“I won’t forget,” Randall said. He put away his own communicator, caught his date by the hand, and headed for the landing pad.
Lara turned to Sikander. “What is it, Sikander?”
“I am afraid I must cut our evening short. We’ve all been recalled to the Hector.” He took her hand and grimaced. “There is a good chance we’ll sail at once. I don’t know where we’re going, or when I will be back.”
“The hazards of dating a naval officer, I suppose,” Lara answered. She sighed. “Well, it was a fun evening. I suppose I can see myself home.”
“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “And, Lara—I am sorry about the way Randall treated you. He shouldn’t have said those things. I promise I will teach him better manners.”
“Don’t let him get to you, Sikay. He’s an ignorant bigot.” Lara pressed herself close and kissed him with a warmth that made Sikander very sorry indeed that he had to go. When they broke apart, she whispered in his ear. “Send word when you can, and be careful out there.”
“I will,” he said. “And I am truly sorry to spoil the evening.” He embraced her again, and then hurried away toward the mansion’s landing pad and the waiting flyers.
5
CSS Hector, Caledonia System
CSS Hector got under way six hours after the general recall. As the mottled green-blue crescent of New Perth faded behind them, Captain Markham summoned the ship’s officers to a briefing. A few minutes before 0800 ship’s time, Sikander made his way to the wardroom. He had just enough time to pour himself a mug of coffee before Captain Markham entered the room.
“Attention on deck!” Peter Chatburn called. Everyone present rose and faced the door.
“Please, be seated,” Markham replied. She took her place at the head of the table as Hector’s officers sat down and waited for her to continue. “I suppose you’re all wondering what exactly is going on. I’ll get to that in a moment. First, a navigation report?” She looked to Chatburn.
On most Aquilan warships smaller than a battleship, the executive officer also served as the ship’s navigator. “We’re aligned for warp transit and accelerating to our ring-activation velocity, Captain,” Chatburn replied. “We expect to bubble—” He glanced down at his dataslate. “—at ten percent c, which we’ll reach at 1555 hours. That should give us a thirteen-day transit. We could boost harder and bubble at a higher velocity to cut the transit time a bit, but that will use a lot of fuel.”
“Thirteen days is sufficient,” Markham answered. “We’re supposed to be on station by the end of the month, and I don’t want to arrive with our fuel bottles empty. Transit at 1555 approved. Ms. Juarez, engineering will be ready?”
Magda nodded. “Yes, ma’am. But I confess I’m curious about where we’re going.”
“Gadira, Ms. Juarez. We are headed for the Gadira system.”
Sikander considered himself reasonably well educated on galactic geography, but he hadn’t ever heard of the place. It wasn’t within the Aquilan sphere of influence, anyway. He noticed that most of the other officers in the briefing seemed just as puzzled as he felt.
Captain Markham took in the confused looks of her officers with a small smile. “I only learned of the system last night. Yesterday the Foreign Ministry informed the Admiralty they needed a warship on station there as soon as it could be arranged. The Admiralty in their wisdom decided that the Old Worthy was just the ship for the job and called me as I got home from the Governor’s Ball.” She glanced around the table, and Sikander thought that her eyes lingered on Hiram Randall a little longer than the others. Had she heard something about his behavior at the end of the ball? “I understand many of you were still there when the recall was sent—my apologies for cutting your evening short.”
“You wouldn’t have called if it wasn’t important, Captain,” Chatburn said. “The needs of the service come first, and all that.”
“Indeed.” Markham looked back to Randall. “Mr. Randall, why don’t you fill everyone in on what we know about Gadira?”
“Yes, ma’am.” As the ship’s operations officer, Randall was the most closely involved with mission planning and intelligence summaries. While the rest of the crew had been loading stores or quickly finishing routine maintenance tasks to make ready for departure, the Operations Department had been examining every detail of Hector’s orders to find out where they were supposed to go and what they were supposed to do. Randall picked up a remote in front of him, and pointed it at a screen on the bulkhead. A moment later the image of a gold-and-blue planet with a single, prominent moon appeared.
“This is Gadira—the name of both planet and planetary system,” Randall began. “Technically this is Gadira II; there’s a mercurian planet close to the star, and three uranian-type gas giants further out. Gadira itself is a temperate semi-terran world, originally colonized by the Caliphate in the Second Expansion. As you can see, its seas are small and landlocked, and tend to lie in the tropical zone. That’s where most of Gadira’s population lives. The higher latitudes are quite arid, with minimal ice caps.”
“The planet seems ordinary enough,” Markham observed. “What about the people?”
“The planetary population is a little under a billion. The system developed more or less independently, especially after the Terran Caliphate fell into decline. Contact with the rest of human space was sporadic at best for several hundred years. The Montréalais reestablished contact forty years ago; Gadira’s still catching up to Coalition standards today.”
Sikander nodded to himself—Kashmir’s story was similar. In humanity’s first waves of emigration from Old Terra, the early starfaring powers launched colony ships to many promising worlds, but the drive technology of that time meant that establishing any kind of interstellar commerce or regular communications would be impossible. The people who felt the need to settle their own world were often trying to preserve vanishing cultures; as a result, long-isolated colonies often retained stronger racial phenotypes and cultural patterns than the more cosmopolitan star nations in the Coalition of Humanity. By the time the Gadiras and Kashmirs of the galaxy had been rediscovered, they’d fallen centuries behind the leading powers of human space.
Randall continued. “Politically, Gadira is a system monarchy ruled by a sultan by the name of Rashid el-Nasir. The sultanate is allied to the Republic of Montréal with a treaty of mutual defense and support, although it should be noted that the other Coalition powers don’t entirely accept the arrangement. When contact was first reestablished, several great powers—the Kingdom of Cygnus, the Dremark Empire, and of course our own Commonwealth—believed they had interests in Gadira. As I understand it, our Foreign Ministry favored more of an open-door policy, but over the years Montréal has become the de facto colonial administration of the system. We haven’t pushed the question.”
“I can’t say I like the idea of Montréal shutting an open door in our faces,” Chatburn said. “Have they noticed our fleet is twice the size of theirs?”
“I suspect we haven’t protested too much because we wouldn’t want Montréal to push us on some of our own colonial interests,” said Captain Markham. “Or maybe it’s a quid pro quo for some other arrangement. Interstellar politics is a tangled web indeed. Go on, Mr. Randall.”
“Of course, ma’am,” Randall said. “Economically, a class of titled aristocrats controls most of the planet’s commercial interests. A good number of people in the outlying districts are actually seminomadic herders who eke out a subsistence-level existence on the verge of the high-latitude deserts. Finally, Gadira is dominated by a post-Terran tradition of Islam, Tharsisi Quranism. Religious participation is almost universal. The history of the planet is punctuated by various violent movements toward stricter interpretations of the role of religion in public life.”