Ambassador 4: Coming Home

by Jansen, Patty

  “There will be not nearly enough fireworks. We have to get rid of that idiot they voted in.”

  I nodded. I agreed. Gamra could never function with Delegate Namion at its head. “He’s only been in the job for a very short period of time.”

  “Long enough,” Ezhya said.

  “Too long,” was Asha’s judgement. “Depose him. Immediately.”

  “I can’t. I’m not . . .” an influential figure. Although I should probably acknowledge that I was becoming influential, in my own way. “I can’t just . . .” When the process has broken down measures must be taken to prevent further damage. That was a quote from the gamra manual itself. If we could prove Delegate Namion’s involvement with the Tamerians, then he was as good as gone, but one didn’t make it to the top by being stupid and his tracks would be well covered.

  I spread my hands. Let them sink again. If they thought I was going to stand for the position and challenge, they were wrong. I would never stand up to gamra’s constant scrutiny. I was not impartial. I was not made of endless patience. I had not covered any of my tracks.

  In amongst all the conflicting feelings and thought that ran through me, I found some sanity.

  “I know the gamra assembly well enough to know that they get easily distracted by details. Not that I call the attempted deposing of a Chief Delegate a minor detail, but compared to the approaching ship emergency, it is. Let’s not try to distract them with internal politics. We can always depose him later. I dare say we don’t even need to get our hands dirty in that process.”

  Ezhya nodded. He rubbed his upper lip, and then he nodded again. It was at times like this that he scared me most. I couldn’t believe that I’d said something that he hadn’t considered, yet he acted like I had, and as if he was arranging the pieces in his head.

  “All right,” he said. “Don’t waste any time with the assembly. I have better things for you to do. I’ll just send it to them, if I can use your equipment.”

  “Sure.” At the same time it occurred to me that my gamra account was still routed through Delegate Namion’s. That would be an interesting message for him to intercept.

  Ezhya continued, “As for any matériel support, is there any group in the assembly you judge capable of giving us useful support?”

  “Kedras is also in the Ratanga cluster. They’re small, but they have the Trader Guild. Their new gamra representative is Kedrasi.”

  “Hmmm.” A look passed between the two men.

  Asha said, “The Trader Guild is not a military organisation.”

  “No. It’s not. But they have a lot of ships.”

  “They do. Hmmm, not sure if I can do anything with that, but leave it with me.”

  Ezhya gave him one of those mysterious hand signals. Asha seemed happy.

  “What about the captain?” I asked.

  “We have him under strict observation. He will receive this document as well.”

  “He’ll likely misinterpret it.”

  Ezhya snorted. “Misinterpret? How much clearer can we be about: do not come here or we’ll blow you to pieces?”

  “He hasn’t shown any understanding about any of the things we’ve attempted to talk to him about.”

  “That’s why it worries me that you have one of his crew here.”

  “She’s been very helpful today. I would not have known all the things I just told you if it weren’t for her.”

  “Nevertheless, I would be much happier if she were with the others under the guard of my people and not with that . . . fop.”

  “Look, I will take responsibility for them. They will stay here, guarded by my staff. They will not jeopardise our actions.”

  “The only way that man won’t jeopardise anything is if he’s dead.”

  If nothing else, that remark showed me absolutely how important loyalty was in Coldi society. Federza was perceived as wavering, untrustworthy. He had a lot of damage to repair, if it could be repaired at all.

  “Please. I trust him. Leave both of them here.”

  “We’ll see.” That was by no means an encouraging reply, but the best I could hope for.

  “Whatever we do must not preclude giving assistance to the ship crew who want to escape. The crew are not there of their volition and their supplies are low. They are weak and sickly. The mission to retake Asto is driven by the captain only. Let’s not act in a similar manner to his actions when refusing to save people, if we can.”

  “If we can,” Ezhya said. It was painfully clear that he thought we couldn’t. “If the ship backs off when we issue threats. If he’s willing to agree to restrictions on where the ship can travel.”

  Asha snorted. “What’s the chance you’ll get that sort of agreement out of a man who’s stayed the same course for four hundred years?”

  We let the answer hang between us.

  Nicha looked decidedly disturbed.

  Ezhya said, “We will fire if that ship turns up here and if the ship is unresponsive to our demands.”

  “I do wish that you’d consider a diplomatic solution, if I can broker it.”

  “Haven’t you tried that already?” His voice was disturbingly serious.

  “Yes. I may have gone about it the wrong way. The captain, I think, is a dead loss. I do not, in any way, endorse the assassination of anyone, and the captain is a major historic identity, but I guess I wouldn’t be disturbed or surprised if somehow during skirmishes he didn’t . . . survive.”

  Ezhya laughed a loud. It was a rare enough sound that it was both uplifting and threatening.

  I went on, even though my ears were starting to betray me. Those damn ears. “I think there may be a reasonable chance that we can separate the crew from the captain, as long as there are no hostilities, as I understand from the crew member we had with us today that most of the crew will have left family behind.”

  “All the more reason that a second mission of theirs will eventually follow the first one.”

  “Which may not be a bad thing if, but only if, we can see the present mission to a peaceful end. From what I understand, the settlers of those new worlds have no love for the captain, and this appears to be one of the primary driving forces of his decision to make the return jump.”

  “He can’t rule the people over there, so he wants to rule people over here.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Whichever way, he wants to rule something.”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s downstairs under guard. At the slightest order from me, any of these people here can go there and assassinate him. We can do that, if it solves anything in their internal hierarchy.”

  That was as close as Ezhya got to asking advice. “It’s not entirely that simple. He is their absolute leader, but they use the term bound to she ship. This appears to relate to some kind of physiological connection. I don’t know how this works, but the ship’s systems appear to have a need to ensure the safety of those with this distinction. The woman we have in here is also bound. The ship might have been set to follow them regardless of what the outcome of their visit here was.”

  “How likely do you judge the chance that the crew will obey the captain?”

  “Very high.”

  “If we take out the captain?”

  “Even higher.”

  Asha made a hissing sound. “So, we have a ship unlikely to respond to a writ, already on its way here in response to the captain’s distress or command. We have a dedicated crew who we can’t access before they get here, who are unlikely to suddenly change allegiance anyway, and who are slaved to the captain and will carry out his commands, whether or not he’s on board the ship.”

  I nodded. “Pretty much.”

  “And out in the Renzha galaxy, there is at least one, but possibly more, inhabited worlds of these people, possibly infused with truly alien genetic material, who might come after this ship?”

  “I am not convinced those people would have any interest in coming here, or if they did, that they’d be host
ile; but yes, that’s what I understand.”

  Ezhya folded his hands and leaned forward on his knees. His expression was dead serious now. He looked at Asha in a way that made me feel small and insignificant. “Our first and foremost priority has to be to destroy their relay network so that they can’t jump. It’s a monumental task, and one that may be impossible.”

  “This is where I can see the Trader Guild being useful,” Asha said.

  Ezhya nodded. “Yes. I can see that.”

  Asha said, “Once they jump, destroying the ship may not be easy. If I had command on that ship, I would jump as close as possible to either planet as I dared, because any weapon that’s going to destroy a ship that size can’t safely be fired close to a planet’s atmosphere.”

  “Anything that size can’t jump close to a planet.”

  “Possibly. We have to run calculations on that.”

  “They can’t. I want you to run calculations on any possible configuration of the array of Exchange nodes that they have remaining out there. I want to know which are the most likely locations the ship will appear when it jumps with the array’s current configuration, or if we can even speak of a configuration yet. I want to know which nodes we need to destroy to keep the jump from happening, if indeed that’s possible.”

  “The larger ones,” Asha said. “We’ve already been destroying as many as we can. Some are quite small, others much larger. We don’t have the time to check what each node does, but it’s safe to assume that the larger ones fulfil more important roles.”

  “What is your assessment of the structural integrity of that ship? What do we need to breach the hull?”

  “They’re well shielded. Their shield processes capture energy and feed it back into the engine, possibly also into weapons systems.”

  “As it would, with a deep space vessel. Can we overheat it?”

  “Not with regular weapons. With the sling, maybe.”

  Ezhya nodded. “How fast can you bring it over?”

  “It needs to go through six jumps.”

  “Time loss?”

  “Without checking, my guess is about a day.”

  “Do it. Now.”

  Asha went quiet and his expression blank. I guessed the order went out to his fleet right this very moment and somewhere deep in space, people would be frantically packing and stowing and cleaning up a ship that was normally used for exploration and research purposes, now to be used as a prime weapon.

  Ezhya was chillingly serious now. For thousands of years, Asto’s society had deliberately selected the most physically able and mentally capable people in their top tiers of society. Children were born without Circle membership. Testing started at age five and for the top tiers, finished at seventeen. These two men were the smartest and toughest in all of Coldi society. I would argue in the entire galaxy. They calculated every step of their actions with consequences far down the track.

  Their decision was to go to war.

  Then Ezhya got up. “I guess that’s it.”

  “What can I do?” I asked, and my voice sounded insecure. I hadn’t realised how my jaw was trembling and I was sweating from the tension.

  Ezhya faced me. For a moment I was wondering if he was going to question what I was doing there, because the preparation for war was sucking his attention to all three of his feeders at once. I felt very small, and insignificant, and utterly clueless on how to behave. These two men were so much more powerful than I was and I didn’t understand why I had ever thought that I could call either of them a “friend”.

  There was turmoil in those gold-flecked eyes, and I could no longer meet them. I looked down, felt myself take up a subservient position even though I’d sworn that I would never do this unless I judged it wise, and only under pressure at that. That had been my human side speaking, my stubborn conviction that all people are equal and that I could match this man. I was stupid. I could not.

  He didn’t touch my shoulder, but a firm, thick-fingered hand moved into my field of vision and pushed my chin up. “I thought you wouldn’t do that anymore except when protocol dictates.”

  I met the gold-flecked eyes. “I’m on very shaky ground. I can’t say I’ve ever participated in a war council before.”

  He laughed out loud. “Neither have we.”

  “Tell me what I can do to help, with the understanding that I would be very much in favour of avoiding the firing of weapons. There are thousands of innocent civilians aboard that ship who never chose to come here and given the choice, would rather go back home.”

  “We do not favour that option either. If the sling can get here in time, it might not be strong enough to work. I’d prefer not to have to try. As for what you can do: I understand that there is a relay buried in an excavation site on the outskirts of town.”

  “There is.”

  “It appears important in terms of communication with the ship. It’s bigger than the ones we’ve found in space, although we don’t yet know why or how, mainly because that stupid council is keeping people away from the site. That scan you sent was helpful, but we haven’t yet had the time to fully analyse it.”

  I nodded.

  “At this stage, there is only one sensible thing that we should be doing with it: destroy it.”

  “Yes.” Absolutely, I could do that.

  “Then go. Iyamichu ata.”

  “Iyamichu ata.” Into a real battle this time.

  Chapter 20

  * * *

  THERE WAS NO TIME to lose.

  Ezhya and Asha left to arrange their respective business. I understood that Ezhya would take full command of Asto’s entire fleet, and would gather as many ships as could possibly make it back to Asto. If the sling could be back in time and if it was fired, he would do it.

  After Asha had left the room, Ezhya said to me, “I don’t envy your task. It’s easy to go hunting and shooting things in the depth of space. They’re often things that shouldn’t have been there in the first place, and no one complains, even if it was a ship with troublesome occupants.”

  There had been suggestions that Asto’s fleet had been hunting Tamerians, and this was as close as an admission that this had indeed been the case.

  “All these things become massively more complicated when there are settlements and authorities involved. I would caution you to stay clear of the Barresh Council and the various powerful interest groups involved in this site. I would advise you to obtain the proper permits and have this relay, wherever it is, dismantled and taken apart to the level where the individual pieces just become parts and no longer fulfil the function they’ve been designed to fulfil. But we have no time for all of that. Therefore, go out there tonight. Take your association, make sure they are absolutely loyal to you, take arms and blast the thing to pieces. I have on my gamra account a prepared statement that I will send out the moment you get into trouble. It will be a notification that you’ve been relieved of your position so that you can be tried in the Barresh court and don’t need to face the gamra court. It will arrive backdated two days ago. You can send that on as evidence that you were acting of your own accord. If you run into trouble.”

  “Delegate Namion still filters all my mail anyway.”

  He snorted. “When all this is over, I’ll have a thing or two to say about that.” He lowered his voice. “When this is done, I will call a council of supporters to make sure we get rid of this idiot. If by any chance you get an opportunity to do it earlier than that, by all means, go ahead. You have my full, utter, undivided support. This extends to taking you into protection and offering you unlimited residence in Athyl.”

  I met his eyes, my heart hammering. Shit, this was serious. Was he telling me that he would condone any of us assassinating Delegate Namion? I didn’t even dare ask. Didn’t want to go there. He trusted me, and that was so much appreciated.

  There was a slightly awkward moment. He had to go, I had my work laid out for me. We might never see each other again.

  We’d been
through all the formalities, war declarations and protocol. A simple “goodbye” would never do. I held out my hand, and he clasped it in a bone-crushing grip—never shake hands with a Coldi person, Nicha used to joke, and by hell, how true that was. He put his other hand on my shoulder and held me briefly in a very human, very earthly hug.

  Then he was gone, crossing the hall in fast strides, drawing his red-sashed guards from the hub room and the door. I would have thought the hug had been a dream, but I could still feel the warmth of his touch.

  Right, then. To work.

  I called, “Thay’, Nich’!”

  They had both been in the hub, and came to the door. “Everyone, in the living room.”

  They weren’t used to me issuing orders, but they nodded, absolutely loyal. They knew that something very serious was up.

  I asked Eirani to bring some refreshments up; and cakes, nibbles and tea arrived at the same time that people started turning up.

  Nicha without his son, Thayu, Veyada and Sheydu who had been downstairs and Deyu and Reida who had been in the bath and came in wearing bathrobes and with wet hair.

  Also Evi and Telaris.

  We settled around the dining table. Eirani poured tea.

  I began, “We have a nasty job to do tonight.” And I continued with a summary of what Ezhya had told me and what we had to do.

  “Shouldn’t be too difficult,” Reida said. “Usually there are only foreign guards at night. Usually Tamerians. They don’t question or ask for more pay.”

  I asked him, “Do any of these Tamerians ever introduce themselves? Do they have names? Do they talk or mingle with others?” Can they be talked around into cooperating because I hate killing people?

  He raised his eyebrows. “Very little. They give one-syllable names. Pok, Mil, Sang, names like that. I don’t think they’re real names. I don’t think they’re capable of holding a conversation or relating normally to people.”