by Patty Jansen
Let’s hope we don’t get caught in an all-Aghyrian conflict, Nicha added.
Exactly. We didn’t need to know the details of how they decided which Aghyrian group had the right to speak for all of them.
We went through the ritual of extensive introductions that were common for gamra meetings. Whenever a delegate took part in a committee, it was customary that the other participants each received a fact sheet about the person in question.
I was impressed with the fact sheet that Devlin had given me. It made mention of the fact that Nayu had once worked in Fourth Circle and it listed all the associations that she had been in contact with. Thayu had done some good work here.
Sadet’s history was plain: born in the zeyshi warren, and lived there all her life. She had tried to get into Eighth Circle, but realised that she would probably do better with the zeyshi so she had stayed there.
According to the sheet, Marin Federza was born in Barresh. He made a great point of the fact that he was the legendary Daya Ezmi’s grandson. He’d lived in the Aghyrian compound in Barresh until going to the Trader Academy. I thought of the children I’d seen on the train yesterday. His biography spelled rich and privileged. The only thing he missed was a wife, something Thayu had noted as a weakness in a comment underneath.
Of Veyada, it said that he was the son of the chief administrator for the city of Athyl. I hadn’t known that, and resolved to remember it as an example of cases where fathers looked after their male children. Usually it was fathers who looked after the girls and Nicha was going to be an exception. Veyada raised his eyebrows when I read the biography out to the assembled group.
Of Nicha, the document said that his mother was now chief officer at the Athyl Water Board, one of the most powerful civil organisations in the mega-city.
Thayu had written about herself that she used to work for Athyl’s Internal Security Service, which was their main spy organisation. It surprised me that she was so open about this, because she normally kept it hidden. However she had done a fair bit of work related to the zeyshi and her statement was probably full of the usual Coldi bluff. To the zeyshi it would spell, Don’t fool with me because I know everything about you. Her biography said nothing, however, about her military connection, and that omission was probably also strategic.
The three junior zeyshi delegates appeared to be lackeys, as I had suspected, their histories as unremarkable as their appearance. Significant only, I suspected, in that they brought the delegation size to five, and this was an important number for Aghyrians.
The meeting itself passed in a fairly harmless way, not in the least because we didn’t touch on any of the claim. This preliminary meeting merely set a time frame and agenda for the talks. How long we would spend on what, and which topics needed to be addressed where.
Delegate Ayanu kept throwing in little sniping remarks about the intelligence of the zeyshi, but Nayu ignored them. She conducted this talk with an air of professionalism. Sadet, however, snorted and tensed at Delegate Ayanu’s barbs and appeared to be bored. She looked out the window, she stifled yawns, and stared at Marin Federza, who didn’t know where to look. It was amusing to watch.
She was an Aghyrian of the black-haired and dark-skinned variety. Her eyes were black without the typical Coldi gold flecking. For once Marin Federza looked distinctly uncomfortable. Halfway through our meeting, he rose and went to sit somewhere else, where he was no longer in direct view of her.
When the official meeting finished, Delegate Ayanu and Marin Federza were the first out of the door. I had intended to ask Federza what had happened to his usual entourage, but he was gone before I could catch him.
I stayed behind to check if the delegation was comfortable and if they happened to have any concerns.
Sadet dragged the jug of juice to her and poured a cup. “Would it be possible to get some real drinks?” Of the fermented or distilled kind, she meant. She drank half the cup and put it down with a clonk. “This is too sweet.”
“We can’t serve zixas,” I said. Neglecting to say that some bars had it, but anyone who ordered it needed to be Coldi. Aghyrians could also tolerate red-coded food, but since many people couldn’t tell the difference between some Aghyrians and Mirani, Aghyrians had been left off the allowable list. Unless they could produce a red-coded permit, which was a gamra issued document, and I was sure that these people wouldn’t have it. Besides, I had no desire to defend the gamra bureaucracy.
“All this planning seems a bit obsessive,” Nayu said to me. She was wearing a very pretty traditional black shayka with silver embroidery.
“Take it from me, it’s not. We’ll have a few more subjects to cover before we are ready to take the case to the general assembly.”
One of the younger delegates said, “So you mean we’re not going into the big hall tomorrow either?” She’d asked about this before. The three junior members of the delegation were definitely lightweight, as if put forward only to maintain the impression that the zeyshi were uncultured and dumb.
“Not yet.”
I had no doubt that Nayu was the brains of this organisation. Sadet was there only to show off her tough image, and I strongly suspected that Veyada might yet be right that they had a high-profile person up their sleeve.
“Why can’t we start the meeting now?” she asked.
Sadet said, “I don’t get it either. I’d have been done with this whole thing yesterday. Done, finished and on our way back home. All we needed to do was get this signed.”
“You’ll find that there are a lot of people here who have different ideas.”
She gave me an are there any other ways? look.
It was as if the zeyshi had on purpose sent the bluntest and most abrasive personality for us to deal with. And they seemed too naïve to be real. Just like I suspected that they’d bring in another and much more competent team member, I was sure that at some point a nasty cat was going to come out of a bag, but as yet, we hadn’t even located the bag.
* * *
When we left the meeting room, Thayu informed me that the Barresh council had been called into a meeting by Yetaris Damaru, about a disturbance in the Exchange network.
“Is this about the same thing we witnessed?” I asked.
I don’t know, but it seems likely. It’s not like there are that many disturbances.
“We should go to that meeting,” I said. “If it’s important enough to call a council meeting, it means they’ve drawn a conclusion.” That in itself was rare enough, as conservative as the Exchange liked to be.
We agreed that I’d go with Thayu and that Nicha, Veyada and Deyu would go back to the apartment, where there was a lot still to do.
According to Thayu’s source, the meeting had already started, and since most trains to the island came in the mornings and afternoons, and there were fewer in the middle of the day, Thayu ordered a water taxi. It was a flat-bottomed boat with six seats and, at the back, a huge fan-driven jet engine. The driver was a Pengali female, young enough to lack the leathered skin common to the older Pengali. She was in traditional outfit—or rather, lack thereof. Because Pengali had striped skin they considered themselves above clothing. She only wore a belt, complete with “hunting trophies”: skulls and insect wings and other bits of animals. Pengali didn’t go around dressed up like this anymore—the young and hip wore bright-coloured belts and “clothing” made out of brightly-coloured fishing nets. They also tended to dye their tails with glow-in-the-dark paint.
This one was dressed up traditionally, for tourists.
She took Thayu’s money with a broad grin on her face and, after tucking it into a pouch at her waist, revved the engine with a giant roar.
The boat spun away from the jetty and scooted over the surface at a crazy speed, blowing wind and spraying drops into our faces.
Thayu laughed aloud, and the driver whoop-whooped and whistled. Since coming to live in Barresh, she had shed some of her apprehension about large, open bodies of water, and
didn't seem to mind being on a boat, as long as it had an engine.
It was amazing to see the joy on Thayu’s face. She had been so serious lately. If all this was over, I had to make sure to take a trip in one of these boats out to the long sand bar that protected Barresh from the sea. There was a wide sandy beach on the ocean side, where the waves crashed on pristine sand. If we went with just the two of us, we could even fit a surfboard into this boat.
We came into town thoroughly windblown, at the jetty next to the airport, walking up the path that also led to the station. As we climbed the incline to the level of the airport’s tarmac, I looked through the fence. Sunlight beat down on the paving and the air above the ground shimmered with the heat. All four of the Asto armed forces shuttles were gone.
From the airport, we walked across the dappled shade of the market square and into the council building. The council’s assembly hall was at the back of the building, through a maze of corridors with mosaic floors. Every now and then we’d pass a domed hall with coloured glass ceiling windows and a fountain. In these domes, the sunlight would pierce the windows, sending shafts of light through the hall below. None of these majestic buildings had climate control, and they were all wonderfully cool, with humid breezes keeping the temperature down. The old city, with this building at its centre, was a little bit worn, ancient, rustic and incredibly beautiful.
The guard at the door to the council chambers informed us that the council was in sitting, but then let us in anyway.
The councillors sat at the central table in the hall. Yetaris Damaru had been speaking but fell silent as we came in.
“Ah, Delegate. I had been wondering why you weren’t here. Come in, we’ve barely started.”
Thayu and I found seats on the tiered benches. People turned to the door and nodded polite greetings.
“My apologies for coming late.”
A serving robot trundled towards us with drinks and snacks. Thayu took a small plate of nut bread and two glasses of juice.
I wrapped my hands around the glass, cherishing the coolness of the chilled juice. Thank goodness for the food. There was no council meeting in Barresh without food.
Yetaris Damaru resumed his talk. “As I was just saying to the members of the council, there has been a significant development overnight in the case of the mysterious Aghyrian ship.”
Yes, it was as I had thought.
Trouble had a habit of hitting all at once.
He flicked the projector into life.
Light from hundreds of little nozzles around the hall combined to form a three-dimensional picture that looked like a giant ball of hair such as one might find in the bathroom sink. The shape of it, however, was familiar to me. The structure of blue lines that looked like a web made by a drunk spider was the Exchange network: a continuous web of interlinked anpar lines which transported ships and communication. A broken line of white marked the known trajectory of the mysterious ship.
When we first observed the ship, immediately after the Exchange outage which it was said to have caused, it was on the outer edge of the galaxy. Since that time, it had come closer, but had jumped seemingly at random from one arm of the galaxy to the other, always staying far enough from inhabited gamra worlds to evade our telescopes, and because we had no one-way slings, or at least none that were not in military hands, we couldn’t check it out. Maybe the Asto military had done that, because they had slings. In any case, if they had checked it out, they hadn’t let us know the results, which I hoped meant that they were not significant.
Over the past months, when the ship had come closer, it had acquired a shape, albeit rather fuzzy still. It emitted no measurable electromagnetic radiation. It operated no outside lights and sent no communication. It had no wings and no rotating habitat either. The thing was a long cigar with flanges whose function we couldn’t begin to guess. The only way we could tell its position was that it sent out a constant trail of visible light, not enough to be picked up with the naked eye, but strong enough to register on our instruments. Even at school on Taurus, my astrophysics teacher told us that visible light emissions meant that there was an antimatter engine at work. It had been during a curiosity lesson before the end of term, when he covered the subject, Possible alien space ship propulsion, and we had talked about theories of different ways of propulsion. It was a lesson that was strangely clear in my memory, even if the rest of my time on Taurus was not.
Visible light emission meant an antimatter engine. There was no other option. So the thing was definitely working, but whether it was alive was another matter.
Yetaris directed a laser pointer at a few spots in the network. “We’ve got new readings for the ship here and here.” The projection extended the wriggly line that had expanded every day since we’d started having these meetings. The ship would continue moving in the same direction for a while and then jump an anpar line to another spot. Those lines would not be natural, but created by the ship much in the way the military sling worked—only much stronger.
“They’ve come a lot closer since the last time you reported on this,” a councillor at the table said.
“Yes.” In a grave tone.
“Still not responding to our communication packets?”
“No. But we picked up something last night.” He flicked the laser and a dotted line cut across the projection of the “hairball” of active anpar lines. It bent around with the curve of the galaxy, crossing that vast space from the ship’s position to us, Ceren, Beniz-Yaza system. Strong, even pulses with periods of silence in between. That was the same strobing signal that Devlin had shown me yesterday.
“This signal was emitted from the ship, we suspect through the same anpar sling they used to bring down the network. I’ll play back a recording of events at the Exchange when it happened.”
The sound system came on with a few crackles.
There was some static and then a woman was talking in Kedrasi, one of the Exchange operators, I assumed. Her voice was interrupted by a loud beep, followed by a burst of static.
The woman shouted, and an alarm went off.
Someone killed the alarm and a male voice—probably Yetaris Damaru—yelled in keihu, “Warn everyone. Get them on the ground!”
The woman’s voice continued in Kedrasi, then switched to Coldi and told a passenger shuttle to come back to the airport—
A deep tone cut through the conversations, so loud and low in frequency that even the replay made the floor vibrate. It pulsated in strength, with the loudest points almost painful. Some councillors put their hands over their ears. And still the sound got louder. Now a hum merged into the pulsating sound, accompanied by blips of sound that went whoop, whoop, whoop. All of this in such low frequencies that if the sound had been any lower, my ears wouldn’t have registered it. But my chest did. It was as if my heart slowed to match the pulses in the sound. The very air vibrated with it. Thayu’s eyes were wide.
Can sound kill?
Then: a high-pitched multi-tonal shriek. Several people in the seats around me gasped or called out.
As soon as it had started, the sound was gone.
Silence.
For a few moments, no one in the hall said anything. My ears were ringing and my heart still pounding with the aftereffects of those vibrations.
I said, “What the hell was that?” and also, “That must have been frightening for the Exchange staff.”
Yetaris Damaru nodded. “It was. I was on the floor. You can hear my voice in the recording. At one point, I thought the building would collapse.”
Holy shit. This building was many hundreds of years old. The walls would easily crack under the influence of vibration.
"Could you turn it down?" I wasn't too sure about how that part of the Exchange operated.
"No. The operators have their individual controls, but the strength of the main signal is controlled by the core, and we are forever trying to increase the strength of that signal, never to mute it."
�
��So, what is your conclusion from this?” I stared at the intensity graph in the projection, where the sound levels of that communication were off the scale.
Yetaris Damaru switched off the projector and the hairball of lines vanished. I could see the other side of the hall again. “There is a lot we don't know or don't understand. Some things we can guess. At the beginning of the recording, we hear the low tone. It is, I’m guessing, a locator, a handshake signal. Then follows the low pulsating sound. It comes from the ship and it gets louder and louder until the humming starts. We’re not sure where the humming comes from. Not the ship or the ground. It could be generated through the satellite that we know was targeted by the signal.”
“What satellite?” a councillor asked.
“One that isn’t on our books, because there is no known artefact at the location where the sound came from, but that is not so unusual in itself. There is a lot of undocumented space junk out there, and much of it could be prodded into action, given the right signals.”
Asto liked keeping a register of every bit of junk around their planet, but had never shown as much care with other worlds. Early on, when they still thought they might annex Ceren as colony, they had placed a lot of satellites in orbit around Ceren. None of those were documented.
“Both the humming and pulsating sounds cut out all of a sudden to be replaced with a shriek.”
“What is the meaning of the shriek?” a councillor asked.
“This is the significant thing. It’s an information packet, sent from within Barresh in response to the handshake and exploratory signal.”
Sent from within Barresh?
That was followed by a deep silence. The statement was highly significant, because it meant there was an Exchange-capable device somewhere in Barresh other than the Exchange. The experimental sling at the Aghyrian complex had been dismantled, I thought, after repeated run-ins with gamra law.
After a while, a councillor asked, “Whereabouts in Barresh?”
My first thought was the Aghyrian compound but he said, “A very unlikely place on the other side of the main island.” He brought up a map showing the spot: in a street that ran along the water’s edge. “We visited the houses in that street to investigate, but there is nothing unusual about any of them.”