Ambassador 2: Raising Hell (Ambassador: Space Opera Thriller)

by Patty Jansen

  “That ship of yours in orbit isn’t a long-distance space-enabled craft?” I used similarly direct pronouns, because this was going to be one of those discussions that would be fought through sheer bluff.

  “Hmmm.” He could do nothing except acknowledge the truth. “Do you have a wish to be cooked alive?”

  “Ezhya told me that we could consider a visit. In fact, he encouraged me to start planning for one.”

  “Did he?” He raised one eyebrow.

  I had a feeling that he disagreed with Ezhya about telling non-Coldi people about the possibility of visiting. But being subordinate, he could not express this opinion.

  Ezhya’s absence had removed that barrier. That was how the breakdown of power would work. If you had a superior, you did not have an opinion. With the superior gone, all bets were off. How long would it take for that shift to take place?

  Asha seemed more bemused than anything. “And what are you planning to do in Athyl?”

  “I intend to take Ezhya’s command key to the hub.”

  Another sharp intake of breath from Thayu.

  “You’ll be killed,” he said.

  “Yes,” Thayu said, her voice full of horror.

  “Not if I can get into the Inner Circle under some sort of excuse. I can arrange . . . an invitation.”

  Perfect eyebrows went up. “Who from?”

  “Ezhya tells me that Risha should be able to inform me about these zeyshi and the Aghyrian claim. It is my job to act as intermediary between Asto and any claimants under Ezhya’s mandate.”

  “Hmmm,” he said, not in a convinced way.

  “Risha does live in the Inner Circle.”

  “He does.”

  “He does look after the relationship with the zeyshi?”

  “Ezhya gave him that task, yes.”

  “So, he’ll be able to tell me who these people are who are making the claim.”

  “I’m not sure about that. I would suggest that this comes from a rogue element with their own agenda.”

  “Risha has talked to you about his dealings with the zeyshi?”

  “Insofar as the army is concerned, yes.”

  Oh well, that wasn’t a good starting point for peaceful talks. I was guessing that he probably wasn’t in favour of talking with the zeyshi in the first place.

  I plunged on, like a blundering drunkard. “Yet, if anyone knows, Risha would. He is your superior. You can introduce me.”

  He gave me a calculating look, as if deciding whether I was shitting him or I was serious. As if taken aback by my direct pronouns. Deciding how much of a curious fellow I really was. Oh, no, I didn’t doubt for one minute that he’d shunt me off to someone else if he could.

  “What makes you think that Risha will see you in the middle of a crisis?”

  “Nothing.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Nothing but the famed gamra narrow vision. Of course I know about the crisis, but I am a gamra delegate and as they are wont to do, I go about my business unhampered by the world crashing and burning around me.”

  “Hmph. Guess that would work.”

  “The heart of the matter is that I get into the Inner Circle. He’ll be curious. He’ll talk to me, precisely because he’ll see me as stupid and harmless. I’ll be his entertainment. But never for one moment will he expect me to have the key. So I’ll go for a bit of friendly conversation to satisfy his curiosity, and when we’re done, I make for the command hub.”

  I met his eyes, silently giving him the same challenge I’d handed Natanu: help me and protect what we worked for together and forget about your own ambition. Except if we lost and he kept quiet about this plan, he might keep his job. As the head of the armed forces, his association would still be intact. The same could not be said for Natanu.

  “Who would be coming on this stupid mission?” But his face showed that he was thinking about it. In what way, I could only guess.

  “Thayu and Nicha, and Ezhya’s guards.”

  He stiffened. “I’m not having them on my ship.”

  “They promised me loyalty. I can vouch for them that they will stay out of the way of you and your crew.”

  “I don’t believe anything that woman says. They’re not part of my association. They’ll endanger the ship, compromise our security and encourage fights. They are only going back to Athyl so that she can challenge—”

  I inserted my hand under my jacket and drew out the key. The metal cylinder lay inoffensive as could be in the palm of my hand.

  His eyes widened. Both Thayu and Nicha gaped at it, too.

  “If Natanu wanted to challenge, she would not have given me this.”

  He glared at me, nostrils flaring. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Damn right I am.”

  * * *

  I don’t know how I did it, but he gave me his word. He’d take me and the team into Athyl, leaving tomorrow.

  On the train on the way back to the apartment, I had to bear Thayu’s anger.

  “Why didn’t you tell us about this ridiculous plan? You remember last year? Well, you’re doing it again. Nicha and I are here to help you, not to be kept in the dark about your plans. What is the point if—”

  “Thayu.” I put my hand on her arm. “You would have told me that this is too dangerous or too stupid—”

  “BECAUSE IT IS!” She spread her hands and rolled her eyes. “Nicha, you tell him.”

  “I’m not going to waste my breath,” Nicha said. He seemed quite relaxed, leaning back into his seat. Underneath his mask of calm I suspected he was amused and excited. He’d done his fair share of stupid things with me, like going sailing on the bay on a blustery day. Coldi had a deep-seated fear of large bodies of water, and until their adaptation had settled, they were quite sensitive to temperature extremes, especially in the low range. I still remembered the panic of being in the middle of the bay with flapping sails, water spray and having Nicha collapse on me.

  I guess it was my turn.

  He said, “Thay’, it will be all right. We’ll give him two suits and some emergency crew’s breathing gear with coolant.”

  Thayu rounded on her brother. “You’ve been thinking about this for a while, haven’t you?”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re both stupid.”

  “I take it you’re not coming then?”

  “Whatever makes you think that? Of course I’m coming.”

  ‎

  Chapter 7

  * * *

  I REMEMBERED weightlessness.

  In my youth I had travelled along the natural anpar lines in huge, Earth-built space liners, massive vessels which were even then close to a hundred years old. Some of them were still in operation, since Earth ships could not use the Exchange, and the reach of Earth’s colonisation effort was extremely limited as a result.

  There was one natural anpar line which Earth people used in getting from Saturn’s orbit to Midway Space Station, then another one to Taurus. Each time, those trips involved covering fairly major distances to get to the anpar entry point, a journey of many months, which was why the ship had to be so large.

  As long as the ship accelerated or decelerated, there was a measure of gravity. Cabins were designed so that one could live on the ceiling just as well as one could live on the floor. But when the acceleration stopped . . .

  I’d been a passenger as a ten-year-old, on my way to Midway Space Station, and I remembered those confusing points of change, where the pilots shut down the ion drives and took most of a day to reverse the direction of thrust, where the floor became the ceiling, where anything not tied down floated around. I reme
mbered hanging in my sleeping bag with my eyes closed, or watching movies on a screen that still had an up and a down. I remembered not eating and drinking when that happened, and regretting the one time I did eat something before a change. Puke does funny things in weightlessness.

  Unfortunately, going without food or drink was not an option for a trip lasting sixteen days, and in our hasty planning of the trip I had been more concerned with surviving the impending heat than with the sixteen-day lack of gravity. In fact, I hadn’t considered there would be a lack of gravity, but apparently the design requirements for artificial gravity resulted in a ship that was either too large, or else unsuited for firing weapons. So, no gravity. Which meant that my movement was somewhat restricted immediately after dinner. This was not helped at all by the fact that the ship was kept at a temperature range suitable for Coldi, which meant that most of the time my clothes were soaked with sweat.

  I swear I lost a lot of weight in those days. Coldi were immune to motion sickness, and Thayu was rather puzzled by the whole affair.

  So now we were on this military tin can hurtling towards a pink hothouse planet, with a crew of an unspecified number, weapons of unidentified types and a ship of unspecified dimensions.

  I hadn’t seen the ship from outside. On the way up in the shuttle, the viewscreens had blacked out soon after take-off. Oh no, they didn’t trust us, not one bit.

  Once we were out the air lock and inside the white corridor—with the obligatory maroon on the doors and in a stripe over the wall—a crew member had taken me, Thayu, Nicha and Ezhya’s guards to a section of the craft separate from the crew. Inside the two dorm rooms, tiny washing cubicle and common room, we had everything we needed, but at the end of the corridor there was a solid sliding door with a panel that required input of a code that none of us had.

  The word prison was on my tongue most days.

  “It’s a military ship,” Nicha had said, by way of apology.

  And I’d hardly ever seen any Asto military display out in the open. Asto’s leaders and representatives strutted and bluffed like peacocks, but their real striking power remained in the shadows. Shielded, blacked-out and secret. Their armed forces wore no uniforms when they were out. You didn’t know who or where they were, although, over the years of dealing with Coldi, I’d developed an eye for picking out military people.

  The two dorm rooms we’d been allocated each had six sleeping bays, leaving barely any space for personal belongings—or bulky suits and cooling equipment. Thayu, Nicha and I went into one dorm, six of Ezhya’s guards in the other, which left Natanu a spot in our dorm, which she hardly ever used.

  It was cramped, claustrophobic and, as usual with Coldi accommodation, always too hot.

  There were also no outside viewscreens and we had no passenger feed with information about the journey or anything that gave us outside news.

  We played a lot of games, told each other stories, and only knew how much time had passed because of Nicha’s timer.

  The only link we had to the outside world was Asha’s daily visit to us. I could understand his wariness towards me and the guards, but his own children?

  Every time he came, I expected to be told that the Exchange was back up and that our journey was no longer necessary, that Ezhya had returned to Athyl to take care of his own position.

  That news did not come, and as the days passed I resigned myself to the fact that I would actually have to complete what I’d set out to do. I took my air tank and coolant off the rack and studied the apparatus’ operation. I practiced putting it on and moving around with it. It was firefighters’ gear. In a place like Barresh, where the fine oil-like substance exuded by the megon trees stopped most fires, firefighting gear was hard to find. This gear I’d borrowed off a Kedrasi merchant who was stuck in Barresh.

  I made myself familiar with putting on and taking off the helmet, putting on the breathing mask so that the flaps blocked any air coming in through the cracks. Our impending arrival in Athyl began to fill me with dread. This might be the stupidest thing I’d ever done in my life.

  “You can breathe Asto air,” Thayu said. “It’s not as if it’s poisonous.”

  I was going to say that I read it could be poisonous, if an ocean wind carried humidity with acidic droplets. Rain could be lethal, so could the thunderstorms and the sand storms, and flash floods in the aquifers. But maybe I’d read far too many meteorological articles about Asto. Maybe I worried too much.

  I started myself on double doses of adaptation medication. The resulting increase in body temperature made me hallucinate, for which I took other medication that made me hyperactive and I spent two days bouncing off the walls. I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t sit still. On board the ship, there was barely any difference between day and night, and to make things worse, the ship kept an Asto day, which was shorter than the Ceren day and further mucked with my sleeping patterns.

  Time was getting horribly blurred—I remembered that from the long-haul trip, too. I hung in my sleeping mat, reading if I felt well enough or watching information about Coldi government if I did not.

  * * *

  One day, about ten days after departure, Asha came into the cabin. He dipped his head to me, gave a hand signal to his son and daughter and treated Natanu with a wary look.

  She hung in the sleeping mat opposite me, on her back, her legs crossed at the ankles and her arms folded behind her head. Her eyes were closed, but I didn’t mistake her rest for sleep. I don’t know that Natanu ever slept.

  Asha held onto one of the wall/ceiling railings next to the door and anchored his tether.

  He regarded us with the humourless expression of a military officer. As he had been since entering the ship, he was impeccably dressed in his uniform, which involved a stern jacket with protective shoulder pads of that mysterious bendable material, used in body armour, that wasn’t plastic or metal. If you moved slowly, it bent, if you hit it hard, it was rigid.

  The fabric of his dress uniform, underneath the patches and decorations, was creamy pink. I’d wondered, on occasion, how pink looked to the Coldi, given their inability to see red. What made it different from white? In any case, I’d never seen anyone carry off wearing pink in such a stern and humourless way. Never mind the pink; everything about him said, Do not mess with me.

  In all the time that we’d camped in close quarters aboard this ship, I had not gotten to know him any better than I did at the start. His visits were brief, business-like and impersonal.

  This man, my father in law, was a mystery to me.

  He shut the door of the dorm room, something he didn’t usually do.

  I tried to work myself out of my sleeping bag without my reader flying off through the cabin. One hand on the railing next to the hammock, the other hanging onto the cord. I needed a third hand for hanging onto the blanket.

  Oh, tether. Right. I clipped the magnetic fastening onto the railing, retrieved the blanket and tucked it in the hammock. By now, Asha hung sideways. I hated this. My stomach had gotten tougher, but my balance was pretty much a lost cause. These cabins needed a sign with an arrow saying, “This way is up.”

  “Is there news?” I asked, trying to distract him from my clumsiness.

  “We intercepted some surface broadcasts from Asto.” His expression was even more grim than usual.

  Thayu must have detected that same grimness because she gave me that hyper-alert look that meant, Watch out.

  “There are a few general transmitters broadcasting, mostly for local use, we suspect, but we can listen in. They report that chaos has broken out near the airport. The Third Circle has been forced to close it.”

  Damn. I hadn’t considered that possibility. Third Circle airport, wasn’t that where we were going? “What sort of chaos?”

 
“People in the streets, riots. Now that the Exchange is out, people are nervous about food supplies and fair distribution of the stored resources. Many people are hanging around near points where food enters the city to make sure they get their share. The airport, the aquifer entry points. The stores keep at most a month’s worth of non-perishables in stock, and people are panicking. It seems an order went out that people could collect food packages from a store in Third Circle. When they came there, no one knew anything about it. A fight broke out. Guards dispersed the crowd, but the troublemakers took their fight to the airport.”

  He took out his comm-reader. I gave my feeder the command to connect to it, and heard the recording he had made earlier. On it, a garbled voice was barely audible over the sound of shouting. It took a fair amount of training for Earth people to be able to distinguish male Coldi voices from female. I’d gotten pretty good at it, but on this transmission it was impossible. There were a lot of voices in the background distorting the sound and the reception kept floating in and out of focus.

  “The groups led by Nayu have advanced into the third circle. Taysha is trying to hold together the First Circle representatives, but some of them have left the compound to defend their own associations.”

  After a burst of static, a second person asked, “How is Taysha holding up?”

  “Still in the Inner Circle, trying to run his side of the network . . .”

  The connection cut out.

  Both Nicha and Thayu frowned at their father.

  He gave a nod, his face grim.

  I struggled to put together the information all the others obtained from this snippet.

  Taysha Palayi I knew better than I was comfortable with. I’d never seen him, but our discussions over how much I owed him for Thayu’s contract had been bad enough that I’d hoped he’d never cross my path again.

  “Who is this Nayu?” Dang the Coldi for not using last names. A clan name would be a great help to me. As it was, I knew only Nayu was female.