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

by Patty Jansen

  We went in. Veyada shut the door and locked it. Then he led us out the other side of the shelter, into a larger room.

  Here, he halted.

  I took the opportunity to sit down on a bench and take off the helmet. I studied the outside but couldn’t see or remember any place to turn off the interior display.

  Sheydu turned to her colleague. “What’s going on? Why didn’t he let us through? These are our people. Natanu’s association. They should let us in. We have no one higher-ranking with us who could be a threat to the hub.”

  “I don’t know,” Veyada said. He was panting. “Something tells me there has already been a re-alignment of power.”

  “But who could have done that? Risha?”

  “Risha’s guards were at the station, remember? They let us through.”

  “Then who? Asha never made it into the building, Taysha is still in his apartment, Natanu is with Asha . . .” She spread her hands. “Anyone else coming up here would have had to fight their way in, and there’s been no fight. He can only refuse us entry if someone is using the hub, and it’s not Taysha, although he would very much like to get in, and it’s not Asha, although he would also very much like to get in. It’s definitely not Natanu, because we’re her association and we would know.”

  Shit, the leadership struggle was in full force.

  I asked, slightly out of breath, “Ezhya lives alone, doesn’t he?” I’d never heard him mention a woman or any other kind of partner.

  Her eyes met mine in a blank look. I wasn’t quite sure what she thought I’d suggested, but the notion that family should be protective of a family member’s position was not so out-there for Coldi to be unable to understand; or was it? Or, based on what Veyada had said, maybe not.

  “Yes, he lives alone.” Her voice had an odd coolness to it.

  What? Jilted lover? Unrequited love?

  All right, all right, I wasn’t going to go there anymore. “Could it be any of his domestic staff?”

  “They are all accounted for in the domestic quarters. They don’t have access to the hub anymore. They wouldn’t know how to use it. They wouldn’t dare enter the hub room.”

  What about cleaning it? But I was sure that would also be a stupid question.

  I tried again, “How do you know it’s a person, not one of the routines gone haywire? Maybe it could have been caused by the Exchange outage.”

  “No. For orders to have changed at this level, someone would have to have gone into the hub with a key or an approximation and accessed the command structure. It would have to be someone from the office or domestic staff who not only has the right to be inside his quarters, but knows how the hub works. The domestic staff doesn’t know that. The office staff can’t get in when Ezhya is not here.”

  I didn’t know what else to suggest. No had had ever spoken to me about the arrangements of the Chief Coordinator’s position. I doubted even many of the people immediately under Ezhya knew those things.

  “Then who knows how to use the hub besides Ezhya?”

  “Not many,” Veyada said.

  Sheydu said, “I do.”

  That’s why she had come with me.

  And then a niggling voice inside me said, What if she wants to challenge?

  But no, I had to believe that at least some people would remain loyal to Ezhya when it mattered, or this would drive me mad.

  Veyada jerked his head. “Let’s keep going.”

  He ducked into another passage. Seriously, how big was this building? It had more secret passages than an Egyptian pyramid.

  I needed all my energy to keep up with them and to stop any embarrassing stumbles.

  At least we were out of that claustrophobic tunnel and ran from one room into another. Storage, offices, communication hubs, all abandoned. I had no idea where we were going.

  Down the stairs, through another hall and out an arched doorway into the plant-filled courtyard. Across the path. Shapes of strange plants and giant mushrooms flashed past—Asto had plants that could move, and most of them had gathered on the ground to catch the lingering heat of the day. Some of them had moved onto the path and I had to make sure I didn’t step on them. I’d seen these odd things before, curiosities in the hothouses of the rich Barresh councillors’ mansions.

  On the other side of the courtyard Sheydu crouched at a small door and folded out her spindly machine while Veyada and I waited in the shadow of the wall.

  Lights had come on in the wing opposite the courtyard where we had come from. Faint sounds of shouts drifted on the air. People were looking for us no doubt.

  Sheydu sprang to her feet. The door opened.

  We bolted outside. Up a set of steps, across another the courtyard. Did I imagine it or had the sky really turned a livid orange?

  Sheydu ran ahead and I followed as best as I could, but I was so hot my vision was starting to blur. When we climbed another set of steps to a kind of footbridge that led across a dome roof, the floor of the bridge suddenly seemed to fall under my feet. My vision contracted to a narrow tunnel. I stopped, grabbing onto the side railing.

  “Stop, Sheydu, please stop.”

  I let myself sink to the floor against the railing, gulping deep breaths. The hot air seared my throat. Veyada crouched next to me. He turned the air flow on my tank up as far as it would go.

  “You’re all right?”

  “Just . . . a little rest,” I panted, gulping cool air.

  I leaned back against the railing, trying to calm my racing heart. I needed to calm down because being agitated made the heat stress worse. But I needed my medication and damn it, where were Thayu and Nicha and why hadn’t the diversion happened? Why had we been separated in the first place?

  Sheydu had stopped a little further, alert as a predator ready to spring.

  She said something I didn’t catch.

  “We need to keep going. Are you ready?” Veyada asked.

  I wasn’t, but attempted to push myself up anyway. A little voice in the back of my head said that I shouldn’t be stupid and let them assist me. Both guards were much stronger than me and had no trouble with the climate. I should stop being stubborn and—

  “Come!” Sheydu called, her voice urgent.

  Veyada dragged me up.

  A small object hit my arm with a plock as if someone was throwing pebbles.

  “What—”

  Another object hit my helmet. Plock! And then another fell on my shoulder—

  “Hurry up!”

  Plock, plock, plock . A little dark circle formed on the stone in front of me.

  Rain.

  And rain on Asto was nasty business. Very high in acid and poisons.

  The wind brought a waft of wet stone that wormed itself between the helmet and my face mask.

  We started running again across the footbridge. I managed to find some strength to move my feet. Veyada was close behind me.

  The footbridge seemed endless. I couldn’t help thinking of that time I had dragged Thayu along the streets of Far Atok in Barresh, suffering hypothermia and barely able to think coherently. That was how I felt. The air rushed through my helmet and I felt like there was never enough, leaving me light-headed. Several times Veyada had to hang onto my arm so that I didn’t fall.

  We reached the end of the footbridge at a kind of porch-like structure in front of a door. It was pitch dark underneath the overhang of the roof, with walls on two sides.

  The wind picked up, carrying clouds of dust and grit.

  Sheydu knelt near the door. Part of her hair had escaped her ponytail. It was flying across her face, defying her attempts to tuck it behind her ear. She shouted orders at Veyada who joined her
in fiddling with the spider-thing and the wires.

  A gust of wind nearly knocked me off my feet. Grit and sand grazed my helmet. More and more large drops hit the pavement of the footbridge which, seen from here, seemed to lead into nothingness, the courtyard having been obscured by dust or droplets, I couldn’t tell which. I could taste dust in my mouth despite the helmet.

  “Hurry up!” Sheydu said.

  Veyada opened the door to a dark room. We stumbled inside just as a sheet of rain lashed the building. I stood, panting, inside the door, looking out over the footbridge, which became drenched in seconds. My helmet display indicated a sharp drop in temperature. Only forty degrees C. I slowly lifted the helmet from my head, breathing the humid air that smelled of rain after a hot day.

  “I love that smell.”

  With heat like that, the scent was very strong. So strong, in fact, that the very stone was breathing. Steam rose off the paving and formed a mist over the ground. Wait—that wasn’t part of the normal state of affairs. That was . . .

  Holy crap. Acid.

  I coughed and slammed the door shut, but could still smell the scent in the back of my nose. How damn acid was that rain?

  “Got a nose full of burning air?” Sheydu asked, her voice barely hiding a smile.

  “Urgh, that’s terrible. Is it always like this?”

  “Often. Although of course it never used to rain when I was young.”

  I’d never truly understood why rain frightened people on Asto so. Rain was supposed to be a good thing, right?

  But if this stuff got into the aquifers and the fragile agricultural systems, it had potential to do great damage.

  The smell of rain after a hot day would never again be the same.

  ‎

  Chapter 13

  * * *

  WE HAD ENTERED what looked like a guest apartment and, by the crunch of grit under my boots, it hadn’t been used for some time.

  I put my helmet down on a bench against the wall and turned off the air. It was pretty hot inside, but I’d better conserve the cool air for when I really needed it. Things weren’t exactly going to plan.

  A steady thrum against the windows indicated that it was pouring.

  “I wonder what this much rain does to the buildings.”

  “It’s not been good,” Veyada said. “It does a lot of damage to stone and metal structures. The first drops are always the worst.”

  I looked out of the window, which offered a view over the city.

  “Those noises we heard, was that Asha and his disturbance?” It was on the bold side asking him this, and he had no reason to tell me. This could be filed under stuff the politician or diplomat is better off not knowing.

  He put a finger to his lips and pointed at the ceiling.

  Oh. Bugs.

  I shivered involuntarily.

  Sheydu lingered by the door on the far side of the room. She kept glancing at her reader and had opened the door a crack so she could see out.

  “Any signs of movement?” asked Veyada.

  She shook her head and kept fiddling with the reader.

  Veyada went to have a look. She pointed at the screen.

  “Are you serious?”

  She looked at him, chin up.

  “Damn. You know I have no love for those things.”

  “You got a better suggestion?”

  He said nothing.

  She sniffed, made a hand signal and went back to fiddling with the screen. Veyada prowled around the room a few times looking at the screen of his reader before he yanked his gun from the bracket. I ducked, unable to muffle a squeak. He fired at the ceiling three times. Plaster and bits of stone rained down.

  One of the hits had left a hole in the ceiling where blackened wires had fallen out of the plaster. Veyada climbed on a box and pulled the lot free with a further shower of plaster, some of which went into my hair.

  I gave him my best What the hell? look.

  “We’re forced to stop being subtle about this,” he said, dumping burnt wires on the floor. “As of now, this is an official attempt to gain control of the hub. Everyone in the Inner Circle will be after us anyway. We need to move fast if we have any chance of reaching the hub. We need to talk without being overheard.”

  Hence the wires on the floor.

  Sheydu said, “You do that while I open this.” She was at the window, and had stuck her threads between the frame and the sill.

  “We are going outside again?” The rain lashed against the glass.

  Veyada nodded, solemnly. “They won’t expect us to do that.”

  “Does anyone go out in this rain?”

  “It’s not about the rain. It is because there are drones.”

  “Drones?” I was starting to like this less and less. Climbing over the façade of a building in the dark was one thing, but doing so with increased gravity was another, and so was climbing while wearing cumbersome gear, and while acid rain pissed down on you. What the hell were drones? I seriously didn’t want to know.

  Just didn’t.

  Veyada said, “Listen. There are a few things you need to know about the drones. They’re about as long as your arm and they crawl over the outside of the building, detecting movement. When they find it, they will come and investigate. They have a biometrics sensor and will scan your ID. When they ask you a question, you should give a code while pressing the two middle buttons on their ‘heads’. Because of who we are, we have the code. I’ll send it to you now.”

  My comm pinged. A sequence of six numbers appeared on the screen.

  “When a drone comes, read it out slowly and clearly. Don’t make any mistakes.”

  “What happens if you get it wrong?”

  “They’ll kill you.”

  “No way. I’ll kill it first.”

  “Sure, but that’s not going to help you much. If you attack a drone, it will attract a general security alarm and will bring all the guards on us. If the drone doesn’t kill you, they certainly will. So please get this right.”

  Sheydu was yanking at the grille that covered the window. Three sides of it were loose already.

  I repeated the number sequence a few times. Six, nine, four, twelve, two, seven. It was a long and awkward number combination, because in Coldi only exponentials of two were whole numbers and the rest were all composite numbers made up out of the exponential plus the number of times the residual was divisible by lower exponentials of two. The notation for twelve was 32: two to the power of three plus two squared. I guess making the code awkward was the whole point. They could have made it 321—fourteen—or 3210—fifteen. It was a system that did my head in at times, but reflected everything about Coldi society: pairs were paramount, and the larger numbers became, the less importance was placed on their accuracy, because the numbers became too long and awkward. Also, with increasing numbers came vastly increasing complexity.

  Sheydu said, “I’m ready, let’s go.”

  She had cut away the grille and forced the window open and jumped onto the windowsill. Veyada handed her a thin rope from his pack and a sticky pad about the size of an orange, wrapped in clear foil. She peeled the foil off, scrunched it up and put it in her pocket. Meanwhile, in her other hand, the contents of the foil reshaped into a baseball-glove-shaped blob, which oozed and sloshed around. It was covered with brown bristly hair. A metal eyelet went through the middle. Sheydu attached the rope to it, and stuck her hand out the window. She flung the thing up against the outside wall, keeping the end of the rope in her hand. She pulled it taut, and yanked harder. She seemed satisfied with the sticking power of the pad and edged out of the window. Where she went and how she hung onto the outside wall, I couldn’t see. Veyada prepared a second pad, looking unconcerned for his partner’s safety.

  The rope swung back to the window.

  “Your turn,” he said.

  “Where to?”

  “Climb up. You’ll see Sh
eydu up there.”

  “What about the rain?”

  “It should be just water now. It’s usually just the first drops that are high in acids.”

  Nothing for it.

  Getting onto the windowsill in my gear wasn’t that easy. Veyada gave me the final leg-up and came to stand next to me. He gave me the helmet, helped me put it on and turned on the tank. Then he attached the rope to my belt, gave me a second rope which he had attached to the second pad. He flung that pad up into the darkness where it hit the wall above the window with a thud and stuck there.

  He yanked the rope, apparently satisfied.

  I peered out into the night. The city of Athyl stretched out underneath me, twisted rows of lights and a variety of architecture reaching all the way to the horizon. Concentric lines of red lights marked the circle boundaries. Occasional spotlight beams showed the intensity of the rain that was still coming down.

  So the rain was safe now, huh?

  The window was on the second floor of this side of the building. There was a domed roof on the ground floor level, probably some kind of foyer.

  I could see the shape of Sheydu ahead. She had walked along a ledge that led from our window to a balcony on the corner facing away from us. The ledge passed a few windows, all of them dark. She had strung the rope along the wall, with sticky pads holding it a regular intervals.

  I stepped onto the ledge. A waft of hot, acid-tinged and droplet-charged air blew up from the courtyard. It fogged up the visor of the helmet, and all of a sudden I couldn’t see where I was going. Shit. Hanging onto the rope with one hand, I pushed the visor up. Did my eyes prick because of the acidity or because I expected them to prick with acidity? Sweat rolled down my back.

  Keep going, Mr Wilson.

  Slowly, I shuffled along the ledge. Wasn’t I lucky that I didn’t suffer a great fear of heights?

  I got into a pattern: move my right hand along the rope, then my right foot along the ridge, then my left foot and left hand. Repeat. Slowly, I came closer to the balcony. The courtyard downstairs remained empty. I saw no drones.