Ambassador 3: Changing Fate: Ambassador Space Opera Thriller Series (Ambassador: Space Opera Thriller)

by Patty Jansen

  The children were very polite and said nothing, and sat in their seats with their backs held straight. They didn’t yell, they didn’t fidget, they didn’t fight. They listened to the older girl, who was still explaining, occasionally interspersed with remarks like we built that or that was our design.

  I often wondered what their adults said about non-Aghyrian people, in that walled-off compound of theirs, where all the adults were Aghyrian and where they were taught that their home was Asto and that without their ancestors, the Exchange wouldn’t exist, there would be no space travel, and basically none of the other people would exist because their ancestors had seeded all the other human populations. They learned that all science was Aghyrian and that the Coldi had tried to deny their status as artificial race for many years and had even gone as far as locking up Aghyrians as deranged freaks. Maybe they learned that if only the Aghyrians withdrew consent for everyone to use their technology, society would collapse.

  The term “brainwashing” came to mind.

  It was a wonder that not all of them turned out as arrogant as Trader Delegate Marin Federza.

  We didn’t speak much in our group on the ride home. Our fellow passengers were only children, but I felt uncomfortable discussing anything of importance in their presence. Aghyrians were very intelligent. They matured early. I didn’t trust them.

  Reida stared out the window, trying to avoid everyone’s gazes. Sheydu was fiddling with something on her reader. Deyu pretended not to be there. Evi did what security did best: sat very still and watched.

  The gamra island was at the end of the line, and lot of people, including the children, got off at the second-last stop, leaving only us and the other gamra personnel, two old men in admin uniforms. They raised eyebrows at Reida. He was that kind of young man, with his tattoos and wild hair and his sullen look.

  I couldn’t help the tattoos, but I could certainly do something about the hair and the defensive expression, yet getting angry at the young man hand-picked by Nicha was not something I looked forward to.

  * * *

  When we arrived at my apartment, Thayu came into the hall from the hub as soon as the door shut behind us. “Ah, there you are. Can you come in here for a moment—”

  She looked from me to Reida and his muddied and ripped shayka and back again. “What a right state you’re in, young man.”

  Reida cringed.

  “I’m getting very sick of this,” I said.

  “I told you I was only trying to help—”

  I turned to him. “Be quiet. Go to your room and stay there.”

  He nodded and drooped off. Deyu went with him, her arm over his shoulder.

  Thayu watched him go, a troubled expression on her face. I knew what she was thinking. He was supposed to answer unconditionally to Nicha and certainly to me.

  “All right, now, what did you want to tell me?” Was it even something I’d want to know?

  “You need to come into the hub to see it.”

  Damn it, what now?

  I followed her into the hub, where it was hot and stuffy and it smelled of keihu and Coldi sweat.

  Devlin sat at the central control bench, working on something that I judged to be one of his study projects—he was still doing courses sent to him from Damarq. He flicked that projection aside where it hung, half finished, in the air. Not a study project, I saw, but a fact sheet on each of the Aghyrian delegates that would take part in the negotiations. We knew all the Barresh Aghyrians, but there were large gaps in the background of the zeyshi ones which it looked like Devlin was filling, probably with help from Thayu.

  Good. I could use that.

  He brought up the Exchange logo, which twirled in the centre of the room while the machines connected.

  “Is there a problem?” I asked, liking this less and less.

  “Not immediately, no, but this happened this afternoon.” The projection showed that connection had been established. He flicked the main projector into life, found the news feed and moved the log slide back to this afternoon. The projection showed various types of communication going in and out. Veyada had been checking some law database. Thayu was on the central Athyl database. Data scrolled over each part of the projection. Devlin had been working on that same document that he’d shoved to the side when we came in.

  All of a sudden, a strobe-like signal crossed the workspace. It flickered on and off for a few seconds and vanished.

  In the replay, Thayu exclaimed, “What the hell. . . ?”

  Devlin replayed it. We watched, and when he killed the playback, we all stared at each other.

  “What was that?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Thayu said in that dark tone that told me that she was thinking the same as I was: more tomfoolery by that Aghyrian ship that had caused the outage of the entire Exchange network.

  “Do we know where it came from?”

  “The Exchange is checking that,” Devlin said.

  “Do they suggest it could be that old ship?”

  “They are investigating it. They won’t say any more until they have more data.” Devlin gave me a dark look. “They’ve suspended all travel in and out of Barresh until midnight. They’ll make another decision by then.”

  “It’s affected only Barresh?”

  “At this point in time, yes.”

  Phew. “And it hasn’t come back?”

  He shook his head.

  “That’s a good thing, at least.” But I remembered that the major burst of energy that had fried the Exchange had given a few warning blips in the days prior to the incident, too. They were right in suspending all non-essential travel. We couldn’t have a repeat of that fiasco.

  “Have they warned Damarq?” The main Exchange node.

  “They have. Everyone’s on standby.”

  Not that that would make a lot of difference. Building up the Exchange network had taken thousands of years. Re-establishing links, if they were broken, took weeks at the very least, no matter how prepared everyone was for the eventuality, and everyone had been very nervous since that disaster.

  We’d since discovered the old Aghyrian ship that may or may not be the same one that went missing after the meteorite strike on Asto, but our complete failure to raise a response from this ship had made people question if this ship was even live or just an empty shell responding to automated processes set up years ago. Things didn’t decay in space as they did on planets, and I had learned that people had found operational artefacts that were even older than this ship. It was just that most of them were harmless. They were satellites or probes that travelled on the course set out for them thousands of years ago. Occasionally, they would send a little blip to planet-based equipment that had long since stopped working to people who had died millennia ago. None of them caused large-scale Exchange failures.

  While the people who tracked the ship were debating its status, it worried me that a few things were converging that had also been in place just before the outage: an important date for the zeyshi claim on Asto and a large presence of the Asto army. That reminded me. . . .

  “Thay’, do you know if your father is here?”

  She looked up at me and frowned. “Here in Barresh?”

  “No.” I glanced at the ceiling. “Up there somewhere. In orbit.” From my trip to Asto in the military ship, I’d learned that Asha Domiri spent very little time on the ground. He was either on a ship or in that mindbogglingly huge, amazing, frightening space station that orbited Asto.

  “I don’t know. Why should he be here?”

  “Because of the negotiations?”

  Her frown deepened. “But these are only preliminary talks. The zeyshi group is small, they have no military capacity and the military has no interest in them from that point of view. We don’t even think these will be the people to conduct the main negotiations once it goes before the assembly. And we may have a huge army, but even they can’t hang around forever everywhere.”

  “That’s w
hat I thought, but there are a couple of unmarked shuttles at the airport loading supplies. They look very much like Asto military stocking up for a large ship in orbit.”

  “That’s . . . odd.”

  “My thought exactly.”

  She fingered her upper lip. “Well, I suppose he could be here, but I have no idea why he should be.”

  He’d be floating well out of the atmosphere.

  She brought up the Exchange transfer log, and found nothing, but the airport log showed the four ships—two departed since I’d seen them. They were listed as private transport. Thayu looked up and met my eyes. She nodded. That was Asto military. She stared at the screen, fingered her lip and shook her head.

  Ever since we first received the zeyshi claim, I’d had that niggling feeling that it was more than what it looked like on the surface. It was either a cover for something else, or there were important people involved. The quality of the legal text of the document seemed to suggest that. It also seemed like everyone else was already aware of this, but neglected to communicate this to us, the very people appointed to organise the negotiations. At some point in the future we were going to find out what was really going on, and hopefully that time would be early enough to avert most of the proverbial shit hitting the proverbial fan; but with every day that passed, that possibility receded.

  Eirani called in the hall that she had dinner ready.

  Thayu pushed herself up from the bench and we both went into the living room, where there were only three plates on the table. Eirani had brought the dinner trolley up and Raanu was with her, taking bowls off the trolley and carefully setting them on the table, her face screwed up with the effort.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked Eirani while I sat down.

  “I don’t know why, but everyone wants to eat in their rooms. Reida says that you sent him to his room—”

  “I did.”

  “—and the young lady is staying there with him. Nicha says that the lady is tired and they’ll eat in his room. Veyada ate in the kitchen. He and Sheydu went into town for something. They seemed in a hurry.” She counted off on her fingers.

  I had to admit that this development worried me a bit, especially from Nicha, but I could understand it because a lot of people in the house made no attempt to be friendly to Xinanu.

  “Can I put the bread on the plates now?” Raanu asked.

  Eirani smiled. “You are getting to be such a good girl. Yes, you can do that, but do be careful with the sauce because it is very hot.”

  “I don’t care!” Raanu said. She held her hand against the outside of the pot. It would have been sitting in near-boiling water to cook, but Raanu didn’t even flinch. That was Coldi for you.

  “That’s a very handy thing to be able to do if you’re a cook,” Eirani said.

  “I want to be a cook. Can I?”

  “It will be a long time before you grow up, little miss. Come with me, and we’ll get the drinks. I must be getting old because I forgot to put them on the trolley.” She bustled out of the room, Raanu skipping along in her wake.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Thayu said, after they had gone from the room.

  “How can you know that? I’m not even wearing a feeder.”

  “And why are you not wearing it? You should. I don’t understand why you’re always so stubborn about it.”

  “And I don’t understand how many more times I have to explain that I don’t like people invading my thoughts.”

  “Baaah, you’re so transparent, it doesn’t matter if you wear it or not. Anyway, I don’t like her either. She’s arrogant.”

  I had to think for a bit who she was talking about. Xinanu, I concluded. “Thay’, do you think Nicha likes her?”

  I could see on her face that the question disturbed her. “He has to, doesn’t he? He chose her. He signed the contract.”

  “Maybe he made a mistake and he regrets it?”

  “There are no mistakes when sheya is involved. You either feel it or you don’t.”

  “How would you explain it, then? He’s miserable and she is the cause.”

  “Yeah, I think so. Frankly, it’s got me baffled. But there is no point worrying about it. She’ll be gone soon. It’s a pity I don’t have the time to search for herbs or other stuff at the markets here to bring on the birth early. I’m sure Nicha would thank me.” She grinned.

  But the thought that Nicha had selected this person who made him miserable, and also selected the two youngsters who didn’t seem to listen to him, disturbed me. Those were two substantial errors of judgment, and I had trouble believing that Nicha could be so careless.

  Chapter 4

  * * *

  NICHA AND XINANU didn’t come to breakfast either, but Nicha came out of his room as I went back to our bedroom to get changed into my formal outfit—I hadn’t wanted to wear it to breakfast so as not to get food on it.

  He was just closing the door behind him—it was dark inside his room and a stuffy smell spread from the door.

  “Everything all right?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes.” He turned around, meeting my eyes. He seemed . . . flighty, for want of a better word. Nervous. Guess I would be nervous, too, when Thayu was about to give birth.

  But since when had I felt so distant from him?

  He nodded—I wasn’t quite sure what the gesture meant. “You’re getting ready for the meeting?”

  “I am.”

  “Well, I better get dressed then, too.” He retreated back into the stuffy darkness of his room.

  What an awkward conversation. Whatever happened to the trust we shared? Hell, the bed we shared. And the comments we always got at the Exchange in Athens about how well our partnership worked.

  When I finished dressing, he was still inside, but left the door open. By the morning light that flooded the room, I spotted him nuzzling the soft skin under Xinanu’s ear, while bent forward over her extended belly. I imagined myself doing that to Thayu. I’d again mentioned using Menor’s seed when we were in bed last night, but she still refused to give me a clear answer. Frustration grew inside me. I would like it if just one part of my life went to plan, even if it was only a little part.

  This association wasn’t working and I had little time to find out why. The negotiations would be very difficult unless I found out what underlying issue made people jockey for the best seats in the house, and after being all tearful about my agreement to use a seed donor for a child, Thayu seemed to have changed her mind. And now Nicha behaved strangely and, come to think of it, I hadn’t spoken to him on a one-on-one basis for quite some time. For crying out loud, I was trying to do the right thing.

  Nicha must have known that I was watching, because he turned around.

  He came into the corridor, letting the door roll shut behind him with a clatter of the slats.

  “Are you sure that everything is all right?” I asked.

  “Yes. Everything on track.” I couldn’t help notice that he sounded tired. “She’s just feeling tired and her adaptation is still bothering her.” Adaptation happened when Coldi dropped or raised their body temperature according to the environment.

  “What about Reida?”

  He gave me a startled look before schooling his face into a neutral expression. “What about him?”

  “Did you talk to him after I picked him up from the jail?”

  “Yes.” Again, an awkward reply.

  “What did he have to say? He seemed very incoherent when I asked him. His story doesn’t add up. Something about trying to replace the bugs that you lost when he fried your system.”

  “He says he’s . . . sorry. And inexperienced, as you can appreciate.”

  “I can. I understand, but do get the truth out of him, whatever that truth is.”

  Nicha nodded. Not entirely comfortable, I thought, but I had to let it rest for the time being.

  I walked into the hall, where the others were also getting ready.

  Thayu arrived from the hub
wearing her one-piece suit, armour and two guns. She also carried a bag on her belt with electronics, and handed me a feeder. I took it from her. Her expression was smug.

  I lifted the feeder to the back of my head, where it climbed into my hair and settled on my skin with a burst of warmth. The flood of messages that went through my head made me dizzy. I took a while to regain my balance.

  You really shouldn’t take it off for so long, Thayu said.

  Yeah, yeah, I know, I know.

  Veyada, dressed entirely in white, came from the end of the corridor, where he and Sheydu shared a room. The suit and knee-length overcoat looked magnificent on him. White was the colour of court officials on Asto, and we’d agreed that he would wear the official outfit to show his status as lawyer. Deyu came as assistant. She wore the plainest, most junior gamra uniform with the khaki shirt and trousers edged in blue. Nicha also came in guard black, wearing armour and weaponry. We had agreed that Sheydu would stay behind to keep Reida in line.

  * * *

  Sadet, Nayu and the other three members of the zeyshi Aghyrian delegation had arrived in Barresh two days ago. They were staying in a visiting diplomats’ unit, which, apart from three sleeping rooms spread over two floors, had a meeting room on the very top level which offered a sweeping view over the water.

  The room was very nice, and gamra staff in charge of the accommodation had provided tea and snacks, mostly fruit and other sweet things neatly arranged on two plates that stood in the middle of the large table.

  The members of the zeyshi delegation were already in the room and, apart from our group, people from the Barresh Aghyrians would attend, as well as people to represent Asto. Delegate Ayanu of Asto came with two of her assistants, and Trader Delegate Marin Federza surprised us by turning up himself, without assistant.

  That was rather strange. In previous discussions he had not shown much respect for the zeyshi group, which he regarded as usurpers and rude blow-ins—not without reason. Turning up in person meant that he now regarded their claim as significant. I wondered what had changed.

  Through the feeder, I gathered that Thayu shared my concern.