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  ‘Code Q-Red,’ she said and gave him a nod. ‘But there’s nobody,’ she said, as she walked away. ‘That’s a cloud of fractals, not a person.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Alex said, to Trilopharus. ‘Quarian perceptions, obviously, differ from ours – Quarus?’ he prompted. ‘The Olaret Nesting? Where we were going when you first popped in?’

  ‘No, haven’t heard of that one,’ Trilopharus said, with cheerful dismissal. ‘The Gider said you were on your way over the Gulf, as you call it.’ That seemed to amuse them. ‘Took us a little while to find you,’ they commented. ‘But the Gider had given us your biocode, obviously.’

  ‘If I ask what’s a biocode and how you used it to find me,’ Alex said, ‘you’re not going to tell me, are...’

  ‘Nup!’ Trilopharus confirmed, but then, perhaps having been prompted by one of the other people they were talking to, ‘Think DNA scanner,’ they suggested, ‘but big.’

  ‘All right,’ Alex acknowledged. ‘Thanks. And – you’re locked on to me?’

  ‘Person to person call,’ Trilopharus agreed. ‘Best line we can get at this range. The Gider said you’d be the go-to guy, see, to help us out.’

  ‘Help you?’ Alex could not even begin to imagine what kind of help the Chethari might want from him, but as he said it he realised how rude that might sound. ‘I mean…’ he was about to say ‘yes, of course, anything that I can do to help’, but then remembered just in time what had happened last time he’d said ‘yes, of course’ to Trilopharus. An unthinking agreement might well find them all knocked unconscious again and the ship whisked off who knew where. ‘Please,’ Alex said, cautiously, ‘tell me how we can help.’

  ‘We need a ship,’ Trilopharus told him, ‘to pick someone up from Pirrell and take them to Lundane. We can’t do it ourselves, our ships can’t go close enough to your worlds. But the Karlane says she’d like you to do it – one of their people is with you already, yes?’

  Alex turned his head and indicated that Shion should get to her feet. She did so, though looking somewhat dazed.

  ‘Lt Commander Shionolethe.’ She had accepted the promotion from Lt after some forthright words from the new Third Lord of the Admiralty and five weeks spent at a regular Fleet officer-training facility. It had needed that to convince Shion that the fact she hadn’t graduated from an Academy didn’t make her any less entitled to the rank she had earned, since. ‘Known on Pirrell,’ Alex said, ‘as Lady Ariel Mgwamba et Savurai, Grace of a Noble…’

  ‘Hiya,’ said the angelic vision. ‘The Karlane says to greet you with all kinds of stuff, but you’ll forgive me if I don’t, not enough time, so just hello and love from her and well done and thank you and will you please come get your aunt?’

  Shion didn’t say a word. She just turned her head and looked at Alex.

  He remembered. It had been several years ago now, but was not a conversation he was ever likely to forget. They had been on their way back from Samart. Shion had asked to speak to him privately and had laid out an idea so radical, so shocking, that even Alex had struggled to hear her out and not give way to outrage. At the end, he had said that he understood her point of view but had begged her never to tell anyone else, only to write it up so that he might pass it to Dix Harangay, with due warning, under the highest possible classification.

  She had surprised him, then, by telling him that while she was happy to comply with that, she felt she had a duty to report back to her people, to the Karlane, what she believed was happening here. And it was possible, she’d said, that if they shared her belief, they might feel impelled to send out an ambassador, a Hand of the Karlane, to help. But even she had said that it might be generations before they made up their minds, or found anyone willing to undertake that one-way journey.

  Evidently, that had happened a lot sooner than Shion had predicted. Her aunt. Her aunt was leaving the Veiled World and wanting to go to Lundane.

  ‘Please,’ Alex said, speaking calmly, ‘when we say yes, Trilopharus, do not just take us off the planet without warning – we will need time to discuss and plan, all right? But yes, of course, yes.’

  That was not a decision he needed to think about, or to take advice on from the mission command team. It was, as far as Alex was concerned, a no-brainer.

  ‘Excellent,’ Trilopharus was pleased, but they evidently felt it was a no-brainer, too, a minor favour to ask and one of such obvious benefit that it would be incredible if they didn’t say yes. ‘I’ll tell the Karlane,’ they said and with that, vanished.

  Buzz put his arm around Shion and took her off the command deck as she started to break down, with the harsh little gasps which would give way to sobs.

  Alex let them go. He would talk to Shion when she was more composed. Right now, it was the broad shoulder of Uncle Buzz she needed to cry on.

  ‘Er…’ Eldovan was staring at him. So was Davie. So, in fact, was everyone on the command deck. ‘Skipper?’

  ‘Ah.’ Alex realised they had no idea what was going on and thought fast. This was going to be highly sensitive. So, start at low entry level and build it up, just as with exodiplomacy exposure. ‘Shion told me once,’ he said, ‘that she wished her people knew what was happening outside the Veil and how much help they might be – specifically, in role as an ambassador helping worlds under Marfikian rule stop fighting amongst themselves and start to work together.’

  ‘Some hope,’ said Eldovan, with a dubious note. ‘She can’t seriously think that would work, can she?’

  ‘Shion believes that a Pirrellothian ambassador would have the trust and respect of every world,’ Alex pointed out, ‘and I do believe she is right about that. I did ask her if it was a role she ever saw herself undertaking and she said no, never, she doesn’t have the skills. But she did, at the time, mention her aunt – a lady, she tells me, who could walk into a stadium full of people arguing and get them to sit down quietly and listen to her.’

  ‘Well, that’s the skill set you’d need,’ Davie allowed, ‘to get Prisos and Arak talking to each other. We can’t even get them in the same building. And this is the aunt, I take it, that we’re going to go and pick up?’

  ‘I don’t know, but it seems likely,’ Alex said. ‘And if there is any chance at all that she can start to build relationships within the Empire – well, we have to do everything we can to help with that, don’t we?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Davie said, though with no great enthusiasm. ‘But – Lundane? We have never sent a warship there. Way too provocative.’

  Lundane was right on the border between the League and the Marfikian Empire. It was the only place where the League and the worlds beyond their borders met. The League had maintained a diplomatic operation there for centuries, attempting to forge relationships. As Davie had indicated, though, many of them hated one another almost as much as they did the Marfikians. And most of them hated the League even more.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Alex said. ‘As if I’m going to swan up there in a destroyer!’ The Marfikians tolerated the toing and froing of civilian ships at Lundane, but it was a tenet of faith in the League that if they took warships there it would be perceived as an act of aggression, triggering dreadful reprisals. ‘There is,’ Alex pointed out, ‘an X-Base. We can pick up suitable civilian transport there for the final run in. And no, before you ask, obviously, we are not going to be cruising merrily through Marfikian territory. We will have to Van Damek it – up and around,’ he gestured largely, in a big arc. ‘And back in through the Lundane Ranges.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Davie, as if Alex had proposed to take a scenic route on the way to a picnic. ‘The pretty way it is, then.’

  Eldovan made a little choking noise. ‘Just like that,’ she said. ‘All due respect, skipper, but phew!’

  ‘Yes, I know, it’s a big undertaking,’ Alex said. ‘But worthwhile.’ He didn’t say ‘I believe’ or ‘I think’ and as Eldovan looked at him she began to realise just how important this might be.

  ‘You really do
think…’ she broke off, remembering where they were and that everyone was watching. ‘Your call, of course,’ she said. ‘Just tell us what you need, skipper.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Alex said. ‘For now, I think, we just need to look at the charts – start thinking about a route.’

  It wasn’t long before the astrogator came to join them – Lionard the Miserable, utterly transformed by the prospect of a real Van Damek, not the petty off-chart sweeps they’d been doing for training, but a big, serious, route-finding expedition.

  Alex left them arguing about the various options when he got a message from Buzz telling him that Shion would like to talk to him now.

  He was with her for two hours, talking it through and having lunch together. As it turned out, she hadn’t been crying because her people were emerging from their long seclusion to take a role in human affairs, but simply because Trilopharus had been talking to her family, to the Karlane.

  It had been a huge blow to her, Alex knew, when the Solarans left. She had a kind of odd, circular contact with her homeworld. The Solarans were in the habit of taking their ships first to Pirrell, then coming into the League. They brought messages for Shion and sometimes gifts, too, to be handed on to her. Shion could not send gifts in return, as anything sent from League space would breach the quarantine, but she sent both loving messages and accounts of what she was doing. The Solarans took these with them when they went back to Solarus Perth, where their ship would be destroyed and its passengers housed on the quarantine world within their system – no hardship, they said, life on one world was the same as on the other, but the homeworld must always be protected. The next ship going to Pirrell, then, would take Shion’s messages with them. So contact was erratic, but it had always been there. And then the Solarans had fled from League space and all contact with her homeworld had been lost. Shion had been philosophical about it. She had always known that was a risk and no point in grieving over what she couldn’t change. The news that the Solarans might be coming back in a couple of years had been emotional for her in itself. But to hear that the Chethari were there, speaking to the Karlane, had been so immediate, so right now, it had overwhelmed her.

  She got emotional again, then, when Alex started talking to her about the practicalities of having her aunt on the ship, because that too made it real. But she’d recovered by the time that they were having lunch, not least because Alex’s steward was attempting to mother her.

  This was absurd at so many levels Shion just had to laugh. Simmy was one of the three members of the crew who didn’t have a blue-docket as able and talented. She was seventeen years old and an ordinary star rating, though working hard on the training which would get her rated able. She had to work hard – her IQ and learning quotients were good enough to have won her a place in the Fleet but her academic skills were relatively poor, making it hard for her to do the independent study so many Fleet courses required.

  And then there was Shion, superhuman senior officer, pilot, linguist and a princess, too, when she wanted to be. She was also, though she didn’t look it, old enough to be Simmy’s great grandmother.

  ‘There you go…’ Simmy put a plate in front of her as she served the lunch.

  ‘Oh.’ Shion looked at the food. ‘This isn’t,’ she observed, ‘what I ordered.’

  ‘No,’ Simmy looked at her with tender compassion. ‘You need something nice when you’ve been upset,’ she told her. ‘So I got you something nice and comforty.’ The ‘nice and comforty’ consisted of Simmy’s own favourite comfort-foods, a bizarre mix of pizza, chicken pie with gravy, spiced yam wedges, savoury bread and a side of curry sauce. ‘Eat it up,’ Simmy said and rested a hand very lightly on her shoulder in a consoling there, there. And then, leaning down, she murmured conspiratorially, ‘Got you loads of yum for dessert!’

  When she’d gone, bouncing out with her usual happy energy, Shion cracked up laughing.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, with an enormous grin, as she surveyed the carb-fest on her plate. ‘You just have to love her!’

  Alex grinned, nodding agreement. It had been Buzz who’d found Simmy, sending her to be his steward when he was away from the Fourth on assignment with the Assegai. He had known that Alex would not be able to refuse to have her looking after him and he had known, too, how much fun she would be.

  ‘She brought me porridge the other day,’ he said. ‘Told me it’s good for keeping you regular.’

  Shion hooted; the particular trumpeting splutter Alex recognised as irrepressible giggles and at that he laughed too, seeing that she really was recovered, now.

  ‘You don’t have to eat that, though,’ he added.

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of hurting her feelings,’ Shion said and as she tucked in, ‘you may have to help me a bit with dessert.’

  By the time they’d worked their way through Simmy’s ‘loads of yum’, Shion had agreed to act as liaison, of course, advising on the provision which would need to be made for her aunt. She was already starting to think about how they might manage and what they would need to ask Trilopharus to pass on to them at Pirrell, too. And there were so many questions – how were they to get there and actually pick her up? Would she have attendants with her, or be alone?

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Alex said, when Shion asked him to put that on the list of things to clarify. ‘Attendants?’

  ‘Yes, attendants,’ Shion said and shook her head. ‘There just aren’t the right words,’ she said. ‘Standard doesn’t even have the concepts – retainers, I suppose, comes closer. People who live with you, attending you, like family. The ayalee are so much shorter lived than we are, people we grow up with as children will grow old and die before we’re in our middle age, so it’s not unusual for three or four generations of a family to attend one of us, their lives and ours so intertwined. When I left, it was very hard to leave my attendants, those who didn’t want me to go and those who wanted to come with me. But I didn’t want to come to the League as chamlorn, I wanted to be Shionolethe, just me. But my aunt, if she’s going to work as Hand of the Karlane, she might bring attendants with her, people who want to be part of that too. And that might be, you know, quite a few people.’

  ‘As in…?’

  ‘Hard to say,’ Shion said. ‘Anything from six, I’d guess, to a couple of hundred.’

  ‘Ah.’ Alex said. ‘Definitely something that we’ll need to clarify, then.’

  Six

  Later that afternoon, Alex held a top secret briefing. This was extremely unusual for him. Alex had been obliged to modify his open-comms policy now that they’d upgraded to the destroyer, but he still had live feed from the command table at any time when operational matters were being discussed or anything important was going on. He was just not in the habit of keeping secrets from his crew, so when he called Buzz, Eldovan and Davie to meet him in his daycabin everyone knew there was something weird going on.

  The weirdness continued inside the cabin. Once Simmy had brought in a refreshment trolley Alex locked the door and informed them all that they were now under the highest possible security conditions.

  ‘Nine ack alpha plus, plus,’ he said. ‘And brace yourselves, please, this is going to be high impact even for you.’ His glance included all three of them, getting startled looks in return. ‘And yes,’ Alex interpreted the looks correctly. ‘I am serious. There are fewer than twenty people in the League who know what I’m about to tell you. It is rated so high impact that there is a requirement for a qualified paramedic to be in attendance when it is being disclosed.’

  ‘A whisky file?’ Eldovan was amazed. ‘I thought that was a myth.’

  ‘The whisky part is,’ Alex confirmed. Rumour had it that there were files in existence so shocking that when they had to be disclosed, a glass of whisky would be put on the desk ready. ‘But the Diplomatic Corps does put paramedic requirement on files which they consider may cause panic reactions, particularly in civilians. And I put the paramedic requirement on this one myself, even for the most experi
enced personnel.’

  Davie was watching him intently. ‘It’s the Big Bad, isn’t it?’ he queried and Alex gave a slight nod and a smile. Davie was not supposed to know even that much, even that there was a file known as the ‘Big Bad’ to the tiny number of people even aware that it existed. But then, Davie always was well informed about things even when he had no right to know about them at all.

  ‘Do you already know it?’ Alex asked.

  ‘No – only that there is such a file,’ Davie said. ‘It’s been around since our Samart operation and rumour is that it has something to do with that, but that’s as much as I’ve been able to find out.’

  ‘Well, it arose from the Samartian mission,’ Alex conceded. ‘This is something that Shion told me on our way back from Samart. She had been struck, there, by how fundamentally wrong the Samartians were in so many of their beliefs about the cosmos – notably, that all intelligent life forms must under biological imperative be mutually hostile and that it is not possible for any species to communicate with another. They’re smart people, the Samartians, obviously, but they had decided that these things were fundamental truths long ago and had stopped even thinking about them, let alone questioning them. It was remarkable to watch a people having to cope with such fundamental beliefs being completely overturned and seeing that made Shion think about what kind of beliefs we have which we treat as fundamental truths and no longer question. Things, even, which she had accepted herself without questioning because we told her that this was how things were and she did not know any different.

  ‘So…’ he looked around and saw that none of them was worried, all three just keenly interested. A pang of regret struck him at that. He was about to shatter that calm and tear down core beliefs, which was not going to be pain-free for any of them.

  ‘We need to talk,’ he said, ‘about Marfik.’

  He put up a star chart on the table between them, indicating the flashing point which was the Marfik system and the hazed-out zone of the space they dominated.