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

by Patty Jansen

  Then, the comm officer took in a sharp breath.

  “What?” the pilot asked, but at that moment, a low tone filled the cabin. It grew louder and louder. The sound pulsed, and I knew that pulsing.

  “Turn it off!” the pilot screamed.

  “I’m trying to!” the communications officer yelled.

  The pilot rose from his seat and reached for her controls.

  The recording stopped abruptly to make way for a recording of an outside camera. A couple of smaller ships approached the huge Aghyrian behemoth against the backdrop of the blackness of space.

  My heart took a while to calm down. What had happened in the other recording? Why did it cut out all of a sudden?

  A voice said, “Get ready to launch.”

  “Ready.”

  It went quiet again. The small ships moved oh so slowly along the side of the large ship.

  A tinny voice said, “Establishing contact.” And a bit later. “Package sent. Standby.”

  More silent time went by. Some sort of protrusion on the large ship slid into view. It looked like a viewing port with windows. I found it strange that they would use windows. Screens were so much safer.

  And then, suddenly, that pulsing low tone again.

  Voices shouted. The smallest of the ships disintegrated.

  I stared at the debris floating soundlessly through space.

  Ezhya came back in my vision. “None of the crew of those missions survived. The ship used the sound to destroy our vessels.”

  We’d heard that sound in Barresh. I remembered the way it had made the air in my chest vibrate, and how I’d been afraid that the building would collapse. A wall had already collapsed.

  But what did they think I could do against a long-distance weapon like that? I was a diplomat. I could do words. I didn’t do weapons.

  “We want you to talk. They’ve communicated with us,” Ezhya said. “We need to re-establish that contact.”

  Re-establish? “When did that happen? After the attacks or before?”

  “Before. We exchanged some communication.”

  And obviously, something had happened there. In the usual infuriating fashion, layers of the truth were being peeled back.

  “Yes, something went wrong. That’s why you’re going there.”

  Funny. I would have sworn that this was part of a plot to get rid of me. “I’m not sure what I can do if the situation has deteriorated this badly already. I presume that I will be fully briefed before I start doing anything.” Because even now, I wasn’t getting the full detail.

  “You will. We’ll need to convince them that you’re not Coldi. We will be sending your image, with all your bio-diagnostics. They seem to attach importance to someone’s biological heritage.”

  Well, that made me really feel safe. Damn it, why did they think we could make a difference?

  “Why not just threaten them with weapons?” Damn, they had a black hole aboard one of their war ships. They could suck the entire ship into it if they wanted.

  “It will become clear to you when you arrive.”

  Well, I bloody well hoped so, because so far, I was not impressed.

  The view flicked off and I was left to stare at the inside of the mask. One glance aside at Thayu revealed that she looked as worried as I felt.

  I couldn’t do anything with half-baked information.

  I understand, Ezhya said in my thoughts. Believe me, I understand. But we need to be extremely careful with what information we let out.

  Just what kind of damage could, for example, the Aghyrians do to the Asto army? They didn’t even have any kind of organised army, let alone equipment.

  Unless they—no, I wasn’t going there.

  Unless they hired the Tamerians—no, I wasn’t going there either.

  Damn it, damn it.

  I was pressed into my seat, which meant that our ship was quickly gathering speed. I had no idea how far we still had to go before the large ship would engage the sling, and with each second that passed the shuttle gathered speed, and I liked this less and less.

  I was sweating in the suit. I wanted to get out of here. I was never much good at being in small spaces, and I didn’t think that I could be of any use to the Asto army.

  Still, the shuttle gathered speed. I was being pushed into the back of the seat, with the weight of the gel-filled bag on top of me.

  Faster, faster and faster. The weight of that thing was getting very uncomfortable.

  Damn. Did they know how weak and fragile I was compared to them? I tried to lift my head in order to look at Thayu, but I could not. How many gees was this ship pulling?

  Very uncomfortable.

  I saw spots. Damn it, I was going to pass out.

  Voices echoed through my mind, but I couldn’t make out what they said or even if it was just the pilot talking or if people were trying to talk to me. I was merely struggling to breathe.

  Thayu!

  I sensed her warmth, but if she was anything like me, she wouldn’t be able to move.

  And the ship was still accelerating.

  The world turned white.

  For a moment that was all I saw. A bright light. For all I knew I could have died and gone to heaven. I didn’t really believe in heaven, but if there was evidence, I could be convinced otherwise.

  But this wasn’t heaven.

  The rainbows kind of gave it away. The colours sliding back into place, as they did after an Exchange jump.

  I took a deep breath, and another one. Air flowed into my lungs. It was still too hot and stuffy and smelled of Coldi sweat, but I’d never experienced anything more beautiful.

  Someone was taking the mask off my face. My vision was blurry. An impossibly warm hand touched my cheek.

  “He’s waking up.” That was Thayu’s voice.

  I was sure I hadn’t lost consciousness. Or had I? Was I making a habit of passing out at least once for every trip I went on?

  I tried to speak, but my mouth felt dry.

  Where the hell were we?

  Someone put a thin object in my mouth. I recognised what I hoped was a straw, and sucked. Water.

  Green-coded, hopefully, although it would probably burn me if it wasn’t. I drank. The water was lukewarm and tasted metallic, but wonderful. My vision was still dubious. I could make out shapes where people were, but not their faces.

  Someone leaned over me and the hot gel-filled bag was lifted off me. The breeze was so cold that it made me shiver.

  “You’re soaked through,” Thayu said.

  I ran my hand over my shirt. She was right. “Everything in these ships of yours is too hot for me.” I hoped I hadn’t wet myself. The smell was just sweaty, so I guessed not.

  “Where are we?”

  But at the same time, I noticed the front viewscreen. The barrier between us and the pilots had rolled back into the wall and I could see into the rest of the cabin.

  Most of the viewscreen was filled with star-spotted sky, but a couple of bright white specks floated in the middle of the screen.

  “Where are we?”

  “Two jumps away from the Janto cluster. There is a large star to the right of the field of vision. No habitable or useful worlds.”

  There often weren’t any around these large stars. They were too unstable and too short-lived to have planets that had evolved enough to harbour life.

  “Is there more than one ship?” To be honest, it looked like there were many, ten or fifteen at the very least.

  “Those are ours,” Thayu said. “We’ll be with them soon. Eat something.”

  She passed me another jar with a straw. I didn’t really feel like eating, but it gave me something to do, and likely there would be no time for eating once we arrived at our destination. I sucked on the straw and immediately recognised the bland taste of Asto army supplies. There were only a few meals from their arsenal I could eat, and during my two-week trip from Ceren to Asto, I’d tried them all, even mixed them to avoid the tedium, and st
ill managed to get so thoroughly sick and tired of them that even now I couldn’t stand the taste.

  I shuddered.

  I finished the jar, though, and lay back, dozing, until I noticed that I was being pulled forward off my seat. The craft was engaging its brakes.

  I made an effort to stay awake, but I dozed off anyway.

  When I woke up, the ships on the viewscreen had come a lot closer and it was clear that there were more than just a couple. The closest ones resolved into recognisable shapes, mostly of the square, blocky deep-space variety. Others were smaller. There were also one or two of the arrow-shaped type that would contain acceleration tubes, as on the ship where I’d left Ezhya. Wait—all those dots in a separate group to the right were ships, too, and I could make out at least four more of the long ones in that group. And then all those little specks . . . Holy cow.

  I’d thought that the ships I’d seen in orbit at Ceren were an armada. I’d been wrong. This was an armada.

  How many of those ships were there? Each of those workhorse square ships would have a crew of a few hundred. The larger ones would have thousands. The big arrow-shaped ones . . . I hated to think how many they had on board. Tens of thousands at least. There were hundreds of ships here, and as we came closer, more and more resolved from the shadows of the bigger ones.

  Population numbers were pretty much the same on Asto and Earth, both about five billion, both having been much larger in the past. But counting off-planet . . . I’d wondered about that before and the thought of the vast size of the Asto military made me sick. How much of Asto’s military personnel lived their entire lives in space and were never counted as inhabitants of the planet?

  “What the hell are all those ships doing here?” I said in a low voice.

  “This is a substantial part of Asto’s fleet. You are not supposed to have seen this.” Thayu’s voice was like a soft breath at my shoulder. She had obviously been awake while I slept and I’d missed some briefing.

  “Certainly, but there would be enough fire power here to destroy ten alien ships.”

  “You don’t know that. Knowing where it comes from, it could be pretty much indestructible.”

  “Could be. Where is this Aghyrian ship anyway?”

  She pointed ahead.

  I squinted at the armada, and at the darkness of space behind it. Couldn’t see anything.

  “You’re not seeing it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Think big.”

  I did, and lines linked up against the darkness of deep space. The shape I had seen on the material stolen from Federza’s office resolved from the faint glimmers in space. I knew why the edge of the armada cut off so abruptly: because the rest of it was behind the ship.

  “Holy crap.”

  Thayu nodded. “It’s so dark that it absorbs all light. It’s very, very hard to see. This is a true deep space vessel.”

  “This is the same ship they built all those years ago?”

  The pilot said, “This ship is five hundred years old by their time, more than fifty thousand by ours. We’ve traced back their anpar lines and think they may have come from the Renzha galaxy.” This was the Coldi name for the Andromeda galaxy.

  I couldn’t stop staring at the massive shape that was barely visible behind the armada. I’d been wrong again. There was certainly a lot of fire power here, but a behemoth like this could easily swipe all of those insignificant little ships aside just by its sheer presence. Hell, most of those square-looking military ships would probably twirl around uselessly in the ship’s anpar wake. Holy-fucking-shit. “Why is the ship still here? Certainly if they wanted they could easily jump to another place.”

  Ezhya said in my mind, “Actually, it’s not so easy. We disabled their drive, although we’re not quite sure how it happened. We’re keeping them in position with our network of Exchange slings.”

  I wondered how many of those arrow-shaped ships there were. I could see seven from my position.

  “There are fifteen,” the pilot said.

  There were a lot more of those ships than I expected. Sometimes it was a wonder why not every inhabited world was in Coldi hands.

  Ezhya said, “There would be no point trying to take over every world. A network like that would fragment soon, and we’d end up with a situation similar to the current one. Except all our competitors would be Coldi as well and they’d be much harder to fight than, say, Damarcians.”

  Well, that . . . reasoning had me floored, actually.

  Every time he did this, I was amazed at how the deeper Coldi psyche was different from ours, how much I still had to learn, and how much I would probably never understand.

  What would philosophers on Earth call that way of thinking? Post-expansionism?

  First, people went all gung-ho on expanding their influence into space, increasing their numbers like crazy. But like the Roman and the American empires before them, every empire must crumble and fragment. Here was Ezhya showing a deep understanding of that, and acting like it, because you can’t hope to keep control over an empire that size, and the enemy you may end up facing could well be your former family.

  That was what maturity in colonisation looked like, not just in space but everywhere, and that the countries on Earth hadn’t achieved by a long shot.

  That might be why many of the entities in gamra were reluctant to engage too deeply with Nations of Earth.

  A civilisation didn’t know how primitive it was until it had a chance to look back and see the mistakes of the past.

  I felt like I’d just been taken by the hand and shown a glimpse of a hundred years into the future.

  Chapter 22

  * * *

  A JUNIOR OFFICER came with a set of dry clothes for me, and she showed me to a tiny bathroom to put them on. I was still feeling a bit wonky, and the lack of gravity definitely didn’t help. Neither did the bland meal which sat like a brick in my stomach. They must have been semi-prepared for me because they had clothing that was both in my size and in gamra colours.

  Thayu came in to help me and told me to hurry up because we were about to enter a larger ship’s hold and people were waiting for me.

  By the time I’d changed, the shuttle was in the dock, and the hold door was open. A junior officer waited outside to accompany us wherever we needed to go.

  Another military docking hall, another ship, and no sign of a second ship carrying Veyada and Sheydu. And everyone seemed in a hurry, so there was no time to ask. We followed the officer through the corridors, pulling ourselves along using railings on the walls.

  The “people” who were waiting for us turned out to be a swathe of military suits, gathered in a room at the back of the ship’s bridge. All those faces, stiff, disturbingly alike with regulation ponytails, were thoroughly unfamiliar to me.

  I glanced at Thayu. Her father was commander of the army. I’d never been able to work out if he was the only commander, but previously I would have guessed that he was, since he had been moved up as Ezhya’s second. The new feeder Ezhya had given me had to help with maintaining the strength of that bond.

  Asto military leaders were always at the scene of the most serious conflict, which made me wonder where he was and why he wasn’t here. Maybe I’d been wrong about his position in the army.

  The room was quite small, insignificant and stuffy, as with all Asto ships. There were no outside screens, and the lack of up or down or any kind of direction made me feel queasy.

  I wasn’t sure that this was such a good idea. Coldi were thoroughly impervious to motion sickness, but unfortunately I didn’t share that feature.

  There were seven people, all kind of floating along the walls, where there were railings for this purpose. They were not a complete association because of the way they separated when Thayu and I came in and made room for us.

  I picked out the highest-ranking officer from those in the room by the way the others positioned themselves around her, or at least I thought the officer was female
, because with Coldi it could be darn hard to tell.

  The higher-ranking officer gave a brief nod when I came in but she said nothing. A glance at her earrings established that she was Domiri, and that probably earned me the nod.

  “I am Shazayu.” Her tone sounded like I was supposed to know from her name who she was.

  Help me, please? I asked Thayu. But Thayu had taken up the subservient position. I didn’t tend to do sheya greetings unless I absolutely couldn’t get away with not doing it.

  She gave me a curious look, and a brief and tense silence passed in which no one appeared to be sure what to do. Clearly she had expected some sort of acknowledgement of position from me.

  “I’m here as a non-Coldi negotiator.” I hoped this would allay her concerns about how I fitted into their scheme. I wanted to shout that they didn’t need to establish my position, but my earrings clearly suggested otherwise.

  A junior officer in plain dark clothing floated around the room, bringing containers with what I presumed were drinks. He didn’t offer me one, so I presumed they were red-coded.

  The others all took a container and the tense situation relaxed for a bit, but looking around the seven military suits, I didn’t think it had resolved. What a weird atmosphere hung in this room. Maybe they didn’t know what to do about me; and, really, in that case, it was up to me to take this situation by the horns and turn it around. Bluff and bluster was what they expected. Their instinct didn’t react to me, but my behaviour could substitute for that to a certain extent.

  “My information tells me that you are standing for the position of Chief Delegate,” Shazayu said.

  What. The. Hell. Did you tell her that? I glanced at Thayu but her face maintained that blank expression that Coldi did so well.

  “That is news to me. Right now, the gamra assembly is in turmoil. If for some reason I end up with the position, rest assured that it will be temporary. I’m not interested in the job.”

  She nodded, and seemed to relax a little. Hell, how isolated were these armed forces ships?

  It was my guess that she was probably more concerned about how the position of Chief Delegate fitted in the military associations, also considering the fact that I was a member of her clan, than anything to do with gamra. As long as the gamra secretary was not Coldi, there was no problem.