Ambassador 1A: The Sahara Conspiracy (Ambassador: Space Opera Thriller)

by Patty Jansen

  One of the guards showed us into the dark corridor and a room off the side. Evi told me that they were not tired and they would talk to Amarru’s security about their brief and other issues they needed to know about.

  We followed the guard into a room at the right hand side of the corridor.

  “Wow,” Thayu said.

  The windows and glass door on the far side of the room offered a view over hilly terrain with vineyards. The sunlight turned everything golden. The sky was light blue.

  The room was the size of a ballroom, and had a high sloping ceiling with exposed beams. A fire roared in the hearth.

  “You can rest in here,” the guard said before leaving the room.

  We put our measly packs down near the door. After the kitchen with its fire and roaring stove, it was none too warm in this room.

  Thayu first headed towards the window. No doubt a matter of habit to check out the windowsill for listening devices, since I couldn’t believe she would worry that her father or any of these people spied on her. As she approached, a very large black and brown dog outside rose to its haunches from a lying position outside the glass door and barked a deep Woof!

  “Whoa!” She froze.

  “It’s all right, it’s only a dog.” I had to use the Isla word, because Coldi knew no dogs.

  “But . . . look at the size of it. It’s nothing like your father’s dog.”

  “They come in a lot of different sizes.” My father and Erith had a kelpie that loved to run on the beach and catch sticks and get so filthy wet and covered in sand that you’d have to hose him—which he loved. Since Asto had only invertebrate animals, most of which hid during the day, it had taken Thayu a fair bit of courage to get over her fear of the dog. But Fred was the ultimate people’s friend. We often joked that he would probably wag his tail if a burglar came to the house. This animal, almost waist high, ears pricked, tail still and growling softly, was quite a different kettle of fish.

  “That is a mean guard dog.” I wondered who this house belonged to, because I couldn’t see any Coldi handling an animal like that.

  We took off our jackets and sat on the couches surrounding the fire. The dog slid back down to the ground, resting its head on its paws. It looked like a giant cat watching a mouse hole.

  Thayu sat on the couch, studying the ceiling. She’d want to know how much listening equipment there was in the room, but she also didn’t want to go back to the window and upset that dog again. She clamped her arms around herself. Not happy at all. I wanted to ask her about specific concerns, but not knowing where the listening devices were and who they belonged to, she probably wouldn’t reply.

  Nicha was looking at his reader. He showed it to his sister. “This is where they want us to go.”

  She took it from him, still with a glowering expression on her face, and read aloud, “Ethiopia is one of those African countries that these days exists only in name. While the rich and relatively cool highlands where the capital Addis Abeba is located are a safe haven and closed off to outside visitors, the northern lowlands, including the Afar region, have largely been abandoned, with the exception of the main road and railway which link the landlocked Addis Ababa region to the port city of Djibouti. The Afar region is known as the hottest region on Earth and over the past fifty years, has seen a slow depletion of its population due to conflicts, unbearable heat and the rising of the water table which rendered the region’s main industry—salt mining—unviable by dissolving years worth of salt deposits. Being barred from going up the mountains to the capital, the local population mostly fled to Djibouti. The mining companies which were said to have been responsible for the nuclear tests that caused the 2097 earthquake have since collapsed, leaving the area with the ruined, rusty remains of their activities and a new ocean that is rising at a rate of one metre per year. The area is more than a hundred metres under sea level and the earthquakes have opened underground aquifers to the Red Sea. Because of the area’s volcanic history, the water is highly acidic, poisonous and devoid of any life.” She pursed her lips. “Sounds riveting.”

  Nicha said, “Are you sure you’re not talking about the Circular Sea?” This was the shallow and poisonous body of water between the two main continents of Asto.

  Thayu continued reading. “As a consequence of people leaving, huge swathes of the Afar region are effectively lawless wildlands. Any people who still live there are required to pay dues to militias to protect them, but ‘ownership’ of settlements changes so quickly that often families can’t pay all of their dues. Payment is then made in the one currency of which those people have plenty: children. The boys are cannon fodder, sent out to fight pointless disputes with the next warlord. Most of those never get to fight. They die of heat stress in the desert. The girls fare a little better. They spend most of their lives indoors as domestic slaves or greenhouse workers and, if they are deemed healthy enough, they are forced to remove their IUD and have children.” She glared at me, as if this was all my fault. “Militias, cannon fodder? Reminds me of Indrahui. No wonder this guy Tanaqan feels at home.”

  She showed me a couple of pictures of people: there were young men and boys brandishing guns. A picture that disturbed me was one of a boy barely twelve posing with one foot on his kill: an older man in a faded army vest. There were picture of smiling women, many barely out of their teens, with many children. One picture showed a girl in a filthy hospital room holding a baby with waxy grey, blood-streaked skin, the umbilical cord still attached and disappearing somewhere between her legs.

  Death and birth by the time they were twenty.

  There was a wide range in types of faces and skin colours. Some people looked very African, some people had dark skin but more of an Indian face shape, some had the lighter skin of the Arabic people who had fled to the region from across the Red Sea in the first of the oil wars.

  I scoured the pictures for Coldi faces, as had been prevalent in the Kazakhstan conflict. I found none. Either they were being careful not to show themselves, or they simply used locals. These locals would be grateful to them for providing work and more safety than they might have known in their entire lives.

  “In what sort of area is this construction site supposed to be?” I went to sit next to her so I could see the screen.

  “This area.” She pointed and flicked through a couple of different maps.

  The most prominent feature about the maps was that they showed little: a few dots, an occasional dotted line that marked a trail, and one uninterrupted line that said Afar Development Road—but in brackets it said (defunct); a few settlements that said abandoned; and tentatively drawn in a dotted blue line was the shoreline of the rising sea.

  A dot said Dallol Volcanic Research Station and a little info window popped up with the climate. December happened to be the coldest time of the year—an average of a mere forty-five degrees. In summer, the temperature went well over fifty.

  Holy, holy crap.

  Even more ideal for Coldi than Libya.

  A separate document was a report from some sort of aid agency that had worked in the area to the west, but the information was at least ten years old, at which time, according to the report, workers had left because of repeated threats by the krayfish who controlled the camps, camel routes and towns. The krayfish worked in a large area. They held up convoys of trucks on the main road from Djibouti to Addis Ababa. They controlled the camel trains that went to the north. They owned aircraft that flew into Djibouti. They owned warehouses and shops in coastal towns, including Djibouti.

  It was said that Robert Kray had an estimated thirty thousand followers—which was huge in an isolated region like this.

  Nothing was said about any offworlders being part of the group.

  The rest of the report concerned food supplies to refugee camps, em
bezzlement of aid funds by administrators in the towns and smuggling of such supplies to war zones. While the situation was sad, and this sort of stuff always made me glad that I’d been born in a safe part of the world, nothing in the rest of the report caught my eye.

  CHAPTER 10

  * * *

  I HEARD A SOUND behind me. It was Amarru coming into the room. She carried a tray with four steaming cups which she set on the table. The smell of manazhu drifted on the air.

  She sat down on the couch next to Nicha and clamped her arms around herself. “It’s cold in here.”

  There were some nods of agreement.

  The leafless grapevines bathed in golden sunlight, but under the house’s overhanging eaves, it was bitterly cold. Outside the window, the dog went woof at something.

  Amarru glanced briefly at the fields, but the dog went back to snoozing.

  I asked, “A rabbit?” Coldi, of course, had no word for “rabbit”.

  “Maybe. Or a neighbour stepping out his front door. The dog is used to the smell of us and doesn’t make a single sound if any of us go outside.” Coldi smelled like hot stone. I didn’t need to be a dog to notice the scent. “Your zhaymas could step outside and he wouldn’t do a single thing. For you, it’s another matter.”

  “I won’t go out there,” Thayu said. “No matter what you say.”

  “That’s smart. The people who are most likely to be attacked by the dogs are the ones who don’t know how to handle dogs, but think they do.” She nodded at the screen of the reader of the table. “You looked at the information?”

  “We did. I’m not sure I like the sound of this,” I said. “It disturbs me.”

  “This disturbs everyone. If we handle this wrong, it will be worse than Kazakhstan.” I noticed how tired she looked. Had she slept at all last night?

  “I’m puzzled that there don’t seem to be any Coldi or any gamra people in any images I can find of people in this area. If Mr Kray had brought in a lot of workers from outside, then people would have noticed.”

  “I don’t know that he uses a lot of non-locals.”

  “Then where does the Zhori clan come in?”

  “If they’re present, they’re being very careful in where they are seen.”

  “False identities?” It used to be that anyone who left the Exchange enclave was given a valid Earth identity. Many people still had them.

  “We usually know where the holders of those passes are.”

  True.

  The door opened and Evi and Telaris came in as silent black figures.

  Amarru gestured them to the couch. “Mashara, do sit down.”

  They did, looking uneasy as they always did when they were asked to join us. They were truly most happy when standing outside guarding the door.

  She now touched the underside of the tabletop. It lit up like a screen.

  On it was a more detailed satellite image of the area. “This is what we’re looking at. This was taken this morning.”

  I stared at the lines in the grey-brown landscape. There was a lot of activity at the site if the little specks in the sand were anything to go by. A lot of dust, too. She flicked across to a nearby area, where a sprawling building with a white roof stood on a hilltop close to the encroaching new ocean shore.

  The water was shallow and a sickly green colour. You could see the bottom for the most part. It reminded me of seeing the images of the Aral Sea drying up: little salty waterholes surrounded by a salt-encrusted landscape.

  “This image shows Mr Kray’s house. You can see the pipes running down to draw water from the shore.”

  I could see the pipes going even underwater.

  “When the sea is full, the house will be right on the beach. As you can see, he’s got palms in his yard already. We’d love to know what goes on in these buildings, what is being built at the main site and why, who he is using to build it and how they’re being paid.”

  “They won’t be paid,” Telaris said, his voice dark. He spoke seldom enough that the sound of his voice shut everyone up.

  Amarru gave a go ahead sign. “This is why you’re here, because you are familiar with his customs.”

  “All the Indrahui warlords have obtained their power through the life debt system.”

  “You’re talking about the thing called pahemin?”

  “Yes. People who are very poor pass their debts onto a leader in exchange for their capacity to work. The leader effectively owns this person.”

  Amarru nodded. “And the leaders frequently abuse this power. The poor people have nowhere else to go, because they have no money to buy out the debt, and what is worse, they pass it onto their children. It’s a very abusive situation.”

  Telaris nodded, his expression distant.

  Amarru put a grey folder on the table and pushed it across to me. “Here is your documentation and your cover.”

  I picked the folder up and opened it.

  It contained ID cards, a couple of scientific articles and a list of numbers. A thin flexi-screen with an ID page had my photo, but the name was Martin Spencer. Designation EN, no EXO. Geology researcher—the articles in the folder were all in his name. Married, two little kids. Well, I guessed this was the only way I’d ever be a father.

  “There is a small research station in the region that used to belong to the Geology Department of Reading University in England. The research staff pulled out about ten years ago. It’s now about to go underwater as a result of the filling up of the Afar basin. You’re going to be visiting this area to check up on the Department’s prior work. You will be an academic with no further knowledge of what’s going on in the region.”

  “I presume I’m not going alone. What about my assistants?” All of whom were decidedly from off-world.

  “The university employs a lot of Coldi people. Everyone who has them can use their local names. I’ve created a new one for Thayu.” Back in the days that the Exchange was hidden, it used to issue Earth passports and other ID under assumed names. It still produced a new identity for every gamra person who did any work outside the Exchange enclave. I guessed Thayu was overdue to receive one. I glanced in the folder.

  “Gracie Chan? Could you at least have given her a tough name?”

  “Let me see.” Thayu snatched the card out of my hands and goggled at it. “I can’t even read that.”

  Nicha glanced over her shoulder. “That doesn’t look like you. Here, it says that you live in Rome.”

  “Where even is that?”

  Amarru waited until the two stopped clowning with the card. She was also one of the people with the least-developed sense of humour I knew. Well, outside Danziger’s office at least. She continued, “If you manage to get onto Mr Kray’s land, you will simply ask if it’s all right if you take a few measurements on his land—which isn’t really his, but let’s keep it polite. On one of the datasticks, there is a huge dossier of papers that you can show him to prove that you’re the real deal. You might read them because some of them are quite interesting. Did you know that the Afar basin started filling up after the 2097 earthquake, which was triggered by testing of fusion bombs in the area?”

  Seriously, was there anything she didn’t know? “What if Mr Kray tells us to fuck off?”

  “I’m assuming there is a chance that might happen. Then you’ll tell him in a very old-style British way that it’s your right to work on parts of the shoreline that are not private land. According to the records—you’ll find them on the datasticks, too—he simply annexed the land and doesn’t own any of it. If you can, try to avoid his patrols. Do use Asha’s excellent satellite images. You’ll find them very helpful.”

  “By the look of things, Mr Kray might have lots of people with g
uns. That will stop us.”

  “Still, tell him you’ll complain to the authorities and that it’s your right to visit the station. It’s on a piece of land that does belong to the university.”

  I blew a breath out through my nostrils. “I don’t like this. You’re sending me out to provoke. I might as well take a writ and staple it to his front door.”

  She grinned. “You are getting very clued up on Coldi habits. No, we’ll do no writs. We’re sending you out to investigate with a couple of people who should know the man’s customs.” That was what Evi and Telaris were for. “Nations of Earth was going to send you on a diplomatic tour where people who know nothing would have confirmed that it was all fine and taken care of. They know it’s not, but like Kazakhstan, they were going to ignore it. You can’t ignore Romi Tanaqan and not suffer for it.”

  “What do you actually want done about him?”

  She formed her hand into the shape of a gun and made a sound like a gunshot.

  I felt chilled. “That’s what Asha is here for, right?”

  “He is monitoring the site from orbit. The ship has ultrahigh-resolution cameras. I’m sure you’ve already seen the quality of the images.”

  Why didn’t I believe her? And worse, what was I supposed to do about it? If Mr Kray was caught for some transgression, he could never be brought to trial, because he didn’t fall under any laws. To speak with Asha, the dealing could never be adequate if we had to keep it legal. But if we allowed Asha or some other assassin types to interfere, we’d have to deal with the fallout of breaking the Nations of Earth imposed “treaty”, which determined that Asto’s military had to stay outside the 500 km exclusion zone. And Danziger would use that as a vehicle to close the Exchange.

  If we didn’t “deal” with these people in this illegal way, Asto would face serious allegations at the gamra assembly.