Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (63 page)

That meant that the Samartians were eating organic, with only the most basic food processing and preservation techniques. It was far below the level of biovat production which was regarded as a baseline for civilised worlds.

‘No!’ Alex exclaimed, not because he didn’t believe her but because it was just so incredible that a society which had created higher levels of nano-tech than the League should still be at a Dark Age level in their food production.

‘Honestly, sir!’ she assured him, and would have said more –
much
more – but for the fact that Rangi intervened at that point. He was waiting there, too, and had been using a scanner to confirm that Tina’s survival suit had not been breached or unsealed during her time off the ship. Now, he stepped in with a hand on Tina’s arm, as if physically trying to take her away from Buzz and Alex.

‘Later,’ he said, with a look which reminded them all that, junior officer or not, he had the authority, here, as medic in charge of a patient. ‘Sickbay, Tina – come on!’

Alex nodded instant agreement, guiltily aware that he had allowed his own curiosity to override the priority of looking after Tina herself. Buzz gave her a pat, too, releasing his hand from her shoulder in a clear expectation that she would go with the medic.

Tina, though, stood her ground. ‘
Five
minutes?’ she pleaded, sharing the appeal between Rangi and the skipper.

‘No,’ said Rangi. His manner was understanding, even apologetic, but uncompromising. His one and only concern was to get Tina through quarantine and med checks, and nothing was going to stand in his way. Seeing the stubborn set of her jaw, indeed, he deployed his ultimate weapon. ‘Look, if you’re not in sickbay in two minutes, Simon will come get you.’

Tina went with him, protesting as they went that she was absolutely fine, but accepting the inevitable.

She
was
fine, as Rangi confirmed about half an hour later. Nobody on the Heron had expressed any fear about Tina’s safety while she was away – it was understood that there was no point giving themselves the horrors with what the Samartians
might
be doing to her over there. All the same, there were few of them who hadn’t had uneasy thoughts about the possibilities – hostile interrogation, drugs, even, amongst the more dramatically inclined, vivisection. It was a genuine relief to see her back aboard ship, and even more of a relief to be assured that she had been treated very well by the Samartians. She was very tired, of course, or would be once the adrenalin high she was on began to collapse, but the best thing for her right now was, indeed, to be allowed to tell her story.

Alex went to sickbay for that, along with Murg Atwood. Fleet regs required anyone who’d been in first-contact situations to remain in sickbay under medical supervision for at least two days, regardless of how sure they might be that they had not been in any way infected or contaminated. Alex and the others had had to do that, themselves, after the Gide encounter, and Tina knew better than to argue about it. She was out of her survival suit, now, and Rangi had arranged things for a comfortable debriefing – a small version of his healing circle, with bean-bags around a meditation focus. It had gently shifting, hypnotic light-waves which Alex recognised were set to a calming frequency. He recognised the scent of a soothing aromatherapy pod, too, mingling with the fragrance of chamomile tea.

For all his unorthodox style, though, Rangi was all medic as he told Alex, ‘You’ve got twenty minutes.’ Then, with an evaluating glance at his patient, ‘Twenty five at the most.’

‘Thank you,’ Alex said. He was even more grateful when Rangi promptly got rid of Simon and Banno Triesse. Banno was still in sickbay and would be an in-patient for a couple more days, yet, though he was becoming increasingly mobile. He was sitting on his bunk on the other side of sickbay, trying not to be obtrusive but obviously just as burning with curiosity as the rest of them. Simon wasn’t even trying to pretend to be unobtrusive, standing nearby with every appearance of intending to stay there and listen to what Tina had to say. And, knowing him, to join in and ask questions, too.

‘Simon – would you please take Banno for a cup of tea on the mess deck?’ Rangi’s tone was friendly, but it was very clearly an order phrased as a request. Simon stared at him in surprise for a moment, then grinned. For all his assumption of authority in medical matters, and his undoubtedly greater skill and experience, the fact remained that
Rangi
was the ship’s medic, here, this was his sickbay, and Simon no more than a civilian consultant working under his supervision.

‘Yo, boss,’ Simon acknowledged, choosing to make a joke of it, and jerked a thumb at Banno. ‘Come on, sunshine. We’re taking a hike.’

That was a major event for Banno – his first steps outside sickbay, and a big thing for him to go back to the mess deck where he’d been injured, too. Only a few friends had been allowed to visit him, so there would be uproar, cheers and a great many hugs as he came back amongst them. In fact, they heard the first yells of delight go up before the door had even closed behind them.

It was good that Simon had gone, Alex realised. Sickbay seemed a good deal calmer without his frenetic energy. Alex, even mindful as he was of how limited their time was likely to be, here, was careful to maintain that calm environment. He and Murg sat down, both accepting bowls of tea from Rangi. He sat down too once he’d served them, watchful but quiet. Murg was very quiet, too, her manner one of placid interest.

‘All right,’ Alex said, seeing that Tina was doing her best to hold that calm demeanour, too, but fizzing with things she wanted to say. ‘Debriefing phase one,’ he reminded her. ‘No need to make a report, just
talk
. What was it like, there?’

As he’d known it would, that question unleashed a torrent, Tina sitting forward and gesturing energetically as she responded.

‘Incredible, skipper,’ she told him. ‘
Awful
, in a way – worse than a courier! You wouldn’t believe how
tiny
it is, aboard – their hulls have to be at least a metre thick, no kidding, and then there’s all the tech, there’s literally hardly any room to
move
, even a courier crew would call it claustrophobic. They don’t have any living quarters – no mess decks or bunks or anything like that at
all
. They sleep in – well, they call them life capsules but they’re more like body bags, stasis bags kind of thing, fixed to the hull and people just zip themselves into them to sleep. And they don’t even have their
own
. There are thirty two people on that ship, skipper – honest to God, thirty two! And they only have eight sleeping bags – two in each capsule. Every capsule is almost like a separate ship, with eight of them in each one, pretty much all of the time. Everything is so tightly scheduled, honestly – when they sleep, when they eat, what they’re doing, all the
time
, no such thing as leisure, while they’re on-ship. They only ever
are
on ship, normally, for two weeks at a time, and honestly, skipper, I’m amazed they even manage that. They’re
tough
, those guys, I can tell you that for sure – way tougher than us, in terms of the standard of living they’re prepared to accept. There’s no way the Fleet would expect, or allow, anyone to serve under those conditions. The safety thing
alone
– we wouldn’t even rate those ships as spaceworthy. Some of their vital systems don’t even have backup, let alone triple-redundancy. Life support, my God! Their ships can’t
stay
out more than two weeks at a time, skipper – they don’t have any tanks aboard, at all, they rely entirely on air-recyc which has only 86% efficiency, so by the end of a week they’re breathing air we’d rate as hazardous to health. There are no showers aboard, either – they have some kind of wipes but they stay in the same clothes, in their suits, for two weeks! As they put it, the ship gets a bit stinky!’

She shook her head, marvelling. ‘And the
noise
! They have to use comms even to talk to one another face to face, or they’d be yelling their heads off. Teeth-juddering vibration, of course, too – constant freefall, too, obviously, as they don’t have gravity generators. Nano-tech, sure, some of their tech is really amazing, manoeuvring thrusters, top of that list! But their safety standards are terrifying – barely any heat shields, even, and the ship is
stuffed
with fluorocarbon plastics. They take it entirely for granted that their ship can fill up with toxic gases in any kind of plastics fire, and that’s ‘normal’, they tell me, during combat. If I wasn’t so in awe of their courage, skipper, I’d have to say these guys are insane!’

Alex gave a calm, ‘active listening’ nod. Tina needed to do this, he understood, expressing at least some of the things which had stunned and overwhelmed her.

‘You’re sure about the fluorocarbons?’ he asked, not because he doubted her but just to prompt her in that direction. Tina nodded quickly, well aware of how important a discovery that was.

‘Totally,’ she said, with absolute conviction, and went on to explain. ‘A lot of their fittings are metal – aluminium, mostly – like control slides and even panels. That ship would fail safety inspection on that alone.’

Alex nodded understanding – the League had regulations about what parts of any ship had to be made of non-conductive material. Control panels were a basic, in that.

‘I commented on that and they told me that they keep plastic parts to a minimum, because of the fumes,’ Tina said, and paused very briefly to show the significance of that. ‘I thought it was some issue with the matrix not translating properly so I said I didn’t understand and one of them called up some chemistry diagrams to show me. Here, see?’

She used a pocket comp to draw a series of recognisable molecular diagrams.

‘I couldn’t put a name to it at first,’ Tina admitted, ‘but I recognised it as a carbon-fluoride compound, and I could see it was a polymer, and what they were showing me, there, was the release of gas under combustion – carbon monoxide, obviously, carbonyl fluoride and hydrogen fluoride. I asked if all their plastics were like that, and they looked at me like I was an idiot and said yes, of course, plastic is
plastic.
I asked if they made any other kind
of
plastic and one of them said that they used to make plastics from petrochemicals, historically, but that it had got too scarce, or perhaps too expensive – something they replaced, anyway, with fluorocarbon processing. It’s theoretically possible I suppose that they
do
make siliplas and for some reason consider it to be such hot tech they have to keep it secret and so they were lying about it, but honestly, skipper, they showed me far more sophisticated stuff than that –
no
hesitation showing me nanotech – and they were just so casual about it I would honestly put everything I own on them
not
having siliplas.

‘It’s hard to explain, too, but they have this attitude, a mind-set, which I’m certain is no kind of act. They seem to have decided, sometimes a
long
time back, that certain things are just impossible, flat out
impossible
, so they’ve stopped researching them at all. Like, with language.

‘I mean, I get it – they only
speak
one language, you know? Globally, historically, from what I can gather there’s hardly even any variation in dialect. Linguistics is not even a recognised science, there, they have no expertise in it at all. But they have decided, see,
long
ago, that it is not actually possible to decipher ‘alien transmissions’. I mean, they don’t just recognise that it’s a very difficult thing for
them
to do, they actually have what they consider to be a rock solid scientific
law
about it.’

Alex was reminded of Shion, laughing and commenting with affectionate amusement on the human tendency to assert ‘scientific laws’ over the universe.

‘They have this formula, a kind of probability equation,’ Tina explained. ‘They know, obviously, that there
are
other civilisations out there and that some of them have intersystem travel ability, but they have worked out to their own satisfaction that all such life forms will be inherently, inevitably hostile both to them and to each other, on some kind of ‘survival of the fittest’ imperative. They also believe it is impossible for any species to understand another because there is no common frame of reference. One of them actually said, you know, actually
told
me, that some of the ships which had come blitzing at them – presumably Prisosans – had been flashing their lights in recognisable mathematical progressions, but, he said…’ she held her hands out in a gesture of helpless incredulity, ‘he said, ‘But that’s meaningless, doesn’t get you anywhere!’’ She paused just for a moment so that Alex could take in the enormity of that, too.

‘They’re baffled by how we’re managing to learn their language – their best theory to date is that if it
is
true that the Olaret, the Old Ones, created some lifeboat colonies, then maybe some of our worlds are ‘human’ too – human by their definition, obviously, meaning sufficiently like them to be able to speak their language. They think we’re the first ‘other humans’ they’ve met. The Marfikians, obviously, are a terror, but they have no understanding at all about Prisos. They call their ships ‘The Other’, and it is a common belief, based on the beetle-style of Prisosan ship design, that they are an insectoid species. They’re finding it really hard to accept that Prisosans are people just like them and have been trying to reach out in the hope of alliance all this time.’

That would, indeed, be a hard thing for any world to accept. Alex himself still winced with guilt and embarrassment when reminded how the League had treated Solaran diplomatic overtures across the centuries.

‘I did try to explain,’ Tina told him ruefully, ‘about ancient root languages and how we use algorithms to build a translation matrix, but I might as well have been telling them they could flap their arms and fly. But that’s what I mean, see – they’ve got this closed-door mind-set, that once they’ve decided something is scientifically impossible, that’s
it
, they don’t waste any more time or effort thinking about it again.