by Patty Jansen
Now that the tension was gone, fatigue washed over me.
I almost fell asleep in the train to the gamra island. Thayu and Nicha sat talking over my head. Veyada and Sheydu looked decidedly out of sorts. They’d be ill with adaptation for the next few days. I could think of which rooms I was going to use for them. If they took my second-best guest room, I’d have to move Margarethe to another room. If she wanted to stay, which seemed unlikely; she probably should go home as soon as possible.
Melissa—damn, I’d forgotten about her.
Nicha had to jolt me awake when the train started slowing down. Sleeping in public would never do.
The train came to a halt in the underground station. Nicha, Thayu, Veyada and Sheydu followed me out.
It was so good to be back. I looked at all the buildings and the rampant vegetation with renewed appreciation.
I felt incredibly light, and the humidity made me breathe easier. The sight of Evi and Telaris at the door almost made me cry.
As soon as we entered the hall to my apartment, Eirani came rushing from the living room where, as was to be expected, she had been setting up a meal.
“Oh, Muri, I am so glad to have you back.”
“I’m glad to be back, too, Eirani.”
She frowned at Veyada and Sheydu. “You’ve taken them back with you?”
“They’re part of my association now. They’ll live here from now on.”
“But Muri . . .”
“We have enough space, do we not?”
“Yes, we do.”
“Then find them a room. They’ll be quite uncomfortable while they go through adaptation. I think the second guest room would do perfectly. It has a nice view.”
“Certainly, I shall inform the staff.”
Devlin had come to the door of the hub.
“Everything working again?”
“Perfectly.”
I wondered about the nature of the outage. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to set up a backup system. We might need to talk to the Aghyrians about that.
The mirror in the hall showed me my peeling face and sun-streaked hair. I looked like I’d been working on an ocean-going sailing boat for months.
There was tea in the living room, where I also found Margarethe and Melissa, deep in discussion. They seemed friendly. Both stopped talking and looked at the door when I came in.
“Cory! You made it back.” Margarethe looked healthy and relaxed.
“Yes, I’m still alive, surprisingly.”
I let myself fall unceremoniously on the couch. All the stress had left me. I felt like I could sleep for days. And sit in a bath that was not too hot, that I didn’t have to share with children, or Nicha, or with anyone else except Thayu. And sleep, eat and simply sit still without sweating.
My eyes met Melissa’s. “I’m sorry that you got stuck here. I guess your employers have been making a fuss.” There was something different about her, about the way that she wore a local shirt from the markets and her hair was loose, tucked behind one ear.
“I quit Flash. I’ve been writing down a lot of notes Margarethe made about Ezhya’s attitude to gamra and Earth in particular. She’s asked me to write a series of articles about it.” She sounded different too. More gentle, less angry.
Well, there was at least one positive outcome of this whole debacle. “What about you?” I asked Margarethe. There was one question I wanted to ask but couldn’t.
She smiled. “It’s going to sound ungrateful, but I’ve had a most wonderful holiday. We went to see something else every day. I’ve spoken extensively with the people at the Trader Guild and our own Traders.”
“Let me guess, they want to sell more coffee, right?”
She chuckled. “There isn’t enough coffee in the world to satisfy demands.”
“Black gold indeed.”
“The talks were very useful. We also visited some outlying communities and development projects. Beautiful country.”
I nodded. I’d been to Kedras a few times. Kedras was a small world, with its economy mainly running on the Trader Guild headquarters, but they did produce some high quality products, both tangible and virtual. And the countryside around the Trader Guild headquarters was something to behold. Vivid orange rock, sheer canyons, blindingly green oases, blue sky. It was a fairly cool world, ancient and rich in certain resources. And then the Trader Guild headquarters were a wonder by themselves. A magnificent complex in its modern elegance.
“So you thought it was useful and enjoyed yourself?”
“Yes, I’m sorry, but I did. He’s an entertaining host.”
Oops, what the hell did that mean? Her face showed no kind of emotion.
What did that mean for nethana?
He hadn’t tried it.
He had tried it but she had politely refused and nothing more had been said about it?
Or, heaven forbid, he had tried it and she had thought why the heck not—I knew she wasn’t married—and had liked it, and attached wrong, human conclusions to the feeling.
Shit.
There was my imagination running away with me again. Of course she was smart enough to do no such thing.
“Whatever was happening at the Exchange, I didn’t feel threatened at any time. We were assured that technicians were working on fixing the outage. I never felt that we were in any kind of danger.”
Ezhya was notoriously good at hiding his distress. He must have done a stellar job.
And being part of the Ratanga cluster of the Exchange, Kedras was not likely to succumb to panic and hysteria.
“Have you spoken to Nations of Earth?”
“I have. I guess a good side of Earth not being an official member of gamra means that no one gets overly upset if something like this happens.”
“They must have noticed.”
“Sure, they did, but the Exchange staff in Athens did a very good job at keeping tempers calm.”
Well, that was at least one lesson that had been learned from the panic that had ensued after Sirkonen’s death.
“I assume you’ll be returning soon.”
“Tomorrow.”
“I’m glad it’s been useful, and not too distressing.”
“Enjoyable.”
Margarethe smiled at me and the twinkle of light in her eyes made a chill clamp around my heart. Damn, she hadn’t, had she? Surely she wouldn’t have been so stupid?
I had to bite my tongue to stop myself screaming What did you do with him in your room at night? But if that question didn’t piss her off, she would remind me that she was a big enough girl to take her own decisions and that it was none of my business. Which she was right, it wasn’t.
One day, I would have to talk to Ezhya about nethana; then again, being him, it would be unlikely that he would listen. I must talk to her about it, too.
One day.
We enjoyed a light meal together, served by Eirani with all her bustle and gossip. She joked with Melissa, who seemed to have used some of the time I’d been away to learn keihu—if ever there was a language that was less useful to learn.
Nicha was preoccupied with something on his reader, but he didn’t seem distressed about it, and I didn’t get the chance to ask.
Before following Thayu into the bathroom, I went into the hub to check messages with Devlin.
He sat by himself in the semidarkness dealing with my unsent correspondence. The controls worked, projections flashed through the air. Even though he was alone in the hub, the room exuded an air of activity.
“Anything important come in that absolutely has to be dealt with today?”
Devlin flicked through the
backed-up messages, not as many as I’d predicted, but he said he’d already shifted anything non-urgent to a low priority queue, so no doubt an avalanche would still arrive within the coming days.
Already, there were a few requests for reports on my Asto visit, but little that needed to be dealt with straight away. I was glad for my staff and their understanding of our relationships. At least they weren’t liable to stab me in the back if I went away for a longer period.
The Exchange manager Yetaris Damaru wanted to see me, but that could wait. Everything was working again now. I needed a bath and needed to take care of those annoying regrown hairs on my chin. I’d have to visit the clinic for another treatment.
Amazing how quickly life again became so disturbingly normal.
Chapter 25
* * *
THE EVENING turned very pleasant. After filing the necessary notes and reports, Thayu and I enjoyed a drink on our lovers’ seat on the veranda overlooking the silver marshland. A couple of punts heavily laden with lily bulbs came in from the fields. The bridge builders had gone home for the day, and the newest unfinished struts for the bridge stood uselessly in the middle of the water, awaiting the construction of the horizontal beam.
I thought of the relentless dry air at Asto, already much less dry than I’d even had the displeasure to experience.
“This place is beautiful,” I said.
“Asto is beautiful,” Thayu said, with a playful challenge in her tone.
“In a harsh kind of way. I don’t know how you live in a place where the oceans are toxic and the only natural water is under the ground.”
Thayu smiled. “I don’t know how you live in a place where you get wet each time you leave shelter.”
I grinned. It had rained a lot when I took her to the town in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands where I had grown up.
We went back inside and found that certain things are much more pleasurable when you’re not sweating and having everything stick to you. Also much more comfortable than when a precocious child has decided you’re attacking the other person. I’d probably have to hear that one for the rest of my life.
I could still hear Natanu’s voice saying, “I didn’t think you were capable.”
Well, wasn’t that great? I was now officially part of a clan where people were comforted by the thought that I could “service” my legal partner.
Good grief.
We sat in the bath in the relaxing afterglow of making love when Telaris came in. “Excuse me, Delegate, but the Exchange owner Yetaris Damaru wants to see you.”
“I’ve already replied to him that I will see him first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Yes, Delegate, but he and Chief Delegate Akhtari are most insistent on seeing you right now.”
I frowned at Thayu. Whatever could that be? No less than Chief Delegate Akhtari? “All right. We’ll be there soon.”
So much for a relaxing night.
* * *
A bit later, Thayu and I walked into the reception area of the Exchange, where it was deserted at this time of the day, and where the only evidence of the upheaval was Asha’s guards’ cobbled-together radio, which stood ready to be packed up or disposed of in the corner.
That, and at the top of the stairs, a couple of armed guards whom I had never seen, in a place where guards were not usually posted.
That didn’t make me feel any better.
In his office, Yetaris Damaru sat at the couch in the corner. Facing him on the other couch, back held ramrod straight, was Joyelin Akhtari.
Ah, that explained the guards. So, this was serious business, huh?
I sat down on the couch next to Yetaris.
There was a reader on the table, and when Thayu had also sat, Yetaris touched the corner to activate the holo-display and placed the apparatus in the middle of the table.
The projection sprang into the air. “This is a compilation of recordings we made from a number of different nodes at the time of the outage. It pretty much speaks for itself.”
The Exchange logo hovered in the air briefly before the projection coalesced into a web woven of strands of light. This image I recognised from the Exchange nodes. It represented the currently-active network. A line of text underneath indicated that this was recorded from Damarq. As the construction of light shimmered and meandered in its usual way, a single, blindingly white thread reached from outside, and immediately the network vanished.
This was followed by another recording, this one from Barresh. Same thing.
Miran. Same thing.
Kedras. Same thing, same time.
The projection finished, and it was silent in the room.
“What . . . what is that thread?” I asked.
“Well, that . . .” He hesitated. “. . . is a very good question, but we’ve ruled out any network malfunction. To the best of our knowledge, naturally occurring strains are not as powerful as generated ones.”
I nodded. I knew about that, all right. Earth’s sole access through the network was through one of those natural strands, one of the few they’d located that was strong enough to carry ships.
Yetaris continued, “That strand you saw there was more than a thousand times stronger than anything we’re able to generate. With anpar lines, the stronger the concentration, the further the distance spanned.”
Which was why Hedron required many jumps. The number was currently sitting at fifteen, but had been much higher in the past. In the future, it might go lower. Not much, not any time soon, people in the know said. Generating anpar strands cost an insane amount of energy.
“So . . . what are you saying?”
Yetaris met my eyes. “This strand comes from a long way off. Like, outside the galaxy.”
“But . . .” None of the anpar strands left the galaxy. Too much energy was needed to sustain them.
He nodded. “Meaning that this is probably not natural. Anpar lines have a wake, especially the stronger ones. If you have an Exchange node set up to capture the wake, you can siphon off quite a bit of information. The Hedron Exchange has that, because they’re suspicious buggers, and because Hedron built our core, we have it, too. We’ve analysed the data and cross-referenced with Hedron to cull any artefacts of the process.” He touched the corner of the screen again. A block of text sprang into being.
“It’s Aghyrian, the old dialect.”
“But how. . . ?” An old resonation from way back?
Delegate Akhtari said, “This is the conclusion we’ve reached while you have been away: many, many years ago, when the Aghyrians of Asto were almost exterminated because of the meteorite strike, three ships managed to flee the planet. One, containing mainly clerics and philosophers and teachers, came to Barresh. One, containing government people, came to Miran. We never found the third ship and it was presumed lost. It was a research vessel, a generation ship with more than ten thousand on board, fully equipped for long journeys. The Aghyrians had used the ship to seed populations on many worlds that are still inhabited by people today.
“There are accounts of history that state that when the seriousness of the situation with the meteorite became obvious, the captain had disagreements with the government about forcefully carrying many more passengers than it was designed to carry for a long distance. There are long dissertations in the old texts about how the captain of the ship, a man named Kando Luzcon, was an arrogant, selfish, authoritarian man. This here . . .” She pointed a long and slender finger at a bit of the text. “Says Kando Luzcon.”
I stared at the curly characters. For all I knew, she could be telling me anything. Then again, she probably wasn’t. I still didn’t trust her—how close was she involved with Federza?—but she probably spoke the t
ruth.
“So now you know where the third ship went.” It was a belligerent, accusatory kind of you that I used.
She nodded. “Or, not really. We can guess, but we’re not sure who they are, who they’re with and what they want. We don’t know where they’ve come from.”
“Outside the galaxy,” Yetaris Damaru said. “They didn’t just tap into the Exchange network, they sent in a super-charged strand and destroyed it.”
“We don’t know if it was intentional,” I said. “It might be a ghost ship with no one left alive on board.”
“Could be,” Yetaris said. “But I wouldn’t want to bet on it. This beam is highly targeted and I’d have trouble believing that could be a coincidence. There are millions and millions of coordinates that the beam could have hit if it was a random occurrence. This not only hit the Exchange network, but it pinpointed the very centre of it.”
Delegate Akhtari nodded.
A chill went over me. “Could they possibly have been listening into the Exchange for a long period?”
Yetaris said, “Possibly? Most likely. Most likely, this is the cause of all the temporary hiccups we’ve had recently.”
Hiccups and unexplained flashes.
I looked accusingly at Delegate Akhtari. “Did you know about any of this?”
“You may not believe me, but I wouldn’t be sitting here if we did.” It was also the first time I heard her refer to Aghyrians as we. She sounded defensive.
“Any guesses as to what they want?”
Thayu said, her voice dark, “Likely, they’re not here to come to a family party. Anyone who can travel outside the galaxy and who can make strands that are strong enough to bring down the Exchange network will have the technology to know that Asto’s climate is changing. They’re here to re-claim Asto.”
A cold feeling went over me. Did the Aghyrians on Asto know about this?
Damn, and here I was thinking we’d solved the problem. “How long do we have before they’re here?”