Rogue Stars

by C Gockel et al.

  Ezhya Palayi left halfway through this discussion, surrounded by the solid, maroon-and-silver figures of his bodyguards.

  Yes, he had indeed come for me.

  Thayu and I, Devin and the female assistant went back to the apartment after the sitting concluded, collecting Evi and Telaris at the door. By now it was almost midday and sunlight beat down on courtyards, casting harsh, double-edged shadows on pavements and tables. Not having eaten since before dawn, I felt dizzy.

  As soon as we came into the door, a mouth-watering smell of baked bread, hearty soup and smoked fish tortured me. A glimpse into the sitting room revealed a veritable feast on the table.

  I turned to Thayu. “Go inside. I’ll quickly check the messages.” Maybe Melissa had written, or Eva. Danziger’s statement wouldn’t be made until later tonight.

  You work too hard.

  And now she was starting to sound like Eva.

  I grumbled a deliberately vague response, and as I went into the communication room, I raked my hand through my hair. The “legs” of the feeder latched onto my fingers, allowing me to pull the device clear of the skin.

  A switch turned in my head. Off. Blissful silence. No more interference with my thoughts. No more accidentally stumbling into hers.

  I was in the mood for a long letter from Eva, full of trivialities about wedding dresses and guest lists, but when I had slipped into the chair behind the control panel of the communication hub, the first thing that came up was a message from the secretary to the president of Nations of Earth, very official looking, with the Nations of Earth symbol and a picture of the assembly hall with its grand columns and marble steps.

  The main content of the message, however, was from Danziger, written last night. Oh damn. I’d spent four days waiting for this. Couldn’t he have sent this a few hours earlier?

  Mr Wilson,

  I have been most disconcerted with allegations raised by you in your article at Flash Newspoint.

  In response, I want to make a number of things clear to you.

  Nations of Earth have not cut your funding and have not isolated you or interfered in your communication. While it is true that a number of countries, as well as the emergency council, wished your position to be cancelled, this vote did not pass in the general assembly.

  More importantly, and I will be making an official statement about this later today, upon occupying late President Sirkonen’s office I uncovered a number of documents relating to the matters you have been studying, or so Ms Murchison tells me, namely the history of Coldi involvement in Earth matters.

  In doing so, I have come upon some material that I find downright disturbing. There is evidence of serious plans to relocate a large part of Asto’s population to Earth. We have detailed technical drawings of a string of settlements planned for the northern and western fringe of the Sahara Desert. I send you this material which I have presented to the emergency council and which was received with utmost concern. There is absolutely no evidence that governments of concerned countries on Earth were ever consulted. I do not take a positive view of this material. It seems to me that those who have claimed danger of an invasion have been right.

  In response to this, the general assembly has voted for you to be recalled. I have arranged for funding for your immediate return to Rotterdam.

  Sigobert Danziger, Acting President, Nations of Earth.

  16

  I OPENED UP the documents that had come with Danziger’s letter.

  Street plans, buildings, satellite photos of an area in the Sahara with the outlines of the plan drawn in. Huge complexes of units. Accommodation for thousands, tens, hundreds of thousands of people. Detailed plans with explanations in Coldi.

  My heart thudded in my throat. Wherever did this come from? How had it fallen into Sirkonen’s hands? I looked for information, a name, a date on the document, but found none. Instead, there were balance sheets of costs, including a plan for transporting a huge number of people across the Mediterranean unnoticed. They even had damned security.

  Oh, shit.

  Whichever way I looked at it, a large-scale Coldi migration to a poor African country which had probably been paid for the land without the knowledge of Nations of Earth amounted to an invasion. A silent, peaceful invasion, but an invasion nevertheless. Exactly the sort of thing people had feared. Present this in the emergency council, and representatives would go ballistic, which was what they had done.

  Closed the Exchange.

  Limited off-Earth communication.

  Yet why had no one told me about this?

  Because you’re so far in bed with the enemy, Delegate, you don’t know which is the right door out of the bedroom. Or so had Eva’s father said not so long ago, in one of our heated discussions.

  I’d known about Asto’s bugs in electronic surveillance. I’d judged them benign.

  And it seemed I had been very, very wrong.

  Meanwhile I’d spent a large part of my speech this morning defending Asto’s innocence? And Ezhya Palayi accused me of double standards while at the same time he said he would vote—wait.

  I brought up the gamra link, with the results of this morning’s voting. I was right, Asto had voted for making the statement that no entity of gamra was involved, including Asto. That meant that they were in breach of gamra law. My fingers trembling with anger, I opened up a blank message. I was going to—

  No. Telling Delegate Akhtari would solve nothing; she was a bureaucrat, and I couldn’t say I trusted her.

  I was going to face the bully head-on. Hopefully, Ezhya Palayi hadn’t left Barresh yet. I typed, I need to see you immediately about a matter of great importance. With commanding pronouns. I signed off with my name and selected send before I changed my mind. There. I was going to play him at his own games.

  Now—what was I to do about Danziger’s command to come back?

  According to my contract of employment, Nations of Earth could recall me for a specified period of time, and gamra would need to be notified.

  Had Danziger done that?

  Come to Rotterdam to do what? To be carpeted for disappearing under the noses of Nations of Earth Special Services Branch spies? To face suspicion about this plan, which I had to have known about, otherwise why had I left so quickly? To join Nicha in custody? Defying Danziger’s order would probably amount to resignation. I was pretty much on my own already, but if I did that, I’d lose all the leverage I had.

  No, I would have to do something else; but until I had a brilliant idea, I’d have to stall.

  I sent off a quick message to the office downstairs to ask if the money for travel had come in from Nations of Earth. It had.

  I fired back another message, Set it aside and do not touch it.

  Then I sent a message to Danziger, According to my contract, gamra authorities will need to be notified if I am to be recalled. I would like to know if this has been done.

  Send.

  Let Danziger take a few days to answer that, then I’d ask another question. Decide what to do when I had the answer. Could I possibly enlist some gamra support to keep me here?

  “Are you coming? The staff are impatient to start serving.”

  Thayu’s voice jolted me out of my concentration.

  I stared at her, vaguely remembering lunch. “I’ll be there soon.” Damn, I didn’t have the time for lunch.

  “The food is really good.”

  “Yes, yes, I’m coming.” Dazed, I pressed myself off the seat. I hesitated, then quickly copied the plan onto my reader and carried that into the sitting room. I slotted the original into my code-protected work area.

  Thayu hadn’t lied. A gauze-like golden cloth covered the table, and on it stood a selection of bowls and plates so colourful I could barely believe all this was edible. There were slices of fruit—orange, yellow, red and vivid purple, salads in green, white and red, jars of juices, smoked fish—or so I thought—pickled mushrooms, nuts, various kinds of bread and of course the ever-present red
tea.

  Eirani waited at the head of the table, giving me a sharp look when I put my reader next to me and sat down.

  “The staff promised to show the Delegate proper food. This is the local food of Barresh, Delegate. All the freshest, best quality the markets offer. This bread is made from the nuts of the megon tree.”

  She put a thick slice of bread on my plate, grey in colour with a swirl of brown. It smelled of roasted almonds. My stomach rumbled.

  “What code is it?”

  “The Delegate can eat everything on the table. Barresh has a gentle climate and we are not so desperate that we need to eat food with nasty poisons.” A glare at Thayu.

  Thayu returned the glare. “And if some of us didn’t have such delicate stomachs, there would be no nasty poisons.”

  Enough. I placed my hands on the table, as if I was about to get up. “If you two are going to be like this to each other, that’s fine, but at least tell me what it’s about, do it somewhere else, or shut up and stop sniping at each other!”

  Oh, Delegate, much too direct.

  Eirani stared out the window, her face impassive.

  Thayu looked down at her empty bowl, lips twitching.

  So they were going to be stubborn. Fine! Just fine, for crying out loud. As if I didn’t have enough trouble already.

  We ate in total silence. I tore pieces off the bread, and picked at some salad. I made an effort to try at least a bit of every dish. Eirani supplied me with more fish, an orange meat with a strong salt-and-pepper taste.

  But my thoughts were in the communication hub, that dark place devoid of daylight, where there might be messages from Danziger, and my stomach seemed to have taken leave of its normal appetite.

  I took my reader and thumbed it into life, shifted my chair so I faced the window, and dragged my tea closer.

  The reader’s screen had come up with the material Danziger had sent. I studied the maps, the detailed plans of apartment blocks, water storage, canteens, covered walkways, tube trains. Why had Danziger said nothing about this discovery when I spoke to him?

  Even Sirkonen must have known. Then another thought: was there more on the datastick than weather maps? Oh, damn.

  I fished it out of my pocket and inserted it in my reader. It whirred and whirred, but nothing came up on the screen.

  I took it out and put it back in. The same thing happened.

  Damn, the laundry. While most data media were waterproof, who said they were resistant to soap?

  “Anything wrong?” Thayu asked.

  I shook my head, pulled the datastick out again, and put it back. It whirred, but nothing came up. Sweat broke out on my upper lip.

  Thayu still stared at me. I was doubly glad I had removed the feeder. Someone had put her in this apartment with me for a purpose, I was sure of that. What if the purpose was to get her hands on this data and destroy it so as to destroy evidence of Asto’s guilt?

  She looked at the reader. “It’s not working? Let me have it and I’ll see what I can do.”

  No, I couldn’t have that. “No, it’s fine.”

  Eyebrows rose. “It makes that noise when it refuses to read.”

  “I’m not sure you could fix it. The data is not recorded according to the Asto system.”

  She gave me a sharp, what-do-you-think-I-am look. “I don’t know that a different system should be a problem. Hedron uses different coding, too. The principles of each are similar. It’s a matter of reading binary code, then just applying formulas of how many bits there are to a byte.”

  That shook me more than anything else. She didn’t know Isla, but she knew those words. What was she—a trained network spy? She was right about the data of course. Although different systems used different conventions, all digital technology was based on the same principles.

  No, I decided. I couldn’t let her have it. Not at all. Not until I knew Asto’s intentions. Not until I knew that secret she’d almost let slip this morning in the assembly hall. “Thanks for offering, but I think I can manage.”

  I was no ace at computer skills, but I did have a program on my reader that might help me—at least I thought I had copied it after that course I had attended on data recovery. If I couldn’t find it, or if it didn’t work, I would ask assistance from a specialist at Nations of Earth. Failing that . . . I remembered how in Sirkonen’s office, a man in Special Services uniform had taken a copy. There would be copies on Earth.

  When I finished eating, I took the datastick and my reader back into the communication room. Alone.

  For some reason, a conversation I’d had with Amarru came into my mind. We’d been sitting in her office sipping hot cups of manazhu. It had been winter, and the cityscape outside the window was bleak and grey.

  She’d said, “Between you and me, Cory, I’m convinced that one of the reasons Seymour Kershaw committed suicide was that he had become isolated. He found it hard to trust people, even those we had sent to work with him.”

  Amarru, of course, had gone through the whole crisis; she was a lot older than me.

  I had been so convinced that isolation and lack of trust would never be my problems. I had a zhayma. I would run an open system, encourage people to inquire, and I’d give open answers to all of them. But in hindsight, that was just a load of bullshit.

  In the real world, people spied and cheated and went behind your back.

  In the real world, you couldn’t trust everyone, maybe not even anyone.

  I sank into the chair and activated the Exchange connection. While the icon crawled over the projection, I rummaged on the seat, found Thayu’s translator, and pressed both on and off buttons for a few seconds to completely flatten the charge. Even if the office downstairs held a supply of charged pearls, she’d have to go there first, and I would have time to get material out of her reach.

  Damn, I was starting to think like a detective now.

  I shoved the datastick in my reader.

  Luckily, I found the program in one of my tucked-away folders which I didn’t use often. I followed the instructions, but no matter what settings I used, the program wouldn’t read the undamaged part of the file. My heart thudded in my throat. Did that mean that all of it was damaged?

  The connection icon for the Exchange was still crawling at the bottom of the projection. Wonderful. Out of all times, the link chose this moment to play up.

  I brought up the gamra link—it worked fine—and entered my code.

  A number of messages came up. A news report on my first appearance in zhamata, generally favourable. A report from Shey’ shamata, the major news service of Asto, on Nicha’s capture, forwarded on by staff in the office downstairs. I guessed the local lawkeeper Inu Azimi who was mentioned was the same person as Nixie Chan. That made sense. Azimi clan were administrators. The report said, Meanwhile, Inu has assured Nicha’s family in Beratha that help will be asked for when the local officials keep stalling his release.

  There was also a message from Nicha’s father, I am getting impatient about my son. Please advise on your progress in negotiations.

  I cringed, seeing Asto military craft descend on Rotterdam. I had no progress to report. Nicha was a hostage, along with two hundred thousand other Coldi. After having seen Danziger’s material, I doubted if there was going to be a peaceful solution.

  That link to Earth still wouldn’t work.

  Oh goddamn it! This isn’t helpful, people, not helpful at all.

  I fiddled with the reader and discovered another option on the recovery program that was called map file. When I selected it, a solid block of numbers and letters came onto the screen.

  Hexadecimal code, I guessed, because the numbers went up to nine and the letters up to F. I turned on the projector so I could see a greater section of the data and scrolled up, and then down, feeling stupid.

  Whatever had given me the notion that I would be able to fix this file? I was a diplomat, and knew nothing about the inner workings of computers. Nicha had usually taken care
of that. Coldi were good with numbers, and binary and hexadecimal numbers ran in their blood, since they counted everything in exponentials of two. The exceedingly complicated counting system reflected the Coldi sense of outward-spreading spider veins of a network. In Coldi, one, two, three, four, five really meant two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, representing an ever-increasing circle of influence. In Coldi societies, you could not subtract five from sixteen and arrive at a workable number. Mathematicians had devised notations for anomalies like the number eleven. There was spoken mathematics and absolute mathematics. Coldi children learned both from birth.

  And here I am, not trusting the only person in this apartment who can help me.

  I scrolled further down.

  There were gaps in the data, all over the file.

  “That’s artificial,” a voice said near the door.

  I gasped and whirled around.

  Thayu leaned against the doorframe, her arms crossed over her chest. How long had she been standing there?

  “Artificial?”

  “Yes, don’t you see it?” Professional-you. She strode forward, scrolled back up. “Look at the data pattern here.” She pointed at the image. “And down here.” She pointed again.

  I didn’t see anything except numbers, numbers and more numbers, and random gaps. “See this pattern? It repeats all over, at regular intervals. This is from the damaged file, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  “This damage was deliberately caused. Whatever was on this, someone didn’t want you to read this information, or wanted to destroy proof. Is it important?”

  “I don’t know.” What a lame answer. How about: a president has been murdered over this? But why? Did she know?

  Maybe, I decided; but before I questioned her, there was one other person in this household who might know more.

  I pushed myself up from my seat. “I think it’s time I have a bath.”

  A bit after midday, of course, was not the appropriate time for a bath, but Eirani came with me nevertheless, bringing her basket of towels and soaps. She didn’t question the strange timing, and that in itself might be a sign.