by Patty Jansen
Some people had started digging sand away from the wheels.
Telaris shook his head. “I don’t think any of us are going anywhere with this sand. We’ll need rescuing, I think.”
Not much later, a whole bunch of messages arrived on my reader.
Amarru. What just happened? I’m getting questions about an explosion where you are.
It was a logged Exchange call, and I pressed reply. I was rewarded with a squeak in my ear. Ouch.
“What’s going on over there?” Amarru asked. “What did you just do?”
“I got rid of some idiots.” I was filthy, tired—how long since we’d last slept?—and not in the mood for apologies. “Danziger wanted Robert Kray gone. He’s gone. The whole of his project, his illegal gun factory, his seed bank of illegally imported plants from Asto is gone, too. The reason why a lot of people in this region were reduced to slaves and were bound to pahemin style debts is gone. He’s GONE, Amarru. No second Kazakhstan.”
I didn’t know Amarru as someone who was easily lost for words, but it took her a while to reply. “I thought that you would want to avoid this sort of action at all cost.”
“Not all cost. Sometimes, the cost of doing nothing is higher than that of decisive action.”
“Sometimes you scare the fuck out of me, Cory. You’ve been studying way too many proverbs. You’re more Coldi than most of us. I hope to hell that nothing worse comes from this.”
“It won’t.” I was a lot less sure about that than I sounded.
CHAPTER 29
* * *
I ASKED AMARRU to get some people to come and rescue us as soon as possible. “There are hundreds of people here, many are weak, malnourished and ill, and we have no water.”
She said she’d organise it. She sounded timid and subdued. I didn’t know why, but I had the feeling that something had just changed in my relationship with her.
I had barely signed off when my reader lit up with another logged Exchange call.
Asha.
“I’m surprised,” he said. “I didn’t expect you to go through with this. I had expected to hear from you to call it off at the last moment.”
I was going to, but there were fights and I lost the feeder. “Sometimes decisive action is needed.”
“I’m glad you’re smart enough to see that. I take it Romi Tanaqan is dead?”
“Very much so.” I had almost forgotten about the mess in Mr Kray’s office, but it would no doubt come to haunt me when I couldn’t sleep at night. “We found no other Indrahui on site. No Zhori either. He appears to have been targeting his actions purely to the disadvantaged natives of this region, getting them to be dependent on him.”
“Good. Then the dealing has been sufficient.”
“I can’t guarantee that the Zhori clan had nothing to do with it, nor that they won’t try to continue the projects. I will raise the issue with Nations of Earth.” Likely, Lucius Brown would lose his job, and maybe even Danziger, although there was no evidence that the photo I’d seen of Lucius Brown, Robert Kray and Danziger at a dinner was anything more than an opportunistic snap. It would create problems for Danziger, I was sure of that. “Thank you for your assistance, but at this point in time, we don’t need it anymore. In fact, I think the situation would be helped if, when people went looking for your ship, they didn’t find it.”
He chuckled. “Don’t worry, we’re getting ready to leave.”
Nicha laughed at me after I’d signed off. We were sitting in the sand on the shady side of the truck. “Did I hear that right? Did you just tell my father to bugger off?”
“I think I might have. I don’t care if it upsets him. I’m not part of Coldi society.”
“No.” Nicha shook his head. He didn’t sound convinced.
* * *
The afternoon dragged on. None of us were prepared for the desert. Some men started digging out the trucks, but I had to tell them to stop, because we had no water, and they’d only wear themselves out.
We sat in the lengthening shadow of the truck, leaning with our backs against the side in the sand that came up to the bottom of the door.
Thayu had been transfixed on her reader for a while.
“What are you looking at?”
She showed me the screen, and it was full of a giant block of random characters: capital letters, normal letters, numbers, other signs like currency signs, plus and minus, hyphens, underscores, quote marks, everything.
“What is it?”
“We found a whole bunch of these when we got the list of attendants and I’d been trying to figure out what it means. Then I noticed that the number of different characters used coincides with the number of characters in the Coldi alphabet. The top line of this block says, We have dispatched your shipment. Payment will be due eight days from now. . . . That’s as far as I got.”
“Who is it addressed to and who is it from?”
“To Mr Kray, from Deisha Zhori. There are a lot of these. Most are fairly short, but it’s still going to take me a while to decipher them.”
I stared at her. Here was our Zhori connection. They’d stepped back from Mr Kray’s project so as not to receive the blame, but they were waiting in the shadows.
Well, they’d have to wait a lot longer now, hopefully forever, if I had anything to do with it.
It was late in the afternoon and we were dozing in the shade when we became aware of a droning noise in the distance.
“There,” Thayu said, pointing at the horizon.
I saw them, too: gyrocopters, at least ten of them—heavy cargo machines coming for us at a high speed. Many of the local people got up and climbed back into the cabins or crawled underneath the vehicles.
A young man yelled at us, “You be careful, mista. They’re PanAf soldiers. Never know what they will do.”
Well, PanAf certainly had an image problem in this region, perhaps not unjustified.
As the gyrocopters came closer, Evi unclipped his gun and held it on his lap, just in case. The area of desert where the vehicles were stranded lay deserted, but millions of footprints in the sand gave away the presence of people.
The gyrocopters flew in a circle around the area, and then the first one came down on a patch of flat ground to our left.
The side doors of the cargo area were open, despite the dust thrown up by the blades.
While the engine shut down with a whine and the blades stopped rotating, a shrill voice yelled, “Mister, mister! In here, mister!”
I laughed. “It’s Henri!”
I had no idea how he had made it so far out of the factory—I could only guess that he’d been able to take his plane to safety and had warned other people. I was glad. I’d feared that he’d be in serious trouble.
Within minutes, all twelve gyrocopters were on the ground. Soldiers in desert grey uniforms jumped out and unloaded crates that contained bottles of clear water. One soldier carried a crate to where the trucks stood. Within moment, she was swamped with people, mostly little boys, begging for some of the precious fluid.
Soldiers handed out bottles and food packs. Having come in the truck, we were not that desperate, so we waited.
Thayu tried to get into the news services, but our link to the Exchange had already been broken. Her father’s ship must have left.
The PanAf soldiers rounded up everyone in need of transport and escorted groups of people to the vehicles. We went in the second-last one, treated no differently from all the other people.
In the gathering dusk, they took us to the nearest town, a small settlement that looked surprisingly modern from the air. The streets were lit, a giant solar power plant lay just outside the town and the buildings looked quite modern.
We emerged from sitting on the hard ground in the cargo hold of the gyrocopter into the mayhem of hundreds of people who had streamed onto the airfield. There was screaming and crying, and people falling into each other’s arms. A group of young men had set up huge drums and many people were dancing.
There was no Exchange connectivity of course, but while we walked through the town in search of somewhere to stay, Thayu managed to get onto World Newspoint. Their top headline said, Calls for Brown’s Resignation Following Allegations of Corruption. The article began,
Allegations have surfaced that PanAf president Lucius Brown may have had a hand in the smuggling of weapons that was recently discovered in Djibouti . . .
Hmm. It looked like Asha had done as I asked, and sent the material on to the news services. A message boy indeed.
* * *
We found a hotel in the middle of town. It was called “The Lucky Traveller”, but that appeared to be the misnomer of the decade, since it lay right on the town’s main square where most of the festivities took place.
The rooms were of a better standard than Tamu’s hotel in Djibouti, but it was still too hot inside.
A man and his daughter operated a café in a small yard at the front of the hotel.
Thayu, Nicha and I sat in the dark while the people in the town celebrated the return of their fathers and sons. They cheered and sang and played music in the streets, hanging out of windows and from the backs and on the roofs of trucks. Bonfires cast an orange glow over the façade of the hotel.
“It’s as if they won the cricket world cup,” I said, but Thayu, who sat next to me, had yet to comprehend the concept of “cricket”. The evening was warm, and after a quick shower and a change of clothes—that we needed to buy because all our stuff had been left at the research station and was probably fried—we felt much better.
“Delegate.”
I turned around and there were Evi and Telaris. They wore dark clothing, but not their black security gear. There was a kind of heavy finality about their appearance that made me certain that they had decided to go back to Indrahui and were coming to hand in their resignation.
I gestured. “Sit down.”
They did, perched at the very edge of their seats. A group of youths walked past laughing and talking.
“Mashara apologises,” Evi began when they had passed.
“Apologies are not necessary. We seem to have achieved what we planned. Whatever went on that was slightly outside regulations will be forgotten.” Or so I hoped. I hadn’t yet seen mention of the strike on any of the news services, but I was sure it was only a temporary reprieve.
It was silent for a while, during which I could almost see the thoughts whirl behind his eyes.
Then he said, “Yes, apologies are necessary. It is mashara’s task to protect the delegate. It seems I lost sight of that. I also exposed the delegate to unpleasant experiences. I apologise for that.”
“I’m sure I’m tougher than that.” I did suspect that the repercussions of seeing someone explode in front of my eyes would hit me later
“It was mashara’s task to protect the delegate from things like this. The delegate was threatened. Mashara should have foreseen this.”
“And how would you have done this? They had you restrained.”
He shook his head. “There is no excuse. There is only one way forward from this.”
“Don’t you even think about it.” I met his moss green eyes, and then Telaris’. “You’re worth much more to me than that. You will go nowhere.”
Evi looked down. “The delegate is much too kind.”
I knew that putting their own interest ahead of their jobs was an unforgivable offence for security personnel.
“Just . . .” I hesitated. If they were Earth people, I would tell them to get counselling. I shrugged, and sighed. “Promise me never to do this again. I know and understand why this was important to you, but let’s forget about it, and concentrate on the future.”
Evi nodded. Telaris put his hand on his brother’s shoulder. He nodded, too. “It won’t happen again. Thank you, Delegate.”
CHAPTER 30
* * *
WE TRAVELLED TO Athens on a regular commercial suborbital flight the next day.
At the Exchange, we were told that Amarru was in damage control and had no time to see us. The press might not yet have understood what had happened—they still spoke of an explosion of an illegal weapons factory—but the military sure hadn’t been fooled that way.
Amarru managed to free her schedule for half an hour to see me. She sat at her desk, looking extremely tired.
She said nothing while I took the seat opposite her.
“Two days until the elections,” she began, and then she pushed her reader across the desk to me. On the screen was a giant headline: Brown Resigns.
I shrugged. “He allowed this to happen. He brought the Zhori to Africa. He allowed Tanaqan to settle. He even encouraged him and gave him grants. He should resign.”
“It’s far to close to Danziger. Africa is his support base. He’s a friend of Brown’s.” She hit the corner of the screen and another article came up. Connections Between Danziger and Brown likely.
I nodded. “Dekker expected me to be able to fix it quietly, or maybe he expected me to stay away for much longer.”
“I guess he didn’t expect you to allow a strike from orbit.”
“He probably didn’t.”
“Danziger wants to see you about it. He’s been under a lot of pressure from the military. He didn’t know anything about Brown’s dealings. I believe him.”
“I’m not saying that I don’t believe him, but what else was I supposed to do? Let another Kazakhstan happen?”
“He’ll close the Exchange down over this.”
“If he wins. If he really wants to have a debate about how he allowed PanAf to support the Zhori, Tanaqan and goodness knows what other kinds of criminals. Because no one said anything, all in the name of maintaining support for Danziger’s campaign. I don’t think he’d survive that debate.”
Amarru nodded, her expression grave. “I hope you’re right.”
* * *
The next day, I booked an expensive hoverjet trip to take me to Rotterdam and back in one day. I really did not want to stay any longer than necessary, and this close to the elections, I presumed Danziger had little time.
On the trip I read that he made some lame apologies that he didn’t know what Lucius Brown was up to. One insignificant line in the article mentioned that he’d sacked his chief aide Simon Dekker.
He assured the news services that he would see to it that Lucius Brown was replaced with someone else as soon as possible.
I saw Danziger in his office while seated at the desk where Sirkonen had been shot.
He did not look healthy. His hair had gone completely white, lines on his face had deepened and his skin looked blotched.
He greeted me with a sharp, “Mr Wilson.”
“You wanted to see me, Mr President?”
“With great reluctance.”
Reluctance or not, I sat down anyway. As usual, Thayu and Nicha had remained outside.
He was playing with a document on his reader and let me wait for a while before he started, “It says EXO-NZ in your file. I could erase that with one press of a button. Certainly you have committed enough offences in the past few days to justify my doing that.” His finger hovered over the keyboard.
“Maybe.” My heart jumped. How much was I attached to that designation? New Zealand was no longer my home, but it would always be part of me. “I did solve the problem Dekker asked me to solve. He let me believe that he was acting with your knowledge.�
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Danziger chose to ignore that last statement. “You barged into a volatile part of Earth under an assumed name, you took offworlders, you implicated key government officials of virtually all Saharan countries in treachery and you sanctioned a hostile, peacetime attack on our soil from orbit by an alien army.”
“It was the quickest way to destroy all the sites and to decontaminate the illegal crops. And to get rid of gamra’s most wanted criminal. I solved the problem. Not just your problem, but gamra’s problem, and a problem that would have led to something far worse than Kazakhstan. I solved the problem.”
He sighed. Let his finger rest. “That, you did.”
“They’re not going to be back for long time. If any are still alive, the hardline krayfish may decide to keep going, but if you keep close tabs on them, they will never rebuild to the same strength.”
“You are a rude, cocky bastard, but much as I hate to admit it, you’re right.” He heaved a sigh. “I’ve instructed my secretary to transfer payment to your account.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t expect any more jobs from this office. You can be a persona non grata without losing your designation.”
“I understand.”
“No, I don’t think you do. You think you’re above the law.”
“What law would that be? Earth law that doesn’t apply to offworlders or gamra law that Earth doesn’t recognise?”
He glared at me, his tired eyes glowering. “Fuck off.”
“With pleasure.” I inclined my head, moving towards the door. “Good luck in the elections, Mr Acting President.”
He glared at me.
I fled the room, meeting Thayu and Nicha in the corridor. We walked out of the building as fast as we could without running.
When we were safely out of the building and away from the guards, I said, “Did you hear what he said?”