Ambassador 11: The Forgotten War

by Patty Jansen

  I stared into the depth. “But it’s an awfully long way down there.”

  “That doesn’t worry us.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The depth of the drop freaked me out.

  Ynggi repeated that it was no big deal, because they’d be careful and Pengali were good at climbing. And it was only a short distance. And was it really any different from climbing to balconies in Barresh?

  Even Reida could do it, they said.

  “I don’t usually mind heights,” I said. “But this is excessive.”

  “You don’t have to do any of the climbing,” Ynggi said. “You don’t need to worry about it.”

  Was I allowed to be worried on their behalf?

  We didn’t have another option.

  Before we did anything, we had to make sure that everyone was comfortable, fed and well-dressed.

  When Nicha, Evi and Telaris had gone shopping, they had bought several non-perishable food items. They now distributed those to other team members, who stuffed the snack bars and packets in their bags or jackets.

  In their minds, the group was already divided. Some supplies for me, Sheydu, Deyu, Reida, Ynggi and Evi who would go to look at the drone. The rest of the supplies for the others.

  We needed to re-pack the bags to contain everything each group needed, but also so we could easily carry all our things. This meant removing personal items from my bag and replacing them with various boxes and packets Sheydu gave me.

  Nothing that was explosive, she told me when I asked.

  I wasn’t sure whether to believe her. All that stuff was damn heavy.

  Since Nicha and Veyada were the most senior team members who would be in charge of the larger group, they needed to be given all the necessary information.

  Nicha booked accommodation for them in a town close to the base. Once we were out of the clutches of the police surveillance, they could make their own way there. Failing that, they could distract the surveillance from what we were doing.

  Sheydu and Isharu passed around several scripts for potential scenarios and what each group member would do and what events would trigger certain actions.

  Deyu was to be our communications person, and Anyu would be theirs.

  While all this was going on, we all took short breaks to sleep, although I had to admit I slept little when my turn came.

  Finally, we got the children out of bed just before dawn.

  They sat in a tidy circle on the carpet, eating their portions without complaining. They were silent, tired probably, but I’d started to notice this odd behaviour in Coldi children. I wondered if they had an instinct that fired when they were in a stressful situation. They faded into the background, did what adults told them without question, and listened. I’d never seen this type of behaviour before, and it had to be an instinct because I would never expect it from Ayshada. But there he was, obediently doing as he was told.

  We hadn’t told the kids anything about our plans, but they seemed to understand that this was serious.

  We gathered in our room, all dressed in warm, dark-coloured clothes.

  Sheydu once again shared the plan and reminded each person of their task.

  There was a tram line outside the building. It went to a terminal where one could hire driverless cars. We planned to take those.

  Typing the name of the military depot in a driverless vehicle’s destination menu would raise eyebrows, but the main road led not too far past it, and it went to the town where Nicha had booked the accommodation under his long-disused Earth identity that was no longer valid. But we’d worry about that once it came to paying the bill. In my experience, people cared much less about who you were when you presented them with money.

  While using this driverless vehicle, we would make it stop along the road, and our smaller team would get off and walk across the fields to the military depot.

  The major risk was getting out of this accommodation and out of the city unnoticed for long enough that we could sneak into the compound. Deyu and Reida had already done a lot of research about this locality.

  Ynggi and Jaki got ready. They took off most of their clothes, because apparently, one couldn’t climb while fully dressed. I made sure that they bundled their clothes in a pack on their backs. Then they went out over the balcony. Ynggi climbed over the edge and shuffled the short distance along the ledge to the next balcony. I was glad when he was over the railing. It was a very long drop down there.

  He then caught the rope that Jaki threw him, and Jaki climbed over as well.

  Then Jaki threw the end of the rope back so Reida could tie it on our balcony.

  Reida climbed onto the railing. He hesitated ever so slightly, but let himself over the edge and shimmied along the two ropes.

  He made it to the balcony, and climbed over, and then opened the balcony door to the room next to ours.

  They went inside. A bit later, the lock to the connecting door clicked, and the door opened.

  As quietly as we could, we carried everything across into that room.

  The weapons were out, carried in Sheydu’s, Deyu’s and Telaris’ arm brackets.

  Sheydu and Deyu moved to the door. Telaris and Evi were behind them. They opened the door and looked into the corridor.

  “The exit to the stairs is right here,” Deyu said.

  Ynggi nodded, a satisfied look on his face.

  “Is it open?” I asked.

  She went outside and tested the door handle. “It is.”

  It would be silly for an emergency exit not to be open, but stranger things had happened.

  Since we were now out of view of the “hotel employees” who still occupied the laundry room by the sound of their voices, we could move without being seen, as long as we were quiet.

  Sheydu held open the door to the room and Deyu held open the door to the stairwell and we all walked through as quietly as we could. Deyu shut the door behind us without making a noise.

  It was a long way down the stairs. We counted down the numbers painted on the wall next to the doors on each landing.

  On the ground floor, Deyu opened the door a fraction to peek out and shut it again almost immediately.

  “There are people out there,” she said.

  So we went down one extra floor and the end of the staircase.

  The door there came out in a concrete-lined corridor with doors at regular intervals. It led to a foyer for the service lift and next to that, an underground car park.

  The rows of vehicles that stood there all carried the hotel’s logo on the doors. The only vehicle that didn’t belong to the hotel, a panel van, was double-parked in front of the lift entrance. The back door stood open.

  Racks with tools lined the sides of the back compartment. Cardboard boxes were stacked on the floor.

  It had been our plan to walk to the driverless vehicle terminal, but it would be better to use this van.

  Reida ran across the underground space to open the gate that closed the car park off from the street.

  We all piled into the van. I offered to drive it, but was told that Telaris would do that, because he knew how, and Deyu climbed into the seat next to him with the map. The rest of us, including the children, had to go in the back. We installed the children on a row of boxes behind the driver’s seat. Nicha sat on his knees looking over Telaris’ shoulder. Both he and Telaris were lapsed drivers. I hoped that between the two of them they could sort it out.

  I understood why Sheydu didn’t want me at the front. I was too visible, too recognisable.

  But it was very cramped in the back compartment.

  I ended up sitting on a box with Pykka on my lap. He was hanging onto his bag of goodies for dear life. As far as I knew, the bag contained sweets and energy bars, his woolly hat and mouse ears, and that blasted container with soap. I better make sure that didn’t burst, or we’d have no end of troub
le.

  The back door only just closed with all of us inside. I wondered where Reida was going to sit.

  The van started moving.

  From my position, I could only see out a little window at the back.

  The van slowed down. The front passenger door opened and Reida jumped in next to Deyu. We took off even before he’d shut the door.

  We turned into the street.

  It was very early in the morning. The road was not busy, but not deserted either.

  We went for a few blocks before we had to wait for a traffic light. Isharu sat next to the window with her reader. In between her and Anyu, I could see her screen. It showed a scan of of the vehicles behind us, light-coloured patches on an IR screen.

  Three of the vehicles were marked with a red dot.

  “Are those following us?” I asked.

  Anyu said, “We need to get rid of them before we can make our way out of the city.”

  “Go around the block,” Sheydu instructed Telaris.

  He did.

  The vehicles still came around the corner. One peeled off into a side street. Two stayed behind us. We went around again, over a different route that went past a road that was closed off because of “emergency operations”, an area where buildings had been damaged by the attack.

  Several bored officers hung around the barricades, turning their heads as we came past. Did they know who was in the vehicles following us?

  “Go a different way next time,” I said.

  Deyu scrolled over the map. “There are patrols in many places.”

  “That will be because of the attacks. They’re not looking for us,” I said. I hoped that was the case.

  Deyu found a route for us to avoid the roadblocks and guards. But the three vehicles were still following us. It was now also fast getting busier as people came out, couriers came to work and deliveries started.

  The day promised to be grey and misty, the latter a result of the fires. The scent still hung in the air.

  Telaris steered the truck over the route that Deyu gave him. We passed the driverless vehicle terminal where we had planned to go. We’d already be on our way if it wasn’t for these vehicles following us.

  Damn, we needed to get rid of them if we still wanted to go to the military depot today. It was still a distance away.

  But how could we get rid of them?

  Create a chaos that closed the street and gave us time to swap vehicles and get away.

  How?

  I looked around the racks that lined the sides of the cabin. Surely, there had to be something we could use to create a disturbance?

  “What are you doing?” Thayu asked. She stood next to me, one hand holding the shelving, the other holding Emi’s shoulder while Emi sat next to Ileyu on Mereeni’s lap.

  “We need to throw something out the back that disrupts the traffic.”

  I studied the boxes in the racks.

  Nails were good, but I could find only nuts and bolts. Those were not sharp enough to puncture tyres and stop traffic.

  There was a packet with rolls of tape. Lengths of pipe, a knee-high machine with a long hose attached.

  The owner of this van must be a plumber.

  Behind me was another rack full of bits and pieces, pipe elbows, fasteners, bottles of glue. There were also two tall gas bottles strapped into a rack against the wall.

  One said O2 on the surface facing us.

  Pressurised oxygen, huh?

  A hose with a nozzle was attached to the top of the bottle. I reached over and turned the valve next to it. Gas hissed out the end of the hose.

  Hmm. I might just have an idea.

  I picked up Pykka and put him on Mereeni’s lap with Emi and Ileyu. Then I opened Pykka’s bag. I took out the bag of bubble soap. It was still attached to the empty mustard bottle. I pulled it off, opened a roll of tape and ripped off a decent length.

  I taped the end of the bubble-blowing mouthpiece to the hose that came out of the oxygen bottle.

  I turned the valve a fraction.

  A burst of bubbles filled the cabin.

  Telaris shouted, “Hey, stop that kid. I can’t see.”

  He batted away bubbles with one hand. They stuck to his hair and his clothes and the inside of the window. Deyu scrambled to remove them.

  I removed the tank from its bracket and lugged it across the cabin to the back door. The thing was damned heavy and awkward to manoeuvre in the crowded cabin.

  “Tell me where the following vehicles are,” I said to Anyu when I got to where she was sitting near the back door.

  She showed me her screen. Two were behind us, and one was waiting in a side street ahead. I looked out the little window, but couldn’t see anything unusual. I presumed Anyu had figured out which cars they were, but I wasn’t going to waste her time by asking.

  “Tell me when all three are behind us.”

  We passed the side street, and according to the screen, the third vehicle came out. A grey van, I thought.

  I held onto the contraption with the oxygen bottle. The traffic wasn’t moving fast enough for my liking. Once I set this thing off, we needed to get away in a hurry.

  A few blocks later, we ended up first in line at a traffic light.

  “When it’s our turn, I want you to go fast,” I said to Telaris.

  I waited, one hand on the knob that opened the back door of the cabin, the other on my contraption.

  And waited.

  The light turned.

  The van shot forward.

  I opened the back door and turned the valve at the top of the bottle. A burst of bubbles blew into the cabin.

  Crap.

  They stuck to my face and jacket and my hair, and got into my eyes. The soap stung.

  Crap.

  The truck swerved. I swayed. I would have fallen out had Anyu not held onto me.

  My eyes were full of soap. A stream of bubbles flowed out of the tank, most of them leaving the cabin through the open door which clanged into the side of the truck.

  Through watery eyes, I could see that the other vehicles were behind us.

  A decent space opened up between us and the next vehicle.

  It was now or never.

  I opened the valve fully and flung the contraption out the door.

  The tank bounced on the paving, spewing a massive cloud of bubbles. A car crashed into the bottle and a second car crashed into that car.

  Several vehicles tried to go around, but a light had just turned in the other direction and traffic from the opposite lanes plunged into the bubble cloud.

  Bubbles stuck to their windscreens. Drivers couldn’t see where they were going.

  The last I saw of the chaos before we turned the corner was someone on the road trying to direct the vehicles to stop.

  I shut the back door to the cabin.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  We kept going.

  Pykka cried big tears over the loss of his bubble machine.

  “I’ll get you a new one,” I said, knowing I’d regret this, and that Eirani in Barresh would have my hide, but the poor kid deserved some credit for having given me this idea, even if I’d regret it, too, over a death by ten million bubbles.

  Two blocks later, we arrived at the driverless vehicle terminal again. Telaris pulled the van off the road, straight onto the footpath.

  We got out, closed the doors and walked away as if nothing had happened. Just some maintenance being done at the terminal, right?

  A few people gave us strange looks, but that was all.

  There was no driverless vehicle big enough to fit all of us, so we divided our group into three parts, one with me, Evi, Sheydu, Reida, Ynggi and Deyu, the party who were going to break into the depot, one with Nicha, Mereeni, Telaris, Jaki and Veyada and all the children, and one smaller group consisting of Isharu and Anyu and Thayu wh
ich would shadow us, and which would include all our heavy gear that we didn’t need or couldn’t carry. I suspected that those people would talk to our mysterious military followers. I also thought that including Thayu in that party was significant. I would have thought she would have preferred to stay with Emi, but as I already suspected, there were other forces at work. Asto didn’t take kindly to being accused of things it hadn’t done.

  On this part of the trip, Ezhya was looking over my shoulder.

  We watched Nicha and Mereeni and the children go off. Thayu waved to Emi, who sat on Mereeni’s lap.

  Then we split up over the other two vehicles.

  Isharu told us to go first. Were they waiting for additional operatives whom I wasn’t supposed to see? If so, they’d just given away that these people would join them soon.

  I met Thayu’s eyes.

  I thought she knew that I knew. She would also know that I didn’t agree with the presence of Asto military on Earth. But they were there. They’d been present since we’d walked off the suborbital in Los Angeles, maybe even before.

  We climbed into our vehicle, a bubble-shaped contraption with benches along the sides. I sat next to Reida, who operated the screen like a pro, and selected the destination as the town near the depot.

  Where did my team find the time to study how to use all these things?

  The menu warned us that the destination lay outside the vehicle’s operating capacity.

  “Does that mean that the kids can’t reach the accommodation?” I asked.

  “No, look, it’s telling me to go to a different terminal. Nicha will follow those instructions. We can’t.”

  “But we’ll go out of range.”

  “We should be able to get close enough that we can walk.”

  At any rate, we needed to get out of here, because the bubble mess was only going to distract the local authorities for a limited time and it was already mid-morning. It would take us at least until midday to reach the destination, then maybe we needed extra time to walk and study the depot’s perimeter fence.