by Patty Jansen
One of the crew handed me an earpiece.
When I attached it, I was blasted in the ear by a burst of static.
Ouch. Asha fiddled with his controls and spoke in his earpiece.
The static in my ear died and a fairly clear voice said, “So. You come to visit us, hmmm? Making history for yourself, bringing in the hordes of foreigners.”
Taysha. Damn it, even his tone was patronising, just like I would have expected from his correspondence.
“In light of the Aghyrian claim on Asto, it has been brought to my attention that a meeting was warranted.” Only the most formal pronouns would do, even if to show how much I disliked his manner. We were into bluff territory now.
The time delay had decreased a lot and I didn’t have to wait too long for his reply.
“Ha, the Aghyrian claim. The cowards won’t talk to us themselves, and send a foreign diplomat? No, no, no, I don’t fall for that. I would very much like to know what matters you could like to discuss with me.”
Actually, I really don’t want to talk with you.
I’d made an attempt to be polite, but his tone and pronouns rattled with belligerence. He’s only needling you. He’d done the same in his correspondence, talking about Thayu in the crudest possible way.
“Ezhya has sent me as envoy, because I look after these matters at gamra. I had hoped to speak to Risha and I hoped he could put me in contact with the zeyshi claimants.”
I waited for the reply. It seemed odd that no one had mentioned Risha, even more so because he was Asha’s superior.
Was I imagining it, or did the silence last longer than the previous ones? “You choose to do this now, at this time of crisis?”
“The next sitting of the assembly is in one solar. It is of utmost importance that I prepare my address to the assembly and that I have input from all the parties. We’ve attempted to contact the claimants, but haven’t been successful. I was assured that Risha deals with the matter of the zeyshi and that he can help me locate the people I need to listen to.”
They called this shenya, mutually-accepted bullshit that was a cover for something else. It was seen as a rude thing, but a skilled leader or businessman could hold an entire conversation in shenya, get his meaning across and not once mention the actual subject of the conversation. Coldi often appended the adjective shenya to non-Coldi conversation. Dishonest, something done by non-Coldi bureaucrats, whom everyone despised.
His reply came with a snort. “You can discuss this with me also. As it is, I have a wish to see you. I shall be expecting you. I shall look forward to seeing you.”
Did he really? To do what? Poke me around a bit more? Show off what he did with all the money I paid him for Thayu’s contract?
He signed off and I relaxed fists that, without my realising it, I’d been clenching so tight that my nails had made impressions in my palms. I peeled off the earpiece, feeling drained.
I glanced sideways at Asha, who regarded me as if he wanted to say, There. Happy now?
He nodded, briefly. There was something in his expression that I hadn’t seen before, but it was gone just as quickly.
I wanted to ask him why I couldn’t see Risha, but I began to suspect that the subject was zharu, under a gag order from Risha himself, and I’d had enough of dealing with rudeness masquerading as honesty for today.
I let the three crew members escort me back to our prison, becoming increasingly certain that I’d made the biggest mistake in my life.
In our section, I found Thayu in the tiny hallway using foldout fitness equipment that we were all meant to use every day but that I found offered too much resistance for my weak, non-Coldi muscles. She was panting and her face was sweaty.
She smiled when I came in. It was impossible to get into the room without going really close to her. I bent to her and kissed the skin on her neck as I passed. Coldi sweat smelled of dry earth and baked salt.
“What was that about?” she asked softly, running a sweaty hand over my cheek.
“I spoke to Taysha to officially announce our visit.” I shrugged. The whole thing had a feel about it as if it was a token gesture from Asha to appease this annoying human. “I wanted to speak to Risha, but I don’t know what’s happening there—”
“Spoke to Taysha—where?”
“In the communications hub, I guess.”
“He let you up to the bridge?” Her eyes widened.
“Um—yeah?”
“The real bridge, with the control benches and the window?”
“I guess that’s what it was.” Was that special?
“Do you know that non-military people never get to fly on military ships or get anywhere near command centres?”
“Not even you and Nicha?”
“Not even us. And you just walk in, invite yourself and . . .” She spread her hands. “This is not the first time you’ve managed to pull that off. How do you do that?”
“Um . . .” How was I supposed to know? “It’s amazing what you can get when you act as if it’s the most normal thing in the world.”
“I could never do anything of the sort.”
That was part of the Coldi make-up, too. I’d tried to get Thayu and Nicha to be more assertive, but as long as I spoke to people who were their superiors, they would never do as much as ask a question. Thayu making snarky comments to Natanu was about as far as I’d seen either of them challenge a superior.
“Do you know that your father is planning anything we don’t know about?”
She shook her head.
“Does he ever talk to you?”
“Not about his work, no. I don’t see him a lot anymore. You can ask him.”
Why not you? “He doesn’t seem to like me very much.”
That brought a look of utter surprise to her face. She stopped moving. “Why do you think that?”
“Well, he . . .” I shrugged. I was going to say, “He’s rude and ignores me,” but that was the sort of thing a high-ranking Coldi would do and she wouldn’t think that was unusual. The fact that Asha had allowed me on this ship—with Ezhya’s guards whom he didn’t trust—probably said more about his opinions of me than his manner did, even if he was one of the most overbearing, authoritative, arrogant dicks that I’d been forced to interact with recently.
I balled my fists in my pockets with sheer frustration. What sort of relationship did this man have with his children? What sort of father would use formal language to his children? Sometimes Coldi family relationships looked like ours, sometimes they were distant and cold like this. I wanted to ask her why my assessment surprised her so much, but Natanu and the guards in the other room were probably listening, so Thayu would never reply honestly.
Natanu might have promised not to challenge, but I don’t think any of us believed her. If it came to a challenge, Thayu and Nicha would be supporting their father. Well, I thought they would, at least. That’s how I understood it. If, in fact, this stupid human understood anything about Coldi relationships—and any certainty I’d ever felt in that regard was receding fast.
I didn’t fucking understand anything.
And come to that, why did it have to be so fucking hot in this tin can?
Chapter 8
* * *
I WENT back to reading and playing games and staring, bored, into nothingness. Sometimes I caught Thayu looking at me, with a worried expression on her face, and I worried, too. I hadn’t mentioned anything about the trouble I’d had getting Taysha to release her contract. I just couldn’t bring myself to do so, especially not with our lack of privacy. But she wasn’t stupid and knew something bothered me.
When action finally happened, five days later, it came suddenly
.
I was attempting to concentrate enough to work on a report when Nicha, in the other hammock, said, “Am I imagining it or did the engine just turn on?”
No, he didn’t imagine it, because there was the slightest vibration in the walls that hadn’t been there before, and not much later, a faint measure of gravity returned. Except of course it wasn’t gravity but the backwards-pointing force from deceleration and it pulled me annoyingly to a side of the cabin I had for the past two weeks considered to be the wall. Over the next few hours, this force grew stronger before ebbing again, and then movement alarms came on. All non-essential crew at their stations.
The clock next to the door went into countdown.
I strapped myself in my sleeping bag and watched the numbers tick down, hanging sideways. At zero, lights went off, the craft started vibrating and pressure increased in the direction of my feet. The safety harness cut under my arms, but I couldn’t even lift my hand enough to stuff a bit of fabric in between my skin and the straps.
I concentrated on my breathing, letting the noise wash over me.
As quickly as it had come on, it was gone, and so was the associated gravity.
There was a clang against the hull and with a weird lurch, another force took over, pushing me against the wall. My borrowed firefighting gear and tanks dangled above me and the wall that held my mat had decided to be the floor.
“We’ve docked at the orbiting base,” Thayu said. Her hammock had conveniently ended up low enough on the wall for her to easily climb out.
She did that while I clumsily wrestled myself out of the harness, resembling a stranded whale. Damn; after only two weeks in zero-g, I felt like I was made of jelly. Thayu helped Nicha down since his sleeping bag now hung high op on the wall. We unstrapped and gathered all our gear near the door. Well, sort of near the door, because the door was now in the ceiling. Fortunately, a set of metal rungs on the wall would allow us to climb up there. I kept glancing at the bags and tanks, expecting them to float away.
Natanu and the other guards sat in the other bedroom, talking in low voices. They didn’t seem to have brought any bags and I’d never seen them with any personal gear. Those suits they wore must be self-cleaning or something. They didn’t look dirty to me despite two weeks of constant wear, and didn’t smell either.
Some time after all movement and clangs had stopped, the door to the rest of the ship slid aside and a crew member stuck his head down into our section.
“You need to disembark here. A shuttle is waiting.”
We struggled up a ladder of narrow rungs with all our gear. I was exhausted just getting to the top.
What was it with this damn thing called gravity? I cursed it when it wasn’t there and cursed it when it was.
The “here” mentioned by the crew member turned out to be the orbiting military base of which I had heard whispers but never had its existence confirmed. The ship had soft-docked. We entered through a wobbly access tube—I was still unsteady on my feet—to an entrance lock guarded by a couple of troops wearing what I’d come to recognise as security corps uniforms. On the other side of the lock we came onto a walkway so wide that it seemed absurd to my ship-adjusted eyes. There was a railing opposite the tube entrance, but the far wall beyond that was entirely transparent, giving the illusion that we hung in space with nothing to protect us from the vacuum. The pink scarred surface of Asto filled the entire view, appearing overhead from where we stood.
“Whoa.” I stopped to re-gain my balance. Another re-assessment of what was up or down. It looked like the planet was about to hit us.
Most of the ship’s crew appeared to be staying aboard, but Asha and an entourage of guards were already waiting.
He led us along the walkway to the left at a brisk pace, accompanied by a couple of uniformed people on scooters.
Natanu walked next to me, and Ezhya’s other guards in a pyramid formation behind her.
A number of troops stood on either side of the walkway, each in a subservient pose. Had they been waiting for their superior? Did they snap into position as soon as they saw Asha coming?
As we progressed, I noticed that all the doors to the gallery were kept shut. Sometimes personnel stood before the closed door as if to make sure that no one got in. Everyone wore charge guns, and I even spotted some heavier weaponry. They were all watching me and our party.
The walkway was smooth and glass-like and curved gently up, so that the floor disappeared behind the ceiling ahead. The parched landscape outside the window had rotated as we moved over it. Damn, we were in a ring structure so big that the floor of the outer ring seemed almost flat. This had to be one of the largest space stations in existence. Much, much bigger than Midway.
What did they do up here? How many military personnel were stationed here? The thought of the sheer power in this place sent a chill down my spine. I’d never understood why Asto seemed so reluctant about using its military, or even admitting that it existed. Seeing all this made me even more puzzled. They had all this and didn’t use it? What was the function of this station in the power structure of Asto?
Next to me, Thayu’s face showed absolute wonder, as if her eyes were drinking this all in.
“Have you been here before?” I asked her in Isla.
“No. No one gets to see this.”
Which explained Asha’s terseness.
And that, when you came to think of it, said a whole lot more about my relationship with a man who, with my non-Coldi senses, I would have described as a first-class arsehole.
A group of military came towards us, and Asha stopped to talk. His guards kept us just out of hearing as if we were naughty children.
The newcomers cast suspicious looks at our ensemble. I suspected Asha had told them about the key.
I pretended to ignore both the conversation and the slight and concentrated on the view.
The station floated directly above a brown and orange tinged ocean. Wind whipped the water into white-capped waves that showed as tiny ripples from here. Sunlight glinted off the surface. On the horizon, coming into view, was Vaneyi, Asto’s main continent, with a brown and pink-edged shoreline caked with foam and yellow encrustations, some of which had formed net-like patterns in the shallow areas amongst which there were pools of many different shades of yellow and orange.
The continent was pink, with outcrops of grey, dark brown and red. A narrow mountain ridge bordered the ocean. Small puffs of clouds hung above those mountains and where I could see between them, the land-facing slopes were covered in dark fuzz of vegetation and bright azure lakes.
Deep scores crisscrossed the land beyond the mountains. From directly above, I could see into these natural aquifers, into the green oases within.
The meteorite that had struck the planet more than fifty thousand years ago had broken up. The main piece had formed the crater that was now the roughly circular, virtually land-locked ocean between the continents. The other was a much smaller piece and it had made a neat circular crater in the desert. The land between the crater and the ocean was known as the Crystal wastelands, a hot, sun-baked plain strewn with sharp-edged stones.
The crater lay just to the south of Athyl and was filled with a grey-purple gas that looked almost like water from this height.
It was sulphur-hexafluoride, a heavy gas that occurred on Earth only through industrial activity. It had formed immediately after the meteorite strike, because of the high fluoride content of Asto’s rock. It was a strong greenhouse gas and its breakdown was the main trigger in the change washing over the planet.
The mega-city of Athyl lay in the middle of the landmass, like a fat spider in a web of roads. Even from this far up, you could clearly distinguish the circles: concentric rings around the middle of the city, marked by a wall or a
stretch of vacant land. Agriculture happened in the aquifers, small strips of brilliant green on the banks of rivers or holding basins. Industry occupied most of the Eighth Circle, followed by administration, education, services, until you reached the Inner Circle, the secret domain of Ezhya and his immediate association. That association which was on the brink of fracture.
“Cory.” Thayu touched my arm and held the temperature-retaining suits under my nose.
I tore my gaze away from that amazing landscape.
“It’s time to get changed.” Her voice was soft and gentle, the way I loved it so much. I wanted to hold her in my arms and kiss her.
“Oh. All right.” I took the soft material from her. Our hands touched fleetingly. Sixteen days since I’d last slept next to her, since we’d made love in our bathroom and then again on the bed by the light of Ceren’s moons. Those sixteen days screamed at me. If I died on the planet below, would it be without ever touching my wife again?
“You got the key safely tucked away?” she whispered to me when I passed, in Isla.
“I do.” Although the weight of it in the pocket of my jacket seemed to be growing.
Everyone in a position of power wanted that thing. How long would it be before someone tried to get it by force?
When the hell was the Exchange going to come back?
I followed her to a small, windowless, featureless room where she helped me into all the gear we had brought. A double temperature retaining suit, the outer layer silver, with the distinctive maroon sash that signified Ezhya’s association. The fabric was too long for me, and she had to wrap it a few times around the belt. I looked at myself in the reflection of the wall: too puny for these clothes, already sweating before I even got to this hot place.
“I will look like a cyborg once I put on my tanks and helmet.” It was a lame attempt at levity which fell flat.
She ran the tip of her nose over the skin under my ear. I held her with one arm while holding the helmet with the other. I kissed her with all the passion I could muster. Her muscles tensed under my hands. Yes, I knew everyone was waiting for us.