by Patty Jansen
But the smells and the sounds were the same, and they were normal and soothing. Nicha bought a bag of roast fruit coated with nut meal that we shared between us by way of breakfast. Eirani would be grumpy that the guests and I had yet found another thing more important than her cooking.
While we walked through the streets, several people greeted me, recognisable as I was in blue.
Good morning, Delegate.
Nice day, Delegate.
Their tone was oddly relaxed and in contrast with how I felt. An Exchange outage wouldn’t affect most people in town.
We went across the square, with its trees that had been planted recently and had begun to spread their canopies, to the Exchange building with its ancient foyer, sweeping stone staircase and coloured glass ceiling window.
Here, the relaxed air dissipated. The hall was full of people, all cramming to get up the stairs to the Exchange office on the first floor. Most of the people were merchants.
Someone up there was shouting in keihu, the local language. I didn’t catch enough of it, but understood the gist: be calm; we’re working on the problem. But that didn’t faze my companions, who wedged a way in through the crowd.
People mumbled and grumbled, looked over their shoulders at my blue tunic and expressions changed.
“Delegate.”
“Out of the way, gamra delegate coming through!”
Others pounced on me with questions.
“Any news about what’s going on?”
“How long is this going to take?”
“I have my family arriving on the next shuttle from Kedras. Will things be back to normal soon?”
I waved the questions away. I couldn’t answer them any better than they could. I continued up the stairs, shielded by Thayu and Nicha and my trusted guards.
On the first floor landing, a few Barresh guards in black stood at the door to the public office of the Exchange, keeping the queued-up merchants and business people in order.
When the door slid open to let a man out, I caught a glimpse of another queue in front of the public desk.
The guards waved people aside so that we could get through.
“I need to speak with Yetaris Damaru,” I said. “It’s a matter of utmost importance.”
One of the guards nodded. “I’ll let him know that you’re here.”
He told us to wait in the corridor inside, where I sat with Thayu and Nicha at a bench against the glass wall that closed off the Exchange room. Evi and Telaris remained standing.
The merchants in the queue before the public counter gave me and my entourage curious looks.
The air was cooled and dry, and felt cold on my sweaty skin.
The guard in black had gone into the large Exchange room and I could still see him through the glass, speaking to someone. Most of the employees who normally sat at workstations had gathered in the middle of the room, which was the space where a 3D holographic image of near-space anpar approaches was usually displayed. A short line to Asto in the same system, longer lines to space-based travel ports at the edge of the system. Longer lines still for the nearest settled world, Kedras. Sometimes, the operator would zoom out and display more anpar lines, if direct transfer from other places was required. But today, there was nothing. Oh, the projector worked; there were the small icons displaying various notations of time and date at the bottom of the central display, but nothing else.
The guard had gone to talk to one of the people in the group. It was Yetaris Damaru, of the family that had run the Barresh Exchange for hundreds of years. He rose from his seat and came with the guard into the corridor.
He gave our party a grim nod. “Gamra representation?” I doubted he knew me personally.
“Not officially. Gamra will send someone along later. I have a serious matter to discuss.”
“You are aware that the Exchange is—”
“I am. It’s related.”
“Best come join us.”
We followed him inside the room, where the absence of the electronic hum normally made by projectors made it eerily quiet.
Some people looked up when we joined the group, and most re-formed the circle to include me and Thayu and Nicha, while Evi and Telaris remained at the back of the room.
I needed to ask no questions about the status of the Exchange. The emptiness of the projection area spoke for itself. The damn thing just wasn’t working.
“Failure of the core?” I asked. The high-tech, highly-sensitive and hyper-powerful core was the very thing that made the Exchange work.
He sighed, which I took as a yes. “It’s not at the end of its lifetime. All the functions test out fine so far. We can’t get it up again, because we’re getting no response from nearby nodes.”
I’d had it once explained to me that if the Exchange network went out, individual nodes would have to establish traditional radio contact with nearby nodes and would have to do something they called wave resonance in order to jump to anpar lines, which they often called the anpar dimension. Only in anpar mode could they reach out to interstellar space and reconnect with the rest of the network. Because of this resonance requirement, nodes had to exist in clusters, and the Ceren-Asto cluster was one of the biggest. Ceren had two Exchange nodes, Asto had three, and there were a couple of satellite relay stations, precisely to avoid a situation like this.
“Surely Miran can cover for us temporarily and explain to the main node what has happened. What do they say?”
“Miran is out as well. They can’t restart their core either.”
Damn it. “And Athyl?” On Asto, they would be on half an hour delay for the time it took radio waves to travel there from Ceren.
He shook his head. “They’re not up either. They’re not in contact with anyone else. To be frank, Delegate, we have no idea what has happened. It looks like this whole section of the network is offline.”
Shit.
“What is our functionality?” asked Thayu.
“At the moment, close to zero. We have a backup running for some peripherals, such as local communication, but the radio lines with Miran and Asto are running down the emergency charge pretty fast. I have all maintenance personnel working on securing those links. We need to get some dedicated transmitters going. Also, I’ve sent a team into the core to check it.”
That chilled me. Exchange cores were pretty damn radioactive, and usually well shielded in giant basins of water of behind concrete and lead plates.
If something had damaged the cores of all those nodes . . .
Cores were made at Hedron, which was the settlement furthest away from virtually anywhere, an extremely old world far on the very end of the Sagittarius arm of the galaxy. Without the Exchange no one could get there to bring a replacement core. Without the Exchange, no one would get anywhere.
And that again made me think of Ezhya Palayi and where he was now, and Margarethe Ollund, and what would happen on Earth if she vanished.
Shadows of Sirkonen all over again. All the effort I’d put into repairing relations gone down the drain.
This was a disaster.
“Look, we have a, um, situation. I need to talk to you privately.”
He raised his eyebrows, in a can it get any worse? way, but gestured me, Thayu and Nicha to the very edge of the Exchange room near the large window. The rush of air from the ventilation made his hair ruffle.
The window looked out over the courtyard and the gate that was the main entrance into the building, to the square beyond. Between the food stalls and trees, I could make out the shapes of a couple of aircraft on the offshore artificial island that was the city’s airport. There was a passenger shuttle on the tarmac. They were all stuck here now.
&
nbsp; “Yes?” he said. He looked tense. Like his forebears of the Damaru family, he was not as rotund a man as many keihu. Quite small of stature, too. His face was pale and he had bags under his eyes. I felt sorry for him that I had to bother him with yet another problem.
I spoke in a low voice. “The situation is this, and I wish for this to remain absolutely secret. Ezhya Palayi and President-elect Margarethe Ollund of Nations of Earth took a little tourist trip last night. They took his craft and they haven’t come back.”
He swore, loudly, and a number of the employees turned around.
“Excuse me,” he said.
“No matter. The situation warrants the language. You understand that this is extremely sensitive.”
He nodded. “What do you want me to do? I can’t track them or bring them back.”
“Well . . .” I didn’t know what I had hoped. Maybe that he could work wonders, but obviously that wasn’t going to happen. “Make sure that when anyone suggests that Ezhya is missing, you allay their fears if at all possible.”
“That will only work for so long. They’ll find out the truth.”
“I am aware of that.” Damn, the trouble we’d be in if this went on for longer than today. “Just stall giving an answer for as long as you can.”
He nodded, his face grave with understanding.
“How long do you think we’ll be out?”
A deep sigh. “We’ve had to cool down the core to send people in. Starting it up will take most of a day, and that is assuming they can fix whatever is wrong. At the moment, we’re stabbing in the dark.”
Chapter 5
* * *
WE WENT home no wiser than we had come, and with an increasing feeling of dread. None of us said so, but we all knew: this was not going to be solved quickly. Not today, not tomorrow, maybe not even within a week.
In the hall of my apartment, I found the reason for Ezhya’s guards’ foray outside the apartment this morning: several boxes of odd electronic equipment that looked to have been bought at the second hand stalls at the markets.
Someone had been unpacking the supplies. Rolls of wire spilled onto the ground, and there was half of the casing of what looked like an old hub transmitter, as well as a couple of circuit boards and plugs and a screen.
The guards themselves were in the hub room, huddled around the rest of this strange collection of electronics.
Devlin stood outside the door, leaning against the doorframe, his arms crossed over his chest and a suspicious and flustered look on his face.
Telaris spoke briefly with him and turned to me. “Mashara apologises, Delegate. It seems they invaded the room while we were gone.”
I glanced into the room at the knot of guards. Only six of them were there. The four men and two women spoke in low voices, in language peppered with jargon that was unintelligible to me.
A screen on the equipment lit their faces from below. Their dark eyes glittered with little blue dots of light from the screen. “What are they doing?”
Devlin said, “They wouldn’t tell me that, Delegate. I was just studying here when they came in. I wasn’t doing anything to bother them.”
“They sent you from the room?”
“They didn’t tell me, Muri, but they took up all the space and started making a lot of noise. I couldn’t work anymore.”
Telaris said, “I think mashara has taken steps to obtain information. It is likely for the good of all.”
And obtaining information clearly required a heap of junk from the markets and upsetting my staff.
I don’t know what Telaris thought, but I needed a better explanation than that.
I went into the room, where it smelled of Coldi bodies. “Excuse me, my staff would like to use this room.”
A couple of the guards turned around, including the fearsome woman Natanu. She rose, left the group and faced me. The average Coldi person was a bit shorter than me, but she towered over me. There was not a skerrick of humour on her face.
“Apologies.”
Her single word sounded like shorthand for, “Go away and mind your own business,” or, “Do you want a fight? Be my guest.”
I had to restrain myself from taking a step backwards. That would be seen as an admission of defeat. “My staff are upset that they can’t use this room.”
“None of us ever said that they couldn’t.”
“You intimidate them.” Oh, that you was much too direct.
My heart was hammering against my ribs. Giving her a direct challenge was probably not a good idea. I wasn’t sure whether to look her in the eye or not. Normally, Coldi didn’t react to people from other races, but Nicha had felt a reaction to me.
Nicha had remained by the door, looking tense.
I had to risk it. I looked up. Her eyes were very dark, and her skin a darker tint than Thayu’s or Nicha’s. She had prominent cheekbones and deep-set, slanting eyes. Her earrings were both the same, which meant she wasn’t contracted to a partner, and the stones were lime green. What clan was that again? Not one of the ones we commonly saw in Barresh. Damn, I’d seen the table with all the different clan names, but I couldn’t remember this one.
As our eyes met, she stiffened briefly. I held my breath—but then her stance relaxed. Apparently I had satisfied the test.
“Mashara apologises to the Delegate.” Her voice had lost some of its edge. “We are trying to ascertain the whereabouts of our leader.”
“Any luck?”
“Nothing yet.”
“I may not be able to help, but if I can do anything, I’m offering.”
She bowed stiffly. “Thank you, Delegate.”
She gestured me into the group of her colleagues, which opened up, and the guards all looked at me. Whenever Ezhya had come to visit, his guards had never met my eyes. That was part of the Coldi make-up, not to look anyone in the eye unless the ranking issue was settled. Coldi on Earth had un-learned the habit, but this was an area in which Earth humans could blunder in and make bad mistakes.
I sat down on the spot they vacated for me on the bench. All of them wore temperature-retaining suits with the distinctive red sash, as well as several patches with symbols that were mostly unfamiliar to me. Two were tall and imposing like Natanu, others were of a typical size. Some were pale, others darker-skinned. Some had prominent cheekbones, others the round faces I’d come to think of as typically Coldi. Every one of those faces was gaunt with stress.
On the floor in the middle of the group stood a hastily-rigged piece of equipment so old that it looked like it had survived the last war. That was the last war in Barresh, again fought before I was born, about two hundred gamra years, in fact. The other female guard sat in front of this bank of machinery, adjusting levels and wearing an old headpiece which she pushed half aside.
“We accessed the emergency beacon, Delegate. We have established radio contact with Asto.”
“From here?”
“There is an antenna on the roof.”
One of those many features of the apartment I’d never noticed. One day, I should take a plan of this building and study all the attributes.
“We are expecting the reply any time now.”
Just then, the crackle came in, followed by a Coldi voice speaking slowly as if read from a prepared response.
“Receiving you. Not very clear but adequate. The Athyl Exchange cut out at 20.22 gamra time and we’ve been unable to establish a cause or to repair the link. It appears that the core is damaged. Our technical teams are investigating. We are still getting some communication through the local network. Our backup orders are still active and can last us until Ezhya gets back from Barresh. The situation is currently stable b
ut we are on high alert. We continue to try to re-establish contact with the local Exchange network.”
I met Natanu’s eyes.
Hidden behind the news about the Exchange, the bit about backup orders was obviously the important part of this message. But I didn’t know enough about that part of Ezhya’s job to catch the meaning of the statement.
But these people assumed at Asto that their leader was with us. They thought that Ezhya was at the most sixteen days away, if the Exchange didn’t come back before that time. Sixteen days without a leader was an eternity in Coldi understanding, but they judged the situation stable under those circumstances. What if they found out the truth, that I had no idea where Ezhya was?
The guards composed a reply, which would take another thirty-odd minutes to reach Athyl. Natanu then took the headpiece and replied on behalf of the group, asking about other people I didn’t know and about the state of the Beratha Exchange and the military base.
We waited, and waited. Thayu scrunched up the fabric of her tunic. “I presume my father thinks he can keep control of the military,” she said in a low voice.
And, damn it, that was another trouble spot. Presumably Asha stood on top of the military network. If that crumbled, things could get really ugly.
I asked in a low voice, “Who is this person she’s talking to?”
“Mizisha, the Inner Circle’s security chief.”
Then the reply came,
“We confirm. The same time the Athyl Exchange cut out, as well as the Beratha Exchange. We have used military sling relay and confirmed that Kedras is out as well, or else they are not responding to our pings. They’re not receiving us, or we’re not receiving them, or . . . It’s starting to look like the entire network might be down.”