Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (23 page)

‘Was it the Olaret who sealed off Defrica, Point Zero, after the plague?’ The question came from Tina Lucas. She’d been studying the Firewall since she was a child, in increasing depth as she gained access to more classified sources of information. She knew now that it had been the Cartash who had first proposed that all infected worlds and those in a barrier zone around them should be sealed in quarantine.

It was logical, as all the worlds involved had accepted. Shion had assured them that it had been no forced imposition, but a sacrifice made by each of those worlds as they recognised it was the only way left to stop the inexorable spread of the plague across the galaxy. Individual world quarantine simply hadn’t worked – it might hold for a while, but even the most rigorous decontamination of shipping had failed to prevent infection spreading. So each of the worlds within the Firewall had destroyed their own shipping, and their own ship-building capacity, too, creating a fire-break so that it would be generations before any of them went back into space again. Others beyond had created the Firewall itself, a quarantine barrier that encompassed all infected space, with the automatic turn-around technology against which the Fourth had banged their ship to make contact with Gide.

Tina was far from being the only one to feel a cold horror at that decision, though. It felt brutal, particularly when you were one of the species abandoned in the plague zone. Their worlds had plunged into Dark Age barbarism, and they had had to claw their way up to their current stage of development while the ancient and mighty civilisations beyond the Firewall held themselves aloof.

For Tina, it seemed incomprehensible, inhuman cruelty that the response of the ancients to the news of the plague had been to quarantine the infected world, sealing it off so that nobody could get out, or go in to try to help them.

‘I believe it was, yes, though I have no definite information on that. It seems likely, though, given that the records say that a star was moved to block the gateway to the Hall of Gathering. The Olaret were terraformers, as I said – not the way you terraform worlds, but landscaping whole systems, moving planets around, that kind of thing.’

She looked a little surprised at the incredulous reaction to that.

‘I’ve mentioned that before, I’m sure,’ she said, glancing around at various people in the audience with an enquiring look.

‘We thought you were joking.’ It was Buzz who answered, though speaking for all of them. ‘Sorry, but that’s…’ he gestured to indicate that it had gone over their heads. ‘Our current level of understanding is that you can’t just move planets around, even given a means of propulsion
to
move something that big. Even if there was some way to do that without causing catastrophic damage to the planet, solar system physics are very well understood. If you change a planet’s orbital position you would also have to adjust its speed, of course, but the law of orbital resonance would also mean that the planet would have to be in, or would shift back into, a resonant orbit relative to other planetary bodies.’ He had Mako Ireson sitting next to him and, glancing at his look of bewildered incomprehension, grinned. ‘That’s high school science,’ he pointed out. ‘Astro mechanics.’

Shion giggled. There was no other way to describe it, as her attempt to maintain public-speaking decorum dissolved into a merry little spurt of laughter, her eyes sparkling with mischief.

‘I do love the way humans decide they know all about something and call it a law,’ she observed, with another trill of mirth. ‘As if it’s not just something they’ve discovered, but the
rules
, which the universe had better comply with, or else!’

‘Are you telling us we’ve got that
wrong
?’ A voice rose above the excited clamour of reaction.

‘Oh no,’ Shion assured him, readily. ‘You’ve understood celestial mechanics, no problem with that. I was just commenting on you calling it a
law
, that’s all.’

‘But astro mechanics makes it clear that moving planets around is impossible!’ The speaker was Jate, typically forthright.

‘Clearly not, since the Olaret did it,’ Shion replied, with a light shrug. ‘Don’t ask me how in any detail because my people abandoned that kind of technology a long time ago. But I do know, for sure, that the Olaret moved planets around, and my understanding is that they did that by adjusting the gravity produced by the star.’

There was a moment of silence while the spacers considered that, then another babble of incredulity, which made her laugh again.

‘You’re talking about stellar engineering.’ Morry Morelle spoke up, with that, an amazed look on his face. He was their engineer, a very able physicist in his own right who had been on secondment to the Second several times and been involved in many R&D projects even while in regular service. Alex had headhunted him way back when he was putting his first crew together. ‘But that’s so far beyond our ability, it’s in the realms of fantasy.’

‘Is it?’ Shion looked mildly surprised. ‘But you yourselves have undertaken some pretty impressive stellar engineering, blowing up Ignition One in such a way that most of the debris would fall into the goldilocks zone. And you saved Pellar, too, with the use of grav-pulse weaponry.
And
I saw, at Tolmer’s Drift, that you have developed artificial gravity satellites capable of collecting megatons of dust and debris. Is it really so difficult to make the leap into theorising that the gravity of a star might be adjusted either by pushing a gas giant into it, or by blowing off significant quantities of its own mass, or by some deep-star technology along the same lines as your own grav-generators?’

‘The calculations, the forces involved, the
timescales
,’ Morry said, and shook his head. ‘Way beyond us.’

‘Well, for now,’ Shion conceded. ‘but I dare say you’ll work out how, one day. Anyway, yes, the Olaret
could
do that, and it seems logical to me that they would have been the ones who moved the star to block the entry to Point Zero.’ She looked at Tina, who’d originally asked that question. ‘Is that important, who did it?’

‘I’m just trying to understand,’ Tina admitted. ‘Not so much how they did it, but how they
could
. I understand the logic, of course, all spacers do. You can’t open an airlock hatch in a blowout, even if people are dying, if opening that hatch means killing everybody else. But to lock the hatch on an entire world, for
ever
– I struggle with that, I can’t understand it.’

‘Everyone on Point Zero was already dead, though,’ Shion pointed out. ‘The Red Death has a hundred per cent mortality. There was no chance for any of them there, and no time, even, to attempt any kind of rescue, removing survivors to quarantine or anything like that. They would all have been dead before news even got to other worlds.’

‘But they didn’t all die, did they?’ Tina said. ‘Because Van Damek found a
populated
world.’

There was a hum of reaction to that, some interested and some a little shocked, though it was clear that this was a friendly discussion.

‘Well, I see two possibilities, there,’ Shion said, considering. ‘One, that the world Van Damek found was
not
Point Zero, but another world we don’t know about – perhaps even one of the missing Olaret Nestings. Or, two, that Van Damek’s account of finding that world was not true. Sorry.’ She grinned again at the little ruffle which ran through her audience at that. They were big fans of Van Damek, in the Fourth. ‘But without in any way subscribing to the theories that he was a nutter, a con-man or delusional, it has to be acknowledged as within the bounds of possibility that he made up his stories of discovering Defrica in the hope of stimulating greater funding for exploration. There have always been myths around there being a Lost World in the Carotis, and how better to engage public enthusiasm for exploration, at a time when neither governments nor corporations were willing to fund even near-border explorations? Van Damek had to fund his own voyages, remember, and he made desperate efforts to ignite public interest and support. On balance, I’d give it a fifty-fifty bet between him having discovered a world we haven’t identified yet, or having made it up. I don’t for one moment think that there are, or can have been, any survivors on Point Zero. They were sealing a grave, you know, not burying living victims.’

Tina accepted that, giving a nod of thanks that held some relief. She hadn’t wanted to think of the Olaret being that ruthless.

It had been a very good question, though, and generated another. Seeing that Shion was happy to discuss even controversial issues, Misha Tregennis asked if there was anything that she could tell them about the Marfikians.

‘About their origins, I mean,’ she clarified.

Shion looked doubtful.

‘I have been asked not to talk about that,’ she said, and looked at Alex, explaining, ‘Ambassador Dolan said it was highly sensitive. Which it is, I’ve seen. If anyone even says the word
Marfikian
there’s an immediate tension, a comment or two and a quick change of subject. And I’ve been told that if you say it in a spacer bar, everyone will stop talking and stare at you.’

‘True enough,’ Alex confirmed. ‘It isn’t something we joke or gossip about, so if someone is talking about them it’s usually because they have some news. And news about the Marfikians is very rarely good. But that’s, you know, socially sensitive. Did Ambassador Dolan mean that, or did she mean that it is diplomatically sensitive?’

Ambassador Dolan was the Exo-Ambassador at X-Base Amali, who had looked after Shion during her first months in human space.

‘Both, I think,’ Shion said, having weighed this up. ‘I didn’t really understand it at the time, but looking back on what she said, I can see she thought that it might be misconstrued, even cause offence, if I talked about my people’s views on the Marfikians. I did already share every bit of information that I have about the Marfikians, did that very early on, but the Ambassador did say when we were discussing me joining the Fourth that it was a sensitive issue and not appropriate for general discussion. And you agreed, didn’t you, Davie?’

Davie nodded. ‘Don’t freak out the norms.’ He gestured around him, and grinned. ‘But these are not norms. They’re fairly bright for homo sapiens, and unusually open minded. I think you can be frank with them, Shion.’

‘Yes, of course I can,’ Shion said, ‘but I just don’t want to upset anyone…’ she looked at Alex again, with a questioning look, ‘Skipper?’

Alex was one of the few people outside the higher echelons of the Diplomatic Corps who had been given access to the information Shion had given about the Marfikians, so he knew already what she was going to tell them.

‘Go ahead,’ he told her. ‘If anyone has a problem with it, we can discuss that, while fully respecting your people’s right to their own views, yes?’

‘Okay.’ Shion looked more pleased than otherwise, and didn’t hesitate, going straight to the heart of the matter. ‘I think what Ambassador Dolan felt to be the ‘sensitive’ here is that my people grieve for the Marfikians, too, as much as for any of your worlds.’

There was an audible intake of breath from several quarters, and a certain wary stillness.

‘We do not, of course, in any way condone what they have done, and are doing, to the people of other worlds.’ Shion said. ‘That is a grief and a tragedy beyond words. But we grieve for them, too, for the horror of what they have become.’ She touched her shoulders, gesture and tone conveying regret. ‘We don’t hate them as you do, or see them as monsters. We know what they are, and in our eyes they are as much victims of the plague as any of your worlds.’

The concept of Marfikians as victims was not one that any of her audience could accept, and Shion could see that, in their awkward seat-shuffles, hear it in the silence of their reaction.

‘I can only explain,’ she said, ‘how we see this, from our point of view. Here.’

She called up another image as she spoke, displaying it on the big screen behind her. It was another statue, this time, a strikingly attractive figure. Humanoid, with regular features, an athletic physique. Close observation would determine that every aspect of the figure matched, exactly, the Golden Ratio that was humanity’s baseline criteria for physical attraction. Even the fact that the figure was bald, with no eyebrows or eyelashes, added to the impression of pure, ethereal beauty.

‘This is the image of the Marefek, in our Gardens of Memory,’ Shion said. ‘We honour them just as we do all the memorials to the Fallen. The Marefek were a fine, honourable people – peaceful, of course, though somewhat isolationist. They held themselves aloof from other worlds, considering most of them to be distasteful, unhygienic. Not
everyone
likes to live in garden worlds, after all. The Marefek valued hygiene to a very high degree – so much so that they had come to see living biospheres as insanitary. The idea of sharing breath with animals, walking amongst plants, insects around them and all that, well, it was just disgusting to them. They lived on a sterile world with the air and all their needs being provided by technology – not an animal, not an insect, not a blade of grass on Marek. They even, so legend has it, perfected their nutrient intake so that they no longer needed to excrete.

‘That’s very unusual – most species eat as much for pleasure as for nutrition, but the Marefek evidently felt that it was more important to consume nutrient in a way that meant they didn’t have to go through the dirty and degrading process of having a poo. The ultimate in anal-retentive, yes,’ she agreed, as that got a few grins and chuckles. ‘And obsessive about keeping everything clean. They had eliminated body hair, too, as they felt it to be unhygienic. They didn’t like outsiders coming to Marek. They’d put up with it, I gather, but would be constantly cleaning around them and asking them to take showers, or whatever the equivalent was back then. I know that from a joke that’s in one of our archives, a comment made by a visitor to our world in discussion with the Karlane. He had obviously been to Marek not long before and commented how pleasant it was to be welcomed by people who didn’t sterilise his footsteps away as he walked and ask him to clean himself twenty times a day. The Marefek themselves very rarely travelled to other worlds, for obvious reasons. So they weren’t very sociable, that’s true, and they might not have been the kind of people we’d sister with ourselves, just not compatible cultures. But that does not mean that they were in any way hostile or
anti-
social in the wider sense. The Marefek were highly advanced engineers even by the standards of the ancients, and if other worlds asked for their help they would provide that freely. I know of at least one situation where another world was having problems with their climate-control technology and the Marefek provided them with new systems. There’s no suggestion of any kind of payment or trade going on with that, it was just something they did because the other world needed it. So they were, you see, decent people, good neighbours.