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

by Patty Jansen

  The plane glided onto the beach and came to a halt. I opened the door.

  Behind me, Thayu said, “Wait.”

  She grabbed my shoulder and pushed me down with one hand while taking the gun from her arm bracket with the other.

  “What is it?” The cabin had leaked during the storm and the ground where I sat was wet. Just when I thought I couldn’t get any more disgusting.

  Thayu had ducked behind the other side of the exit. I unclicked my gun from its bracket.

  “What did you see?”

  “Someone here.”

  “Wouldn’t that be our three Pengali?”

  “They would have come out to greet us.”

  “Maybe. Maybe they’re asleep. Maybe they’re afraid of planes.”

  “Look, this is why we shouldn’t have taken them. We don’t know what they’re going to do.”

  “I was actually thinking we may need to go the other way: I wanted to employ some Pengali in the office.”

  Thayu snorted. I couldn’t see her face, but I imagined that she rolled her eyes.

  “It’s my job to try to make sense of different people and find some sort of compromise.”

  “That was between the Coldi and Aghyrians, and the Aghyrians are gone now.”

  “There is a lot more to understand about different people. I’d like to understand Tamerians, too, but Pengali would be a good place to start, because I don’t understand them either. Do you see anything yet?”

  “Nope. You might want to stop talking.” She slowly shuffled into the door opening and let herself drop to the sand.

  I followed her example.

  For a while we stood still, scanning the edge of the forest, listening for the tiniest sound over the crashing of waves.

  Then she slowly walked sideways to the spot where the solar charger had been. Deep drag marks showed where it had been taken away, in the direction of the forest.

  One thing I didn’t understand: there were no boats other than the ones we had brought. If there were other people here, how would they have gotten here?

  Robert?

  Or other accomplices of his who had been in hiding on the island?

  We followed the drag marks to the forest, all the while scanning dark places under the trees and vantage points. If they were Pengali, we wouldn’t see them.

  After last night’s storm, it was so humid and pressing that I was soon sweating. Not a leaf moved.

  We came to the forest’s edge, where the drag marks simply stopped. I couldn’t see any footsteps either.

  Thayu looked up, and there was our charger, hanging in a tree. What the hell?

  “Should we get it down?” I asked.

  But she motioned me to be quiet. She pushed into the forest very slowly without making a sound. On the forest floor, half-hidden under loose leaves, lay four Pengali, asleep. None of them were our drivers. These ones wore leather gear. A couple of guns lay on a piece of leather. They also had armour: vests made from metal threads with tiny resin beads. Their shoulders and upper arms were marked with large pentagonal grey-brown patches.

  Thousand Islands tribe.

  I didn’t know what I had expected. I knew that the Thousand Islands tribe had a town along the south coast, and that they traded manufactured goods in their own, strange, Pengali way. These were goods that Pengali made, from local materials. I knew that the only Pengali who still lived traditional tribal lives did so by choice and only for a short period, but I hadn’t expected sophisticated clothing and weapons either. No, I was wrong, I hadn’t expected them to produce sophisticated clothing and weapons.

  We backed away very quietly.

  “Where are our drivers?” I whispered once we were back on the beach. I realised that when we had come here before, I’d forgotten to ask the Pengali drivers about the currents and the campfire we had found. Had that been a Thousand Islands tribe camp, too? With the storage jar? Had someone perhaps lost a whole container of these jars and were they distributed all over these islands?

  But Thayu looked over my shoulder, and said, “Shit.”

  I turned around. At the far end of the beach, another group had come out of the shadows—five Pengali, Thousand Islanders, pushing Langga, Maray and Della in front. Their hands were bound behind their backs and their tails were tied together.

  Langga’s eyes widened when he saw us.

  One of their captors yelled out, and more Pengali came out of the forest, including the ones we had just seen asleep. There were at least twenty. They surrounded us, a wall of small people armed with guns the likes of which I had never seen before: they looked like they were made of resin and wood, but their shapes were sleek and modern and whatever went inside, whether they were charge guns or projectile, I had no doubt that these weapons were deadly. That’s what people always said about Pengali: do not, under any circumstance, underestimate them.

  We had assumed that by staying away from the tribe's settlement, the tribe would cause us no trouble. We had been wrong.

  “What are you doing on our land?” the leader said.

  She was a middle-aged woman, with greying hair at her temples. She wore a singlet made from a rubbery black material and leather trousers and vest. A leather band around her head held her hair out of her eyes and contained the usual adornments of coloured glass beads and eel teeth. But it also contained a little device with a lens.

  Thayu raised her gun, but I put mine away. I had no illusion that we could fight this many people. I would have to solve this in the best way I knew: with my mouth.

  I stepped forward and knelt in the sand. “I’m sorry about trespassing on your land. We came to look for people who have been causing trouble for everyone in the region. I have employed the Pengali you hold captive. It is my fault that they are on your land.” I didn’t know if I used the right words and right noun inflections. Keihu was not my strong point, but I supposed I should be happy she did speak keihu, because my knowledge of Pengali was less than rudimentary.

  The woman snorted.

  I continued, “I offer my sincere apologies. If you ask the Pengali Office in Barresh, they will confirm that I did attempt to ask for permission to travel here.”

  “They cannot give it.” Her keihu was harshly accented.

  “She told me that. I didn’t know where else to get it. She said she didn’t know where to find people from your tribe in Barresh.”

  “Did they tell you that, eh?” She said something in Pengali to her companions, and they all made snorting piggy noises of laughter.

  “They did, and honestly, that’s all I can say. I am not proud that I know nothing about your ways. I came here to find a man, because I had been ordered to find him. I have since learned that he did not want to be found, or at least not by us.”

  She snorted again. She flicked her tail, and her armed companions backed off a little.

  She sat in the sand. “You talk much.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m afraid talking is my thing. My name is Cory Wilson. I am a representative of gamra.”

  Judging by her face, that didn’t hold much sway by her, not that I could blame her.

  “My talking name is Abri. Are you a friend of the sky stone men?”

  “You mean Robert?”

  “We call him hairy face. There is another one we call red face. They are ones with the hair on their face and half-blind little eyes that see nothing in the dark. You look like them, but . . .” She eyed my face, but these days my beard regrowth was limited to a few hairs here and there.

  “I am from the same world. But I am interested in what you just said: there is more than one man? The man you are talking about, hairy face, is he the one who was on the other beach yesterday?”

  “He’s been there for a few days. The other one I haven’t seen for a while. They come for the same reason. They buy sky stones and cut them. They give our young people easy money that they will go and spend in the city on things they do not need. They will not take their vile business off this
island and every time we come and someone is here, they will shoot at us. They should leave and we told them so. This is our island.”

  “Do they come often?”

  “Not often. But we do not want them. We do not understand why these stones are worth so much to them. When they are not seen as a part of the land where they grew, they have no value.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “Red face first came here ten seasons ago. He was alone, and he watched us fish, and some of our people spoke to him. We had some young people who wanted to go to the city, and he told us he’d help them. He did. It was all right. Then he came back later with two other people. They did fishing and he took more young people. And he came back a few times. Then he brought hairy face, and we knew he was different, because he had evil in his eyes. He did not go fishing, but he went digging in our streams. He came back the next dry season and took machines to makes holes in rock. And then the next time red face came back with some people, they all started making holes in rock. They collected sky stones. We told them that we didn’t like it, but they made threats to us. So we told our young not to go to the city anymore. They ignored us, so we said that if they didn’t stop taking sky stones, they would not be allowed back. Next they brought Kasamo.”

  Gusamo? My heart was thudding.

  “He is not like the others. He is a friend. He comes to us to learn our ways. He teaches the youngsters to ride on waves on pieces of wood. Then something happened. He ran away from the other men. He made a camp here. Then hairy face discovered him and killed him. But beisili are his friend. The beisili took him to us, even if he was already dead, and we followed the trail. We found his camp. We found evidence of hairy face’s evil.”

  “What evidence?”

  She rose suddenly. “Come. You will not like to see this, but I think you must.”

  The circle of armed tribespeople parted for her, and Thayu and I followed her to the very far end of the beach, where we had not been before. She preceded us into the forest.

  We had only gone a few steps when I became aware of a vile stench. I looked over my shoulder at Thayu, who had a much more sensitive nose than I did, and she had fallen back, covering her nose with her hand. She held her other hand close to her gun.

  Abri pushed aside some vegetation and exposed a little clearing. The ground had been disturbed, and at first it was hard to see what I was looking at.

  “They think they can get away with killing Pengali because they think no one cares about Pengali.”

  The dirt-covered body half-buried in the ground was Pengali, I thought. It was hard to tell, and I didn’t want to get one step closer.

  “Who is this?”

  “I do not know. Someone from the Washing Stones tribe. Hairy face does not like prisoners. He brings them here, shoots them and buries them in the sand. We have seen him do it. Kasamo ran away, but hairy face found him anyway. He killed Kasamo and buried him like this, but the beisili took him out.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “We can see the hole, back there.” She waved towards the other end of the beach. “We can see his footsteps. We can smell his scent. We can see beisili tracks. We know that beisili brought him to us.”

  Damn it, so that was what we had seen.

  We retreated from the site back to the beach, where it was easier to breathe and Thayu uncovered her nose.

  “I’m reasonably certain that I know who wrote the note in the jar,” I said to Thayu.

  “I thought we already knew that.”

  “No, it wasn’t Robert. It was the second man on the trip. I think they came to the island for the supposed surfing holiday, and there was a disagreement. Clovis left and Gusamo fled to this beach. Robert found him and shot him. I have no idea why the disagreement happened, but we won’t know the exact truth before we find Robert.”

  The Pengali were looking at us with suspicion. Maybe some of them had never heard Coldi spoken.

  “We need to go back to our people on the other beach,” I said to them. “We have a person who is injured and she needs to go to the hospital. We came here to retrieve our equipment that’s hanging up there in the tree. We need to find Robert so that we can take him back to our world.” Meanwhile, I wondered how many other bodies lay buried in the sand. This pristine island had a dark secret. We’d found no trace of Melissa’s crew or her Kedrasi partner.

  Abri’s face was very serious. “Hairy face went to the city. We are ready to track him and fight the Washing Stones tribe for letting this evil man onto their land. It’s through them that these men came here.”

  Langga snorted and said something sharp in Pengali. A few others protested.

  Before an argument broke out, I said, “If you release our boat drivers, we will take everyone back to the city and leave you alone.”

  She snorted, but flicked her tail. One of the other Pengali extracted a glittering glass-stone knife and sliced through Della’s bonds, and then Maray and Langga’s. The three huddled together. Langga took his knife from his belt and cut through the rope that held their three tails together. He snorted, his nostrils flaring. Holding or tying down a Pengali’s tail was a serious insult.

  He made a sharp remark in Pengali. Abri snapped something back.

  I stepped between them. “Look, I’m sorry about coming here with these people. I hired these Pengali and I wish to have no part in your disagreements. We’ll leave now, and we are going to find this man.”

  “And we will come.” Abri snapped her tail.

  “We will be there, too,” Langga said.

  CHAPTER 20

  * * *

  I HAD NOT imagined that we would return to Barresh in the company of two warring tribes, yet that seemed exactly what was happening. The Thousand Islands Pengali insisted on coming with us to make their displeasure of the situation clear. And if I’d doubted Langga’s assessment that Thousand Islands Pengali would have occupied the beach with a lot more people, a whole bunch of other Pengali came out of the forest. I’d heard people say that you could visit a place and think you were alone, but all the while hundreds of Pengali could be watching you.

  Abri ordered a couple of them to lower our solar charger from the tree, while most of them congregated around Langga, Maray and Della on the beach. I kept an eye out for hostilities, holding my arms crossed so I could grab my gun from its bracket the moment trouble erupted. I assumed that the contract of employment for boat drivers included returning the boat intact and the driver alive.

  A lot of shouting and tail snapping went on, and the argument was still going by the time Thayu and I climbed back into the plane.

  Thayu shook her head. “Those two tribes have had their petty disagreements for many thousands of years. I don’t think you’ll be successful in getting them to accept each other’s existence.”

  “Well, I can only try.”

  “Because your mouth is your biggest weapon.” She grinned. “They will keep fighting and won’t bother us.”

  “But we need the boats.”

  “They will come. They like money more than bickering.”

  She was right, because the last glimpse I had of the beach before the rocky ridge of the island blocked my view showed that our three boats had just cleared the surf. If anything, Pengali understood the concept of completing a task for payment.

  That they were leaving the Thousand Islands people on the beach with no means of transport, I couldn’t feel terribly sad about. On second thoughts, the Thousand Islands people probably had some boats hidden around the corner. Or maybe they rode beisili now that those all seemed to have finished their reproductive activities and were heading back out to sea in small groups.

  Thayu and I returned to the other beach and while the Pengali were still motoring around the point, we brought Melissa out of the shelter to the plane. She lay on a stretcher, was awake, delirious and incoherent. Telaris reported that the wound looked infected and that if she couldn’t be taken home today, he would have to
try to get the bullet out.

  I told him no, thanks, and we removed some seats from the back of the plane to make room for her.

  Thayu set up the charger and contacted the hospital. We also contacted the Barresh guards to be on the look out for Robert, as well as the Exchange not to allow him to leave. I hoped that would work, because he had obviously come into town under a false identity, and appearances were easily changed. Also, how did one describe the concept of a beard to someone not familiar with beards or the fact that they were easily removed?

  The Exchange informed me that there was a raft of urgent messages for me. I briefly spoke to Devlin, who informed me that a good number of those messages were from the medico who was upset that I had ignored her directives not to do anything too strenuous.

  It seemed medical people had this air of self-importance all over the universe.

  There was also some news that he’d discuss with me when I got back. I didn’t like the sound of that, but I could do nothing about it until I got home.

  When everything was packed and secured and the plane charged, we set off. The plane rose quickly in the bright morning sunshine. The bad weather was gone and the day bright and clear. The islands floated like little green dots in the turquoise sea, like the jewels that Robert sold.

  “Isn’t this just the most beautiful sight ever?” I said to Thayu.

  “It’s nice. Not as pretty as sunrise over Athyl.”

  And that was the measure by which a Coldi compared everything. “That’s very pretty, too. But I’m thinking we should come back here, ask for the proper permissions and learn about the Pengali life. I would like to visit the Thousand Islands settlements.” If anything, I owed it to Gusamo, whose business I had used, who had respected the Pengali and who would never return home.

  Maybe I should start a surf school for bored and directionless youths. It was all very well concentrating on the big picture things that happened at gamra, but it was no good treating the city where I lived as something quaint to be viewed from the window of a moving train. I needed Pengali in my household, no matter how much Thayu would hate it. Eirani, too, probably.