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

by Patty Jansen

  Thayu said, “She is an activist from the Outer Circle. Zeyshi. A troublemaker.”

  “So the zeyshi have become involved already?”

  “It is their reason for existence to try to put holes into our society. As soon as there is an imbalance, they create trouble. If there is a conflict, there are zeyshi. They explore all the cracks in society and try to force them open. People in outer circles support them quite a bit.”

  And that was the odd dichotomy of Coldi society, how they could, at any one time, support the existing structures of power and support those mechanisms trying to pull those structures down.

  I tried again, “But what about the backed-up commands from Ezhya that should have kept everything running as normal?”

  Asha said, “Should have, yes, but obviously stability hasn’t lasted that long. Something appears to have happened, and we’re still trying to establish what. In any case the guards tracked the false information about food parcels in Third Circle back to the Inner Circle. Something in the command hub has been giving nonsense orders.”

  “Ezhya’s command hub?”

  “So it seems.”

  I asked, “Would that be a malfunctioning part of the routines he left running or something new?”

  Asha replied, “Hard to tell from a distance, although it’s too early for his regular routines to start malfunctioning.”

  I felt a chill at this statement. I had understood us to have some time before Ezhya’s order routines would start falling apart, and now it looked like we didn’t. I asked, “Can anyone stop the faulty routines?”

  “They can’t, because as happens when the Chief Coordinator is away, the Inner Circle has gone into lockdown and the guards are under strict orders let no one in.”

  “What has caused this?”

  “Could be anything.” I sensed he’d said about as much as he was going to say, or at least with Natanu in our cabin, or maybe to me full stop.

  I became more worried then.

  “There is no need for panic.” Asha said, his voice decisive. “The airport is out, but we’ll have other places to land.”

  “You’re not planning to set us down in Beratha?” Nicha said. He met my eyes. That would pretty much ruin our plan. Beratha was on the other continent and its climate was definitely too hot for me to visit.

  “At the army compound in Athyl,” Asha said.

  “That’s in Second Circle. There is no train anywhere close.” Thayu’s face was concerned.

  Asha held up his hand to ask for silence. “We’ll walk, or commandeer transport. Listen. This is our plan.” Seriously, which father used chi pronouns to speak to a group of people that included his children? “All communication we’ve had so far comes from Taysha. He has access to the radio transmissions we’ve made to the surface. I’m sure he knows that we’re coming and he knows who is on board this craft. He will also know that Ezhya is not, since Ezhya has not communicated with the Inner Circle since the Exchange outage. He will suspect or know that we have the key and that this is the reason we’re coming back now instead of waiting for the Exchange to return to full function. He would also know that I am coming back because I cannot risk upheaval in the armed forces.” His dark eyes met mine. “He will want to meet us. I believe you wanted to discuss something with him?”

  “I wanted to see Risha, not Taysha.” I didn’t want to engage in any kind of discussion with that man, certainly not in Thayu’s presence.

  “Taysha and Risha are zhaymas, so one will know what the other knows.”

  Yes, but I don’t want to speak to that man! Wasn’t Risha Asha’s immediate superior? Well, I suppose he had no control over communication. Damn.

  I blew out a breath through my nostrils. “I suppose that if Risha is unavailable, I’d have to speak with Taysha—”

  “Good. We will request an audience with him on your behalf. He’ll be most interested in meeting you, the man who forced him to capitulate his contract with the lady. He has already said so.”

  I glanced at Thayu. She frowned at me, and a seed of anger grew in me. There should be no need for her to face this man. If he still had any gripe with me, and goodness knew I’d paid him enough already, the standard protocol was to raise the issue with me. “I will go and talk to him about the zeyshi or about keeping the command hub running, nothing else.”

  He gave me a sharp look. “You’ll find that he will have different ideas.”

  He had already spoken with Taysha? Where was Risha and why couldn’t I speak to him?

  I said, “I don’t care what ideas he has. I’ll talk to him about Ezhya and about the zeyshi claim, if he knows anything about it.” Forced him to capitulate his contract with the lady. He was talking about his own daughter, for fuck’s sake. What was more, Asha had agreed to me taking over the contract.

  He went on, oblivious. “He will invite you, but he will know it’s shenya.” A lie for political purposes. “It will be very polite and genteel. I will send two of Ezhya’s guards with you.”

  “Thayu and Nicha will come with me.” If I had to face this manipulative arsehole, I wanted only them with me. And what was with this I will send? Whose idea was this whole expedition anyway?

  “Taysha expects us to come and try something with the command key. He knows we have it. He will think I have it and he will think that I have taken you as a curiosity to distract him. He will play the game and meet you while he directs his best guards to stop us. We will pretend to have the key and we will initially go to my quarters and stay there. They will be puzzled and hang around to see what we’re doing next. They might come to question us, in which case we will deal with them, or they might grow bored and leave. After that, we will try to enter the building through another entrance.”

  A chill crept over my back. In Coldi parlance, dealing with them usually involved weapons and dead bodies.

  “Meanwhile, you will talk to him until we provide a distraction. I won’t tell you what it is, but you will know when it happens. From Taysha’s quarters it is only up the next floor to the command hub. Once Taysha ends the discussion and is forced to react to the situation created by us, you will walk up the stairs and into the hub.”

  The plan was not bad and probably close to something I would have thought up myself, but the way he was ordering me about annoyed me. It annoyed me that I had repeatedly said that I wanted to see Risha, not Taysha, but everyone seemed to have ignored that request. “I want to say one thing, though.”

  He glanced aside.

  “I request to go to the on-board communication hub to speak to Taysha and tell him about this visit. I should talk to him and make the arrangement. If you do it, it’s going to look like I work for you. I work for Ezhya, not for him, not for you. I should act on Ezhya’s behalf. If I were in an association, I would not take orders from anyone except Ezhya.”

  Asha said nothing. His face was blank as always and I could only guess that underneath that mask, he had to be annoyed at this upstart who not only cost his family money, ran off with his daughter, refused to back down and was much more chummy with his big boss than he was. And why did Thayu look so much like him?

  “We’ll see,” he said. “But Thayu and Nicha can’t come. We don’t want to make Taysha nervous. He knows both of them too well.” He sounded irritated. Judging by how Thayu and Nicha treated him, he was used to being obeyed without question, even by his own children. Worse, he was probably right.

  He unclipped his tether as if the discussion was finished.

  I wasn’t finished, though. I pushed myself across the room so that I hit the door before he did. I stopped the bounce back by grabbing the handle to the emergency hatch. There. I’d had a lot of practice doing this over the past week.

  “I want a reply to m
y request. I want to speak to Taysha as soon as possible to discuss my visit.” Goddamn royal-I.

  I met his gaze squarely, wiping the sweat from my lip. A vent in the wall blew hot air over me face. It was only going to get hotter.

  He nodded, pushed off so he floated around me and floated back towards the door. “Can I get through?” It was phrased as question, but it was an order.

  On his ship, at his mercy, I could do nothing except move aside.

  Inside, I was seething.

  He thumbed the lock code to the door and left us, his face still impassive.

  Shit.

  Not only was I going to have to go into that building alone with some guards who didn’t know me and didn’t owe me anything, I wasn’t handling the father-in-law too well, either.

  I glanced at Nicha and Thayu, and none of us seemed to know what to say. I did not want to be bait for Taysha, putting my relationship with Thayu up as a discussion point to do it. The man who forced him to capitulate his contract with the lady. What the actual fuck. I didn’t want to have to tell her about the horse-trading I’d been forced to do over her with this foul man, and I especially didn’t want to tell her just how much I’d paid to buy out her contract. She’d be horrified. Hell, I was horrified.

  I re-settled in my hammock, wrapping the stiff outer support layer around me so that I didn’t float away.

  “You know Asha’s going to challenge, don’t you?” The voice that broke the tense silence was rich and undeniably female. Natanu pushed herself into a sitting position, as well as one can sit in zero-g. Of course she hadn’t been asleep at all and she’d heard everything.

  Thayu gave her a sharp glance without looking into her eyes. “So? That’s his right. Are you going to challenge?”

  Nicha let out a low hiss.

  For a moment I thought there would be a fight, but Natanu said, her tone surprisingly flat, “I gave up the key, didn’t I?”

  The object in question felt like it was burning a hole through the inner pocket of my jacket.

  Natanu snorted. “Unlike all you people, I sit still. I watch. I do not enter a fight unless I am pretty sure I can win.” She met my eyes. “Unlike some of us.”

  Thayu said, “In case you haven’t noticed, he’s doing his best to help us. He doesn’t even need to do it at all.”

  Nicha warned, “Thay’, please.”

  I pushed myself from my hammock and floated in the middle of the dorm room. “Please, can we stop making allegations?”

  Natanu looked me straight into the eyes, her expression humourless. “Allegations will be made, whether we take part in the making or not. No matter what Asha’s told you, he intends to challenge, because Taysha will challenge and he cannot let that challenge go unanswered.”

  In all truth, I didn’t know what Asha wanted. I just assumed that because he agreed to carry us, he supported our action at least somewhat. Or, I hoped he would.

  “Well, we all want to maintain the current power structure, right?”

  No one said anything.

  I glanced at Nicha and Thayu. Come on, help me. But I knew they weren’t going to, not while facing someone far superior. Thayu had already tested the boundaries by speaking up against Natanu.

  And Natanu had never said that she wouldn’t challenge. If she wanted to make a grab for Ezhya’s position, she didn’t need the key.

  I felt like punching the walls, but with the lack of gravity, I didn’t even know which the walls were, and punching walls, floor or ceiling would just make me bounce through the cabin.

  Nowhere in this tiny shoe box did we have a place where the three of us could talk and not be overheard by Ezhya’s guards. Even my feeder was useless here because there was no Exchange and on-board networks didn’t support many of its features, including direct lines into other feeders. Or, more likely, didn’t give us access to those features.

  Did Asha speak the truth? Was Natanu’s promise worth anything?

  Was anyone free of this instinct to dominate?

  Where was Risha?

  Thayu and Nicha were probably too far down the hierarchy to be in contention for the leadership, but everyone else around us seemed to consider themselves in the running. And while they were prowling around and eying each other, they’d given me the hot potato. Increasingly, I was feeling like everyone could pounce on me at any moment.

  * * *

  We busied ourselves with preparing dinner.

  Even though the ship had a food lab, the food on board consisted mostly of freeze-dried things that had been packed and stored so long that it was impossible to determine what they had been. Most of the rations were red-coded, so the choice in diet was even more boring for me, not to mention bland. When heated up, Thayu’s dinner smelled a lot nicer than mine, but I knew better than to try to eat some.

  We’d just finished eating when the door opened and a crew member came in. It was a woman I hadn’t seen before, one of the lower-ranked ship crew.

  She looked at everyone in the room, stopping at me. “Delegate. Come.”

  I glanced at Thayu and Nicha. Should they come with me?

  She pre-empted that with, “Only you can come.”

  “For what purpose?”

  Asha was going to deal with me to keep me or both his children in line. He’d been severely put out by my use of pronouns and my demands. He was going to demand compensation—

  Stop it, Delegate. There was no reason to believe that he would do any of those things.

  Living cooped up in this tin can was getting to me.

  Heart thudding, I followed the woman out the solid door. Two other crew members waited outside. They both wore flight pressure suits and one wore a jacket over the top that had attachments for monitoring equipment. As far as I knew, these jackets were worn by weapons operators.

  We floated through the ship, and I was once more reminded that moving around so much after eating was not a good idea.

  We passed through a long corridor that had doors on all four walls: sides, ceiling and floor. While obviously Exchange-enabled, this ship was designed for deep space. There had often been rumours at gamra about Asto’s spy ships shadowing important delegations and monitoring industrial projects from the cover of deep space. At various points in time, groups of delegates would rally in favour of the setting up of more space telescopes to pick up this kind of activity. Within gamra, Asto was the major force, but it absolutely owned deep space, and this ship was one of those vehicles for that domination. I eyed the doors on either side of the passage. Most of them were unmarked, although some had security panels or warning lights. I suspected that more than a few would be locked, providing access to the ship’s engines, its reactor or weapons systems. For all I knew, the ship possessed an Exchange sling, which was said to cut out the need for a local Exchange reference point. That meant that there had to be some kind of Exchange core on board. All of which meant that the Asto military probably had an unhealthy interest in the activities of the Aghyrians in Barresh. Alternate Exchange systems, some of them suitable for use as weaponry. Press a button on one planet and an explosion happens on another planet.

  I shivered. Damn, being shut up in this tin can really started getting to me. The fact that we were here, in mid-space, meant that the Asto military had no alternate Exchange system, right? Because otherwise they would have used it, right?

  At the end of the passage we came to a tube with metal rungs that led at right angles to the corridor. It was dark inside, with thin rings of blue light encircling the passage. The tube was only wide enough for one person and we pulled ourselves through. The female crew member first, one of the guards second, then me and then the crew member with the weapons control vest.

  One of the blue
rings flashed when I passed. No doubt assessing the risk I posed. Scanning me for weapons, or some such.

  The top of the tube opened out into a larger area which was quite dark, but a strange glow of light hit the wall just outside the tunnel. I followed my guides out of the tube and, to my great surprise, onto the ship’s bridge.

  I floated in mid-air, taking in the huge banks of controls, the large window or viewscreen at the far end, where the glow of a huge half-lit planet hung to the left.

  The rest of the sky was dotted with millions of pinpricks of stars.

  Oh, wow. Look at that view. Look at the detail of shadows and mountain ridges on Asto. Look at the cloud formations billowing into the atmosphere.

  In my amazement, I let go of the handholds and floated through the cabin. One of my guides took my elbow and attached my magnetic tether to the wall.

  Don’t be dumb, Delegate.

  There were at least six people in this room, all of them strapped behind their work stations. Two of them sat at the very front row of controls. The next bench back held four work stations.

  The single chair behind that, on a slightly elevated platform, was Asha’s. He sat leaning back, with a small portable console on his lap. He glanced up briefly and met my eyes, still emotionless.

  “Use that terminal,” Asha said, gesturing at an island bench to the left-hand side of the room, unoccupied.

  I floated across, trying not to hit anything this time. I aimed for the seat, which was more like the seat of a bike with straps on the “pedals” to keep the occupant in place.

  The bench had two screens and a whole bevy of input controls.

  Both screens were empty. The three crew members who had come to get me took up positions between me and the front two rows, obscuring much of my view of the window. Heaven forbid I might actually see anything on the pilots’ controls. Little pinpricks of blue or white on black screens that would tell me so much, pardon the sarcasm. I suppose I might also see the weapons station on the other side of the cabin.