by Patty Jansen
My vision wavered for a moment. I gasped, steadying myself on the seats on either side of me.
A voice in my head said, Leave the vehicle.
What? They were going to give me instructions up there, too?
For your own safety. Leave the vehicle now. A bunch of armed people are coming in your direction.
Thayu was already on her feet, walking to the back of the bus.
Evi said to the driver, “Can you open the door?”
“We’re not at the place yet.” This was the first word I’d heard the driver speak.
“What’s going on?” I asked Thayu.
“A militia road block.”
“Are they looking for us? Are they krayfish?”
From his seat, Nicha said, “Likely. We don’t want to find out. We don’t want any of them to register our presence here.”
Thayu pushed the rear window. In most buses, it came out easily, but not this one.
The driver said, “You want to leave? Wait, I’ll open the back do—”
With the butt of her gun, Thayu smashed in the rear window.
The driver protested. “Hey! Who’s going to pay for that?” He’d gotten out of his seat, but was being held back by Telaris.
A blast of hot air came in.
Thayu kicked the remaining glass out of the frame. Evi jumped through the hole onto the street. Nicha handed him the packs, then he more or less manhandled me out of the window and jumped down himself. Then Thayu. The driver tried to hold her back, but she simply pushed him aside. Telaris was the last to leave the bus. He handed the driver a small object—I suspected either a bundle of grubby bank notes or a credit chip, and vaulted through the opening.
A small crowd of people who had left their vehicles or pushed their bikes or carts closer to see what was going on had gathered around the bus.
“Follow me,” Evi said. He lifted his gun so that everyone could see it. Onlookers pushed out of his way. We followed him in single file through the traffic chaos. Around cars, behind trucks. Curious folk had gathered everywhere.
It was so hot that the heat radiated through the soles of my shoes. The light reflecting off car windows was so bright that it was hard to see where we were going.
I tried to look to the side to see if anyone was following us, but sweat was running into my eyes.
“They’re following,” Nicha called out. “There are three, no, four of them.”
He didn’t say who, and there was no time to explain. I had trouble just keeping up with my team.
We reached the side of the street, where even more people had gathered. A woman yelled at us, waving her hands. What did she want?
Evi led us into a side alley crowded with onlookers and street vendors and beggars and graceful women carrying jugs of water on their heads, and men in kaftans sitting at tiny little tables smoking.
At the sight of us, a good number of people started down the alley, more than the narrow passage could cope with.
Evi called, “Out of the way. Out of the way.” In Coldi because no one here would understand Isla anyway.
Women yelled, staring at his gun. Within seconds, a crowd of people had closed in behind us and I could no longer see the road behind us where we had left the bus. Neither could I see anyone following.
Evi was still calling out, “Out of the way. Let us through!”
We moved forward following a narrow path through the crowd. First Nicha and then me and then Thayu with Telaris bringing up the rear. In that maddening throng, I concentrated on Nicha’s back.
We turned left and right a few times. It didn’t take very long before I’d lost completely where we were going. I fixated on Nicha’s back. If we became separated, I would be seriously screwed.
And then—whoa—the street opened up. We entered an open square surrounded by a ring road of traffic. On the other side were a few glittering high-rise buildings. We crossed the stream of traffic—which wasn’t moving very fast.
In the middle of the square was an attempt at a park, but the grass was dry and trampled by hundreds of street sellers and beggars, many of whom watched us. A few came up to us. Some got scared by Evi’s gun, but a few yelled out, presumably to me, “You wanna buy pills, mista?”
Some were even blatant enough to wave said pills in little plastic bags.
Nope, I did not want to buy their drugs.
I had enough trouble keeping up with the pace that Evi and Nicha set.
We crossed the stream of congested traffic on the other side of the square. Here we entered an upmarket shopping area, where guards in uniform shooed the street sellers and beggars away. Girls in western style clothes got out of black chauffeur-driven cars. Many were accompanied by some poor maid or male servant, walking a few paces behind them to carry their shopping. Western-style music blasted out of air-conditioned shops. Beautiful, groomed—and rich—people sat in cafes and sipped their drinks through fancy straws. A woman carried a handbag that contained a baby cheetah. The poor thing was looking around at the strange surroundings with bewilderment.
There were only a few streets of this clean, rich and surreal haven before we passed another line of security guards and were back in the dark backstreets with the beggars and street sellers.
By now I was so hot that all my clothes were wet.
Thayu gave me a concerned look. “It’s not far from here,” she said.
“I don’t even know where we’re going.”
“Just somewhere to stay while we organise ourselves.”
Not much later, Evi led us into a building that was no different from the dreary bullet-hole-ridden concrete apartment blocks that surrounded it.
It was not until we arrived in the foyer—a low-ceilinged job with a worn and dirt-stained tiled floor where it smelled of spicy cooking—that I saw the “Hotel” neon sign on the back wall of the foyer. Guess it would have been easier to see had the sign been on, but it wasn’t, and it was so dark inside that I wondered if there was a power outage.
A single man sat behind a rickety desk that served as check-in counter. He was one of the Arabic type people, with fairly light skin, curly hair and a beard streaked through with grey. He took one look at us, rose without a word and disappeared through the door at his back.
“So much for service,” I muttered, staring at the empty desk.
A moment later, he came back in the company of a woman. A Coldi woman.
Ah, now I understood. This was a place from the gamra register. Stupid me. I should have realised that they were everywhere.
CHAPTER 12
* * *
THE WOMAN’S EYES widened at the look of Nicha’s Palayi earrings. She took up a subservient position and he had to lightly touch her shoulder and lift her chin up before she could meet his eyes. She turned her attention to the counter, leafing through a grubby book, flicking pages forward and back again.
The man said something to her and put his hand on her arm as if to calm her. I couldn’t hear what he said and probably wouldn’t have understood but I guessed that he didn’t like it when she did this. He was not alone in this sentiment. This superior and inferior ranking business made even me uncomfortable, and I’d lived with it for years.
“I’m Tamu,” the woman said in Coldi, her voice timid. Omi clan, judging by her earrings. “How can I help you?”
“We need a place to stay for a few days,” Thayu said.
“Yes, yes.” She leafed through the book, running her index finger along the lines. “I can’t fit all of you in one room. Our best rooms have only three beds. Or a double and a single.”
“You don’t have any apartments?” We’d become used to that luxury.
She almost
flinched. “We have nothing as fancy as that. This is not a very good area. If that is what you want, you will need to go downtown.”
“That’s fine, we’ll have two rooms. Adjacent ones if possible.”
That was possible, she said.
She took a long time writing our names, mine as Martin Spencer in Isla, Thayu and Nicha’s in Coldi in the awkward hand of someone who hadn’t written Coldi for a long time. She grew even more flustered when trying to enter Evi’s and Telaris’ names in the book. She claimed she “didn’t know their language” and asked them to accept her apologies. Was I correct in thinking that she recognised them as Indrahui and that this Robert Kray/Romi Tanaqan guy had really made a name for himself even in this town?
Thayu and I would share with Telaris and Nicha with Evi.
She accompanied us up a set of rickety stairs. The upstairs corridor was dark, with a bare floor, and a few lights that could be nowhere near bright enough for her Coldi eyes.
She babbled on. “You’re lucky. We were very busy just a few days ago. Lots of visitors from all over. They’re gone now. Here are your keys. Rooms 34 and 35 are yours.” She gave another subservient greeting and then she turned around to go back downstairs.
Nicha snorted when she was out of earshot. “I must have been living here too long, but I hate that simpering and cowering.”
Yes, I disliked it, too.
“Room” was a misnomer for the hole in the wall on the other side of the first door. Both rooms were on the street side, now in the shade, but the windows would receive full sunlight in the morning. It had a narrow double bed under the window and a single bed against the side wall, leaving enough space to walk around, but barely enough for bags. The walls had once been painted in a strange kind of ochre coating, but roof leakage—did it even rain in this place?—and substances I did not want to know about left dark stains on the walls.
Nicha and Evi definitely got the better deal. Their room had two single beds in the same space where ours had a single and a double.
I opened our window but the air that came in was neither cool nor fresh. In fact, it smelled like the curious combination of hot cooking oil and garbage.
“Urgh,” Thayu said.
Coldi noses were more sensitive than mine and even I found the smell too much to put up with. I shut the window again, annoyed at the stuffiness in the room. Even in Barresh the air wasn’t as breathless as this, or maybe it felt better because it didn’t smell so bad in the places I frequented.
“Well,” Thayu said, dropping onto the bed. The bottom was exceptionally springy, like a trampoline. “Let’s look at this from the bright side. It looks like we’ve managed to shake all minders, bodyguards, guides and spies. Unless the woman downstairs at the desk is someone’s plant, but I’ll get that checked out.” She fiddled with her reader. “I need to wait until the ship comes over, though. No reception.” She leaned back, folding her hands behind her head.
I sat on my side of the bed. It creaked and wobbled ominously. “I’m a bit more worried about how we are going to get to this research station without running into any unexpected nasties. It’s quite a distance from here, and the krayfish patrol the roads.” I wiped my face. Damn, it was so hot and stuffy in this room.
“We’re getting there our way. We got coordinates, we got some help up there.” She looked at the ceiling. It was also water-damaged with big brown patches.
“Thay’, we can’t let your father have his way with his guns. Just can’t. He jokes about the exclusion zone, but it’s serious. If Danziger even knew about all the spying that they’re already doing that’s outside the agreement, the fallout would be huge. I don’t know how to make him understand.”
“My father is one of Ezhya’s direct thirds. No one makes him understand anything.”
“Why did Amarru get him involved? She understands.”
“Amarru did not get him involved.”
I stared at her, finally realising who was calling the shots here, quite literally. There was infallible logic in that realisation. If he was the highest-ranking person involved in this project, he would be in the lead.
Except I didn’t have to adhere to Coldi structures. I often did out of respect, but I didn’t have to. That was why I was involved. As a safeguard. As subordinate to him, Amarru could not tell him “You can’t do this.” There was only one person who could. I was that person.
Damn.
* * *
We waited until dark before Evi and Telaris went out to get something to eat. I wasn’t hungry. In fact I was starting to feel ill. My stomach was grumbling a lot and that usually didn’t bode well. I administered some adaptation medicine in the hope that it would clear it up, but this kind of rumbling rarely ever vanished without first getting worse.
Evi and Telaris came back. Clean water was expensive, they said, and most of the food was of dubious quality. They’d bought some packaged stuff which was also not cheap. Most of the shops didn’t accept credits and the hole in the wall where they went to get local currency charged them way too much. They tried to barter it down, but it had been clear that they were giving a hefty commission to the local police because apparently they were not allowed to change any money for “chans”.
Evi and Telaris weren’t chans even, but when I said that sort of treatment set the tone for the kind of reception they were going to get here, they said that they’d had to beat off a few people who’d come up to them asking for jobs.
The pre-packaged things they had bought were mostly dry biscuits. I forced myself to eat some, because we’d be unlikely to get anything of better quality.
While we were eating in our room, my vision suddenly went dark. For a moment I thought I was going to faint, but then I realised: I was getting an image sent from the ship. I focused on it the same way you could get a reader to work with your mind. An image resolved from the fog. It was a city from above. There was a mass of cars and people standing around doing nothing while a couple of cars with an emblem on the roof blocked the traffic. It looked like the jam where we had escaped the bus. On closer inspection, the emblem on the roof was the PanAf symbol.
A male voice said, “We processed this and enhanced the resolution. It’s a test run.”
This would be a lackey appointed by Asha to communicate with us.
“I’m receiving it clearly.”
I streamed it through to Thayu, who was busily putting through all her requests while we had connection. She looked at me and nodded. “I thought they were responsible.”
“You don’t know that they were trying to stop us in particular. No one came after us when we ran into the alley. It might have been just a random road block.”
“It might.” Clearly she didn’t think so.
“Come on, Thay’, just tell us what you’re thinking, because this is kind of frustrating. Also, if we know, we can help you keep an eye out for whatever you want us to look for.”
“There’s the thing: I don’t want you to look for anything. I don’t even want you to know that any of us are looking for anything. You are a scientist and we are workers.”
“But I only want to help you. Two pairs of eyes miss less than one.”
“Honestly. You know how Amarru said that the people most likely to get bitten by a dog are those who don’t know how to treat a dog? So I stay away from dogs, because I don’t understand them. You stay away from trying to be an amateur spy. Because I want you to go home with me when we’re done in this horrible place.”
An intensity in her eyes stopped me from making a joke. She wasn’t joking, and the situation was not to be joked about.
“OK, then. But what sort of cover do we have? Everyone knows we’re here. It’s kind of obvious with me being pale and taller than many. Evi and Telari
s are being recognised as the same, perhaps related, to Robert Kray. The place isn’t exactly a tourist destination.”
“Well, last week it was.”
I frowned at her. Then remembered that Tamu at the front desk had also mentioned that it had been very busy.
“I asked my father and he got into some images from around here.” She took out her reader and showed me an image, much enlarged, of a bunch of vehicles travelling down a dusty road. They were accompanied by a gyrocopter.
“It’s flying really low,” Nicha said, looking over his sister’s shoulder. He mentioned just how low, which he calculated from how far the shadow was from the vehicle, the angle of the sun, the coordinates of the location and the orbit of the ship. Yeah, just like that. Maybe I could do it after spending half a day struggling with formulas and calculators.
Thayu enlarged the image even further but even at the highest resolution, we couldn’t see any demarcations on the gyrocopter. Just like the one that had attacked us in Rotterdam.
“PanAf, again,” Thayu said.
“I don’t understand why you think that.”
“They use gyrocopters.”
“And alone that makes PanAf a suspect?”
“They always were suspect.”
“Well then you know more than I do. PanAf is part of Nations of Earth.”
“PanAf are probably doing very well out of the krayfish. They administrate an area that was previously lawless and useless and make it orderly and give locals jobs. They don’t want anyone to poke about in their business, because they know the president won’t like it, but people are happy and they have food, so what’s the alternative?”
I spread my hands and was going to say something self-righteous about laws and international responsibilities, but the only time people would care about such things was when they had enough to eat and had a safe roof over their heads.
* * *
We went to bed, but I had trouble sleeping. Even if I’d taken some adaptation medicine, it was too hot and stuffy in the room. I tried opening the window again, but the owner of the shop downstairs was having a protracted argument with his wife that involved a lot of yelling. And although he was no longer cooking, the smell of it lingered and annoyed me.