by Patty Jansen
“So being a member is actually less useful?”
“Right now, it is. Until the president asks for help, and gamra can delegate Asto to provide that help.”
“Has anyone else made a statement? Nations of Earth? Other countries? Has Dekker said anything? Has he asked for help?”
“Not that we know.”
“What about the Exchange?”
“We’ve had little useful communication out of the Exchange for days.”
Crap. Oh, crap.
A lot was starting to make sense.
I even understood why we had been attacked by the townsfolk. Because every local knew that we were at the old factory, we were seen to be part of the enemy, and we were “aliens”.
I hoped Junco and Sage had extricated themselves safely. They seemed decent men and had been blindsided by the events as much as I had.
In the very back of my mind, I was trying to push away thoughts about a very similar situation.
A large Aghyrian ship disrupting the Exchange, almost causing a conflict to tear through Asto society. Aghyrians would never fight. They recruited others to fight on their behalf.
Meanwhile, the discussion between the members of my team had shifted to feasible ways for us to get out of here and back to Athens. Contact with the Exchange had been sporadic since the start of the trip, and as things were looking now, all commercial air travel had been suspended.
They discussed whether we should call in some additional favours from Clay, Marisol and Vanessa, and ask them to fly unauthorised across the continent back to Athens.
But Sheydu said that we were likely to encounter hostile military action because the military was on high alert and could not be trusted to act on messages informing them that an unknown craft of Asto make was going to fly across the country in the same way the Exchange notified other authorities if this was the case. We’d have to fly across America Free State and either Dixie Republic or Prairie and Atlantia and none of those countries were friendly to us, or had agreements with the Exchange.
None of the senior members of my team were keen to take the risk. Not Sheydu, or Isharu or Anyu.
Nicha asked if we could ask for assistance from the Asto military, but also agreed with Sheydu that it that would not be a good look.
According to Isharu, the Exchange could attempt to sneak in a craft over the Pacific Ocean if we could reach a place on the coast.
From where we sat in the living room in the house on the hill, I had a feeling that one might be able to see the ocean on a clear day. It wouldn’t be far to travel. I was sure we could do that.
In that case, it might be possible to drop in on my father and Erith to see if they were all right. I’d just have to install the rest of the team in a hotel nearby. I could do that, too.
One thing we couldn’t do was to stay here to ride out the crisis. No one knew how long this was going to take.
There was nothing we could do from here.
I wanted to get back to safe territory for the sake of the safety of the children with us. I could already hear complaints from Larrana and Nalya’s families when they heard of the risks I’d subjected their sons to. Never mind that Larrana’s family had most heavily pushed for the trip. When things went wrong, it would be my fault.
But a rebellious part in my mind wanted to do more.
I’d been through this rubbish before. When I started in Barresh, President Sirkonen had been murdered in similar circumstances: through means that didn’t look familiar, and therefore were decreed “alien” and by extension, gamra should be blamed. Nations of Earth would have successfully blamed gamra had I not objected to that conclusion, even if I had less evidence back then than I did now.
I did not accept Celia Braddock’s conclusions. Moreover, I wanted to prove that she was wrong. Gamra was not responsible. We needed to find out who were. And sneaking out of the country back to the Exchange did nothing to further that aim.
Chapter Twenty
My team had concluded their deliberations and were now looking at me, waiting to decide on the choices they had outlined. Were we going to wait for assistance from the Exchange, ask the Asto military to rescue us, or try to make an escape via the coast?
But I had a different proposal to put to them.
Normally, we would have a team meeting in the hub in our apartment in Barresh, or if we were somewhere else, in the accommodation’s bathroom, because if the accommodation was bugged, bathrooms were echoey and that messed with the quality of the recording.
I wasn’t sure if we should include the locals in our planning. The fewer people knew about our plans, the better. But they might feel offended if we left them out, and I had no reason to distrust any of them. So my team gathered around me on the couches and the floor under the curious gazes of the others.
I began, “You were just looking at the images of the piece Celia Braddock said they found and claimed to have been responsible for the attacks. What conclusions do you draw from it?”
There were some frowns.
“We just discussed that,” Deyu said. She sounded puzzled.
“No, we discussed what we know for certain. I want you to speculate about what the concerned parties are going to do about it.”
“There is going to be trouble,” Telaris said.
“That goes without saying. When Celia Braddock accuses gamra, what is Nations of Earth going to do?”
Deyu’s eyes widened.
She pulled out her reader, opened an empty page and drew a circle in the middle. I was too far away from her to see what she wrote in the middle, but other members of my team now understood what this was about.
A doodle. Organising our thoughts until our best avenue forward became obvious.
“This is us,” she said, pointing at the circle.
“Do you mean us, our association and people in the house, or do you mean us as gamra people? Or us as people who have been affected by the attacks?”
She formed an O with her lips.
She drew two more circles close to the first one, one being gamra and one Nations of Earth.
I asked, “Does Celia Braddock need a circle?”
Deyu drew another circle, close to the edge of the page.
“Why do you draw it all the way over there?” I asked.
“They’re not related to us and are not sympathetic to us.”
“True, but whichever organisation is behind these attacks is even less sympathetic.”
She rubbed out the circle and drew it closer to ours.
“Who do you think is behind the attacks?” I continued.
“Aghyrians?” she said.
“The Pretoria Cartel,” Evi said, his voice dark. “They didn’t like losing the election and now they’re trying to turn opinion against gamra to stop the joining process at the last moment.”
“I don’t know. They could have had many opportunities to do this before now, and much easier methods of doing it. We’ve been following this unknown approaching object in the solar system for over a year. I’ve spoken to Minke Kluysters about it. He says the Pretoria Cartel or Tamer Collective knows nothing about it. I am inclined to believe him.”
Not everyone in my team believed him, and, in my case, the operative word in that sentence was “inclined”. I was happy to change my mind at any time.
“Then Aghyrians?” Deyu said again.
“Probably. Or some group related to Aghyrians or related to the Cartel but not officially affiliated with them or sanctioned by them.”
Reida frowned at me with a did you just muddy your own argument? look on his face.
Deyu was busily drawing on the reader with dotted lines and questions. She also drew in other circles. I wasn’t sure what they represented.
Sheydu snorted. “Who these people are is not our immediate concern. The local authorities will sort this out. It’s our concern to get
out safely, especially with the youngsters in our care.”
“But it is our concern. Nations of Earth signed to join gamra and we have to continue to act like that will happen, regardless of current developments with Simon Dekker. Under that contract, the agreement gamra signed with Nations of Earth, we are obliged to help them, if the source of a conflict originates off-world. And Governor Braddock clearly suggested that it was. Not only that, getting out of here is related to being able to determine the origin of the attacks. If people in this part of the world think we, gamra, are responsible, we’ll have trouble getting out.”
Anyu said, “Not if our sources have anything to do with it.”
“I object to involving the Asto military unless we have no other option. Right now, we do have another option. We even have an option to find out about the governor’s claim, because we’re here, and because we know she has this fragment of the projectile that they managed to bring down.”
“They should pass the images to Nations of Earth and Amarru,” Sheydu said.
“Yes, but do you think anyone around here is going to give Amarru access to the information collected about this thing? Where it was brought down, how it was brought down, what they learned from it other than that their conclusion is that gamra was involved?”
“But we’re not involved. Amarru will be able to confirm that.”
“Amarru won’t get the chance. Because these people have already decided it was done by gamra, never mind that there are many entities within gamra and if, for example, this is an Aghyrian thing, it’s in the interest of all of us to know, especially for Nations of Earth, because we have the means to find out who within the Aghyrians or Tamer Collective is responsible. To broadly blame gamra is as ignorant as it is stupid. Gamra doesn’t own equipment, doesn’t have armies. Therefore, this cannot be gamra technology.”
“We can’t be entirely certain because the image quality is not very good,” Isharu said.
“Yes,” Sheydu said. I wasn’t sure which part she intended to agree with. Then she added, “That’s what the Exchange is for: communicate with the locals.”
I continued, “They’re not communicating very well at the moment. The president is ignoring me and Amarru. Amarru is too polite to tell me so, but I know it to be true.”
Most of the members of my team and the others in the room gave me puzzled looks, but Thayu stared at me. She had seen this part of me before, and she knew what was coming.
“No,” I said, and the members of my team, and the local Coldi, fell into silence. The security team stopped discussing security things, and everyone looked up to listen to me. I still found this a little embarrassing, because they had vastly more knowledge about many of these operational things than I did.
I continued, “As far as I can see, there is only one thing we can do.”
After a further silence, I said, “The problem is that they think gamra means off-world. But gamra doesn’t have distinctive technology. Its members do. And the non-members as well. This thing could be Aghyrian, it could be Tamerian, it could be something else altogether. But it’s not Asto technology and has nothing to do with gamra. I think the best way of proving the truth, now that we are here on this continent, is to investigate this fragment. They should let us defend the accusations. Or at least let us look at this fragment, so we can analyse where we think it comes from. I don’t hear any other reports of people having captured any of this technology elsewhere in the world.”
“That’s because this supposedly captured technology is staged,” Nicha said. “I suspect they cobbled this together so they can blame us. They have a history of doing that sort of thing.”
Sadly, this was also true.
“That could be true, but we won’t know until we see this fragment,” I said. “That’s what we should do: demand to see it while we’re here. No doubt they would prefer to kick us out of the country so that their theories can go unchallenged. Haven’t you noticed how well the theory that gamra or some sort of aliens are responsible suits the local government’s politics?”
It actually hurt me to say that word, aliens. I’d almost forgotten those derogatory terms that had marked my youth. Chans, ethies, aliens. They belonged to a different era.
“So what would you do?” Nicha asked. “We can’t just walk up to them and demand to see this thing they shot down.”
Clay said, “Yes. This piece of evidence will be held under tight security. You can’t just barge in and look at it. These people are paranoid about their safety. Many years of conflict have scarred them deeply.”
“I’m not sure if I’d want to bother with asking them,” I said. “They’ll never show us if we make a request. They’ll shadow us and tell us to jump bureaucratic hurdles designed to keep us away.”
Sheydu snorted. “Well, yeah. We’re deep in hostile territory. Their armed forces are plentiful and make up for their technological deficiencies with their numbers and enthusiasm and brute force. We have children with us, whose parents will be seriously displeased if something happens to them. We’re no longer nimble and invisible. I’m not in favour of splitting the team up again.”
I chuckled. “Is this really Sheydu, telling me to give up?”
“I’m just warning you that the usual parameters for our team don’t apply.”
“Then I’m asking you to change our parameters to accommodate the plan. This is our story: we got marooned in the middle of an attack. Commercial travel has stopped and we’re trying to get home. We’d be excused for attempting to travel overland to the Atlantic coast because this brings us closer to where we want to go. All of us will travel together. When we reach our goal, we might split up briefly, where a part of the team conducts the covert operation. We need to know how to make this travel happen, and we need to know where the governor keeps this piece of metal.”
“That’s likely to be on a military base,” said Clay, his eyes wide.
“How can we find out where it is?” I asked, looking at him.
His mouth opened further.
“It’s easy,” Thayu said, “We ask my father. The governor gave her talk outside. The fragment was outside. They’ll have satellite imagery of how it was brought to where we saw it, and then all we need to do is track the vehicles back to their origin.”
She looked motherly, with Emi on her lap, but I had never seen a more dangerous version of Thayu.
“All right, I’ll authorise that particular use of the Asto military. Find out. Then we’ll find some way to get in and out of wherever this fragment is held. A small team will go, while the others stay in a safe location. We make sure that we have a means of escape lined up, either through Amarru or the register or a private transport company. We would prefer air travel, but would settle for travel across the ocean, maybe for a short distance just to get across the border. Do you think you could do that?” I looked at Sheydu.
“Hmmm,” Sheydu said. “We could do that.”
“Just make sure we don’t have to travel on water,” Anyu said.
“Yes,” Isharu said, from the depth of her heart.
It was settled.
The locals were giving me Is this guy for real? stares. One of the military people in the corner gave me a small nod.
Sheydu rose and walked to the door, presumably to start preparations. On the way out, she turned to Clay, pointed at him and said, “And none of you heard this conversation.”
Chapter Twenty-One
There were a lot of preparations to be made.
Clay and Marisol offered to book ahead as many parts of the journey as possible. They had contacts in several places. They took me to the bottom floor of the house where room after room contained supplies: clothing, cooking gear, camping gear, stoves. I objected to taking too many things. We might not be able to return them.
“This material is here precisely for this reason,” Clay said. “It’s not ours, but it’s here to dis
tribute to people who need to travel inland and may have to avoid cities and towns.”
He told me to make sure that Anyu and Reida came down to collect electronic gear that was better adapted to local systems.
Why did I have the feeling that the Exchange paid for this stash of stuff? Why did it make me feel uncomfortable to think that this was a safe haven for spies and that the presence of an association of Asto military officers was no coincidence?
We put the children to bed.
Nalya asked what was going on and what we were doing tomorrow.
Like this, with the light coming from the side, he looked a lot like Thayu. I’d found a lot of her quiet and resilient attitude in him.
Admittedly, I’d worried about having him along. The human part of me had trouble accepting that a family would send a child with someone who had murdered the child’s uncle, even if it had been self-defense. But apparently not. Nalya’s uncle, Taysha Palayi, had been killed in the pursuit of power, and that was acceptable, honourable even.
Nalya had been quiet, polite and easy to get on with from the time I’d collected him and Larrana from the apartment of Delegate Ayanu with whom they’d travelled from Asto.
Larrana had been racing around the hall, but Nalya sat on a bench, studying. I asked him what he was doing, and he’d shown me his text. Damarcian agriculture. Did he choose to study that, I’d asked him, and he said no. It was because teachers were told by the Inner Circle to raise a generation of people who knew about growing things and restoring landscapes, so that’s what he did.
The maturity in this kid was quite something.
When he asked a serious question, I could not fob him off with a simple story. I sat on the edge of his bed, a narrow fold-out thing crammed in a small room at the back of the house. Larrana had the full-sized bed that stood in the room, and Ayshada slept on a mattress on the floor. Both of them were still in the bathroom with the Pengali kids. I could hear Ayshada’s voice through the closed door. He was arguing in Pengali.