ Her eyes widened still further at the flash of defensiveness she saw in him at that. ‘The LIA has secret labs?’ She said. ‘Torturing people?’

  ‘No, no, no!’ the LIA agent protested and somehow, with everyone there looking at him with profound reproach, he couldn’t stop himself trying to defend the indefensible. ‘Not labs!’ he declared. ‘And if we have – interrogation facilities – where we have sometimes to do hot questioning in the interests of League Security, then that is entirely justified and thoroughly regulated by…’

  His voice trailed off. Tears had coming into Silvie’s eyes and the visual impact of that alone was like seeing a small child welling up with grief. The emotional impact, the sorrow that flowed out from her, was heart-wrenching.

  ‘I don’t think,’ Silvie said, ‘I like you very much.’

  The LIA agent would have said that there was nothing anyone could ever say to him which would shake his faith in the service he had chosen. The LIA, he truly believed, was the front line of defence against all manner of forces from which the League was under constant threat, from terrorists to alien invasion. He would have stood staunch and proud, defying anyone to tell him that his role in that was anything less than good and honourable.

  But those few words from Silvie cut him to the quick.

  ‘All right.’ Alex saw that Shion was comforting Silvie, taking her hand and talking to her in that near wordless way they had. His own manner was icy as he stared at the man who had made his daughter cry. And Silvie was his daughter, in every way that mattered. ‘That will…’ he saw that Bennet had raised a hand and broke off, giving her a nod. Jarlner and Bennet rarely spoke in briefings, so on the odd occasions they had something to say, it would be important.