by Patty Jansen
“Or their inhabitants?” someone in the audience said.
He shook his head. “Not the inhabitants either.”
Thayu asked, “What was in the signal?” She rarely spoke up in meetings like this, but her keihu was passable.
“We’re still decoding it. As is possible with the wake of the anpar lines, you can’t just skim it and listen in. A good number of satellites encrypt their data, and this one appears to be very old and using a code that we’re unfamiliar with.”
I was keen to ask, How about they send someone up there to look? but a councillor asked another question.
Thayu answered it for me. I have a suspicion it could be what my father is doing.
I looked at Thayu. If that’s what he’s doing, Asto would have known about this live satellite before now.
True. And her expression turned to worry, because if the Asto military knew about the satellite, why hadn’t anyone captured or destroyed it?
Who knew what sort of vessel this was? We couldn’t have unspecified satellites relaying information to them. Thayu’s father would definitely not allow that.
A councillor asked, “Apart from investigating this area, what else have you done? How likely is it that someone on the ground is actively talking to this satellite or even this ship?”
“Highly unlikely. We would have picked up the communication long before now. We scanned most of the island. Not just us—the entire Exchange network has undergone a full scan. The only information we have from the ship is the text we skimmed off the anpar wake.”
I’d seen the translation of that snatch of text that had been hotly debated ever since the anpar line had disrupted the Exchange. It seemed a random snippet of text, a page from a diary or something similar. Its purpose was unclear, and certainly didn’t seem to be part of a conversation or intended as such. It didn’t even seem to be particularly relevant to anything. Just a random page ripped from a book and tossed on the wind. It mentioned the Aghyrian captain Kando Luczon, who had been captain of the ship when it left Asto. According to Yetaris Damaru, that was pretty typical of the type of information that one could gather from an anpar wake. Contemporary ships often left snatches of their maintenance logs. Thoroughly useless information, because it was never complete and often jumbled up.
The meeting concluded with the Barresh councillors congregating around the food trolley. I walked down the steps to the central floor of the hall and met Yetaris Damaru there.
“Many thanks for informing us about this meeting,” I said.
“It is a pleasure.”
“Keep me up to date when there is a new development. Could you send me the data you have on this shriek? I don’t expect to have any answers, or to be able to decode it, but you can’t have data like this in too many hands.” I glanced at Thayu. She would remember the business with Sirkonen’s datastick well enough. We’d been making triple, quadruple backups of everything ever since.
“Yes, I will send it.” He made a note on his reader. After copying, I would have to look at it and give another copy to Devlin to play with, or Thayu. Did we have any code-breakers in the household? Veyada?
Veyada is pretty decent at code-breaking, Thayu said.
No one knew what to expect when that ship finally showed up here, as it seemed on its way to doing in a slow and roundabout way.
Heck, all the things we were discussing with the zeyshi claim might be futile once that ship was here. It might be an automated drone. There could be Aghyrian descendants aboard. The ship would be armed. It might be violent. The Aghyrians might want their planet back. One thing I knew for certain: if that ship was live, and if there were Aghyrian descendants aboard, we would not like what fifty thousand years’ worth of development had done to a population that, fifty thousand years ago, built one-way slings that could transport them out of the galaxy.
But for now, they were playing a game of cat and mouse with us.
Chapter 5
* * *
WHEN WE CAME OUT of the meeting, the sunlight was turning golden and both suns hung low over the marshlands. In this part of the city, we were close enough to the markets that the air smelled of food.
Thayu said, “You know what? Let’s eat here.”
“Great idea.” All of a sudden, I felt tired. I didn’t want to go home to the problems that waited for me there: Xinanu’s sniping to the staff, Eirani’s complaining about it, Reida’s sullen appearance, Nicha’s apparent incapability of dealing with all of this.
“I’ll let Eirani know that we’re held up and don’t need dinner.”
I sent a message to the hub so that Devlin could let Eirani know.
We walked hand in hand along the main commercial street of Barresh. Market Street was a wide thoroughfare which held all the main administrative offices and a lot of commercial offices as well. It was a wide, tree-lined street with extensive dining areas on both sides, now fast filling up with people coming out of the offices. I spotted the occasional gamra blue glimpse in the crowd, but most of the diners were locals.
Thayu and I were quite fond of one of the quieter local eating-houses in an area that had been unaffected by the recent storms. The old trees here towered over the three and four storey commercial buildings on both sides. Wait staff at the eating houses underneath were frantically trying to clear the tables of little pink petals that fell from the canopy above. If you flew over Barresh at this time of the year, you could see the streets in the old city outlined in pink.
The serving staff at this place knew us and knew where we liked to sit. The business was unusual in that it was owned and run entirely by Pengali, and a group of young waiters and waitresses stood ready to take orders. Pengali were often referred to as a primitive race, but the ones I’d met were like these youngsters: confident, alert, smart and modern. They wore purple fish netting and had their tails dipped in purple paint.
Because it was early, we received a lot of attention, and had glasses and water and red-coded supplement pills for Thayu brought to us by three different people.
The dye on their tails glowed bright purple.
“Funky,” Thayu said under her breath, while watching a young man walk past, tail waving behind him.
“What do you think about this Aghyrian communication?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” She returned her gaze to me, fingering her upper lip. “I’m trying to think up a thousand ways that this could be a hoax or some trick people play on us, but I’m not seeing any.”
“I don’t think it’s a hoax. I do think that some people, like the military for example, know more than they are prepared to share.”
“Oh, there’s no doubt about that.”
“Like your father for example.”
“Of course. With his status, it’s a surprise that he shows his face at all. He regularly turns up at Inner Circle meetings. People even know who he is and what he does. In the past, Asto would never have been so open.”
It depended on your definition of open, I guessed.
“Could you guess how big the army is?” I suspected that she had visited some of these secret bases, even though she’d probably been instructed not to talk about them.
“They have their own associations.” That was the standard reply to the question about the size of the army. More and more, I suspected that it meant that no one really knew and that the only place where the army was connected to the rest of Asto’s associations was at the very top, which, to be honest, was the only way it would work. But it meant that no one except Ezhya knew of the size.
It was something that I’d not let myself get greatly worried about, but it tended to come out of dark corners sometimes to remind me that perhaps we should worry about it.
A waitress came to bring us two empty bowls and two sets of little tongs that locals used for eating. She placed these on a small glass plate—Pengali craftsmanship—while her tail swayed in a sensual rhythm behind her. I’d learned that there were two skin pattern types in the Pen
gali: zebra-striped and leopard-spotted. This woman was of the spotted variety and the pattern extended over her hands, shoulders, neck and lower legs. The Pengali tail was always black and white banded. Except when the white was dyed purple.
I picked up my water and cradled the cup in my hands. “It was a great idea to come here. This is a very relaxing place. We haven’t done this for so long.”
“Well, I hate to disappoint you, but that wasn’t the reason I suggested it.”
“Oh?”
“I wanted to talk to you for a bit.”
Her expression was serious and my heart skipped. There was something that I had missed, I was certain. Something about her and my suggestion that we use a surrogate, or something about Nicha.
She said softly, “It’s about this boy.”
Boy? Then I realised. “Reida?”
She nodded. “What did the guards tell you about where he had been arrested, and for doing what?”
“Apparently, he was trying to climb the balcony of the old commercial building in Market Street.” We’d just walked past it. “He said he was trying to replace the bugs that you lost.”
“That’s rubbish. We did have a bug there at one point in time, but that was during the council scandal and it was a long time ago.”
“But what about the ones he fried?”
“Not in that building. But do you know what he was doing in that building?”
“I can make a decent guess. Merina Ramaru’s house backs onto that building’s yard. So her father has worked out how to stop him coming into the yard and using the ladder to climb into the window, so he climbs onto the balcony to—goodness knows what he’d been trying to do. Climb from the balcony over the fence?”
Thayu shook her head. “No. Do you know what is on the first floor of that building?”
I frowned at her. Did that matter?
She lowered her voice. “Yes, he was arrested climbing this balcony, and maybe councillor Ramaru and his big-bosomed daughter live adjacent to the complex, but our little rascal set off the alarm in one of the offices. He wouldn’t have done that had he not been inside the office in question—”
“But the guard said nothing about this—”
“He wouldn’t have, because the owner of that office doesn’t want a fuss.”
“All right. Now you have officially got me really curious. How do you know this?”
“First rule about spying: you never ask a spy where they get their material.” She tapped me on the nose with a warm finger. A woman a few tables down from us frowned. I was still in gamra blue and Barresh people very much disapproved of open displays of affection. I could already hear the outraged calls and these people do whatever they want wherever they want it.
“All right then, madame spy, tell me whose office it is.” And what was it with her flaunting her spy status anyway?
“Our friend Marin Federza.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I never kid. I am the picture of seriousness.” And she was, and she was not, because she smiled like the most gorgeous woman in the universe. My heart melted when she looked at me like that.
The sensual leopard-spotted waitress came to deliver our dinner: a bowl of glassy noodles, a bowl of sauce with fish pieces and a salad with nuts and red flowers. Thayu reached inside her pocket and pulled out a small bottle with a near-black fluid inside that looked like soy sauce but was so red-coded that it would probably kill me in five minutes. She sprinkled some over her sauce. Since she had started supplementing her food with this stuff, I’d noticed that her skin looked more alive, her hair had more lustre and she was not as tired. And she argued a lot more.
“But Marin Federza has an office at the gamra island in the plaza next to the station.”
“He does. That’s his gamra office. He’s a Trader. He has a business office as well. Not a very large one, but, as is typical for him, it’s in the most prestigious building in town.”
Yes, that was true. Traders were inseparable from their profession and would probably rather die than give up the trappings associated with their status: an aircraft and office. I shouldn’t have forgotten that.
“Why in all the worlds would Reida be interested in what is in Marin Federza’s Trading office?” Then another thought. “Does that mean he was breaking in?”
“Whatever you want to call it, he definitely wasn’t in there legally.”
“But I still don’t understand. Federza never misses the slightest opportunity to complain to me. Why hasn’t he been at my doorstep to tell me about this?”
“That’s the big question, isn’t it?”
Holy shit. I leaned back in the chair, but I couldn’t see the building from here. “Does he know that Reida was in there?”
“Most certainly. There is a recording, taken by his security cameras. Wait. I’ll show it to you.” She pulled out her reader and after some searching put it on the table facing me. On the screen I could make out a person carrying a light that made a glowing patch over a wall. The person walked slowly in the direction of the camera. When he passed, the light briefly reflected from the wall onto his side. He was Coldi, wearing a loose and light-coloured garment and a black tattoo of thorns encircled his upper arm. That was zeyshi and Reida was the only person in Barresh, at least that I knew, who had one of those tattoos. This was Reida. There was no doubt.
“What was he doing there? How long have you had this?” My heart was thudding. This was really much more trouble than I needed.
“I got this recording this morning. I haven’t spoken to him yet. Nicha should do that, but I haven’t spoken to Nicha either. You should do that.”
She met my eyes. There was no playfulness in her expression now. I tried not to cringe.
She put a hand on my arm. The skin was so warm that the hair on the back of my arm stood up. “Nich’ has fucked up. He knows it. I told you before that you should go hard on him and acknowledge that fact, so he can feel punished, and can move on to fix it.”
“You know that’s not my style. If he knows it, there is not much point in my yelling at him.”
“Not yelling. Order him to fix it. You’re the head of our association. You can’t afford to let control slip, because someone else will take it.” I was disturbed to see how angry she was. Here was a part of Coldi nature that would sneak away from me and then belt me over the head with vengeance. Nicha was her brother.
I sighed. “I can’t just blame Nicha for something he hasn’t done.”
“He has done it. I don’t know what clouded his mind when he selected this boy.”
“He’s just an adolescent rascal. We’ll get sense into him eventually.”
“No.” Her eyes met mine in chilling intensity. “This is not your world. He is not immature or a child. All right, the first two escapades were immature, but we were meant to think that. They were probably diversions to distract us from the real action. Which is breaking into offices.”
“Do you have any idea why he keeps behaving like this? Does he even have the instinct?”
“Oh, he does.” Her eyes met mine. Clearly, Coldi could feel such a thing, while I was helplessly flailing around and surviving off guesswork. She came even closer and lowered her voice. “This is my theory: what likely causes his odd behaviour is that he has another superior somewhere else and he’s acting on those orders.”
Shit.
Her expression was serious. She nodded. No words were necessary. We both understood that danger.
I licked my lips. “You suggest that this other bond is stronger than ours?” That was something I didn’t want to consider.
“It could be.” I didn’t like the frown on her face. “I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently.”
And Thayu would not mention a suspicion unless she was quite certain that it was right. I’d run into that problem before, too. And now I was up against a brick wall by myself with no instinctive guidance for how to handle this situation.
I said, “I’ve
been afraid of something like this happening. I don’t understand why security doesn’t vet people’s associations.” It was precisely why I had suggested that Nicha find someone from the Outer Circle, because they were less likely to bring high-level unwanted listeners into the household. As it was, I already had to contend with the Asto army chief, who happened to be my father-in-law, but who also knew of most things in our household as soon as we decided on them. This was unavoidable. But as a silly Earth human, it made me uncomfortable, and I wanted to do whatever I could to limit this sort of thing happening. Coldi would go the other way. They’d collect as many ingoing and outgoing links as possible, and be proud of them, too. Look at who’s spying into my household.
Thayu gave me a frustrated look. We’d discussed this subject many times, and I didn’t feel I came any closer to understanding it or that they came any closer to understanding my concerns and discomfort. She continued in a low voice, “And to make matters worse, he comes back with this damn woman. She is an Azimi. And she’s having a boy. Which also means that once she’s had her child and she has left us, we’ll still be living with an Azimi in our household.”
“Only a baby, though.”
“Babies grow up. No doubt that was exactly the purpose of this exercise. So we have someone from Azimi clan networks poking their fat noses in, as well as some unspecified network through Reida.”
I took a deep breath. “All right. How can we find out who this superior of Reida’s is?”
Wrong question. I knew it the moment I had asked it. I should have asked, How can we make sure his loyalty to us is strong enough that he doesn’t do anything that damages us?
Thayu gave me that withering look that could make me crawl under the table. Coldi women did that look very well. I was sure that if I stepped back, or, heaven forbid, mucked up so badly that someone took a gun to me, she would take leadership of this pathetic semblance of an association in a heartbeat. In fact, I wasn’t doing so well, so why didn’t I hand over control to her straight away? Wouldn’t it be great to just be told what to do?
