Ambassador 4: Coming Home (14 page)

I ordered my usual: a local liquor made from flowers. As I suspected, Asha wanted zixas, and this was indeed one of the places that had a permit for serving it.

We chose a table near the fountain’s edge, where a little waterfall fell over the edge into a drain, and disappeared into the ground. Most of these fountains were part of Barresh’s elaborate drain system that kept the islands dry and habitable.

We sat down, facing each other.

His expression was a lot more serious now than it had been earlier in the evening.

“You are positive you want to hear about this?” he asked. “Knowing that when I tell you what I’d like to do, you don’t have the option of backing out?”

My heart was hammering. “I am assuming that you would never ask me if you didn’t think there would be a benefit to the peace.”

“A benefit to the
established
situation.” Which was not entirely the same as “peace”. According to some, Asto had entirely too much power. I’d spent the last few years making sure that I wasn’t seen, not in public at least, to be favouring one side or the other.

Ezhya had placed me in charge of negotiations about the Aghyrian claim, because I was seen as neutral. Had I turned the corner when I’d gone to Athyl to secure Ezhya’s position? Maybe not, because any of the people who would have taken over would have been detrimental to the peace in the region. I’d definitely been let into some deep military secrets when I went to break the standoff between the Aghyrian ship and the military, but that, again, had been because people saw me as neutral. Oh, Asto exploited every bit of that neutrality. They had
bought
me a seat in the expert panel section of the assembly, I was well aware of that. And I was
not
entirely neutral, because I happened to believe that a strong Asto was vital for peace in
gamra,
and I also happened to count Asto’s Chief Coordinator as my friend.

But deliberately stepping out of that neutrality? That was mine-riddled ground.

I licked my lips. “Do you think that the situation is serious enough that I should risk my position?”

“I don’t ask any of this lightly. When you agree, you may be seen by some as betraying
gamra
. I think we can both agree that the current leadership is rotten to the core. In their quest to counter what many see as evil Coldi dominance, some principles have been bent or forgotten. As Coldi, we can’t do anything about it without appearing to further our own position, which of course backfires and pushes possible doubters in the other direction. None of this would matter much—in fact it
hasn’t
mattered one bit for many years—if we didn’t have the Aghyrian situation. And we’ve found a couple of factors that converge disturbingly.”

I realised I didn’t really have the option now to back out anymore. He seemed to have started on his story already. Had probably been bursting to do so all night.

A Pengali waitress came to our table to deliver a tray with two small glasses. One contained a cloudy greenish-yellow drink that I recognised as mine, the other a clear blue oily fluid. That glass had a little lid that fitted it perfectly.

Asha rotated the tray so that the glass with the green liquor faced me. It was cooled and condensation coated the outside of the glass.

I lifted the glass and took a sip. I quite liked this stuff. Not too strong and very mellow.

He lifted the other glass off the tray and took off the lid. A thin trail of vapour rose from the blue fluid. It was zixas, one of the most red-coded, utterly poisonous drinks invented by the Coldi. It wasn’t legal for bars to serve it to the general public, so you had to know where to get it and I’d guessed right that he wanted it.

He lifted the glass to me and drank a good gulp. The breeze carried the faintest waft of vapour to me. It made my eyes water and my face tingle. It wasn’t unpleasant, but holy crap.

He set the glass back down and put the lid back on. “So, the Trader Delegate disappeared, but no one seems to care a lot.”

“Um . . .” Out of all the things I had expected him to talk about, Marin Federza’s disappearance was probably the least likely.

“Let me summarise some things. Somebody—and this is somebody who is in league with those who control, or know how to get help from, Tamerians—is keen for certain things to stay a secret. These are things to do with the Aghyrian ship, its whereabouts, its occupants, its trajectory, its history. Delegate Ayanu—Azimi, the same clan we’ve had some trouble with recently—had the information briefly before your rascal spy took it off her and you presented it to the assembly. As, I add, was entirely appropriate. I know that you get annoyed with the boy, but my son chose his seconds wisely. Hang on to that boy. He’ll pay you back any investment in him many times over.”

I really did wonder how he knew all this.

“Question: that information about the ship that the rascal stole from Ayanu’s office, that’s been picked over and analysed many times, would that have been all that’s available about the ship?”

Damn. Of course not. I opened my mouth—

“No, don’t answer that. There is a lot more, of course. Whether it was all covered in easily understood conversations with the Barresh Aghyrians, I very much doubt it, but all communications from that ship, including the considerable anpar wake it created when coming in, will have produced information. Where is all that information?”

“I . . . I don’t know. I assume that the Exchange collected it and passed it onto appropriate authorities and that they’re working on it, or looked at it and informed us of any information they could glean.”

“What have they told us? At the very beginning, they told us that they deduced from the anpar wake that Kando Luczon was aboard the ship.”

I remembered that. It was just after I’d returned from Asto. We’d all been so shocked that we hadn’t even asked what else there was.

“They’ve told us nothing since. Do you believe that none of the Exchange data could have added additional information?”

“When you say it like that, not really.”

“Now who controls the Exchange?”

“
Gamra
.”

“In theory. In practice, who controls it?”

And that’s where my insides went cold. The
gamra
Barresh node of the Exchange was the only privately-owned Exchange in all of the settled worlds. Who owned it? The Damaru family, but ultimately, the round-waisted men of the Barresh council.

Who had teamed up with Delegate Namion to stop me or Kando Luczon getting access to the dig site? Even using Tamerians to do this. Tamerians that
might
have been developed by the Aghyrians to “replace” the “faulty” Coldi.

Which, by itself, was an aim that suited the Aghyrians and anyone not Coldi in the
gamra
assembly.

Oh shit.

Asha took the lid off his glass and lifted it to his lips for another sip.

I asked, “That thing that’s buried under the ground in the lost ship that Thayu sent you that scan of—”

“She sent it to the History Division in the Inner Circle.”

“Yes, sure.” I met his eyes, unsmiling. I felt like he was joking, but his showed none of it. “It’s some kind of communication device, isn’t it?”

“Too right.”

“And you’re still fearing that there might be other relays orbiting Asto in the space junk clouds.”

“Not fearing. We know that these things are present there. We’ve noticed that some appear to have moved recently.”

“Moved?”

“Judging by maps, some of them older than me.”

“Have they moved by themselves?”

“That’s the question. There is no way to find out unless we send drones out there to bring in every single piece of space junk and analyse it. But we know some of the junk clouds have reconfigured, more often that would have expected them to do as a result of collisions. Some satellites have moved. We just don’t know which ones or how. Doing a complete sweep is impractical within the time frame we have.”

“Time frame?”

“The main ship appears to be waking up.”

“I thought you couldn’t communicate with it.”

“We can’t, but there is increased activity and increased radiation and heat output. You saw that huge hall with all the stasis pods along the side? I think those people are being woken up. Maybe the process was set in motion by something we’ve done, maybe it was set in motion a long time ago, but they’re definitely waking up.”

I remembered the vastness of that hall with all those pods around the walls. Thousands of people. No, thousands of Kando Luczons. “What will they do?”

He spread his hands. “I’m guessing they’re not here for the annual occultation festival.” This was a big celebration in Barresh’s calendar, when one of the suns went behind the other.

“If all this is true, I really need to get on with talks with Kando Luczon.”

“I understand he’s an unpleasant character?”

I sighed. “Someone asked him in the assembly if he was the arsehole who could have transported thousands of people off Asto when the meteorite impact was imminent, but didn’t, and I would have loved to have risen and cheered with the rest of the delegates.”

“I guess hanging around long-term in the isolation of space can make one an ‘arsehole’.” He met my eyes.

I couldn’t work out if he was joking or offended.
He
spent a lot of time in space.

Delegate Wilson, you suffer from a serious case of Foot-In-Mouth disease
.

I took a sip from my drink. My ears were glowing, and I hated it when they did that.

He continued. “Can you give an honest answer to a question?”

I looked up at him.
Even more honest than that?

“Do you think you’re making any inroads with this arsehole character?”

I shrugged. He seemed to have latched onto the word “arsehole” and adopted it as his new favourite. How embarrassing. “It hasn’t been easy. Sometimes I feel that we’re speaking to each other in two different languages. Their understanding of society is entirely different. The trouble is we have no reference points to tailor our approach or responses. If only the historic texts or surviving information from the time of the Aghyrians contained data about how their society was structured—but they don’t. Surviving information is all about technology. It seems the reference to society is lost.”

Asha laughed. He clapped me on the shoulder. “I like you. You’re a very good diplomat.”

Oh?
I frowned at him.

“Using eighty-seven words where just one would have done: No.”

Geez, thanks
. “Well, I guess you’re right. But it’s early days.”

“We don’t have early days. Or I should say: early days are all we have. There will be no late days. We need this solved now. We need an agreement or understanding from them about what they’ll agree to do with that ship, where they’ll stay and where they won’t go, and where they won’t interfere. Failing that, we need to defend ourselves.”

“Defend ourselves” was not a term one wanted to hear from the mouth of the leader of the largest army in the settled worlds. Hell, what information did he have that I didn’t? “So, what would you do in my position?”

“Ask for assistance.”

I frowned at him.

He continued, “I heard you’re planning to take the captain on a little excursion to watch his beloved home planet from orbit. If I were you, I would allow the military to tack onto this expedition to run certain . . . reconnaissance programs.”

“But that’s—”

“Outside your mandate. I know. That’s why I suggested that once you know about this, there is no going back.”

“Nice trick.” I took a sip from my drink. The liquor didn’t taste half as sweet and mellow as it should. He had me by the throat, and he knew it. Yet again, the only inroads we’d made with the captain were that we now knew that the rumours about his self-absorbed character were not rumours. “What would these reconnaissance projects be?”

His lips twitched.

“You’re asking me to take a major risk. It’s only fair that I know what you’re going to do with my commitment, if I give it.”

He snorted. “I suspect that once he’s up there, our captain will have some way of contacting the relays in orbit. Once he does, we can identify them.”

“And destroy them?”

He nodded, once.

“What if they’re . . . unimpressed?”

“There is no ‘What if?’ They
will
be unimpressed, but unless they let us know all the missing pieces in their story, we’re going to make every damn attempt possible to stop them coming into the Ratanga cluster. I’m guessing that they came back for a reason to do with us. In other words: they may need us, so they can’t destroy us. But they’re going to do something. The increased energy output of the ship probably means that they’re gearing up for whatever it is.”

“I thought you had them cornered?”

He snorted. “I have no illusions that we control them. They’re probably happy to sit where they are now. I very much doubt that we could stop this ship, or even destroy it, if we wanted. We’ve run analyses on it and I’m worried about what the engineers tell us. These people travelled between galaxies. We don’t know what sort of forces operate in that void. We don’t know what they found at that other galaxy. Because I’m sure that they found things that could change our world, but they’re not telling us. I don’t trust them.”

I didn’t trust them, either. We were on the same page on that issue. “I had hoped that by taking the two companions, we might be able to extract some information from them, but they’ve acted like mindless, faceless robots.”

“That’s probably because they
are
mindless, faceless robots. They were probably creations of the original Aghyrians, like us. Except they lost control over us when the meteorite struck and we survived on Asto free of their control. Could you imagine what our life would have been like if they had still been here? We were meant to be an ‘all-purpose colonising race’. What if they would have used us simply to do hard work on new colonies, only to kill us off when the work was done?”

Damn. “So now they have created the Tamerians for the purpose of getting rid of us?—I mean, the Coldi.”