by Patty Jansen
The only one who was truly oblivious to the danger was Ayshada, asleep in the pram.
The clouds that had been threatening for most of the day decided to discharge their rain. It was cold and horrible. Warm light radiated from the windows of eateries and you could see people inside, but all the tourist shops had closed and many were dark.
Hardly anyone still walked along the boulevard. I felt stupid and horribly exposed. There could be snipers in any one of those apartments, or on any of the roofs. They could shoot us and no one would ever know who did it.
We walked under awnings, close to the display windows.
We went around the corner into the alley that took us to the tram stop, and then we ran out of shelter. The large exposed area was designed to handle the big crowds that came here in summer. The pavement was gritty with sand.
We didn’t see any police although a siren issued short bursts of sound somewhere in a nearby street.
The tram station was empty, if well-lit. The shelter faced the wrong way to keep passengers out of the rain, so we huddled at the back of it.
A pillar displayed the timetable on a screen that cast a blue glow over the wet pavement. The news scrolled over the top bar of the screen, including the news about the shooting and that it affected two tram services. None of the ones we needed.
No one said much. I knew Veyada and Thayu were listening to whatever signals they received from whomever was sending them. Nicha stood with his face hidden in the collar of his jacket, and Evi watched every tiny movement around us. When the wind made the trees wave, he glanced at them. When a man in fluorescent clothing came to empty a rubbish bin, he followed him with his eyes until he vanished, whistling, around the corner pulling his trolley with larger bins into which he emptied the smaller ones. Two automated police vehicles came past on what seemed to be a normal patrol. Somewhere in a control station, there would be people manning the moving camera on the roof. Neither found a reason to linger.
How long until this tram turned up? Should we perhaps get a taxi instead?
Evi froze, staring at the building opposite the shelter. Warm light radiated from most windows, and you could see people moving inside.
Thayu turned in the same direction. She held up her reader. It showed a yellow bar across the screen that became longer or shorter depending on the strength of some signal. It was the strongest when she pointed the device at the building.
“There,” Veyada said in a low voice. His screen showed a 3D image of the building with a blinking dot that corresponded with a spot on the second floor balcony directly opposite us. A light was on in the unit, and the balcony was full of various items. I couldn’t see a person.
“What are you seeing?” I asked.
He showed me the screen. A section of it showed scrolling text. I recognised some words, but it mostly consisted of code.
“Some form of communication?” I asked.
He nodded, his eyes still scanning the building, not looking at me.
“Who is it?”
“I don’t know. I’m not getting any data on the origin.”
“Record it,” Thayu said. “We’ll have a look at it later.”
“Already doing that.”
A short period of silence followed, in which all the members of my team focused on the building. Thayu established that there were at least two spies.
And then Evi said, “Look at this.”
He was pointing his reader to another building behind us. This one was not a residential building, but commercial premises with shops on the ground floor. He, too, had text scrolling across the screen. It was in Coldi, but I recognised a few Isla terms transposed into Coldi script: the words unit and police jumped out at me.
“Those are our Nations of Earth minders,” I said.
But then who were the other ones? If they were the men hired by Conrad Martens, they would have been easily identifiable by their communication that would be similarly peppered with Isla words.
And it wasn’t.
Most of what Thayu had on her screen was code of some type. What sort of people had Conrad Martens hired? Or who else was watching us? Who—or what—were they?
“Interesting,” Veyada said. “Very interesting.” By the tone in his voice, he didn’t think it was a particularly good kind of interesting.
Another police vehicle showed up, this one with four uniformed officers inside. It stopped at the entrance to the building opposite us. Three officers went into the building, and one remained with the car.
“Someone is coming down the stairs,” Nicha said.
“Do they know we’re here?” I asked.
Neither Veyada nor Thayu answered that, but Veyada pushed me to the other side of the tram stop, behind the shelter, where I was buffeted by the wind. Ayshada in the pram woke up and protested against the onslaught of weather. Nicha picked him up and sheltered him under his jacket.
The shelter’s back wall was made out of see-through plastic. I peered through the surface, scratched by the use by many passengers, bill posters and bored teenagers keen to let the world know who was dating whom.
Veyada reached under his jacket. He didn’t pull out his gun, and that was probably a good sign.
I could now heard a shout drift from the building, a couple of loud bangs, at least one of which sounded like a gun shot, and then the sound of someone running down the stairs.
At that moment the tram came rumbling into the street. A young woman ran across the pavement at our back to the tram stop shelter oblivious to the goings on.
The tram stopped.
A man ran out of the building on the other side of the street from a plain door that looked like a fire exit. He turned left and took off at incredible speed. The police officer who had remained with the car shouted and ran along the front of the building. He was far too slow.
The tram opened its doors.
Veyada said, “You go, I’ll catch up.” And he was gone.
He sprinted across the street—and to see a Coldi man sprint at full speed is a truly awesome sight—and followed the escapee down the road. The police officer had already decided to call for help.
Since this was the end of the line, all the tram’s passengers got out and we and the woman were the only ones to get on the tram. We sat down at the front. I tried to look down the street, but Veyada had already disappeared.
Nicha lifted the pram and jammed it in between the first bench and the cubicle where the driver sat. It just fitted in sideways. Ayshada was whining. He wanted to run around. Thayu attempted to distract him by letting him look at her screen.
He pointed a chubby hand. “There, there!”
Yes, the screen showed bursts of communication in code, alternating with lines that came clearly from the police officers, who now came out of the building.
“Very good,” Thayu said to him and then continued to Evi, “Be prepared.”
Evi was prepared, I had no idea what for. He sat sideways in his seat, following the progress of this running person through the building.
The tram doors closed and the tram set off. The lights dimmed, which made it possible to see out.
“There they are,” Evi said.
The tram passed first Veyada and then the man who was running along the footpath.
The tram pulled ahead, but then it came to a stop where two people waited. By the time we set off again, the escapee had caught up and I could see Veyada not far behind.
There was no one at the next stop, so the tram pulled ahead a good lot.
I though we had lost him when the tram needed to stop at the station after that. Three young women got on, talking and giggling. They weren’t very organised, and one had to look in her bag for her pass, and while the tram sat idle, he caught up again.
“Suspiciously excellent runner,” Thayu said. Her voice sounded dark. “Very, very suspicious.”
Yes, it was strange. The only people I knew who could out-run a Coldi person were—
Tamerians.
Really?
I asked against better judgement, “Could he be a messenger from Conrad Martens?”
“A Tamerian? I don’t think so. If he was a messenger from Conrad Martens, or Margarethe, he would have come and introduced himself, not spied on us from a distance.”
True. But still, a Tamerian? Who here used Tamerians? Tamerians didn’t have gamra citizenship. How did they get them in through the Exchange?
The young women looked wide-eyed at our group and went right to the very back of the carriage. They didn’t say anything while they found their seats and then only spoke in low voices.
The tram continued.
It didn’t stop at the next stop, and didn’t stop at the stop after that either.
“Do you think we’ve lost him?” I asked.
I imagined Veyada catching up with the man and tackling him to the ground.
But at that moment, the tram slowed and stopped, the door opened. The three girls got out.
Evi sprang up and bolted out the door.
“Come.” Thayu pulled my arm.
Nicha carried Ayshada and the pram down the steps onto the platform.
“What are we going to do here?” I asked. But Thayu and Evi were already gone into the darkness.
“Wait here,” Nicha said in a low voice. “There will be another tram later.” He, too, vanished in the darkness, leaving me with the pram with Ayshada on the platform.
He blinked at me with big round eyes. The peacock purple sheen on Coldi hair was very prominent in newborns and faded slowly over the next few years when the underlying black pigment grew in. Ayshada’s hair was still quite soft and thin and therefore quite strongly purple.
It glittered in the single light on the platform.
We were in a park where giant oak trees lined the tram rails. The shelter had a neon light that cast a bleak pool of light on the platform, but the surrounding area was dark. Thayu, Veyada and Evi had disappeared into the darkness, as had the three girls, although I could still hear them talking and laughing when the sound was carried in our direction by the breeze.
Then the sound of running footsteps resolved from the background city hum. It was too dark to see anything along most of the footpath, except for a couple of sparse lanterns, mostly obscured by greenery.
The runner was definitely coming closer.
Someone cried out. A dog yelped and started barking. A man’s voice shouted, “Watch where you’re going, idiot!”
A dark figure ran along the footpath through a pool of light cast by a street lamp, followed by a man with a dog pulling on its leash and barking. The first man ran into another area of darkness.
Then two people came into the light, both swerving on either side of the man with the dog.
That looked like Nicha and Thayu.
The man with the dog yelled and the dog went nuts, almost pulling loose.
Nicha and Thayu also disappeared into the darkness. There was a thud and a scuffle. A man shouted and then the footsteps continued. The first man pelted down the footpath faster than I had ever seen anyone run. Nicha and Thayu followed, but he pulled ahead. Thayu had to give up first. She stopped, out of breath. Nicha kept going for a while longer, but even he could not catch up.
They both came back, panting, in the company of Evi. Veyada also joined us, breathing fast.
“I could have caught him if I was in better shape,” Thayu said.
The pregnancy was already slowing her down.
Veyada shook his head. “I don’t know. He is fast.”
Nicha said, “We might have caught him if it hadn’t been for the guy with the dog.”
“At least I got his jacket.” Thayu held it up. Plain, made from dark leather with lots of pockets.
“Did you see anything of him?” I asked.
“Not much.” She let a little silence lapse in which the unspoken comment went between us: not many people could outrun a Coldi. Coldi were much stronger and faster than any people on Earth, or even people of gamra . . . except for Tamerians.
Could there be Tamerians following us? Nicha seemed to think so.
Jasper used Tamerians. I thought of Puck and his puzzling answers. Tamerians were supposed to be super humans, but all I saw were semi-robotic people who were physically strong but with the mental capacity of a toddler. However, they were effective killers.
Was there a chance that these were the people who had killed Conrad Martens?
Tamerians, in the pay of someone else, of course. But who and why?
And look at my team, all of them on high alert, standing around me facing outwards, watching with their Coldi eyes unused to the darkness, listening to the sounds on their feeders. That man was out there somewhere. He was armed, and there were others, too.
Evi was communicating with someone, probably Devlin, asking for reinforcements.
He had to be unhappy that Telaris, his work partner and brother, wasn’t here.
The next tram came into the station, and we got on. About ten people were in the carriage, and we got some strange looks. Both Thayu and Veyada had wet smudges on their clothes.
I sat down next to Thayu, who was examining the pockets of our pursuer’s jacket. She found a transport pass and an old ratty earpiece that was probably broken.
In the other pocket, she found a very thin, lightweight reader. She held it up, grinning at Veyada, but didn’t touch it otherwise, and Veyada didn’t ask her to see what was on it. I guessed they assumed it had some sort of self-destruct mechanism that would destroy all the data if it wasn’t accessed by the correct person. She slid it in the pocket of her coat.
She grinned. “Who needs a useless, annoying Tamerian when you can have his reader?”
The rest of the tram ride was uneventful. We got out at the stop in front of the hotel, where the dead zone had already gone into operation.
Dinner had passed by without us, but we’d eaten at the beach so that was not a problem. I was also informed that notice had come that Abri was required to appear in court tomorrow. Apparently Reya and Mereeni had become concerned about the requirement, written on the summons, that no recording equipment be taken into the courtroom.
I thought that was a standard provision, but they didn’t seem to think so.
Thayu took her prize jacket and reader to the spare room at the top of the stairs, which had become a communication and tech hub, and where the table, dressing table and part of the bed were all covered in equipment and chargers and blinking lights. Evi and Amarru’s guards were also in there, and they went into technical discussions that were very much over my head.
Nicha wanted to bathe Ayshada, who was covered in sand and sitting very quietly in the pram.
Tired, I guessed.
I was wet, windblown, cold and tired so I also had a shower. When I came out, Thayu had still not returned, and a peek into the security room showed them very much still at work. Thayu was yawning, but I knew better than to tell her to go to bed.
I found Eirani and Karana in the foyer, admiring their purchases, which included forks, a cheese slicer, a turban cake tin and an orange press. What did they need that for, I asked, since Barresh had no oranges?
“There was a woman demonstrating this in the shop,” Eirani said. “She put half a fruit on top of this part here, and then brought down the lever. It pushed the fruit into a cup shape. I thought I could use it for other things that are not fruit. It has always annoyed me that the filled rolls take so long to make. This is easy. You put the dough in here, push down, here is your cup, put the filling in and seal the top.”
“That sounds good.”
I hadn’t noticed Jemiro in the room, but there he was, sitting in the corner clutching a cup of tea. He wore a thick jumper that was much too big for him, with the sleeves rolled up. I asked him if he was all right and did he have everything he needed and he said he did. To be honest, I was getting annoyed with his one-syllable responses and his refusal or inability to engage with the
group. It was not that we were terribly noisy, or deliberately kept him our of discussions.
“Have the Pengali woken up yet?” I asked him.
“Oh, yeah.”
“Where are they?”
“They went that way.” He made a broad gesture to the door.
My heart jumped. “That way? Outside?”
It was dark out there, and it was raining. On the other hand, Pengali were nocturnal, and they’d been keen to go fishing.
Oh, crap, oh crap.
I ran back to our room and put on my coat, which surprised me unpleasantly with its lingering salty dampness from the beach. I looked around for something drier in our suitcase, and found, at the bottom between my clothes, the case with my gun. I picked it up and weighted it in my hands. But I put it back down.
This was Earth. People here didn’t solve things with weapons, at least not in a civilised town.
I went into the hall.
“Where are you going?” Thayu asked from the security station as I passed.
“The Pengali have gone outside. I’m afraid they may have gone fishing.”
“In this weather?” She met my eyes. We both knew that Pengali often considered rain favourable fishing weather. She added, “Oh, shit.”
Oh shit, indeed. Veyada and Evi jumped up. They were still in their work clothes.
Thayu said, “Let me come.”
“No. We’re just going for a look. We’ll call when we want reinforcements.”
“How? We’re in a dead zone, remember?”
Yes, I remembered. I did not want her out there. “We will come back if it’s going to take more people than just the three of us. You try to see what’s on that reader. I’m useless at stuff like that.”
I was right and she knew it. She sighed. “Do me a favour and take the weapon.” She gave me a penetrating look. She knew me well enough to guess correctly that I didn’t have it.
“But Evi and Veyada—”
“Take it.”
She was right, too, so I went back to our room, took the weapon out of its case and strapped it on. In Barresh we would wear the weapons openly on arm brackets, but because the weather required jackets and coats and we could not openly wear weapons on the street, I had harnesses made that allowed a weapon to be carried against one's side underneath one's clothing.
