Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (45 page)

‘They’re not single-use disposable, like our probes,’ Misha Tregennis informed him, along with a report which included footage of the probe in the moment that it had hurtled past them. Stills grabbed from that revealed something that looked more like a miniature starship than a missile-type probe. It had a power source as hot as a superlight mix core, manoeuvring thrusters and a bristle of sensors and transmitters. They were all much smaller than anything the League had in production, though Misha did not think that there was anything there beyond their ability to manufacture. It was just that it would be prohibitively expensive when standard sized tech was far cheaper.

Jermane watched just a little wistfully as the probe he’d helped to program was fired off in response. If it had been his decision, that probe would have carried the full first contact package, giving detailed information about themselves and the League. Instead, the skipper had insisted on just a few words, to be broadcast both in League Standard and their best guess at Samartian.

‘We represent the League. Bring someone empowered to negotiate.’

Jermane had agonised over that wording. The imperative ‘bring’, he’d suggested, might cause offence. It would be better to say ‘We wish’ or ‘We would like’. Alex had ruled otherwise. They had shown respect for Samartian authority while within their territory, but they were not, he said, going to hover at the border asking to talk to someone like cold-call sales reps.

Fourteen minutes later, the Samartian signal carrier flashed past them again, transmitting just one word.

‘Tarros.’

‘Wait.’ Said the translation matrix and Davie, simultaneously.

So, they waited. Taking the instruction literally, they moved into a holding orbit, circling on a three minute loop which was immediately matched by the Samartians.

They had repeated that loop five thousand, four hundred and seventy six times before anything changed. It was a long, frustrating six and a half days. They could see the Samartian ships right there on their long range scopes. The temptation to try to get a closer look at them, if not to attempt further communication, was ever present. For some of them, like Jermane Taerling, it was a torment.

‘What if they tell us to go?’ he agonised. ‘Will we just
leave
, without even having seen them?’

‘Yes,’ Alex said, simply. ‘We have to respect their decision.’

A hundred and sixty four hours after telling them to wait, though, the Samartians fired off a probe which signalled another word.

‘Pursos.’

‘Follow,’ the matrix translated, with a note which added that the ‘os’ suffix was confirmed as indicating a command imperative. After a wait of several minutes, the Samartian ships turned onto a new course, and Alex gave Gunny a nod.

So, the Heron followed the Samartian ships, keeping their distance and making no further attempt to communicate. Their course was not taking them in towards Samart, but would take them on another orbital course.

‘We can only hope that they’re taking us to meet a negotiator,’ Jermane observed. ‘But what if it’s a trap? They might have decided that we’re just too dangerous to let go, and be leading us into an ambush.’

Alex didn’t smile.

‘Yes, that’s quite possible,’ he agreed. ‘And if they attack us in force, of course, we stand no chance.’

He let that hang, and Jermane’s expression turned from one of shock into anxiety.

‘But…’ he said, and floundered, having hoped for rather more in the way of reassurance than that. ‘But you don’t think they
will
, do you, skipper?’

‘I honestly don’t know,’ Alex said. ‘I hope not, but I’m not about to give any definite assurances on that point, because I can’t. Their ships are faster than ours and have greater firepower. They also, evidently, have longer range scopes than we do and the ability to communicate between their ships and perhaps even all the way back to their homeworld. The two ships there could take us out any time they wanted to. The only assurance we have is that they
did
fire warning shots at first encounter and have refrained from firing at us since. Frankly, Mr Taerling, we have very little choice at this point. I believe the risk of following them is worth it, balanced against everything we stand to gain if we succeed, so I am not prepared to turn back now. Would you be, if you were in my place?’

Jermane hesitated for a moment, then gave a rueful grin.

‘Well, actually, no,’ he admitted. ‘If you were turning back I’d be begging you to reconsider. It’s just so scary – for me at least – that they won’t talk to us. I mean, yes, I know, we’ve got to First Effective Contact and that’s marvellous, or at least, we’re the first ship we
know
of to achieve FEC. But what if other ships before us have got this far, or further, and just never made it back? I don’t want to be melodramatic about it, but it has to be faced, there
is
a chance that they might kill us all, or even, you know, that we could end up being captured and taken to, you know… labs.’

Alex didn’t laugh. He knew as well as Jermane himself that the response of governments to unknown ships coming into their space had, historically, been to capture them and take their crews to secret facilities for interrogation and scientific study. That being the case, it was far from being a ludicrous fear. ‘Possibly,’ he said, ‘but we all knew that risk when we crossed the border. And are you really telling me that you wish, now, that you’d stayed with the Stepeasy?’

Jermane looked shocked again.

‘No, no,’ he said quickly. ‘Not at all, skipper! I was, well, I guess I was…’ he hesitated, then gave an abashed grin, ‘I guess I was just expecting you to steady my nerves with a ‘Don’t worry about it, it’ll be fine.’’ He admitted.

‘Oh, I see.’ Alex looked amused, too. ‘I credited you with more intelligence than that,’ he said, with a teasing note. ‘But if groundless platitudes will help, then by all means,’ he changed his tone to one of lordly patronage, ‘Don’t worry about it, Mr Taerling, it will be fine.’

Jermane laughed, and in doing so he
did
feel better. He still didn’t have much of an appetite for lunch, but he was able to swallow enough to appease Simon, with his eagle eye on stress levels and nutrition.

They followed the Samartian ships for three days before they came to a point where eight more ships of the same type came out on an intercept course. The original two ships which had been escorting them promptly departed, or at least, headed off the range of the Heron’s screens. The eight ships which had replaced them adopted an elliptical holding course, making no attempt to signal them.

The Heron dropped in neatly to match the Samartian course, remaining at the distance the Samartians had themselves maintained. The Samartians were in tight formation – much closer than Fleet ships would consider safe, barely a hundred kilometres between them.

‘And now, I suppose, we sit and wait again,’ said Jermane, fatalistically. ‘For days and days and days.’

As it happened, they only had to wait fourteen hours and sixty three minutes before the Samartians fired a comms probe past them. This time it carried significantly more communication, too.

‘Dakaelin Jurore Tell.’ The matrix could not translate that and both Davie and Jermane had tagged it as likely to be a name, or a title, or a combination of them. Jermane’s interpretation of the subsequent words was, ‘Empowered to speak for the World’. He tagged that rapidly with an exo-briefing telling Alex and the others that it was common to find that worlds making exo-contact for the first time had a name for their world which translated
as
‘World’, as if up to that point they had believed their world to be
the
world. That seemed to be the case, here. They certainly did not identify themselves as ‘Samart’. ‘Identify yourselves,’ the signal concluded.

Davie’s translation, as always, was more idiomatic.

‘I am Daekalen Jurore Tell, I represent this world. Who are you?’

Whichever interpretation was correct, Alex waited ten minutes then responded with the signal he had already decided on.

‘I am Captain Alexis Sean von Strada. I am here as Envoy from the League of Worlds.’

The signal carried a visual image – his official Fleet ID holo – and a copy of his official accreditation as Presidential Envoy.

It was forty three minutes before they responded, and when they did, their answer made it clear that negotiations were going to have to start at a very basic level.

‘What is ‘League’?’ the matrix translated.

Alex had said from the outset that it was unlikely the Samartians would know much about them, but even so it had been hard for them all to believe that Samart really could know
nothing
about the League. As far as they were concerned, at least, it was the biggest and most powerful union of worlds within human space. And, logically, if they had heard even myth and rumour about Samart, it seemed reasonable that Samart should at least have some mythology about them.

Clearly, however, the Samartians had no idea who they were, so contact really was going to have to start from absolute beginnings.

Half an hour later, therefore, they transmitted a star map with the League’s borders and worlds identified. Even Jermane, by then, was happy with that, not pressing for the much bigger recommended first-contact information bundle to be sent.

It was two days before the Samartians replied. When they did, it was with a series of fuzzy images and an interrogative which Davie and Jermane agreed meant, ‘Did these belong to you?’

This time, they needed time themselves to identify the images, confirming as best they could that they were, in fact, Prisosan ships. It was two hours later that they sent a probe with a ‘negative’ signal, along with a map indicating Prisos as the planet of origin of those previous attempts at contact.

Given the pace of the communication so far, the Samartian response came with remarkable speed, just eleven minutes later. This time it was a much sharper image of Marfikian Thorns, accompanied by the interrogative, ‘Do you know these?’

Alex had spent hours with his command team, choosing the best possible images and information to convey the situation in as small a databurst as possible. If it had been left to the Diplomatic Corps, at this point they would have been transmitting an explanation which began with the disastrous first contact with Marfik nearly two thousand years before and which would include the usual justification of the League’s decision to pull back into defending their own borders.

Alex, however, merely sent them thirteen seconds of holo recording along with their best guess at ‘Yes.’

The recording was of a Marfikian attack on a convoy making its way toward Cherque. There were more than fifty freighters and three liners in the convoy, under a Fleet escort of eight warships. It was footage shot forty six years previously, during the most recent wave of border raids, testing their defences.

Everyone in the Fleet was familiar with this footage, though it was rarely broadcast on groundside holovision even now. It showed five Marfikian Thorns flashing through the convoy. They came out of nowhere and were gone before the warships could respond. They were tiny ships by League standards, not much bigger than couriers. They didn’t even look particularly impressive, no menacing black paintwork or bat wings as the baddy-ships tended to have in the movies. They were dull little craft, the unadorned grey of duralloy, a blunt cylinder at the rear tapering to the sharp pointed bow which gave them their name. They did not even carry insignia or identification, no way to tell them apart. They were each, however, armed with a single cannon every bit as powerful as those on Fleet warships. Importantly, they were faster and more agile – the swarm class fighters had actually been developed as the League’s latest effort to match and exceed the speed and agility of Marfikian Thorns, only to fail when it was discovered that the limitations of human pilots made them highly unstable. The Fleet had had to restrict their speed and manoeuvrability to a level at which pilots could cope, at least until Shion had begun teaching the Fourth’s pilots how to fly them with the stabilisers off.

The fighters on patrol around the convoy had barely had time to flick into chase mode and fire a few ineffective shots, though. The Marfikian attackers were on their scopes for less than eight seconds.

During those eight seconds, however, they caused havoc. Three freighters were punctured by cannon fire and went spinning off course with explosions of gas and debris hurtling from them. Other ships in convoy veered off in panic. One of the freighters already had the weird blue lightning of a mix core dephase crawling in its superlight field. Within moments, it was gone, just obliterated in an explosion which reduced the ship and everything within twenty five thousand kilometres of it to high energy tachyons. There was no debris from that, no hope even of survivors in the lifepod which fired off at the last second. There was a silent flash, a surge of energy on sensors, then nothing.

It was an image that made it very clear that the League, too, was under siege by the Marfikians. It also made it quite clear that they did not have ships with the speed or agility, themselves, to defend against such guerrilla attacks. It was important, Alex said, to be up front about that right from the start. Then they flashed an image of Cherque, the League’s most heavily defended world. It showed the thousands of automated missile arrays, the squadrons of system defence fighters, minefields within the system itself and the massive homeworld defence squadron. This made the point that while their shipping was vulnerable, their worlds stood strong against Marfikian invasion.

Alex did not add any statement of ‘We seek an alliance’, or anything like it. The Samartians were only very tentatively willing to talk to them at all. Any hint of rush and push and they would almost certainly withdraw or chase them away.

‘I don’t believe they’re slow, at all,’ said Buzz, as they waited for the Samartians to respond to that. ‘Not like the Solarans, I mean. I think this is all about control, managing communication on their terms.’ He smiled at Alex, with a nod of acknowledgement to him. ‘You seem to have an instinctive understanding of them, dear boy.’