by Patty Jansen
Thayu gave me an odd look. I guessed she had the same thought. A flicker of concern went over her face.
The young servant led us into a luxury bedroom where there was a huge white bed and mirrored wardrobes along the back wall. The floor-to-ceiling window looked out over a little courtyard with a burbling fountain and bright green grass.
“You stay here. You see Mr Kray.”
He bowed again and turned to the door.
“Wait. Does this mean Mr Kray will come and see us in this room?” I glanced at Evi. Such a meeting would probably not go well.
“Mr Kray is very busy.” The boy’s Isla was probably not good enough to understand the insinuations in his halting statements. “You stay here. You see Mr Kray.”
He showed us a cavernous bathroom off the room looking out onto the same courtyard. The colour scheme was getting a little monotonous. The floor was pristine white, the bath was white, the towels were white.
“You clean and wash. Get clean clothes. You see Mr Kray.” He gestured at the wardrobes at the back wall.
He bowed and backed away to the door.
“When will Mr Kray see us?” I asked him.
“You see Mr Kray.”
He didn’t seem capable of saying anything else, so I let him scurry out of the room.
The first thing Thayu did when the door shut was walk around the room and inspect it for bugs. Finding no obvious ones, she inspected the cupboards and the bed. She didn’t find anything there either.
Thayu tried the sliding door to the courtyard. To my surprise, it opened, letting a waft of hot air into the room.
The white cat had followed us into the room when the servant had let us in. It now slipped out the door into the courtyard—past Thayu who hadn’t noticed it and gave a gasp of surprise. An alarm started wailing.
A big guy in a white uniform with gold piping burst into the room. He was a dark-skinned African and looked frankly ridiculous in his uniform. If I hadn’t known any better, I would have thought that Mr Kray was a colonial-style white man in the same way that the Nations of Earth diplomats were very much into Victorian customs and clothing right now. The servant was making a big fuss, waving his hands while speaking rapidly. He had his front teeth.
“I don’t think he likes us going outside,” I said to Thayu in Coldi.
“You’re kidding, right?” She snorted and pushed the door shut.
But the man went past her and opened it again. He went into the courtyard, out of view of the window, and came back a bit later carrying the cat, all paws sticking up. It gave us an accusing look. He put it on the ground where it scurried away, tail held high. It turned around at the door, twitching the tip of its tail.
The beefy servant bowed and left after saying something while waving his hand at the cat.
Mr Kray obviously didn’t like the kitty to burn its tootsies on the hot ground outside. If there were any mice in this place, they were likely to be inside.
When the beefy guy was gone, the cat sauntered up to Nicha, going mreow and butting into his leg.
I’d long since decided that the awkwardness of Coldi around larger animals was genetic, because, despite having lived on Earth for most of his life, Nicha really wasn’t fond of people’s pets. He tried to push the kitty out of the way with his boot—spilling more sand over the floor—but it started headbutting his other leg.
I decided to rescue him from the kitty before things got unpleasant. I picked it up and dumped it in the middle of the room, but as soon as its paws hit the ground, it scooted back. Now it ran up to Thayu, jumped on the couch where she sat looking at her bug detection screens and wriggled under the screen onto her lap.
Fortunately, my father also had a cat named Myra, and she had become familiar with the concept of cats and the irony that they loved Coldi people because of their high body temperature.
So we were spared the sudden jump to her feet and the yowling of the cat as it was unceremoniously tossed to the ground. But impressed by this white fur ball on her lap, Thayu was not. It lay down, as if the whole world belonged to it, and curled its tail around its body. Thayu spreads her hands in a what the hell? type of gesture.
I said, “Let’s go in the bathroom. Cats hate water.”
There were nods all around. Evi and Telaris had hardly said anything since arriving at the house. They sat next to each other, brooding black giants with moss-coloured hair and bronze curls.
As they got up, I realised something. “Wait, where is Henri?”
He was not in the room with us.
As far as I remembered, he hadn’t even come down the corridor with us. Had he even entered the house, or left the truck?
A chill crept over my back.
Thayu and Nicha gave each other a meaningful look. They knew something? I gestured in the direction of the bathroom. Somehow, it seemed a safer place to have a discussion than the living room, given that Mr Kray was probably trying to snoop on us.
The bath was set in the middle of the room, a circular basin that, with a bit of squishing, held all five of us. Fortunately also, with five people in the bath, it didn’t need so much water.
We sat on the ledge around the perimeter while the water splashed into the basin and rose around our feet, legs, backsides and waists.
Thayu and Telaris held a conversation in code. It was about bugs, but that was about the extent of the meaning I could glean from it.
The kitty remained at the door and stalked away when I flicked water out of the bath. It jumped on the couch with a glowering look at us. I went to shut the door after it.
“Henri,” I began.
“He was kept in the truck when we got out,” Nicha said.
“I didn’t even see it,” I said. “I was too concerned about my own backsides. Still am. I don’t like what’s going on here.”
He shook his head. “No. This . . .” He gestured at the bathroom’s white interior. “Putting enemies up in your house in luxury is something Ezhya would do. Anyone from the Inner Circle, really.”
“He’s Indrahui. Do those warlords play games with visitors as well?” I looked at Evi.
He shook his head. “They’re more likely to throw them in the dungeons.”
Well, maybe that was the next step. “Thay’?”
She licked her lips. “That arrangement on the table in the hall . . .”
“Yes,” Nicha said, as if glad that someone finally mentioned it. “I noticed that.”
“What does it mean?” I asked.
Thayu said, “It’s ugly. It means that everything is broken and all associations disbanded. It means that people will be killed.”
Nicha added, “But also it wasn’t quite complete. If Mr Kray really intended it to be a Coldi arrangement and cause offence with it, he would have included an offensive object, like a broken gun or something.”
Evi said, “At Indrahui, we don’t have that custom with the arrangements in the hall. It could be a coincidence. How would he know that he’s getting Coldi visitors who can interpret it?”
“That’s the question, huh?” Thayu said, in a tone that indicated that it wasn’t much of a question for her. “Henri or Tamu?”
“I don’t think Henri knows anything much,” I said.
“Why isn’t he here with us, then?”
“Because they don’t want him to find out much either. He’s been flying supplies to them. I think they’d like to keep him.”
But I realised something else. The broken gun that Nicha said was missing from the arrangement in the hall. I’d seen it, in Dekker’s office. Was this a ridiculous coincidence, or some practical joke played on us? And if so, who was playing it? Danziger? Dekker? Or Mr Kray? Did thi
s scheme go all the way to the top?
CHAPTER 21
* * *
THE QUESTION WAS what to do now. How to get out of here, and whether to worry about Henri. The others said to just worry about ourselves, but it didn’t feel right to me. Living and working in this area, Henri would know more about Mr Kray and weapon smuggling than we did, but I didn’t believe he worked for anyone. If anything, he’d seemed more terrified of the soldiers than we were.
We discussed what Mr Kray intended to do with us. It could well be that he believed we were a scientific team, but I wasn’t holding my hopes up. Neither were the others.
And then the order to dress in clothes from the wardrobe full of white kaftans?
“I’m in this house because I have no choice, but I’m not wearing any of this vile man’s stuff,” Evi said, a deep hatred in his voice.
Telaris nodded, the expression on his face intense.
Nicha said, “Take it easy.”
But I agreed with them. We should rely on this man’s property as little as possible.
So after we got out of the water, we washed our clothes in the bath.
I was annoyed that all my things were scattered over the area: some stuff left behind at the research station, some in the plane. I didn’t think I’d left anything incriminating in any of those places, but a change of underwear would be nice.
Evi risked the alarm and took all our wet things into the courtyard. He seemed disappointed that it didn’t go off and didn’t bring in the servant in the prim suit, because Evi was stark naked and very black in all sorts of interesting places, including the palms of his hands and soles of his feet. Indrahui had blue tongues.
There was no obvious place to hang the wet clothes, so he draped wet shirts and pants over the bushes.
“Hot out there, but our stuff should be dry soon,” he said, when he came back in and joined us while sitting at the edge of the bath. Nicha had pulled out the plug and the muddy water gurgled down the hole.
We agreed that we would hold onto the scientist and team story as long as we could.
“It’s not going to stand up much longer, mind you,” Telaris said. “As soon as he sees us, he’ll know something is up.” Us meaning himself and Evi. Indrahui. He would know that he had been recognised. He probably already knew. If we could only find the damn bugs that spied on us.
Evi nodded, his face grim. “Something will be up.” The two of them always had a brooding appearance, but right now they looked terrifying.
They were here only for one thing, and it wasn’t sitting in the bath.
“How about we try to avoid bringing you two into a meeting with him?” I asked.
They remained quiet. Evi said, “Mashara goes where the delegate goes.”
“But I’m a scientist, not a delegate.”
“Amarru’s orders.”
“All right then. If we’re called into a meeting you can stay outside and observe the area as much as you can.”
“We’ll go inside with our scientist,” Thayu said. “In case someone decides to do something stupid.” I had no doubt that she’d still managed to smuggle a weapon inside, even if I had no idea how she did it.
Evi wasn’t happy with that, but that was how it usually worked and how we planned it.
Telaris went outside to check on our clothes, still stark naked.
“I don’t understand why the other door is armed and this one isn’t,” Thayu said.
“There is a sloping roof directly above our head here,” Telaris said, coming back into the door with an arm full of shirts. “If there’s more than one of us, we could boost each other up and have a look at the rest of this place.”
“We’d have to wait until dark, though,” Evi said.
“And hope they don’t have floodlights all over,” Nicha added.
“Or vicious guard dogs,” I said.
Thayu shuddered.
They all agreed. Dogs would be really bad news.
Telaris distributed the clothes. “The rest wasn’t quite dry yet.”
“What about we can try to tap into some sort of security network?” Thayu said. “Seems less risky than going outside and being discovered by Mr Kray’s clown guards, or the serious ones. Or having to face dogs.”
The team liked that idea, and what was better, it could be implemented immediately, if Thayu could locate the bugs that were likely to be in the main room, and maybe in the bathroom, too.
The discussion about bugs finally drew Evi out of his brooding mood. He and Telaris—Thayu and Nicha, too—hated being passive, and liked moving forward on their own terms, even if the situation was risky.
I had a good team.
Telaris went back into the courtyard and retrieved the rest of our clothes, which were almost dry after barely half an hour out there. Again, the alarm did not go off.
“It’s really strange,” Thayu said. “Why arm that door and not this one?”
No one could answer that question.
I got dressed. My shirt and pants had gone stiff in the sunlight, and I didn’t doubt that, were we in Barresh, Eirani would have a fit with their lack of cleanliness, but they smelled of sunshine and felt fresh.
Thayu was already going around the room for a second inspection for bugs when both my feeders burst into life.
Notice you stopped moving. This was Asha himself.
We’re inside the house. We had an issue with the plane.
Are you restrained against your will?
Not yet.
We will be going into geostationary orbit so that we can observe the area constantly. We have discovered other construction sites nearby. Not all of them obvious. Will send you images.
I suspected that Thayu was already looking at those images, because she had abandoned the search for bugs and leaned against the wall next to the mirror-fronted wardrobes. The white cat sat at her feet.
I told Asha, We will find out as much as we can about what these people are up to. Not mentioning that we’d have a little trouble getting out of here.
This man Romi Tanaqan is not be underestimated. He’s smart, can be nice and entertaining if he wants to. Even at Indrahui, he managed to woo clan leaders and officials. They would come to his house, only to be killed or subjected to unspeakable cruelty. This is another reason your cover would work well. He is interested in power and knowledge. A scientist would intrigue him.
That would be good if I were actually a scientist. I was hoping that he wasn’t going to grill me on geology.
Let me know if you need any assistance.
I will.
But I knew one thing for certain: calling him for assistance was the very last thing I’d do, because if I did, he wouldn’t risk his troops by putting them on the ground fighting a land war. He’d do something from orbit. And if that happened, Nations of Earth would revoke my citizenship faster than you could say alien invasion.
When he signed off, I went to look over Thayu’s shoulders. She was indeed studying satellite images of building activity in the desert.
The shape and design of a rectangular site in amongst sand dunes followed the outlines of the old Coldi plan. On the far side of the main site lay only a patch of churned earth. There was nothing to see there, at first glance, except that the colour of the soil was slightly darker in a clearly artificial, perfectly rectangular area. Closer inspection revealed a driveway that disappeared under the ground and appeared to be the entrance to an underground building. Now the image I’d seen earlier made more sense. What we were looking at was not the foundation of some project yet to be built, but an existing building which was mostly underground.
Then I noticed the locality coordinates at the b
ottom of the image. “Hang on, this is not even close to where we are.”
Thayu shook her head. “No. He says they discovered three similar sites in the northern half of this continent.” The other localities were in Algeria and Egypt.
Nicha, Evi and Telaris joined us in studying the image, but neither had any idea what might have been built under the ground.
We chalked it up as “another place someone should have a look”, but right now, we weren’t even sure how to get out of this one.
“How are you going with the bugs?” I asked Thayu.
“I can’t find any,” Thayu said. She looked unhappy.
Nicha said, “This house is new. The bugs are probably built into the walls.”
Thayu argued that even if that was the case, her scans should be showing some activity. Nicha said he didn’t believe that bug could be shielded, so they walked around the room studying all the places where bugs should be hidden if there were any, mainly in the ceilings and corners, above the doors. And finding nothing.
“How about you check places where you wouldn’t put them?” I said.
Thayu gave me a don’t be stupid look. “But . . . you wouldn’t put them there.”
“You wouldn’t. Maybe they’ve had different training and would put them somewhere else.”
“But if you put them somewhere else, you wouldn’t get as good a view of the room. That’s why everyone puts them in the ceiling.”
“They could be for listening only.”
She spread her hands, looked like she was going to argue, but then let them sink. “Who is part of the security here?”
But I did notice that she checked under the table. It would have been nice if she’d found anything there, but my luck didn’t go that far.
