The shock of that made me miss a couple of minutes. When I came out of my daze, the Aadi of Alpha sector had been replaced by the president of the board of Hospital Earth.
‘… procedure begins with the citizens of Earth voting on whether to accept the invitation. Should that vote be in favour then Earth will join Alpha sector at midnight on 15 November. Elections for Earth planetary representatives will follow, and Hospital Earth will begin a transition process, involving handing over planetary government and dividing its remaining functions between a purely medical Hospital Earth and a new Novak-Nadal Syndrome Care Foundation.’
‘Novak-Nadal syndrome?’ asked Amalie in a puzzled voice.
‘When the first colonists portalled from Earth to Adonis, two of them died because they were Handicapped,’ said Raven. ‘The first names carved on the walls of the Courtyards of Memory are Ernst Novak and Esperenza Nadal.’
‘That’s a good idea,’ said Dalmora. ‘It was horribly unfeeling to call people Handicapped. Do you think Novak-Nadal syndrome is better, Jarra?’
I didn’t reply because my head was still whirling. Earth would join Alpha sector on 15 November. That was Wallam-Crane Day. The Handicapped had never celebrated the public holiday that marked the birth of the inventor of the portal, but they would celebrate on 15 November 2789!
‘Will Earth’s citizens vote in favour of Earth joining Alpha sector?’ asked Krath.
I gave him a look of sheer disbelief. ‘Of course we will. This offer … They’re finally admitting we’re human!’
I remembered the Adonis Knights marching to deliver their petition for justice. Everyone had assumed they were asking for Alpha sector to pass the relationship legislation, but they’d been asking for far more than that.
I turned to look at Raven. ‘You did this.’
He had a strange smile on his face. ‘No, Jarra. I talked to a few people, Dalmora’s father talked to some people as well, and Lucius Augustus Gordianus has been talking endlessly to everyone. It’s been wonderful being part of this, helping to set right something that was wrong, but it was you that really did this.’
I shook my head. ‘That’s … That’s just nardle.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ said Raven. ‘Lucius Augustus Gordianus was fighting for his grandson, but he wouldn’t have risked his career and his clan’s social status without the clan of Tellon Blaze leading the way. Dalmora’s father could use his fame to talk to influential people, but they only listened because they’d seen Jarra Tell Morrath on the vids. I convinced the Adonis Knights to march, but they weren’t doing it for some anonymous citizens of Earth; they marched for a glowing girl.’
Everyone was looking at me. I couldn’t manage to speak, and their faces were oddly blurry.
I felt an arm go round me, and heard Fian’s voice. ‘Jarra needs some space for a while.’
He tugged me out of the room, along a corridor, and guided me through a door. ‘Is there a way to lock this?’
I looked blankly at the door for a moment, a memory stirred, and I tapped a code into the controls.
‘Good,’ said Fian.
I turned round and saw we were in one of the small hospitality suites, decorated in a pale blue and white to blend with the view from the glass wall. I dived through a side door into a bathroom and bathed my face in cool water. When I came out again a few minutes later, Fian was sitting on one of the huge curved couches by the window. I went to sit next to him.
‘I made a real idiot of myself back there.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Fian, I just burst into tears in front of Playdon, our class, the whole of Cassandra 2, and an Adonis Knight!’
He gave a low, gentle laugh, put his arm round me, and pulled me against him. ‘Jarra, you’re allowed a little emotion at a time like this.’
‘I’ve just realized how stupid I’ve been,’ I said.
He looked into my eyes. ‘Exactly how have you been stupid?’
‘For tactical reasons, the General Marshal wanted other worlds for the Handicapped. The two most heavily populated sectors are Alpha and Beta. Their planetary representatives can easily win a vote against the other three sectors combined. Correct?’
Fian nodded.
‘So, the Military knew they had to get Alpha and Beta on our side,’ I said. ‘I was conveniently part of the Tell clan, so they could start a chain of events in Beta sector with the help of the Betan Military clans. Alpha sector was a bigger problem. Dalmora was my friend, and her father was famous, but he didn’t have much political influence.’
I laughed. ‘I’m a nardle, an utter nardle. When Colonel Leveque said he’d chosen Raven to be our bodyguard because it would be impossible to bribe an Adonis Knight, I believed him, but his real reason was because an Adonis Knight has direct access to the political heart of Alpha sector.’
Fian gave a little shake of his head. ‘The Military are supposed to be politically neutral. They wouldn’t dare to order an Adonis Knight to use his influence, but … You’re right, Jarra. Leveque chose Raven to be our bodyguard, hoping he wouldn’t just fight for us physically, but get drawn into fighting for us politically as well. I can just imagine Leveque calculating the probability of success, and the numbers getting higher when he spotted Raven was a romantic trying to live up to the Adonis Knight oath. Just remember the words of that oath.’
‘“Knights shall demonstrate nobility, honour, grace, valour and perfection in all virtues, and be champions of justice,”’ I quoted.
‘Exactly,’ said Fian. ‘Did you see Raven’s face back there? He was looking for a cause to champion, and he found you. His glowing girl. His image of the Handicapped. You represented a group who weren’t just suffering from prejudice, but blatant injustices like researchers experimenting on you.’
I remembered Raven’s anger when he heard Hospital Earth let its wards be used as test subjects. ‘Yes, Raven found his cause to fight for. He’s happy now because he’s proved whatever he needed to prove to himself.’ I sighed. ‘It’s nardle the way people keep seeing me as symbolizing the Handicapped. We aren’t all the same. People never are.’
‘Well, I don’t see you as a symbol, Jarra. I see you as a person who’s amazing, but real, and flawed, and human, and loving, and betrothed to me. I’ve been waiting weeks for this moment.’ Fian looked across at the refreshment area. ‘Krath’s right, the wine is all in locked cabinets. Would an ex tour guide know how to get into those?’
‘The security system forces them to change the codes every week, but they just alternate between Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. I thought Playdon would prefer me not to tell Krath.’
Fian went over to the wine cabinet, and came back with a bottle and glasses. ‘Pity there isn’t a table.’
I laughed. ‘Furniture command couch extend table.’
A table slid out from the wide, cushioned arm of the couch.
‘I’ve spent too much time in primitive dig site domes,’ said Fian. ‘I never thought to try voice commands.’
He poured out the wine, and handed one of the glasses to me. ‘Fidelis, Jarra.’
‘Fidelis, Fian.’
We sipped the wine. I was Military again, Earth was to join Alpha sector, and Fian and I were together on the Roof of the World. What moment could be better than this?
‘I will come to you when spring turns to summer,’ said Fian.
‘I will come to you when spring turns to summer,’ I repeated.
‘And our future will be golden.’
He leaned towards me and kissed me. I got a bit powered after that, but I was powered from being with Fian again, not from the wine.
27
Earth was out of portal lockdown and my body was back in the real world, sitting on a grey flexiplas chair in the grey flexiplas hall of our dig site dome, but my head was still reliving amaz moments on the Roof of the World. Aadi Quilla Amarion saying that Alpha sector was offering membership to Earth. Fian’s urgent kisses, and h
is hands drifting down to …
An elbow jabbed me painfully in the ribs. I turned to give Amalie a reproachful look, before discovering Playdon and the whole class were laughing at me.
‘Now I’ve finally got everyone’s attention,’ said Playdon, ‘I’d like to explain our schedule for the next few days. Cassandra 2 are planning to focus their efforts for the next week on a manufacturing centre near the west side of the Land Raft. We’ll be working on a nearby block of buildings that were used for housing and …’
He broke off as three lookups chimed simultaneously. One of them was mine. I tapped it, read a message that cleared my head of daydreams, and scrambled to my feet.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I said. ‘Fian, Raven and I have orders to portal to Zulu base with all possible speed.’
Playdon sighed but nodded, and I went out of the hall with Fian and Raven a step behind me. Once we were through the door, we started running. The Military phrase ‘with all possible speed’ meant exactly that. What the chaos was going on?
Raven entered the portal code we’d been sent and stepped through ahead of us. Fian and I followed, and found ourselves in one of the base reception areas. I was grazzed to find not just the usual four Military Security officers waiting for us, but Colonel Leveque as well.
‘We’re heading straight to Alien Contact Operations Centre,’ he said.
Alien Contact Operations Centre! I’d somehow managed to forget the aliens. No, not exactly forget, I’d just had a lot of other things to think about lately.
A base internal portal was only a few steps away, with the portal already active. Within seconds, we were walking through a door into a vast room. I looked round, awed, at the amount of people, desks, equipment, vid screens, and then lost interest in everything but one person. Colonel Nia Stone was sitting at what was obviously the command desk, and she wore a white sash over her uniform jacket.
That white sash meant something desperately important. I fished urgently for memories of vids I’d seen about the Military. A General wore a white jacket, and the General Marshal wore entirely white. A white sash meant …?
I got my answer from memories of ent vids about Tellon Blaze. He’d been given field promotions all the way up to Colonel during the Thetis chaos year, and the images of him near the end of it had him wearing a white sash. The Military couldn’t give him a field promotion to General, but the white sash showed he was acting in a position that would normally be held by a General.
Nia Stone’s white sash must mean she was acting commanding officer of the Alien Contact programme! Why? What had happened to General Torrek?
Stone’s chair swivelled to face me, and she smiled. ‘Congratulations, Jarra. You’ve found the alien home world.’
I stared at her in bewilderment, and she laughed and nodded at Colonel Leveque.
‘To be more exact,’ he said, ‘you’ve given us a map that should help us find the alien home world. You suggested we should look for a repeating data stream in the alien probe’s light sculpture, which would be our Rosetta stone, our key to beginning translation. Yesterday, our researchers finally managed to disentangle the first level data streams of the light sculpture. They didn’t find one repeating data stream, they found two.’
He paused. ‘One of those appears to be exactly what you predicted, a simple sequence that matches the test sequences we used to reach the signalling device, though there’s extra data at the end we don’t understand. The other confused us because it was in a series of distinct sections. We’ve now worked out that those sections were strands that formed a simple static light sculpture themselves.’
He moved across to what was obviously his desk, and tapped a control. A light sculpture appeared in the centre of the room, showing a star with its attendant planets.
‘This can’t be a scale model,’ said Colonel Leveque. ‘The ratio of interplanetary distances to planetary diameters makes that impossible. It does, however, appear to give us the relative sizes of each planet and their moons. We’re now running checks against every star system in our stellar survey records looking for possible matches. We hope to rapidly eliminate the possibility of the alien home world being in humanity’s space, and searching new uncharted sectors will go a lot faster now that we’ve a clear idea what we’re looking for.’
‘General Torrek will be extremely happy to hear that when he returns from his rejuvenation treatment,’ said Colonel Stone.
I relaxed. I should have guessed General Torrek was away for a rejuvenation treatment. He was eighty years old, so he’d need them every three months, and there’d been a long period of panic after the alien probe arrived. He was bound to be due, if not overdue, a treatment.
Colonel Stone waved her arm, indicating that Fian and I should go over to some spare seats and sit down. Raven took up an inconspicuous position against a nearby wall.
There was a soft musical chime, and Colonel Leveque leaned forward to study the grid display inlaid into the top of his desk. ‘A potential match in Alpha sector. Almost certainly a false alarm since we’ve already double-checked that star system.’
Colonel Stone glanced at a man in a Commander’s uniform who was sitting at a desk to her left. ‘Send a team to triple-check it just to be on the safe side.’
‘Yes, sir,’ he said.
There was a quiet spell, followed by another two possible star systems being found in quick succession. The one in Gamma sector was ruled out. It contained one of our inhabited worlds, so had already been extremely thoroughly checked. Colonel Stone ordered an extra check on the one in Beta sector.
Once that excitement was over, there was another, longer wait. I entertained myself by playing a game of guess the alien home world, pulled up information on Sol system on my lookup, and did a bit of mental comparison between that and the light sculpture image of the alien star system. There were three tiny planets nearest the star, then four great big things, followed by two more tiny ones.
I felt the fact the aliens had visited Earth suggested conditions here weren’t wildly different from their own home world. I stared at the planets shown in the light sculpture. The gravity on the giant planets would be scary, and too far from the star would be incredibly cold, which left the three inner planets. Number three was too small, its gravity would be only half that of Earth. The alien home world was probably number one or number two.
There was another chime. ‘We have a potential match in Zeta sector,’ said Colonel Leveque.
His voice sounded as lazy as ever, but the atmosphere in the room instantly changed to tense expectancy. Everyone expected matches in the other sectors to be false alarms, because Planet First teams had covered those star systems already, but Zeta sector was different. Stellar survey was still in progress there, and Planet First assessments to choose potential colony worlds were only just beginning. A match in Zeta sector could be the real thing.
‘This system is a close match,’ said Leveque. ‘We only have the basic outline stellar survey from a mapping probe bouncing through. That will be followed by …’
He broke off and started a new sentence. ‘Unfortunately, a Planet First probe entered this star system five days ago.’
‘Is the probe still in passive mode?’ asked Colonel Stone.
‘The last routine contact with it was four hours ago,’ said Leveque. ‘It had completed passive monitoring phase without detecting any sign of intelligent alien life, and had just started broadcasting standard mathematical and other greets.’
‘Chaos!’ Colonel Stone snapped out the word. ‘The probe’s still at the star system threshold then?’
‘Correct,’ said Leveque. ‘It has a further five days of greets scheduled before it starts moving into the star system. Its next routine contact is in eight hours time.’
‘Contact the probe now,’ said Stone. ‘If everything is quiet there, then cut the broadcast. I don’t want to stir anything up before the General gets back.’
Leveque worked at his desk for a moment
, and the light sculpture of the alien star system abruptly vanished and was replaced by a weird jigsaw of different holo images. One was obviously the matching star system, but there was a lot of multi-coloured stuff and bursts of numbers that didn’t mean anything to me.
I saw Leveque’s right hand stab at his desk, and the holo image of the star system reappeared. It shifted in size, so only a vastly magnified section of the outer edge of the system was visible. A white dot appeared.
‘The white dot,’ said Leveque, ‘marks the position of our probe at the edge of the star system.’
A second dot appeared. This one was red.
‘The red dot,’ said Leveque, ‘is an object moving on a course that will intercept our probe in fourteen hours seventeen minutes time. The chance of this being a natural object randomly on this course is vanishingly small.’
There was silence for a full minute before Colonel Stone spoke. ‘We currently have the option to use remote destruct on our probe before intercept.’ She looked slowly round the room. ‘You seem to have views on that, Commander Tell Morrath.’
‘I’d advise against it, sir,’ I said. ‘If someone comes to your door, sticks their hand on the door plate, and then runs away, it leaves a bad impression. If they come again, you start off by being suspicious.’
She gave a nod. ‘Anyone have an argument in favour of remote destruct?’
No one responded. Stone nodded again and tapped at her lookup. I gave a startled look at the holo head that instantly appeared above her command desk. The General Marshal!
‘Sir,’ said Stone, ‘I assume you’ve been following the situation on the command feed.’
He nodded. ‘You’ve had my undivided attention since you found a matching system in Zeta sector.’
‘Using remote destruct on our probe at this point could have negative implications for a future approach. I therefore recommend against it, sir.’