by Patty Jansen
“You can explain that for us.”
“Me?” It came out as a strangled squeak.
“Yes. That’s part of the reason we wanted a local guide: so that he could communicate with the locals and explain the situation to them. You speak their language.”
“Um. Yes.” He was looking at his hands. He wiped his face, leaned forward on his knees and wiped his face again. “That will be . . . more.” He mumbled something else.
“More what?”
“More money. For talking to the warlord. Up front.”
“When we come back. We don’t have any money that we can give you here.”
“You have connection. I saw it. You can put it in my account.”
“Why can’t you wait until we’re back? That’s what we agreed.”
“Because I have to live, mister! If you die then what am I supposed to do?”
“You’ll grab all our stuff and sell it. That’s what. I stand by my offer and our agreement. You’ll get all your money when we come back.”
He nodded, but didn’t meet my eyes.
Soon after, he got up from the table. “I’ll be going to my room, then. To contact the warlord.”
“Let us know when there’s a reply.”
He nodded, but as he went into the corridor, I realised that he hadn’t even asked for our full names, so there was not a chance that he was actually going to ask for that permission. Besides, we ran our connection through the Exchange and he wouldn’t have access to that. Maybe he had some other way of communicating. Watching him in the next few days would be interesting.
Thayu got out her reader and we briefly discussed the route we’d take tomorrow. Nicha and I had to speak Isla to make sure that Henri didn’t get too suspicious. He was sure to be listening, and I was sure that he was reporting to someone about us.
Meanwhile, the real conversation went through our feeders, because the ship was overhead.
We wondered if we’d just stumbled onto a spying pilot, if spying was a side revenue stream for pilots in general, or if he’d been tipped off by Tamu, or hired by someone tipped off by Tamu.
It was all speculation.
Thayu stared at the open door into the blackness of the night. She was intensely unhappy about the situation.
I don’t understand any of these people.
To which Nicha remarked, There are spies and corrupt people on Asto.
Of course but at least there I understand why they’ll sell themselves to certain people but not to others.
I nodded. It was true, but only once you knew where a person’s loyalty ties went. Before that time, you were as much in the dark as here.
Loyalty links are not hard to find out, Thayu commented.
They aren’t if you have the highest security clearance. And certainly not always then, either.
“Anyway, I’m going to bed. I’m tired.” She rose from the table and Nicha did the same.
“I’ll be there soon. I want to check on the guards,” I said. Keep an eye on him, I told Nicha before he went to his and Henri’s room.
I went out the front door to the veranda. The Moon had come up and cast pale light over the water, still as glass.
The two guards sat cross-legged on the ground, leaning their backs against the wall. The air had cooled a bit.
“Mashara,” I said, and sat down with them.
They nodded. “Delegate.”
“It’s actually not too bad out here now,” I said.
“It’s acceptable.” Their moss-green eyes were possibly even greener in the glow of the little light on my reader.
“Are you going to stay out here all night?”
“Mashara will keep this place secure.” Which was as much as saying yes, and I wasn’t really supposed to ask about their operations in keeping us safe.
“I don’t trust the pilot,” I said.
“No.” Simple. Blunt.
We looked out over the water. The night was absolutely still, with not a breeze of wind, not a sound made by an animal. There were not even insects.
“We’ll fly over some of Mr Kray’s territory tomorrow,” I said. “I’m sure that mashara is aware that he is from Indrahui. Is there anything about a warlord from Indrahui that we need to consider?” It was as personal a question as I’d ever asked them. I was uncomfortable with it, which was why I hadn’t asked it earlier, because I knew that they would be uncomfortable with it, too. Neither of the men had ever discussed how they came from Indrahui to work for Amarru, who had passed them on to me. I had never even caught them trying to contact their family, although I hoped that they did.
I wasn’t surprised that a long silence followed my question. Eventually, Telaris said, “This man is well-known. He got busted for smuggling Asto-made arms, but he should have gotten busted for countless acts of insane cruelty.”
Evi nodded, his face dark. He was no longer looking at me, but sat with his head bent staring at his knees. “Nobody ever cared about all the people he killed, because Indrahui is not a full gamra member.”
I said, “It’s not gamra’s task to—”
Evi interrupted me. He had never done that before, and the wide-eyed look in his eyes chilled me to the core. “I know, Delegate. I know.” Evi and Telaris didn’t often refer to themselves in first person either. “It’s gamra’s task to administer the Exchange. And so they do that, but they talk endlessly about which worlds are worthy and which ones have structures in place that obey their laws before they’re admitted as members. This world is not a member. But this world satisfies the most important condition: it has an official independent body which can send people to protect civilians. It’s a really good one, too. No, it’s not perfect. It’s bureaucratic. Sometimes it’s a bit biased and sometimes there is corruption, and it’s slow. And sometimes there are political reasons why they won’t or can’t do anything. But think of it like this: the gamra assembly is as close as we get to this terrible, bureaucratic, silly organisation that’s Nations of Earth.” I hadn’t heard this level of sarcasm from them either. “So, Delegate, if no one at gamra says anything about the cruelty of these Indrahui warlords, then who will? We have no Nations of Earth.”
That outburst chilled me even more deeply. I looked from Evi to Telaris, who nodded quietly. “Do you know this particular person? I’m sorry if I ask questions that are not appropriate for me to ask.”
There was another long and dark silence, in which I imagined the figure of the Grim Reaper floating over the still water. Nothing lived there. Wars and other human stupidity had left this place utterly destroyed.
Telaris cleared his throat. “Delegate, we were taught that it’s not appropriate to state a person’s personal motivations.”
Now it was my turn to burst out. “Oh, just cut the ‘Delegate’ bit. We’re stuck here in this terrible place together. If you have anything on Robert Kray that can help our mission, or that helps me understand the situation, tell me. Use my name. Be or don’t be ‘appropriate’. I don’t care.”
There was another long and heavy silence.
I was thinking about getting up and going to bed. I was tired and, to be honest, a bit sick of everyone’s hang-ups.
Then Telaris said, “Nothing is appropriate about seeing your sister’s baby cut from her body while she is alive, about being forced to watch that, and seeing her life blood seep into the soil. This man, whose name doesn’t deserve to be spoken by anyone, ordered that done. He watched it, too. He had the power to stop it. He didn’t. He laughed.”
Evi cried, “And what does gamra bust him for? Smuggling arms! They cared nothing about her and all the other people he mutilated. Nothing!”
I made another important conclusion. “You’re brothers?�
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Telaris nodded.
“I’m going to kill the bastard with my bare hands,” Evi said. “I’ll take his body to Indrahui. I’m going to string his guts across the desert. I’m going to cut off his head and feed it to the garrongi and when the crushed skull comes out the other end, I’ll put it in a box with ribbons, and bring it to our mother.” He leaned his head in his hands.
I had no idea what garrongi were, and I had a feeling I didn’t want to know.
Telaris put a hand on Evi’s shoulder. The moonlight that reflected off the water showed that his cheeks were wet. I wiped my cheeks, too. I felt stupid, insignificant, arrogant and ignorant. Of course I never claimed that I knew about hardship, but I professed to understand, to attempt to deal fairly with people.
But every now and then, something happened that made it painfully clear that I knew nothing at all.
CHAPTER 17
* * *
I SLEPT BADLY. I kept thinking about Evi and Telaris and their family, still at Indrahui. Their world didn’t qualify for full gamra membership because their regimes systematically excluded several groups of people, and because there was no overarching organisation that had the power to bring warlords to court. Also, pahemin, life debt, the system of indenture in which time was exchanged against money. It put poor people at the beck and call of rich ones. It was akin to slavery.
It was hot in the room and I was thinking that Evi and Telaris had the best deal, sleeping on the veranda. Taking adaptation medication always made me feel feverish and jittery, my stomach was still not one hundred percent, the standard of the bed was not great, and the thought of Henri compromising our safety didn’t help.
I was wakened in the middle of the night by a soft noise. It took me a while to realise where I was. Apart from the faintest glow of light through an open window, the room was so pitch dark that I could see nothing.
I registered that Thayu was no longer in the bed. I whispered, “Thay’?”
Of course the ship was out of range when we needed it.
She activated her reader and gestured An intruder in the bluish light. The light went off again. I slipped out of bed. On my hands and knees, I felt for my bag and my gun in the side pocket. Its weight and metallic feel were oddly comforting.
At home where she had plenty of backup, I’d let her deal with this, but not here where she and Nicha were alone and unfamiliar with the surroundings. And where were Evi and Telaris? Why hadn’t they heard anything?
I followed her down the short corridor as silently as I could. I hoped we’d disturbed a monkey or some such thing, even if I knew that nothing grew in this area and there was nothing for animals to feed on.
A faint glow came from the kitchen. Someone had put a light on the table and stood bent over on the other side, checking bags.
Thayu leapt forward and ran across the kitchen. The intruder called out, “Hey!”
She crashed into him. They both fell against the wall and slid to the ground with a thud that made the flimsy structure of the building shudder. The table was shoved sideways, pushing two of the chairs over. The door opened. Evi and Telaris came in both with lights in one hand and guns in the other.
Thayu had wrestled the intruder to the ground. She sat on top of him to keep him down.
Evi directed a light into his face. He squirmed away from it.
It was Henri. Damn, I should have thought of that.
He met my eyes in the space between Thayu’s body and her arms and squealed, “Get your fighting machine off me!”
“What are you doing sneaking around in the dark?” I couldn’t muster the energy to be friendly. I pushed his bags aside. They were the same ones that had been in the plane. “Did you want to sneak out without us? Leave us stranded here? Why did you think you could get away with that?”
He squealed. “I’ll do anything you want but don’t tell anyone about me. They will kill me! Please, please.”
“Who will kill you?”
“The krayfish! I don’t know what you’re doing here, mister, but they will kill you, too. Please let me go!”
“And leaving us stranded here wasn’t going to kill us?”
“I was just going out. I was going to come back, honest!”
“What have you done that makes you so afraid of the krayfish?”
But he was crying and pleading and saying that he’d do anything we wanted as long as we let him go. I could get any sense out of him.
I noticed something on the floor. He’d been carrying a packet of white cubes, similar to the material I’d been offered by the old krayfish at the shop. The little bag lay under the dining table and some of the white cubes had come out. I picked up one of his bigger bags and pulled open the zipper. The bag was full of similar little plastic bags with white cubes. “You’re trying to use this trip to smuggle drugs?” Had he been about to meet up with his contact?
“It’s not like that at all! Yes, it’s a drug, but it helps to cope with the heat.”
What. The. Hell. I picked up one of the cubes. Sniffed it. The material lacked the distinctive smell that my Coldi-produced adaptation medicine possessed.
Nicha frowned at me.
“He says it’s adaptation medication,” I said in Coldi to him. And then to Henri, “Is this your business? Is this why you have a fancy plane like this, because you smuggle this stuff?”
“Please, mister! I’m not doing anything wrong.”
“It’s illegal technology. Hasn’t been tested on people on a mass scale and there are no approved versions of it.” That was the official Nations of Earth position.
“Mister, when you have to work in that heat, you can be dead from heatstroke or you can live and work another day if you take the medicine. That is all the approval I need.”
True. I blew out a breath. I was being a hypocrite of the worst order. I took adaptation, and it hadn’t harmed me. Sure, there would probably be people who would have bad side effects, and a proper medical trial would be needed before it could be released into the population, but as far as illegal things to smuggle went, this was an area where I was happy not to support the Nations of Earth position.
We’d gone crazy on the poor guy. Evi and Telaris stood at the door, Nicha at the entrance to the corridor, and Thayu pressed his wrists to the floor above his head.
I gestured to her Let him go.
She sat back. Henri scrambled to his feet and dropped into one of the two chairs at the kitchen table that still stood upright.
“Where did he get this stuff?” Thayu asked.
“I went into that shop to hire him, and a guy offered me a bag of this stuff. I thought they were illegal drugs and ignored it.” The man had said that I’d need the stuff. Damn it, he’d been trying to be helpful. “I suspect it’s everywhere in this region.” Allowing people to survive here.
“As long as that’s the only thing he’s got,” Nicha said from the door. He grabbed Henri’s second bag and upended it on the table. The stuff that fell out was just the usual: mainly clothing, a pair of thick-soled shoes—for walking on very hot ground, and a few bits and pieces of technology related to the plane.
Nothing suspicious.
I picked up one of the fallen chairs and set it upright then I sat opposite Henri, looking into his face. He was wide-eyed.
“If you have anything to say to us now, about Mr Kray or your relationship with him or about what you’ve been hired to do, here is your chance.”
“I don’t know Mr Kray.”
And when I gave him my best disbelieving stare, he added, “I know of him, of course, who doesn’t?”
I kept staring. He fidgeted, rubbing his wrists where Thayu had held him.
“I sell the stuff to
some of his workers. Sometimes.” Meaning that he snuck into the building site without Mr Kray’s approval?
“Do you come out here often?”
“Sometimes.” He looked down. Meaning a lot, I guessed.
“Were you trying to sneak out to meet a business contact?”
He nodded, still not looking at me. “I’m sorry, I won’t do it anymore. We can go and do your work—surveys, whatever—tomorrow and then I’ll take you back to town as promised.”
He still struck me as nervous and flighty.
Nicha said, “It strikes me that these few bags here would hardly be worth coming all this way to meet someone for. These few samples wouldn’t last people very long.”
Henri let his head sag further. “The rest is in the plane.”
I met Thayu’s eyes, hoping that she understood. She held her reader and was probably listening to the crude translation that the device would make.
“Who is your supplier?” Nicha asked.
“I don’t want them to get into trouble. There is going to be enough trouble already. But I have to eat, mister. I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Tamu is your supplier, right?”
He nodded. Another piece of the puzzle fell into place.
“What do you want us to do about him?” Telaris asked me in Coldi.
I had to think about that for a while. I still didn’t trust him, and still didn’t think we’d heard the entire story. “Go back to bed. Keep an eye on him to make sure he doesn’t leave the room. I hate to admit it, but we need him. We—”
I became aware that no one paid attention to me. They were all listening. From somewhere in the distant darkness came a heavy thud-thud-thud-thud.
CHAPTER 18
* * *
“A GYROCOPTER.” Henri’s eyes were wide. “It’s PanAf. They’re coming for us.”
Thayu and Nicha glanced at each other. What now? The ship must have been flying overhead, since we were going through a patch of connectivity.