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

by Patty Jansen

  I asked her whether Robert had spoken of Jasper. Melissa said no, and she was surprised about my question. Why did I think Robert and Jasper had anything to do with each other? I guessed that we were dealing with two men who were utter professionals.

  The interview stressed her, and when I thought I had exhausted her memory I asked Thayu to stop recording. I felt terrible about leaving her without anyone to visit her.

  “Do you want me to contact your family?” I asked.

  “I already contacted them. My father said he’d come . . . stepfather,” she amended.

  “Does he still have permission to go to Asto?”

  She shook her head. “His family has lived in southern Germany for a long time.”

  “What clan are they?”

  She glanced at my Domiri earrings. “German.”

  “Fair enough.”

  I let a silence lapse. Just like not every human wanted to return to Earth, not every Coldi wanted to return to Asto. Me and my big mouth.

  “Do you have any other family? Brothers? Sisters?”

  “I have a brother-in-law. He says he’s met you.”

  “Has he?”

  “A few years ago.”

  “He has a better memory than I do—wait, is he Coldi?”

  “No. He’s German.”

  I stared at her. “You’re not telling me that Klaus Messner is your brother-in-law?”

  She smiled. “You have a better memory than you think.”

  And then I remembered the things she had told me when I first visited her with the note in the jar. She’d been worried about a conspiracy listening in on us. To her, the security breach had been a bigger story than me and my jar. If Klaus was her brother-in-law, then maybe there was a reason for that. And maybe I, with my stupid attitude that I know better, should start listening to her.

  CHAPTER 23

  * * *

  KLAUS MESSNER, I explained to Thayu on the way back, was a top-level spy for the Exchange. We had met him briefly, when travelling in the hidden freight train from Rotterdam to Athens after the attack on us at the airport.

  “He was the man who showed us onto the hidden carriage?” she asked.

  “Yes, that one. I keep meaning to have a chat with him. His story will be interesting.”

  “I’m wondering if he is the one . . .” She fingered her upper lip. Like Thayu usually did, she would not say any more until she could verify her suspicion. Yes, if we went back to Earth, scheduling a talk with Klaus might be beneficial. I now had the excuse: to let him know about Melissa.

  We came home not much later, were informed by Devlin that everything had been quiet and everyone had packed.

  “They young ones are very excited,” he said. “They have never travelled outside the system.”

  “They deserve to come. They’ve been very valuable.”

  Thayu and I finally retired to the bedroom. It had been an extremely long and tiring day, but we still found some energy for each other before falling into a deep sleep.

  The various members of my association started rummaging around long before I was ready to wake up. It wasn’t even light yet, but Nicha came into the room, Thayu started going through the cupboard in our room looking for something that he’d come to ask about, and there were scuffles and voices in the hall.

  Urgh.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing sleep out of my eyes. Thayu opened the door to the hall. A smell of freshly baked bread drifted in, together with sounds of people talking and laughing. Better go and have breakfast then.

  I got dressed in my house clothes—no need to risk getting food stains on my gamra blues. Most of my association were already at the breakfast table. Deyu and Reida in their blacks, Veyada in the grey suit that he wore under his white lawyer’s gown. I grabbed a quick bite before submitting to Eirani’s ministrations: doing my hair, helping me into my blues and brushing the hair off my back.

  “I won’t have anyone to do this while I’m gone.”

  “First impressions count,” she said. “And I can’t count on those people having any sense of sophistication that they will tell if something is not right. But I’ve done my best.”

  “Thank you, Eirani.”

  She squeezed my shoulder. “If I had a son, I would have wanted him to be like you. You make me proud.”

  I had an insane idea to take Eirani to my father’s farmhouse one day. She was like a favourite aunt, always fussing, but only happy when there was something or someone to fuss about. It would be my thank you to her, and she would like being introduced to the concept of scones and jam. Rephrase that: she would go nuts over them.

  I went back into the hall, where everyone was ready.

  Overnight, Evi and Telaris appeared to have sourced proper handcuffs and manacles, which they had put on Robert. He looked pale, unshaven, only slightly cleaner than before, still badly sunburnt and worn out. Evi and Telaris were a head taller than their charge, very, very black and very imposing. They wore their blacks, with blue gamra bands around their upper arms, hard armour of the type that went over the top of clothing and a variety of weapons and devices.

  People shouldered bags and weapons and the column started moving towards the door, watched by Devlin and Eirani and the nanny with Ayshada, who was waving and yelling “Bye! Bye!” at the top of his voice. His hair was getting a bit long, but I would hate Nicha to cut it. It was elfin-like, sleek, fine and iridescent purple. I’d never seen that before, and it amazed me. In places I frequented one rarely saw Coldi babies. It turned out they sometimes had purple hair.

  Then we were out on the gallery and on our way.

  It was still very early, many delegates were still away, and only a few people saw us walking to the station. The train, too, was virtually empty. It grew a lot busier at the airport, where we waited in the business lounge. During the trip here, or indeed at home, Robert had not said a single word. He seemed to have resigned himself to the fact that we were going to hand him over to Nations of Earth.

  But while we were waiting, and he was sitting in between Evi and Telaris, I asked him, “What name did you travel under?”

  He snorted. “Fuck off.”

  All right. I’d find out soon enough anyway.

  * * *

  The trip was uneventful. The Exchange process messed with time, so I had no idea how much real time had passed when the shuttle floated down into the giant maw in the ground that was the entrance to the departure hall of the Athens Exchange. To me, it always felt like the trip took the best part of a day, but even on occasions when I’d taken an old wind-up watch, it would say 4 o’clock when going into the jump and it would say 12 o’clock coming out, for a process that felt like five minutes.

  It was dark in Athens, because the Exchange and regular air traffic control had long ago come to agreements about air traffic and not getting in each other’s way. The Moon was out and the sky clear.

  During the flight a lot of other passengers had given us curious looks. Most of them were Coldi, although I spotted one keihu woman who, when the craft was manoeuvring into its landing bay, donned a veil and changed into an attractive middle-eastern woman.

  If nothing else, that brought home to me how necessary it was to have a formal structure for travel and access to different societies, or every place would be rife with hidden identities of people who were someone else on another world, and the whole mess would become impossible to keep track of.

  The door opened. Passengers started gathering their bags.

  “All passengers, please remain seated,” one of the crew announced.

  That was unusual. People craned their neck to look at the door in the back of the cabin. A couple of heavily-armed guards came in. For us.

  “Delegate, come with us please.”

  I glanced at Thayu. She gestured, go. They were gamra guards, wearing black with thin blue stripes.

  I took my bags and we followed them out the door and down the gangplank. They didn’t stop to explain
what was going on, but led us across the gallery, past the other craft that stood there. It looked like the Exchange had just opened for the day, because there was a lot of activity on all levels of the hall. The noise of departing craft was deafening.

  The guards led us out a side door into a long corridor.

  “Phew,” Deyu said behind me. “A lot of noise in there.”

  Nicha explained to her about how the Exchange worked and a bit of its history.

  “Really, did they make a separate entity just for the bit of land that surrounds it?” Deyu’s eyes widened.

  “And the city it’s in,” I said. “Which is a local city, where Coldi have lived for almost two hundred years.”

  Both she and Reida drank in the information. Sheydu and Veyada would have been here before, maybe once or twice with Ezhya, although their exposure to local people would have been fairly limited. Evi and Telaris were veterans, but it was the first time that neither had bothered with any kind of disguise. No sunglasses, no coloured lenses to turn their moss-green eyes black, no hair dye in their copper-coloured curls.

  In fact, none of us pretended to be anyone other than ourselves.

  We had gone quite a way before I realised that the guards were taking us to the main public foyer. I had wanted to talk to Amarru, but I guessed it would have to wait.

  Indeed they used their passes to open the large double door that led into the foyer, the door that was normally only used by people coming in.

  The huge hall on the other side had changed little since I last came there. It was still full of people. There were still giant news screens on the walls, and the windows still looked out over the stately, date-palm-lined driveway.

  A military vehicle stood outside the main entrance, with a handful of soldiers. Nations of Earth soldiers. Special Operations. Uh-oh.

  Yes, indeed, they were waiting for us. The gamra guards handed our group over to them under the overhang of the entrance. Some of them looked like they had been ordered to take charge of Robert, but backed off when they saw Evi and Telaris.

  “Mr Wilson?” The highest-ranking officer searched around the group, and it was a while before his gaze met mine. Certainly I wasn’t that hard to recognise?

  He nodded a very cold and very formal greeting. His gaze went down my full gamra blues, the non-Earthly gun in the bracket on my arm. Disapproving, I thought. “Come with us. An aircraft is waiting.” He hesitated, looking at the others.

  “They’re with me.” I kept my voice equally cold.

  And so we were back playing the Oh, I hadn’t expected that you were travelling with such a large group, and they look like they’re all aliens game. In all the years that I’d worked for gamra no one had gotten over this shit yet.

  It did not bode well for the rest of the trip.

  We got into the passenger compartment of the vehicle. I gave my association the careful sign. Only talk about innocent things. The scenery, the weather.

  We went to the airport, of course. Like the previous and last time I’d had anything to do with Nations of Earth, the president had sent a private craft.

  As we boarded, I didn’t miss the usual Do we have to take all of them? and Yes, he says they should travel with him discussion that went on between the military guards and the craft’s crew.

  This had always annoyed me, but right now it annoyed me even more than usual.

  As I sat down and belted up, I also wondered why Amarru hadn’t yet been in contact with me. Thayu sat next to me, but I didn’t want to ask her, because we’d be monitored. Deyu, across the aisle, was looking around with wide eyes. She had been very good and not asked a single sensitive question and not said anything about sensitive subjects. On the way through the city, the simple sight of a girl walking a dog had set her and Thayu off into a discussion about dogs and what they were and what they were for. Thayu explained that Fred, my father’s dog, liked to fetch things and Deyu went, “Really?” Then she noticed pigeons and wanted to know if they were useful for anything. And then cats, to which Thayu said they weren’t useful, except to keep you warm. I could only imagine Deyu’s delight at the concept of a horse.

  The plane took off and made an uneventful trip to Rotterdam. It was night, of course, but that did not keep Deyu from looking out the window and asking us what all these lights were.

  It was still pitch black when we arrived in Rotterdam. Not only that, there was a rare blanket of snow on the ground.

  Deyu did her very best to contain her excitement, because things were getting serious now. A contingent of Nations of Earth guards were waiting for us to take care of Robert. One man grabbed him by the arm and dragged him across so that he almost fell. Robert cursed and the soldier belted him on the ear. The men then pushed him into the highly secured back of a waiting truck. He’d been quiet and sullen but obedient during the trip, and I saw no reason for the rough treatment those guards gave him. It made me feel uneasy.

  Much more luxurious transport waited for us: the Nations of Earth VIP train carriage that would transport dignitaries to and from the compound to the airport. The carriage came with more guards. A short train ride later we were at the little station which was open only to this particular train.

  The clock on the platform said 2:13 am. It was pitch dark. The Moon was out—another source of wonder to Deyu and Reida because neither Asto nor Ceren had moons worth mentioning. It was full, big and fat, and its blue light made the snow glitter. It was also cold. I spotted Reida blowing out breath and waving his hand through the resulting steam—and Coldi with their high body temperature made even more steam than other people—but as soon as he noticed I was looking, he straightened up and put on a serious expression. It would have been funny if I hadn’t been getting worried about what we would find at the end of this trip. If Margarethe needed to see us at this time of the day, then there had to be some problem, right?

  We walked the short distance from the station to the president’s office. The three guards who accompanied us seemed nervous. No one said much. Thayu hid deep inside her jacket. I pretended not to notice how Sheydu slipped in the snow and almost fell.

  We went up the broad marble staircase to the foyer that once, what seemed ages ago, I’d seen full of police and other security personnel on the day that President Sirkonen was murdered. There was no one in the hall now; the lights in the chandelier were off and the stairs dark, even if a light was on in the upstairs foyer.

  The guards exchanged a few words. I was ashamed to say that I didn’t understand them. Maybe once I had been familiar with some of the codes they used, but no longer.

  It was protocol that I go in to see the president alone.

  My association had seen Margarethe. They trusted her, so they had no problem with having to wait in the secretary’s office. The secretary was not at his desk, of course. Everyone sat on the couches and the floor between the couches and the table. They were most fascinated by the screen tabletop that displayed the news, and even more intrigued when the screen revealed itself to be sensitive to touch. Thayu would soon show them how to use their feeder to control it, but by that time I had gone into the president’s office.

  Margarethe sat behind the familiar desk. It no longer stood in the position where both Sirkonen and Danziger had put it, underneath the portrait of the current president on the wall, but to the side, in the darker corner of the room where the library used to be. The old shelves with their old books were gone. The walls had been repainted and the lighting adapted to modern design. The room looked less stuffy, more airy and modern.

  “Cory.” Margarethe rose.

  She wore a stylish dark purple suit. Her hair was, as usual, piled in a bun at the top of her head. In Barresh, the style had seemed a little quaint, but here, while she crossed the room, all the memories came back of Eva and her penchant for Victorian-style dinner parties.

  She took both my hands. Her hands were cold, and indeed it was none too warm in this office.

  “Sit down,” she s
aid. “Do you want tea?”

  I had no idea who would be drummed out of bed to provide this tea, but I couldn’t say no to that.

  Silly me: a machine made the tea, in the corner of the room.

  Margarethe took two cups and carried them to the table. We sat on the armchairs.

  “Why are you still at work?” I asked.

  “I was working late, and then I heard you were coming in, so I stayed.” She sounded casual. I didn’t think she was so relaxed.

  “I brought Robert Davidson back. He was quiet and well behaved on the trip.”

  “Thank you for that.”

  Then she let an uneasy silence lapse. It was one thing to meet her in an informal capacity in my apartment, but another entirely to see her here.

  “What is so important about this man?”

  Margarethe signed. “Have you heard of the Pretoria Cartel?”

  I hadn’t.

  “It’s a group of influential people who don’t want Earth to join gamra—”

  “Has Nations of Earth ever made any progress made on that subject?”

  “There are many issues associated with joining and we’re talking about all of them.”

  “Just talking? Because I haven’t heard anyone at gamra as much as mention Earth for quite some time.”

  “Yes, Cory, just talking. Melissa observes, she reports to us and she answers questions for the assembly. The committees advise us on a final decision.”

  “This has been going on for how many years?” Were these all still the same issues that Sirkonen and I had discussed when I first started to work for him?

  “It’s not a fast process, no.” She sounded a bit annoyed. “Tell me where you’re going with this.”

  “We don’t have years. People are impatient to have a decision made either way.”

  “You don’t need to tell me that. It’s my platform for the upcoming election.”