The V'Dan (3 page)

Dusk Army
looked like a hamburger to Jackie. A giant metal hamburger, nothing more than a cylinder ridged and ringed along the sides with sensors and shuttered observation ports in place of the bumps and ridges of meat patties and vegetables, with domes at either end representing the buns. Tiny oblongs of light were windows; even tinier pinpricks were external sources of light. “Anyone know where we’ll be parking?”

Her quip was taken seriously. Robert lifted his chin at their destination. “I had a bit of a chat with Docking Control while half of you were still waking up from your prejump nap and getting a meal. They’re not used to so many small ships needing to go into quarantine all at once. They have enough space for this ship and two more of our more normal-sized ships in the quarantine section’s hangar bay, but the rest will have to stack and rack on three docking gantries.”

(
Stack and rack?
) Li’eth asked, glancing at Jackie for enlightenment. (
I didn’t even think to ask where all these ships will park, but what does he mean by that?
)

(
These ships have dorsal and ventral airlocks—the ones
on the topside and the underbelly normally aren’t used save in an emergency, or for stack and rack parking,
) she explained, dredging the details out of her memory. It was from her training days shortly before the
Aloha 9
had encountered the Salik warship holding Li’eth and his crew. (
In the event of an emergency, a line of ships can be linked up airlock to airlock, each one parking at a right angle to the one below it, belly to back. You can stack them left-right-left-right, or in a left-hand or right-hand spiral, or even nose-to-toes, alternating the opposite way. The tail fin just clears the wings.
)

(
Why do I get the feeling there’s a story behind that design?
) Li’eth asked her.

(
Because you’re getting better at reading subthoughts?
) Jackie offered. Her eyes were on the station they were approaching, but her inner thoughts were on her training lectures. (
There was a bad case of carbon-dioxide scrubbers on three of the earliest
Aloha
models. One of them went to the rescue of the other . . . and then
their
atmo-scrubber broke down, which required calling in a third ship. There was a lot of awkward maneuvering, of coupling and decoupling. None of the hulls were damaged, but all three sets of pilots and copilots complained so much to the design teams that they pulled production on the original models and immediately modified the next generation to include stackable airlocks.

(
Don’t worry,
) she added in reassurance, catching his own subthoughts. (All
of those scrubber models were replaced and all of the replacement parts as well, with the new ones triple-checked before being installed. The last of the current
Aloha
Class came into use round about the time I was recalled to active duty; the rest have been coming off the production line with several other upgrades, too.
)

(
And your people put together fifteen new ships in just a couple of months?
) Li’eth asked her, impressed.

(
It didn’t take
that
much to redesign the hulls,
) she countered. (
The airlocks were already a long-proved design left over from modular supply-depot construction. The exact same type of depots we stopped at for resupply on the way here, in fact. Even the
1
, here, was already under construction when the hatchways were added for modification. The body’s thicker, the wings a little broader, but it’s still modular construction.
The hardest part was rerouting the conduits, and that wasn’t all
that
difficult.
)

(
Duly noted. I suppose I should remind myself that your ships are a fraction of the size of ours. Ours can take anywhere from half a year to two years to build,
) Li’eth admitted. (
But then again, they’re a lot bigger, and they don’t make you feel sick each time they travel from star system to star system.
)

(
Plus you get an actual private cabin, rather than a shared one,
) she agreed. That in turn conjured up a strong subthought of his, of how cramped the quarters were no doubt going to be.

(
One hundred ninety-five
people are a
lot
of people to put into quarantine, even if some of them are going to be manning some of those docked ships,
) he pointed out. Even he knew that much, that the Terrans were going to keep some of their ships fully crewed and prepared for departure at a moment’s notice during the quarantine period. As soon as they were cleared to depart quarantine and had ferried their personnel to the surface, several of those ships were going to deliver precious telecommunications gifts to other worlds in the known galaxy, while the embassy staff set up and got ready for a formal introduction to the Alliance.

(
At least we convinced them to put all the psis into their own shared quarters,
) Jackie said. Then wrinkled her nose. (
At least, I
think
we got it through to them.
)

Jackie had brought four other polyglot telepaths with her on this expedition. That had taken away almost half of her people’s most powerful psychic translators. It was deemed necessary, though. With their new potential allies embroiled in an interstellar war, the faster both sides could communicate with each other, the better it would be for everyone involved.

Two of them were even xenopaths. Unlike Darian Johnston, whose military commission—like Jackie’s—had been reinstated for this mission, Aixa Winkler had never actually touched a fully sentient alien mind before. Johnston had served for ten years, and had faced down the Greys five times. Winkler didn’t have that kind of experience; instead, she had served for decades as an animal-rights advocate, communing with a wide variety of subsentient minds.

Min Wang-Kurakawa was a newly minted junior-grade officer. She had expected to be sent on patrol ships to pay for her
secondary career in engineering, being a technosentient psi as well as a polyglot telepath. Clees—Heracles Panaklion—had been included in the embassy not only because he was a polyglot psi, but a Psi League instructor. His official job would be to assess and offer training to any V’Dan psis, being certified for basic instruction in all known branches of abilities with two decades of practice at training and teaching.

He had also declared he would be the embassy’s chronicler, hauling along a variety of camera equipment, “. . . to capture the behind-the-scenes history in the making!” Jackie had a hard time imagining where the fifty-two-year-old got all his energy and enthusiasm. He hadn’t been one of her instructors—a case of her living all around the Pacific Ocean, while he had lived and taught around the Mediterranean Sea on the opposite side of the planet—but she had read the glowing recommendations from many of his students, appended to his personnel file.

The lowest-ranked telepaths were Johnston and Winkler, but low was comparative. At Rank 9 each, they were sensitive enough to pick up thoughts at a mere touch. Bunking with nonpsis could lead to tensions and troubles whenever roommates might bump into each other, as they invariably would. Fellow psis could shield their own thoughts, true, but even if the mental walls weren’t up, they would be far more understanding and forgiving of any accidental touches leading to accidental eavesdropping.

Robert spoke, though not to her. Still, it drew Jackie’s attention back to the actual docking as he chatted with the station’s traffic managers. Dead ahead, the
Dusk Army
now filled most of the view through the forward windows. Not just the station, but a large, rounded, rectangular set of doors that were sliding slowly open, revealing a well-lit interior.

Terran and V’Dan docking technology were not yet compatible, so Commander Graves was having to dock and land manually. Jackie suspected that the “course corrections” on approach were not only for the sake of the insystem defense grid, but to reassure the station’s traffic control center that he would heed verbal directions swiftly and accurately.

Her comm station pinged. As the chief pilot, Robert was in constant communication at this point with
Dusk Army
Traffic Control. That meant this was something else. Jackie noted that it
was a video link, and opened the channel. The man who appeared on the screen had both mint- and forest-green stripes along each cheek and a stripe down the center of his scalp, tinting his brown hair. He wore a dark shade of green for his jacket, with grass-green lapels, cut vaguely along the lines of Li’eth’s Imperial Army uniform and decorated with gleaming silver buttons molded in a pattern of some sort of beast, but it was not an actual uniform.

She offered him a smile. “Greetings. You’ve reached the communications officer for the
Embassy 1
. How may we help you?”

Hazel eyes narrowing, he frowned at her. “. . . Aren’t you the Ambassador? You look like her.”

“That is correct, but until I have disembarked from this particular ship, I am also its comm officer. How may I help you?” she repeated. On her left, Li’eth shifted a little closer, peering at the screen.

He gave her a look somewhere between puzzled and dubious. “. . . May I speak with your protocol officer?”

“That would be me as well. How may I help you,
meioa
 . . . ?” she asked, using the Alliance term for addressing someone politely. Without a suffix, it was gender neutral and thus considered very polite.

“That, Ambassador, is Imperial First Lord Mi-en Ksa’an,” Li’eth stated, leaning in even closer to Jackie. (
I know him by sight,
) he added quickly, telepathically, (
but we rarely moved in the same social circles, for all that he’s a First Tier relative by four generations, if I remember correctly.
) Out loud, he added, “Greetings, Ksa’an. Are you still working for the Protocol Ministry?”

“Yes . . . Your Highness. It is good to see that you are well. We will need to speak with these Terrans about the proper protocols for welcoming them into the
Dusk Army
’s containment quarters,” the green-striped man stated.

Jackie eyed him. “I am confused as to the need for protocol, Imperial First Lord.”

He gave her a skeptical look in turn. “How so, Ambassador?”

A sudden shift of the nose of their ship made everything sway forward and down. Robert cursed under his breath and corrected, compensating for the transfer from weightlessness to artificial gravity. It felt like Mars, lighter than it should be.
Jackie swayed and clutched at her console, then breathed deep to adjust to the sudden need for supporting her own weight after fourteen days in space.

“Please remember that I am not V’Dan and do not understand nor grasp your customs . . . but I would think at this point we are medical patients. Where we come from, all patients are treated equally, save that their needs are based on a triage of who is in need of the most immediate attention. Since we are all healthy as we enter quarantine confinement, the only protocol that should then be followed is a security matter.”

“. . . Security?” the V’Dan on the other end of the linked screens asked.

“Yes. My head of security wishes for one of our doctors and some of his troops to tour and assess the quarantine facilities before I disembark,” Jackie told him. “This was outlined in the notes we sent through the hyperrelay node at your system’s edge—speaking of which, we have a satellite node ready to deploy. Your people have not yet indicated where you want it.”

“That is not my department, meioa,” the protocol lord demurred.

“Well, it will give me something to discuss with someone else while we wait for the team to make its assessment sweep. You can arrange that, yes?” she asked him.

“. . . Yes.” He didn’t look entirely pleased about that.

Jackie chose to address that skepticism with a dose of pragmatism. “My people have a saying. ‘Trust is earned, respect is given, and loyalty is demonstrated. Betrayal of any one of those is to lose all three.’ I believe the speaker was a fellow named Abdelnour from around three hundred years ago . . . This is the ‘trust is earned’ stage, meioa,” she clarified, using the Alliance’s preferred form of address, since she was still a bit unclear on what an Imperial First this or that Lord meant. “My people would like to trust yours, that your facilities are adequate for containing pathogens, and safe for us to live in for the duration of our quarantine stay. However, as this is an incredibly important meeting, my people need direct reassurance that everything is indeed safe.

“We would have extended the same courtesy to our guests, save that there were so few of them that it was simply easier to
view and demonstrate everything in person, with no security chiefs demanding that their checklists of procedures and requirements be met,” she finished lightly. “There are 195 of us Terrans, and Captain al-Fulan takes his responsibility as our chief guardian seriously.”

Indeed, Captain al-Fulan had literal checklists of everything security- and safety-wise that he intended to mark as acceptable or inadequate. She had rolled her eyes when he had first showed them to her, but the captain had explained patiently that
he
had twelve years of working high-profile security details, including in areas that were dangerous. The Terran United Planets worked hard at representing everyone they could, but there were still pockets of humanity who insisted on rioting, rebelling, and committing acts of violence against each other.

Dr. Du would be accompanying him. The pathologist was now familiar with space-station quarantine containment procedures, and intended to study the V’Dan version to make sure they were adequate for her checklists. Jackie had a few checklists of her own, but all of them were in languages other than Terranglo. It wouldn’t be diplomatic to let the V’Dan know what she really thought of the things she observed, right now.

As it was, she observed the Imperial First Lord sighing. “. . . Very well. What is the proper protocol among your people for welcoming aboard a military security team?”