Ambassador 4: Coming Home Read online

  By the time she made that remark, Kando Luczon had upset so many people that a chorus of cheers had broken out.

  And when the collective assembly had quietened down, Kando Luczon had said, “The story goes that it is now possible for people to visit Asto. Our measurements confirm this. Yet you maintain the restrictions. Are you going to prevent an old man from returning to his home before he dies?”

  This remark led to more shouting.

  I’d been sitting up there in my box cringing all the way, with all my staff and all their equipment ready to record, lobby and vote and solve this issue. To come to an agreement with this massive ship and where they could go. Where, possibly, the crew could settle, if they wanted. But the captain appeared only interested in causing as much offence as possible. Answering a blunt question with another blunt question. Come to think of it, had he ever answered any of our questions?

  More evasive than a gamra diplomat was an expression in keihu. Kando Luczon took evasiveness to uncharted heights.

  The train was slowing down and nerves returned. I hadn’t heard back from the council about the visit. I hoped that, for once, something about Kando Luczon would click with some of the local people. All right, the man was no diplomat, but it would be awesome if he was an academic.

  Outside the window Barresh’s main island slid by, with its jumble of roofs of the stately old houses intermingled with spreading tree canopies. The western side contained the airport, the administrative centre and the houses of the well off. The eastern side of the island was more quiet and unassuming in nature. The houses were a lot closer together and people who lived here were the middle-class workers and well-off Pengali.

  I leaned into the aisle so that I could see Thayu and Nicha in the next compartment. They were already on their feet ready to go. Above all, they remained professional. They removed themselves from situations where they might step out of line.

  It would be nice if I could do the same.

  The train slowed further while still being above the water and then slid into the station. The doors opened, letting in a waft of warm humid air. This station, on the southeastern line, was nothing more than a concrete platform raised over the water. It had a wide overhanging roof, so that passengers didn’t get wet in the monsoonal rains, and a small shed that might contain maintenance equipment and an electrical substation.

  A bridge connected the station to the land.

  I’d been here not long before we went to the Aghyrian ship. Back then, it had been dark and we’d come from the land. Back then, there also hadn’t been the giant white tent over a section of marshland, nor the shacks or digging machines that stood on the strip of dry land adjacent to the back walls of the yards that faced the marshlands.

  “I assume that’s it?” Kando Luczon said. He squinted into the light which was unusually bright because the sky was cloudless—almost unheard-of in Barresh.

  When we came here before, we approached the station from the marshland and had to return to the main road to access the station bridge, but since that time the council had built a flight of stairs that led directly from the bridge to a timber walkway across the marsh, from the station to the white tent.

  It was much more humid on the walkway than it had been on the platform, a reminder of the pressing heat of the monsoon that was to come.

  There was a lot of activity at the white tent. The sides were open, and I could see people walking around on platforms inside.

  We had barely covered half the distance to the tent when a couple of Barresh guards in black came in our direction.

  One man called out, “Halt. This is a restricted site. What are you doing here?”

  “I sent a message that we’d be coming.” Certainly he would know who I was.

  “I have not been informed about that. We can’t have curious folk crowd around. We need space to work.”

  I couldn’t see any curious folk other than ourselves. “Certainly you’re familiar with this man here: Captain Kando Luczon of the Aghyrians. He is coming to have a look at the ship that carried his fellows here.”

  “Can I see your ID?” His face remained impassive.

  I pulled out my pass, puzzled by this state of affairs. He took it from me and ran his scanner over it. He looked from the screen to my face and back again. His brown eyes were the only thing that moved. He was keihu, of the body type that was solid and short, with a course face. His nose had the characteristic longitudinal groove in the middle.

  “Hmm.” Then he held his hand out for Kando Luczon’s pass.

  The captain gave the pass he had received yesterday, frowning. The guard ran the scanner over that, too. His face remained unemotional as he gave both passes back.

  I expected to be let through now, but he asked, “Do you have a permit to enter the site?”

  “Well, nobody told me that we needed—”

  “I need to see a permit.”

  “When did that come into force?”

  “Since the dig started. We can’t have sightseers trampling the site.”

  “That’s all very well, but have you seen who this man is?”

  The guard glanced at Kando Luczon, who glared back. To his credit, the guard didn’t seem to be impressed by the captain’s death stare. “Look, I don’t really care who he is. He could be Asto’s Chief Coordinator for all I know. I have orders, I’m afraid.”

  “Can I talk to your superior?”

  “They’re all at lunch.”

  That was Barresh in a nutshell. Anything important to be discussed? Everyone was at lunch. Not to mention that it was so late that lunch was in danger of bleeding into dinner. “When are they due back?”

  He shrugged. “After lunch, I guess.”

  Ha, ha, ha.

  “What’s going on?” Kando Luczon asked. He had not yet developed the ability to understand keihu, but considering the Aghyrian aptitude for languages, I didn’t expect that to take very long. Keihu was not a terribly complicated language either.

  I translated for him. “He says we can’t get in because we don’t have permission.”

  “We don’t need permission. I give permission. This is my ship.” He pushed past the astonished guard and strode in large steps in the direction of the white tent.

  “Hey, hey, sir.” The guard ran after him, yelling in Coldi. “You can’t just—”

  “Yes I can. This is my ship.”

  Kando Luczon’s legs were much longer than the guard’s.

  The guard had stopped his pursuit and was on his comm. A couple of men in council black came out of the tent. Guards, with guns clearly displayed on their belts. They blocked Kando Luczon’s path. Even without the long white hair and flowing robe, he was impressive, at least a head taller than the guards, who were not short men.

  I ran over the walkway.

  When I reached the group, a guard was saying in heavily-accented Coldi, “Everyone who comes here must show their pass and must have been authorised by the council.”

  “Rubbish,” Kando Luczon said.

  “Those are our orders. Challenge them with the council if you must.”

  Another said, “We can’t let anyone in the site. It’s a very delicate site and we don’t want people trampling over it.”

  “Rubbish, rubbish!”

  I stepped between them, holding up my hands. “Calm down, calm down everyone. There must be some sort of misunderstanding. You know who this man is. Are you really telling me that the council has expressly forbidden him to enter the site?”

  The guard turned his attention to me. “Not just him, just all people who don’t work on the dig. The council says they will reveal the findings when it’s all done.”

  I saw. This was about ownership of the process. I tried again. “But you know who he is, right?” One thing I’d understood about the Aghyrian ship people was that they had strong feelings about their home ships, which made sense seeing as they spent their entire lives on board.

  “I don’t care who he is,
Delegate,” the guard said. “Unless the council sends us an update with people allowed access, we won’t let him in. We won’t let you in. When the Chief Councillor comes, we won’t let him in. When Ezhya Palayi comes, he won’t get in.”

  I snorted. “Well, I’d like to see you get challenged on that last one, but I get the point, stupid as I think it is.”

  “Raise it with the council, sir.”

  “I will.” Then I added in Coldi for the benefit of the captain, “We’ll be taking this up with both the council and the general assembly.”

  “Do that,” Kando Luczon said. “I’m looking forward to that discussion.”

  Chapter 4

  * * *

  SO IT SEEMED that this was determined to be one of those days that consisted of a long string of turds lined up in a row, waiting for me to stupidly blunder into them.

  We could do nothing at the site except go back. I hadn’t come because I’d thought there was an awful lot to see at the dig yet, but I’d assumed that those doing the excavation would be interested in the views and experiences of someone who had been alive at the time the ship landed here. I mean—which archaeologist on Earth would refuse the assistance of a real live ancient Egyptian while studying the pharaohs’ graves?

  I couldn’t believe that the historians themselves would refuse this assistance, but clearly the Barresh council was assuming ownership of the dig to the point of excluding everyone.

  Stupid councillors with their stupid egos.

  Meanwhile, what was I going to do with this man who was getting increasingly antsy, who was extremely smart, who had aims we could only guess and commanded technology we had never seen?

  We made our way back to the station in a brooding silence.

  “It strikes me that your current council is none too smart,” Luczon said once we sat in the train.

  Well, that was stating the obvious. It wasn’t my council either. I wanted nothing more to do with those self-important idiots.

  “I’m sorry. I honestly have no idea what is going on here.” At the first chance I got, I was going to find a higher authority to override them, although I realised that would be hard.

  The silence continued. Clearly, he was unimpressed. With the council. With me.

  When we reached the gamra island, Kando Luczon and his two silent companions went back to their apartment—goodness knew what sort of mischief they’d get up to there—and we went upstairs.

  Evi stood at the door; and at my questioning if anything had happened, he said that no, it hadn’t.

  He was right. It was blissfully quiet in the apartment. The hall was empty, the corridor was empty, and from somewhere within came the usual sounds: Devlin talking in a quiet voice in the hub, Eirani singing while bringing around the clean laundry.

  Hopefully, Xinanu had gone to sleep. Nicha went to his room, and with a bit of luck, he could do so without setting her off again.

  I went into the office where the first thing I did was send an official complaint to the Barresh Council. I could have written it in keihu, but I chose Coldi because it had a far greater array of looking-down-your-nose pronouns. I could have made it informal, but I chose to use the official gamra channels so that the gamra stamps would show up on all future correspondence as well. The more I thought about it, the angrier I got, so when I finished that complaint, I wrote one to the new gamra Chief Delegate as well, expressing in the strongest possible terms that this wasn’t going to be acceptable. Let him do something useful for a change.

  Meanwhile, Nicha and Thayu had started wading through the morass of correspondence that cluttered my data storage system. A bit later, Veyada slipped into the room and sat next to Nicha to help him.

  “Wow, there really is a lot of it,” Thayu said. “I don’t understand where it all came from. I see no relationships between the addresses. I don’t even know where some of these places are.” That was saying something. I would have rated Thayu’s knowledge of inhabited worlds better than mine.

  She flicked through a couple of messages. “They all want assurance that we’re not going to give the Aghyrians significant control over the Exchange.”

  If I ever needed a reminder of how much the Exchange outage had spooked everyone, this was it.

  “I don’t even know why anyone would think that,” Nicha said.

  “Because people are stupid,” Thayu said. “They weren’t on that train with us. They didn’t hear what the arsehole said. If they had, they’d know that we’d never give that idiot anything over our dead bodies.”

  Veyada was curious about what happened on the train and Nicha recounted Kando Luczon’s words.

  Veyada was one of the most patient, even-tempered and gentle Coldi I knew. He swore. “He said all that?”

  “Pretty much in those words,” Nicha said.

  I nodded. There was nothing wrong with Nicha’s ears.

  Veyada blew out a breath and shook his head. “It’s almost like he’s here to deliberately cause as much conflict as possible.”

  “I said he’s an arsehole.” Thayu crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m impressed with Cory for still trying ‘to make him see’ what effect he’s having on us. I’m pretty sure that it’s all deliberate. Whatever we know about Aghyrian history is full of this sort of stuff. They were—are—manipulative people, whose aim it was to ‘win’ discussions, political shitfights or actual armed conflicts.”

  “Which makes it very hard to have any kind of meaningful negotiation with them,” Veyada agreed.

  I could see in Thayu’s face that she didn’t want a negotiation. Nicha was probably leaning that way, too. Veyada’s expression was grim, as if he realised that likely there wouldn’t be a meaningful negotiation, and Ezhya had probably asked me to intervene on the remote off-chance that I could stop a bad situation sliding into a war.

  And damn, it, I hated letting Ezhya down, but it sure as hell wasn’t looking good.

  I sighed, leaned my head into my hands and sighed again.

  I had to try. I had to keep my cool and keep plodding along. I had to keep a straight course. Take things one step at a time. Concentrate on the little things in the hope that they would add up to a big thing.

  Change of subject. I gestured at the screen. “Veyada, legally, what am I allowed to do with all this correspondence?”

  “What would you like to do with it?”

  “Dump it in Delegate Namion’s account so at least I can work again. I don’t understand why all these people are asking me these questions—well, no, that’s not true; of course I do know—but he’s Chief Delegate, so if he wants to play he should play.”

  “I told you that you should stand for the position,” Thayu said.

  I snorted. She had to be kidding.

  Veyada said, “Legally speaking, we’re dealing with two conflicting issues. One: your correspondence is yours and you are responsible for it. On the other hand, gamra bylaws say that Delegates should not step outside the task assigned to them without consulting others.”

  Nicha snorted. “Have you ever done anything that’s inside your assigned task?”

  I said, “Veyada, does that mean ‘Do as you wish’?”

  “You got it.”

  “Hmm. Delegate Namion will be pissed with me if I send him the correspondence. He will also be pissed with me if I don’t send it.”

  “So: send?” Thayu said.

  “Yeah. Why not? At least he can’t accuse me of keeping information from him.” And I wouldn’t have to worry about all those messages in the three seconds he would take to blow up and come blast my ear about it.

  Come to think of it, I didn’t even know him well enough to be certain that blasting ears was his style. “Let’s do it. Give me the other stuff that needs to be dealt with.”

  Thayu sent me a much trimmed-down list of messages. In fact, once I had dealt with a decent number of messages by simply filing them, scheduling them or replying Yes or No, I started to see the last messages that had arrived
in the account before I left, before the entire world was turned upside down.

  The last one I had opened was a message from Marin Federza—

  Crap. I should make some inquiries about him.

  “Thay’, have you seen or heard from Federza since coming back?”

  “Thankfully, no.”

  “Me neither,” Nicha said. “No great loss.”

  “I’m kind of serious. He was deposed as leader of the Aghyrians, sacked from his position as Trader Delegate, shot at when he was in my apartment, had the windows shot out of his apartment and his office trashed, and didn’t come to the last assembly meeting before we left. He’s not here and no one seems to be worried about it.”

  “He probably turned up and has simply gone back to his Trader life. He’s got a house and an office in town. And since he’s a Trader, he’s probably travelling.”

  Nicha was probably right, but it didn’t dispel my unease. Federza didn’t seem the type of person who would just quietly disappear. “If I send him a message, that will get to him wherever he is, right?”

  “The Trader Guild has their own satellites, so yeah. It will even bypass the regular public Exchange channels and, if he’s off world, it will have no lag time or booking time.” He still sounded as if he wondered why I bothered.

  So I sent Federza a message, with apologies for my sudden absence and some other vague stuff. It was all strict business, and it was bullshit, but I would feel a lot better if he replied. I disliked the man deeply, but that didn’t mean I wished him ill.

  A bit higher up in the list was a message from Menor that I hadn’t read. It said that he was going home to Hedron for a brief visit. In case we needed his services, he provided a list of dates that he’d be available. Very clinical and professional, avoiding the term “sperm donor”.

  Thayu stopped me staring at the screen and came to stand next to me.