Ambassador 5: Blue Diamond Sky (Ambassador: Space Opera Thriller Series)

by Patty Jansen

  So I went through my umpteenth security reshuffle. I absolutely fucking hated this with a passion of ten thousand flaming supernovae.

  Not only that, it had to be done soon so that we were fully operational before all the delegates returned to the assembly for the elections. I was sure I would have to do some lobbying in favour of Marin Federza and I would be under intense scrutiny for not breaking any rules about giving candidates unfair advantages or disadvantages through information being leaked from my correspondence. That meant having a secure system.

  Great. Just great.

  What was worse, I had to tell Thayu that we had postpone our next meeting with Lilona Shrakar until after the elections because of this stupid situation.

  “I’m extremely sorry about it, but if the assembly smells blood, and finds out that we’re conducting business with the main candidate’s partner, they’d turn us out on the street.”

  Thayu nodded, but I could see the pain on her face. I knew how much she’d been looking forward to that visit.

  Lilona had taken all of the medical knowledge from the Aghyrian ship, and was going to report to us what she would need to develop a treatment that would make me genetically compatible with Thayu. I still wasn’t sure what to think about it. It seemed the sort of thing that you went to talk to your parents about before you did it. Hey, Dad, I’m going to change my genes so that I may look different, act differently and may essentially no longer be the same person.

  The thought gave me the shivers.

  But I promised her, and she was upset about the delay, even if she didn’t show it.

  So my punishment was to sit in my office and sort files. And I grew increasingly annoyed at the number of times that I’d done this previously, and knew that we couldn’t cordon sensitive information off from my Coldi networks. And so this problem was going to rear its ugly head again and again. Seriously, for fuck’s sake, as if I had nothing better to do.

  And I also couldn’t help thinking about Melissa and her conspiracy theories, and so when I got really bored, and I couldn’t stand the sight of one more directory list, I looked up the company that had been responsible for sending us the infected message to see if I could poke them with a really sharp stick.

  Gamra security would have investigated them ages ago, but I killed some time looking at their services and pricing. Besides archiving services, they sold hacking protection and insurance against security break-ins—ha! First you freak out the client by showing how easy it is to crack their systems, and then you sell them just the thing to fix it.

  The company’s information wasn’t, generally speaking, as unprofessional as of some of the other hawkers I had seen. Their information was well-presented, clean and professional, with logos and other marks of “serious” businesses that operated anywhere outside Barresh.

  They spelled out what they did, what all the various plans entailed—they involved mainly buying data—and while reading through the various articles, I learned things I had never known about.

  A business customer could, for example, track all of a buyer’s purchases through Trader Guild records—this would mean that the company also had inroads to that system. They could then get back to the customer and offer goods that required repeat purchases for a cheaper price.

  A political customer could buy tables of gamra’s likely future decisions sorted by subject and likelihood that the proposal would make it into law. There were prices on various levels of lobbying required to swing a decision one way or another. One could also buy agendas for future meetings of the gamra assembly. Those “products” just gave the date of the meeting with agenda to be streamed later.

  I’d known that this was going on, and some of it was unavoidable, but the sheer blatancy of the activity of this company was as astonishing as it was fascinating.

  As far as I could see, it was all white-collar rule-bending, and there was no conspiracy involved, no mafia or crime—although I agreed with Melissa that the Zhori mafia on Earth had been disturbingly quiet recently. This was a data-mining operation that appeared to be doing quite well for the company. They even included some quotes from people who had used the company.

  “My sales doubled in the first month after I started using this program,” one owner chirped.

  Well, they had better, because the prices were a bit ridiculous, clearly targeted at more than just the small business owner.

  Should I notify Federza that the Trader Guild systems had also been breached? Likely they would have been notified by gamra security already.

  I yawned. Damn, why was dinnertime still so far away?

  Back to the directories.

  The door opened. It let in a snatch of sound from the hall: Eirani telling one of the domestic staff what to order from the grocery delivery people, and a squeal of Ayshada’s laughter. At least someone was having fun.

  Then the door rattled shut again.

  Devlin had come in.

  “I’m not quite ready for the next batch yet,” I said. That’s what you got from letting yourself get distracted.

  “I’m not here because of that. There is a message for you, Muri, from the Exchange. It’s important.”

  Just what I needed. Gamra security with an added disaster, no doubt. “Can I take it here?”

  “No, it’s off world, and there are visuals.”

  Even worse.

  I got up from my desk and followed him into the hallway, wondering what the hell this could be about.

  Eirani stood at the top of the stairs talking to one of the young girls from the kitchen. Her name was Yelida, and she had joined my household recently.

  A loud squeal echoed through the apartment. A female voice said, in keihu, “Ayshada, be quiet. People are talking.”

  Which was followed by another squeal and a burst of child’s laughter.

  Devlin chuckled and I had to laugh, too. I was sure his being a member of the Azimi clan would cause problems, but for now Nicha’s son was an utter delight and a true ray of sunlight in a household that had been far too serious of late.

  The babysitter was just carrying the little boy across the foyer when we reached the door to the hub. Nicha was talking to someone in the living room, and his son had clearly decided to join him, testing the—excellent—acoustics in the hallway in the process.

  There was no one else in the semi-darkness of the hub, with its control benches and blinking lights. Sheydu often sat in there, at the workstation at the back, but she must have gone somewhere else. I had to admit that the comings and goings of Sheydu were a mystery to me most of the time.

  I sat on the central bench, normally Devlin’s spot. I put on an earpiece. Devlin reached over my shoulder and hit a button.

  A projection sprang into the air. First a brief flash of the gamra logo and then a man I knew well. It was Yetaris Damaru, the owner of the Barresh Exchange. He used live projection which showed the top half of his body as clearly as if he sat in the room with me. Showing off his new technology.

  “Good afternoon, Delegate.” It was eerie how it looked like his body and head grew out of the top of the bench that held the projector, as if he’d fallen into the thing up to his waist.

  “Good afternoon. I understand you wanted to speak with me?”

  “I received a communication from the Athens Exchange. Amarru wants to talk to you.”

  Normally these kinds of communications would go through messaging, but clearly she had judged this important enough to use voice and image. This was one expensive communication.

  “I’m ready. I can talk.”

  “Good. I’ll put her on.”

  He winked out and was followed by a number of clicks and crackles and flashes as the signal was relayed and relayed yet again as it spanned a good deal of the galaxy.

  Another image sprang to life. Not three-dimensional and with a much poorer resolution. It showed a middle-aged, somewhat dumpy Coldi woman in a utilitarian unisex shirt with her hair pulled into a simple ponytail. Am
arru was not known for her style.

  “Cory.” Her warm voice always made me feel at home.

  “Amarru. How unusual to hear from you in this way.” Everything about this screamed that it was not a social call. Amarru didn’t make frivolous calls anyway, and she had probably the least-developed sense of humour of all the people I worked with.

  A typical Coldi, she got straight to business. “I understand that you investigated two days ago about any people from Earth having travelled to Barresh recently.”

  “I did.” Seriously, that woman knew everything. “Did you find anyone, because I didn’t.”

  “Well, I don’t know. Judge for yourself. I got a strange message from one of my local network publicity people. He was contacted by a woman who had clearly never dealt with anyone from off world before. She was very upset, very scared and my colleague took a long time to get out of her what the problem was and whether she was even in the right place to get help.”

  I nodded. If things were as they had been when I lived in Athens, it was not exactly easy to find Coldi people, or sources that put you into contact with them or their authorities, especially if you didn’t know what you were looking for.

  “My contact made a recording of the visit. I’m going to play a part for you, because I have no idea what to make of it.”

  Amarru’s face disappeared and was replaced with a scene in an office, as seen through a camera that stood on a desk. It showed a good section of desk surface covered with a protective sheet and a few bits of electronics. A couple of armchairs stood around a low table on the other side of the room. A Coldi man sat there, as did a middle-aged woman with greying blond hair that hung loose to her shoulders. She wore a stylish pantsuit in pinstripe dark grey. She was in her fifties, I guessed.

  I didn’t know the Coldi man and had no idea where this was recorded. The view out the window showed another building which I presumed to be on the other side of a street. Maybe in the city of Athens somewhere. The blocky building style was about right for that.

  The Coldi man said, in Isla, “Have you heard from him at all since he left?”

  The woman shook her head, wiping her eyes. “I don’t understand. I mean, he told me that he’d be somewhere extremely remote and I wouldn’t be able to contact him. He’d let me know as soon as he was back in civilisation again, but that is more than four weeks ago now.” She had a strange, clipped accent that I’d heard before but couldn’t remember where it was from.

  “Does he often go to places like that?”

  “He does. He loves adventure and he’s been hiking everywhere and sailing and climbing mountains and kayaking down raging rivers. He’s been away this long before, and no, he doesn’t have a mistress if that’s what you’re thinking. I’ve been with him on some trips, but we have a disabled son, and someone needs to be home to look after him.”

  “So, when, after four weeks, you heard nothing, what did you do?”

  “I went to the police, but they just nodded, took down all my information and I’ve heard nothing since. They seem to act like I’m crazy.”

  “Is that why you’re here?”

  “Well, they traced the location of the last message he sent me to Athens. Also, the police asked me to go through his desk and his computer and other things that belong to him. I found this.”

  She put a reader on the table. The Coldi man held it up slyly so that the camera could see what was on the screen and the image zoomed in.

  It was an ad, laid out in a sparse, professional style. There was a picture of a couple of rocky islands with greenery on top protruding from a turquoise ocean.

  Underneath it said, “A place of unrivalled rugged beauty, where you will be guaranteed to find privacy and walk on beaches where no human has walked before.”

  In smaller letters, it extolled the virtues of the company, called Exclusive Adventures, and they included, “exquisite food catering for all dietary requirements” and “guaranteed confidentiality”. It said, “If you travel with us, we guarantee that no one else gets told about your adventure, so you can keep coming back to your favourite spots year after year, without the risk of your locations being spoiled by other tourists.”

  As activities they listed survival camping (No gun licence required!), hiking, swimming, skindiving, sailing, surfing (with plesiosaurs!)

  I took in a sharp breath. Plesiosaurs. Beisili.

  A message in a bottle.

  “Stop the projection.”

  Amarru did, and her face returned to the projection, looking concerned. “Cory?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “What, yes?”

  “I think I know what this is about. This is my missing man, the sender of the message. Who is it? What’s he doing in Barresh? How did he get here if he didn’t show up in the Exchange records?”

  “I don’t know. What are you talking about?”

  “You mean, you don’t know? You always know everything.”

  “What am I supposed to know?” Why did I always forget that she had no sense of humour?

  I quickly explained what had happened to us in the past few days and why I had been trying to find people from Earth through the Exchange.

  She frowned deeply. “So you think this is the same person?”

  “There is no doubt. It talks about surfing with plesiosaurs. I just did that, a few days ago. They’re called beisili and they’re not all that harmless.”

  “But why the note in the jar? I’m guessing this man would have been with a guide. Where is the guide?”

  “Obviously something happened. We had a big storm a few days ago. Maybe their vehicle flipped or sank and he managed to get himself to an island but there are no other survivors.”

  “Ugh. What are the chances of him surviving for any length of time?”

  “Depends on if he’s injured and if he happened to have landed in a place that has fresh water. Some of those islands don’t have any. Or if there are hostile tribes.”

  She blew out a heavy breath. “I don’t like this at all, Cory.”

  “No, it could get messy.”

  “Really messy, for us, too. I checked and we have no records of him leaving Earth through the Exchange.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “That is a very good question, but it’s highly likely he travelled on someone else’s ID, and that seems very odd for a legitimate tourist operation. In fact, the whole thing is odd. No one runs tourist trips off world. Not from Earth at least. Too much hassle, too expensive.”

  “This gig is only for very rich people. Have you seen what this company charges?”

  “Yeah.” But she didn’t sound convinced. Amarru, who rarely left the Exchange complex, had very little idea of how little money some people had and how lucky she was not to have to worry about living expenses.

  “Do you . . . want me to go and find this guy?”

  “Yeah, probably. Be quick. It’s not going to look good when the media gets a sniff of it before we’ve found him.”

  I could agree with that. “Could you send me all the information that you got from his wife?”

  “Sending it now. There is a fair bit of stuff: the rest of the recording, communication details and other stuff that I personally haven’t had the time look at. Good luck with it.”

  “Keep in contact.”

  “I will.”

  She logged off and I sat staring into the dark space where her image had been, while the transfer lights blinked.

  “Muri?” Devlin said. “She is sending something for you.”

  “I know.” I turned to him. “Go and call everyone in here. Tell them that it’s important.”

  He nodded and left.

  CHAPTER 7

  * * *

  WHILE I WAITED for everyone to turn up, I opened the first document Amarru had sent. It detailed the man’s personal information. His name was Robert Davidson and his occupation was listed as Chief Executive of Execo Ltd., which turned out to be an engineering compan
y that designed and adapted specialised mining equipment. He came from Cape Town. Ah, that accounted for his wife’s strange accent. Did that mean she had travelled to Athens especially to see if she could find out why her husband had not contacted her? Likely, but that would be an expensive trip on the suborbital.

  I also watched the rest of the recording at double speed, which made people’s voices go funny, but it didn’t provide me with that much more useful information. The Coldi man—some sort of legal representative like Nixie Chan in Rotterdam?—was cautious when talking to her. He said he’d investigate—and that investigation apparently consisted of contacting Amarru—and proceeded to ask her for some personal details that he cross-checked against the Exchange records to be sure that she or her husband were really not known. It didn’t look like they were. Whatever possessed a man like that to come on this trip?

  By the time I’d finished watching it, the first of my association were coming in. Thayu and Nicha, with Reida. Then Veyada and Sheydu and Deyu. Evi and Telaris were missing. I was beginning to have a feeling that sending them to visit their family might not have been as smart as I thought. For one, they had much more intricate knowledge about survival in the wilderness of Barresh than any of the others did.

  “We’ve found the owner of the note in the jar,” I began, and quickly brought them up to speed with what Amarru had said. I showed them a couple of still images from the recording, especially the parts that showed the ad.

  Nicha’s eyes widened. “He’s paid what? to go on this trip?”

  “Yeah, we’re not talking about some down-and-out poor guy who got duped into coming here. He’s paid for the privilege, and paid dearly.”

  “That’s not Barresh,” Veyada said, nodding at the image of the islands. “The sea is the wrong colour.”

  “You’re right, but I think that whoever wrote this ad knew very well that the whole expedition was going to be illegal. Seeing as this guy is seriously rich, they might even have charged him for Exchange fees, and then used the permit of someone else whom they bumped off the flight.” I was thinking on my feet. The possibilities for foul play were endless.