Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (46 page)

‘Time will tell,’ said Alex, with a note of caution.

It did take the Samartians a while to process the information. It required some adjusting of their cosmological view, after all.

‘It has to be overwhelming, if you think about it from their point of view,’ Mako observed. He and Jermane were sitting in the lounge, the translator having been told to take a break. It wasn’t possible to keep the ship at full action stations for more than a few hours, so they were operating at standby-stations. That meant that everyone on watch was fully suited up and all guns and fighters manned, but those off duty were able to eat and sleep as usual. Even Alex was taking five hours to sleep every day and eating healthy meals, doing his part to generate a sense of calm normality. Jermane, though, had either been on the command deck or in the lab working on the translation matrix every minute he was allowed to work. He was red eyed from lack of sleep and staring at screens. Even now, while submitting to Simon’s decree that he must take a half hour meal break, nothing could stop him gazing at the long range scopes, as if willing it could make the Samartians transmit another signal.

‘I mean,’ Mako went on, ‘if you think about it, as far as they’re concerned there are two alien species, right? One kind has the small ships which attack them, and the other has the big ships which blitz into their space broadcasting incomprehensibly and won’t go away, which to Samartian eyes probably looks like an attack in itself. They’ll certainly have come to some kind of theory of the cosmos to explain that, over the centuries, and may well believe that there
are
only two other sentient species in the galaxy, both hostile to them. And then suddenly there’s us, and they have to get to grips with the fact that there are hundreds more populated worlds than they knew about. I remember Shion telling us about that, I mean, when her people first heard about the League. They’d remembered that there was life on many other worlds, of course, but they believed that all those other worlds had fallen into Dark Age barbarism. The only ships they saw at their borders were Marfikians and Prisosans, just like the Samartians, here. So that’s what they thought, that there were only two ‘human’ species out there with space travel capability, both of them aggressive and mutually hostile. They didn’t want to get involved with either, so didn’t even attempt to respond. It was only when the Solarans told them that they had established diplomatic contact with the League that they realised there was so much more going on. Shion says it took her people months to come to terms with that, so if this is as far as we get with the Samartians this visit, really, we’ll have accomplished a great deal.’

It dawned on him as he was speaking that he had been allowed to talk for an unusually long time without Jermane jumping in to give his own opinions. He looked round from his own gazing at the big screen which was displaying long range scopes, and saw that Jermane’s eyes had closed. The linguist was asleep.

*
*
*

The next signal came in just a few hours later. This time, though, the matrix let them down. The message was only three words, but that in itself made it more difficult to translate as there was so little context. The matrix could only give ‘probable’ translation for two of the words, and at that, with so many possible variations that it couldn’t generate any kind of definitive translation. Even reducing possibilities to translations which made sense left them with thirty seven possible readings ranging from ‘You (untranslatable) gift’ to ‘Death (untranslatable) you’.

‘So – are they offering us a gift, asking for a gift or threatening to kill us?’ Alex asked, looking around at the team.

‘I can’t get a handle on this…’ Jermane was almost frantic, working screens which were trying every which way to decode the untranslated word. ‘The nearest we’ve got, phonetically, ranges from ‘wujickshul’ to ‘yajuckshil’ but it’s not showing up with commonality to
any
known language…’

‘I’ve got nada,’ Davie admitted, looking up from his own bank of screens with a quick head-shake.

‘Me too,’ Shion gave the skipper an apologetic look, having run through her own linguistic knowledge and found nothing that would make sense of the unknown word. ‘Sorry.’

‘Breathe, people,’ Alex said, as the atmosphere on the command deck had become noticeably tense. ‘This was bound to happen. It’s normal. Amazing that we’ve got
this
far without hitting a stonewall. So, we signal ‘nal competz’ and hope that they get
that
.’

The Samartians evidently did, as they re-signalled about half an hour later, using a kind of stick-figure diagram to clarify their meaning.

In the diagram, a ship came to a world with blue stick figures on it. The ship had red stick figures. When the ship landed on the world and the red stick figures stepped out, the blue stick figures started to turn red, and to fall over. Within a few frames, they were all dead.

‘Ah!’ Many voices on the ship exclaimed, at that, with sudden understanding.

‘They’re asking if we’re infected,’ Simon got in quickly. ‘Specifically, if we’re carrying the plague, the Red Death. Be very very careful how you answer that!’ he reminded the skipper. ‘If you just say yes, they’ll almost certainly destroy us.’

He didn’t need to tell Alex that, but the skipper gave him a nod of acknowledgement anyway.

‘Give ‘we present no threat to you’ our best shot,’ he asked, and after a brief huddle between Shion, Davie and Jermane agreeing their best effort at translating that, they loaded it onto a comms probe for transmission and launched it past the other ships.

The Samartians, though, re-transmitted their question. They did so without emphasis, leaving Alex to decide whether they simply hadn’t understood the assurance, or weren’t prepared to accept it.

‘Okay – let’s send the primary medical databurst,’ he said.

This had already been prepared by Simon and Rangi Tekawa, in accordance with Alex’s request for the absolute minimum of information needed for the Samartians to work out what risk the ship might pose to them in terms of pathogens.

‘Are you sure, skipper?’ Jermane was anxious. ‘It’s very early days for such high impact information.’

‘I know, but yes, I’m sure.’ Alex said. ‘We stick to our policy – clear, simple, honest answers to any question that they ask, right?’

So the databurst was transmitted. It contained a copy of Alex’s own DNA, decided upon after much discussion. Rangi had wanted to send the standard first-contact DNA pack which included the full range of genomes collectively described as ‘human’, while Simon had wanted to keep it simpler by sending an ‘average human’ DNA. Buzz, however, had suggested that they use Alex’s own genetic code, as it was in the mid-range human band and would be recognised as having commonalities with the ancient Samartian genome, too. Whether that was still the case, and what the Samartians looked like now, was still unknown. The Samartians had volunteered no information, and Alex had not asked any questions. They were the ones making the approach to Samart, he said, so it was up to them to explain themselves first.

There was a sense of breath-held suspense on the ship after the probe was launched. It contained more than Alex’s DNA. There was information there about the variants of plague still extant on League worlds, diseases they had lived with for so long that they were regarded as normal, unimportant. They were all, after all, treatable by drugs and rarely fatal to anyone with a healthy immune system. The Samartians, in theory at least, should have a healthy immune system too, since the Olaret had created their Nestings
as
survival species. They would have built up no natural immunity to the many pathogens that were normal on League worlds, though, so extreme precautions would still have to be taken.

The medical databurst was very clear about that, specifying that everyone on the ship was certified disease free, and that they had stringent pathogen control procedures.

Even so, it had to be terrifying to the Samartians, that they were admitting to having pathogens on their worlds which had the potential to devastate their people. They all understood that this was a trigger point; information which might well cause the Samartians to draw back from even this level of contact, or even to regard them as so much of a threat they had to destroy their ship.

Hours passed. They were learning, now – if the answer was coming from the people on the ships, it would usually be forthcoming in less than half an hour. Any longer than that almost certainly meant that they were transmitting what they had been told back to some central authority, and waiting for orders on how to proceed. Morry had worked out that if the sensors did reach all the way back to Samart and transmitted at the rate they had observed, it would take them just under an hour to transmit a signal all the way there, and another for the answer to return. That tallied with what they’d observed, allowing time for the authorities on Samart to process the information they’d been given and make a decision on what to do next.

What they would do next was weighted pretty heavily on the side of attacking or telling them to leave. It was what most human worlds would do, after all, with an unknown ship admitting to having potentially deadly pathogens on their worlds, even if they swore that they didn’t have any on their ship. It all depended, now, on whether they had won sufficient trust over the past twelve days, enough to convince the Samartians that they presented no immediate threat.

The fact that it was another four days before they replied suggested that it had needed a good deal of discussion before the decision was made.

When the signal did come, it was unequivocal. So that there could be no chance of them misunderstanding, it came with the same kind of stick-figure diagram. This time, it showed very clearly that if the Heron attempted to enter the space defined by the sensors, they would be destroyed.

Alex signalled back their understanding, and waited again. Thirty six minutes later came the question that they’d all been waiting for, and hoping for.

‘What do you want?’

‘Finally!’ Jermane burst out with a crow of delight, as this marked a key turning point, moving from identifying who they were and what risk they posed into entering a dialogue.

Even then, though, Alex would not broadcast any more than the minimum information needed to answer the question. This time, in addition to their best guess at ‘We seek a relationship of mutual benefit.’, they transmitted a series of stick-figure diagrams of their own. In theirs, the red and blue figures stood together, defending against waves of Marfikian attackers.

This got the single word response ‘Tarros,’ which they took to indicate that they would be waiting for longer than usual.

It was just as well they did understand that, as they had no further communication for another seven days. Jermane was not the only one to be getting a bit fretful by the end of that.

‘It is, you have to admit, a very unorthodox approach to diplomacy,’ Simon observed, ‘To come all this way, and
not
talk to them.’

‘We have to allow them to control the pace, dear boy,’ Buzz reminded him.

‘Yes, but surely, within
reason
,’ Simon objected. ‘People can’t be expected to cope with this level of strain indefinitely. And there is a limit, after all, to how long we can stay here before we risk running out of supplies.’

‘We’ve got another couple of months before we need to start worrying about that,’ Buzz said, comfortably. ‘And I think you’ll find, Simon, that if you go around and ask everyone aboard whether they want to back out now
or
challenge the skipper’s decisions on this, you’ll get a pretty emphatic response.’

Simon had no answer to that, because he already knew it was true. The Heron’s crew had a high degree of confidence in their skipper, and were quite shocked when Simon asked if they were happy with the decisions he was making.

‘The time for that kind of debate is over, mate,
long
over,’ Jonno Trevaga told him, with some severity. ‘We have our say during planning and training, which is more than any other skipper in the Fleet gives his crew, let me tell you. But now we’re on ops, we’re active, this is no time or place for debate or second guessing the skipper. He makes the call, we back him up. That’s how it goes; no messing.’

Simon got pretty much the same answer from everyone he talked to, and quite a few of them told him, too, that they didn’t take kindly to people stirring up that kind of talk, it was bad for morale.

As for the ‘intolerable strain’ Simon felt sure they must be enduring by that point, he could see little evidence of it amongst the Heron’s crew. In this, too, they took their cue from the skipper and the other senior officers.

‘If they’re cool with it,’ said Banno Triesse, ‘ain’t no cause for us to lose any sleep.’

Even Simon, after the meeting on the seventh day, had to concede that morale remained high, from the skipper to the most junior member of the crew.

It was a routine weekly command team meeting, dealing mostly with admin, adjustments to the watch and quarter bill, safety issues and the like. The meeting consisted of Alex, Buzz and the three watch commanders. Tina Lucas was sitting in on it, as part of her Tagged and Flagged programme. Davie could have joined them, too, given his diplomatic status, but had declined the invitation, saying frankly that he’d sooner watch paint dry. Nobody was paying a great deal of attention till they got to operational matters and Alex asked if anyone had any concerns or issues that they wanted to raise. Everyone expected that to be a nod-through, with all the officers entirely on-side with the skipper’s plan. On this occasion, though, Jonas Sartin raised a hand, giving an apologetic look.

‘I was wondering,’ he explained, when Alex looked at him in mild surprise, ‘whether it might be possible to move item thirteen higher up the prioritisation.’

He indicated the ops board displayed on a command deck screen, highlighting item thirteen. It was a request, should they get that far in relationship building, to move their ships close enough together to be able to see them and communicate directly. As tantalising as it was to be this close and not to be able to see the Samartian ships, that had been rated pretty low in priority.