by Patty Jansen
No Coldi.
No other Indrahui or anyone else from off-world.
Mr Kray was again dressed in white, which contrasted sharply with his very dark skin. In the flesh, his impressive size stood out even more.
Evi raised the gun and pointed it at Robert Kray’s head. The expression on his face was intense with hatred.
Sara gave a little squeal and cowered behind the couch.
For a moment, I was afraid that he was going to shoot, giving away our position, bringing guards up here, making sure that we’d never complete our mission, making action by that ship in orbit a certainty.
Telaris said something in Indrahui in a low voice. Evi let the gun sink again, blowing out a deep breath. He gave me a startled look.
“Mashara apologises.” He wiped his face. “Mashara must not let anger get in the way of the mission. The shot would have been no good going through the glass anyway.” He put the gun in his belt. “But I’ll kill the bastard the first time I get a clean shot.”
I didn’t know what to say. I had no sisters or brothers, let alone ones who had been cruelly killed by a warlord whose face I’d got the chance to see through the sight of a gun. If I was in Evi’s position, I didn’t know if I’d be disciplined enough not to push the discharge button.
The subject of their hatred continued to speak, oblivious of his temporary reprieve.
“What is this setup anyway?” I asked in Isla, turning my attention back to Sara.
“Mr Kray likes giving parties that go on for days,” Sara said. “We have to cook the food and serve the food. He gets his own people to bring the food, because the men from the factory floor would eat it.”
“Who are ‘his own’ people?”
“They’re the ones who are most loyal to him. The krayfish. You get points for doing certain things, and he judges if you’re trustworthy. If you have enough points, you go into the guard. You can get a gun. If you’re a girl, you can live in his house and clean and cook there. They take your teeth.” She grinned, showing her intact front teeth.
She was still only mentioning local people. “Are there many people like her or him?” I gestured to Thayu and Nicha.
She frowned. “I thought they were both girls.”
Nicha snorted. Thayu’s face had a puzzled expression, and through our feeder I was getting signals that she was annoyed and thought she should really learn Isla.
You should, I told her.
That made her even more annoyed.
“They both have long hair,” Sara said.
True, and the differences between male and female Coldi was very subtle. I no longer had trouble with it, but I remembered when I did.
Sara shook her head. “There are no people like them.”
The implication of this little statement was huge: no Coldi meant no Zhori clan and no connections to the Exchange. So Romi Tanaqan had bought advice from the Zhori and had then started his own illegal settlement?
“Any people like them?” I now indicated Evi and Telaris.
“They’re like Mr Kray,” she said, her voice uncertain. Clearly, anyone looking like Mr Kray frightened her very much.
“Anyone apart from Mr Kray?”
“No. He’s the only one.”
“Does he have family?”
She shook her head. “There are a couple of girls who don’t mind sleeping with him, but none have children.”
“Don’t mind?” Evi asked.
“Well, I hope it’s all right me talking about these things, mister, but he’s pretty big, in the downstairs department. He hurts the small girls.” Her skin went even darker than normal.
Yes, I knew what she meant, having seen Evi and Telaris naked, and yes, the subject was embarrassing. I steered the conversation in another direction. “Has anyone told you where Mr Kray comes from?”
She shook her head. “There are rumours, but no one knows for sure. Mr Kray is black, but he looks strange.” She cast Evi a nervous look. He was at least a head taller than her, and was clearly unimpressed with her remark about Robert Kray’s size in the men’s department. “I thought he was just odd, but I see that he’s a different type of person. They say that these people are from other worlds. Like the Moon. It looks quite small in the sky, but when you get closer, it’s as big as the whole world. You can live on it.”
“Yeah, that’s close enough to the truth.” It never ceased to amaze me how certain areas of news completely bypassed otherwise intelligent people. Like when Thayu and I visited New Zealand, people would often ask us if I knew that president Sirkonen had been shot by aliens! never mind that I’d been in the room with him.
Different worlds, I guessed.
“So, who are all these guests?”
“He calls them the African Forward Thinking Group. They meet once every couple of months.”
“Who are they? Government? Political leaders?”
She frowned. “Sorry. I don’t know any of them. They’re important people, that’s all I know.”
“Do you hear any of what he tells them?”
“A lot of the same things that he tells us: that he wants this area to become independent and have industry. That we will always have jobs, and there will be enough money to buy imported things. The sad thing is that the boys very much want imported things and they believe every word he says. But only Mr Kray’s close friends ever get anything. Not even all the krayfish, although they get enough so that they don’t leave. The ordinary workers just stay here and stay poor.”
In the hall, Robert Kray was showing a clip of a farm in the middle of the desert, taken from a plane. The contrast between the green fields and the surrounding desert was almost painful. The crop was some kind of broad-leaf plant, I had no idea which.
Thayu said, “That’s moya.”
Moya was the standard staple crop that fed large parts of Asto. It was a large-leafed plant, about waist high, that produced fruit reminiscent of a pineapple, except that it was very dry and woody and needed to be ground into flour. I’d seen plenty of pictures of street vendors in Athyl’s outer circles crouching over a hotplate to bake the flour mixed with water into pancakes.
To grow these plants in the desert was smart and highly illegal. Asto's plant species were adapted to extreme heat. They also carried diseases against which Earth had no defence. Many species were invasive, or poisonous.
Nicha said in Coldi, “It’s like he’s taken the idea of a Coldi colony in the desert and made it bigger.”
“And there are no Coldi people involved,” Thayu said. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand why Danziger has allowed this to exist.”
“He doesn’t,” I said. “Isn’t that why we’re here?”
“But why let Mr Kray get away with it this far? You can’t tell me that no one knew.”
No; Nations of Earth, or at least PanAf, would have known.
“Well,” I said. “My hunch is this: for many years, Nations of Earth has given vast amounts of money to PanAf as part of the Copenhagen agreement” —the 2061 treaty that determined compensation paid by richer countries to the third-world nations who had seen their viability reduced because of temperature increase or rising sea levels— “but Nations of Earth has been frustrated because this area has never been anything other than a vast money pit, while other nations have used the funds to get ahead and have something to show for it.” Like Pakistan and Bangladesh, once basket cases, which were now quite well off. “I’m guessing that the vast amounts of aid given to this area by Nations of Earth are getting in the way of Danziger’s other promises to other areas, so when some guy comes along with plans like these, he’d be excited, especially when that guy is a friend of his friend L
ucius Brown.”
“He’d only be excited until he discovered that this scheme is set up by one of gamra’s most wanted criminals, and is therefore unlikely to be benevolent.”
I nodded. “Something like that. And with those photos in Mr Kray’s office, I’d have to say that Danziger knows about it.” And somehow, Danziger had not realised at first that Robert Kray was not an African. That was something I could believe about Danziger, too, because of his limited knowledge of gamra and his refusal to accept advice from people who were in a position to give it.
“This is nothing more than the worst kind of slavery,” Thayu said, glancing at Sara. “Even in the Outer Circle, we don’t allow this.”
“It’s the production of illegal weapons under everyone’s nose, and with their approval, too,” Nicha said.
“The man is a criminal of the worst kind,” Evi said. His voice wavered with anger.
They all appeared shocked by the brashness of the scheme.
I said, “Danziger didn’t see me that night when we were called back to Rotterdam because he wanted Dekker to clean up his dirty laundry. Because of the election. He also didn’t want to renege on any deals he had with either Lucius Brown, a friend, or with Mr Kray, because the krayfish would kill him. So he asked me instead, citing the presence of gamra people, which he already knew about. At least this way, if there were any assassinations, the person killed would be me.”
“You’re already dead,” Nicha said.
“Yeah, I think I’ll rise from the grave soon.” I was going to make a zombie joke, but none of them would get it.
Thayu snorted. “It really astonishes me what sort of behaviour you tolerate from your superiors—What?”
I was shaking my head. “Danziger is not my supervisor. Dekker told me not to bother the president with any of this ‘because campaigning is tiring’, but I think I might just ignore that order. I might also send a copy of all this to Flash Newspoint.”
Down in the hall, Robert Kray was still speaking.
The wall behind him held a large screen. On it was a map of the northern half of Africa, indicating a couple of locations in red dots. Ethiopia, southern Egypt, Libya—was that the original site?—and Nigeria. Dotted lines connected these locations to each other and to another dot at the top of the map. A ship in the Mediterranean? Or—I felt cold—a satellite in orbit?
Thayu was busily taking pictures.
This guy was planning to take the whole northern half of the continent with the knowledge of all these people.
I felt increasingly sickened by this man’s tricks. Using the old Coldi plans would assure that when gamra found out about the intent of the plan, Asto would be blamed.
CHAPTER 25
* * *
“SO, WHAT ARE WE going to do?” Nicha asked. “There are way too many people here and there are only five of us. There is no way we can barge in there with guns and hope to get out alive or even just get the guests out alive.”
Asha’s voice in my head said, I have the locations. We’re calibrating actions.
My heart skipped a beat. No. And after a panic-filled breath, That’s not necessary. There are many innocent civilians in this area. I’m confident that we can resolve the issue without the use of military force. Damn, I’d thought that he wouldn’t be able to do anything from that distance.
I said to Thayu and Nicha, “One of our most powerful weapons will be information. All these people here look important. They need to know what’s really going on.” I turned to Sara and continued in Isla, “We need your help.” Hell, we all needed each other’s help to avoid any “action” from orbit.
She nodded, eyes wide.
“Is there a place where Mr Kray or his secretary stores the details of all these people who are here?”
“There is, in the office downstairs, but I don’t work there.”
“That’s all right. Can you get us some uniforms like the one you’re wearing?”
“Men’s or women’s?”
“Women’s. Two sets.”
Nicha protested, “Hey! What do you think I am? A drag queen?”
I said in Coldi, “These are the type of people who will find a woman less threatening.” Back to Isla. “Can we use the bathroom here?”
“Not this room, but there is an empty room on the other side of the corridor.”
“Take us there, then.”
Sara did. The room was much smaller, but contained a double bed, a single bed, two chairs and a wallscreen that, when Evi turned it on, displayed details of what was going on in the hall downstairs.
I asked Sara to bring us something to eat while she was down there.
Sara went to get uniforms, and we studied the layout of the building. The foyer in the bottom floor of the accommodation wing was next to the pool, and a little room behind the reception desk held the computers with administration details.
Sara came back with coffee, bread, rolls and jam, carrying a bundle of clothes over her arm. We demolished the food and then Thayu and Nicha went into the bathroom carrying the uniforms.
We discussed the plan: get the guest list and send a message about the weapons factory and the illegal alien crops to the guests. Make sure that all those who wanted to leave could do so.
I prepared a message and photos. “I think I should sign with my real name.”
“The risk will be increased, but mashara agrees,” Telaris said
Evi burst out laughing. It was such a rare sound that I looked behind me. Thayu and Nicha had come out of the bathroom, both dressed as waitresses. I don’t know which of them glowered the most: Thayu because she had to wear a light blue dress that showed her nicely-shaped legs, or Nicha because he had to wear a light blue dress that showed his nicely-shaped legs. He had also stuffed hand towels down his shirt to give the appearance of breasts.
I stifled laughter.
“Remember that I’m doing this for the good of the world,” Nicha said. He took the cup he’d left before going into the bathroom and gulped the remaining coffee.
Thayu sat on the bed, a dark expression on her face. The uniform did, in fact, look quite sexy on her, since Coldi women were always quite sturdy and the shirt was tight around her breasts and shoulders.
The two of them looked so much alike.
We went through the plan. They were to go down to the office, and Thayu would break into the computer while Nicha guarded the door. A simple thing, Thayu said. They knew where the office was, and breaking into computers was easy.
They left.
I sat in one of the armchairs, making a list of all the people outside the settlement to whom I needed to send as much information as possible: key Nations of Earth officials, Melissa Hayworth and the head of the Special Services branch of the Nations of Earth guards. I deliberated sending the information to Danziger, but Dekker would probably intercept it.
I chose the most incriminating of Thayu’s pictures: the trophy picture on Mr Kray’s desk of Danziger with Robert Kray and Lucius Brown, the image she had just taken of Robert Kray standing in front of the map with all their planned settlements. The crops in the desert. A wide-angle picture which clearly showed all the important guests sitting at dinner.
Then I wrote a message, explaining what we had found out. It included relevant text of the laws that prohibited unauthorised imports and especially the culture of non-Earth plants. I included pictures of those plants and effects of the diseases they could carry. I included pictures of the original settlement plan by Mizha in 1975 and the number of deaths attributed to the Kazakhstan disaster. I even included vague hints that gamra wasn’t happy with the situation either, and that there might be some kind of military action if nothing was done about it.
A
t the end I said, I advise that everyone get out of here as quickly as you can by any possible means that is safe. I signed with my real name and attached a scan of my tag that could only have been taken by someone with access to that tag, and the tag itself only worked if a person was alive.
I was still perfecting it when the door opened and Thayu and Nicha came back. Thayu gave a thumbs-up, passed me the list, and both of them first disappeared into the bathroom to get changed back into their regular gear.
A quick glance at the attendance list revealed that the guests came from countries all over the northern half of Africa. There were many from Sudan, a country that had done surprisingly well out of the violent changes in the last seventy years or so. It had been one of the first countries to go one hundred percent solar, even when cells and batteries were a lot less efficient than they were now. They sold power across the borders. With the money made from that, they had pioneered low-cost versions of everything: power stations, cars, planes. Lately, they had been into cloud seeding to produce artificial rain. They were also experimenting with large-scale controlled-climate habitats.
There were people from Egypt, the hotbed of several radical religious groups; Algeria, where some of the Zhori were said to have gone; Senegal, where huge camps held hundreds of thousands of environmental refugees, most of whom had been there for generations with no hope of ever returning to their parched home countries; Nigeria, Morocco, Libya, and so on, all countries that were deeply affected. Many that were broke, near-defunct and lawless.
Some of the names were marked with different colours. Sara had gone back to her work, so I couldn’t ask what the colours meant.
Thayu said that her father had run her pictures through a face recognition process and had names on several people.
I was happy to see that at least some names were the same as on the attendance list, although there were also disturbing discrepancies. The people whose names appeared in both lists were mostly from middle layers of government. Not members of parliament themselves, but assistants of members of parliament. Some of them had to be tribe elders as well, but I gathered that face recognition wasn’t useful for people who didn’t frequent places where they were likely to be picked up by some sort of database or security camera.
