Ambassador 4: Coming Home

by Jansen, Patty

  The rooms at the end of the passage were not cells. They looked to have been a guard’s station. This seemed a stupid place for a guard station—I would have put it next to the stairs—but then I realised that the wall at the end of the passage dated from a much more recent period than the jail itself, and from memory, it was not the new jail on the other side of the wall. That institution was at the back of the corner block.

  After the darkness of the corridor, the light in the guard station seemed impossibly bright. The room contained a pair of scruffy couches and a low table, the surface stained with moisture spots.

  Federza sat in the far corner at a dining table that had been turned into a desk. When I came in, he rose.

  I couldn’t work out whether the expression on his face was happiness or annoyance or all of the above. I remembered him the last time I had seen him, when he came into my apartment scared. Was there anything I had missed then? He’d obviously been more scared than he’d let on.

  “Delegate Wilson.” He shook my hand, Earth-style. He had travelled there. His grandfather was the legendary Daya Ezmi, the founder of the Barresh Aghyrians.

  He gestured at the couch and I sat down. The cushion released a waft of musty air. He sat on the other couch. Thayu and Reida remained near the door while Lilona sat on one of the chairs at the table.

  Federza frowned at her. “Is that . . . ?”

  “She’s from the ship, yes.”

  He stared at her, and she looked back at him, pale as she was. From his looks, Federza did not belong to the dark-haired, Pakshari, group of Aghyrians, even though his family heritage said otherwise. His hair was bronze and his eyes the colour of beach sand: beige, almost yellow.

  He rose again and bowed to her. “I cannot offer you much in the way of refreshments, but I have clean water.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I haven’t been feeling very well.”

  “Do have it checked out.” He sat down again, still looking at her.

  Something intense about the exchange went beyond words.

  Thayu frowned at me. We were under the ground so the feeder didn’t work. I would have loved to know what she made of this.

  “Tell me what happened and what led you to coming here,” I asked Federza.

  He blew out a breath and leaned his elbows on his bony knees. “It goes back a long time.”

  “Something like twenty years when your people first started talking to the ship?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t involved. I didn’t become aware of it until a few years ago. At first I thought it was just too silly for words, but then I saw the proof and wondered why no one had told gamra about the ship. But our leaders said the information and the ship was ours and no one else had a right to speak to it.”

  “Except they did speak to others, didn’t they?”

  Federza glanced at Lilona. She shrugged. “I work in the lab. That’s what I do. The captain makes decisions about which information to give out.”

  Proof that she knew at least something, and felt uncomfortable discussing it.

  I asked her, “Did you, at any time, know who he was communicating with?”

  “No. Just the new inhabitants of our home planet, he said.”

  And he’d lied, unless he had been talking to the zeyshi group, too. That was a distinct possibility.

  “I don’t know how much of a setup it was,” Federza went on. “I still don’t know. I don’t know what their aims are, but when I started questioning, people became defensive.”

  “ ‘People’ meaning the Aghyrian leadership?”

  He nodded.

  “I became more and more convinced that the approaching ship should be mentioned to the gamra assembly, but they continued to overrule me. In the end, I copied the information and took it out of the compound, but they found out. That’s when they sent the Tamerians after me. When you disappeared to the ship, I had nowhere to go. I came to the island but it was full of Tamerians. I couldn’t leave a message for you because they would have intercepted it. They have bugs everywhere. Except here.”

  “You went to the guards for protection, and they put you in jail.” Which, all things considered, was a pretty smart thing to do. “But you can’t get out.”

  “They will kill me.” He sighed. “Since our last meeting, I’ve learned more disturbing material.” He passed his reader to me. I tilted it so that the image faced the right way up. It was a block of unfamiliar code.

  “Look at the date,” Federza said.

  I did. It was twenty years ago. I would still have been in high school at Taurus, before I went to Mars, before I lived in Athens with Nicha. “What is it?”

  “Genetic code and instructions.”

  “Where did this come from?”

  “The Exchange picked it up but never released it, because they looked and couldn’t find the origin, and because nothing else ever came from that direction, they filed it and forgot about it. But someone received this data and worked on it for years. That man you killed in my office, I had his genetics analysed. It matches with this.” He gestured at the screen in front of me. “This is Tamerian. No one knew where it came from, no one knew where it went. No one recognised it for what it was. No one worried about it.”

  No one had known about the ship.

  “They were communicating with people back then.”

  I looked at Lilona. She sat staring into the distance. With her limited understanding of societies, what was the chance that she had no idea what we were talking about?

  “They were. It all went to Tamer, although the Exchange doesn’t have any proof for that. They used old satellites that had been floating around amongst other space debris.”

  I nodded. “The Asto military destroyed them as soon as they sprang to life.” Asha hadn’t told me how long they’d been doing that for and how long each satellite had been transmitting when they destroyed it. Hell, information like this could be transmitted in a few minutes.

  Federza said, “I’m not sure there would have been that much point in destroying them after the fact. They have so many of these potential relays that we can’t keep track of them. Even if each communicates only once before it is destroyed, they still get a lot of material through before all of them are gone.”

  “But I don’t quite understand why they’re after you.” I would have said he was just paranoid, if there hadn’t been that attack on him while he was in my apartment, and if his apartment hadn’t been ransacked.

  “No. Most of this was known already, even if no one did anything about it.” He met my eyes squarely.

  The sandy colour always made me feel strange. The ship Aghyrians didn’t have such interesting eye colours. Theirs were more human: brown or blue.

  “They were after me because I know who made the Tamerians. I’m not the only one who knows, but because I was going to take the communication with the ship to the assembly, they judged me a risk.”

  “This is about the Barresh Aghyrians, isn’t it?”

  “Yes and no. It’s a cartel, not a single person, and mostly they’re investors, they don’t do any of the work. That’s why they’re doing it at Tamer. Because if they did it on a gamra world, it would be traceable.”

  Tamer was a dreadful, dangerous world that colonists had left mostly alone. It was inhabited by impenetrable thickets of live forests, trees that were half animal, half plant; and by fierce predators. There was a research base somewhere on a tall mountaintop, but that was the only settlement I had ever heard of. Tamer was about as Wild West as they came. “So these investors are mostly Barresh Aghyrians?”

  “Again, not all. Some names I’m certain of, others I can only guess.”

  A series of loud pops sounded above our heads. Thayu and Reida looked at the ceiling. Reida formed his hand in the shape of a gun.

  Gunfire? Up there?

  “Any chance of sharing names before we go out and get ourselves killed? The more people know, the less chance the secret dies.”

>   “They’re very secretive.” He sighed. He had aged a lot in the past few weeks. Yes, he still cared too much about his appearance, but damn it, I hadn’t given the man enough credit. That’s what happens when you behave like an arrogant dick. People take a long time to warm to your good deeds.

  I appeared to have misjudged him badly.

  He said, staring at his hands. “The one I’m completely certain about is Joyelin Akhtari.”

  I blew out a breath. She would still have been Chief Delegate if she hadn’t been pressured to resign. Then again, maybe the pressure had provided her with a perfect excuse. And I should have seen it. I’d even suspected her, but never had any proof. Never had any reason to look for it, and probably wouldn’t have found any had I tried.

  “She has provided a lot of money for the project.”

  “Tell me honestly. Do you know if she was ever involved in Amoro Renkati who killed President Sirkonen?”

  “No.”

  “But she never took active steps to discourage them either.”

  He shook his head. “No, she didn’t. I was quite friendly with her at the time, and she knew they’d eventually implode, so she left them alone and pretended she never heard of the organisation.”

  “You’re not friendly with her anymore?”

  He laughed, not in a happy way. “Would I be here otherwise?”

  “Well, I don’t know. There seems to be an entire shadow society that’s dedicated mostly to ending the Coldi domination in gamra.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “That’s why the ship Aghyrians helped them by making Tamerians.”

  He completed the train of thought. “Except the shadow society didn't realise that these ship people aren’t interested in helping them end the Coldi domination at all. The ship people hate everything about what our society has become. Because it’s not ordered, and we’re dirty, and we—heaven forbid—interbreed. That man is a fucked up nutjob. He probably always was, even in his day when he neglected to save the thousands he could have saved.”

  At his point, looking into his sandy eyes, I finally realised—much too late—that Marin Federza and I had always been on the same page, and that I’d just been too blinded by some of his behaviour that annoyed me to see it.

  Lilona was watching this exchange with wide eyes.

  I cringed. I could just about hear her say, “My captain.” Except she didn’t. She was staring at Federza. Was she shocked by all this? Did she even understand it? It was impossible to tell.

  I asked him, “So, tell me this: back when we had the trouble with Amoro Renkati, you gave me their contact because someone supposedly had a job for me. You didn’t send me in there because you wanted to convert me to their cause?”

  “Hell, no. I sent you in there because I knew you didn’t take bullshit, and I wasn’t in a position to do or say anything about it myself.”

  He’d been distant and aloof to me because he’d been afraid to be seen as an enemy by powerful people in the Aghyrian group. I remembered how he had sought me out in the clothing store downstairs. How I’d thought that he was trying to talk me into joining his cause, while he was actually trying to warn me and inform me. Which he had done quite successfully. And it had taken me this long to see it. Damn, I’d been an arse.

  My ears did their thing again, but fortunately it was dark so no one could see it. “So, what can we do now?”

  “You can come and join me in this prison.”

  “Not likely.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that.”

  Another misjudgement on my part that had come to the fore in the last few weeks. Traders were allowed to carry heavy arms and were said to be a backup if a conflict erupted and no guards were present. They were said to be happy to use their weapons. Not Federza: he was afraid of armed conflict.

  “Well,” I said, scratching my head, reordering a couple of major pieces of the story in my head. “We could go back to the island and set up a secure zone there. Ideally, all of this should go before the assembly as soon as possible, but since there is no session planned and many delegates won’t be at the island, we should probably alert Delegate Namion as soon as possible.”

  “Are you kidding? He’s one of the people whose investment in the Tamerian project I haven’t yet been able to prove.”

  I stared at him. “Delegate Namion? You’re serious?”

  He nodded, slowly. “He and a good proportion of the Damarcian upper-class delegates are involved. I’ve got evidence of payments made by Delegate Vitani, who is Delegate Namion’s brother-in-law. The Damarcians never got over the fact that the gamra headquarters were permanently moved from Damarq to Barresh. According to them, Damarq was ideal, neutral ground.”

  “Well, yes, but back then, the headquarters moved to the home of the elected Chief Delegate, didn’t they?”

  “Yes.” It was also why gamra could never be on Asto. When Isandra Andrahar won and she lived in Barresh, and Barresh at the time was dilapidated, the council purpose-built the island, and the railways, and they did such a good job that the assembly voted to make it permanent.

  Federza snorted. “The Damarcians say that Barresh is a stand-in for Asto. Too close. So they and a number of other investors acted on this mysterious data that had been sent to them to produce this superhuman race that was going to challenge the Coldi and with them, the entire established order.”

  “But if Delegate Namion is involved then that would . . .” make all of the island unsafe. Would make all of the city unsafe.

  He nodded in response to my unvoiced fear.

  Shit. Reorder all the pieces in my mind again.

  “I still think we should set up a safe zone on the island. I still think being at the gamra island will offer us protection. Once gamra shows clear bias in the direction of the Tamerians . . .” Asto would be here in a heartbeat, and they wouldn’t be coming for tea. That thought shook me deeply.

  I continued, although I must sound incoherent by now. “Well, I think we have a much better chance at staying safe at my apartment.” I was clutching at straws of sanity. In one hit, it looked as if the entire world had gone nuts.

  Which dumb, ignorant, utterly stupid young diplomat had said that gamra’s excessive formality prevented violence?

  Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

  Thayu had been listening with a darkening expression on her face. She now looked at her reader. “Evi says Asha’s guards have a van waiting outside. Backup has arrived and we should be able to get to the island safely. He says they flushed out some snipers and other undesirables.” Presumably related to the noise we’d heard upstairs. “Now is probably our best chance, while the Tamerians regroup.” She put the thing back in her belt. “I hate not knowing what I’m fighting.”

  “We’ll do a good deal of research when we get home.”

  She snorted. “And I’m not dressed for this either.”

  That was my fault, of course. I still managed to underestimate how quickly a situation could blow up.

  “What do you think?’ I asked Federza. “Are you taking my offer for a ride out of here?”

  He pursed his lips and thought for a bit, staring into the distance. “Yeah. All right. Either way, my days are probably numbered. Might as well die trying to save the world as we know it.”

  He rose and collected a number of things into a bag.

  Then he offered Lilona his arm and led her into the corridor, saying something about food supplements that he could provide her with that were certain to make her feel better.

  My head was reeling.

  I wondered how much she had understood of the conversation. In any case, it must be painfully clear to her that unless Kando Luczon backed off and came clear, there would probably be an armed conflict of some kind—that Asha wasn’t sure the Asto military could win. Especially not if the ship could count on the assistance of goodness knew how many Tamerians. Although I wondered how long that collaboration would last, because I was sure that Kando Luczon had
no loyalty to anyone who would help them. If Coldi were an “all-purpose colonising race” meant for front-line work, and not meant to be fertile, I could only imagine what the ship folk thought of the Tamerians.

  Damn.

  Evi and Telaris waited at the bottom of the stairs, each carrying a military grade weapon that I was sure didn’t belong to them. The keihu prison guard was also there.

  We were halfway up the stairs when Federza stopped. “Wait.”

  He squeezed past us and went back down. He ran down the corridor and came back a moment later with a set of noodle tongs. “These are mine. My grandfather gave them to me.” He stuck them in the inner pocket of his jacket and continued up the stairs.

  That was when the explosion struck.

  Chapter 17

  * * *

  THE GROUND TREMBLED.

  Evi, who was at the front of the group, tumbled a few steps down. He was followed by a couple of bricks that we managed to duck but that bounced down the stairs until they landed in the puddle at the bottom.

  Then the light went out and we were plunged in total darkness.

  “Great,” the guard said.

  “Everyone all right?” Telaris asked.

  Several people said that they were. There were a couple of big thuds upstairs. People running. A crash. Shouting.

  “What now?” the keihu guard said.

  “There’s an emergency light in my room.” This was Federza’s voice.

  “If we can find it,” Thayu said. Being Coldi, she saw even less in the dark than I did, and it was so pitch black that I wasn’t sure if that was possible.

  We managed to get down the stairs, while the noise from the guard station above us intensified. Shouts, alarms, rumbling. People running.

  “Are those shots?” Telaris said.

  “Likely,” said Federza. “Likely Tamerians have been in hiding in the surrounding buildings ever since I came here.”

  It seemed like every curtain you shook around the place had Tamerians falling out of it. That thought was frightening. Just how many of these emotionally blank fighting machines were there?