Rogue Stars

by C Gockel et al.

  Snatches of conversation drifted across the room.

  “. . . like a bomb being thrown into the window.”

  “. . . sure? He says Sirkonen saw something.”

  “. . . have to get that on record . . .”

  Where was Nicha?

  I struggled to the edge of the couch. Tested my legs, and then rose carefully to tap one of the uniformed men on the back. The man turned. “Sit down please, sir.” He, too, wore the emblem of the Special Services Branch.

  Another said, “Ambulance is on its way.”

  “I’m sorry, I . . . I need to speak to my . . . assistant.” I was more careful with language this time. Coldi words upset too many people. “He’s in the foyer.”

  “I know. He’s being interrogated.”

  Interrogated? “I need to speak to him.”

  “Not yet, sir.”

  “You shouldn’t interrogate him until I speak to him.”

  There was a flicker of hesitation on his face. Maybe he heard the anger I tried to keep from my voice.

  “Sir, there has just been an attack on the President. We need to—”

  “I understand, but Nicha Palayi falls exclusively under gamra law. If you wish to interrogate him, you can apply to your local gamra delegate, which happens to be me. Now I will grant that permission, because I understand that you need to speak to all possible witnesses, and I have no desire to withhold information. However, I want to see him first. I would also appreciate it if my feeder could be returned and my security staff were brought up here. They are at the security post downstairs.”

  Goodness knew what those two young men had been subjected to, how bewildered and lost they must feel. They spoke some Isla, but with poor fluency.

  The man snapped into a military salute. “Sir.” He turned on his heel and marched out of the room, no doubt to get a higher-ranked officer.

  He didn’t return.

  Two guards asked to search me. In my pocket, they found the datastick the president had given me. One guard turned it over; the black plastic surface reflected the light. “What’s on it?”

  “I don’t know.” I wished to hell I knew.

  “I’ll need to make a copy.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “The investigating team will need to study every object present in this room.”

  “It’s most likely information pertaining to my job. I’ve had no opportunity to look at it. It might contain material sensitive to gamra interests.”

  He raised his eyebrows, like he wanted to say The president has been attacked, isn’t that more important than extraterrestrials?

  “I assure you, sir, all material we collect is confidential.”

  I nodded, by no means assured, but what could I do? Refuse and be treated as suspicious?

  He took the datastick to a colleague at the door. Shit. Sirkonen had given this thing to me. Not to be pried at by Special Services.

  He had been talking about Seymour Kershaw, my predecessor of sorts, who had disappeared at gamra headquarters in Barresh ten years ago. Now some idiot had made the story into a movie which accused the Coldi, the dominant ethnicity within those sections of the galaxy serviced by gamra, of killing him. I hoped the information wasn’t about Kershaw. The connection between it and the fictional allegations in the movie would be all too easy to make.

  I could hear the questions from the press. Why didn’t these aliens allow Earth investigators to see for themselves what had happened to their ambassador? Why did they keep such tight control on their precious Exchange—so that smart humans couldn’t travel to other worlds and infect them with undesirable ideas, like democracy and religion?

  And I could explain as much as I wanted: because gamra is familiar with the consequences of allowing different species to pursue their jurisdiction across interstellar space. It rarely ends well. Because you cannot translate law from one species to the other. And no one on Earth would listen to me.

  Eight years of working with gamra, and I thought I was beginning to understand. Yet the main thing I understood was that these people might be our biological cousins on the human family tree, separated by fifty thousand years, or more, of isolation, but their physiology and mental hardwiring differed so much from ours that Earth hadn’t even begun to understand.

  I believed we desperately needed to set the incident aside and move on, because that’s what gamra did, drowning conflicts in bureaucracy, because it was the only way to keep the Exchange network functioning in peace.

  I got the datastick back, and managed to work it into my pocket with the bloodied towel. Shit.

  Sirens wailed outside, but the promised ambulance didn’t come, or if it did, was diverted elsewhere. Military hovercraft zoomed backwards and forwards across the part of the sky visible through the hole in the wall.

  I was sore.

  I was tired, barely having slept since my father had driven me to the airport in Auckland thirty-six hours ago.

  I was hungry.

  I still clutched the filthy towel around my hands.

  I caught the attention of a young Special Services officer. I thought it was the one I had asked about Nicha before, but all faces blurred in my mind.

  “Look, I’ve been sitting here long enough. I asked to see my assistant. Where is he?”

  “Sorry, sir. I asked the boss, but he must have been held up.”

  And fuck you, too. “Ask him again, I . . .” I swallowed the words. No. Complaining wasn’t going to gain me any points. “I need medical care.”

  His cheeks went red. “Sorry, sir.” He went out.

  What the hell was going on here? I expected this kind of obtuse pass-the-buck-ery at gamra. They were good at that. I had not expected this kind of treatment here, in Rotterdam, at Nations of Earth.

  Oh, blow their restrictions.

  I wriggled one hand out of the towel. Pieces of glass glistened in deep cuts, which still oozed blood.

  I smeared it on my jacket as I fished in the pocket for my comm unit. Ouch, ouch and ouch. Contrary to security regulations inside the President’s office, I turned the unit on.

  It beeped.

  Not Nicha. The ID told me that much.

  “Eva?”

  “Cory, there’s been an attack on the President.” The female voice with the Polish accent brought a wave of longing, of safety, of roast dinners with glasses of wine, and the distinctive smell of nicotine-free tobacco from her father’s pipe.

  “I know, I’m in his office.”

  “His—But you weren’t meant to see him until tomorrow!”

  “There was a change of plan.”

  “Oh Cory!” She burst into tears.

  “Eva, please.” I forced my voice into the calmest tone I could muster. “I’m fine, tell your parents, but right now, I need to call—”

  The connection went dead.

  A uniformed figure stood before me, flipping shut an electronic device. “Sorry sir, no communication from this office.” He, too, belonged to Special Services.

  “I want to talk to my assistant. Can you return my feeder? It’s in a basket on the secretary’s desk. I’ve been sitting here for a long time. Gamra will be asking questions about me.” And if you don’t let me go now, I’ll give you more shit than you’ve ever seen in your life.

  “I’ll go and see, sir.”

  He also vanished out the door that yawned like a portal to freedom.

  Then a different man in uniform came in. “Mr Wilson, come with me please.”

  “Are you taking me to my assistant?”

  “Follow me, please.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Out.”

  Stupid question, Mr Wilson. Out was a definite improvement on wait here, so I stumbled to my feet, intending to give him an earful as soon as I faced a part of him that wasn’t his uniformed back. Waiting in the foyer was a female ambulance officer with a first aid kit. Hers was the first smile that greeted me for hours. The anger seeped awa
y.

  “Are you in much pain, sir?”

  “Not too bad.” The pain had subsided into a dull throbbing, but the muscles in my hands were getting stiff. I was shivering, in need of infusion to counter the effects of my adaptation treatment. That medication and equipment was in my hotel room.

  I glanced into the hall through the open doors, but saw no sign of Nicha, my guards or my feeder.

  She made me sit in the secretary’s chair and took the towel off my hands.

  One look. A grimace of her lips. “This will have to be treated, I’m afraid.”

  “I need to find my assistant.” Nicha had to be going crazy without me.

  Her face turned serious. “You need surgery to remove all the glass from your hands, sir.”

  “But my assistant . . .” And my feeder, and my guards . . . I glanced at my bloodied palms, repressing a shivering surge of nausea. She was right.

  I think she saw that realisation in my face. Her tone softened. “Come, sir. I’m sure your assistant is in safe hands. You should worry about yourself now. You’re injured and in shock.”

  She clipped her case shut and helped me up.

  The hall and the stairways crawled with servicemen, Nations of Earth, Special Services, National Guard and ordinary police, all of them bristling with guns. The two-storey-high space hummed with voices in Isla, as well as Gaelic, Friesian and Neo-germanic, an unintelligible mush of languages new and old.

  My guardian angel shouted, “Out of the way, out of the way. Ambulance personnel coming through.”

  Men in uniforms shuffled aside leaving some semblance of a path to the door, where an ambulance with flashing lights waited.

  Neither Nicha nor my security guards were within sight.

  2

  THE HOSPITAL. Harsh lights and clanging of metal and doors. The smell of antiseptic on the air. I sat shivering, my head reeling, bathed in the smell of my own sweat. It wafted from under my jacket every time I moved. I hated it, felt embarrassed about it. At gamra, being clean, well-dressed and presentable was important. Coldi had an acute sense of smell.

  The doctor didn’t seem to mind. He poked about in my palms for buried pieces of glass with a frightfully long pair of tweezers. Even though they had given me an anaesthetic, I could feel some weird sensation of movement bordering on pain. With my adaptation treatment, my body reacted differently to medicines and anaesthetic seemed to be one of those things. Increased metabolism, I guessed, since I was on an acclimatisation course for living in a hot climate.

  I told the doctor, but within a few lines of gruffly exchanged conversation, it became clear to me that he knew nothing about adaptation, and was convinced I ran a high fever. To top it off, his first language was Gaelic, and my New Colonist’s version of Isla confused him. In fact, I spoke a dialect referred to by linguists as Cosla, and though the two had started out as the same language, they were now drifting further and further apart. My command of Gaelic didn’t reach beyond asking directions in the street and half-understanding the answer. Worse, even—climatic adaptation was Coldi technology, and I doubted a lot of the terms had Isla translations.

  During the long periods of waiting between treatments, I fumbled with my comm unit to get Nicha, or help from a gamra doctor at the Exchange who could explain in medical terms that increased body temperature was the whole point of adaptation, and that a yellowish skin taint came with my skin’s increased resistance to ultra-violet light.

  My comm unit wouldn’t work. There was no reception in the emergency room. Then the charge ran out.

  I was totally buggered, at the mercy of the system. No, sir, you can’t go. The doctor needs to see you again. For fuck’s sake! If only I had my feeder. What was happening to Nicha?

  After the last doctor had looked at my hands, the last nurse had fiddled with my bandage and had given the last bit of advice and told me when to come back for a check-up, an appointment which I told them I couldn’t keep, I was finally allowed to leave. My left hand resembled a mitten and they’d taped together the three middle fingers on my right hand, leaving me two thumbs and a pinky to deal with life. Wonderful.

  By now, I was swaying on my feet and as I stood alone in the lift while it rumbled its way to the ground floor, I thought I was going to be sick. I leaned my forehead against the cool metal, swallowing bile. If I spewed here, they’d take me back up and the circus would start again.

  The lift stopped and the doors opened. Yelling, shouting. Flashing cameras.

  I stared at the seething mass of people, the last shred of energy draining from me. Through there? They had to be fucking kidding.

  Two red-cheeked nurses and a lone security guard were pushing people back to the door.

  The poor man shouted, “Outside please, people, this is a hospital. Please go outside!”

  A woman behind the reception counter yelled into her headphones. “No, now! There’s about a hundred in here. Yes, they’re fucking journalists. Just send someone!”

  Then someone discovered me in the lift.“Mr Wilson!”

  Hundreds of lenses pointed my way.

  “Mr Wilson!”

  I jabbed at a random button with my left thumb, but the first of the news hawks were already at the lift, a man shoving his foot in front of the sensor light that stopped the doors shutting.

  The questions flew like rotten eggs.

  “Mr Wilson, can you tell us what happened?”

  “How is President Sirkonen?”

  “Mr Wilson, can you give us the Union’s position on this attack?”

  “Mr Wilson, are you still going to the Union?”

  I stopped, blinking at the sea of live cameras.

  “Why on Earth would I not be going?”

  The crowd hushed. All those reporters sank into an expectant, tense silence, broken only by the sounds of anxious breathing, and occasional beeping equipment.

  A woman said, “I presume you have heard it’s a Union attack?”

  “Is it . . .” My heart did a violent jump.

  Shit.

  The wavering image, the red aura.

  Could it be. . . ? I didn’t know any technology that had those effects, but did that mean it didn’t exist? Shit, shit, double shit. Some of the non-cooperative actions by Nations of Earth guards started to make sense. I was a gamra employee; they didn’t know where my loyalties lay.

  I tried to find the asker of the question in the mass. “Um—Madam?”

  A woman wriggled forward, meeting my eyes.

  “Melissa Hayworth, Flash Newspoint.”

  About my age, short brown hair and a sharp nose. Fierce brown eyes. Just as fierce as her gutter-press employer.

  She asked again, “Does this mean you’re withdrawing from your position?”

  A moment silence. What to say? My stomach was playing up again.

  “Ms Hayworth, for all I know, having sat in the president’s office and watched the investigators turn over every piece of debris, no one has drawn a conclusion about the perpetrators. I am sure we will hear about this from the police in due course, and before that time, I will refrain from speculating.”

  I looked straight into the camera attachment on her shoulder. Sophisticated equipment, that. Had I been much younger and not feeling like shit, I might have waved to my father in New Zealand. This was beamed live all over the world.

  “I’m asking you the question: are you still going?”

  “Of course. For one, I’d be upset at having studied for nothing for eight years.”

  It was a lame attempt at lightheartedness, but a few people laughed.

  “Mr Wilson, what do you think will be the outcome of your tenure?” asked a different journalist at the front of the crowd. She carried two digi-cameras and an electronic notebook with the stylus dangling on a string. A conservative news service, that one.

  “I believe that my candidature is vitally important, especially in times when many factors challenge the relationship between Nations of Earth and the entities
of gamra. It is my task to keep this relationship alive and to facilitate dialogue.”

  “The relationship has just been damaged,” Melissa Hayworth broke in again. “Or should I say: has been damaged further? For all we know, no satisfactory answer has been provided by the Union as to what happened to your predecessor. Someone makes a hypothesis—”

  I opened my mouth—

  “Yes, I know it’s only fictional, a harmless movie, but that is not how the Union will be viewing it, is it? They’ll be saying that we accuse them of killing Kershaw. You know they have funny ideas about fiction, and about justice.”

  She was right of sorts, on both counts. The only gamra species present in any kind of numbers on Earth were the Coldi, and they didn’t “get” fiction and their justice involved power plays and calculated murder.

  “That’s why they tried to kill the president!” someone yelled at the back of the crowd. A few others supported him.

  My heart thudded. Oh damn, oh damn, this wasn’t going to end well.

  “That is wild speculation.” My voice barely rose over the shouts. Instead, I faced the camera attachment on Melissa Hayworth’s shoulder. “And may I add, too, that speculation ahead of the facts will only add fuel to the potential disagreement. I strongly advise calm on this subject until a police report becomes available.”

  I held some hope that the microphone would sift my voice from the racket. At the same time, I knew that denying an outrageous allegation was a lot less sensational than raising it, and that no matter who denied a gamra attack, some rumour would survive until the perpetrator was found, and perhaps even after that time.

  And if I knew what was good for me, I would shut up until I had some official information.

  “If you would please excuse me. I want to go to bed.” I stepped out of the lift, looking over the sea of heads and waiting for it to part. But my name clearly wasn’t Moses, and miracles were not going to happen for me.

  A male journalist asked, “Mr Wilson, just where do you stand?”

  And another, “Yes, you’re defending the Union. For what reason? Is there anything you know that we don’t?”