Ambassador 4: Coming Home

by Jansen, Patty

  —and someone charged out of the doors and ran into me at full speed. Thayu shouted. I fell backwards and crashed onto the platform on my backside.

  Ouch.

  The other person had fallen after tripping over my legs, sprawled on his belly. He was now getting up, brushing dust off his clothes. He was young, dressed in black and—

  “Reida! Whatever are you doing?”

  “Don’t get on the tram. There’s Tamerians. Run!”

  He didn’t say where the Tamerians were, and as I scrambled to my feet, I didn’t see any, but despite his tall tales, I’d never known Reida to lie.

  “Come!” I turned around and headed off the platform with Reida. Thayu and Lilona were behind me.

  “Where are the Tamerians?” I asked him.

  “I managed to give them the slip at the next station. They’re waiting for us there. They’ll probably find out that we didn’t get on the tram soon. They’ll be running this way.”

  “I’ll get a water taxi,” Thayu said.

  “I think we’re better off walking through town,” Reida said. “I have some news and you may want to act on it.”

  “Do you know where Evi and Telaris are?”

  “They’re at the previous station trying to keep the Tamerians in check.”

  Damn, I hoped they were safe. I hoped Asha’s guards were there as well.

  “Cory, wait!” That was Thayu.

  I stopped. While we had been going at a decent jogging tempo, Thayu and Lilona had fallen behind. Thayu was standing with her hands at her sides, the pose she took when she was annoyed. Lilona stood doubled over, panting, supporting herself with one hand on a wall.

  No exercise aboard that ship, huh?

  Thayu spread her hands, clearly annoyed. “We can’t protect her going through town when she can’t run when we need her to.”

  True. “Maybe we should get that water taxi after all.” And here I was thinking that I was unfit and weak.

  “No,” Reida said. “There are more Tamerians on the outside of town than inside. Once we’re on the water, they’ll only need to pick us off. There is no shelter out there. They have excellent night vision.” In contrast to one of the “mistakes” supposedly made with the Coldi people.

  I said, “We need a vehicle. It’s a good run from here to the airport and we should take her back before we do anything else.”

  “She won’t survive a run across the island,” Thayu said, her voice dark.

  Lilona still stood at the wall, now vomiting up her dinner.

  “Better check if she is all right.” Thayu walked back, leaving myself and Reida in indecision.

  His eyes glittered in the dark as he scanned the surrounding rooftops. “We can’t stay here for long.”

  No, we couldn’t, but Lilona was in no state to run.

  “What is the news that you found?” I asked him. “Is it why the Tamerians have taken an interest in you?”

  “Yeah.” He pushed a strand of hair behind his ears. “I know where Trader Federza is.”

  “You do? How did you find out? Where is he?”

  He lowered his voice. “It’s a long story, but he’s in the jail.”

  I gaped at him. Surely he was kidding. “I went there and notified the guards that he was missing. Why did they say nothing?”

  “Apparently, he went there for his protection and no front desk staff was allowed to say anything about it. Someone tried to contact me instead, but that gave me away as working undercover at the dig site so I had to bail and run because . . . those Tamerians are fast.”

  “What does he need protection from?”

  “His own folk, against the Tamerians. I think he knows stuff, and he’s been trying to tell someone.”

  Shit. And then I thought of all the things Asha had said about the Exchange and the anpar wake and all the missing information about the Aghyrian ship.

  I felt cold. “We have to go and get Federza. He’s likely to have information about that ship.”

  Thayu nodded, her face grim.

  Lilona had straightened. Her face glistened with sweat in the light of a street lamp. Whatever Captain Luczon said, I wondered how healthy the Aghyrians truly were.

  “We need to go,” I said to her. “I don’t know how or which route we’ll take. We’ll use a vehicle if we can find one.”

  Lilona gaped from me to Thayu and back. “My captain.” Her eyes were wide, her face pale. To be honest, she looked like she might faint at any time.

  Thayu said, “The captain’s fine. We’re not at the island yet. Nothing is happening there.”

  Reida called, “Oy!”

  He pointed at the other side of the road, where another tram had turned up. He ran. We followed much more slowly, Thayu supporting Lilona as she often did with me when her running speed was more than I could manage. Except I could outrun Lilona by a long margin. We were slow. Reida was going up the steps to the platform.

  The tram doors opened—

  —And someone rose on the roof of the vehicle, firing a wide spray of charges into the dark.

  Thayu pushed Lilona into a garden bed where she fell unceremoniously into the bushes. With her other hand, she extracted her gun and returned fire.

  “Take cover!” she yelled at me.

  I scrambled into an alcove in the wall surrounding a yard and pressed myself into its dark shade. Ew. Why did these things always have to contain rubbish bins? I felt under my clothing for the light-duty gun Thayu had insisted I carry.

  Found the gun. Turned it on, seeing the green light flicker into life with a sense of relief. I’d had enough training to know that I could protect myself, if needed. The gun wasn’t going to be much good at this distance, and I knew better than to fire it. It would only anger Thayu.

  Another man had come out of the tram, gun raised.

  No one fired for a very tense silence. I could see some of the tram’s passengers sheltering behind a maintenance shed.

  “Where is Reida?” I whispered.

  Thayu pointed, but I didn’t see him.

  The two Tamerians inched towards the edge of the platform. The first one jumped off—to be taken care of by Reida who had hidden in the shade of the overhanging platform.

  The second one took a hit square in the back.

  Thayu laughed. “On the roof!”

  It was Evi. Telaris was there, too.

  Good. Now I felt a lot better.

  Lilona, however, didn’t, if the sounds from the bushes were anything to go by.

  Chapter 16

  * * *

  WE GOT ON the tram with much rejoicing.

  While we had been in the hospital, Evi and Telaris had been called to Reida’s aid. He had run into trouble at the previous station. Apparently the Tamerians, too, knew where Federza was and didn’t want us to know it.

  The mess from that struggle was still evident when our tram passed. There were a lot of guards on the platform, the tram drivers’ station had its door smashed in and there appeared to be a body on the platform, but it was hard to see because of all the spectators.

  Reida, Evi and Telaris sank to the floor of the tram and relied on us to report on what was going on. Fortunately, no one checked the tram as it stopped at the station—Sheydu would have had something to say about that—and we continued on.

  A few passengers had gotten on and they gave us strange looks, particularly when Evi was unstrapping his spare gun to give it to Reida, as well as a few bits of electronics. Telaris was speaking to someone, probably Devlin, probably to send over reinforcements. We could use Sheydu, in particular if there were explosives involved.

  We got off the tram one block away from the guard station. The trams didn’t go through Market Street and this was the closest stop. Some of the new trams had no drivers, and a disembodied voice took the place of the driver yelling destinations into the cabin from the front seat. When we were getting off, such a voice stated that the northern line was closed and all services would terminate for the
night because of an emergency.

  “Oops.” Thayu looked at me and waggled her eyebrows. Very pretty eyebrows they were, too.

  Reida found it funny.

  Lilona was barely following us off the platform, pale-faced. I wished we had time to take her home, but we should act while we’d managed to sidetrack the Tamerians on the subject of our location.

  We took a shortcut behind the main council hall, a tree-lined alley shrouded in darkness. The council buildings were all empty for the night.

  It was not the sort of place one would want to be on a night like this, with Tamerians lurking about. Evi and Telaris were our eyes, because Indrahui night vision was excellent. In one spot, we disturbed a pair of Pengali lovebirds. They scurried off, tails still intertwined. Sheesh, were those kids even old enough?

  Evi laughed.

  Thayu touched my hand.

  We stopped at the entrance to the alley and could see the dingy entrance to the guard station jail across Market Street, past the trunks of the still young trees that were nevertheless already a decent size. Something moved in the shadows a few steps to the right. I took in a sharp breath, but everyone else remained relaxed. It turned out to be only Veyada. Sheydu was with him. She had climbed the wall of the council complex and now sat atop, holding her gun and watching the street. Her backpack stood next to her on the wall. I guessed it contained her gadgets to make explosives.

  She would be in view of security cameras where she sat, and I guessed that was probably the point of sitting there. Why, I didn’t know.

  The jail office across the street was lit but unmanned. The light was of the local light pearl style, a sickly greenish glow that washed out all colour, reminiscent of the really old fluorescent lights that some of the Earth ships still used.

  “We’d be pretty visible if we cross the street like this,” Thayu said.

  “They’re probably all over the area watching us,” Reida said.

  “Then there is no way to get there other than with violence.”

  I said, “I think there is. Why don’t I just walk in oblivious to all that’s going on? They’re not going to take shots at me in the middle of town.”

  “No, you can’t do that,” Thayu said. She’d been watching me a lot since we had left the hospital, as if she had latched onto the idea that somehow my genes could be changed so that I could father her child.

  “I’ll be fine. You made me wear armour.”

  “That doesn’t mean I want your arms or legs shot off.”

  “They’re not going to shoot me in the middle of town.”

  “They shot at Federza.”

  “What? When he came in here?”

  “No, when he was in your office.”

  “That’s different. They were in the reeds and could easily clear out quickly. Here, the only places where they can hide are easily identifiable. The tree up there. The window and balcony. There are enough of us to keep an eye on those places.”

  Thayu sniffed. “I knew this would involve you putting yourself in the line of fire. I’m coming.”

  Telaris was undoing his belt. He slid off one of his devices and handed it to me before doing up his belt again. It was a military-style receiver, much sturdier than the one I had in my pocket. “At least take that.”

  Thayu rolled her eyes. “I should have known that. You’re all in cahoots with him putting his life on the line. We’re supposed to protect him.”

  Telaris grinned.

  I said, “Sometimes a situation requires a person with a gun, sometimes it requires a person with a big mouth.”

  She sniffed. “Sometimes I think your mouth is bigger than the rest of you. I’ll come.”

  “All right then.” I nodded. “We should also take Lilona.” I didn’t want to have her on the visit, but I didn’t think she’d handle being shot at very well and inside the building was probably the least likely place for that to happen.

  Reida would accompany us across the street, and Evi and Telaris would stand guard in front of the door once we had gone in, while Sheydu and Veyada would remain where we stood to spot approaching danger and distract it.

  We stared off across the street, through the open space that would, many years in the future when the trees had grown, again be in the shade. My heart was hammering, but nothing happened and we reached the door safely.

  A chime rang in the office when I opened the door. The sounds from the street dimmed when the door shut again. Thayu leaned on the counter, looking sideways at the screen on the desk. Reida remained next to me, and Lilona sat on the seats next to the door. She really didn’t look at her best.

  From elsewhere in the building came the sound of footsteps and a moment later a guard appeared from behind the counter. This man I knew, too, from the times I’d picked up Reida here.

  His eyes widened when he saw me. “Delegate, you must be mistaken. I didn’t notify you about the young man—” He noticed Reida, who grinned.

  “I understand that you have someone else in here who normally lives on the gamra island.”

  “No, why should I? We have no say over anyone from gamra. We don’t hold those people here.”

  “Can I check?”

  “What?”

  “I’d like to check downstairs, because the man we’ve lost may be hiding here.”

  “Whatever are you talking about?”

  “I have it from reliable information that you hold Marin Federza here.”

  “What? Of course I don’t. He’s a respected citizen.”

  “Then if you don’t, can you take me downstairs to check?”

  He huffed. “I can’t allow just anyone off the street to walk in wanting tours of the jail.”

  “I’m not anyone from the street and I don’t want a tour of the jail. If you don’t want to come, why don’t you give me the key and I’ll go by myself.” I held up my hand. “Just in case you feel in any way stressed about this person’s presence in your establishment, I’m offering to take him off your hands.”

  He hesitated. “Do you know what you’re dealing with?”

  “I know enough. Our security is strong enough to withstand any kind of pressure from our Tamerian friends.”

  They only tended to shoot from a distance anyway. Whatever Tamerians were, smart didn’t appear to be one of those things. And so every artificial race had its problems. Fancy that.

  He put the key in my palm, hesitant. I walked past him to the door—

  —and it opened from the inside, almost hitting me in the face.

  An armed man ran out. I jumped aside. He shouted and pointed the gun at me. Lowered it again.

  He blew out a heavy breath.

  It was only a Barresh guard. “What were you doing?’ he yelled at his colleague in keihu. “I’d almost shot him. I thought this was one of those . . .” Then he looked at me, as if realising that I understood him. “What are they doing here?” Then he frowned at Reida. “He’s the one normally behind bars.”

  The first guard said something to him in a low voice. The second guard nodded, again glancing at me. “He said they’d take him?”

  The first guard gave his colleague a warning look.

  I said, “You do have Marin Federza here. I want to see him.”

  The first guard wiped sweat off his upper lip. Unless I was mistaken, they appeared nervous and very much on edge.

  “Come.” The second guard jerked his head and disappeared through the heavy door behind the counter. I handed the key back to the first guard and followed him. Thayu was close behind me. Reida and Lilona followed him.

  We plunged into the darkness down the circular staircase that reminded me strongly of a medieval dungeon. The steps were made of limestone blocks that had become slippery with the constant seeping moisture.

  “That smell,” Reida said. His voice sounded disturbed.

  The smell was typical for many of the old cellars of Barresh. These were not cellars for dry storage. They were for drainage and cooling, as most of them
were below the ground water level and water seeped through the stone and evaporated. These structures always smelled of algae, wet stone and must.

  The guard waited at the bottom of the stairs until all of us were down and the door had shut behind us. He was a tall fellow, broad in the shoulders rather than round-waisted. He possessed several tattoos on both sides of his neck, visible because, unlike most keihu men, he wore his hair short.

  “I don’t know how keen he’ll be to go outside with you,” he said. “To be honest, he’s paranoid. He says there are people with military-grade weapons waiting to pick him off outside. We’ve tried to get him to leave several times already, but he’s flatly refused.”

  “How long has he been here?”

  “A week or two.” He scratched his head. “Seems longer than that.”

  “Is there another way out?”

  He laughed, spreading his hands. “What do you think? This is a jail.”

  “Was a jail. This is no longer the main jail.”

  “No, but we hold miscreants here to cool their heels after a brawl or rowdy night out.”

  Didn’t I know about that.

  “The other building is newer and may smell better, but it’s much worse for the inmates.”

  True. That jail had a “termination room”. Local judges favoured the death penalty over long prison terms.

  The winding staircase was on one end of the passage and from where we stood, we could see all the way to the other end. The doors to the cells consisted of metal grates and all of them were dark, some closed, some stood open.

  A glow of light came from an open door at the end of the passage.

  “I guess he’s down there.”

  “Yup. I hope he’s not going to blow up when he sees you.” Clearly, the prospect terrified him.

  We set off down the corridor.

  Reida muttered some words as we walked past the cells. Occasionally, when he was stressed, he reverted to zeyshi dialect, and this was one of those occasions. I now wondered how he had found out that Federza was here, and was unsure I wanted to know. Asha had said that Reida was gold, but that didn’t stop me feeling deeply disturbed by certain parts of the young man’s life, such as the times when I’d come here to rescue him from one of the cells.