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

by Patty Jansen

  The tunnel that led to the main part of the project was 2.4 kilometres long. It had a walkway along its entire length and, apart from the house, and the pump station further down towards the shore, there were no other entrances. The only exit was in the factory hall of the underground settlement.

  The trouble was how to get to the tunnel, which had an entrance at the end of the corridor where we were.

  “We no longer have weapons,” I said.

  Nicha said, “First lesson in defence: in the hands of a skilled fighter, a flower can be a weapon.”

  That was the proverb that his father was trying to get credited to his name. It needed to have seen a certain number of documented cases of use before it could be official. I didn’t think this counted as documented use.

  It does, said a dry voice in my head.

  Thayu, Nicha, Evi and Telaris were discussing whether the best option was going out the courtyard door, or the room’s door into the hall. I had the feeling they were deliberately ignoring me, telling me ever so subtly to shut up. I told them to go into the bathroom and that I’d take Telaris’ position by the door.

  Once the four of them were gone, I became aware of an odd sound, like something being dragged across a rough concrete floor.

  The sound came from the back of the room. As I got closer to the back wall, something in the wardrobe went mreow.

  Ah, the cat had woken up. I opened the door a crack and got rewarded with a scratch over my toes. Ouch.

  OK, kitty was unimpressed. I shut the door again, and the cat resumed scratching the back of the door.

  It was an awkward situation. I hated doing this to an animal, but also couldn’t risk it walking around transmitting stuff we couldn’t allow people to hear. I had no idea how to deactivate the bug. Normally Thayu would rip cords out of the wall and cut them. I guess Mr Kray killed animals when he didn’t need them anymore.

  I sat on the couch.

  The cat scratched the back of the door.

  I found it hard to listen to. I hoped that when we left, someone would free the cat. I hated it when people were cruel to animals like this. Or like giving adaptation to camels. Whose idea was that?

  It was just getting light when Nicha and Telaris came in.

  I began, “What is—” but Nicha motioned to be quiet. Next he gestured Get your things.

  I scrambled to collect my reader, my shoes and socks, and put them on. Urgh, those shoes smelled bad.

  When I was ready, I nodded to Nicha. He made a signal. Evi came out of the bathroom, followed by Thayu. She carried a strip of plastic that looked to have been removed from a cupboard or some piece of furniture. She took it to the door, and knelt. Very carefully, she inserted the strip between the door and the doorframe where the lock was. After a couple of minutes of wriggling, there was a click. Thayu nodded and rose, while keeping the plastic strip in the door. Then Evi yanked open the door and Nicha ran through.

  A shout in the corridor was followed by a heavy thunk.

  A few moments later Nicha came back, studying a gun in his hands. It was a model like Simon Dekker had shown me, except this one was complete with a plasma chamber. He gave it to his sister, who studied it. “Interesting model.”

  “Didn’t you just show me that there’s a bug outside the door?” I protested. “They’ll have seen you.”

  “Mashara disabled it,” Telaris said, his tone smug.

  Clearly, Mr Kray had not expected trouble, because there had only been one guard outside the door, and as Nicha told me, he’d been dozing. He now lay unconscious on the floor.

  Thayu went over his clothes and divested him of other things that might be useful; some sort of entry pass, a reader and a knife, which she gave to Telaris.

  “Come.” She led the way further into the house.

  We walked as quietly as we could. It was in the very early hours of the morning, and outside everything was still pretty dark. Inside the house there was no activity and even our very careful footsteps sounded loud.

  We found the tunnel entrance at the end of the corridor easily enough.

  A few flights of stairs led down into the ground. Unlike the house, the stairwell wasn’t air-conditioned. The air was breathless and hot.

  We came to a door at the bottom of the stairs, where Telaris and Thayu disabled another camera before leading us through. It led to the mesh walkway in the tunnel. The giant pipes ran in both directions underneath us. It was so quiet that I could hear the water sloshing inside on its way to the house, settlement and the factory.

  We started walking. The passage was lit only by the occasional green emergency light on the ceiling. Our footsteps sounded loud on the metal of the walkway.

  Thayu was walking first with her scanner. Every now and then she would stop and turn around, holding the scanner in front of her with her arms outstretched.

  Telaris said, “Mashara has established that there are bugs in this passage. We will have to disable them.”

  Thayu gestured. “Up there.”

  Nicha went a few paces back, approached at a run, and jumped up the side wall. He reached for something on the ceiling, and then tumbled to the ground with a thud that made the walkway shudder.

  “Nich’!”

  He rolled to his feet, got up and came back to us, grinning and holding a tiny square box dangling on a piece of electrical cord.

  As we progressed through the tunnel, this process repeated itself a few times. It was slow. I knew the tunnel was 2.4 kilometres long, but it seemed much longer. It was hot and humid because the pipes leaked a bit in some places. Nicha made enough noise for a herd of elephants, and he was starting to look dirty, with smudges of moss and algae on his hands and clothes. We couldn’t just shoot the bugs down, Thayu said, because we had only one gun, which was only one-third charged and we might need it later.

  I still felt we made enough of a ruckus that a reception committee would be waiting for us when we finally came out of the tunnel.

  Finally, the end was in sight—or at least some place where the tunnel opened out and there was more light. An oil-scented breeze wafted from that direction. And a good deal of noise: clanging and hammering and clicking and zooming. I guessed this was the factory hall that we’d seen.

  Closer up, I could see into a big hall where the pipes crossed close to the ceiling. At the entrance into the hall, there was a metal grate with a guard on the other side. If the guard in front of our room had been half asleep, this one was very much awake. And he carried a very big gun.

  Thayu motioned stop.

  We did, crouching against the side of the tunnel in the darkness. The tunnel’s wall was rough and dusty here. My hands felt filthy. If that guy with his big gun decided to turn on the light in here, there would be absolutely nowhere to hide. A lot of hand signals were passed between Thayu, Nicha, Evi and Telaris.

  Then we started moving again, slowly this time. Telaris motioned for me to stay at the back.

  Closer we came, and closer, creeping in single file along the tunnel’s wall.

  And closer, and closer.

  Not ten metres away from the grate, we stopped again. Telaris took one step away from the wall and drew himself up to his full height. He lifted his arm and threw something that flashed in the light and flew through the passage, between the bars of the grate.

  The guard stiffened, and fell sideways.

  We ran to the grate. It was locked, but Thayu fired at the lock. The metal glowed, and globs fell down. She pulled the grate open enough for one person to go through. The guard lay in a pool of blood with the haft of a knife sticking out of his temple. Evi dragged the body into the tunnel where it was not clearly visible save for the fat bloody trail on the floor.

&nb
sp; I felt sick.

  We had come out of the tunnel on a platform above a factory floor. The big water pipes crossed the hall, supported by brackets on the ceiling. On the ground floor, twenty-five or so local people stood at tables putting weapons together. Attaching handgrips, clipping in plasma chambers, screwing on sights, packing complete guns in crates by the dozen. At the far end of the factory hall people were working on the gun parts: machining barrels, welding, cutting, pouring red glowing resin into moulds. A bank of shelves contained smaller boxes with parts that were clearly imported from off-world: parts of mechanisms, rivets and strips made of Hedron steel with its characteristic purple sheen.

  Guns. A whole factory of them.

  The noise and smells of plastic and oil wafted up to where we stood.

  I said in a low voice, “I guess this is the part where we go gun shopping.”

  “Yup,” Thayu said. She had our only gun, so she led the way down a couple of flights of metal stairs. We were about halfway when people at the gun assembly line started noticing us. They looked with wide eyes but didn’t move from their positions.

  Someone yelled, “This way, mister, this way!”

  I thought I recognised the voice, and indeed it was Henri. His cheekbone was bruised, and he wore ankle braces with chains attached to the workbench. His clothes were ripped. He looked dreadful, but I was glad to see him.

  Thayu ran to him. The other workers scrambled away from her. She fired at the chains until they, too, fell apart into molten globs.

  The factory workers who had scurried away were returning now that they’d figured they weren’t going to be shot.

  “Free as many people as you can,” I told Henri. “Take them outside.”

  “Please, mista,” an old man said. “No good can come from trying to help us. If we leave, they will find our families.”

  Many people nodded. There were at least twenty, all local people, most of them men, and numbers were still growing. There had to be at least a few hundred workers in this hall.

  They were skinny, filthy. Some had weeping sores from burns or other injuries. Some had no shoes. None of them had overalls or anywhere near appropriate gear for working on a factory floor. But all the ones I could see had their front teeth. Not krayfish.

  “How did you end up here?” I asked.

  “He promise us money,” a woman said in heavy accent. “He says: money if you work. We said: we know how to work, give us money. He says he look after us. Then we get here, no money. We get food, but not enough. We complain. Few days later they bring your brother or sister. Sometimes they bring your old mother. They make them work. You try to escape, they kill you.”

  Evi and Telaris gave each other a dark look. Evi lifted his chin, an Indrahui way of indicating yes.

  These people were under pahemin. They were indebted workers, Indrahui-style. They’d bought into it without knowing what they agreed to.

  I looked at Henri and had another chilling thought. “Who actually owns that plane of yours?”

  The expression in his eyes told me enough.

  Someone shouted on the other side of the hall.

  “Let’s go,” Thayu said to me in Coldi.

  “But . . .” I spread my hands. These people needed help.

  “Any of these weapons that we can use?” she asked.

  I translated the question.

  “You need to attach the plasma chamber,” Henri said. “We don’t assemble them here. The krayfish do that. Those are packed and stored separately.”

  Made sense. “No gun shopping.” I told Thayu what he had said.

  She didn’t look impressed.

  The shouting on the other side of the hall increased. Likely some bug or such trivial thing as the presence of a dead body had alerted guards that we were in the building and they were coming to ferret us out.

  “Quick!” Thayu called.

  She took off across the hall.

  “Keep safe! Try to get out!” I called to Henri while running after her.

  CHAPTER 24

  * * *

  WE RAN ACROSS the factory floor, between the benches where some people were still working. Once, Thayu almost crashed into a grey-haired man who crossed the aisle while carrying a crate. He gave a cry and stumbled back, almost toppling over. His work mates all scurried out of the way. They made no move to speak to us or ask questions. Many stared at Evi and Telaris with wide eyes and cowered. If ever Indrahui intended to build goodwill here, they had a long way to go.

  A passage led away from the hall, and two guards stood at its entrance. At our approach, both reached for weapons. Thayu made short work of one with the gun while Evi threw a metal bar he had picked up somewhere at the other guard. It hit the man on the side of the head.

  The guards both slumped to the ground. Both locals, too. I could hardly believe Mr Kray was the only offworld person in this place, but it was starting to look like it.

  Thayu kicked the men’s guns aside. One had carried a big gun of the type I’d seen in Dekker’s office; the other had two smaller guns.

  “Take those.” She dropped to her knees next to the bodies to search them for other useful items. The one she’d shot wouldn’t be getting up anymore, but the other man might live. For someone who didn’t like people getting killed, I sure spent a lot of time in situations where that happened.

  The men’s belt pouches contained an assortment of gadgets that she stuffed into her pocket.

  She handed the big gun to Evi, and the others to Telaris and Nicha. “You’ll have to do the shooting. Mine is almost flat. It’s for show only.”

  They all inspected the weapons with the same cold, calculated military look. It chilled me.

  Telaris flicked the switch to turn the weapon off and on again. He pushed another button bringing a small display to life. “Made locally?” He seemed impressed.

  Behind us, a whole audience of the factory floor’s workers had assembled in the hall. They stood there looking at us, like a silent crowd of ghosts. Their eyes were hollow, their hands marked with cuts and burns. Some people wore dirty bandages.

  Most were thin to the point of being emaciated.

  I shivered. The Indrahui pahemin debt system was notorious. There were whole generations who would never be free from indenture to the warlords. As long as the people were dependent on these warlords, they could not protest against them. They would not pass on any information to anyone else. The warlord owned these people. He owned their children, their voices, the products of their work. He owned their future.

  We continued further into the passage with Thayu in the lead. I had no idea where she was going, but she seemed quite confident, occasionally glancing at the map her father had sent us. She led us into a side passage and ducked into a stairwell, going up. One floor above, we came out into a soft carpeted corridor. There were doors on both sides, with little numbered signs. It looked like an expensive hotel. The air was cool and clean, there were plants in large pots along the walls next to each door, the light was muted. The place was deserted and eerily quiet.

  What now? I met Thayu’s eyes, but she held her finger to her lips. With a jerk of her head, she motioned Telaris to come over. They each took up position on either side of a nearby door on the right-hand side.

  The door opened and a cleaner wheeled a laundry trolley out of a doorway. She stopped. Looked at Evi. Her eyes widened. Telaris grabbed her from behind, putting a hand over her mouth. He dragged her backwards into the room.

  She went, “Mmmmm!”

  “Be quiet,” Telaris said in Isla.

  He forced her to sit down on a chair. She strained against the pressure of his hand on her face. “Hmmmm!”

  “Quiet,” I rep
eated Telaris. I crouched so that my face was level with hers. “Do you want to leave this place?”

  She nodded behind Telaris’ hand. She was a local of the dark African type, probably no more than eighteen years old, pretty and soft-skinned. I gestured for Telaris to take his hand away.

  She began, “My brother . . .”

  “He works in the gun factory?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid for him. People have told me that he is sick. I haven’t seen him for years.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Sara.”

  “Sara, would you like to help us so that you and your brother can be free?”

  Her eyes widened. “Do you know that they can kill me just for talking to you?”

  “Not if you help us, you won’t be killed. We’ll be letting all of you out of here. We’re here to shut this place down.”

  “Delegate, have a look here,” Evi said from the other side of the room.

  Evi had moved a curtain aside. What I had taken to be the room’s back wall was in fact a window. It looked out over a large hall. There was a blue swimming pool to one side. Big pots with palms stood around the edge. On the other side people sat at tables. These were all the dinner guests I had seen before but they were now having a breakfast meeting and wore more business-like outfits.

  Waiters and waitresses in white aprons moved between the tables carrying bread and coffee.

  I could almost smell it up here. My stomach rumbled.

  They were listening to a man behind the dais that we had seen earlier. Because they sat at tables instead of in rows in an auditorium, I could see some of their faces. I hadn’t expected to recognise anyone, and I didn’t; but I could tell they represented a wide range of groups from all economic backgrounds. There were clean and cultured people in suits and wizened, wrinkled elders from desert tribes. There were West Africans and North Africans and Arabic Africans and people from local tribes.