by Patty Jansen
The passage ended in a closed door with a panel next to it on which a green light burned. I presumed this led to the cockpit.
We sat and strapped into the chairs. Judging by the expressions on Thayu’s and Nicha’s faces, they felt just as out-of-place as I did. This was not a place for me or any of my team. This was a place for top diplomats and movers and shakers at Nations of Earth. I wondered if it was Danziger’s private jet.
Some people clearly had far too much money.
Both Thayu and Nicha were looking around, dark eyes roving the ceiling—looking for bugs, of which I had no doubt there were plenty.
We did seem to have acquired a flight attendant. She came out of the kitchenette to ask if we wanted drinks. I asked for coffee—I was still trying to wake up—but Nicha and Thayu stuck with water. Before getting those drinks for us, the flight attendant pressed a button next to the door which set a mechanism in motion that pulled up the ladder and closed the door. Then, while the engine fired up, she brought our drinks, all smiles.
I spotted Thayu drop a little tablet in the water. It fizzed on the way down in a stream of yellowish bubbles. Some sort of red-coded supplement, likely with a high concentration of hydrofluoric acid—hence the bubbles? Something that was exceedingly poisonous to me for sure.
Nicha sat sideways on the couch, his eyes closed. Thayu was reading something. We didn’t speak much. The message was clear: this was not our territory and we didn’t know who would be listening.
Security-speak for this was “the weather forecast”, since the weather was considered one of the safest subjects.
The plane took off and levelled out above the moonlit landscape.
I looked out the window, seeing patches of light scroll past. Cities and towns asleep, while I was up here, recalled urgently to attend to some disaster.
As usual, my mind mulled over the possibilities.
I’d recently discovered that way back in the time of Mizha Palayi, some time not too long after 1975, Asto had made payments to Libya for the use of their land to build a desert colony.
At the time, the murder of one of Mizha’s seconds and the protracted subsequent troubles had left the whole of Asto’s society in danger of collapse, and a good section of the Palayi clan had been looking for a way to safety.
I wasn’t sure if the money was for a rental agreement or if land ownership had ever been transferred, but it had disturbed me. Ezhya had assured me that Asto had never considered the plan seriously, but the payment showed that it had been a good deal more serious than he made it out to be.
I’d learned that with Coldi, you needed to be careful with what they said about events in the past. They did not consider the past as important as most people on Earth did.
And now Danziger wanted to see me about this discovery, urgently, even? Had his main opponent in the election for the position of President of Nations of Earth gotten a whiff of the rumours surrounding the plan, and now wanted an explanation of what Libya had done with the money? That sounded like something Margarethe Ollund would do.
Last year, the murder of Sirkonen and subsequent stupidity by Danziger had almost brought the world to a war with Asto. I don’t think anyone appreciated how close Asto had been to using military action to free their citizens trapped on Earth. Nations of Earth would have considered that an act of war and the situation would have spiralled out of control from there.
I knew little about Asto’s armed forces. Heck, few people did, even Thayu and Nicha, and Thayu had worked for them, and their father was some kind of admiral. But what I knew about Asto’s army was enough to realise that you did not, ever, want to provoke them.
* * *
It was still dark when the jet touched down on the runway in Rotterdam, and lights blazed in all the airport buildings. Smaller planes were waiting on the tarmac to take off, mostly private craft. It would be a couple of hours before daylight came and the big solar suborbitals could take off.
Another car waited for us outside the Members’ Lounge entrance. It was a Nations of Earth service vehicle with a uniformed driver, who took our bags with barely a word spoken. The air was so cold that our breath steamed. Thayu clamped her arms around herself.
The car took us over the dyke that connected the airport to the rest of the city. Moonlight glittered on the water on both sides.
The streets were still quiet. The occasional tram trundled in the other direction, with the bleary light in the cabins wasted, but for the occasional passenger coming back from a night shift or going to work at this ungodly hour.
We arrived at the Nations of Earth complex, where the gates were closed, but the guards let us through with a simple wave. The only signs of life in the broad, tree-lined avenues were the guards that stood on the corners and a pair of squirrels chasing each other across the road in the headlights of the car. They brought a bout of laughter from Thayu who had spent many hours at my father’s veranda feeding oranges to possums, and didn’t want to believe him when he said that most people in New Zealand hated them because they were introduced pests.
She sat as a warm presence next to me, comforting in this very cold and bleary night.
We didn’t stop in front of the building that held the president’s office as I had expected, but turned into an alley that ran down the side. It gave access to an underground parking area, closed off by a steel gate that opened at the driver’s command and rolled shut as soon as we had gone inside.
The car stopped in an underground car park in front of a set of double steel doors, gleaming, threatening and forbidding.
A reception committee of armed guards waited for us. The highest-ranking officer, with the emblem of the Special Services on his chest, came to me.
“Mr Wilson, come with me. The president’s aide has been notified that you’ve arrived.”
Another of the guards said, “Uh, sir, what about . . .”
He glanced at Thayu and Nicha.
I said through clenched teeth, “They’re with me.” Seriously, when was this nonsense going to stop?
“We need to check with our supervisor.”
“They come with me. I am the gamra delegate and these are my zhaymas. They will come with me to the door of the meeting room. It’s gamra protocol that they come inside with me, but we accept that the president may wish differently.”
“Um, yes sir. I have to check, sir.”
After a brief exchange of words with a supervisor, Thayu and Nicha were allowed in, to the door of the meeting room only. The guard clearly didn’t like it.
The steel doors slid aside and let us into a dark corridor. I guessed this was the president’s private entrance into the building, but why did we need to come in here?
I expected to be taken upstairs in the lift, but the Special Services officer took me along the corridor that was only illuminated by lights in little alcoves in the walls. There were a few doors to the left and right, but they were all closed, with security locks on the doors.
I’d heard people speak of this place. It looked like this meeting was going to take place in the safety bunker that was built for wartime purposes.
What the hell were we doing here?
CHAPTER 4
* * *
TWO GUARDS TOOK US to the very end of the passage. It was a dank room, with minimal lighting, and the lush furniture did not dispel the feeling of darkness and disuse.
To my surprise, the man seated at the desk reading something on a screen was not the president, but Simon Dekker, aide to the Acting President Sigobert Danziger of Nations of Earth.
I’d met Dekker a few times and he always struck me as a perfect companion to Danziger: tall, thin, dark-skinned, perpetually dressed in grey, with a less well-developed sense of humour than a corpse.
His eyes met mine as I came in through the door. It was a cold, calculating look.
He pre-empted my question, Where is the president? by saying, “The president is indisposed.”
“He’s all right?” I felt compelled to ask, although I felt that if the president was not all right, everyone would have known already. The question of Danziger’s advanced age—he was seventy-four—was a hot topic in the election campaign and the faintest whiff of physical weakness would send the media into a he-won’t-last-the-term feeding frenzy.
“He’s in bed. Campaigning is a never-ending grind.” Said completely without humour.
I wasn’t sure what he was telling me with this little exchange of words. Was it: The president wants you to come urgently in the middle of the night, but it’s not important enough to see you himself? Or was he saying: The president doesn’t like you and is going to annoy you and let you wait until he gets up before he sees you?
Those were the games that Danziger played and, yes, Thayu and Nicha were right. He would never get away with this in Coldi society. Our feeders didn’t work in this bunker, but I didn’t need them to know what Thayu would be saying to me. That I was weak, that Danziger didn’t deserve my support, that I should tell him to get lost. Yes to all accounts, but there was that minor detail about my contract that had not expired yet. And I did feel weak. Like a jellyfish.
Dekker gestured me wordlessly to a chair, and I sat opposite him.
As soon as I sat down, he got up. He opened a cupboard behind the desk and took out a hessian bag the size of a decent bed pillow. By the way the muscles in his arm strained, it was quite heavy. He upended the bag and the content slid onto the table.
A gun.
More correctly, parts of a gun, made out of a light-coloured metal, with off-white ceramic trim. Dekker picked up a long piece—the barrel—slotted in the handgrip and attached a third piece that was—I thought—a sight and a control panel. A few spindly things went up on the top. I could only guess their function. The weapon looked impressive. The barrel gleamed, the handgrip looked new and solid. The whole contraption was a bit longer than his arm. I’d never seen anything like it before.
He lifted it and pointed it briefly at me. “How would you like to be at the wrong end of this thing, Mr Wilson?”
I looked at the discharge plate that would unleash a white-hot stream of plasma. “I guess that’s why you brought me here—you’re going to shoot me.” Oo-er. Interacting with Coldi people brought out my bluntness. But I seriously didn’t like to be woken up and flown through the night to face some humourless guy pointing a gun at my head.
He lowered the weapon. “Ha, ha, ha. The controls are disconnected.” I had no doubt that he pointed the gun at me because he disliked me and probably dreamed of pulling the trigger. In fact, disliking me would have to be a prerequisite to get a job working for Danziger.
He put the weapon on the desk and pushed it across to me. “Have a look at this baby, Mr Wilson.”
I picked up the gun, the metal cold in my hands. Oof—it was heavy.
He was right; the control panel was loose. It contained a few buttons and instructions in tiny letters, in Isla. Yet the main body of the gun was not a local product. Unless the Asto army had recently changed their models, this wasn’t one of theirs. Then what? Locally made according to an offworld blueprint? With the tiny strip of Hedron steel that ran down the side of the barrel, that was unlikely. Made off-world to order? That thought gave me the chills.
“What is this? Where did it come from?”
“You tell me, Mr Wilson. I was advised that you know all about these things.”
“These things” being gamra matters, administration and societal structures and customs, or politics. I was hardly a weapons expert. I turned the weapon over in my hands. “Can I show this to my zhaymas? They know a lot more about weapons than I do.”
He moved his chin up which I took as a yes, so I rose, and went to the door. Thayu and Nicha stood in the corridor playing a staring game with the two guards on either side of the meeting room.
“Thay’, Nich’, can you quickly take a look at this?”
I’d spoken Coldi, but it seemed that Nations of Earth guards guessed the gist of it, and because both Thayu and Nicha went inside the room, they both came as well.
Thayu took one look at the gun on the desk and sucked in a breath through lips forming an O. She lifted the gun and turned it over.
“What is it?” I asked her.
“It’s a type of plasma weapon. Very powerful. Most effective at distance. You can use it to do a lot of general damage to a building, or shoot down an aircraft at low altitude. Strangely enough, it’s not much good at killing people at short distance.”
“Does anyone own these legally?”
“Privately? No. You couldn’t buy this thing. My permit doesn’t even cover it. This is a military grade weapon, used by armies and militias. Not for use in civilian security. The plasma chamber is missing, though.”
Dekker had been looking at us with an interested but suspicious expression on his face.
“She says there is a part missing,” I translated for him.
“She’s right.” Maybe he’d left the plasma chamber off to test if we really knew what we were talking about.
“Where did you get it?”
“Before I tell you that, can you ask her where this type of weapon normally comes from?”
I was guessing he wanted Thayu out of the room as soon as possible. I translated his question.
Thayu said, “There are a few places where they use or make weapons like these. I would have to take it apart to know exactly where it was made. But Tamer or Indrahui is the most likely.”
“Then what the hell is it doing here?” With text in Isla, no less.
“These are often custom-made to order,” she said. “Not cheap.”
Damn. I was starting to get a very bad feeling about this. As far as I knew neither of those worlds had much of a presence on Earth. Either the weapons manufacturers on those words were seeing business opportunities, this was part of an offensive by parties wrong-footed in the debacle surrounding Sirkonen’s murder, or someone with a lot of money was getting involved in what had previously been the domain of poorly-organised militias. Or all of the above.
I translated for Dekker what Thayu had said, and then he put the gun back in the bag, looking pointedly at her.
This was as much as Dekker was going to share with Thayu and Nicha, so I made one of the security gestures I knew, the one that meant I’m fine. They left the room and the two guards followed them.
He waited until the door had shut with a click, the silence between us tense.
“This weapon, intact, was found in a container with similar merchandise in a crate in an airport hangar by an aid worker in a sea cargo terminal in Djibouti. The shipment was slated to go out to one of the refugee camps along the east coast of the Horn of Africa.”
Of course, Djibouti. That had been a trouble area for years, with massive numbers of environmental refugees who had nowhere to go.
“Can I take a picture of it?” I wanted to show this to Amarru.
“You can have it. We got a whole crate of the damn things. I guess the only good point about that is that those weapons won’t be used against us while they’re sitting in our storage. The bad point is that we don’t know how many more of these shipments there are and how they’re coming in.”
“I don’t think customs is going to be impressed if I try to bring a whopping great big gun in my luggage.”
He shrugged in a suit yourself way.
I put the gun in the middle of the table and took a couple of pictures of it from several angles, and several close-up
shots of different parts of it.
I asked, “Why Djibouti? And why does that have anything to do with the Saharan plan? Djibouti is not in the Sahara.”
“I was getting to that part next.” Dekker sounded prim. He had put his reader on the table and flicked through images until he found the one he needed, and turned the reader around to face me. His fingers were unusually thin and long.
“When we got sent this weapon, we poked around a bit in the area, and discovered this, across the border in Ethiopia, not terribly far from Djibouti.”
The screen displayed a satellite image showing a good chunk of the northeastern African coast. He zoomed in on the eastern tip, the bit where it looked like a chunk of Africa was about to break off.
He zoomed in and zoomed in, and different geological features flashed past: rocky outcrops, deep scars cut into the soil as if someone had taken to the planet with a knife. The land was red or various shades of pink, with barren hills and the multicoloured sores of hot springs and salt encrustations. I couldn’t discern much in the way of vegetation or habitation. The landscape looked barren and alien. If someone asked me to guess where this was, I might have guessed Beratha on Asto.
Then the view scrolled past a thin line that resolved into a dirt road. A blue-green area in the top of the image turned out to be a body water, quite shallow, with bands of white and yellow salt encrustations that edged the shore like lace.
“What’s the water?” I asked.
“That’s the Afar inland sea.”