Ambassador 4: Coming Home Read online

  On a personal level, I needed to find something to keep the captain occupied and happy to remain in Barresh. We didn’t want him to return to the ship until we knew the ship’s capabilities. Keeping him here and occupied with something that interested him was the best way of neutralising the ship.

  But no one was giving me any assistance.

  And the captain was downstairs, no doubt just as frustrated with the situation as I was, not understanding it. He had no loyalty to any gamra systems and he would be destructive if he was allowed to get angry, and I just did not know what to do about it.

  I had no messaging account, because I didn’t want to send any sensitive messages either, except to Delegate Namion, asking when control of the account could be returned to me.

  You can use it. It works, was his secretary’s chirpy reply.

  That wasn’t good enough, I told him.

  He replied that he wasn’t sure when they could transfer the account back to me. There appeared to be some sort of error, he said, because so much of that correspondence was coming in should be going to his boss. He needed to investigate.

  Bullshit. Those people were writing to me because they saw me as the person to answer their questions. No matter what position Delegate Namion held, they did not see him as capable of answering their questions.

  I now wished I’d never decided to send him all those messages, but knew that would not have been anywhere near an adequate solution either.

  It was about midmorning when Eirani came to notify me that a visitor had arrived and that he was waiting in the living room.

  My first thought was Federza, because he had the tendency to turn up unannounced, but when I went into the living room, I found, to my surprise, Tayron Kathraczi seated on my couch. He scrambled to his feet when I came in and nodded a greeting. Each time I saw him, I wondered if, when all his fellows on the ship had been woken up, one would be able to see the difference between them and the Barresh Aghyrians. For one, none of the locals had his olive skin, which would have to be pigmented and not tanned, seeing as he spent his life inside a space ship. He wore his dark brown hair—with wavy curls—combed back from his forehead. It wasn’t long enough for a ponytail and barely long enough to go behind his ears. His eyes were so black that you couldn’t see where the irises stopped and the pupils started. Whatever colour they were, Aghyrian eyes were always very intensely hued.

  Without the presence of his captain, he looked less demure, and why oh why were all those Aghyrians so tall? He towered more than a head over me.

  I gestured him to the couch, and we sat down. “How can I help you?”

  “The captain wants to know if, since it is obviously not possible to see the excavation of the old ship, it would be possible to visit other sites. He wants to see Asto, even if we’re told we can’t land on the surface. He wants to see other artefacts that are preserved in this area. He understands that there are other items preserved in a place called Miran.”

  “I am aware of all the places you need to visit. I have to beg for your patience. None of those sites are easily accessible. Many have cultural significance and belong to local people. We need their permission to bring you there.” For example, there were some incredible murals preserved from the time after the Aghyrians had landed in Barresh, but the site belonged to Pengali tribes, and held great significance for them. Many of those sites also were so well preserved because they weren’t easy to reach; in one case going there involved a dunking in ink-black water inside a cave in order to duck under a wall. I needed Pengali permission to visit places like this. Visiting Miran was on another level of complexity altogether.

  “My captain says you keep telling him the same story. He says he wants to hear a different story.”

  “I wish I could tell him something different, but unfortunately, I can’t. It will take time to arrange the permissions.”

  “Is that necessary just for a visit?”

  “It is, I’m afraid.”

  “My captain says he doesn’t see the need for all these useless rules.”

  Was he even allowed to have his own opinion or did they all have to repeat what the captain said?

  “I’m guessing there would be no need for permits on the ship.” Especially not if the vast majority of the crew was in stasis. “But we’re dealing with many different peoples and different nations. We can’t just turn up, the same way that people wouldn’t be able to visit your ship without getting your permission.”

  “Yet you turned up like that at our ship.”

  “I could not have entered the ship without your knowledge and permission.” I still didn’t think he understood the concept of borders or different people, or culture for that matter. “Look, I’ll see what I can do, but I really do have to beg for your patience.”

  “We have travelled from outside the galaxy. Do not try to teach us about patience.” He sounded miffed.

  “I’m sorry. I just wanted to make sure you understood.” This wasn’t going well. One way or another, our conversations seemed to always butt up against a wall of wrong interpretations and misunderstandings. “I think we fail to understand your point of view. It’s hard for us to comprehend the vastness of the universe when we have only travelled through such a small part of it. But feel free to explain. We are eager to learn.”

  “I don’t know what there is to learn. There is a lot of empty space out there.”

  “Surely the ship jumped most of that?”

  “Most, but not all.”

  “Did you . . . find anything that wasn’t open space?” They’d been to the Andromeda galaxy, after all—what Coldi called the Renzha galaxy.

  “We found interesting things, most of them of scientific nature.”

  “Any habitable worlds?”

  “The Renzha galaxy is not a system as you would know it.” Some small part in me still hoped that he didn’t mean you to sound as condescending as it did.

  “So—what then? Gas clouds and force fields?”

  “Something like that. It is a very strange system.”

  “Surely the whole galaxy is not like that?”

  “It’s very hard to comprehend for someone who has not experienced it.”

  “Try me.”

  He gave me a penetrating, almost insulted, look. “You ask so many questions.”

  “Am I not allowed to ask questions?”

  “Where do you get all these questions?”

  “Where do I—what do you mean?”

  “When the captain says that a thing is a certain way, then it is like that. There is no need for a question.”

  “We don’t have a captain.”

  “What about . . . the man in the blue robe?”

  I felt like laughing. Delegate Namion couldn’t be further removed from a captain if he tried. “He is the leader of the assembly. Nothing else. He does not control this island. He does not control my life.”

  “Then who is your captain?”

  “We don’t have any captains.”

  He frowned.

  I felt chilled.

  “But let’s go back to the question I asked. What did you see when you were in the other galaxy? I can’t believe that there would not have been anything worth mentioning.”

  “You want to know this—why?”

  “We know where you’ve been and we’re curious. We want to know what the place looks like.”

  “We can report the differences in chemical composition and the differences in the nature of force fields. Is that what you want?”

  “Just what it looks like would satisfy many people, but also things like maps to complement the ones we have.”

  “The captain will have to do that.”

  “Can you ask him?”

  He returned a wide-eyed stare. Apparently, no one asked the captain anything.

  We spoke for a bit longer, but I didn’t get anything else useful out of him. Even when we spoke about Barresh, it was as if he completely missed my points. He twisted everythi
ng back to his ship and captain. He seemed to be incapable of discussing anything without mentioning his captain.

  I blew out a deep breath when he was gone.

  “I don’t trust him,” Thayu said, coming into the room. She had been working in the hub but of course had heard—and recorded—everything we said. “There is something he’s not telling us.”

  “You say.” I laughed. “Do you think there is something he is telling us? Because I don’t know that he said anything useful.”

  “All those years cruising at high speed finding nothing, only to turn around and go back home with nothing more than a few chemical and mathematical data? It makes no sense at all.”

  “Well, we can’t go and check. We have to take his word for it.”

  Thayu said, “How about we try to get that woman by herself and ask her some questions?”

  “I don’t know that we’ll get a chance. Both of them seem to be glued to their captain.”

  I had randomly picked two of the captain’s crew members so as not to give him the chance to bring accomplices, but I seemed to have picked the wrong people. I had never thought that the captain would be cooperative, but I had at least hoped that the two companions would be more informative, but they seemed incapable of thinking for themselves. Both of them were all my captain says this, the captain says that with no sign of their own thoughts or even a skerrick of personality. Brainwashed seemed to be the word for it.

  I sighed. “I have to think about what we’ll do with them. Right now, I think we might need to go into town. I should probably put in a regular application to see the Pengali sites to keep him busy, but it will take a while, not to speak of trying to visit Miran.”

  Thayu snorted. “What would you put down in the application as ‘purpose of visit’? Study early Mirani settlement and change the course of history?”

  We laughed. Those stupid Mirani forms. The nation of Miran surrounded the Barresh enclave, but most of those regions, like most of Miran, were sparsely-populated. They didn’t want a flood of illegals coming over the border from Barresh and subjected visitors to ridiculous questionnaires.

  Thayu said, “You know what? It would be far easier to apply for him to look at Asto. There are no rules for looking at a planet from orbit.”

  “Right. Your father does it all the time.”

  She grinned.

  But she had a point. Although . . . “It would worry me to take him there. For all I know he’ll try to do something stupid to force us down.”

  “He would be extensively searched before boarding any aircraft.”

  Except the things that worried me could probably not be found in a search. But Coldi, practical as they were, always dismissed the idea of mental powers: that a person could spin a web of small anpar threads like the Exchange. I’d even seen this done by that Aghyrian medico who had once visited me in my apartment. Little sparks flying from her fingertips.

  We didn’t know if the captain could do anything of the sort, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he could.

  All factors considered, looking at Asto from orbit was something we could organise quickly without much obfuscation from any authorities. It would just require the regular departure permits from the Exchange. I decided to go to the Exchange to get those permits in person, so at least I knew everything was approved.

  While I was at it, I wanted to do a few other things in town.

  We agreed that Thayu would come with me, but Nicha elected to stay at home. Was something finally happening? Hell, I hoped so, for all of us.

  Nicha’s second, Reida, was in town for the task I’d given him, and Deyu was there, too, running some errands for him, so Sheydu said she’d come while her son and zhayma Veyada sorted out some legal thing at home.

  We were a strange and somewhat lopsided group going to the station, not balanced at all. Thayu picked up that I noticed that. She mentioned it to me when we sat in the train.

  “Don’t you mind that we’re a strange group?” I asked.

  “For routine jobs of lesser importance, no, it doesn’t make a great deal of difference. We’re all part of the same association.”

  With me on top, kind of bumbling through situations where, had I been Coldi, instinct would guide me.

  Silver water flashed past outside the window. The train moved fast over the uninterrupted stretch of rails that ran low over the water between the artificial gamra island and the old city.

  “You’d better hope that nothing of importance happens, then.”

  “You’re nervous.”

  “That man makes me nervous. He talks but he doesn’t answer any questions. He just states his points over and over again. He doesn’t listen. He has absolute control over his companions. What they do, what they say, even what they think. There is no world for them outside the ship community. He says he wants to see these historical sites, and I understand why, but he’s made me so suspicious that I’m thinking there may be something more behind it all. He doesn’t seem to have any soft spots.”

  “He acts like the man who let thousands of spaces in his ship go unoccupied while the Aghyrian civilisation died.”

  “Yeah.” I nodded. Just he had been portrayed in Asto’s historical texts. An arsehole.

  Chapter 6

  * * *

  AT THE EXCHANGE, getting a permit to leave and come back ended up being really easy. In fact, the employee obviously wondered why we didn’t do it through the auxiliary network. He didn’t even want our names.

  “I just wanted to come in to make sure that the permit was actually granted,” I said. A small bit of certainty in this world which had become very uncertain.

  “I will need a ship registration when you have it,” the employee mentioned before we left.

  Yeah, of course we needed someone to take us there. I had a feeling that someone would offer their services. I had a feeling that Asha Domiri was not far away. I supposed we could hire a craft if no one offered by the time we were ready to go.

  On the way back out of the building, in the magnificent staircase, Thayu shook her head. “Sometimes I don’t know why anyone believes any of the stuff you say. ‘Make sure that the permit was actually granted.’ That was the sole reason we went into town?”

  Sheydu said, “Nup. The fun starts now. I’m guessing we’re looking for Federza. Where are we going? Talk to the council or visit the Aghyrian compound?”

  “Neither. We’re going to Federza’s office.”

  “I should have guessed that,” Thayu said, her expression dark. She didn’t like it when I did things she hadn’t predicted.

  Sheydu predicted it because . . . she was just being Sheydu, more than twice Thayu’s age and three times the experience. One day I must ask her about all the places she had worked, but I suspected I wouldn’t like some of the answers.

  Thayu hadn’t guessed because looking for Federza was not a thing a Coldi person would do, since Federza was not in their loyalty networks. He was supposed to have his own loyalty networks. Except he didn’t. And I guessed in some sort of perverted way, he was in my loyalty network, if being a colleague could be called that.

  Marin Federza’s Trader office was in the old heritage four-storey building at the beginning of Market Street, a thick-walled, squat, cramped affair that you’d call ugly until you heard that the building was hundreds of years old and therefore, by Barresh standard, needed to be treated with reverence. Federza occupied one of the larger suites on the first floor. Because it was daytime, the metal gate at the bottom of the staircase was open and people walked in and out of the building.

  Some of them greeted us when we came up the stairs.

  The door to Federza’s office was closed, and remained so after Thayu’s knocking and jiggling of the handle.

  Thayu harrumphed. “So, he’s not home. Not that we’d thought any different. What’s the plan?” I thought she sounded belligerent and didn’t understand why. It was not like her to get upset about small things like failing to guess our de
stination. No doubt I’d find out what bugged her soon, but right now it wasn’t very helpful.

  “Reida broke into this office, remember? Last time I had to pick him up from the jail.”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t get all the sordid details.” There was definitely something bothering her.

  I addressed Sheydu. “Reida said he broke in to replace the bugs in this building that we lost, but he was working for Delegate Ayanu Azimi stealing documentation that Federza had been intending to give up to gamra.”

  “Is there a point to this?” Count on Sheydu to lose patience quickly. Damn it, everyone was in a foul mood.

  “Yes. While Reida was there, he placed new bugs.”

  Sheydu’s eyes widened. “They’re not ours. They’re Delegate Ayanu’s.”

  “I guess you want me to access them. I can’t. I need codes,” Thayu said.

  “I have the codes.”

  She turned sharply to me. “What? Why didn’t Reida give them to us?”

  “Because of his loyalties, and because of the attack on Federza and he didn’t want to be targeted as suspect. Because we went away soon after.” And because Federza wasn’t in anyone’s loyalty network and there was no need for them to know about bugs in Federza’s office. And also because it was Delegate Azimi’s bug network. “Anyway, Reida only gave me the code yesterday. And tell me what’s wrong, because everyone is snapping at me, and I’m just doing the best I can. This whole situation is fucked up, I know. This guy drives me crazy, and it’s not even safe coming home anymore because Xinanu might bite off my head. I don’t want any of you to start as well.”

  She sighed. “I’m sorry. We’re all stressed.” Nothing about what bothered her in particular. Too personal, I guessed, to be shared with Sheydu.

  I pulled out my reader and passed Thayu the code that Reida had given me yesterday, and she went up to the door with her reader.

  While Thayu did her thing, Sheydu and I stood a short distance back, pretending to wait for someone. We talked about the weather and the view from the balcony—into the back yards of the rich keihu families. Chatting with Sheydu was a hard job because she tended to give one-word replies, but fortunately I didn’t have to make conversation for very long, because Thayu came our way. “I’ve got the security camera recordings. They’re extremely short. Nothing happens.”