His Majesty's Starship (3 page)

She couldn’t take her eyes off the aide and the words it was displaying. A corner of Gilmore’s mouth turned in a smile when he remembered the first time he had received a similar message: bald and uninterested, but oh so important. It had been one of the dispatches waiting for them when
Australasia
returned to UK-1.

‘You are instructed to take command ...’

“It’s the
Antarctica
,” she said. Her first command, and promotion to lieutenant commander with it.

“The Earth run.”

“That’s right.”

“You’ll want Samad as Chief Engineer?” Gilmore said.

She smiled broadly. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Hannah was married to Samad Loonat,
Australasia
’s chief engineer. The two of them hired out their joint services to the space lines: it was a common means for married couples to get around the long separations of space travel. Where Hannah went, Samad went.

And where Hannah was going was one of the Royal Space Fleet’s freighters, shipping goods between Earth and UK-1. Definitely one up from a sweep ship like
Australasia
. Gilmore had been there once.

“I’m glad for you,” he said.

“Mike-”

“No, I am.” And he was. Hannah deserved better than him.

She looked at the display again, then slowly raised her eyes to his. “Getting back to the
Ark Royal
...” she said.

“What about it?”

“Do you know anything more than that?”

“Not yet. I’m ordered to report to the palace once I’m done here.”

“The palace? Not the Admiralty?” she said.

“Correct. I’m going to hear it from the horse’s mouth.”

“Can I give you my decision when you know more about it?” Hannah said.

Gilmore smiled. “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he said. However much he wanted her as his first officer, he wanted her to make the decision fully informed.

“And I might not get the choice anyway,” she pointed out. “I’m ‘instructed’ to take command.”

“If I’m to be captain of
Ark Royal
,” Gilmore said, “I’ll be doing the instructing.”

*

Being inside UK-1 was meant to be like being back on Earth. The laser images projected on the ceiling gave the feeling of the infinite vault of a real Earth sky. Live flora and even fauna were loose in the open areas, all native to the British Isles. The air had a clean, piney smell which Gilmore always felt to be tacky, being so blatantly artificial.

His legs were wobbly: he had been on a two month patrol in a ship without a centrifuge, and working out in the ship’s gym only just kept muscular atrophy at bay. Now those wobbly legs were trying to carry him through a crowd, which he hated at the best of times, and his eyes were fixed firmly ahead, trying to navigate a passage through the jostling people. In this way he almost stumbled over a cluster of three Rusties.

They were gazing into a shop window, for all the world like tourists out on a buying spree. Gilmore fought to regain his balance and suddenly he discovered he wasn’t quite so uninterested in the stumpy, four-legged creatures after all. Still only a tiny percentage of people had seen one in the flesh and until now he hadn’t been one of them. He tried to look at them without staring.

“Mike!” A powerful hand slapped him on the back and drove the breath out of his lungs. “How are you?”

“Hello, John,” Gilmore muttered after a couple of breaths. “Have you seen the Rus-”

“Yeah, yeah, aren’t you bored of them?” John Chase was a large man in all directions. He and Gilmore had started in space together but Chase had shot ahead and now, while Gilmore was called a captain by virtue of commanding a ship, Chase was a captain by rank. And that meant he was able to draw Gilmore away from the three aliens and carry on chatting, and Gilmore couldn’t do a thing about it except to cast a final look back as the Rusties were swallowed by the crowd. “Heard the darndest thing about them,” Chase continued. “Did you know they make their ships out of pottery?”

“Yes,” Gilmore said. A plastic-ceramic compound, to be accurate, but not ferro-polymer, like the ships made by humans.

“Say, Mike ...” Chase looked about them and drew him to one side. “Rumour says you’ve been given command of
Ark Royal
. That true?”

“I’m on my way to the palace now,” Gilmore said hopefully. Chase drew back quickly.

“Then why are you talking to me? Get on, Mike! I’ll catch you at the Captain’s Club.”

He backed away into the crowd and Gilmore gratefully headed for the transport tube.

Strap hanging on the way down to the palace – the colloquial name for ‘F’ wheel, the sixth wheel of UK-1, which was occupied exclusively by the king, his family and staff – Gilmore pieced together his brief impression of the Rusties. Quadrupeds, the largest of them coming up to his chest. Flesh covered by a ruddy, fuzzy substance that could be hair, could be feathers, could be something with no analogue on Earth. It was the colour of oxidised iron and even close up it really did look like patches of rust flaking off the creatures. Now Gilmore thought about it, he could remember a smell which he realised had been coming from the aliens. It was as if they had splashed on too much aftershave: not displeasing but not pleasing either.

The jokes about telling them apart weren’t fair: he had seen they were all of slightly different sizes and shapes. The only identical thing about them was the translator units hanging around their necks. They also had harnesses around their necks and over their bodies, on which hung things that might have been tools or decoration or both, which were as varied as human clothes.

And that was the sum of Gilmore’s impression of the aliens. He thought dark thoughts about John Chase, a man so accustomed to them that he thought they were old hat, but he shook the thoughts away as the tube reached ‘F’ wheel. He still had his appointment with the king and, if His Majesty had in mind what Gilmore suspected, he was going to see a lot more of the Rusties than John Chase ever would.

- 3 -

27 September 2148

‘This is a chance for both our species to make a fresh start. We of the First Breed hope that you will take it.’

The entire text of the Rusties’ invitation was burned into his mind: he had memorised it and looked at it backwards, forwards, left to right, right to left and upside down.

They wanted something. Nothing was so simple, so straightforward as the invitation made out: life wasn’t like that. In the opinion of R.V. Krishnamurthy, life was far too short for riddles and far too short for being expected to answer them. He believed in taking the simplest solution, and with solving riddles the simplest solution was to ask someone already in the know. This was precisely what he expected to do here, in this remote lodge in the Himalayas, with no one as yet but his loyal assistant and 20 elite NVN soldiers for company.

“We have them on radar, Excellency.” The speaker was a slim, nervous man in his mid thirties – twenty years younger than his master.

“Thank you, Subhas,” Krishnamurthy said.

Subhas Ranjitsinhji was one of those people who was permanently making Krishnamurthy ask himself why he tolerated them. And yet tolerate him he did: the man had been by his side for years. Ranjitsinhji could handle Krishnamurthy’s network of spies and informers, and all the other fiddling but necessary details that frankly bored his master. A useful subordinate and occasionally a handy scapegoat or just plain kicking stool.

Krishnamurthy deliberately did not get out of his chair but turned another page in his book. A shame about the appearance he had to keep up, he thought, because outside the great studio windows of the lodge the view of the Himalayas gleaming in the sun was stupendous. He had spent many happy holidays here and he was well aware of its isolation, so when he had heard that a party of Rusties visiting Katmandu wanted to look at Everest ...

Now he could hear the engines of their flyer, echoing along the valley. He slowly put down his book and got up, stretched and wandered over to the balcony. Someone handed him a pair of binoculars and he put them to his eyes. His paid-for, tame pilot was flying down this particular valley with no questions asked, which was as well because the man would have taken much more persuading if he had known about the bomb.

A puff of smoke and flame burst out from one of the flyer’s engines and the whole craft yawed. Krishnamurthy set the binoculars to autofocus and followed the trail of smoke down, holding the plunging flyer in the middle of his circle of vision. At the same time the noise of the explosion reached them in the lodge, and the sound of the tortured engines that were trying to hold the flyer up.

“Recovery team, stand by,” said the NVN major.

The flyer came down onto the valley floor in an exploding cloud of smoke and sparks and dust. It skidded along the ground, still wavering from side to side, ploughing out a scorched furrow behind it, until it slammed sideways into a boulder. It tilted up and for a moment looked as if it might somersault over, but then it fell back down and settled right way up with a mighty crash. It was directly below the lodge on the floor of the valley, two hundred yards away. It couldn’t have been better.

The recovery team was already scrambling down towards it. Much as he regretted it, Krishnamurthy turned away from the scene – image was everything – and returned to his chair. “Time to finish my chapter, I think,” he said. “Get the ski masks ready.”

Armed men in masks stood around the mangled four-legged form on the floor. Krishnamurthy had ordered that only one survivor be left but it looked as if he had been lucky to get even that one. The flyer had come down more heavily than intended.

He squatted down by its head and poked it. The Rustie shuddered in pain.

“Can you hear me?” he said.

No answer, except a rattling noise which could have been their usual speech or could have been a gasp of pain that its translator unit couldn’t handle. He hoped it hadn’t lost the power of speech; he wasn’t going to be able to repeat this trick and secure himself another captive. They would believe one flyer full of visiting Rusties struck down by some natural cause, but two?

He prodded it harder. “I can’t understand you. Speak clearly.”

Or maybe the translator was smashed-

The creature spoke. “... hear,” it said.

“You are a prisoner of the Movement for Free Nepal,” Krishnamurthy said. The Movement was his current bugbear and deserved a few more enemies. “Your friends are dead and you are badly injured. If you want to live you will answer my questions.”

“... help,” the alien said.

“Are you asking for it or saying that you will?” Krishnamurthy chuckled. “Never mind, I will soon find out. Now, what is the purpose of the invitation?”

The creature was hurt but it wasn’t stupid, and it took a lot of encouraging to answer. Water deprivation, pain, keeping it out of the healing coma that was its natural response to its injuries. Much of what it said didn’t make sense but he took it all down for later playback.

Five hours later the creature was dead, naturally, of its own injuries. So, no need for the freedom fighters story. Krishnamurthy pulled his mask off and stood over the body, hefting in his hand his aide with the recording of the session. He would find out. He would piece it all together. Oh, yes-

*

“The Rusties have asked us,” said Manohar Chandwani, secretary to the Prime Minister of the Confederation of South-East Asia, “to pass on to you their appreciation of your efforts in trying to save their colleagues. They regret the effort was wasted.”

Krishnamurthy shrugged expansively. “One does what one can,” he said.

Chandwani had Pathan blood in him somewhere: the shrewd look he gave Krishnamurthy could have frozen a lesser man in his tracks. Krishnamurthy had long become inured to what others thought of him, particularly lukewarm wishy-washy liberal Progressives like Chandwani. For a while, he thought, for a brief while, for a glorious couple of decades, we had begun to reclaim our country’s heritage once more. And now people like you would throw it all away again.

“It was convenient the flyer came down so close to your lodge, Krishnamurthy, and convenient you and your NVN friends were holding your security conference there,” Chandwani said.

Another shrug. “Fate.”

“Yes. Of course.” Chandwani touched a button on his aide and the display changed: Krishnamurthy couldn’t see what it was. “To business, Krishnamurthy. The Prime Minister has studied your proposal most carefully.”

“That is very good of him.”

“And he has decided-” Chandwani gave a heavy sigh and glared up at him. “He has agreed.”

“Agreed?” Krishnamurthy’s blood pounded in his ears.

“Every detail. The budget, the procurements, the overall strategy, everything.” Chandwani sat back and put his hands behind his head. “You can even keep that idiot Ranjitsinhji as your assistant, though goodness knows why you want him. Every detail.”

Every detail, Krishnamurthy wanted to sing. It was all coming true.

For years, he had been laying out the case for why the Confederation had to have a presence in space. The one gap in the country’s defences was so sadly obvious. For the last century, Delhi had been too obsessed with expanding its empire sideways to bother with upwards, and as a result the Confederation was a world power with no space presence. The logic was that there was plenty of room down below on Earth; but Krishnamurthy, who had spent most of his career helping his country acquire and retain its empire, knew otherwise. Afghanistan, Tibet, Bangladesh, Burma ... there wasn’t much further they could expand before they clashed with the interests of other nations that it would be best not to antagonise.

But now the Confederation was going on the delegation, and he would be in charge ...

“They’re giving me rope,” he murmured.

Chandwani gave a thin smile. “How can we lose? At best, your plan succeeds, we win the bid for this world of theirs, you will no doubt remain as administrator or whatever. You’re out of our hair. At worst, we lose the bid and you return in disgrace, defeated, finished. You’re out of our hair.”