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

by Patty Jansen

  Later. Much would be said about this later.

  We floated past, pulling ourselves along by the edges of the cubicles.

  We came to a different section that was closed off by a giant container of see-through material. We hovered in front of the glass looking at the rows of pods hanging there.

  Thayu pre-empted my question. “Don’t ask me why these people are in here. I don’t know.”

  I could see nothing different about the people, except . . . “They’re all women.”

  Young women, too.

  “They could be breeders,” Thayu said.

  I was reminded of the pregnant woman I had seen in the zeyshi warren on Asto.

  “Aghyrians are obsessed with breeding and genetics.”

  “Seems like that.”

  I couldn’t tell if any of the women were pregnant because of all the coverings.

  “According to my map my father should be in a passage that leads away from this hall.”

  “How do you even know where he is?” I thought the big ship jammed all communication.

  She gave me a sideways look. “That’s the big question, isn’t it?”

  “You know how many times you’ve said that today?”

  “Sorry, but some details I’m not allowed to discuss.”

  “Thay’.” I held her back. “When did you become a military spy?”

  She gave me that blank look that she did so well. The blue light from the pods reflected blue-green in the gold flecks in her eyes. She was so gorgeous, so deceptively quiet, so dangerous.

  “My father does dangerous things. He knew I would likely do dangerous things, too. At my birth, he had a tracker implanted in both of us, so that if either of us was ever in danger, we could rescue the other. My father loves me very much, no matter what you think.”

  I cringed. “I don’t think anything. Your relationship with your father baffles me. That’s all.”

  “There is nothing to be baffled about. My father and I treat each other as protocol says we should. We don’t need to communicate through regular channels. And I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I work for the Inner Circle, not the military.”

  Which, because of her father being Ezhya’s second, was pretty much the same thing.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t need to know that.” Breaking through the protocol always left me feeling guilty. Had I been Coldi, and had I actually understood these relationships, she would never have told me.

  She touched my cheek with a gloved hand. “Hey, I love you because you’re always doing unexpected things. Life is never dull with you.”

  Geez, thanks, Thay’.

  She unclicked her gun from the bracket on her arm. She didn’t offer me a weapon, probably judging me a menace in zero-g, and probably being right about that. She grabbed my arm with her free hand and pushed off. We floated across the vast empty space again. I was glad for the infallible Coldi sense of direction, because I had no idea even where we had come from.

  She took me into a passage that led out of the hall. It was quite dark here, but fortunately, gravity returned.

  Both sides of the passage were lined with medical booths, each with an empty pod. There were rails on the floor, a main track in the middle of the passage with side tracks to each bay, where the pods sat.

  I stopped briefly to look inside the pod. It had an odd chemical smell. There was none of the white foamy stuff. The bottom of the pod was taken up by various pieces of equipment.

  “Come on.” Thayu was waiting for me.

  I followed her to the end of the passage where a glow of light came from an opening in the floor. Thayu stopped at the very edge and knelt. There was another gravity change here, but she didn’t use the railing that stood at the edge.

  I began, “What—”

  She placed her finger against her lips.

  I crawled to the edge of the opening and looked in. Whoa. What would have been a sheer vertical wall became the floor. Inside the well-lit room, a woman was tending to a handful of pods, walking from one to the other, while the blue light glowed over the face of the occupants—wait, the person inside that one had a broad face with a flat nose with flaring nostrils. He had a curved mouth with dark lips and thick black eyebrows. His hair—black and straight—was tied at the back of his head in a ponytail.

  I didn’t recognise the face, but this was a Coldi person, not Aghyrian.

  I mouthed to Thayu, “Is that one of ours?”

  She gestured, yes and wait here. She was turning down the beam intensity on her gun while balancing on the point where gravity shifted. Then she jumped over the edge into the room.

  I lay on the floor in the passage and waited, staring at the ceiling, feeling naked without a weapon. Hopefully Thayu wasn’t going to need my help.

  This close to the gravity shift, I could feel shimmers of weightlessness, but the rubbery suit the army had given me felt like it was made of the ultimate non-slip material.

  The sound of a discharge echoed from the room, and another one and a little later a third one.

  Thayu ran back to the entrance. She reached out a hand for me, helping me over the gravity change and into the room.

  The woman who had been checking the pods lay motionless on the floor. She wore the same grey uniform as the others, and disconcertingly she had golden curly hair much like mine. She carried no weapons that I could see.

  “Help me with this thing,” Thayu said.

  She stood at one of the pods, staring into its blue glow of light. The occupant was Asha Domiri.

  Shit.

  “How do I turn this thing off?” Before her, against the side of the glass covering was some sort of control panel where lights blinked and fine lines of light and Aghyrian script lit up.

  “Have you tried opening the lid?”

  “I don’t know what’s inside and what keeps him sedated.” She sounded distressed, panicked almost.

  I knocked on the cover. It made a hollow sound. “I think there’s air inside.” The pod looked a bit different from the ones inside the big hall. The light wasn’t as evenly distributed. “I think they were still going to add the fluid.” I found a clip along the edge that might be used to close the lid. I fiddled with it, but couldn’t figure out how it opened.

  I said, “We don’t have any time. How about you shoot it?”

  She gave me a dubious look, but then took out her gun, dialled the beam to narrow. She crouched and pointed the weapon so that any charge would go through the canopy and back into the room. She fired. The cover glowed briefly but didn’t break. She dialled the strength up and tried again. The charge hit the top of the canopy. An orange stain spread through it, pulsed and faded.

  “Damn it.” Thayu bent over the cover. A spark crackled—

  I yelled, “Watch out!”

  The cover shattered in thousands of little pieces that flew out like a spray of water and fell like molten globs of glass on the floor. Thayu had shielded her face, but two pieces stuck to the sleeves of her suit.

  Molten globs of glass . . . That was a strange coincidence. I saw similar globs of glass on the carpet in my office, on the bed in Marin Federza’s bedroom. The Tamerians wouldn’t have been in contact with—damn, certainly I was dreaming. Seeing ghosts everywhere.

  Thayu yanked the other coverings off her father, scattering bits of glass. Underneath, he was wearing a pyjama-like grey suit. She peeled off bandages and straps from his wrists and ankles, pulling off drips and tubes. The screen of the unit was flashing in yellow.

  Then she had him free from all attachments. She waited, panting.

  “We may have to carry him,” I said, and I tried not to worry about the other six people. I pulled the gun from her hand. “Let me start on the others.”

  That she let me take it was a measure of her distress. As I turned to one of the other pods, she said, “Come on, you can wake up now.” It pained me how her voice cracked.

  I fired. The orange stain spread over the cover. Then I
used the barrel of the gun to let the spark escape. The glass blew out.

  I was pulling away all the tubes and plaster attached to the man inside when there was a great gasp behind me. I turned around just in time to see Asha roll on his side and vomit a great gush of green stuff. It went over the bed of squishy foam and onto the floor.

  The man I’d just freed was gasping, too. He exhaled a spray of green stuff through his nose and then vomited as well.

  Freeing all the other guards was a messy business. By the time we were done and the last of the guards had woken up and was puking his guts out, Asha was walking around, retrieving his and the guards’ clothes, belts and weapons from a bin between two of the pods.

  I asked him how he had ended up here.

  “We went to negotiate, but they were never interested in anything we had to say,” he said, his voice still hoarse. “We came into the docking hall and they stunned us as soon as we left the craft.”

  Attacking a leader who came to talk was considered extremely rude. That said, if I had to be honest, I thought that this had been a bad, predictable and dumb miscalculation on his part.

  That’s because the Coldi never need to negotiate with anyone of the same strength who doesn’t understand their customs.

  Still, if Asha found out how few people there were awake in this ship where he had let himself be captured, it would be a cause of severe embarrassment.

  Or more likely it would be a cause of affront.

  All the guards found their clothing and most of their gear in the bin and were happy that none had been stolen. Thayu had to re-stun the Aghyrian woman. “We had better go now, because if I have to do this again, I’ll probably kill her.”

  We went to the control room where we found Veyada and Sheydu, now in the company of a group of about twenty crewmembers, all seated on the floor. Aghyrians, all of them, many young women. The captain sat on his chair and Sheydu held a gun pointed at him. He was staring at his knees while holding his head.

  Veyada raised his eyebrows when he met my eyes. His stance relaxed a bit when he noticed Asha. Asha’s guards went to help Sheydu guard the crew.

  The man himself went to Captain Luczon. “You insulting bastard.” He grabbed the captain by the front of his shirt—

  “Wait,” I said.

  Asha turned around and gave me his you insignificant worm look. Bluff, I had to remind myself.

  “There have been many misunderstandings.” My heart was thudding. Every now and then, I had this odd feeling that he was going to challenge me in a fight, which I would utterly, utterly lose.

  Asha snorted. “The only thing I need to understand is that he authorised an attack on a peaceful delegation. No misunderstandings necessary.”

  “I agree that was not a smart move, but maybe they felt threatened.”

  “Well, they should have.” Then he turned to Captain Luczon and yelled in his face, “I only need to give the word and the army outside will attack. Your insults know no boundary.”

  The Captain didn’t react. He continued to meet Asha’s eyes in contempt. And Asha’s abrupt and aggressive replies were really not helping.

  I said, “Let’s all ease off and cool down. I’m sure we can find a solution.”

  Asha went to his group and I retreated to the other side of the room, where Veyada stood. The screens behind him showed scrolling text.

  He noticed me looking at it. “He has reopened the communication channel.”

  “That’s something at least.”

  We were silent for a bit. Asha’s guards had started searching the crew. Sheydu stood next to the captain. I blew out a sigh through my nose.

  “I guess you don’t like this either?” Veyada said.

  I shook my head. “We need to get out of here. If this was supposed to be a take-over of the ship, it was much too easy, and I’m afraid he’ll spring a trap on us.”

  He nodded. “I wonder when the rest of the crew are going to turn up.”

  “We’ve discovered where they are.”

  He gave me an oh? look. “I guess the news isn’t good?”

  “That depends. There are thousands of them. They’re all in stasis pods in a giant hall just behind this section. Probably still using the same techniques as they used for the buried children.” Those pods had lasted and kept their occupants alive for more years than one could comprehend. The last one had been found a mere hundred and fifty years ago, a young woman who had gone on to become one of the great Aghyrian teachers and mothers.

  “Is this the state in which they travelled?”

  I spread my hands. “No one knows. The old man is telling me some story about being old and wanting to see Asto one more time. He’s upset that the Coldi haven’t brought Asto back to the way it was before. I’m disturbed by his contempt for the Coldi, to be honest. He is also surprisingly unsentimental in other respects. He never mentioned the rest of his crew. For all I know, they might have been asleep since leaving Asto.”

  “I gather you don’t trust him.”

  “Don’t trust him?” I laughed before returning to seriousness. “But what I fundamentally don’t understand is why he allowed this siege to happen if he’s really as vulnerable as he says. It would have been much easier to be honest. He could have communicated with gamra that he needed help, or that he wanted to re-establish contact. Instead he talks to certain groups only, and they’re instructed to keep those communications a secret.”

  Veyada said, “I’m guessing the army’s presence spooked him.”

  “Or he’s not as vulnerable as he makes out, because he’s been talking to the Barresh Aghyrians.”

  “Talk does not require weapons.”

  “I’m thinking that he was hoping that the Aghyrians would be all-powerful and was hoping to get some help from them.” I could just about imagine Federza telling them all sort of half-truths and coming under fire when reality came out.

  “Maybe. It’s all speculation.”

  True.

  The old captain still sat motionless in his seat. Never mind how many crew he had, he could probably kill all of us—including himself—with the press of a button or a command in his head.

  “We’re going to have to assume that we’ve got control of the situation and have to make a decision what to do with him and his crew and the ship.”

  We thought about that for a while. Thayu and Sheydu were helping the soldiers search the captives. A female prisoner held out her hands and when Sheydu patted the bottom of her drab uniform, she touched Sheydu’s armour with an expression of curiosity on her face. Sheydu straightened.

  The woman said something in Aghyrian and held out her hands again.

  Sheydu gave her a puzzled look and continued searching while the captain looked on with his impassive expression. They didn’t look like the actions of hostile people. I just couldn’t get a handle on them.

  Next to me, Veyada said, “If he wants to see Asto, why not let him see Asto?”

  I turned to him. “Do you think Ezhya and gamra would be fine with having this behemoth with untold technology in the system and no clue what these people are capable of?”

  “I’m not talking about the ship. Just him.”

  “Leave the ship here?”

  “Under guard, of course.”

  “Do you think he would leave the ship that’s been his home since he was born?”

  “That’s his decision. We can maintain this stalemate indefinitely, if that’s what he wants. If I were him, I’d take the hand we offer him.”

  Except I didn’t think that it was so simple, but leaving the ship and its thousands of dormant crew here would be a good start. Anything was better than a show of weapons. It also gave the army more time to analyse the ship’s capabilities. More time to gain an understanding of each other.

  I asked him, “How confident are you that the army has really disabled the sling?”

  “Ask Asha.”

  The man himself was talking to Thayu, who—and this continued
to disturb me—stood in the subservient position. Thayu was his daughter for crying out loud.

  I joined them, refusing to play the game of superiors. Asha met my eyes, nostrils flaring.

  “Everything in order?” I asked him coolly. Let’s play the game of bluff.

  “At least the old man restored connectivity to the main fleet.”

  “Then we should think about going back to our shuttles. Do you think we’ll be let out?”

  “We’ll shoot our way out if necessary. I’m keen to leave.”

  Asha’s absence brought the army’s power structure into danger. That was what had been at stake here. For all I knew we were all trapped here until the old man could be persuaded to press the button on the mechanism that released us.

  “I’d like your assessment of the situation, especially with regard to threats. Do you think we’re in control of the situation?”

  He flicked up his eyebrows. I didn’t know what that was supposed to mean. Damn it, every time I thought I had this man worked out, he threw me a curveball. “The crew is in stasis. There are over three thousand of them. We have found only thirty-one running the ship.”

  “I’ve seen the stasis chamber. What is your assessment of why they’re in stasis, how long they’ve been in there, when the captain intended to wake them up—”

  “Or whether he intended to wake them up.” There was a serious, penetrating look in his eyes. Here was another person I should never underestimate.

  “You’re thinking that the captain has forcefully retained his crew?”

  “It seems that way to me. Otherwise he would have woken them up and gotten them to man the battle stations once we turned up.”

  Damn, yes, he was right about that. “He says he wants to visit Asto.”

  “No way.”

  “What about him alone? Coming with us, on our ships?”

  He flicked his eyebrows. “And leave this abomination here?” A flicker of interest went over his face.

  “Well-guarded. Are you absolutely confident that you’ve got their sling contained?”

  “Reasonably confident.”

  “But not one hundred percent?”

  “Look, I know that it’s hard to stomach for diplomats and other talk-fest enthusiasts at gamra, but military matters never come with a guarantee.”