by Patty Jansen
“We are being accused of being behind the attacks,” I said to Nalya.
“I heard that, but I don’t understand why. We were just in our accommodation. We were about to go to the beach because Larrana wanted to watch some kind of show. We saw the explosions in the sky. We weren’t anywhere near them.”
“They’re not accusing us, our association, but they’re accusing Asto and gamra and because we’re from gamra, they don’t trust us.”
“My father says that people always accuse Asto of these things,” he said.
Yes, and his father wasn’t the easiest person to talk to on the subject of Asto’s relationship with gamra. That part of the Inner Circle wanted to send out the army when there was a perceived affront to Asto, and I was glad that the army wasn’t on board with that.
“Unfortunately, when you’re a big entity, that happens. People become vengeful or envious. You have to be forgiving when people accuse you of causing problems, because if you return the same level of viciousness, it’s easy for things to get out of hand.”
His face creased in a frown.
“So we should just let these people say we did it while we had nothing to do with it?”
“No. We shouldn’t engage in their bickering. We should go by what is the truth. We should find out what that truth is.”
His frown deepened. He was a thinker, and I hoped that maybe when he grew older, he might question some practices he saw happening at home.
“Where are we going?”
“We hope to get back home. All the commercial flights have stopped because of the attacks, so we will take alternative forms of transport.”
At this point, there was a lot of commotion in the hall, so I said a quick good night, and went to see what the fuss was about.
The noise was coming from the room that served as the hub, which was small enough to have originally been intended as a broom cupboard. There was not enough room for all of us, with all security personnel wanting to cram in at once.
“What happened?” I asked their black-clad backs.
“We suddenly got Exchange coverage,” Anyu said. “Apparently it’s not very common that this happens, but they catch small patches of it when the right configuration of satellites exists.”
Here was another strange thing.
If I, with my diplomatic, non-military background, were to plan an attack on Earth in the fashion that had just happened, I would make damn sure I’d disabled those satellites, in case they accidentally transmitted something that I didn’t want to become public knowledge.
The Exchange was monitoring the satellites. Nations of Earth was monitoring the satellites.
If I were a general in the Nations of Earth forces, the first thing I’d do was to disable those satellites, in case they transmitted further commands that would cause more damage.
But nobody had disabled them.
It didn’t make any sense for all the communication channels to still be open.
It was fortunate, if baffling.
Once they established the connection, Anyu hustled me into the room. Zyana vacated the seat at the hub. It was hot in there, with a powerful smell of hot stone that was the scent of Coldi sweat.
I sat in front of the unit. A very simple affair.
“I haven’t seen one of these models in a while,” I said. The hub in my apartment in Barresh used to have a unit like this, but even when I moved in, it was already outdated.
“These are simple but very powerful units,” Anyu said. “They require little fine tuning or maintenance. Ideal for places where those things are in short supply. Do you know how to use it?”
“I do.”
First stop was Amarru. But it was very early in Athens, and the junior Exchange operator told me she wasn’t in. To his credit, he did try to contact her, but got no reply.
He told me they’d been through some gruelling days at work and she might have turned off her communication. That didn’t sound like Amarru at all. I assumed she’d gone for a walk, as I’d known her to do.
She had, however, directed her staff to send me a message. He asked if I’d received it.
I hadn’t, so he re-sent it and told me about the gist of it. It was short and direct. Amarru was going to send a rescue team to pick us up from an as yet undisclosed locality on the coast, similar to the way she’d arranged to pick us up from Cape Town.
“You mean she’s sending a craft to Los Angeles just for us?”
“There will be others who can use it, but she definitely wants you safe back here.”
Oh no, I wasn’t having that. I needed to have a look at the fragment that Celia Braddock had been parading as proof that gamra was responsible.
“Tell her to save our seats for desperate people with children and nowhere else to go.”
“You’re important to us.”
“We are fine, honestly. Tell Amarru not to worry about where we are. We will make our own way back. I wanted to visit my father, anyway.”
“She is clear about it: she wants you safe and on that flight. We’ll let you know the flight as well. You can travel to the pickup point together. We’ll let you know where it is.”
I couldn’t bring myself to tell him a lie, to promise that we would come, and that we would wait and register. I didn’t want to talk about our plans, because it was very likely that people were listening in, in case Amarru thought it was a stupid idea, and in that case she was right: it was a stupid idea. Especially with such a large team that included children.
So I just signed off, telling him that people in my team wanted to use the link. I didn’t like it.
Normally, if Amarru was informed about our plans, she would be fine with taking back part of our team, like the children and others we didn’t need, to a safe haven, but she didn’t know and I couldn’t tell her.
We would have to give Amarru the slip. She worked hard and had not deserved me making a lot of trouble for her. But unfortunately, I saw no way to tell her why we wouldn’t be at the rendezvous. Maybe in time, when she stopped being angry about it, she would even agree with me.
I was about to hand control of the hub back to Anyu when a message scrolled over the screen proclaiming that I had an incoming call.
Someone local, someone with a long identification number. I knew that number.
“Dad, why are you using the Exchange?”
My mind played horrible images in my vision. The safe haven where he and Erith lived destroyed in the attacks, houses burnt, people dead.
“Good evening, son.”
“Well, yes, that, too. Are you all right? Where are you?”
“Erith and I are safe at home, but the lines are down, so I used the little doovey you gave me, a long time ago. Quite surprised that it worked, to tell you the truth. You might have heard that there was an attack on Auckland—”
“No, I hadn’t. They’re only talking about local attacks here. Which places are affected? How many?”
“Many big cities. Tokyo, Jakarta—”
“Athens?”
“Yes, there, too.”
“How bad?” Why hadn’t the Exchange operator said anything about that?
“Oh, I don’t know. There is too much going on in this part of the world. I checked with the family. I know you haven’t seen your cousins for years, but they all survived, although Jasmin and Morgan had to evacuate their home.”
That was an unexpected right-angle turn into memory lane. Jasmin was the daughter of my mother’s older sister. I hadn’t seen her—or any of my other cousins—since that fateful family gathering where that self-absorbed brat Dennis had thumbed his nose at my studies and desire to work at the Exchange. I’d decided that I had better uses for my hard-earned money than the suborbital to New Zealand to visit such rude gits, even for weddings.
“Has anyone said anything about where the attacks came from?”
“No. It’s k
eeping a lot of people occupied. It’s all so random. All we know is that the drones appeared as if out of nowhere. They didn’t communicate, delivered their explosives and vanished without a trace.”
“Celia Braddock says that the Atlantian military forces brought one down.” Damn, why hadn’t she mentioned the worldwide attacks?
“That’s the first I hear of it. The security council of Nations of Earth has been in meetings since the event. Dekker has sacked the security chief and the head of the Special Operations unit. He made a very brief appearance that was stunning in its lack of information. Most governments have put their own defensive procedures in place. We’ve been supplied with emergency rations of medicines and have been given access to shelters, although we’re probably too far away to get there in time if there is another attack.”
“Dad, this is serious. You have to get to safety.”
“Oh, I think we’re quite safe here in our forgotten corner of the world.”
“Dad, there is an unknown ship coming in this direction that we know nothing about. It’s not answering any of our communication. It’s the origin of these attack drones, even if we have no idea how they covered the distance between where the ship is and Earth. We know nothing else about this ship. When I say ‘we’ I mean gamra and the Asto military combined. We don’t know what they want and we don’t know who they are.”
He said again that he’d be safe in rural New Zealand. And honestly, he was probably right.
I told him to take care, and that I was still planning to visit to show him his granddaughter if we could at all make it. He said he was looking forward to that, but I heard in his voice that he had doubts whether it was ever going to happen.
Reality sank in. Earth was under attack. We were on the brink of a war with an unknown enemy.
There wasn’t much time to talk. Members of my team were lining up to speak with their contacts. I’d best get out of the way to let them do that.
I ceded the room to my team, and they went on to talk security things with security people. The connection would last perhaps half an hour before it phased out, and we were on our own again.
I found Thayu in the room where she had stayed overnight, packing away Emi’s baby things. I told her about what my father had said. “One thing I don’t understand is why the Exchange carried on as if nothing had happened. Why we heard nothing.”
“That doesn’t surprise me at all,” she said. “You’ll have heard Sheydu complain about the lack of connectivity here. This country is backwards.”
“Yes, but what about the Exchange? I know connectivity is bad, but there has been contact. Earlier today, even. Why didn’t they say anything?”
But I already knew the answer to that. Exchange communication was not secure.
Thayu confirmed my thought. “When the Exchange goes quiet like that, something is up.”
In hindsight, I agreed. “Do you think they’re badly affected?”
“Not badly enough to have stopped operations, but they’re obviously keeping their heads down.”
I then I told her about Amarru’s directive to stay where we were so her people could pick us up.
“But I thought you wanted to see that drone?”
“Yup.”
“Did you tell them?”
“We can’t. The fewer people know about this, the better.”
“I agree. What are we going to do?”
“I don’t like it, but we have no option but to ignore Amarru. Hopefully, we’ll be able to communicate with Amarru’s people about where we are going, and they can come after us.”
“She won’t be impressed.”
“Nope.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
I ran into Clay in the hallway when I was going to our room to pack. He held me back in the passage that led to the front door but was deserted right now.
“I’m worried. I heard that Amarru is sending people to pick you up. What am I going to say to them when they turn up?”
“Tell them we’re held up getting to the coast.”
“That’s not going to keep them happy for long.”
“Tell them we left, and to the best of your knowledge, we’re on our way to meet them.”
“They won’t be impressed.”
“Being impressed is not what they’re paid for. When they come here to pick us up, they can wait for us to turn up, they can leave again with the other people they’re rescuing, or they might like to chase us. That’s up to them. We can’t communicate our plans across any networks because there is a risk our information will fall into the wrong hands. If they turn up here in person, you can tell them the truth.”
He still seemed very uncomfortable. What was his motivation and loyalty? It was hard to determine. He wore no clan earrings. He seemed close to Amarru. Very close.
I’d also never seen Coldi civilians who hosted units of the Asto military.
It made me think: was he a military spy? Thayu seemed to think Clay and Marisol were from the Lingui clan. I knew little about that clan or their relationships with the military.
By the time I went to bed, there was still a lot of activity in the communications hub. When I walked past, Deyu and Sheydu sat at the tiny table, going over some maps and satellite images while Zyana made notes. The trip would indeed involve trains, Deyu informed me when I checked on them.
Sheydu’s team, with the help of the military satellite, had made a detailed analysis of the vehicles that had visited the garden of the government residence where Celia Braddock had given her talk.
They were still working on the identity of the vehicles in the car park outside the residence, but they had narrowed down the path that the fragment of drone had travelled and Reida was following the truck back to where it had originated, just like Thayu had said.
We had a pretty good idea of where this fragment was held. My team would confirm and crosscheck this with the military.
Thayu sat in a chair checking a security briefing, next to Emi who was out cold in her travel cot.
“Do you think we’re doing the right thing?” I asked Thayu, sitting down on the bed. “I hate the thought of endangering the kids.”
“What is the danger to them? That someone gets angry? That some in our party get taken into custody?”
“That would be unpleasant, especially since we know little about the norms and culture.”
“When you operate at the level that we do, everything is about publicity and perception, even if it may mean temporary discomfort. You want to see their evidence. You can either see it by stealth or by forcing them to let you in. We all prefer stealth, because none of us can claim to comprehend this regime. I’m pretty sure you know this already. You’ve done stuff like this all your life.”
“Yes, but I didn’t have the responsibility for all these children.”
“They’ll be fine. It’s a learning experience. We want Emi to follow in our footsteps, right?”
We both looked at Emi, on her belly on the mattress, her face scrunched into the sheet.
Yes, I wanted her with me, asking questions like Raanu when she was that age.
I really didn’t have an option. Ezhya would want me to investigate while I was here. Once I took the proffered flight back to Athens, I would never get back into the country.
But I spent a long time looking at the ceiling in the darkness, listening for distant sounds.
I didn’t know what I was waiting for.
Another attack to come out of the blue? Signs of unrest? Amarru’s people coming up to the house sooner than I had expected?
But eventually, I fell into a dreamless sleep. I was awoken in the morning, while it was still dark, by activity in the hallway. People were talking, not bothering to keep their voices down.
I got out of bed, seeing that Thayu had already gotten up. Emi was still in her cot, looking at me with big bright eyes.
&
nbsp; I lifted her out and dressed her in her travel clothes.
We had a sling we used to carry her.
When she was a little baby, we would carry it around the front, but now she was big enough to sit piggyback. That meant she would have to go over the jacket, and I needed to put on my armour and strap on my weapon, which would also have to go underneath my clothing. We had an extra piece of armour that went over Emi’s sling to protect her.
It made for an interesting puzzle and combination of items.
With that done, I picked up our bags and went into the hallway.
By the sound of voices drifting through the hallway, I judged that most of my team was in the kitchen having breakfast. Indeed, I found all of them standing around the central bench. With them was another familiar face: Junco.
He greeted me with a crooked smile.
“I was worried about you for a bit,” I said.
“No need. I’ve faced tougher situations.”
“Even tougher than showing around a bunch of aliens when the aliens are supposed to have attacked your cities?”
“Yes. We do mostly tours for high-profile people, a lot of them world political leaders. Not all of them are particularly popular with the locals. Especially not the ones that come from across the Atlantic. When the townsfolk get wind of it, strange things can happen. You know, there are a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands out there.”
It was heartening in a way that tourism still existed in a world like this.
I ate breakfast standing up—because Emi’s armour made it difficult to sit. Emi didn’t like the breakfast offering and refused to eat the sweet bread or the flavoured porridge. She had her mind set on getting yoghurt, but Coldi didn’t tolerate milk very well, and we had no time for upset stomachs.
I had to remove her from the kitchen to stop her being grumpy.
I found Thayu in the security broom cupboard with the rest of the security team in a briefing where Sheydu handed out gear and weapons. Telaris and Nicha would each carry local weapons in addition to their regular pieces.
We were ready. We were heavily armed. The trip would take the best part of three days. Overnight, the Asto military had confirmed where the drone fragment was stored. All we needed to do now was go and see it.
