Ambassador 2: Raising Hell (Ambassador: Space Opera Thriller)

by Patty Jansen

  “Ew, that smells.” Raanu wrinkled her nose.

  “Do you think I could rinse off in that pool outside?” I asked Veyada. My jaw was shivering.

  “Yeah, if you like getting wet.”

  Not only did I like getting wet, I suddenly felt that if I didn’t, I’d be dead before night.

  I slung both suits over my arm and went outside. Whoa, the light had become a lot brighter suddenly. Without the suits, the wind scorched over my skin, as if I stood in a hot exhaust.

  I clambered down the rocky slope to the water and was about to dive in when I remembered the vapour rising off the rocks. How acid was this water? I stuck the tip of my finger in. It looked like normal water. It smelled like normal water.

  What to do?

  I was so hot, the sweat was running in my eyes. Where was Thayu with my medication?

  I sat on the rock and stuck my feet onto the water. It was warm. Did it make my skin tingle? Was it slowly eating away at my feet?

  I didn’t even care anymore.

  Damn, I was feeling very bad all of a sudden. This would not be a good place to faint. I turned around. I managed to push myself to my feet, but my knees felt weak and my legs were unable to support my weight. I tried to call for help, but my throat was dry and only a strangled sound came out.

  The vision in the corners of my eyes went white. I took a staggering step but lost my balance on the wobbly rocks. I fell. A voice yelled somewhere far in the distance. Then all my senses blacked out.

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  Chapter 16

  * * *

  VOICES.

  There were voices in my head, hollow and echoing.

  I was lying on something soft that held me in a half-sitting position, head elevated. My legs and body felt cool.

  I couldn’t move.

  Why were there so many people around me? Why couldn’t they shut up?

  I tried to open my eyes, but there was a sharp light above me that hurt my eyes.

  Someone close, a woman with an unfamiliar voice said, “He’s waking up.”

  I tried harder and a bright slit opened. Ouch, that light was really sharp.

  “Can you turn that off?” My tongue felt like rubber and probably didn’t produce the words as I wanted.

  The light remained on.

  Someone lifted me under my shoulders and held a cup to my mouth.

  I drank.

  Water. Cool and soothing. There was a splashing sound around me. I could feel more water lapping at my skin.

  My eyes opened further now. I half-lay into a shallow bath, wearing nothing more than a loincloth. A thick arm band sat snug around my upper arm. A tube filled with clear fluid went into it. Two patches with leads dangling off were attached to my chest.

  There was a privacy screen around me, and to my left stood a bank of blinking equipment, none of it familiar to me.

  Well, bugger that. Someone had taken me to a hospital. I vaguely remembered collapsing on the stony beach of a pool. In fact, there was a scrape on my leg that I must have sustained when falling.

  At a stool next to me sat a woman in an odd kind of loose garb reminiscent of a Roman toga. It was grey, not white, and she wore an apron over the top. She was tall, dark-skinned, with high cheekbones. The toga left her slender arms uncovered. Her hands had very long fingers.

  I wanted to say, “Who are you?” but my throat tickled so much I ended up coughing. She put the cup to my mouth again. When it was empty, she set it on a tray next to the bed.

  “Where am I? Can I get up?” My voice was still very fragile.

  “If you’re well enough.” She sounded distinctly female, not like a typical Coldi voice that was too dark to be female and too high to sound male. “Let me take this off first.”

  She loosened the band around my upper arm and detached the skin infusion patch that was at the end of the tube. Adaptation medicine.

  I struggled to sit up.

  She pulled the sticky pads off my chest.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  “I think so.”

  “I’ll get someone to bring you some food.” She rose from the stool and left, carrying the arm band and the tube.

  “Green-coded,” I called after her.

  “We are aware of that.”

  The head of my watery bed was shielded by the moveable screen, but past the foot of the bed I could see others in the room. People on beds, people sitting next to beds, people walking around.

  Wait.

  Last I knew I was in one of the aquifers in Athyl.

  Some of these people weren’t Coldi, including that strangely-dressed nurse.

  I clamped my arms around me. I’d never thought I’d say this, but it was actually quite chilly in here. That fluid in the basin wasn’t water, but some kind of very runny, clingy gel that made a cold patch wherever it dried.

  “He is going to be fine,” the nurse said somewhere else in the room.

  Running footsteps approached.

  Raanu came around the privacy screen, pulling herself up on her toes on the edge of the bed. “You have woken up! Oh, I have to tell everyone.”

  She ran off again.

  Her voice drifted through the room. “Come, come here quickly, he’s woken up!”

  This was followed by quick footsteps in the part of the room that was obscured by the screen, and then . . .

  “Cory!”

  Thayu. Her eyes bright with joy.

  She ran to the bed and wrapped her arms around me. And kissed me. Not caring about the inappropriateness of the intimacy or the fact that most Coldi didn’t kiss, or that I was wet with disgusting gel.

  I clung onto her, feeling the heat of her body through her clothes, and the heat of her mouth and her breath over my skin. Her heart beat under her chest, I could feel that, too. I was never going to leave her again. Never.

  Eventually, when the silence around us had grown too awkward, I let her go. Her eyes glittered with tears. Her chest heaved with deep breaths.

  Nicha was there, too. He came to me for a wordless hug.

  “What happened? Why are you here? How did you know I was here?” Where is your father and Natanu? Why didn’t the diversion happen?

  “I had your medicine with me. I knew that if you . . .” She swallowed visibly. “. . . if you were still alive, this was the only place you would be, because these would be the only people who would know what you needed.”

  I digested that for a bit. The tears in her eyes, the equipment around me.

  “How long have I been out?”

  “Two days. They said the aquifer farmers brought you in after you collapsed. You are very lucky, Cory.”

  Two days?

  And where were we?

  The only people who would know what I needed?

  The tall brown-skinned woman was now attending a different patient on the other side of the room. The grey garment she wore was not a toga. Thin and sheer as gauze, its many folds wrapped around her legs as well. I thought I recognised it from the pictures. This was a shayka, a loose garment made from one length of fabric that was mainly worn by desert rebels.

  I frowned at Thayu. “Zeyshi?”

  Whatever happened to the people who were supposedly so deprived that Marin Federza considered them a lost cause.

  She nodded. Her expression had a careful expression.

  I glanced at the nurse. “Is she Aghyrian?” All the Aghyrians I’d ever seen were pale-skinned, slender, elfin-like creatures I’d come to distrust intensely.

  She nodded. “There have always been Aghyrians with the zeyshi. It’s why the zeyshi live und
erground and why the group was formed in the first place.”

  The nurse moved to the next patient, an elderly Coldi man. Her actions were competent and her eyes alert; her face lacked the haughty expression that I knew from Federza, Chief Delegate Akhtari or any other Aghyrians I’d met in Barresh.

  Zeyshi and many other people in the Outer Circles lacked the association instinct and didn’t form loyalty networks in the same way most Coldi did. In hindsight, it was clear that this was the section of the population rich in Aghyrian blood, but ages of discrimination and poverty preceded that discovery.

  The hospital was well-appointed and modern. Obviously, the days that zeyshi were poor and lived like animals in holes in the desert, killing each other over a few drops of water, were long gone. It also seemed that Federza and the Barresh contingent had completely overlooked and underestimated these people.

  A different nurse, this one male, Coldi and also wearing a grey shayka, came to bring a tray with a bowl of food.

  “Thank you.” I sat up, shivered with a breeze going over my wet skin. A bowl on the tray contained a handful of mini-rolls, bread-like things the size of a large marble. They were still warm and exuded a fresh smell. They tasted good, too.

  “How far are we from the Inner Circle?” I asked with my mouth full.

  “Quite a way,” Nicha said.

  “And is the situation in the Inner Circle still . . . stable?”

  “I think so. It’s very hard to get news here, but it seems there is a stand-off going at the Inner Circle. If there had been a take-over, there would have been a lot more violence followed by a very sudden stop in fighting.”

  Of course, none of us had experienced a change in leadership, so this was pure guesswork. I agreed that the signs were in favour of the status quo.

  “Look at the goose bumps on you,” Thayu said, trailing a finger over my arm which, ironically, increased the goose bumps. “You should get dressed. I’ll go and see what happened to your clothes.”

  When she was gone, Nicha leaned against the edge of the basin. “There is some good news. The Exchange has made an announcement that they expect to be able to start resonating with Barresh later today.”

  Thank the heavens. “Anyone heard from Ezhya?”

  “Not yet. No one knows how badly other sections of the networks have been affected. It could still be days before functionality is returned.”

  “We don’t have days.”

  “No, but there is little we can do from here. You did what you could. You were successful. Right now, I think the most important thing for us is to try to get you out of here. Taysha holds all of the area surrounding the hub. He will get in within the next day or two. It’s beyond us. The race is between him and the Exchange.”

  Damn. “Can’t your father help us?”

  “I’m afraid not. That side of the command has broken down. It seems Taysha dealt with Risha first. We can’t raise him and no one seems to know where he is.”

  And Risha, of course, was Asha’s superior, without whom Asha was cut adrift. The saying went that a high-powered Coldi without a loyalty network always gravitated to the top. And Taysha had cleverly neutralised both Risha and Asha.

  “Is that why the diversion didn’t go as planned?”

  “That and other problems. When we got to my father’s quarters, Taysha’s troops were waiting for us. They took us into custody and interrogated us. We managed to get out, but our father is still held. They’ll be testing his loyalties.”

  “Testing?”

  Nicha’s eyes met mine, sincere. “You really don’t want to know.”

  Well, then, I guess I didn’t, and I guessed that testing loyalties was probably something that involved semi-legitimate torture.

  “Are you worried about him?”

  “No. If he chooses to challenge Taysha, he will do so because he knows he can win. Otherwise he will not challenge.”

  “Would your father serve under Taysha?”

  “Never.”

  “So he would essentially take Risha’s position?”

  “If it is indeed vacant.”

  I was somewhat pleased with that reply, although it probably did make matters more difficult. If Taysha took over as Chief Coordinator, what did that mean for the entire army?

  If that happened, I interpreted from Nicha’s tone that Asha would challenge and that it would be a fight to the death, and that quite possibly there would be armed troops involved.

  I was trying to digest this in a Coldi way, while a little voice inside me was screaming do you know we call this a military coup? and I couldn’t convince it to shut up.

  But it wasn’t. Not yet. Ezhya still clung to power. I had to maintain hope.

  Nicha said, “There will be a time of turmoil. Associations have been ripped and everything needs aligning.”

  I nodded. I felt the same about what had happened with our small group. Coldi had a word for that: denaryi. It meant “everyone is OK, but the associations are a mess.” It described our current situation well.

  “What happened to you?” Nicha asked.

  In a few sentences, I described the meeting with Taysha, and the writ—

  “You’re serious? Did he want that?”

  I switched to Isla. “Would I joke about that? You know how much I hate horse-trading over partners.”

  “He’s got to be kidding. You know . . . you should write a counter-writ.”

  “That’s what Veyada said.”

  He snorted. “Veyada would just go and kill the bastard if this happened to him.”

  That’s what Veyada had said, too. “What do you think, Nich’? What should I do? I don’t want to get involved in this justice system I don’t understand—”

  “You understand better than many Coldi.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Nicha sighed. He nodded. “You don’t want to give orders to kill anyone. But, you know, you’re going to have to make a decision. Since you have clearly violated the laws of your own world, gamra will want to see you obey some law, not pick and choose whatever law suits you.”

  Ouch. “Thanks, Nich’. ”

  “I mean it. This is what people say to me: is he Coldi or what jurisdiction does he fall under? Everyone saw clearly how you stood up to Danziger.”

  I nodded. I could pretend I didn’t, but I understood perfectly well. The concept of democracy was alien to these people. What a leader said was law. You did not argue with a leader. Also, what Veyada had said resonated with me. If I didn’t act, future powerful Coldi people would try to bully other foreigners into submission because they knew they would get away with it.

  “So I should send the writ?”

  Nicha nodded. “That’s what I would do.”

  My heart sank. “Who would carry it out?”

  He gave me an are-you-fucking-kidding look.

  “You?”

  “And Thayu.”

  “But you’re my zhaymas.”

  “Delegate Cory Wilson, it is time that you stopped holding yourself to illusions—”

  “Nich—” He had never spoken to me like that.

  “—We are a complete association. There are two zhaymas and a superior. The zhaymas are my sister and I.”

  I stared at him, wanting to protest, but knowing deep inside that he was right. When I challenged Ezhya Palayi in his apartment in Barresh last year, something had changed in our relationship. I’d not wanted to see it.

  “Don’t look like that. There is no reason. This is the way it is. Associations change all the time. You moved up. We are both honoured to work with you.”

  “But I don’t—” There was no point i
n arguing. Wanting had nothing to do with it.

  I knew. It had probably been like that for some time already. But then he looked down and took up the subservient position.

  I cringed inside. All the friendship we had, the times we’d laughed and did things together, were they all gone? Moreover, what did it mean for my relationship with Thayu?

  I swallowed hard.

  “All right, I’ll accept that. Two things, Nich’. This writ . . . If there is any acting to be done on my writ, I’m not going to send both of you to do my shitty jobs. If there is no other option but to kill him, I will do it myself. Secondly, I want you to never, ever act like a subordinate in front of me again.”

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  Chapter 17

  * * *

  WHEN I TURNED away from Nicha, Thayu had returned with my clothes. She stood to the side, just behind the end of the privacy screen. I wondered how much of the conversation she had heard. Raanu was with her so I couldn’t ask.

  I met her eyes and I wondered if she saw any of the pain I felt.

  Damn it, these associations would ruin everything I’d built up with Nicha and Thayu. The closer I came to Ezhya, the further I ventured from them. Yet I should have known. When I first met Thayu, she had shown a subservient reaction to me. Nicha had shown a latent reaction to me.

  Who was I? What was I? What right did I have to do these things and mess up these people’s lives? What did it mean for me to support a leader whom everyone already seemed to have considered having lost his position?

  I climbed out of the water. Thayu handed me a towel. I still felt a little light-headed and sat on the stool where the nurse had been sitting earlier.

  “I’ll help,” Raanu said. I wanted to protest but hadn’t the energy. Guess Coldi didn’t worry much about their children seeing naked adult men. I let her dry my back.

  “It’s funny, you have hair here.” She pulled.