by Patty Jansen
“Here is a mention of PanAf again,” Thayu said. She handed me the reader so that I could see what she was talking about. I flicked aside the frame that provided a Coldi version of the text. Those translations were often not the best.
The article said,
PanAf Secretary Lucius Brown stated that this was a cowardly attack and that the international community must stand together against this type of action. Mr Brown strongly denied that militant terror groups incorporated under the PanAf umbrella had carried out the attack.
“We vet all member organisations,” Mr Brown said. “Any that do not meet the standards cannot join.”
Yes, that was right. I had learned about that in the International Politics module I had taken at Mars University. Because parts of Africa were no longer under control of formal effective governments, PanAf included not only African states, but also major advocacy groups, like tribes that crossed borders and other ethnic groups. Some people at Nations of Earth—and especially people from non-African countries—said that this gave a voice to criminals, because some of those “advocacy groups” were rebel organisations, and the funding, ethics and legitimacy of those could be a bit grey, to say the least.
Most of the article was about Lucius Brown being on the defensive about these advocacy group members, but there were no real suggestions that any of those people had anything to do with the attack. I could understand why they were under such intense scrutiny. If anything, those were the people on the ground who would find Coldi money most beneficial. They would defend their income or supply of weapons. I was a major threat to it.
But yeah, this was really stabbing in the dark. So, no, I didn’t believe PanAf had anything to do with the attack, but some of the advocacy groups might.
“Maybe I should try to speak to Lucius Brown,” I said. I strongly suspected that this had been in the brief that had been blown up with the jet. “I’d like to know where he stands on these accusations and what he knows of involvement on off-Earth elements in Africa.”
I tried to remember where he lived. This was truly Danziger’s territory, because he had come to power through the ranks of the world’s aid organisations. I would have expected him to be best mates with people like Lucius Brown. And I felt out of my depth because I knew little about the man.
I took out my reader. Of Lucius Brown, it said,
President of PanAf, 2110 to current. Born in Kenya in 2055 at the height of the first wave of oil wars and educated in Western Europe and Egypt, he rose to prominence as a political figure during his student years in Cairo as a member of the Return The Power movement.
Those, as I remembered, were a series of incidents of social unrest orchestrated online where the disenfranchised citizens of poor countries protested against the influence of the large international corporations over their governments: they had bought the politicians, had taken over the nation’s debt or controlled the only source of income of those countries. Those countries rose or fell by the whims of a board of directors in another country.
After Lucius Brown went to university, he seemed certain to win an influential position. However, in his first year, both his parents died during the Nile Flu epidemic. The young Lucius Brown disappeared for a period of two years, and was rumoured to have spent the last year of this period with the Freedom Front.
This was the northern African rebel organisation that was formed out of militant interests from the desert tribes who had been displaced by the desertification of northern Africa. Homeless, violent, and full of very angry young men.
During that year, the Freedom Front was known for being highly organised, and carried out a number of successful attacks. Although Brown’s influence was never officially documented, it is widely believed that their success, and the Freedom Front’s subsequent absorption into the African Freedom Fighters at the time of Brown’s return to public life, is no coincidence.
The African Freedom Fighters, of course, were one of those semi-legitimate organisations that had a lot of influence on PanAf’s policies. They were not direct members, but their offshoot, the North African Alliance of Tribes, was.
Damn, I wished I had paid more attention in class about Earth political history. I’d grudgingly taken those classes at university. I remembered wondering why politics of Africa was of any importance to me, taking the classes on Mars, since colonial politics had nothing to do with Africa, because most of the continent was a basket case, right?
Well, I’d been a dumb, cocky, arrogant dick.
Everything was important. And sitting here in a car speeding away from a crime scene, not sure where we were going, all the things that I didn’t know and I’d thought were unimportant, local skirmishes, pressed on my mind like a heavy weight.
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit.
Danziger, Africa, Lucius Brown, rebels, offworld weaponry, potentially Coldi interests. It had all the makings of a disaster.
Thayu still listened to the little voice in her earpiece.
I mouthed, Are you talking to Amarru?
She gestured, Yes.
Where are we going?
She made a gesture that I hadn’t seen before and I wasn’t sure what it meant. I didn’t count myself an expert in signal code.
Nicha was talking to the driver in a low voice. We were now on the other side of town. No one had followed us yet and that could not be coincidence. It had to have something to do with Amarru. That woman knew everything.
Eventually, Thayu handed her earpiece to me. I affixed it to my ear. “Amarru?”
“I’m glad you’re unharmed.” Coldi women tended to have dark voices, but I always found her voice exceptionally warm, like a favourite auntie where you could always go for a hug and a pat on the shoulder. “I’m sorry that we didn’t inform you earlier. This situation developed too fast and caught us unawares.”
“Any idea who did this?”
“We can only speculate at this point in time. It’s probably someone who is keen to show displeasure about your involvement with Danziger’s mission to clear up the festering smuggling business.”
“How do you know about that?” It never ceased to amaze me what Amarru knew about what people said and did.
She didn’t answer the question. Maybe someone from Nations of Earth had spoken to her about the problem. Or maybe she had spoken to them. That was more likely, since I couldn’t see anyone from Nations of Earth acknowledging her.
Maybe Lucius Brown had spoken to her.
“Whatever this new development is,” she said, “we want it cleaned up, too. It looks bad for all of us.”
“Hang on, it wasn’t you who passed Nations of Earth that information and the weapon, was it?”
“Careful, Cory. This channel may not be secure. I’ll talk to you when you get here. Stay undercover. We’ll have to pretend that you were killed in the explosion.”
“But . . .” I felt sick. Well, at least now I knew where Flash Newspoint had drawn that conclusion form. This news would go all over the world. My father would think that I was dead, and wouldn’t even get a body to bury.
As I had suspected for a while now, the car took us to the train station. But rather than drop us off at the front of the building, we went around the back, where there was a loading dock for goods. It was now finally starting to get light, but clouds had rolled in, keeping the light level down.
When the car came into the dock, a man appeared from the building in the grey morning light. He had blond hair and a short beard, was dressed in dark clothing and wore a gun on his belt, a regular Asto guard-service charge weapon. That alone was strange, because he very obviously wasn’t Coldi.
He came up to the back door of the car and opened it for us. He exchanged some code with Nicha.
Thayu and Nicha got out. I followed. More code signals were exchanged. I wished I understood more of it. I wished I knew his name.
The man led us wordlessly into the building, a large shed where goods stood on pallets, ready to be loaded onto trains.
He took us past a couple of plain concrete train platforms with cranes and loading lifts. The rails between the platforms were empty.
At a third platform stood a closed carriage with the logo of a German transport company. He went to this carriage and heaved a door open. Nicha stepped in after him. I glanced aside at Thayu. We were going to ride in a goods carriage? I didn’t like this much, in addition to the fact that the man was an ordinary human and appeared to be well-versed in Coldi security sign language.
But Thayu’s face was unperturbed, and if both she and Nicha couldn’t see a reason to make a fuss then probably neither should I. After all what did I know?
The blond-haired man said, “Delegate, we apologise for the conditions, but your safety is of utmost concern.” His Coldi was perfect. He made a subservient Coldi greeting, turned around and retreated from the carriage.
Well, what the fuck?
CHAPTER 7
* * *
A LIGHT CAME ON inside the carriage and showed an awkwardly shaped but comfortable apartment. There was a little sitting room with a table and couch, two sets of bunk beds against the wall, a kitchenette and in the back, the door to what I presumed to be a small bathroom.
The blond man shut the back door behind us. Locks clicked. From the outside as well. I again checked with Thayu, but she seemed relaxed with this situation.
I still didn’t like it, but then again, I’d drifted in space in a tin can that was under control of other people, so I could do a tin can that was on the ground.
“That was Klaus Messner,” Thayu said.
“The Klaus Messner?”
“Is there more than one?”
“Well, no . . .” But it seemed overkill that such a top level spy for Asto would busy himself with this situation. Or—what did he know that we didn’t?
Klaus Messner was, of course, someone I had often considered a brother-in-arms, despite never having talked to him in person. Like me, he was usually considered a traitor, working for “the other side” by the virtue of having been raised off-world in a mixed family and being in a mixed relationship. I’d gone the diplomatic route; he’d specialised in intelligence.
I now wished I’d said more to him.
We inspected our quarters. The bunk beds were firm. The couch seated only two, but one person could sit on the bed. The kitchenette held such wonders as a filter machine for making coffee and manazhu. There was even a half-opened jar of the stuff that looked and smelled fresh. I busied myself with making drinks. It was none too warm in this container.
“What sort of contraption is this?” I asked. “Does Amarru have these stationed all over the rail network?”
“A field station,” Thayu said. “Klaus probably uses it a lot.”
“Didn’t he get his Earth designation revoked recently?” Nicha asked.
“Yeah. The case was really weak, though. As far as I understand, Danziger said, ‘I don’t like you,’ and just deleted his GER designation.” GER stood for Germany, as NZ stood for New Zealand on my ID.
Nicha said, “The case was a façade. He wasn’t even there to defend himself.”
“There was a lot more at stake than his designation, but I agree that it was not a blueprint for what you’d call a fair trial.” To be honest, the case had given me the shivers. Sure, he’d been caught having some documents he shouldn’t have had, but he was still legally a German citizen, and Germany had not been making a lot of noises that they didn’t want him anymore. I suspected they probably did want him, because there was a strong Coldi presence in some of the southern German cities.
The action to revoke his citizenship had been taken solely by Nations of Earth. They had always had the power to revoke someone’s nationality status, but had only started using it in seriousness recently. In the interest of public safety, they said. The fact that the harsher stance had happened at the time that Danziger took the lead was purely coincidence, of course, if the administrators had to be believed. If.
The percolator machine had produced a jug of dark green liquid. I took three cups from the cupboard and poured. Thayu took the steaming mug from me and clamped her hands around it. “I wonder if this place has a heater.”
Nicha came to get his cup. He wore a blanket wrapped around him. They both felt the cold weather a lot more than I did.
Thayu rummaged in the cupboards under the kitchen bench.
“Ah.” She found a heater in a cupboard. She unrolled the cord, dislodging several spiders as she did so.
The heater was an extremely simple device, with a cord and a glowing coil and a fan that blew hot air into the room.
“Wonder what century this thing dates from,” she said.
Nicha said, “It still works, so probably mid twentieth. They don’t make them like that anymore.”
A cloud of dust blew out when Thayu turned the machine on. “Urgh, it probably hasn’t been used for all that time either.”
But whatever the age of the device, and the smell of burned dust it issued, it worked and soon the little cabin was comfortably warm and even grew so warm that I had to take off my jacket. Nicha fell asleep on the bottom bunk.
I sat on the couch and read the morning’s news bulletins. There were a fair few articles about the explosion, most accompanied by an uneasy tone that seemed to hide the suspicion that extra-terrestrial interests were involved. An air of censorship hung over the tone of reporting. I checked if Flash Newspoint had any more news, because they were the network with the least scruples, but even they didn’t mention those interests. That was Danziger’s influence, clearly, or at least the influence of the men in grey suits behind Danziger. Because if you were in power, you could exert a degree of control on the media.
Thayu looked over my shoulder. She stood behind the couch in front of the heater.
“It’s a strange thing,” she said. “If they were people from PanAf, why would they have this attack in Rotterdam where everyone can see it? If we were going to Africa, why didn’t they wait until we got there?”
I spread my hands.
A loud clang made the carriage shudder.
Nicha woke up with a gasp.
Thayu motioned him to be quiet. A man walked past the side of the carriage while talking remotely to someone. There were more clangs.
Then the carriage started moving, with a small jerk. This was followed by a lot of rumbling and jiggling over tracks and switches, maybe a turntable as well, and then thumps as we were hooked up to a larger train. That train then sat somewhere on the rails for an hour or so, at the station probably. I could hear other trains pass at low speed and the occasional voice and crunching of footsteps on gravel.
I’d decided to have a nap and lay dozing on the bottom bunk of the second set of beds when we again jerked into motion, and kept moving at increasing speed. The train settled into a gentle rocking rhythm. The goods trains moved slower than the passenger trains, but would still take us to Athens within a day. It was dark and really warm in the cabin. Nicha had taken up position on the couch next to Thayu, both with their readers.
I spent some time working on material I was preparing for Ezhya, but I felt distracted and kept checking the news every five minutes. That led to more distraction, since I hadn’t read a lot of Earth news recently and I filled my quota of trivia about celebrities I didn’t know and royal families—yes, they still existed—I barely remembered.
We inspected the cupboards for food and found the cabin well-stocked with various food types which we he
ated up and ate while sitting on the couch and the bed.
I climbed into the bottom bed of the bunk furthest from the door. I didn’t know what the time was, but having been up most of the night, I was quite sleepy, and the stuffy warm air and the darkness inside the cabin didn’t help.
* * *
The next thing I knew, the train had stopped. It was now pitch dark in the cabin and so warm that the side I’d been sleeping on was all sweaty. I sat up. The air blowing out of the heater made my sweaty skin feel cold.
Thayu went, “Hmmm.” She turned on a small light that created a pool of gold on the couch, the table and surrounding floor. By its light, I could see her getting up off the couch and putting on her shoes. Her ponytail was all mussed up.
Nicha climbed down from the top bunk, muttering Coldi swear words.
I checked the time. It was almost six in the morning. Had we been asleep for that long?
People walked past the train, footsteps crunching on gravel. Locks clicked and someone opened the door at the front of our cabin. Through the open door I could see a few indistinct dark shapes silhouetted against the sky that was turning blue. I could see no buildings or lights. How long had we been in this tin can?
Someone out there carried a light, so that a second person could climb up the ladder. The silhouette was stocky. The person entered the cabin. “Ichumya ata.”
I recognised the voice as Amarru’s.
All three of us repeated the pledge of loyalty. It was that kind of occasion. She didn’t often venture outside the Exchange. It must be serious for her to meet us herself. We stood in the dark at the entrance to the carriage. Amarru’s hand was warm on my shoulder, but the air that came into the carriage had a strong bite to it.
“What’s going on?” Nicha asked, yawning. His breath steamed in the light.
“This is where you have to get off.”
We collected our things from the back of the carriage, put clothes and shoes back on, and followed her into the night. It was awkward to walk on the rails and gravel because it was still so dark on the ground that I couldn’t see where the sleepers were. I imagined that Thayu and Nicha saw even less. A single light produced a weak glow on the veranda of a rickety building at the deserted siding. The Milky Way above had faded to a few of the brightest stars.