Oolite Bulletins

Sometimes you just have to stumble, pick yourself up and carry on.

I was all set, I guess, to talk over how it was the day the family got wiped out, all except me, but I realized at once I’d touched a nerve that didn’t ought to have been touched. Macrae took only a few seconds to recover, but it felt like I’d aged several years in the meantime. That was my cue to watch my mouth another time. It’s not an escort’s business to ask personal questions of the boss.

“We’re getting maudlin,” Macrae said – and I noticed his burr had vanished. “Let’s look at our itinerary. We have… let’s see… Riveis, Arexe, Xeean, and Edle – all about enough for one day. Ususor’s only another four hours after Edle but the Xeean to Edle hop will take a full twenty-five hours, so we’ll be ready for a stop-over and all the fresher when we get to Ususor. Watch out for strangers at Riveis.”

I checked the map. “That’s because of Atarza just next to it? The Anarchy system?”

“Yes. Point four of a light-year away – that’s ten minutes in Witchspace, and the miscreants with fuel to burn if they have injectors. I’ll not take us through Atarza system for all it would shave a number of hours off our run.”

Extra distance racks up the time quickly on a Witchjump. Go four light-years followed by one, and you’ve taken seventeen hours in total, nearly all on the first jump. Do the five all in one go, and that’s an extra eight hours. Of course, the extra jump could mean ringing the bell in a dangerous system, and even if you hyperspace away they can use your own wormhole to follow you. Even so: “I’m game for it if you are, sir. It’s what I’m paid for.”

“Thank you, but no. I know the schedule I’m running, and I can spare the time.”

Of course, your trader can be setting out to minimise the risks all he can, and you can still find yourself meeting up with trouble no matter what. The warning about strangers at Riveis, for instance, was right on the money.

We dropped out of Witchspace just twenty-three hours out of Diedar to find that the miscreants, as Macrae so aptly called them, were loitering near the Witchpoint with intent to shake down strangers for cargo. They gave us some line about propping up the corrupt state, but the long and the short of it was, they were demanding money with menaces, which I well knew by now was something Macrae aimed to discourage as strongly as he could.

My part was limited to blowing up a single Gecko who Macrae didn’t get first. The rest was clearly all in a day’s work for my boss – and I’d not even seen him fire a missile yet, although he was carrying four of the best, the kind that have the anti-countermeasures built in and cost about twelve times as much as the regular torpedoes. I didn’t see too many bumps in the road otherwise. All our waypoints were in nice orderly systems with efficient police forces, and even the assassins seemed to have fallen silent lately.

So the only unhappy part as far as I was concerned that I would very soon have to go back to earning a living, and no more formal dinners in fancy clothes with perfect gentlemen blessed with exquisite taste. Not that I ought to be complaining. It’s almost unheard of for a trader to hob-nob with the hired help, even if the trader himself is one of these Cobra-and-a-hundred-credits legends that you hear about. The one exception to the general rule turning out to be a man like Macrae, instead of some slightly seedy older man who thought the phrase “hired escort” carried over into the twelve hours after arriving on-station, was a once-in-a-lifetime bonus. I didn’t want it to end, but I supposed I didn’t ought to be greedy.

What was surprising me, a little, was that I wasn’t missing the spacer-bar parties as much as I would have expected. If you’d told me five days earlier “You’ve got a short-term contract coming up, pay’s regular but you won’t be frequenting the bars until the end of your hitch,” I’d probably have said “Get bent, I’m having no trouble getting hired as it is and I’ll stick to what I know and like.” I just didn’t do this whole business about getting dressed up for dinner and taking three hours over it and six different knives and forks – but I’d got to like it a lot.

Well, four more stopovers and then we’d be at Ususor and it would all be over – although I still wondered what Macrae had meant about giving a try-out to his mysterious new ship. If he was going there on a business venture and wanted someone to show off one of them to someone he was trying to sell them to – well, there are professional pilots for things like that, and they’re not usually the ones who hire out as trade escorts.

Sufficient unto the day, I told myself – which was another one of Macrae’s phrases that I’d picked up – and I followed him down to Riveis station.

Macrae continued issuing the dinner invitations, I continued attending them, and I carried on receiving an education at the same time as being fed and entertained, all of it at my employer’s expense. That plus the general lack of serious nuisances on the way made it feel like an extended holiday, which was another thing I’d never really had before.

And we arrived far sooner than I liked in Ususor system, after a four-hour Witchjump from Edle, to find a reception committee waiting for us. I only carry the cheap scanner in my Sidewinder, not the one that scans the police bands – but even the cheap scanner will register hostile locks on you or your freighter perfectly well.

There’s a level of force that no-one can beat.

It’ll vary from person to person. Your greenhorn in his new Cobra III off to make a killing on his first twenty tons of food may find a single old Krait too much for him. At the other end of the scale, no one ship can fight off a thousand, even a hundred, even fifty, and for smaller numbers you still need an edge in speed or firepower – both, for choice.

The twelve ships coming in at us from all sides look as though they will be enough. They’re coming in very fast. Do they all have injectors? I can’t spare the time to check out all of them, I’m desperately trying to burn one of them in the time it takes to get from maximum range to in my face –

And I’m having to break off, even as I see that Macrae got one in the beam of his port laser and has blown him to dust and gas. But it was a long blast, and Macrae’s surely got a hot laser there… and there are missiles heading for him. I hear the scream of his ECM and a couple of them burst, but not all.

Macrae’s turned and is running. I’m following him, more scared than I’ve ever been, not just for me but for my freighter, I don’t want to lose another one… and I realize as my stomach clenches and my heart thumps, it’s not about my freighter. I’m actually crying here. I’m actually raging, “You murdering cowardly bastards! Twelve onto one?” It’s not about my freighter, it’s about Macrae.

“Kill them both,” comes over the commset. I glance at my rear view. There’s an Asp tailing me at barely five kilometres. It seems to loom over me and I feel as though I can see straight down the barrel of that huge gun mount they have at the front.

Murdering cowardly bastards!

Macrae’s rear laser stabs out a moment before he gives his injectors a quick dab and pulls around. There are still two missiles on his tail and he’s not even trying his ECM. They must have the hardened avionics. I jink to break the Asp’s target acquisition, but I can’t outrun it. I see its laser blast stab past me for an instant but its pilot has quick reflexes and cuts as soon as he sees he’s not on target.

“Oh, you tak’ the high road, and I’ll tak’ the low road, and I’ll be in Scotland afore ye!” comes over the commset. The computer calmly reports that the message is from The Whisky and the Music, but who else would it be from?

Macrae launches one of his own hardheads. Then another. He’s acquired two missile locks in less time than it takes to say it, still ducking the ones on his own tail…

But two of the ships after us just break off, injectors flaring. They can get out of range and break the lock, and be back in half a minute. Half a minute’s a long time in a space battle, but is it long enough?

“Boss! Inject away! Get those missiles off you!” I yell, and my commset calmly passes the message on. Then it reports one incoming: “Stop struggling, Marilee. It’s over.” The commset say it’s from –

Haven’t You Forgotten Something? !?

“Keturah!” I yell. I get my rear sights on the Asp long enough to get its ident. Headsmack. Why did I just assume she flew a Sidewinder like mine?

“Of course. I’ve come for you. Ironic, isn’t it?”

It takes a moment for the double meaning to sink in. “Why, you…”

“Oh, don’t. This isn’t personal, it’s just business. Now stop your wriggling and accept the inevitable. And thanks for the help.”

I’m already ahead of her. I told her where we were going and it’s thanks to me we’re in this trap. There’s still seven or eight ships converging on The Whisky and the Music and they aren’t all missing, and no shields are going to stand that for ever.

“Stop dodging, Commander Macrae. Are you expecting someone to come and help you?” says a ship that is actually named Nothing Personal, Just Business. Macrae outright says “Ha ha ha ha ha…” – a commset won’t pass on a laugh – and scratches another one of them with his rear laser. Just seven still after him, with the two that he missiled on their way back… but there are a lot of drive flames out there all of a sudden. Bystanders, or are they going to help – and which side? Whichever way it’s going to happen, it needs to be quick. Macrae had to run straight to get that laser shot in, not for long but long enough to take a storm of hits.

I’m still afraid, but I’m enraged as well, and I cut power, pull around, and set myself head-on at the Asp with my drive on maximum and my laser finding the mark. Let’s both go together, Keturah!

“Tally-ho!”

“View halloo!”

“Reynard’s broken cover!”

“Game’s afoot!”

My commset is full of nonsense and I haven’t a clue why. I don’t have time to think about it. Keturah’s laser is filling my viewscreen and my energy’s burning away far too fast. But I don’t care as long as she goes as well. I flapped my mouth and betrayed my boss and I don’t deserve to survive this.

“Crazy little dirtbag!” comes over the commset as the Asp breaks at the last instant. She’s shedding plasma, badly, but so am I.

“I say, play the white man, Stiffy. My bird, don’t you know?”

“Oh, don’t beef about it, Ginge. There’s an Adder there that’s more your mark.”

I still haven’t a clue what all this is about, but –

“Haud yer wheesht and pay attention to business!” sends The Whisky and the Music.

Then –

“Thanks for the assist,” says Haven’t You Forgotten Something. “Bye, Marilee.” What –

“Warning. Hull breach.”

Swotty Neville here.

The Macrae asked me if I could possibly set down a few words about how things went down at Ususor, for those of you who’ve been following what we found on the young lady’s recording device, since obviously she – Well, if you’ve been reading up to now, you already know. Sorry.

It always seems to be me who pulls these assignments, ever since Stiffy, Ginger, Nobby and I were boys together. I don’t know whether it’s because they genuinely have no idea how to tell a story, or are too bone bloody idle by half, or if it’s just that I’m always half a second too slow to duck. Anyway –

But first I ought to give people their right names, I suppose. Not that Stiffy and the others would mind the least once they got to know you – and there’s not an ounce of real snobbery in all of them put together – but, you know, while we’re still officially strangers there are standards to keep up, what? So I’ll carry on using the nicknames for now, but you should know that Stiffy Fitzalan is known to the world at large as Reginald, Earl of Arundel; Ginger Percy is actually Hugh, Earl of Northumberland; Nobby de la Pole is really Frederic, the Marquess of Suffolk; and all of this makes me Archibald Neville, Earl of Warwick. That’s the introductions over with.

Now, the Macrae got word through to us that there was something in the wind. Exactly how he did it, I’m sure you’ll understand I can’t tell you, but believe you me, the Macrae’s not one to drop a word idly. Equally, he’s as good a man as you’ll see when it comes to fighting his own battles, ever since – But that’s his story to tell. Let’s just say that firstly, if the Macrae’s actually admitting he might be glad of a little assistance, you can take it as read that something monstrously unfair is being set up for him, and secondly, when this man asks for help, he doesn’t need to ask us twice. Part of the reason is that he owns about a million acres up in the Highlands, all of it absolutely prime sporting land, and he’s very liberal when it comes to letting a friend have the run of it in the Season, and of course he’s the man to go to if you want to know what ticks in the whisky world. Mostly though, he’s such a thundering good egg that no-one wants to be the man to tell him no.

Well, Ginger got hold of me, and I got hold of Stiffy and Nobby, and we warned a few other likely chaps to be on standby, turn and turn about as you might say just in case the Macrae got the time or the entry point a little off, only I’ll not mention any of the others for now lest ill come of it, and we got the Purdeys greased up and ready for the off. Not to impugn your nous or anything, but I doubt you’ve seen a Purdey. They’re all custom-built and never sold on to the general public, and the few that there are generally stay in-system although they’re perfectly good enough for a quick hop over to Arazaes or Edle or Gerete. They’re meant as sporting rigs, though, not long-distance space transports – but they also make first-class fighting ships when you take the buttons off the foils.

Without going into too much detail, let’s just say that a Purdey is about as fast as you want, about as well-armed as you need bearing in mind that a missile is a blackguard’s way to pot a bird, and – which is handy from time to time – rather hard to spot from just outside scanner range. And now I think I’ve probably told you enough to understand how it was we came to be lurking among a small clump of asteroids thirty-odd kilometres from the Witchpoint, watching for wormholes for all the world as if we were crouching in a stuffy hide on a damp morning waiting for the Monarch of the Glen to put in an appearance.

Of course you’ll see any number of wormholes open up in any system, especially in Ususor where there’s a ready market for those fancy electronics and a steady supply of whisky to ship out (but not the good stuff, and never believe anyone who tells you different). So we had to bide our time and watch for suspicious activity – such as ten to a dozen drive flames all edging around the Witchpoint as nonchalant as you like. Little did they know, we thought.

It doesn’t take long to close the distance in a Purdey and start to teach a bunch of miscreants the reason why they should conduct themselves like gentlemen. Granted, by the time we were moving the Macrae already had a swarm of the blighters acting tiresome, but we set about evening up the odds as soon as we could, and it’s no loose vainglory to say that we do it rather well. Of course we practise on “dangerous game” regularly, with the buttons on the foils of course – but that doesn’t stop us knowing how to give a scoundrel the point when it needs to be done. Quite the reverse, let me assure you.

The Macrae bade us watch out for a Sidewinder, who was one of his party and likely to be out of her depth, and I must say we did the best we could, but she was sore beset by an Asp that had ought to be picking on someone her own size, and before we could get to her – and we saw her giving the Asp of her best, for all that – I’m afraid some scummish waghalter gave her a fearful searing with a laser. It would have been too much for her had her ship been in the best of order; and it wasn’t.

Neville here again.

It’s not good to be caught in a doomed ship with no escape capsule. The human body really is not designed to stand up to an exploding ship’s drive, and even if it were, tolerably few of us turn out to be all that good at breathing vacuum, and less of us get much chance to practise.

It might surprise you to learn that there was any chance of survival at all. I’m afraid that ships will explode when their drive’s containment field ruptures. There’s nothing to be done about that until someone rewrites the laws of physics and comes up with an entirely new energy source for spaceships. For most of us it’s enough to have something that will let you bat around a solar system pretty much indefinitely and not need refuelling – and which, if you have the right kind of hull and so on, will even let you land on a planet and take off again, or skim through a star’s upper atmosphere – and it seems manifestly ungrateful to demand something that won’t explode when you let it out of its bottle in too much of a tearing hurry.

What isn’t beyond the wit of man, though, is to design a containment field in such a manner that, when a ship blows, there’s a safe zone – roughly conical – that won’t get torched by the hellish energies being loosed on the inoffensive vacuum of space. That’s darned handy if you have an escape capsule and are just a half-second slow punching the eject button, and it also means you have a fool’s hope if you don’t.

You then move on to that business about learning to breathe vacuum, which of course is utterly imposs., and in fact your best hope – insofar as you actually have one, which you naturally don’t in all but the most freakish set of circumstances – is to let your breath out in a controlled but above all rapid fashion before you rupture the one and only set of lungs you were issued with. That leaves you with a tiny amount of oxygen in your blood, although for the little that it’s worth, the vacuum will keep the carbon dioxide levels in your lungs vanishingly small, so at least your nervous system isn’t frantically signalling you to breathe when there’s damn-all to breathe in. You’ll black out very soon, of course, but you’ll do so largely painlessly, although I for one don’t care to make a habit of it.

Now you’ll remember that I mentioned about practising on “dangerous game”, and the most dangerous game you’ll find, on or off-world, is a man whose training and armament is a match for your own. We’re rather fond of space duelling in Ususor system – some more than others, admittedly – and while we do take care not to space each other carelessly, we do take account of the fact that accidents will happen.

When they do, you can either weep, wail and wring your hands, and then make manly statements at some poor devil’s funeral, or you can move efficiently into action confident in the knowledge that you have prepared for every eventuality as best you can, and no-one needs to end up dead if everyone does his bit. That’s what happened when Get An Honest Job blew up.

First of all Stiffy cried out “Rider fallen!”, and Nobby called out “On it! Keep the miscreants busy,” which of course we were all doing to the best of our ability and no small effect as it was. Now Nobby’s Purdey was equipped, as was mine and Stiffy’s and Ginger’s, with the necessary accoutrements to rescue some poor soul who’d just been consigned to hard vacuum, always granted one or two minor considerations such as remembering not to hold her breath. The first one was an extra little sensory device that no-one much bothers with because no-one much needs or wants.

A human body’s an inefficient radiator, what with the temperature being so low and all. Even so, it’s perfectly possible for sophisticated electronics to pick up a human body’s warmth at a range of a few kilometres, as long as you’re not looking for it against the sun. Can’t expect miracles, you know.

You then need a device not unlike those fuel scoops that a lot of merchants carry – and yet not entirely like, for all that. A cargo canister’s very solid metal and can stand rough treatment, even if there’s some poor devil of a slave inside it. Flesh and blood needs gentler handling.

You also need a pilot who can lock onto this warm body, make the best of his way to it, and get it safely scooped up in a single pass; if you miss the poor blighter you’re at grave risk of passing him or her through your drive flame, which is odds-on to be immediately fatal.

Taken all in all and considering the astonishingly poor chances involved, you’ll understand why most spacemen will cheerfully shell out the denarii for an escape capsule, even at slight risk of being scooped by the wrong side and sold for a slave after all or, if the opposition is feeling particularly bloody-minded, blown up while you’re helpless. Since the ungodly on this occasion would surely have skewered any escape capsule fired from The Whisky and the Music or his escort, you can see why it wouldn’t have helped much this time.

However, if you’ve once been fortunate enough to have had all of the above go pretty much according to the maker’s instructions, and you’ve not succumbed to brain damage in the meantime, your chances are excellent if, while your rescuer’s brothers-in-arms are dispatching the rest of the baddies to the region where the woodbine twineth, you yourself are being gently repressurised in, for choice, about two hundred hectopascals of best O2.

All of which, I’m pleased to say – and apologies for the epistle, but this is indeed why they call me Swotty – happened.

I never expected to wake up in my own coffin.

No matter how I try, I can’t make the memory come back – of the few seconds after my Sidewinder exploded, and I went tumbling into the void. Apparently I let my air go, and I must have been conscious for several seconds while I went hurtling head over heels at about the speed of my vanished ship. I may even have seen a gleaming black shape appear against the backdrop of stars, match velocities with me with impossible precision, and gather me into its belly. But my brain won’t bring the image back for me. It’s gone, like a dream that vanishes when you wake and you never recollect again.

So I can’t swear that I ever even lost consciousness, but I didn’t regain actual awareness until I was in this narrow compartment that was just big enough for a rather larger human being than me, with a gentle hissing in my ears that told me air was being brought in slowly and patiently.

“Don’t be alarmed, Marilee,” said a voice through a speaker. “You’re in safe hands. Are you badly knocked about?”

“Macrae!” I gasped – not because I’d mistaken the voice for his, but because I needed to know how he was. The voice seemed to grasp what I meant, luckily.

“The Macrae is doing just fine, and you can save your sympathy for his opponents,” the voice reassured me, “and I ask again, are you badly knocked about?”

“I – I don’t think so,” I said.

“Bleeding?”

“Can’t feel any… let me check… no, I think I’m okay.” If I was bleeding into my space pants, I couldn’t find out until I had room to take them off; they’re too bulky to make much of an examination through.

“All right, I’m going to take that as meaning you’ll live for the next half an hour or so. Heading on down. There’ll be a sedative coming through in a moment. Don’t fight it, there’s a love.”

“Macrae!” I gasped again, and once again the voice seemed to know what I meant.

“He already knows you’ve been picked up – and it’s all quiet out here now. I’ll let him know you’re doing all right and asking for him – now you just have a nice cosy nap.”

I had no trouble doing as he said, which was certainly for the best – being carried along blindly in a tiny container while a ship makes a dash for the Coriolis station is probably something that’s best slept through if you have the option. I don’t know if he was a little heavy-handed with the sedative, but the next I knew was after I’d already been let out after the ship docked, and stretchered away to a clinic that was a step up from any medical facility I’d ever seen.

There was an instrument panel on a trolley next to my bed, with a whole set of sensors stuck to my body that were, I guess, communicating wirelessly with the panel. All the lights were green, which was reassuring.

And Macrae was sat in a chair next to my bed, completely unharmed and in the best spirits I’d ever seen him. He grinned. “Glad to see ye made it, lassie.”

I held out my hand and he took it, and then I closed my eyes to try to keep the tears in, and not really succeeding. “I’m sorry. This was my fault.”

“How so?”

“Tiraor station,” I stammered, “the last girl I slept with… I forgot to keep my mouth shut, I told her where we were going, I was in uniform… she was with the assassins and she must have known the Macrae colours if they’ve been after you. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

I felt a soft pad of cloth on my face. “Dinnae talk daft, child. It was nae fault of yours.”

“It was!” I insisted. “It was a stupid mistake and it’s not like I didn’t know better, I shouldn’t say anything to anyone about where my employer’s going, all the more if they’ve got the whole time we’re crossing the sector to set you up!”

“But that’s what I wanted,” Macrae said, and my eyes blinked open. “Aye, ye heard me right. I couldn’t count on yon rapscallions hearing it from you – but I left plenty other breadcrumbs as I was going. I knew well enough there’d be a trap laid for me, and what I was after was to lay another one of my own.”

My eyes widened – and then, despite everything, I began to smile. “You scheming old…”

“Compliment accepted,” said Macrae. “An’ ye’ll understand that I couldna let ye know what was going down?”

I nodded. It was obvious. What I didn’t know, I couldn’t betray by some unintended word or gesture – anything that might have stopped Macrae from turning the trapper into the trapped. But… my ship was gone, for all that. I gave a brave smile my best shot. “Is there any chance I’ll get to find out what this was all for?”

“Aye, an excellent chance. First, though, I’ll see to it that ye’re a free agent. If ye but say the word, I’ll spot ye a brand new Sidewinder to continue plyin’ your trade in. Alternatively, I can make it a Cobra Mark One plus a few highly desirable extras – injectors, beam lasers, and some trading capital.”

I blinked in astonishment. “That’s… an outstandingly generous offer.” Not the Cobra III of my dreams, but a viable trading vessel for all that.

“Alternatively,” Macrae said, “an’ it might entail a free ride in a ship we were discussing just the other day… I’m heading down to the planet directly. Medical staff here will keep ye under observation, and security will be very tight. When ye’re ready, catch a shuttle down.”

He handed me a datapad. “Travel expenses are credited on this. Ye’ll find instructions also. Read ‘em verra carefully and commit them to memory.”

Thanks for posting those three chapters so quickly. I hate cliffhangers where a main character's life hangs in the balance...

- Neelix

Ah, I spoil you guys. The force was with me, but I had a number of interruptions that stopped me writing until the evening, by which time I had several episodes backed up.

More interruptions today, but stay tuned... there's more to come.

Dammit, Malacandra.. you gave me a lump in my throat that took quite a bit more reading to dispel!

Well done.

After the heart in the mouth moment and subsequent gut wrench...

Malacandra wrote:

Hull breached!

I'm glad Marilee came out the other side of the mangle - and in better shape than did Fleabag (something to do with body mass? - I expect ClymAngus could explain better 'n me). It would be hard to see Marilee walking down the ship corridor with the occasional neck twitch

Malacandra wrote:

Swotty Neville here.

...but you should know that Stiffy Mowbray is known to the world at large as Reginald, Earl of Arundel; Ginger Percy is actually Hugh, Earl of Northumberland; Nobby de la Pole is really Frederic, the Marquess of Suffolk; and all of this makes me Archibald Neville, Earl of Warwick.

There's a few names right out of the 'War of the Roses' here - Percy of Northumberland, Neville of Warwick, de la Pole of Suffolk, (and also I think) Reginald of Arundel. Takes me back to a board game I played when younger - 'Kingmaker' - that I'm sure I've still got buried in a cupboard somewhere.

Three cheers all 'round,
Rah, Rah, Rah!

SteveKing wrote:

After the heart in the mouth moment and subsequent gut wrench...

Malacandra wrote:

Hull breached!

I'm glad Marilee came out the other side of the mangle - and in better shape than did Fleabag (something to do with body mass? - I expect ClymAngus could explain better 'n me). It would be hard to see Marilee walking down the ship corridor with the occasional neck twitch

Well, Marilee was lucky enough to have some extremely good help much closer on hand than she suspected - and these guys are so insanely gung-ho you suspect they may actually have spaced each other to see what it feels like.

SteveKing wrote:

Malacandra wrote:

Swotty Neville here.

...but you should know that Stiffy Mowbray is known to the world at large as Reginald, Earl of Arundel; Ginger Percy is actually Hugh, Earl of Northumberland; Nobby de la Pole is really Frederic, the Marquess of Suffolk; and all of this makes me Archibald Neville, Earl of Warwick.

There's a few names right out of the 'War of the Roses' here - Percy of Northumberland, Neville of Warwick, de la Pole of Suffolk, (and also I think) Reginald of Arundel. Takes me back to a board game I played when younger - 'Kingmaker' - that I'm sure I've still got buried in a cupboard somewhere.

Three cheers all 'round,
Rah, Rah, Rah!

Mowbray (incorrectly!), but yes. Although it's a sign of the times that I checked my English earldoms online rather than go three steps from my swivel chair and get "Kingmaker" down off the shelf (but now that I have, I'll correct the episode). I've not actually installed "Feudal States" but the wiki gave me some inspiration that I felt I should act on rather than waste the opportunity granted by a random-seeming trip up to Ususor - although I've had a fair idea what "The Macrae" is going there for...

"The Macrae"? All will be revealed soon enough.

I needed some new clothes again.

Not that I had very much to my name apart from the credits banked away in my account, which I could access from any GalCop station. There isn’t that much room in a Sidewinder, and just carrying around my Macrae uniform had roughly doubled my personal possessions; but of course all that was gone along with my usual off-duty clothes and the very small handful of odds and ends I’d bothered taking around with me. I didn’t shed too many tears over any of that, but it did mean I had nothing to stand up in apart from hospital pyjamas, which cover the essentials decently enough but look odd in public –

And I say that in spite of the wild variety of styles and colours you’ll see on any GalCop station, where you’ll find an awful lot of sentient species rubbing shoulders with each other, and even the humans are dressed according to a thousand different styles from a thousand different worlds. You’d think against all that background noise that hospital scrubs would go unnoticed, but they’re almost uniform enough to be recognised for what they are anywhere you go, and unless you want to look like an escaped patient, you need to get something more fit to wear once you start thinking of checking out.

I had an escort wherever I went – actually a choice of escorts, who took turns to stick to me real close. The first one I was conscious enough to recognise told me to call him Nobby, since he figured that having pulled me from the æthereal void he was entitled to consider me family or near enough. Obviously I’d ask him why he was called Nobby, and he laughed and explained as follows:

“When we were kids together, we always had it drummed into us. Noblesse oblige. Means a chap has duties to go with the rank, what? Well, I always pronounced it with a short ‘o’, so those clever coves started calling me ‘Nob-less’, which I, you know, strenuously dissuaded ‘em from until at least we compromised on ‘Nobby’. Of course a Marquess is about as nobby as it gets from the perspective of oi polloi, but no more than an Earl in real terms. Anyway, you might as well call me it if you’re going to be kicking around with The Macrae.”

He also said he was happy to answer to Freddie or Pole, as the spirit moved me – and that, along with his effortless ability to pronounce the æ in “æthereal”, won me over pretty much on the spot.

Pole was younger than Macrae, but still quite a bit older than me – old enough to have been my father if he’d had an early education, which from what I’ve learned about the Ususor nobility is as like as not – and from his colour and the strength of his grip and how he moved I guessed he didn’t sit around all day doing nothing, whatever a Marquess might do for a living. I noticed a couple of things; firstly, that he was keeping me on the Ususor side of the Coriolis station rather than the GalCop side, and secondly, that without being ostentatious about it, he seemed to be armed to the teeth.

I learned very soon that this is a privilege which the ruling classes on Ususor negotiated with GalCop, along with a larger-than-usual share of the Coriolis station territory. The planet itself may be low-tech, and you might think it would be backward, but the nobility have a lot more influence within and around GalCop than you’d expect for all that, not least because they mainly have a lot of wealth tied up in the more advanced systems in their local cluster.

What it meant to me, at that time, was that it was perfectly safe for me to go shopping on the Ususor side, because if anyone had got past the rest of the station security, Freddie and the gang (as he also called them) had a number of interesting and effective ways of registering their objections to any threat on me.

Although my savings were a long way from allowing me to retire, they were more than up to buying a new wardrobe without the least danger I’d miss the money, and the only reason the tailor couldn’t provide me with a whole new Macrae rig off the shelf was that they were most insistent about making it afresh from scratch. That, so they said, was the way the Macrae would want it, and the delay would be only a short one.

That did give me time to meet the other three – Swotty Neville, who was about as bookish as an Inleusian spotted wolf, Ginger Percy, who was exactly as red-haired as advertised, and Stiffy Fitzalan –

“You see, back when I was learning to fence, the duelling-master was always on at me to loosen up. ‘Too stiff! Too stiff!’ he used to yell at me… so of course these dear souls made sure I heard plenty about it. As long as you know. These jesters would as soon have you believe it’s because I never saw eleven a.m. without a stiff one to brace me up.”

As I was to learn, all four of my rescuers could put away as much as Macrae and show as little sign of it – which would have put any spacer-bar partygoer to shame – but none of them were anything but cold sober the whole time they were watching me. But I was soon fit and well, and respectably dressed, enough to catch the shuttle down to the planet.

“Mind you don’t forget what The Macrae told you to say, now,” they warned me. “Hope to see you soon!”

All four of them claimed they needed to be there to see me board the shuttle. If there’d been anyone present who meant me harm, there wouldn’t have been enough left to cremate. I hoped I’d see them again.

Ususor spaceport doesn’t have a shanty town.

Now, I’m not claiming that Ususor or any other planet that’s run by a noble class is automatically a paradise on the strength of it, and maybe a whole lot of people are worse off for not being allowed to leave their land when they want to. What I do know is that on my homeworld, people could leave their land because no-one cared enough to stop them, and they could travel all the way to the one advanced, civilized place on the whole planet, and then they could find out the truth when they got there. The streets aren’t paved with gold, food and luxuries don’t drop down from the sky by magic, and it’s nearly impossible to find even a paying job that will keep you out of the most horrible squalor imaginable, and anyone there that can make a living off someone even worse off than them will cheerfully do so. So the fact that Ususor is spared that is automatically one up to the ruling classes.

There is a town not too far from the spaceport, and it does provide labour for them, and it does have an actual stone keep overlooking it, and there is a knight or a lord or someone in charge of the keep and the town, and it’s his say-so as to whether anyone gets to move in to town, and strays and vagabonds are sent home either with a whipping or without one, as they choose – so Macrae told me later. But the town is no more disgraceful than anywhere else on the planet, and the human misery there is a drop in the bucket next to the shanty town on my homeworld.

Macrae’s instructions told me to look for the sign of the thistle – with an illustration helpfully provided on my datapad, or I’d not have known what to look for – rendered in white on a midnight blue background. That took a little finding. There turned out to be a lot of signs of one kind or another, which shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn since any given nobleman on Ususor rules only a small fraction of the planet. Still, once I’d learned what the sign looked like for in its actual size and colour, I had no real problems following it.

I was respectably dressed in my new Macrae colours, only a few hours old, and carrying one small holdall which contained all my other worldly goods. It came as no surprise to find that the young man on the desk under the sign of the thistle was dressed about the same – although the colours were different, the style and pattern were much what Macrae himself wore. Well, I had my instructions to follow.

“May I ask the purpose of your visit, please?” said the young man with perfect grace and politeness, and I answered:

“I’m here to see The Macrae?”

“The Macrae?” he echoed.

“Yes. Macrae Of That Ilk, if you prefer,” I replied. The message had deleted itself from my datapad after I’d read it, but Macrae had been quite insistent: All would be well if I used that form of words; and if I did not, then I would be given the politest run-around possible until I gave up and went away. I needed to get it right first time and I would not be given the slightest chance of a do-over. Fortunately, I’d remembered my lines correctly.

“Just so,” said the young man. “May I ask if you are familiar with a low-technology planet?”

I smiled. “I was born and bred on Qudira. It doesn’t get any lower than that, believe me.”

He checked the computer screen in front of him and nodded. “So I see. Then you will need to know that GalCop credits cannot be redeemed in the interior, and you will need local currency. I have that here for you, if I may check… Thank you.”

It was quite a novel experience to be handed a bag of actual coinage. My datapad beeped as the credit was transferred, and also as a guide was uploaded to tell me what the various coins were and how much they would buy. Then: “If you’ll go with this young lady, please. Your transport’s paid for.”

The young lady in question led me through to a ground vehicle not unlike the one I’d ridden with Agent Elus in, but with seating for many more people. Today, though, I had it all to myself. If it came to that, there weren’t too many single travellers coming through the terminal building, though it looked like it could accommodate many more if it had to.

There were several different air vehicles all marked with the thistle, too, some of them much larger than the one I was led to, though I can’t tell you much more about them. I’m a spacer; all atmosphere transport is “thing with wings” as far as I’m concerned, and all I needed was to be shown where to get in and where to sit. This one had seating for just three other than the pilot. Apart from that, I can’t tell you much, except that it definitely wasn’t of local manufacture: its power plant was a slightly smaller version of what they put in an Adder, and there’s no way Ususor’s own industry was able to build that.

There wasn’t much formality about our departure, either – much less than you’d need to launch from or dock with a Coriolis station even on a slow day. So I guessed they didn’t have all that much use for air transport on Ususor, either.

However it was, I sat back and enjoyed the ride. The drive was a little less noisy than it would be in a Sidewinder, and there was a little noise as we were moving in air and not space. Otherwise, there was no reason not to just enjoy the view – except that the weather wasn’t cooperating.

It rains a lot in the Highlands.

That was nothing I wasn’t used to from Qudira, which has heavy rainfall for a lot of the year. On the other hand, on Qudira I’d never had to worry much about not being able to see more than ten metres in front of my face. I never travelled far enough from home to have to worry about getting lost or falling over the edge of a cliff, and at walking speed even ten metres of visibility is plenty to avoid bumping into things.

Air travel is different. I didn’t enjoy the sensation of being unable to see anything in front of me for a good five minutes after we took off, and while we were then above the cloud layer and could see in front of us, I hadn’t a clue what was below us.

My pilot seemed happy and confident though, and after half an hour or so she took us back down through the cloud, until we emerged a lot closer to the ground than I liked. To either side of us, in fact, the ground was reaching all the way up to the low cloud, which left me wondering uneasily what would have happened if she had been half a kilometre off to either side.

“Forecast has this clearing by the afternoon,” she said companionably, “and then you’ll get a better look. On landing approach now.”

And with that she sleighted us directly at a long narrow lake below, which made me actually yelp in protest given that I was already looking around for a flat stretch of land and not seeing one. She took her eyes off the landscape long enough to look tolerantly at me. “Something the matter?”

“We’re heading for the water!”

“Aye, so I should hope. Sit tight.” And with that she went back to her task, performing a number of technical things that I would have understood better on a spaceship.

We touched the water about two minutes later, bounced once, then settled comfortably, leaving a white wake behind us. Look, I already told you they were just things with wings to me, all right? I had no idea the funny-shaped things below us were meant to float.

My pilot brought us round to a wooden jetty that stuck a hundred metres out into the lake, where they winched out a kind of cover that meant I could get off the aircraft without getting rained on, and the two young men waiting in a shed at the jetty were both stood on guard. I told them, as I’d told the young man at the spaceport, that I was there to see The Macrae, and one of them said:

“Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled;”

“Scots, wham Bruce has often led,” I answered.

“Welcome to your gory bed,” said the other.

“Or to victory!” I completed. They looked at each other, and the second one said:

“Was that ‘often’ or ‘aften’ she said just then?”

“Sounded like ‘often’ to me,” said the first; and they looked at each other as though they were about to tell the pilot to take this stranger back where she belonged, before grinning and saying together “It’ll do.”

“And ye’d better come in the dry while we sort you out,” the first one added. “Ah’m Andy, by the way. Andy McCorquodale. The fright yonder is Gordon, Gordon Farquhar. He disnae bite; me either.”

They found me a warm place to sit while we waited for the rain to ease off, which it did just before noon, when Andy walked me along the jetty to where a two-horse carriage was waiting. I knew what a horse looked like, of course, although we had used an ox for the draft work when I was younger. The driver was a rather older woman than my pilot, but I didn’t think she could be much over thirty, and I noticed that Andy seemed to defer to her.

“Welcome,” she said kindly. “You’ll be The Macrae’s guest. Allow me to help you up; you’ve arrived just in time for the best of the day.”

As he held the carriage door for me, Andy coughed discreetly. “It’s the custom to spare your porter a mite o’ siller – mebbe a groat or a bawbee.”

I searched his honest face for any sign this was another joke at the stranger’s expense, but I had money to spare and handed over two of the small silver pieces, reasoning that Gordon might expect a share, before the carriage pulled away.

The road would have passed for a fair highway on Qudira, but probably nowhere else, and the horses took it at a steady walk while the sky continued to clear. Now at last I could take in the grand sweep of the tree-lined hills flanking the long lake on either side – a deep green that was almost blue, with a hint of mist as the morning rain began to burn off again. And the scent! After the sulphurous atmosphere of my homeworld – which as a native you learn to endure but never love – and the carefully neutral air of every GalCop space station, this was almost beyond describing. I can only say that if it was possible to bottle “fresh”, that would the the Ususorian Highlands scent – as if the world had been newly made that morning.

But the massive stone building in front of us, half an hour from the jetty, was not newly made by any means; and even the strange music being played by the four dozen kilted men marching on the gravel before it sounded ancient – inspiring awe and reverence in the same measure as it seemed to make the blood burn for battle. And there on the steps of the great stone house was Macrae, in full dress, but this time with an actual sword belted at his waist.

“Welcome,” he said as the carriage driver helped me alight. “I hope you like the pipes!”

There was one thing puzzling me.

Which is a gross distortion of the truth. There were any number of things puzzling me, and I figured I might now have permission to ask, which Macrae confirmed at once.

“Aye,” he said. “You’re here no longer as my employee, but as a guest and a friend, so ask away.”

He led me up the steps to the huge wooden doors, which a servant opened as we approached, and I got my first look inside. The overwhelming impression was of age – and space; it was far larger than any house I’d ever seen even if it was much smaller than many an office building you can see in a spaceport or most hi-tech planets. Inside, a fantastic assortment of art treasures and antiques lined the entrance hall, and old-fashioned pictures – the kind that were worked by a human being, not a computer – gazed down on us from either side. There was a queue of people waiting for us, or for Macrae at any rate.

“Thank you. You told me you were from Gerete?”

“And here I am settled into a large estate on Ususor, a couple of light-years away. Yes?”

I nodded. “That’s exactly it. Also, why do people keep talking about ‘The Macrae’? It’s not just your sporting friends.”

Macrae led me past the line of people. “Donald Hamilton, my majordomo. Ye’ve met his wife Elspeth already – she drove you up from the loch. Finlay Macadam, my ghillie. Sholto, Dirk, Morna and Shona, house-servants. That was Dougal that opened the door for us. And here comes the Young Macrae with Eilidh Campbell.”

The Young Macrae was a copy of his father about thirty years younger, leaner and fitter but plainly cut from the same cloth. The girl with him was maybe a year or two younger than him, and the skirt she wore was of the same design as mine and the women of the Macrae household but a completely different colour pattern. She looked at me guardedly as we moved away.

“So to your questions,” Macrae said. “Gerete is where I live and spend most of my time when I’m not in space; it’s where my company headquarters and what you might call my ‘town house’ are, and if you were looking to get hold of me for any reason, Gerete is where you’d start looking and where I’d be likeliest to see you. However: Here on Ususor is what you might call the ‘ceremonial home’ of all the Scots on Gerete. There are a few million that live here permanently, and many more that make the trip over from Gerete perhaps once or twice in their lives. It’s actually a similar story with Percy, Fitzalan and the rest of them, though they’re not Scots.”

“Okay, and Scots are…?”

Macrae laughed. “The easiest thing for you to do is watch and listen. It’s a way of dress, a way of talking, a way of life… it’s blood-ties going right back to the Homeworld and it was old then. You’ll see plenty of what it means over the next few days – while The Macrae is at home.”

He waved me to a seat by a small table and called over two of the house-servants, Shona and Morna, both of them rather older women. “Miss Marilee just arrived from off-world. She will be wanting refreshment.”

“All right,” I said when they had left, “and The Macrae is, what, head of the family?”

“Of the clan – which is a collection of closely-related families. The men you met a few moments ago are not members of the Macrae family, but they are members of the clan – so Finlay might introduce himself as ‘Finlay Macadam of Macrae’, whereas I am ‘Alisdair Macrae of Macrae’, family and clan. Ye might call me ‘Macrae Of That Ilk’, meaning ‘of the same’ – another way of saying ‘Macrae of Macrae’, in other words.” He frowned. “Although there’s some scholarly controversy as to whether we’re usin’ the word in the exact ilk sense as our forefathers.”

I sat back and listened to the music outside, letting the Scots atmosphere wash over me. It was yet another wonder Macrae had shown me in the few short days since I had met him. “This is fantastic.”

“So we think also – and folks on Gerete will save all their lives to make the trip. Space travel’s no’ so cheap, even for a beggarly couple of light-years. But have no fear. Any that wants can register for a free trip, though the waiting list is very long and not everyone can arrange to come while The Macrae is at home.”

Refreshments arrived – a hot herbal drink that was tan-coloured and had a hint of bitterness, and a plate of some cream-coloured biscuits that melted as you bit them. “What is happening, then? I’m guessing it’s a very special occasion if the head of the clan himself doesn’t come here very often.”

“An astute deduction. There will be music, dancing, feasting, an opportunity for the townsfolk to see some traditional crafts and perhaps take home a little something as a keepsake, and the games of course. And also…” He leaned forward and rested his hand on one knee. “A few extra guests to discuss what I hinted at the other day, concerning that new ship I showed you. You’re invited.”

Macrae sat back in his chair. “Meanwhile, I have some father and son time owed to me with the Young Macrae, which means you will need showing around. Since that means taking young Lachlan away from his Campbell girl for an hour or two, I think perhaps you and she should make friends. I do believe…”

He cupped his hand to his ear and nodded. “Aye, they’ll be in the music room just now. I hear the piano; that’s Eilidh’s playing for sure. Just cut along and let Lachlan know I want to see him, will you? You can follow the sound easily enough, I’m thinking.”

Nice work, Malacandra .

After i noticed a reference to Heinlein (one of my fav authors) by you in another post, i started following the story.