When the captain awoke it was dark outside. She slipped naked from underneath her eiderdown, refreshed rather than chilled by the cool of the quiet air. A glance at the screen as she headed for the shower told her that it was just over half way through the standard night. There were a good few hours yet, before the artificial sun would rise at aft to start its run down the filament of sky, rekindled by unsleeping computers from where it had set in the Reference Bridge. Most of the crew would be asleep but Quella had slept long enough already. She was not needed on the bridge or she would soon have known, and she wasn’t expected there for another standard day, but Kalindy was no less interesting in the dark. As the soothing water washed over her, Quella knew that it was a little unprofessional to let her circadian rhythms become somewhat out of phase with ship day shift time. Stepping out of the shower she made a mental note to watch her body control. It would have to be brought back into line soon. She must have found the experiences of the last couple of days more tiring than she had thought.
She dried herself quickly and slipped on a light robe and bio bracelet, but left her hair damp at the shoulder. Outside a light breeze was no less refreshing because she knew it came and went through carefully controlled vents at the behest of a machine. The gravel path crunched softly as she walked into the ship’s heartland. The monitor at her wrist was suddenly an intrusion but although she toyed with the almost unethical idea of removing it, the concept of the controlled environment bit too deeply. She was the captain and this would never be a planet.
A hundred metres or so from her home the main path took a sweep off to the right but a little track angled gently left from the corner through a stand of waist high grasses. It was not completely dark. A silver mirror scintillation from the sky filament preserved the illusion of stray star light or indirect moonlight on earth. The grasses were slightly damp as Quella pushed through them; a hidden sprinkler system had just finished refreshing them. The captain walked swiftly enjoying the luxury, unique in her experience with Vital Void vessels, of being able to walk purposefully for exercise instead of round some treadmill of a machine. It took over an hour to reach the far bulkhead but she only intended to go as far as Lake Neriad. The grasses opened out onto a little meadow of bluebells and iceflowers, encircled by low bushes. Quella cut diagonally across it, breathing in the delicate night scents given off by the kingsblood moss as her footsteps squeezed the living cushion. A stand of rhododendron set up and open woody lattice with the hard earth bare beneath their day shade. In the O.2 g of Kalindy XII they had reached heights that their ancestors in the Himalayas might have envied. They were certainly not the largest species but from what would have been a medium sized shrub they had become handsome and involved trees, limited only by the extent to which their roots were allowed to spread. Now she was at the stream and could follow a more obvious path which she kept to for five minutes before reaching a narrow wooden bridge and crossing to a grass alley between dwarf cedars angling off at forty five degrees to the brook. There was a low pagoda at the end and from a distance there seemed to be a few people gathered round it. Getting closer, though, you could see that they were marble statues of regular and exo subjects. At the far end of the clearing, for instance, a huge white athcaratadid from Vesperosa loomed between two greenwoods, head reared with every crown feather spread out and eyes wide with killing rage, a full ten metres tall. The pagoda itself was only fifteen metres high and it looked as if the infamous hunter would strike it down with one blow from its wickedly pointed beak. Quella sat at the base of the pagoda on a bench that circled it. She could here faint voices which sounded like the residue of a wild party coming from down the narrow path which cut right and was the most direct way to the lake from here. It was the direction of Prince Falym’s estate, where the common land skirted his private lawns.
A sudden screech startled her, shocking the body into involuntary stimulation as the adrenaline pumped through her limbs. She sat back again, cursing inwardly at the unknown individual who had disturbed her peace but before she had relaxed completely the scream came again, louder and more urgent. There was something worrying about that scream. It sounded more than an innocent party cry; closer to a real cry of terror. Alarmed, Quella stood up and started to walk towards the source of the noise. When the shriek came again there could be no more doubt and she began to run.
Through thin bamboo like trunks came a flicker of head high moving yellow and red lights. Course shouts, obscenities and encouragements with an arrhythmic pounding of feet heralded the approach of the hunters and the hunted - a sinister pursuit and flight. Quella rounded a sharp corner in the path and almost collided with two nearly naked leisure girls - special employees from the famous School of JaParys - who were running for all they were worth.
“Here’s another one boys!”
There were five hefty looking men in the uniform of the Iron Sun’s marines.
“Get the bracelet, quick!”
Half off balance, Quella was caught by surprise as the nearest soldier grabbed her arm and quickly ripped the biobracelet off. It didn’t take her long to recover.
“What is the meaning of this!” The ascending volume ending with an awesome shriek was an aspect of the commanding voice she had been trained to use but never expected to apply in practice. It was a rather outdated part of Vital Void training but against this type of opposition it was at its most effective with the psychological reinforcement of military habits taking over in the listeners. For a moment they stopped but it was one of the leisure girls who answered first.
“They were trying to force us into actions outside the Code!”
“They threatened us with knives,” the other broke in, sobbing for breath.
“I see,” said Quella in the most severe voice she could manage. It was a dangerous situation. Looking at the golden stains around the mouth of the leader and his senior henchmen it was obvious that they had been chewing upher root and they all looked as if they’d had a fair amount of alcohol or an equivalent stimdepulant.
“Do you know who I am?”, she said loudly and distinctly. She had to maintain psychological control. “I am the captain of this ship and I can have you all spaced for this.”
There was an awkward silence but then the captain realised that she had lost. One of the men had begun to laugh uncontrollably and the others broke down to follow him.
“She says she’s the captain....that’s a good one!”
Quella had forgotten the rigorous sexual divisions in the societies of the Iron Suns; their reversion to a chauvinism that made it quite inconceivable to these lowly soldiers, when ‘liberated’ by drugs, that a woman could captain any ship.
“She says she’s the captain does she?” the oldest and most senior of the soldiers was in a nasty fighting mood again.
Now Quella really regretted that she had let them get her bracelet. There was no quick way to summon help without it, but that didn’t mean that her situation was hopeless. She signalled for the leisure girls to run while the attention of all the men was focused on her, and they fled into the night.
Backing into some low shrubs towards the stream, Quella automatically assumed the best defensive posture for an unarmed combatant facing opposition with a knife - hands clasped together and pushed before the waist with elbows locked, thus simultaneously protecting the vital organs as far as possible and providing a natural club to disarm the attacker. One step at a time she slipped back from the path. The soldiers were beginning to encircle her in a way she found decidedly undesirable. Apart from the grey bearded one in front, however, none of the others had drawn weapons yet.
Quella let her arms move slowly from side to side with the threatening hypnosis of a cobra and stopped retreating. The knife flashed in the glow from the plasma torches as the ‘tourist’ in front of her shuffled it in his right hand. She noticed that he was adopting a trained fighting stance, advancing in a crouch, pushing the knife arm forward like a sword sprung at the elbow, with his body twisted to the narrowest angle of approach. But he still held a torch in his left hand and his reflexes were hopelessly affected by drugs. When he struck it was over in a few seconds. Her fists swept away his right arm and her left foot followed through into his groin. As he fell he dropped the plasma torch but clung frantically to the knife which was his final mistake. Before he had recovered, Quella grabbed the dull blue heavy metal rod and whipped it upright. The ion flames that played at its tip seethed with deceptive serenity in their magnetic prison, a hard plastic shielding and locking mechanism that was so familiar to the captain - ‘Varilux power in vacuum dark holds’ as the advertising slogan went, this sort of torch was carried in almost every regular ship in the Confederacy. And there was a well known design fault; certain things you must not do with them. The ringleader was rising and the others were beginning to close that ring as she struck back.
She looked away as if in fear but swinging through a full arc the tip of the torch caught him in the head just as she released the safety lock and pushed the flood test overdrive simultaneously. A wash of naked plasma whitened his brain and left a small fire where his head had been. He had no time to scream his death but the others did. The carcass heaved sickeningly and in the afterglow, those who had been looking at the spot found themselves sightless for a few stumbling moments. Someone retched.
It was enough time for Quella to flee into the dark bushes, running frantically towards the stream, through a grove of whispering birches that whipped her face. Already the sprinklers were cutting in automatically to limit the effects of the blaze she had left behind; machine tears of panic and reaction which Quella echoed. Warning lights would be flashing in Environment Control and on the Reference Bridge. And in Quella’s heart as it beat in time with the pulse of the Strip Engine there was only room for the repeated thought, “I’ve killed him. I’ve killed him. I’ve killed him.” But it didn’t stop her running.
And it was not over; not yet. For the flight was now in earnest and the dead man’s comrades recovered their composure and howling like the winter wolves of Lorn they set off in pursuit of revenge. She had to get to the stewards before they caught her. Time was on her side and she must use it to delay the confrontation for as long as possible.
At the stream she was still ahead. She reached it at a point where the water was made to tumble through artfully arranged mossy rocks, sprayed by its passage. Here it was wide but shallow and the rush of its foam was louder on the bank than the blood in her ears. She jumped quickly from stone to stone, light-footed over the current. The marines were not far behind, cursing and promising incoherent terrors as they smashed through the carefully sculptured environment. An open meadow rose up steeply at first on the far bank, then levelled out for thirty metres and the captain’s pursuers were at the bottom before she reached the top. In a stand of tall umbelifers, twice as tall as a regular giant hogweed; overpoweringly sweet and sticky of stem, her foot slipped between two awkward roots and twisted her to the floor.
“There she is!”
“We’ve got her!”
Their breath was heavy, their hearts heaving from recent abuse followed by unexpected exercise, but Quella could do no more than crawl away from them. Her ankle shot bright little plasma sparks of pain through her head as punishment for trying to move. Her right arm was grazed and bleeding - the robe torn down the sleeve. And so she was caught.
“Punish the killer!”, someone shouted.
One of them held her arms and another her legs as they brutally turned her round to face them.
“Make her suffer!”
There as a thick smell of sweat which mingled with the odour of the vegetation to outrage the nose. Artificial light blanked down the universe. The urgency was receding but the menace rising as a short bald figure stepped forward.
“Right boys, what shall we do?” But it was a rhetorical question. The same one who had taken over the dominant role in this little gang was already unfastening the leather belt at his waist in answer and the others laughed.
“That’s what Mewal would have wanted,” someone chuckled maliciously.
“You’ll do nothing.”
It was a quiet voice and the effect on the startled troopers was disproportionately large. No one had noticed the dark figure approach through the fetid feathery leaves of the flowering grove.
“Who the hell are you?” one of the younger ones said belligerently.
“I might ask the same of you,” the other replied unperturbed, “but I’m not that interested and I’ve no reason to let you know who I am. You’re clearly not here on a social call. Now get out!”
Enraged, the marine rushed towards the speaker, determined to dispose of him quickly. He was the first to collapse. The second was the little bald man, caught with his trousers down, reaching for a knife that wasn’t there. The other two promptly fled, leaving Quella and the black robed man alone. Laughing softly to himself, he pocketed the small gun that had done the work.
“Sufficient on the tips of those needles to stop an athcaratadid in full flight - biogeneral enough too,” he explained. “They won’t wake up until dawn.”
Quella tried to stand and by using her arms and pushing down with her good knee she managed to get as far as sitting upright but it was slow and painful. Her rescuer looked concerned as he reached out to give her a hand. In the small circle of light cast by an abandoned torch the blood on her right arm glittered along the welling red tracks of a dozen parallel scratches from elbow to elbow.
“That’s a nasty looking wound for a simple fall,” he remarked. “I don’t think it’s serious but it wouldn’t do to let infection in. Theodore Vega is my name and you can be none other than the captain of our ship. Can you walk?”
Gently testing her weight on the sensitive left foot, Quella found that she could just about make progress, which wasn’t too impressive for bones designed for five times the gravitational strain. With care she could put most of the pressure on her right leg. She nodded wanly.
“I think so.”
“Then if I may suggest it, it would be a good idea if we tried to get to my dwelling. I have sufficient medical equipment to provide quicker first aid than you’d get by waiting for your stewards and speed is important in these matters; particularly of you’ve picked up some poison from these plants.” He eyed the umbeliferous monstrosities with distaste.
It was a rational argument and Quella was still in partial shock, so any reservations she might have otherwise have had about dealing with a passenger in this way were overcome in the fractional hesitation before she agreed. Even so, as she hobbled slowly forwards, supported by the strong arm of the Water Weed harvester, she couldn’t help smiling inwardly at the contrast between this start to their relationship and the one that she had visualised as she wrote those undemanding files into her screened terminal. The plan had been to study from a distance and when any passengers were approached to keep the distinction between her professional role and their client status clear from the outset. Only that way had she expected to be able to face up to them and later to more subtly probe into their characters. Reality was never as simple as theory; not that she wasn’t grateful!
One thing was for sure - Theodore Vega shouldn’t be underestimated. He hadn’t wasted much time dealing with the marines. Despite the fact that he had never seen her in person before he had recognised her straight away; a circumstance which fitted in with her earlier observations and theories concerning his own apparent note taking.
It took almost five minutes to reach the squat pyramidal mass of their destination, and save for the occasional swallow of pain when the captain was too eager and placed more weight on the bad foot than it could stand, they walked in silence. Much of the surface of the building was glass and bright yellow lights cut shadows behind them as they came to the door. The rooms were horizontal sections across the entire area; five floors each smaller than the last, ending in a pyramidal attic. On every floor apart from the peak the broad open areas were divided by tapestries and sliding walls as in her own much smaller house. It was a daring design, both bold and simple which had appealed to Quella ever since she had first seen it under construction.
She sat in an area carpeted a plush dark red and curtained behind her in a cylindrical section of black velvet. In front, the clear wall fell without support to the level of the spinning ground. Running around the outside edge of the room was a small trough sunk into the floor, where a continuous set of fountains, lit from beneath by subtly changing oranges, yellows and reds got almost high enough to touch the sloping glass. There was no other light in the room apart from the reflections of those warm colours filtered by water, but that was enough to make the land outside invisible, except where a white flood angled from a hidden tree illuminated a low rockery.
“Wait here,” her host instructed her, ”I won’t be a moment.”
There was a contact terminal on the low table hooked up to Central, so that Theodore could request information or service from the stewards.
“May I use your terminal to let the crew know where I am? It will save a lot of unnecessary time wasting and worry. My biobracelet vanished with my attackers.”
“Be my guest but it might be quicker to use the camera network outside that feeds the Reference Bridge - a little more direct eh?”. He winked. Quella had the strength of character not to blush but she did allow herself a small smile of embarrassment at the open acknowledgement of her ‘secret’ spy system.
“That will be quite all right, thank you.”
“When the curtains closed behind him, she made contact with Colin Le Grant. The chief steward received her brief summary of events with initial relief and later formality. He confirmed that the leisure girls had reported the incident ten minutes ago and that security was already on its way to the area.
“Have them pick up the two sleepers and then call them off,” she said. “I’ll report back to medical before my next duty watch.”
“We’ll try and tidy things up as best we can,” he assured her. “The fire is under control. Could you identify the runners again?”
“I think so.”
“Good.” He hesitated visibly. “And the usual procedure...? “
“You’d better get in touch with Donald.”
It was only after she had signed off that she realised that she had forgotten to arrange any transport. Inside Kalindy there were only three ways of travelling - by foot - by one of the lumbering balloon tyred EnvironWagons or in the ‘express’ that ran through the hull integrity zone. The first of these methods was out of the question now - her foot was easy at the moment but would never stand the walk back. The ‘express’ was fast but it was intended mainly to carry the crew from engine to bridge. There was only one intersect station and that was further from here than it was to the crew quarters, the line being one hundred and eighty degrees from the stream and the station half way along it. She decided to summon a Wagon later.
This room was clearly a favourite with Theodore. A tall open set of shelves, populated by scores of books ascended almost to the ceiling on Quella’s right, and liquid light from the ripples in the fountain pool flowed over it. In front was a wide desk and chair with three volumes stacked casually in on corner. She could make out the titles without much difficulty.
“The Outward Urge - Galactic Expansion and the male sex drive (A comparative study)”
“Confederacy and Conquest”
and “The Culture Eater”.
It was a pretty funny set of books for a Water Weed harvester from Cascoll to be reading; not at all what she would have expected. Just the physical presence of so much of this faintly antique medium of information was strange enough, but books as books still had their uses and were more common outside the Core Worlds. The first two were well known and old. Quella had read “Confederacy and Conquest” as part of her training with Vital Void. It was the classic propaganda of three hundred years ago - tried and tested regular philosophy. “The Culture Eater” was a more recent tract and much more controversial. In fact it was written in direct opposition to the other two works, and with it, Michael Carrylion had spawned the ‘Quiet People’. It was the seminal text - a strong polemic but one she hadn’t studied.
Curiosity overcame the captain and she went over to the desk Another volume was open in front of the chair. “The True Community of All Believers” at chapter 3 - “A benign universal”. It was hardly the light for reading but Quella’s eye was caught by a sentence that was underscored heavily. It read “By a combination of these techniques the Confederacy always subsumes, without absorbing, those civilisations with which it comes into contact and begins the slow process of subtle reorientation towards its long term goals.” Beside this ponderous claim, someone had written ‘not even true at this level. Remember Azol!” Quella couldn’t remember Azol.
At that point she noticed the note books. She had just decided to risk opening one, when Theodore returned. His hand grasped a lurid orange shell on the desk, twisted with thirty or more flattened spines, and apparently mistaking her interest he said, “A coral harvester from the Southern Grief Reefs on Inskerelleryon. Fascinating isn’t it ? There are ten distinct subspecies, forced to be distinct because this pattern of shell has to key precisely into the male shell before they can mate.”
“I was looking at your books actually. They seem a little...well.. involved.”
Theodore’s face shut down like a formidable fortress. “What’s the matter captain? Don’t you think we read on Cascoll? Do you think I’m such a provincial that I’ve no right to study? Or do you think Water Weed harvesting is supposed to take up all my time; that we don’t live in an age that demands an intelligent response?”
“No need to be so touchy!”
“Sit down,” he took her arm and pushed her gently back into the chair. “Now let’s take a look at this wound.”
From a red cloth bag he had brought back with him, he withdrew a small bottle of yellow tincture and a roll of white fibre compress. He pressed the bottle top to the wad of the material and allowed it to absorb the liquid for a few seconds. The smell was ethereal, like the distillate of some bitter lemon, fired by summer lightning.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be rude.” Nevertheless, she thought, it was a disturbing reaction bordering on paranoia.
“That’s all right,” he replied shortly, rather from abstraction than necessary formality, for he was already studying Quella’s arm.
“This will hurt a bit. You may not be used to this particular chemical mixture but it’s quite as effective as any Corrin brand. It will sterilise the wound and there is a mild contact anaesthetic to desensitise the nerves. I’ve checked the biological register and those plants can’t do you any harm so this treatment should take care of the bleeding.”
He pressed the soaking wad firmly against her shoulder and ran it swiftly down the outside of her arm. The sudden sting made Quella’s eyes water briefly, cleaning out the tear ducts, but the initial pain faded quickly, even before he repeated the process, the strong fingers pressing firmly against her flesh darkened and coloured, she supposed, by years of pulling nets across the swift channel of the Great Estuary. From the bag he took a roll of bandage and proceeded to bind the arm to prevent the possibility of subsequent infection. As he worked he began to tell Quella a little about his life and to hint at his interest in Confederacy politics without really saying anything controversial.
“The Conclave of the Twenty Seven on Old Earth will be the most important meeting for a hundred standard years, you know; since the last one on Tocan, in fact, and I think more important.”
“I suppose it will,” Quella replied. She didn’t often think of the galaxy in terms like these, but as Theodore spoke she had a sudden renewed vision of the age and diversity of the Confederacy such as she hadn’t had since leaving Vital Void training; despite all her subsequent travelling. But the moment was fleeting. Theodore was changing the subject to finally ask outright what had been postponed for too long. He was holding her foot.
“Your ankle, I think, needs better examination than I can give it here, but I doubt if it will be further damaged if you put no weight on it. It doesn’t hurt?”
“No”
“Then may I ask what happened? It’s surely hardly usual for the captain of a ship like this to be wandering around half naked at night,” and he smiled almost shyly. Quella hunched her robe tightly about her shoulder.
“I’ve killed a man.”
The sudden shock of the bald confession was too much. When she had been relaying the information to Le Grant she had been almost emotionless - deadened by the speed of it all and playing her necessary role as captain to her crew. Now the force of her actions broke through to her in a surprise attack; a backwash of their own dreadful reality against defences weak from the initial pounding. She was crying but this second telling of the story was good. Theodore was patient and sympathetic - a sort of father figure. Clones may be born in the Vat and raised in crèche but they are human too and their needs may be stronger because of that upbringing; whatever the psychologists say (or are paid to say)
And when she had finished - released the tension - Quella saw Theodore in a new light. He was still looking at her with compassion but there was just a hint of something else that suggested he might be more than a father figure. She was conscious again of the flimsiness of her robe but this time she wasn’t embarrassed by it. She smiled shakily and he squeezed her shoulder. She knew she wouldn’t be sending for the Wagon just then.
