Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (22 page)

‘Diddely om pom pom...’ he tagged, and Alex laughed too, giving him a nod of warm commendation, a silent
‘You’ll do,’
that made Jonas stand just a little taller.

Eight

Shion gave her talk about the Olaret that evening. The gym was packed out, set up in lecture-theatre mode with a live feed to comms throughout the ship for those who hadn’t been able to attend.

Shion began the talk with the ritual used by her people when visiting the Gardens of Memory, a memorial to the tragedy that had struck ten thousand years before.

‘There was a time when the galaxy was at peace. Ancient people lived in harmony with their worlds, and with one another. Then came the Falling, the nineteen civilisations who fell to dust and the two hundred and eighty five who live on only in the Hope that they created to survive them. We stand in their shadow.’ She touched one shoulder, then the other. ‘We will never forget.’

Everyone in the gym, and all those watching around the ship, echoed the shoulder-touch gesture, the newcomers rather self-consciously and some of them a little behind the others, but all of them recognising that this was important, a kind of salute that honoured the dead of the greatest catastrophe in history.

‘We will never forget,’ they chorused in response, and Shion smiled.

‘So,’ she said, ‘the Olaret.’

She had prepared visuals for the talk, of course, and began with a map of this arm of the galaxy, the worlds of the Olaret Archipelago highlighted and identified by their ancient names.

‘Perisos was what they called their first world, not a capital world as such but their world of origin. They were a colonising people, though, they liked to terraform worlds and build new cities – they were known as architects. They had a close relationship with the Cartash.’ She highlighted the world now known as Chartsey, ancient Cartasay. ‘Not a sistering, as such, but both the Olaret and the Cartash were active people, engineers and architects. Both the Olaret and the Cartash had people at Point Zero, too, the world you call Defrica. For those of you who may not know, Defrica was never a homeworld, it was a meeting point. Some records refer to it as the Hall of Gathering. It had several functions – it was a world people went to to meet other species, socially and in what your terms would be considered diplomacy. It was also a world where agreements were made for the supply of goods that worlds might provide for others, though with nothing like a financial economy the word ‘trade’ would be misleading, there. It was a world where collaborative efforts between peoples could be undertaken – artistic, musical, scientific. Nobody knows exactly what happened. The reports that came out were frantic, garbled, everyone involved was already dead and everyone on the planet was infected within hours. All that is known is that there was some kind of accident at a science facility where it is believed that they were experimenting with terraforming technology. Whatever they were trying to do, they had created, and released, the virus we now call the Red Death.

‘It spread, of course, unstoppably. A ship that fled from Defrica brought the plague to Alar; they were the first world to die. The first Olaret world was infected about a decade later – records from the time are erratic so it isn’t possible to be more accurate than that. I do know that they had lost two of their worlds in the century that followed. Everyone was trying everything they could to stop or survive it, of course, and it was at that point that the Cartash came up with the idea of creating a survival genome.’

She smiled at them; the humans who were themselves the outcome of that decision, the people known to those beyond the Firewall as the children of the plague.

‘Accepting that they themselves could not survive infection, they created a genome which could, in the hope that they would carry on the culture of the Cartash and rebuild, one day, to restore what they had been.

‘The Olaret took that idea and went much further with it. They created survival genomes, each engineered for best chance of success on the worlds the Olaret gave them. But they felt that it would be too much of a burden on those societies to be living in the shadow of the past. They didn’t want them to feel oppressed by the heritage of a great and ancient civilisation, and nor did they want to find themselves being worshipped as gods. So they gave them everything they needed to thrive and left them to develop independently. They called them Nestings, creating nests for survival genomes to take life onward even if the rest of the galaxy succumbed to the plague. They are known to have created thirty eight of them.’

She spent some time identifying thirty four of those Nestings on a starmap, indicating with green which ones she was certain of, and yellow for the ones that were an educated guess.

‘I have no idea about these four,’ she said, indicating a side-panel with four names listed. ‘They’re mentioned in the record but there’s no known world they correlate to. It’s possible that they failed, or that they are further out across the Gulf and have yet to be discovered. I’m pretty confident about Zamarat, though.’ She indicated the star system now known as Samart. ‘Though I have no information beyond that; everything I say from this point is pure speculation. I can say that it is likely that they are humanoid. The genetic code created by the Cartash was used extensively with only minor variations, obviously, because the Cartash had produced a genome which
could
survive the plague. The Olaret certainly used that basic genome for all the other Nestings I do know about. This is what the Olaret looked like, themselves.’

She put a still image up on the screen of a statue set amongst a cloud of pale, delicate flowers. She had already put that image on the notice board, as people had been asking if she had any pictures of the Olaret, so it caused no surprise. The statue was of a very thin figure, arms set low on the body, large flat eyes set almost on the sides of the small oval head, a tiny chin merging with the long narrow neck. They were not, to human eyes, beautiful. But they were fascinating, and everyone gazed at the image. The Olaret civilisation had been around for longer than the human mind could really comprehend, a history that stretched back over millions of years. Then, in the space of what was in comparison no more than a heartbeat, they were gone, wiped from the face of the galaxy.

Alex looked at the face of the people who had created his own ancestors, and felt a deep sense of humility. Would humanity, he wondered, have the grace to do anything like that, if they were facing their own inevitable extinction? To give life, and hope, to some other species which would replace them? It was, he felt, pretty unlikely. If a species arose which
could
survive what was killing them, the humans would regard them as an enemy.
Thank you
, he thought, in a silent acknowledgement of the gift the Olaret had given them. And then, since he was after all human, a small part of his mind added, irreverently,
And thank you for not making us look like that.

‘It is a fair guess that the Samartians will be like you, similar in lifespan, intellect and physiology, with a high metabolic rate to support an immune system.’ Shion went on, after a brief pause to allow them to study the image. ‘Though exactly what they look like is beyond the realm of reasonable speculation. If they’ve gone down the same bioengineering route as Quarus, indeed, they may no longer even be humanoid. On balance, though, my guess would be that they are, at least, basically human shaped and within the genome range you consider to be normal.’

Her glance rested briefly on Chief Petty Officer Martins, who was from Chielle. His squat, thick-boned physique was not all due to Chielle being a high gravity world, any more than Angas Paytel’s gangling height was solely due to his upbringing on Korvold, one of the lightest-gravity worlds in the League. There were, indeed, significant differences in their genetic code, the definition of ‘human’ embracing a wide range of genomes.

‘As for communication,’ Shion went on, ‘What little we know of their language indicates that it should have shared roots with both ancient Prisosan and Quarian, but language is so rapid in its evolution that I can’t give you any reliable idea of what their language is like now.

‘Culturally, it is likely that they share certain fundamentals that are found in all the other known Nestings. If we take Novaterre, Shanuk and Quarus as examples, there – on the surface, they have very little in common. Novaterre is an industrial world, with a people known for their unusual degree of formal reserve in public.’

She grinned briefly at the skipper, and he grinned back as that got a quick ripple of amusement in the audience.

‘Shanuk, on the other hand, is a gaian spiritual culture whose people still live in tribal communities. And on Quarus, of course, they bioengineered themselves into aquatic life-forms with a high degree of empathy. If you were asked what these three worlds have in common, you’d have to say, really, not much. But if you look a bit deeper, you’ll find that all three of them are rooted in similar social principles. There is a strong sense of individuals having a duty to society, an ethos of service which puts the needs of society higher than that of individual aspirations. On Novaterre, that manifests in people controlling their own behaviour in public so as to keep their cities the calm, orderly places they value. On Shanuk, it means that people maintain their traditional lifestyle, the spiritual values that are more important to them than modern conveniences. On Quarus, they have evolved a fully cooperative society in which all decisions are made by a process of ongoing referendum, and in which necessary tasks are carried out by individuals as an act of social generosity, for the greater good. There is no culture on any of these worlds of individual striving for achievement at the cost of other people. They are highly ethical societies, with little interest in material gain – the quarians have abandoned money altogether, the Shanuk operate a trading culture with the purpose of ensuring that everyone has what they need, and Novaterre, too, has a notoriously low level of consumerism.’

She looked at Davie, with that, and he laughed, nodding confirmation.

‘Deeply frustrating to the corporate community,’ he observed. ‘No status-goods market at all, and barely any luxury market to speak of. It
looks
like it should have – pretty much the whole planet looks like typical central worlds suburbia both architecturally and ethnographically – but they just don’t have the normal suburban psyche of wanting to outdo the neighbours with bigger cars or better gadgets.’

‘Exactly,’ Shion agreed. ‘My belief is that the shared roots of social responsibility are still fundamental to each of those cultures, and those of the other known Nestings, and on that basis it is reasonable to speculate that the Samartians will also have some elements of those characteristics. That tallies with what little we do know about them – their high sense of honour, the principles of service inherent in a military culture. Beyond that, I really can’t speculate, though I would like to make one final point before we go to questions.

‘Clearly, there is another aspect to the Nesting cultures which I’m sure some of you have already spotted. They are, essentially, conservative, quite static societies. Novaterrans tend to know their ancestry right back through generations, in far more detail than is common on other worlds, and they prize history, preserving old buildings, taking pride in the continuity of customs and traditions. Shanuk is all
about
preserving their traditional way of life, and nothing much has changed on Quarus for centuries, they’re not an innovative or exploring people. I would expect, therefore, that the Samartians would also be conservative, traditionalists. But the point should be made,’ she looked pointedly at Alex, ‘that even the most conservative society may throw out dynamic, radical individuals.’

That got laughter, as well as applause at the recognition that this had brought Shion’s prepared lecture to an end. It was fairly brief applause, though, because they all knew that she would move on now to take questions. They all had to be considerate about that, as a rule, in not bombarding Shion with questions all the time, so this was a treasured opportunity.

Questions came, therefore, thick and fast. Few were about the Samartians, as most people recognised that she had already told them everything she knew and could speculate about. Most of the questions were about the Olaret, and she had to answer most of those with an apologetic, ‘Sorry, I really don’t know.’ And if she didn’t know, as everyone understood, none of her people had that information. It was possible that the Solarans might know more, but communication with Solarans was so slow and confused that it might take years to get any kind of comprehensible information from them. It was possible that they’d learn more from the Gider, but that relationship was still in primary diplomatic contact and it wasn’t clear, yet, even how well they were understanding one another.

Just occasionally, though, there was a question she could answer, and even more rarely, that answer gave them astonishing new information. That could happen even after all these months aboard ship. It wasn’t that Shion was holding back. She would talk freely and answer questions whenever she could, as well as frequently writing information files to be shared with the Diplomatic Corps. Even she, though, could not be expected to write down absolutely everything she knew about every possible subject, and she sometimes just hadn’t realised either that the humans didn’t know something already or that it would be of interest to them.