Ambassador 4: Coming Home (23 page)

“Whatever anyone aboard the ship is making you do or say doesn’t apply here. We have our own laws, and they will protect you, if necessary.”

Again, a glance at Federza, whose corner of his mouth moved up. The scramble through the tunnel had left him with smudges in his face and his normally sleek hair looked dishevelled with wisps having come loose from his ponytail.

“You can say to us what you want, because your captain can’t hear it.”

She spoke in the merest whisper. “He knows.”

“He knows what?” I sensed a very small victory.

“Everything you say or do. Or think.”

“When you’re on the ship, maybe, but not here.”

She looked at me, puzzled, as if she truly didn’t understand that the micro-cosmos that she was used to didn’t extend beyond the walls of the ship.

Her expression sent a chill through me. Ages ago, as part of my degree at Mars University, I’d done a project on how truly frightening dictators control their people, like the sect leaders whose followers were so dedicated that they would kill themselves for their master. I remembered reading through reports of how the victims were scarred for life, and had often been vulnerable people to begin with. When pushed, they would at first deny any wrongdoing by the leader.

“It’s the truth. We don’t have the same system. If we did, he wouldn’t have access to it. Besides, there is no coverage in this tunnel.”

She turned to Federza. Again, he nodded. He pulled out his reader and showed her the blank screen. “See? I can access anything that’s stored on here but if I want to talk to someone, I can’t.”

She turned back to me.

“Speak out if there is anything that we can do for you or the other crew of the ship.”

“Oh, no, you can’t. Their schedule is set from within the ship. We set it before we left.”

“They’re waking up?”

“Soon they will be ready. They will do as the captain says. It’s his journey.”

“But not yours?”

She stared at me. Blinked. That question probably cut too close and she wasn’t ready.

I tried a different angle. “Do you have any family on board the ship?”

“No. Dashtari is my world.” Her eyes glittered.

“This is where you came from?”

“It’s my home. It has soft green oceans and floating islands that follow the ocean streams to where the fish and the floating gardens are.”

So they
did
settle worlds out there. “So the captain lies when he told us there was nothing out there.”

“The captain would never lie. There
is
nothing. For him.”

“What do you mean?”

“He wants to own a place and the people in it. He says that humanity owes it to him that anyone is still alive. He said that Asto was his, that it was back to the state he left it in.”

“But he lied and it was occupied by the Coldi and still too hot for you.” Although that would change over the next fifty to a hundred years.

“The captain . . . does not want to talk to any of you. He doesn’t want to collaborate. He wants no agreements. He wants to destroy you.”

I nodded. That didn’t surprise me either.

The sound of an engine came from the mouth of the tunnel. It appeared Thayu and Reida had annexed a channel boat, which they now brought upstream. I hoped the water was deep enough here.

Lilona continued, “The captain wants to start again, as he says. But we’re tired. He’s had two opportunities at making a new world—”

“Two worlds you settled there?”

“No, there are more. But he could have come to this world and started here, but he didn’t like that there would be Pakshari refugees aboard his ship, so he refused to save anyone. He could have set up a settlement on this planet, but he left instead. That was the first opportunity he didn’t take. It was very hard on the crew. They were at minimum supply levels and they had little breeding stock. When people challenged, he put the whole crew in stasis and made the jumps himself. They found Dashtari and built a settlement there. People were happy, but he refused to work with them. Because they were doing it all wrong. So he left them.”

Thayu steered the boat to the water drawing point in front of the bench where we sat. It drifted sideways and hit the stone. She jumped out.

I looked at Lilona. “Wait. Are you saying that there are people left on that planet?”

“Many. Or, there were many people there when we left. Don’t know about now. We will never see it like that again. So much time is lost when the ship jumps.” Her eyes glittered. “When we left, they were facing problems with adaptability and disease and wanted to use indigenous material to overcome the problem. But the captain didn’t agree. It was ‘not pure’ he said. But the world had changed and people didn’t listen to him anymore. They were going to use the native material anyway. He got angry. Any of the families who still owned debt to him had to send him crew. He was going back and reclaim Aghyr.”

“So that is how you came to be on board?”

She nodded.

“What about the other crew?”

She kept nodding. A tear leaked over her cheek.

“This guy really is a first class arsehole, isn’t he?”

“A . . . arse . . . hole?” Lilona looked confused.

“Eeeyup,” Thayu said, standing with her hands at her sides. “It’s the part of you that your shit comes out, unless shitting is beyond you.”

“Thay—”

She faced me, muddy, wet, with filthy hair, but her eyes were blazing. “Don’t make any excuses for them. They’re all arseholes! They’ve been keeping the most important information from us.”

“She was controlled by this guy.”

“Oh, that’s just an excuse. I don’t believe any of them anymore.”

“I have a feeling that he controlled her with something like our feeders.”

“He doesn’t. We took all the scans and there is nothing unnatural in them.”

“Because our equipment doesn’t pick it up, it doesn’t mean it’s not there.” I could think of technology that didn’t show up on scans. Even Coldi technology included wetware—biological tech, for example the bacterial screens.

Thayu snorted. “I don’t believe any of it. They’re laughing at us. Oh, we’re so happy to be back. Playing the
old man wanting to see his home one more time
card. No, we’re not going to tell you that we were hounded out of our new colonies by our intergalactic peers and oh did you realise that we’ve got a whole ship full of arseholes about to jump containment lines coming to your doorstep. That’s what they’re like! Sorry if I don’t roll out the welcome mat.”

Thayu, that’s really not helpful right now
.

But there was still no reception here so she couldn’t hear me.

“We can talk here all day, but we need to go,” she said. “Don’t know what’s brewing out there, but something is brewing. I picked up a lot of surveillance activity on the scans when we were out there.”

“Tell me quickly, what is the captain’s plan?” I asked Lilona.

“He is the captain. He does not share his plans.”

“Then what was he looking for?”

“The relays. The one in the ship, in the place where we can’t go, is powerful, but there are others.”

“Other ships?”

“No, they float about in space. You probably never noticed them.”

But we had, and Ezhya had committed to cleaning up the space junk in an effort to find all those old things that were still operational.

“What are they for?” They were satellites, weren’t they?

“You know how in your jump system, you use nodes which create a jump line?”

“Yes, but they have to be activated from both sides. Your ship would have a sling of some sort.”

“It does, and that’s the problem. Because this . . . sling is not very precise. It generates a funnel on both sides of the line, and especially the exit funnel is a problem. Its diameter depends on the size of the ship. It’s often more than a hundred times wider than the length of the ship. That’s a nuisance for a small ship, but with a very large one, it’s a real problem, because with a funnel that size, there is a real chance that something gets caught in the mouth and the ship hits it when it exits. There are quite a few asteroids in the system.”

Yes, we knew about those.

“When the ship left, the captain seeded relays along the way to generate the field that allows the ship to jump home in the same way your system works. We can’t jump yet because the relays in this area are disturbed. A number aren’t working. We need to reconfigure them in order to generate the jump line.”

Shit. All those satellites we’d thought forgotten, abandoned and drifting and now moving into position? It was a fucking Exchange array.

I raised my hand to my mouth. I had to talk to Asha, urgently, before the ship jumped, before Captain Luczon’s army of human war drones was going to be unleashed on two planets I loved deeply.

Lilona said, “We must bring the ship here. There are three thousand of my people on board, and supplies are running critical.”

But bringing the ship here is just what the captain wants, so that he can defeat us with a bunch of crew who are slaved to him
.

Thayu met my eyes. I didn’t need the feeder to know that she understood the seriousness of the situation.

She said, impatiently, “Is anyone going to get into this boat?”

W
E SCRAMBLED
into the boat. It was one of the channel ferries. It had a flat bottom and wobbled a lot even when we got in one by one, with Reida holding the vessel steady. Lilona found it scary, and Federza told her to sit on the row of seats closest to the engine. It was noisy, he said, but less wet and bumpy. He insisted on sitting at the front. He had a gun, he said, so he could help protect us. He sat at the front bench, looking very dapper.

I struggled not to laugh. Did he realise that she was off the dating market courtesy of her captain?

“All in?” Thayu flipped a lever that reversed the airflow through the engine. It blew a waft of hot and humid air over our heads that made our hair fly. The boat reversed out of the tunnel at a good speed.

She cut the engine again to slow down to pick up Evi and Telaris at the entrance. Telaris was dripping wet.

“How was the water?” I asked him.

He grinned.

Thayu gunned the engine and turned the boat around.

“Hang on carefully,” I said to Lilona. If this was going to be like racing through the aquifers at Asto, we’d better hang on very hard.

And yes, it seemed it was. The channels were narrow. Walls and trees and jetties and other boats flashed past. Fortunately, it was night and not busy. Unfortunately, Thayu was Coldi and had extremely poor night vision although from the way she was driving that boat you would never tell.

We raced at a crazy speed through the canal, turned left—

Reida yelled, “No, you need to go right there!”

“Just who is driving this thing—Shit.” We had come to a dead end.

“I told you so. This goes to the markets. The channels don’t cut across there.” Reida pointed.

She turned around, and Evi swore. “Tamerians!”

In one movement, I pulled Lilona off the bench and pushed her between the seats. On the row in front of us, Federza had done the same. He lay on his back with his gun clutched to his chest.

Thayu was steering the boat. That left Reida, Evi and Telaris to defend us. Thayu hit the reverse thrust, and a few shots hit the water in front of us. Evi returned fire, but the sniper was on top of a roof, and he couldn’t get a clear shot.

Then Thayu hit the thrust so hard that Telaris in the front almost fell over.

We raced through the narrow canals. In places, there were signs up with maximum speeds for boats. I didn’t need to see the controls to know that we were going much faster than that.

I realised to my horror that they had no interest in keeping Federza alive. They wanted him dead. They probably wanted us dead as well. Tamerians moved in the shadows, and they could get away without trouble, especially if Joyelin Akhtari had anything to do with it. After sixty or more years in the Chief Delegate position, she would know exactly how and where to get the documentation to easily clear all the security checks.

It was our luck that this was a highly populated part of town. There were houses on the sides of the canals. There was the occasional surprised citizen who got a fright when we came past. It was our misfortune that there were no direct canals from here to the airport. The main square was the highest point of the island and the airport and train station were on the other side. We would have to backtrack through the eastern part of the island and go around—and the canal between the two islands was notorious for bogs on the northern side. Or we could take the longer route around the south. And Thayu wasn’t that familiar with these canals. And they were windy, and narrow, with many dead ends.

There was just no end to them. We went left, right, left, right, with Thayu often having to make the decision in a split second. I had no idea where we were going. I don’t know that she had an idea either. We had to turn around twice.

Eventually, I could see the canal opening up into the water ahead where moonlight glittered on the water, but there was a lock at the end, and it was closed, because it was night time and the tide was out, and because it was the dry season.

Damn it.

Thayu killed the engine and jumped out. The water was only thigh-deep, which the instruments would have told her. “Come on, lift it over.”

We all jumped into the water, including Lilona. She was neither strong nor skilled in physical work, but she helped, her face screwed up with the effort. It was as if something had shaken loose in her brain.

The lock wall was only low. At the moment, it served to keep water in the canals.

We lifted the boat onto the lock wall, slid it over and plunged it into the reed bed on the other side. Because it was the dry season, the ground was only muddy, not under water. The boat slid over the mud easily enough, but walking was another matter. With each step, I sank in ankle-deep soft mud, and each step was a fight with the mud about who was going to keep my shoes.

By the time we had traversed the reed bed, both moons were high in the sky, visibly tracking across the starscape. They moved so fast that they would set and come around for a second lap before the night was over. Right now, they provided the only light, a silver glimmer over the water.