Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (60 page)

The courage it took to come through that tube could only really be appreciated by those who had, themselves, engaged in first contact. To put yourself entirely into the hands of an unknown race, to go into an entirely alien environment, was a moment of heart stopping terror.

Heart pumping thrill, though, too. And if this was a moment of historical importance for the League, that was nothing to how important it was for the Samartians. They had only ever attempted one friendly contact with visitors to their worlds, historically, and everyone aboard that ship had died. Since then, their only experience of visitors had been the continual threat of Marfikian raiders and occasional, equally terrifying ships blitzing into their space signalling incomprehensible gobbledygook at them. And it really was incomprehensible, too. The reason the Samartians had not responded to any previous communication efforts was quite simply because their systems could not make any sense of those signals at all. Even the Fourth had had to stretch both their technology and their programming skills to the limit in order to transmit and receive comprehensible data. It was apparent that that was beyond the ability of the Samartian ships, and since it was unlikely the Prisosans had that capacity either, there had never been any possibility of meaningful communication between them. The Fourth were, quite literally, the first people the Samartians had met who had spoken to them in a way that they could understand.

So here they were, now, taking the historic step of sending their first explorer aboard an alien ship. For good or bad, the impact of that would be enormous, culturally, globally, not just now but for centuries to come. If the weight of responsibility on Tina was high, the equivalent weight on the Samartian officer had to be just overwhelming.

Buzz began to understand why the Samartians had chosen Janai Bennet for this, though, as she came through the outer airlock. It was at that point that the historic ‘first step’ descended into farce as the Samartian squeaked, yelped and fell splat on the deck.

It was apparent to Buzz that she was unprepared for there to be gravity in the inner airlock. She seemed for some reason to have been trying to come through the airlock sideways, only to be yanked down as she entered the gravity zone. She was pulling herself back up as he opened the inner door. It was obvious that she was dazzled, too, twisting her head away from the ceiling lights and shielding her eyes with her hand, instinctively. She managed to adjust, though, with some blinking, as she regained her feet.

Had that been a senior officer representing the Samartian government, clearly, there would have been huge embarrassment and loss of face at that point. Sending a junior officer to check things out first was, indeed, a sensible decision.

And a good choice, too, clearly, in Janai Bennet, a
very
good choice, as laughter was mingling with her astonishment.

‘Koto!’ she said, in rueful amusement, and then saw that the hatchway was opening. She pulled herself quickly into a more formal stance, composed her expression and held up her hands.

In the League, that gesture was regarded as a universal gesture of surrender, hands palm forward, slightly above the shoulders. There was something very natural and habitual about it, though; the way she did it, it looked almost more like a salute.

Buzz smiled warmly, taking in every detail of her appearance. She was wearing a spacesuit with some flexible metallic outer layer. It looked like pale copper, with a matt, slightly textured surface and a separate helmet attached with a pressure-sealed ring. The front half of the helmet was transparent, showing her face. Her hair was mostly concealed under a fitted cap, just a hint of strawberry-blonde visible at the temples. She looked very young – mid teens, Buzz would have guessed – with eyes so vivid they were almost turquoise, fine-boned features and a slightly snub nose. She was small, by League standards, just over a metre fifty and lightly built, at that. The hands she was holding up had only three fingers and a thumb.

‘Welcome, Janai Bennet,’ Buzz greeted her, and though the words were formal his tone was fatherly. He held out his right hand to her as he spoke, and as she continued to stand there with her hands up staring at him in blank bewilderment he explained, ‘It is our custom to take hands, at meeting.’

She put her hands down and echoed his gesture, rather hesitantly, looking very solemn as he took her hand in his and shook it gently. ‘Welcome,’ he repeated, speaking slow but comprehensible Samartian, and stood back, waving her aboard the shuttle hospitably, ‘Do, please, come aboard. My name is Commander Burroughs.’

‘Predeo, Commander.’

They were in some difficulties with forms of address – the matrix kept insisting that the word the Samartians used to address both military superiors and subordinates translated as ‘beloved’ or ‘darling’. Jermane Taerling said it was right, too. There had been quite a debate about it and they’d not been able to come to a decision. Until they had a better grasp of that, given how sensitive people could be about the correct use of honorifics, it had been agreed that Samartians and Fourth’s personnel would address one another by rank.

‘And this is our pilot, Leading Star Higgs.’

‘How do,’ said Jace, twisting around in the pilot’s seat and grinning hugely as he lifted a hand in greeting. ‘Creseo.’

Every member of the crew knew that ‘creseo’ meant ‘welcome’, along with a handful of other words and phrases they had all learned. Beyond that, they would have to rely on the translation matrix, though Buzz was one of those who’d become reasonably fluent, learning the language as fast as they deciphered it.

‘Predeo, Leading Star.’ Janai Bennet said, but it was apparent that this was a purely automatic response, meaning, ‘honoured’. She was staring around at the shuttle’s interior, eyes widening in a look Buzz had seen before. He had seen it on the recording of the Fourth’s first-contact team as they stepped out into the Gider encounter zone, awed by the sheer size and strangeness of it. To the Fourth, this was a perfectly ordinary shuttle, but it was apparent that Janai Bennet had never seen anything like it before. She was looking around as if she felt the space to be enormous, and stared at the seats, too, as if they were something weird and wonderful. The seats were, admittedly, quite big, as the Fourth routinely used seating which could accommodate people wearing hullwalker rig, so to her they must look as if they were seats intended for giants.

‘Do, please, sit.’ They had had some difficulty with the verb ‘sit’ as the matrix didn’t seem to be able to find a reliable translation. It kept insisting that the Samartian word meant ‘squat’, with no equivalent at all for ‘sit down’. Buzz, therefore, waved her to a seat and demonstrated by sitting down, himself. Their flight back to the ship would only take a couple of minutes but it was normal to sit while the shuttle was in transit. Telemetry was confirming that Tina was now aboard the Samartian ship, so Buzz nodded to Jace.

‘Disengage,’ he said.

Jace got to work – it would take another minute or two to disengage the airlock, pull the improvised tube back against their own hull and finally release the grapnels that were holding them to the Samartians’ superstructure.

While he was doing that, though, Buzz was making another discovery. Janai Bennet did not know how to sit in a chair.

It was something so mind-boggling that it took him a few seconds to realise what the problem was. She was looking frankly bewildered, staring from Buzz, seated in his own chair, to the seat he had indicated for her, and then back again, as if trying to figure it out. Then, with the air of attempting something entirely new and just a little intimidating, she turned around and folded herself into the seat.

Her awkwardness in that was comical, but nowhere near as funny as her reaction when the seat automatically cradled her in a safety field. As she felt it pull and enfold her she yelped again and scrambled back out of it, only to trip and land up back on her knees.

‘It’s good!’ Buzz jumped up hastily and, seeing that she’d been frightened, reassured her, ‘It’s good, it’s fine – it’s just for safety, to keep us safe in the seat if there is any…’ he hesitated, needing to use the translation matrix to find a word, and struggling as ‘turbulence’ refused to translate. ‘If the shuttle makes any quick moves,’ he amended. Having helped her back to her feet with a hand under her elbow, he demonstrated again, sitting down slowly and with exaggerated movements, then demonstrating the field by jerking against it, ‘See? It just keeps us safe. To stop it, put your hand here…’ he indicated the panel on the seat arm, and stood up again as the field released. ‘See?’

Janai Bennet was clearly a little alarmed, but braced herself and sat down, just yipping a little as the field put gentle pressure on her. Buzz saw her testing the release, and saw her relief, too, as she found that it worked and she really wasn’t being held prisoner in that bizarre contraption. His smile was as warm, and kind, as if he comforted one of his grandchildren after a fright, and as she glanced at him again she ventured on her first, shy smile.

‘Toko,’ she said again. The literal translation of that was ‘inevitable’ for which the matrix offered a range of possible idiomatic meanings including ‘Whoops’, ‘I’m an idiot,’ and ‘Oh well, that’s life.’ It was evidently, from context, intended as a rueful, self-deprecatory comment, and Buzz gave her another reassuring smile.

‘It’s good,’ he told her, and keeping it simple, repeated, ‘Welcome.’

She had heard ‘creseo’ at least a couple of hundred times by the end of her visit, as everyone said it at least once and some repeated it several times. She answered it always with ‘predeo’, though with varying degrees of formality according to who she was talking to at the time.

Her visit was, for sure, a great success. They learned a lot simply by finding what surprised her the most –
astounded
her, indeed, as was apparent from her reaction, at times, to things they were showing or telling her about.

It was clear that she found the sheer size of the ship overwhelming, marvelling particularly at all the open space they had aboard, the height of the ceilings, room for people to walk about. She was bewildered by their furniture, too, regarding tables and chairs as if they were incomprehensible alien artefacts. She got so excited when they showed her a bunk that they all ended up laughing.

‘For one person?’ She held up one finger to be sure there was no misunderstanding. ‘
One
?’

‘Yes, we all have our own bunk.’ It was Hali Burdon she was speaking to, then. The tour had been arranged so that different people would show her key aspects of life aboard ship, and it had fallen to Hali to show her around Mess Deck One.

‘Eight crew could sleep in that,’ Janai Bennet commented, more to herself than to them, and gazed at Hali with frank wonder. ‘Truly, you do live like gods.’

As the laughter died down, Hali assured her, grinning, that this was perfectly normal for any Fleet ship.

‘Our ships make long journeys,’ she explained, ‘we may be on the ship for months, so we have to be reasonably comfortable.’

‘Months?’ Janai Bennet queried, and with some use of the matrix, they managed to convey the kind of timescale it had taken them to get here from Therik.

‘Oy-yella!’ Janai Bennet said, another colloquialism which evidently meant the equivalent or ‘wow’ or ‘incredible’.

She said that a lot, too, as there wasn’t much about the ship that she
didn’t
find incredible. One of her first tech questions was about the gravity, finding that it was constant throughout the ship other than for the zero-gee hatched out zones around ladders. Buzz opened up a deck plate for her to see.

‘We use a field generator based on this material,’ he pointed out a thread woven into the underside of the deck plate, ‘it has complicated names but we just call it grav wire. It has the property of generating a gravity field when energy is passed through it. It does take a lot of energy – the gravity system uses about twenty eight per cent of our total energy budget, and we have to turn it off when we need the energy for other things like launch or firing guns. You don’t have artificial gravity on your ships?’

‘No – we believe – believed,’ she corrected herself, ‘that it was not possible. It has been one of our laws of physics for many centuries that it is not possible to make gravity fields.’

‘Well, you need to have access to the base mineral in order to discover and invent grav-wire,’ Buzz observed. ‘And it is rare, not found in many star systems, so your scientists were right, perhaps, that it is not possible for your people to make this. But this is a technology, and a material, we would be very happy to share.’

‘Gratitude,’ she said, though it was already understood that she was not in any position to discuss such issues officially, let alone make decisions about them. She took keen interest in all the technology they gave her access to, though, finding that not all of it was more sophisticated than her own people’s. As they had already realised, the Samartians had gone much further down the road of nano-engineering than had ever been considered worthwhile in the League, with much of their development focussed on making their tech ever smaller and smaller. When they gave her a pinchip to hold and managed to convince her that this really was the base-chip used in circuits throughout the ship, she was amazed. But when they managed to establish just what the computing power of that chip actually
was
, she cracked up laughing.

‘A chip of such power would be…’ she held up the speck-sized chip, ‘a thousand times smaller than this, on my ship.’ She looked at the tech again, fascinated, ‘everything is so
huge
.’

It wasn’t only the tech that astonished her, though. One of the hardest things they had to contend with, all visit, was getting her to believe, and understand, that they really did have civilians aboard. That came out when she was shown to the lab, and introduced to Sam Maylard. It took some persistence even to explain that he was a university professor, and what that meant. Even then, she was struggling with the concept.