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

by Patty Jansen

  But when Nicha looked up and met my eyes, I knew that it was absolutely the right thing to do. He’d been confused and needed firm guidance. His eyes brimmed with tears. I hugged him and he held me in a grip so tight that I could barely breathe.

  After a short and comforting silence, I said, “Let’s go and see what Reida has discovered, then.”

  “We’ll need to talk to him.”

  “He’s in his room. I sent him there last night.”

  We walked into the hallway, where it was dark and quiet. The part of the sky I could see through the ceiling windows had acquired a blue tinge. Dawn already. Eirani would get up soon. Maybe she was already up and in the kitchen. Her room was downstairs. I’d intended to do some reading before the meeting started.

  Nicha went into Reida’s room without knocking. The privileges of being a superior. He disappeared into the darkness.

  He called. “Time to get up. We’re here for the information.” He flipped the switch that brought the light pearl in contact with the metal stand. Wan greenish light filled the room. The room was a mess. There were clothes on the floor and bundles of electronics spilling off his desk over the surrounding floor space.

  The bedsheets hung half off the side of the bed. One of the pillows lay on the floor. The bed was empty.

  Chapter 11

  * * *

  WELL, BUGGER THAT.

  “Shit,” Nicha said. He took a few big steps to the bed and looked underneath, but that didn’t make Reida appear. He repeated, “Shit.” And a bit later, he added in a frustrated tone, “Evi said no one went out except Federza.”

  “Maybe he hasn’t gone out.” Although I had been pretty clear that he was to stay in his room—not that Reida had ever taken any notice of our orders. “Maybe he’s just hiding from us.”

  We checked the cupboard, the passage to the tiny bathroom, under the beds, behind the curtains, under the couch. We checked the bathroom, the living room, and Deyu’s room. She was asleep and none too happy about being woken up. But since this concerned her zhayma and because I was involved, she got dressed and helped look for him. But Reida was nowhere to be found.

  “I don’t understand,” Nicha said. “Telaris has been in the corridor all that time.”

  “He obviously got called away for a moment.” And not being considered any risk beyond the annoyance factor, Reida had not registered with security as needing surveillance.

  Nicha said, “He’s probably just gone to get something to eat.”

  But Reida was not in the kitchen. Nor was he in the downstairs living room where he often spent time with the kitchen staff. We went back upstairs, but no one there had seen him.

  “Mashara was in the hallway the whole time. We did not see the young lad,” Telaris said.

  “You didn’t leave at all?”

  He shook his head. He didn’t show it, but I could imagine the what-do-you-think-I-am expression on his face.

  Deyu said, “He’s not in the cupboard, or under the bed or anywhere else he could hide.”

  “The grate?” Telaris asked.

  “Checked that. Too small.”

  We went back into the room and searched through all the corners where a person could hide and corners where a person couldn’t hide, just in case. Since this was an older apartment, it still had the ceiling ducts that brought a soft whisper of cool moist air from the waterfall in the hall of the building, but the ducts were far too narrow for a person to crawl through. They were also covered in slimy vegetation, so it was just as well that there wouldn’t be any duct-crawling involved. Ew.

  “It beats me where he’s gone,” Thayu said. She had rejoined us as soon as we left the living room.

  We went into the hub where I asked Devlin for the scan log to see who had gone out. Sure enough, Reida was on that list. He’d left the apartment not long after I’d gone to check on Federza’s apartment, while I’d ordered him to stay in his room. I trusted that Telaris told me the truth that he hadn’t seen Reida leave.

  Damn.

  The tracker showed him walking towards the main administration building. But the trail stopped suddenly in the courtyard.

  Thayu and I looked at each other and then at Nicha.

  Thayu asked, “Do you know of anything that he carries that can kill the signal so effectively?”

  Nicha said, “No.” But his face showed his horror. “Delegate Ayanu’s office is in that courtyard.”

  “Do you think he’s gone to deliver his information?”

  He said nothing, but he obviously did think so.

  “What sort of harm could this knowledge do in her hands?”

  “Enough that I don’t want to have to deal with it. Let’s go,” Nicha said.

  “Go where?” Thayu replied a little more angry than normal. She must be tired, too. “I don’t want anyone leaving this apartment without a good reason.”

  “This is a very good reason. Probably the reason why all these people are lurking around here.”

  I held him back. “Nich’, please at least tell me the gist of what it is that Reida found.”

  “All right. The very short story is that the Aghyrian ship out there is live, and some people in the Barresh group of Aghyrians have been secretly communicating with them for quite some time.”

  I stopped walking and stared at him. “You’re kidding.”

  “I wish I were, but wait until you see the data. It’s unequivocal, and damning.”

  “What sort of people?”

  “The descendants of the original crew of the ship, I’m guessing.”

  “Has Federza been talking to them, too?”

  “I don’t know about him personally, but yes, his group has been talking to that ship. It seems that some people within the Aghyrian groups want to share this information with gamra and others don’t.”

  “Who is in which camp?” A chill went over my back. “What about Delegate Akhtari?”

  “Who knows? We’re only just scratching the surface of it.”

  “But then what is Delegate Ayanu going to do with this knowledge?”

  “She knows about it because the military picked up the signals, but this evidence will give her irrefutable proof. She’ll use it to put pressure on Chief Delegate Akhtari. She can make demands: do what we want or we’ll make it public that your people have been negotiating in secret.”

  Shit. My head reeled. This was bad. This was bad enough to seriously undermine the integrity of the gamra assembly. What if Federza, and other Aghyrians, would be forced to step aside? What if it affected Chief Delegate Akhtari’s authority? “I think anything as serious as that should definitely go before the assembly.”

  “I agree. That’s why I wanted to keep it out of Delegate Ayanu’s hands, because she is not going to do that.”

  “You would go against her? But she’s in your network.”

  He winced. “Sometimes the choices you have are all equally dreadful. Then you have to take the one least dreadful to the community as a whole.” One of the favourite Coldi proverbs.

  “But I don’t understand why she doesn’t want to put it before the assembly. It would be pretty damning for her opponents. It would be a huge win for Asto.”

  “Yes, but admitting that they could listen to the data means admitting the existence of the military sling.”

  And the Asto military would rather die than do that. And the military were up in to their ears in this. They had known about the ship as well.

  And now Reida had either fled or was going to deliver this material to Delegate Ayanu. He was in danger. And Federza . . . if he’d come to see me, I could only imagine that he belonged to the camp that wanted to take the matter to the general assembly, which meant that he was not my enemy, as he had already said, and that these guys hired by the other party—Tamerians!—were after him and he was in grave danger as well.

  Damn it. Damn it. And I’d let him leave the apartment in the company of some random gamra security.

  My first priorit
y should be Reida, as part of my association, but I took out my reader to send Federza a message—and of course private traffic was restricted.

  Triple damn it.

  We left the apartment at a trot, meeting Eirani in the hallway, coming up the stairs. She said that breakfast would be served soon and looked wide-eyed as we all went for the door.

  “But, Muri, breakfast!”

  “Keep it until we come back.”

  We ran back down the gallery, not bothering to wait for the lift—did I ever have the patience these days? Down the stairs, into the hall and across the echoing space to the opposite entrance. The gamra guards still stood there.

  “Seen anyone come this way?” Thayu asked.

  Like Reida, like Federza.

  There were shakes of heads all around.

  “It’s been very quiet,” the leader said. “Command says that the alert will be downgraded at dawn so that people can go back to work.” I’d never heard a security guard use the word mashara when they spoke amongst themselves.

  “Has anyone been caught?” Thayu asked. If they’d been catching Tamerians, we’d have a lot of dead bodies, prone as they were to kill themselves when captured.

  “Apart from the individual struck in the Trader Delegate’s office, no. We did a sweep of the island and found no trace of anyone else. As to his motives for being there, that will be investigated.”

  “You’ve been told about the signals we picked up, right?” From when she’d taken that gun.

  “Yes, we investigated those, but have no reason to suspect a threat associated with them.”

  “Did you find the devices that were receiving the signals?”

  He frowned at her.

  “That device was sending signals to others!” She spread her hands. “The receiving parties were moving around.”

  “We found no evidence of that. The area has been extensively searched and cleared. Normal business can return soon.”

  She snorted. “We better go sort this out ‘soon’ then.”

  Oooh, that was a downright rude pronoun form. And Thayu wasn’t often rude.

  She set off at a brisk pace and we followed. I refrained from asking questions. It was rare enough that I was privy to discussions between security personnel, and to be honest, I could see why Thayu was balling her fists against her legs, but she knew her place, and that was with our household, and not to criticise gamra personnel.

  When we were out of earshot of the guards, she muttered, “Fucking idiots.” In military dialect.

  Sheydu gave her an I told you so look, and Thayu snorted in response.

  She would normally defend gamra security whenever the subject came up for discussion with Sheydu. But now Sheydu was actually right and by the look of things, it didn’t put Thayu in a good mood.

  We continued into the brooding atmosphere, through the passageways that led from the residential section to the main building. It occurred to me that on most days I didn’t see as much of the island as I had this night.

  “This is where he disappeared,” Thayu said. We stood in the middle of a spacious rectangular courtyard. There were a few benches to one side and a couple of trees randomly placed around the perimeter. “Delegate Ayanu’s apartment is up there.” She gestured with her eyes. Most of us knew where it was anyway. I had seen her go up there many times. A light was on behind the window.

  “Do you think he’s gone up there voluntarily?”

  “With her, nothing is done voluntarily.” Nicha shuddered.

  “How do we get in?” Veyada asked.

  Sheydu said, “We could just use the door, blast our way in and be done with it.” Boy, she was in a foul mood today.

  Veyada sniped back at her. “The Delegate would call the guards and rightly so. We have no valid reason to go in.”

  “She doesn’t need a valid reason to hold him up there.”

  “If that’s where he is indeed.”

  “Where else would he be?” Sheydu snorted. “I say we shoot our way up there and get the fuck out of here. I’m tired. I don’t feel like chasing vague leads.”

  Everyone was tired. This had been one heck of a long night.

  Thayu squinted into the light streaming from the window. It showed a patch of ceiling and a corner of a cupboard. The sky behind the building showed a distinct blue tinge. We wouldn’t have much time until people started walking around. The all clear would be given at dawn, the guards had said, unless we could convince them that there was a real threat to public security.

  There was nothing in the courtyard useful for climbing walls, just a few planter boxes with small trees for shade, and a couple of benches and stone walls for people to sit on. A fountain burbled in the pond in the middle of the open space. There wasn’t even a café, as in so many of these courtyards. A quiet space to reflect. I looked around the surrounding part of the building. The windows that looked out over the courtyard were mostly from minor delegates’ rooms. They were windows in bedrooms and the storerooms and staff rooms, since these apartments faced outwards, with views of the marches and the jetty. I couldn’t see any movement up there, no one watching us.

  “Up there,” Sheydu said and gestured at the roof behind my back. Thayu, Veyada and Nicha all looked and nodded. I couldn’t see what they were looking at. Sheydu walked to the wall and tested the downpipe. Apparently it passed her scrutiny, because the next moment she jumped against the wall and hauled herself up, holding onto the pipe. She was on the roof in no time. Why did the sheer athletic strength of the Coldi always surprise me?

  Nicha clambered up after her.

  I said to Thayu, “If you think I’m going to climb up there—”

  “Shhh.”

  The feeder channel opened.

  There’s a passage here, Sheydu said. She and Thayu used their feeders a lot more than I did with her or with Nicha.

  From my position down in the courtyard, I could just see the top half of Nicha’s body, and he now bent and folded something open. A window or an entry hatch.

  Be careful, I said to him.

  His head disappeared when he climbed down.

  It’s a kind of storage area, I heard Nicha’s thoughts. Not much here. Now walking through into the next room.

  “I got you,” Thayu said. She bent to me so that I could see her screen, but she was using the ultrasound scanner and I found it hard to make sense of the diagrams. The scanner worked like a bat’s sonar, and showed the position of walls and other solid objects. Something moved on the screen but it was hard to see if that was real or an artefact of the scan.

  I felt rather useless. I had no idea why they thought that they could get into Delegate Ayanu’s apartment through this building, but if there was one thing I’d learned, it was that security was best left to those trained for it. I lifted my hand up to my arm, feeling for the gun. Not sure whether it would protect me at all. All right, I had fired at Taysha Palayi when I had no choice, when he expected it and knew that it would happen. It still astonished me that I’d actually done that, and also that, even though he was right in front of me, I hadn’t managed to miss.

  Shooting rarely solved anything. At the very best, it made the situation a little bit less muddy for a bit.

  Since coming back from that harebrained escapade, I had often lain awake at night experiencing that moment, over and over, like a horrifying, ever-repeating nightmare, as well as the moment that Ezhya came into the hub and I saw in his face that, had I been Coldi, I would have deposed him. Despite my assurances, he still didn’t quite seem to have gotten over that and he seemed to have been avoiding me. I would see him for the upcoming assembly debate about the Aghyrian claim, but it would be the first time since that day.

  We’ve found a way to get in, Nicha reported. We’re outside the back windows. Look, we’ve even found Reida.

  What is he doing there?

  It seems they’ve locked him in a room. Ah, he’s just seen us. Doesn’t look too happy.

  No, I was sure he w
ouldn’t be happy. By the sound of things, Delegate Ayanu wasn’t happy with him, either.

  Sheydu said, Shut your chatter and come help me open this window.

  All right. Reporting back later.

  Chapter 12

  * * *

  WE WAITED.

  I sat down on one of the benches, looking into the fountain. I’d often wondered what Coldi would do when two of their multiple networks gave clashing signals. Thayu had looked puzzled when I asked her about it, as if that sort of thing never happened, but it must, and they must have some way of reconciling the less serious cases. For the more serious ones . . . I guessed we were about to find out.

  It never ceased to amaze me what some people, Coldi or otherwise, would do for power. So, Delegate Ayanu was annoyed by my growing influence with Ezhya, and therefore she sent her daughter to prey on Nicha, to take advantage of him when he was down, just so that she had some strings to pull inside my association.

  And there would be a little boy living in my household who was the result of that scheme. What a great start to life.

  Thayu stood next to me, leaning against the trunk of a tree, listening to another news stream, if the screen on her reader was anything to go by. Veyada crouched nearby, continuously checking the building with his scanner. He would give periodic coded updates in what was apparently a delicate operation to get into Delegate Ayanu’s office without triggering alarms.

  I wished they’d hurry up.

  The sky was fast becoming lighter. The gamra guards must have lifted the ban on going out, because people walked through the courtyard. At this time of day, they were mostly domestic staff with supplies. The breeze brought occasional wafts of cooking. I thought about Eirani and her wonderful breakfast that I didn’t want to miss.

  I hoped there would be time for a rest, too.

  “Uh-oh,” Thayu said next to me.

  She grabbed my arm and pulled me into an entrance to a stairwell where the approaching dawn had not yet reached. The air here was cool and smelled of moist stone. There was a closed door at the top of the stairs and Thayu, Veyada and I pressed ourselves into the little alcove to the left of that door, which was probably built as a place where delivery people could leave their wares if the occupant of the office was out.