Ambassador 4: Coming Home (29 page)

“Don’t ask me,” Thayu said.

“What are we going to do about them?” Reida had assured me that there were only Tamerians guarding the site at night. Those we could shoot. We had not planned on having to deal with innocent civilians.

“Move them out before we blow the thing up,” Sheydu said.

Count on her to make a blunt remark. Never mind that she was right, and never mind how we were going to get them far enough away that they wouldn’t see the explosion and wouldn’t have questions that might get certain people—like the Barresh Council—to interfere with what we were trying to do. We really couldn’t use
witnesses
.

But did we have an option? “All right. Who’s going to do the moving? I don’t want any of us to be recognised.” Evi and Telaris, especially, were well-known in town as my guards. Everyone knew Thayu and Nicha, too.

“Reida will do it,” Thayu said, having been privy to my thoughts through our feeders and agreeing with them.

She gestured Reida over. He was quite a sight. Muddy, wet and covered in sticks as we were, carrying a military-style weapon that I was sure wasn’t his and belonged to no one in our household. He was bleeding from a cut to his cheekbone, and his attempt at wiping the blood had only distributed it all over his face.

Thayu spoke briefly to him in a low voice. I made no attempt to listen in. Most of it would be in spy code. Reida understood. His face looked solemn. He might be keen to measure himself with a Tamerian—and his muscled arms looked so impressive that I would hate to be that Tamerian—but he definitely didn’t see fighting as enjoyable or frivolous. Asha was right. That young man had come a long way, both as a fighter and a provider of mysterious Pengali backup.

He turned around and held up two fingers.

Thayu whirled around, aiming her gun at the darkness. With barely any sound, a small figure climbed onto the walkway, followed by a second one. Both female, near-naked, Pengali and carrying fearsome guns.

They were much smaller than any of us and they regarded us with their huge, roving brown eyes. Both dipped their head in greeting to me. One of them waved her tail over her shoulder in the way Pengali greeted each other.

I said, “I’m honoured to have your help.” I didn’t speak their language beyond a few words relating to food—another thing on my long
if I have some time
list.

Both followed Reida into the tent.

The people under the table huddled closer together. A keihu man at the front of the group shouted. “Don’t come any closer!” He held a piece of wood.

“The boss says you have to leave,” Reida said.

“We’re not going anywhere,” the man said.

“You don’t understand. You are
going
to leave. I’m not asking. I’m ordering.”

“I have my orders, too. This site is ancient and precious. It belongs to the people of Barresh and not to you filthy . . .” He was getting agitated. His eyes were wide. I wondered if he’d taken something or what possessed him.

“Get. Out! Or I’ll use this.” Reida held up the gun. He strode in big steps towards the table.

A woman squeaked and crawled out from underneath the table. She ran for the exit in the far corner. A young man followed her, and so did a middle-aged Kedrasi woman, who was still wearing her facemask. The man with the piece of wood was shouting at them not to abandon their principles and let a dirty foreigner dictate what happened to a precious historical site.

“Get out, get out!” Reida shouted at the remaining people.

One by one, they all chose safety over historical treasures, until the only one left was the man with the piece of wood. He drew himself up, waving the wood in front of him. He was taller than Reida, but faced with a Coldi young fighter holding a gun, the gesture was ridiculous. His entire behaviour was ridiculous.

“Come on, man, go,” Reida said, annoyed, gesturing with the gun.

“You can’t make me.” His face was set in a stubborn expression.

Reida pointed the gun at him. “You want to feel the end of this?”

The man said nothing. He stood perfectly still for a little while, staring, wide-eyed, at the business end of the gun. Definitely not in his right mind.

Something must have clicked in his brain, because he lowered the piece of wood.

He retreated a step, and then another.

Reida followed him, still pointing the gun.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m going.” The man dropped the wood on the walkway. He retreated faster in the direction of the exit.

I gestured at Sheydu to come over with her gear. She hefted the pack onto her shoulder, ready to go in.

The man had reached the exit, but when he was about to go through, he almost crashed into someone who came in from outside. Someone with a gun. Not one of our group. A guard.
Not
Tamerian. Damn.

He called out, “What’s the meaning of this?”

All of a sudden, there was a lot of action. The crazy researcher ran outside. Other people ran in. Guards, dressed in grey with the
gamra
blue band around both arms.

In amongst them, a tall man in a flowing blue robe entered the tent.

Oh, shit. What the hell was Delegate Namion doing here?

E
VERYONE FROZE.
Delegate Namion and his guards on one side, Reida and his two Pengali assistants on the other.

Delegate Namion looked pointedly at Reida’s gun, still levelled at chest height, where a moment ago the nervous research worker had been backing away, and where it now pointed at the Chief Delegate.

Reida lowered his gun, mumbling an apology. My heart was thudding. Reida had a lot still to learn about
gamra
protocol. I was pretty sure that
he
wouldn’t easily be forced into doing silly things with that weapon, but I wasn’t so sure about the Delegate’s nervous guards.

Reida and his two friends retreated slowly to our side of the tent. Faced with a couple of heavily armed
gamra
guards, there was nothing they could do.

There was nothing any of my association could do. Only I could handle this situation. I pushed the tent flap aside and entered the brightly lit space.

The Delegate’s guards turned to me, raising their weapons, but lowered them again. One of them nodded a greeting. “Delegate.”

Delegate Namion raised his eyebrows, and the greenish glow from the lights above the abandoned tables made his tigerlike irises—yellow with a black rim—even more yellow. Even without the harsh light, he looked like a scarecrow.

“Well, this is quite an interesting occasion, meeting you here,” he said. The tone in his voice betrayed his surprise, and it didn’t sound like it was a pleasant surprise.

I bowed. Not strictly necessary, but giving me time to think. Seriously, what the
fuck
was he doing here? “That sentiment is mutual. I was told only council workers could come here.”

“Clearly,” he said. “And that’s why you’re here at this odd time? Snooping into the site where you’ve been told not to come? Really, does that justify the dead bodies outside?”

“We’ll talk about them if we can find any who are not illegal Tamerians.”

“They’re appointed by the council. They have nothing to do with me.” It was a very curt reply.

Liar.
“By the council? Aren’t there enough local young men out of work? Does the job require thugs of this calibre? Just what are they protecting the site from?”

“Tell me, Delegate Wilson, what
you
are doing here, completely outside your authority, I should add.”

Out of all the things I could have told him, I decided to tell the truth. “I’m here to destroy this thing.”

He took in a sharp breath. Stared at me. Whatever he had expected,
that
was clearly not it. “Surely you are kidding?” His voice was soft. Genuine surprise this time.

“I wish I were.”

“But I don’t understand. This site contains historical artefacts thousands of years old.”

“Yes. One item has to be destroyed, urgently.”

He huffed.
“Has
to? Who says that?”

I made an attempt to explain about the array, and that the ship was going to use it to jump. I was forced to leave out huge chunks of information that involved things that I didn’t want to tell him, things that he knew, but I couldn’t let him know that we knew them, too, and things that were related to his activities that might lead to defamation claims from his side until such time that we could prove them.

Without these things, my story was incomplete and didn’t make much sense. His expression showed it. This was a disaster. We couldn’t possibly have run into a worse person here.

He spread his hands in a theatrical gesture, as he did when he spoke to the assembly. “And that is why you want to destroy this ancient artefact? So that the captain can’t get his hands on it? So that a ship that’s powerful enough to jump outside the
galaxy
can’t return here? They can jump here any time they want. They don’t need whatever it is that’s small enough to have been carried here in this ship.”

“They can’t. They’re too big and it would be too risky that they hit something. They need this array.”

He huffed again. “But then to destroy this thing . . . I would have thought you to possess more sense than that. Especially to come here in the middle of the night to do it. Illegally. You know what the inside of the Barresh jail looks like?”

I did, but wasn’t going to enlighten him. “Ultimately, it is necessary because the captain has not come here in peace.”

“No, of course not. He wants his planet back—”

“Which is a ridiculous claim—”

“Which is a valid claim.”

“Have you asked him what he plans to do with the Coldi people?
Fix their genes
, because apparently, they are faulty. Haven’t you listened to what he thinks of anyone else, including you or I? Don’t allow him to fool the assembly into thinking that if he doesn’t think much of the Coldi, he’s part of your team by default. Because he’s not. There is only one team he’s on: his own. And I’m not even sure it’s a team. The two people with him are slaves. This man does not come in peace.”

“And that is a reason to destroy this significant historical site?”

“It would be a pity about the site. It’s equal to the one in Miran—”

“Ha! Miran.” He obviously didn’t think much of
them
either.

“And there are a number of very similar sites on Asto. Much is known about the original design of the ship that can’t be gleaned from this site and the state it’s in. It’s really
not
well-preserved, and the only thing that is preserved at this site is dangerous.”

“How do you know all that? You’re not a historian. Why don’t we take a real expert’s view on that? Oh, but you’ve just chased them all away with your armed thugs.”

“Please. We don’t have time. The array is reconfiguring. The ship will jump as soon as it’s done—”

“But this is a major historical site!”

“The future is always more important than the past.” A Coldi proverb.

He snorted. “I know what team
you’re
on. You’re rubbish. Your reasons are rubbish. You’re not impartial. Everything you say is rubbish, and you know it. Have a look at this.”

He walked a few paces to one of the long tables and flicked a lever up. A couple of bright spotlights came on near the ceiling in the middle of the tent.

They lit a rectangular area cordoned off by metal plates driven into the soft marshy ground, the gaps between them sealed by bright blue building putty. A pump hummed while keeping the water level down.

A wooden staircase went from the perimeter walkway into the site, where it ended at a platform that hung over the muddy ground. A couple of smaller platforms hung suspended over the ground from beams that spanned the area from one side of the perimeter walkway to the other, so that people could access the site without stepping on anything.

Most of the ground inside the excavation was muddy, with little fragments of rusty metal and other bits visible as little specks from where I stood. Someone had put out pegs with flags on top, presumably to outline the shape of what had once been a ship.

The remains were so fragile that if someone had dug through it by accident, they would barely have noticed.

With the exception of the dirt-encrusted object in the middle of the site.

If I hadn’t known any better, I would have judged the dark lump to be a barnacle-encrusted rock, half out of the ground. Except there were no rocks in Barresh.

The thing was dark and slimy-looking, covered in so much marine growth and encrustation that it obscured the shape. Someone had put little posts around it.

That had to be the thing that Kando Luczon had been looking for. Perhaps the thing that the Tamerians had been looking for. The relay that had responded to the signal from the ship.

“That is the thing we need to destroy. If you step aside and we get some time, we could dig it out and—”

“Dig it out? Never!”

Oh, crap, it was so easy to annoy this man. Everything about him seemed to be designed to rub people the wrong way. Maybe he’d been voted in because people figured he’d annoy everyone so much that he wouldn’t last long, buying various groups a bit of time to mount a proper election campaign. Maybe he knew that, too, and had resolved to be as annoying as he could possibly be within the short space of time that he was in the job.

I should
not
let him rile me so much.

“Inside that lump of growths is the thing that sent the burst that almost fried the Exchange and that made a wall collapse.”

He snorted. “That? I’m sorry, but if there is any piece of equipment in that rock, it has long since stopped working. I’m sure you have seen the state of the rest of the ship.”

“I’m sure you have seen the scan of the site. The captain has confirmed to me that this thing is here. The ship communicated with it. There are satellites up there in orbit around us and around Asto, and there are ones trailing us and Asto at the LaGrange points. Most of those look like pieces of space junk no bigger than a fist. We’ve managed to learn from the captain’s companions that those pieces are manoeuvring into position to form an array of Exchange nodes which will allow the big ship to jump. This here in the ground is a vitally important node because of where it is and because of its size.”