Ambassador 6: The Enemy Within

by Patty Jansen

  “Your trip has been very enlightening. We don’t normally send people into Nations of Earth. We rely on our conventional bugs and trust them to report to us. But it has become apparent that this communication has been much suppressed over the past year. Your trip shows us that our concerns about how suppressed were well-founded.”

  “So . . . my trip was a spying mission in disguise?”

  “Well, let’s say we wanted to send people as much as they were keen for you to come.”

  “I really don’t like being used.” I felt sick.

  “No, but this is an extraordinary time that justifies extraordinary measures. Come. I’ll show you something.” She opened a door to the side of the room. I’d noticed this door before and assumed that there was a bathroom behind it. The building had been built as a private hospital and, in its original state, many of the rooms had bathrooms attached.

  My assumption couldn’t have been more wrong.

  We entered a darkened large room that appeared to have been formed from knocking out a couple of walls of adjacent suites.

  In the centre of the room stood a circular bench that came to life with lights as Amarru approached.

  I had seen something like this before, only once, when I’d had the privilege to enter Ezhya’s nerve centre that he used to communicate with his vast networks of associations.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised that this existed right here on Earth, but it rattled me, nevertheless. I could already hear the protesting voices in the Nations of Earth Assembly. We said they controlled us, but no one wanted to believe it, but look at this. The Pretoria Cartel would be right at the front.

  Damn, Amarru. Here was my answer for how much control she had over communication on Earth.

  The answer: total control.

  Damn, damn.

  “What you see here is the completion of more than two hundred years of work. Every time someone uses any electronic form of communication, we can track it.” She touched a light point on the screen before her and a projection sprang up. Lines of text—in Isla—scrolled across it.

  “Nice.” Scary. Absolutely scary. There would be revolt in the assembly once people found out about this. I didn’t even dare ask the question: does Margarethe know about this?

  I hoped she didn’t, in which case a confrontation between Nations of Earth and gamra was in the cards if it came out. I hoped that she did, in which case Margarethe’s position in the assembly would become untenable if the existence of this network, and her approval of it, became public knowledge.

  And then I asked anyway, because I couldn’t live with not knowing.

  Amarru’s reply was, “I didn’t bring you here to talk about that.”

  So—avoidance?

  Margarethe didn’t know?

  “I’ve brought you here to show you this.” She touched another light point on the bench and the projection grew into a ball made of light that hovered in the middle of the room. A very familiar ball, with the familiar shapes of coastlines of Earth’s continents.

  I felt sick, like I had been transported to a conspiracy movie, watching the extent of influence of the bad guys over Earth. She couldn’t—I had to—damn, Amarru.

  “Look here.” She pointed out a dark spot over Western Europe, another over southern Africa and another over eastern Africa. “We’ve lost communication in these areas. These black zones are growing. This is the work of the Pretoria Cartel. We now know for sure because of your visit. We have not been able to get full coverage of Rotterdam for almost a year.”

  And now I knew that Margarethe did know about this and I felt even sicker.

  “Do you know . . .” I cleared my throat. “Do you know that the president intends to hold a referendum about joining gamra?”

  And oh, gamra itself would have something to say about this vast spying network. Coldi had always defended their position that they were not attempting to take control of Earth on the sly, and surely one look at this room would put a nail in that coffin.

  “I know.” She looked up from the seat in the middle of the circular bench. Here she was, a middle-aged woman with grey spiked-up hair who had more influence over Earth than anyone. “These elections depend on communication, right?”

  Something snapped in me. “No. Amarru, you can’t manipulate communication. You can’t. That’s not how Nations of Earth works and why it was set up. It’s not how the court works or how anything works on this world!” I breathed fast. “Don’t even suggest to me that you’re going to do this, because I’m not going to cooperate with it. I will be forced to report it to both Nations of Earth and the gamra assembly. Don’t do this to me, Amarru. I’ve trusted you, and—”

  She raised her eyebrows at me as if she wanted to say, I thought you were made of sterner stuff.

  I was sweating under my shirt.

  Then she looked down and shrugged. “Well then, I guess you might be happy with this situation.” She touched the light point again. Now the vast network flicked off to be replaced with just the previously dark spots around Rotterdam and in Africa. There were additional, albeit much smaller, spots, along the eastern Canadian coast down to the south into the conflict zone of eastern America. All these spots were linked to each other and to threads that came from out of space.

  What the hell?

  I frowned at her.

  She nodded, her lips pressed together.

  “What . . . who is that?”

  “We can only guess.”

  “Can I make a guess that it has something to do with Kando Luczon?” In fact, this whole Tamerian thing smacked of Aghyrian influences. We didn’t know where the Aghyrian ship had gone and had not been able to locate it. But of course a very old and vindictive mind like Kando Luczon’s would not take no for an answer. He’d been denied access to gamra worlds, but there were plenty of non-gamra ones . . . of which Earth was by far the most populous and influential.

  Damn it.

  Now we got to the bottom of the issue.

  Amarru nodded again, still looking at me. She looked old to me.

  The conflict was not Earth vs gamra and not even old politics vs new politics, and it had nothing to do with the Pretoria cartel, or the curtailing of off-Earth crime or, heaven forbid, the Zhori clan and their weapon smuggling.

  The conflict was two middle-aged women—influential ones but still, only two—against a mysterious force somewhere in deep space, and the battle ground was the hearts and minds of everyone on Earth and possibly at gamra as well.

  I blew out a sigh. “What now?” Margarethe had to win this referendum, or there would be war on a scale gamra had never seen.

  “I’d like you to stick around for a bit if you can,” she said.

  “I was planning to take my team for a fun trip to visit my father in New Zealand.”

  “New Zealand will do.” She flicked back to her, our, trusted network. There were plenty of light spots in New Zealand. People on the register, who could help us. “I’ll get you some tickets so you can go as soon as your female team member has recovered.”

  * * *

  I went to see Thayu when I came out of Amarru’s office. She and the rest of the team were sitting in a bright room at the hospital. Thayu was in bed, but she was drinking tea and her cheeks were pink and her eyes bright.

  She smiled at me. “They say I can go. There will be no lasting damage and we can try again.”

  I thought uncomfortably about the needles and the procedure I’d had to undergo. Ugh. Anyway, we’d face that once we were back home.

  I had no idea how much they knew about my talk to Amarru, but we discussed plans to go to New Zealand. There would be time later to bother them with the worrying things I’d seen.

  Eirani wanted to know if she was finally going to need the cold weather gear that she had brought.

  “It’s winter in New Zealand,” I said. “That doesn’t mean very much, but yes, it may be colder than you find comfortable.”

  The Pengali sat on the flo
or at the foot of Thayu’s bed, looking at a reader which displayed screen after screen of different kinds of sharks. They would go back to Barresh tomorrow. I made a note to talk to Ynggi in private before he left. I wanted him on my staff.

  Eirani had poured me some tea and was sharing around cake when a Damarcian man in a light green hospital uniform came in. He met my eyes and gestured me to the corridor, where he shut the door to Thayu’s room before speaking.

  “The other . . . person who was with you, do you know much about him?”

  “No. He is not usually a member of our group. How is he?”

  “Not terribly well, I’m afraid. Do you know anything about the implants he has?”

  “Implants? No, I’m afraid none of us know him well enough to know that he has any. What are they for?”

  “It will take us some time to figure that out, and I don’t think we’ll have the time.”

  “All I can do is give you the details of someone who will know more.” If I could find Jasper’s contact details.

  “Is this someone in Barresh?”

  “Yes, Jasper Carlson.”

  “We already contacted him. He claims not to know anything about this man.”

  What? He would let Jemiro die rather than help him?

  “We need to know about these implants before we can touch them. Our medical engineers have looked at it, and they seem to think that the implants are self-destructing and that they are the only things keeping the man alive. We’ve tried to override the programs, but we’re unfamiliar with this technology and may do more harm than good.”

  He took me to a room a floor down, where a single bed stood in a small room, surrounded by equipment.

  I barely recognised the figure in the bed. His face was sickly grey. His hair stringy and thin.

  The doctor went on, “We have also contacted the Pakiru family in Barresh. They were quite disturbed about this case. They said their cousin was killed in a fight recently. They sent us a picture of him.”

  “Is this the same man?”

  “It is.”

  A deep chill went over me.

  So, what? Jasper and his cronies had rebuilt Jemiro? Revived him and implanted knowledge into him? As far as I knew, most traditional keihu families farewelled their dead by placing them on a float and letting them be dragged into the ocean by the tidal currents. Were there really people out there who snatched dead bodies to turn them into mindless workers?

  They had sent him with us to show how they could create people with skills on demand, and the demonstration had not gone as they intended.

  “What do you want us to do?” the doctor asked me.

  “Try your best, both to see what is going on with him and to save him. If he’s stable, send him to Barresh. If he doesn’t make it, send him back to his family.”

  “They already said they can’t afford to pay for it.”

  “I will.” I’d said it before I remembered the dire situation with my accounts.

  But, damn it, I was disgusted. This was not how I wanted people to be treated.

  He deserved better. His family deserved better.

  The doctor asked me for details and declarations before I could go back upstairs. I explained the situation to my team, and they were just as disturbed as I was, in particular Thayu.

  “I hope Jemiro comes out of it all right,” she said, her voice soft.

  Maybe it was hormonal influence, but she seemed more emotional than normal.

  “Yeah, I hope so, too.” I held little hope, based on what the doctor had told me, but if he did come out, maybe I should give him a simple job in the house.

  “You know, I’m always surprised how you manage to think of the small things in the face of much larger problems,” Thayu said.

  I smiled at her. She was already recovering well from her misfortune, and I would need her in the near future, not just as a partner, but as a colleague and member of my team.

  “Sometimes, the smaller problems are the ones that give us hope.”

  “He talks a lot, but this is true,” Sheydu said. “The small problems are the ones we can solve. The bigger ones might solve themselves.”

  “Or they might not,” Nicha said.

  “Whether they will or won’t is out of our influence.” I rose. “We’re leaving tomorrow. I suggest everyone get some rest.”

  Everyone left in pairs. Nicha with Ayshada, Reida and Deyu, Veyada and Sheydu. Mereeni had gone back to Amarru’s service. Veyada had not mentioned her and I had not seen him take any time to say goodbye to her, but I reminded myself to ask him about her, because Coldi courtship behaviour mystified me more than ever.

  A doctor came and cleared Thayu to leave the hospital. It was also fine for her to come to New Zealand with us.

  I contacted my father and made arrangements. He would come to the airport with the bus that belonged to the community where he lived. He was looking forward to seeing us. To be honest, I was looking forward to it, too. Heaven knew when I’d last had a real holiday.

  It would be a period of calm before the storm, before we had to sort out with Jasper what was going on, before Margarethe called the referendum and I might have to come back to help her, and before the inevitable upheaval that would follow.

  Thayu and I walked to our room hand in hand. No words were necessary for the heaviness in our hearts, the worry in our minds, and the knowledge that whatever happened next, we would always have each other.

  Thank You

  . . . for reading Ambassador 6: The Enemy Within. The story continues in Ambassador 7: The Last Frontier when Cory faces an enemy with the power to bring down any hope for a fair referendum. Learn where to get The Last Frontier here.

  About the Author

  * * *

  PATTY JANSEN lives in Sydney, Australia, where she spends most of her time writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her story This Peaceful State of War placed first in the second quarter of the Writers of the Future contest and was published in their 27th anthology. She has also sold fiction to genre magazines such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Redstone SF and Aurealis.

  Her novels (available at ebook venues) include Shifting Reality (hard SF), The Far Horizon (middle grade SF), Charlotte’s Army (military SF) and The Icefire Trilogy consisting of Fire & Ice, Dust & Rain and Blood & Tears (dark fantasy).

  Patty is on Twitter (@pattyjansen), Facebook, LinkedIn, goodreads, LibraryThing, google+ and blogs at: http://pattyjansen.com/.

  More by This Author

  * * *

  In the Earth-Gamra space-opera universe

  The Shattered World Within (novella)

  RETURN OF THE AGHYRIANS

  Watcher’s Web

  Trader’s Honour

  Soldier’s Duty

  Heir’s Revenge

  The Return of the Aghyrians Omnibus

  The Far Horizon (For younger readers)

  AMBASSADOR

  Seeing Red

  The Sahara Conspiracy

  Raising Hell

  Changing Fate

  Coming Home

  Blue Diamond Sky

  The Enemy Within

  In the For Queen and Country universe

  Whispering Willows (short story)

  FOR QUEEN AND COUNTRY

  Innocence Lost

  Willow Witch

  The Idiot King

  The For Queen and Country Omnibus (Books 1-3)

  Fire Wizard

  The Dragon Prince

  The Necromancer’s Daughter

  In the ISF-Allion universe

  Shifting Reality

  Shifting Infinity

  Epic, Post-apocalyptic Fantasy

  ICEFIRE TRILOGY

  Fire & Ice

  Dust & Rain

  Blood & Tears

  The Icefire Trilogy Omnibus

  MOONFIRE TRILOGY

  Sand & Storm

  Sea & Sky

  Moon & Earth

  Short story collections

  Out Of Her
e

  New Horizons

  Visit the author’s website at http://pattyjansen.com and register for a newsletter to keep up-to-date with new releases.