“You don’t understand. You are going to leave. I’m not asking. I’m ordering.”
“I have my orders, too. This site is ancient and precious. It belongs to the people of Barresh and not to you filthy . . .” He was getting agitated. His eyes were wide. I wondered if he’d taken something or what possessed him.
“Get. Out! Or I’ll use this.” Reida held up the gun. He strode in big steps towards the table.
A woman squeaked and crawled out from underneath the table. She ran for the exit in the far corner. A young man followed her, and so did a middle-aged Kedrasi woman, who was still wearing her facemask. The man with the piece of wood was shouting at them not to abandon their principles and let a dirty foreigner dictate what happened to a precious historical site.
“Get out, get out!” Reida shouted at the remaining people.
One by one, they all chose safety over historical treasures, until the only one left was the man with the piece of wood. He drew himself up, waving the wood in front of him. He was taller than Reida, but faced with a Coldi young fighter holding a gun, the gesture was ridiculous. His entire behaviour was ridiculous.
“Come on, man, go,” Reida said, annoyed, gesturing with the gun.
“You can’t make me.” His face was set in a stubborn expression.
Reida pointed the gun at him. “You want to feel the end of this?”
The man said nothing. He stood perfectly still for a little while, staring, wide-eyed, at the business end of the gun. Definitely not in his right mind.
Something must have clicked in his brain, because he lowered the piece of wood.
He retreated a step, and then another.
Reida followed him, still pointing the gun.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m going.” The man dropped the wood on the walkway. He retreated faster in the direction of the exit.
I gestured at Sheydu to come over with her gear. She hefted the pack onto her shoulder, ready to go in.
The man had reached the exit, but when he was about to go through, he almost crashed into someone who came in from outside. Someone with a gun. Not one of our group. A guard. Not Tamerian. Damn.
He called out, “What’s the meaning of this?”
All of a sudden, there was a lot of action. The crazy researcher ran outside. Other people ran in. Guards, dressed in grey with the gamra blue band around both arms.
In amongst them, a tall man in a flowing blue robe entered the tent.
Oh, shit. What the hell was Delegate Namion doing here?
Chapter 22
* * *
EVERYONE FROZE. Delegate Namion and his guards on one side, Reida and his two Pengali assistants on the other.
Delegate Namion looked pointedly at Reida’s gun, still levelled at chest height, where a moment ago the nervous research worker had been backing away, and where it now pointed at the Chief Delegate.
Reida lowered his gun, mumbling an apology. My heart was thudding. Reida had a lot still to learn about gamra protocol. I was pretty sure that he wouldn’t easily be forced into doing silly things with that weapon, but I wasn’t so sure about the Delegate’s nervous guards.
Reida and his two friends retreated slowly to our side of the tent. Faced with a couple of heavily armed gamra guards, there was nothing they could do.
There was nothing any of my association could do. Only I could handle this situation. I pushed the tent flap aside and entered the brightly lit space.
The Delegate’s guards turned to me, raising their weapons, but lowered them again. One of them nodded a greeting. “Delegate.”
Delegate Namion raised his eyebrows, and the greenish glow from the lights above the abandoned tables made his tigerlike irises—yellow with a black rim—even more yellow. Even without the harsh light, he looked like a scarecrow.
“Well, this is quite an interesting occasion, meeting you here,” he said. The tone in his voice betrayed his surprise, and it didn’t sound like it was a pleasant surprise.
I bowed. Not strictly necessary, but giving me time to think. Seriously, what the fuck was he doing here? “That sentiment is mutual. I was told only council workers could come here.”
“Clearly,” he said. “And that’s why you’re here at this odd time? Snooping into the site where you’ve been told not to come? Really, does that justify the dead bodies outside?”
“We’ll talk about them if we can find any who are not illegal Tamerians.”
“They’re appointed by the council. They have nothing to do with me.” It was a very curt reply.
Liar. “By the council? Aren’t there enough local young men out of work? Does the job require thugs of this calibre? Just what are they protecting the site from?”
“Tell me, Delegate Wilson, what you are doing here, completely outside your authority, I should add.”
Out of all the things I could have told him, I decided to tell the truth. “I’m here to destroy this thing.”
He took in a sharp breath. Stared at me. Whatever he had expected, that was clearly not it. “Surely you are kidding?” His voice was soft. Genuine surprise this time.
“I wish I were.”
“But I don’t understand. This site contains historical artefacts thousands of years old.”
“Yes. One item has to be destroyed, urgently.”
He huffed. “Has to? Who says that?”
I made an attempt to explain about the array, and that the ship was going to use it to jump. I was forced to leave out huge chunks of information that involved things that I didn’t want to tell him, things that he knew, but I couldn’t let him know that we knew them, too, and things that were related to his activities that might lead to defamation claims from his side until such time that we could prove them.
Without these things, my story was incomplete and didn’t make much sense. His expression showed it. This was a disaster. We couldn’t possibly have run into a worse person here.
He spread his hands in a theatrical gesture, as he did when he spoke to the assembly. “And that is why you want to destroy this ancient artefact? So that the captain can’t get his hands on it? So that a ship that’s powerful enough to jump outside the galaxy can’t return here? They can jump here any time they want. They don’t need whatever it is that’s small enough to have been carried here in this ship.”
“They can’t. They’re too big and it would be too risky that they hit something. They need this array.”
He huffed again. “But then to destroy this thing . . . I would have thought you to possess more sense than that. Especially to come here in the middle of the night to do it. Illegally. You know what the inside of the Barresh jail looks like?”
I did, but wasn’t going to enlighten him. “Ultimately, it is necessary because the captain has not come here in peace.”
“No, of course not. He wants his planet back—”
“Which is a ridiculous claim—”
“Which is a valid claim.”
“Have you asked him what he plans to do with the Coldi people? Fix their genes, because apparently, they are faulty. Haven’t you listened to what he thinks of anyone else, including you or I? Don’t allow him to fool the assembly into thinking that if he doesn’t think much of the Coldi, he’s part of your team by default. Because he’s not. There is only one team he’s on: his own. And I’m not even sure it’s a team. The two people with him are slaves. This man does not come in peace.”
“And that is a reason to destroy this significant historical site?”
“It would be a pity about the site. It’s equal to the one in Miran—”
“Ha! Miran.” He obviously didn’t think much of them either.
“And there are a number of very similar sites on Asto. Much is known about the original design of the ship that can’t be gleaned from this site and the state it’s in. It’s really not well-preserved, and the only thing that is preserved at this site is dangerous.”
“How do you know all that? You’re not a historian. Why don’t
we take a real expert’s view on that? Oh, but you’ve just chased them all away with your armed thugs.”
“Please. We don’t have time. The array is reconfiguring. The ship will jump as soon as it’s done—”
“But this is a major historical site!”
“The future is always more important than the past.” A Coldi proverb.
He snorted. “I know what team you’re on. You’re rubbish. Your reasons are rubbish. You’re not impartial. Everything you say is rubbish, and you know it. Have a look at this.”
He walked a few paces to one of the long tables and flicked a lever up. A couple of bright spotlights came on near the ceiling in the middle of the tent.
They lit a rectangular area cordoned off by metal plates driven into the soft marshy ground, the gaps between them sealed by bright blue building putty. A pump hummed while keeping the water level down.
A wooden staircase went from the perimeter walkway into the site, where it ended at a platform that hung over the muddy ground. A couple of smaller platforms hung suspended over the ground from beams that spanned the area from one side of the perimeter walkway to the other, so that people could access the site without stepping on anything.
Most of the ground inside the excavation was muddy, with little fragments of rusty metal and other bits visible as little specks from where I stood. Someone had put out pegs with flags on top, presumably to outline the shape of what had once been a ship.
The remains were so fragile that if someone had dug through it by accident, they would barely have noticed.
With the exception of the dirt-encrusted object in the middle of the site.
If I hadn’t known any better, I would have judged the dark lump to be a barnacle-encrusted rock, half out of the ground. Except there were no rocks in Barresh.
The thing was dark and slimy-looking, covered in so much marine growth and encrustation that it obscured the shape. Someone had put little posts around it.
That had to be the thing that Kando Luczon had been looking for. Perhaps the thing that the Tamerians had been looking for. The relay that had responded to the signal from the ship.
“That is the thing we need to destroy. If you step aside and we get some time, we could dig it out and—”
“Dig it out? Never!”
Oh, crap, it was so easy to annoy this man. Everything about him seemed to be designed to rub people the wrong way. Maybe he’d been voted in because people figured he’d annoy everyone so much that he wouldn’t last long, buying various groups a bit of time to mount a proper election campaign. Maybe he knew that, too, and had resolved to be as annoying as he could possibly be within the short space of time that he was in the job.
I should not let him rile me so much.
“Inside that lump of growths is the thing that sent the burst that almost fried the Exchange and that made a wall collapse.”
He snorted. “That? I’m sorry, but if there is any piece of equipment in that rock, it has long since stopped working. I’m sure you have seen the state of the rest of the ship.”
“I’m sure you have seen the scan of the site. The captain has confirmed to me that this thing is here. The ship communicated with it. There are satellites up there in orbit around us and around Asto, and there are ones trailing us and Asto at the LaGrange points. Most of those look like pieces of space junk no bigger than a fist. We’ve managed to learn from the captain’s companions that those pieces are manoeuvring into position to form an array of Exchange nodes which will allow the big ship to jump. This here in the ground is a vitally important node because of where it is and because of its size.”
He again eyed the lump in the sand as if rearranging his thoughts. I saw it as a hopeful sign. He had to be reasonably smart to have made it this far.
I continued, “Right now, a lot of people are working very hard to destroy as many relays as possible. I’m sure you read the statement Ezhya Palayi sent from my account to the gamra assembly.”
He snorted. “I highly disagree with this kind of unilateral action.”
“They do have the right to defend their own world.”
“But why the hostility? That will only provoke the aggression that Asto so dearly wishes to see. Why go to such lengths to stop them? They will come anyway. We have no technology to stop them. I can only imagine that you want to stop the ship jumping because the Aghyrians will want to displace the Coldi.”
“These Aghyrians want to displace all of us. These people do not come here in peace. They come here to wage war.”
He snorted. “Well. That’s news to me. Why haven’t you raised that with the assembly? We could have instated a negotiating team.”
What do you think I’ve been doing? “The most damning evidence against the Aghyrians has only come to light overnight. We heard from Marin Federza.”
“Marin . . . Federza?” That seemed to shake him. “He’s . . . not here, is he? He’s gone . . . to Guild headquarters at Kedras, hasn’t he?”
“Yes,” I lied.
I would have laughed at the utterly confused face he pulled had the situation not been so serious. I would love to have known what he’d been told about Federza. Something that was obviously a lie, because he seemed genuinely surprised.
“Federza had some very interesting data that I will be presenting at the next assembly, but first, I have to make sure that we will still have an assembly. We have to stop that ship coming into the system. Step aside, and let us destroy the relay.”
“Never.” He crossed his arms over his chest.
“But I explained to you—”
“A lot of tall tales and false accusations, that’s what you told us. Nothing substantial.”
“Oh, there will be plenty of substantial evidence.” Including evidence against you. “I would go to the assembly if there were time. I would even call for an emergency meeting, but we don’t have that time. We have to destroy this thing as soon as possible. Before the array can form and the ship jumps. Tonight. So please stand aside and let us—”
“No.” He placed himself at the top of the stairs that went down to the dig site. “If you do that, you’ll have to destroy me, too.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“You dare call me stupid? Do you even know what you are saying? Do you know that I have the power to sack you and send you home to your miserable little planet, or better still I’ll send you to Asto since you seem to love them so much.”
A strange wailing sound echoed over the water outside. The walkway thudded with the sound of people running.
“What was that?” Delegate Namion said, turning his head to listen.
A high-pitched squealing noise echoed over the water.
People yelled in the distance.
Chapter 23
* * *
I HAD NO IDEA what was going on. The sounds and voices were unfamiliar, not close enough to be anywhere near the tent.
One of Delegate Namion’s guards went to have a look—and came back a moment later, pushing a Pengali youth in front of him, holding him by the hair. The young man kicked and tried to yank his hair free. His tail lashed up and around the guard’s arms. The guard grabbed the tail and pulled it until the young man’s feet almost left the ground.
You did not hold a Pengali by the tail. A woman, also Pengali, ran into the tent letting out an angry shriek, attempting to stab the guard with a fearfully sharp diamond knife. The guard tried to fend her off with his free arm. He wore armour, clearly.
Delegate Namion retreated while this fight was going on.
In the chaos, I gestured to Sheydu, who was looking in through the tent flap on the other side. I gestured, Quick.
She ran across the walkway and jumped over the side railing onto the platform below, landing with a heavy thud that made the planks under my feet shudder. Coldi strength never ceased to amaze me. If I’d have tried that, I would have broken both my legs.
She slid the pack from her shoulder.
Two more Pengali
had entered the tent, as well as another guard in response to calls for help from the first. They had restrained the woman with the knife, but the youth had managed to free himself.
Delegate Namion had retreated behind the tables where the researchers had been working. He was shouting at all of them to go outside and continue their fight there, while the guards struggled to get the situation under control. They were gamra guards, both Damarcian. I didn’t know that Damarcians made decent guards. Damarcians were thinking people who valued knowledge highly. They were thin and often moved awkwardly, and these were no exception.
Sheydu often rolled her eyes at the gamra guards’ competence, and I had come to see how she was right in many instances.
She couldn’t complain about these particular clumsy ones, because she used the chaos to unpack things from her bag in quick and efficient fashion. She laid out one glob-shaped wad of explosive, and another. Then a bag that went around the explosive that had a highly adhesive surface. Then two tiny buttonlike devices that she pushed into the soft material before closing the bags and tying them tightly at the top. She tapped her reader against the parcel where lumps indicated the position of the devices. They each emitted a tiny flash of light.
She flicked through a few screens on her reader. I recognised the “Device Activation” screen. Working. Contact.
She gave me the all systems go sign.
I needed to get all these people out.
But the struggle between the Pengali and the guards attempting to arrest them had spread. More Pengali had come into the tent. If these were all Reida’s supporters, Reida should call them off.
I checked the time.
Asha’s craft would be up there, destroying as many relays as possible. Ezhya would be doing the same, maybe talking to the sling, too, while it made its way back. I must make sure that that terrible weapon was not used.
I gave Sheydu the sign. She jumped from the fixed platform to one of the suspended ones. It swung back and forth with her weight. Carefully, she lowered one of the bags onto the encrusted surface of the relay. And then the other one. Tapped on her reader. Jumped back onto the fixed platform. The two explosive bags lay on the muddy surface like someone’s discarded garbage. The bags were white, so stood out clearly. A little light blinked at the top of each.
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