Ambassador 4: Coming Home

by Jansen, Patty

  The floor was humming now, and the tinny voice in my helmet was rattling off technical details, the meaning of which went completely over my head.

  Sweat ran over my chest. It tickled but I couldn’t wriggle my hand up far enough to wipe the drops. It was so hot in this damn thing.

  The humming increased, and all of a sudden burst into an explosive roar. The pressure on my chest increased. Some machine pumped air into my pod with a loud hiss that gave me a fright. Through the little screen I could see only sky.

  Thay’?

  There was no reply. I guess I couldn’t count on the feeders working inside a military ship. I tried to turn my head but the downward force was too great. I didn’t know that I could have seen her in the pod anyway. The little screen inside the pod went dark. What was going on? Panic closed like a vice on my chest. I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that everything was under control, that I shouldn’t worry, but right now the situation was reminding me, with the bluntness of a freight train at full speed, that I didn’t like space travel.

  I thought I passed out for a few seconds.

  Then, slowly, the pressure eased to make way for another feeling that was far too familiar: weightlessness. And I hadn’t brought any sickness medication.

  Great. The universe was going to send me to war throwing up. Here comes Spewy the Hero.

  I closed my eyes because anything else would just make it worse. It got quiet. The engines must have stopped or were only running at low speed. A blue glow filtered through my eyelids when the screen came back on, showing the curve of the planet backlit by sunlight. Numbers scrolled over the side of the screen, but I had no idea what they meant.

  I might have drifted off for a bit and was jolted wide awake by some heavy thumps and sideways shifts that made the ship shudder.

  I guessed this meant that we had docked at the larger ship in orbit, but the jolting was much rougher than I had felt on previous flights.

  After a while, there were clanks and clicks, and then someone opened the pod from the outside. The lid folded up and a muscled figure floated in the space before me. Thayu. She pulled out a bag that she carried tucked in her belt, and handed it to me in case of embarrassing emergencies. That made me feel better.

  She touched me gently on the cheek. “Hey, you look terrified.”

  “I am terrified.”

  “It’s a military ship. Not built for utmost comfort of passengers.”

  “I noticed.”

  “The pilots are already tracking the relay, and we’ll come within range soon. Once we’ve dealt with it, we’ll join the rest of the fleet.”

  I pushed myself out of the pod. “All right then. Let’s go and hunt some satellites.”

  Chapter 26

  * * *

  WE WERE STILL weightless even though we were in the main ship. On the previous trip I’d learned that a rotating habitat, and artificial gravity, was a heavy drain on the ship’s systems and interfered with weapons operation. A large ship might have a rotating habitat when travelling or observing, but the moment they entered any level of alertness, all rotation stopped.

  Of course, Coldi did not get motion sickness.

  Sheydu was helping Veyada out of his pod. It seemed that he had used his enforced imprisonment to catch up on some sleep. Smart Veyada. If anything that flight had made me feel more tired.

  The crew had lowered the pressure door and were moving about. One operated the mechanism next to the door, and it opened, letting in a waft of ship air: clean but perpetually too hot.

  Damn, I’d almost forgotten about that.

  This crewmember said, “You are cleared to proceed to the command room.” I still had no idea of the gender of any of these four soldiers and this bugged me far more than it should.

  “The four hostages will remain on board this shuttle under our guard.”

  I nodded, unsure where I stood with them in terms of ranking. I should have expected something like that. Asha and captain of the main ship would never let non-Coldi into any area of significance.

  At the door, I turned around. The four crew were just now freeing the hostages from their pods. I met Federza’s eyes in between two dark-clad backs. His expression was . . . determined, observing. I didn’t think he looked angry, but Traders were notoriously good at hiding their emotions. He seemed to have accepted his fate, whatever it would be.

  Thayu preceded me out of the cabin through a narrow tube that led into a busy docking area of a much larger ship. It resembled the setup I had seen in that giant space station that orbited Asto: a fairly narrow space with high walls from which protruded brackets that each held a ship. The ground, irrelevant as it was, hid out of view in the darkness below. Our was the only non-fighter ship that I could see.

  We floated into the open space.

  “Stay here,” Thayu said, yanking the tether on my belt. It attached to the outside of the ship with a sticky pad.

  There seemed to be a traffic highway past our ship, “down” into the darkness and “up” to a rectangle from which yellow light radiated: crew hurried past, pulling themselves along a railing on the wall.

  My tether had a metal loop, too, and Thayu showed me how to attach it. Then we followed the other crew to the square entrance. It was a corridor, with entrances on all sides.

  This was a deep space ship, built for long-term travel in weightlessness. The sides of the corridor could each function as walls or floor. Most of the time, they ticked the “none of the above” box. Two tether railings went through the middle: one for traffic in each direction. Thayu pulled herself along at a decent clip.

  Veyada and Sheydu followed me, with Deyu, who looked at everything with wide eyes: at the doors, the control panels, the crew in desert pink uniforms, which she would never have seen, since Asto military didn’t go uniformed when mingling with the public. Some crew greeted us, some even with subservient greetings.

  From the corridor we went up through a manhole into another corridor and then straight ahead to the ship’s control room, where the narrow corridor widened out to a huge, funnel-shaped space.

  Deyu whispered, “Wow.”

  And it was quite impressive. All around the walls, people were busy at workstations. From the design, I guessed this room could rotate, but right now it didn’t and all the workers were attached to their part of the perimeter with their tether clipped to a “seat”. There were easily over a hundred people in the room, stuck to the inside of the funnel-shaped walls like bats in a cave. The far end of the room—the “mouth” of the funnel—was taken up by a huge window in a couple of segments. A bank of screens and another workstation hung in the centre, suspended from the window frame. A serious-looking officer in uniform sat there. I guessed this was the ship’s commander.

  When this officer noticed us, he—I thought it was a he anyway—unclipped himself from the seat and floated towards us with deadly precision.

  A brief flash of panic flared up in me. He met me as the leader of our respective associations, and I was expected to feel whether I was higher or lower in rank than he was. As recently as last year I would always have erred on the side of lower because I thought that would please people, but Veyada assured me that this wasn’t true at all. Just getting it wrong was a source of annoyance. Getting it wrong could mean the difference between having a successful cooperation with the other association and trying to break a stone wall with water bombs.

  What was it? I didn’t know. I lacked the instinct.

  And he already threw his tether pad to the wall and reeled himself in. He decided I was . . . higher. He looked down, holding his arms by his side, palms facing backwards.

  What the fuck?

  I touched his shoulder, sweating, feeling ready to faint or vomit, or both.

  “Don’t be so nervous,” Thayu said softly in keihu because no one else was likely to understand it.

  That was easier said than done. I wasn’t ready for this. Oh hell, I wasn’t.

  The captai
n introduced himself. His name was Ledaya—male indeed—and his clan Domiri as evidenced by the blood red stones in his earrings. My clan.

  In fact, all of this ship was likely to be run by people from the Domiri clan.

  I guessed I should have known that. I just hadn’t been thinking clearly. Too tired, too stressed out and too busy keeping the contents of my stomach where they belonged.

  He told us to join him at the command module in the middle of the hall.

  Of course he was much more adept at navigating the open space to get there. I misdirected my push off the wall and Thayu had to come after me to stop me drifting into some highly bemused workers.

  Great. Making an idiot of myself already.

  When we arrived at the command platform, me with my pride slightly dented, he gave a hand signal. The light dimmed and a giant projection sprang up in the void, consisting of many glimmering dots. Most of them where white, but some, clustered in groups, were blue. Two red circles intersected the projection, one inside the other. Those, I made a guess, were the orbital paths of Asto and Ceren. A little orange blip indicated he current position of each planet.

  Each planet possessed a cloud of dots. “At some point, the array will form a network of anpar lines. We have a number of different models for when we think this might happen. The trouble for them is that over the years so many of the relays have drifted off-course. They have come to life to change their orbit. As soon as they fire an engine, we can detect them and destroy them. We have calculated a number of different configurations that they are likely to take up before the ship can jump.” He enlarged the area around Asto until the planet became a neat yellowish sphere. “It’s likely that they’ll be using this cloud here around Asto. The relays have drifted and are bunched up at the LaGrange points. They will likely need to spread out further to get any kind of resonance happening between them. Some have started to move. Estimates for them to form a decent array at their current speeds is between a few days and a week.”

  “Are all those dots relays?” The sheer size of the cloud was astonishing.

  “They are. The known ones, at least.”

  “What about the blue ones?”

  “Those are the ones we’ve destroyed.”

  There were many more white ones.

  The monumental task only became clear to me then. “All those need to be destroyed?”

  “Ideally, yes, but some might not have any function. Some could be more vital than others. There are a lot of unanswered questions. There may also be some relays that we don’t yet know about. That’s likely.”

  Damn. Finding them all and destroying them was a huge task. “Forgive me for saying this, but it seems futile to chase just our one little dot here at Ceren.”

  “It’s not just a little dot. It’s bigger and more powerful than most of the others and fulfils a special function in the communication with the ship. We don’t know what that function is.”

  He zoomed out again and now enlarged the area around Ceren, which was devoid of dots, apart from a single one in low orbit.

  “This is the one. We are on an intersecting orbit and will come into range shortly. You’re welcome to stay here and watch.”

  A little floating platform appeared from below. It looked like an upside-down mushroom with a thick stalk.

  Crew in pink uniforms attached the floor to the command platform and pulled seats out of the central stalk, insofar as one could talk about seats in zero-g. They looked a bit like giant spoons, where one sat in the spoon’s bowl, held in place by a belt.

  All around us, below and above and to the sides, people were working on their individual tasks. The navigator section was on my left-hand side, if the giant screens with diagrams and lines were indeed maps. I thought weapons were directly above. There were a lot of people with very serious faces in that part. Below my feet I thought were the ship operations and maintenance divisions.

  The entire command centre was a hive of busy but controlled activity.

  The land underneath us was starting to change. Low golden sunlight stroked the pristine, forest-covered hills of the southern slopes of the Mirani continent, way beyond where the nation of Miran petered out in uninhabited swathes of dense forest. This land was deserted, dangerous and cold. In places I thought I could see patches of snow.

  Ceren was an overwhelmingly cold world, with huge ice caps and an ocean filled with icebergs that drifted to quite low latitudes. I could see some of the icebergs now, breaking off glaciers, pushed into a corner of a fjord by currents and the wind. The water was azure blue, the forested hills dark green with patches of snow.

  It was really harsh, infertile country down there.

  We continued into the eastern sunlight. The suns were so close that they almost touched. We rounded the southern tip of the continent, a rock-strewn, barren, icy place, where it was hard to see where the sea ice started and the land stopped. There were thousands of islands here, a giant archipelago that extended along the length of the western coast to just south of the Barresh delta.

  Even when it wasn’t dark, one rarely saw this much of the world on a commercial flight. Ceren was an agricultural world, underpopulated because of its cold climate even if ironically, Barresh was decidedly tropical.

  “There,” said one of the navigators.

  A flurry of activity followed between the navigators and the weapons crew. Snatches of jargon flew to and fro. The navigators at the projection communicated with at least two groups, one of which was in the control room, the other elsewhere. Ledaya watched the activity with sharp eyes from his command chair.

  After a short period of frenzied activity, he said, “Permission to fire.”

  Navigators peered at their controls, faces tense with concentration.

  A shudder went through the ship. I peered out the window, but didn’t notice anything until a faint glint of light bloomed and flickered out.

  One of the navigators said, “Positive.”

  I guessed that was it? I didn’t dare ask. Everyone seemed busy. Thayu watched the goings-on with sharp eyes. Did she understand what they were doing? With the many jobs Thayu had done, I didn’t think she’d ever done a stint in the military, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she had.

  This stealth warfare thing was not half as exciting as I thought. I attempted to lean back against the central stalk of our platform, as far as one could speak of leaning back in weightlessness, and go to sleep. But as I closed my eyes, the light from the projection and the thousands of white and blue dots turned into streaks when filtered through my eyelashes. Ledaya had again zoomed out so that all locations near both planets showed up. The dots formed an almost half-circle which, when I squinted, all looked like they were connected to each other through streaks of light.

  I opened my eyes, and I lost it again, but the streaks reappeared when I squinted. It was an effect of light reflecting off my eyelashes or something, but the resulting image made me think.

  A bit over a year had passed since we first heard from the Aghyrians. Back then, I remembered Ezhya talking about the alignment of the planets. This happened only once every five years. Ceren’s years were long. We were now almost at the quarter point and Asto was about a quarter of an orbit ahead of us. The relays were mostly in orbit around Asto. A good number of them had drifted to the Trojan LaGrange points, which were in the same orbit, but ahead or trailing the planet by a sixth of the orbit.

  There were also a handful in the Trojan LaGrange points of Ceren. The only relay at Ceren itself had just turned blue.

  Supposing the ship was not going to use an area with a high concentration of relays, but an extreme spread of them? It now had relays in positions that spanned a third of a circle around the two suns. Supposing the ship needed as many of these relays to connect with each other as possible, and assuming that they would focus on the jump point, which, if I was the captain, I’d choose to be the L1 LaGrange point on the inside of Asto’s orbit—well, I didn’t know that, but let’s
assume it.

  All those relays would then need to focus at that point. Their means of communication was probably not terribly fond of the disturbance caused by stars. Which meant that if Asto and Ceren were on opposite sides of the suns, the array was huge, but communication poor. If both planets were at the same point, the array was small but the communication excellent. Which meant that now Asto was racing ahead, we were going into a long period of poor communication and they would probably jump sooner rather than later.

  I explained this to Thayu, and she said, “Shit. I don’t know that that option has been included in the calculations.”

  She undid her belt and floated over to the command module where she spoke with Ledaya.

  “They produced three possible models,” Veyada said.

  “We assumed that a certain concentration of relays would be necessary to produce a strong enough signal,” Ledaya said, joining us on our mushroom platform.

  “What if the larger ones are resonators or boosters?”

  He frowned deeply, staring at the projection. “We just got rid of the only relay at Ceren. Ceren’s trailing cloud would be about to go out of range. That would explain some things . . .” He fingered his upper lip. “I’ve been getting messages that the ship’s engines are ramping up, and we haven’t been able to understand why, since our calculations didn’t have any of the arrays in a useful formation for a number of days. Engineers suggested that it might be for tests, but to me, it looks like they will jump soon. Which means . . .”

  He pushed himself to the command module and spoke urgently into his earpiece. All around us, people stopped working and listened to commands we couldn’t hear. There was a sense of urgency in the air.

  “Are we going to jump?”

  “It seems so,” Sheydu said.

  “Our work here is done,” Thayu said. “I’ve just been connected to the ship loop. He says we’re going to join the fleet to destroy some relays around Asto. Oh, and my father has just received word from the Trader Guild that they’re ordering all their ships to go up as well.”