Ambassador 4: Coming Home (31 page)

We probably shouldn’t have been surprised that the explosives weren’t strong enough to destroy an object that had lain dormant but operational in the mud for fifty thousand years. Or maybe Delegate Namion’s actions had prevented the explosives from working properly.

Nicha said, “Listen.”

He held up his comm and turned up the sound: the same pulsing deep tone that we’d heard several times before.

Whatever the reason, the explosion had awakened the relay. It was live. It was calling the ship to come home.

Despite both Sheydu and Telaris firing at it, the thing rose and rose in the air, quickly fading to no more than a bright speck of light. We stared after it, standing on the train tracks, a sense of despair coming over us.

Shit. I was far too tired to go after it and save the universe. I didn’t even know how. I’d go home and hide in bed when Asha and Ezhya learned of our failure.

Then Thayu said in a low voice, “My father says that the Aghyrian ship has turned on all its outside lights.”

No, this wasn’t the summit of our failure. It was the beginning.

W
E CLIMBED INTO
the single carriage and sat, wet, dirty and dejected, on the floor between the benches. Few words were said.

The floor of the carriage had started humming, and outside lights came on. I felt terrible for leaving like this. I should stay and make sure that the injured were taken care of and that no one died because they’d fallen unconscious in the water and there was no one to pull them out.

But my decisions were not my own. Ezhya had placed absolute trust in me. He had asked for me to complete this task. He would not be impressed that we’d failed and he would probably issue further orders. I could do nothing but wait for them and his inevitable disappointment in me.

I could hear myself making excuses to him.
Look, most of the time I did hare-brained things they ended up going my way
.

It didn’t matter. The one time it was important, I failed.

The door to the control room was open, and Deyu stood inside, with the schematics of the railway tracks on front of her.

“I can take us straight to the island,” she called.

That was good. I felt mortally tired. I stank. I was hungry. That probably applied to all of us. All we could do now was go back and prepare for war. Hopefully most of it would be fought in space. Hopefully it would consist mainly of bluff and a bit of fireworks as satellites were destroyed so that the ship could not jump. Hopefully both Asha and Ezhya would survive.

Evi and Telaris sat sideways in the aisle, leaning against the seats. Evi leaned the back of his head on an armrest and Telaris leaned forward on his pulled-up knees. Thayu had crashed face down on the floor and was already asleep, but Nicha was doing something on his reader that appeared to be holding his interest.

After a while, he got up and went to the cabin. He spoke to Deyu. She pointed at the tracks on the screen. Something about turning sideways. She nodded.

Nicha came back into the cabin. “Change of plan. We’ve got to go after that thing and destroy it with heavier firepower. My father has sent us a ship and crew. He and Ezhya are tied up sweeping up as many relays as they can around Asto. A shuttle will be on its way down to pick us up.”

Shit. Go into war? Like this?

“And something else. Ezhya tells us to bring the hostages.”

“All of them? Even Lilona?”

“Yes, he says all of them. He wants to use them as bargaining chips.”

“He’s expecting the ship to jump?”

“He wants to be prepared for all eventualities.”

Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

I didn’t want to do this. I believed I could fully crack Lilona given more time. She was deeply unhappy, missed her family and was beginning to see that there was life outside the ship and away from her all-knowing captain.

But I’d sworn loyalty to Ezhya. There were times that I could stubbornly argue about his way of doing things. This was not one of those times.

We turned onto the train line that went from the
gamra
island to the main island, and Deyu had to go slowly over the switch to the southwestern track. The squeaking and clanging of brakes and couplings under the floor of the carriage woke Thayu. She pushed herself up, wincing, looking unimpressed and annoyed. “What’s happening?”

“We’re going home to get the Aghyrians and then to the airport.” I told her what Nicha had said.

“Oh, fuck.” She rubbed her face with her hands. There was a large red blotch on her cheek where it had been pressed against the hard floor of the cabin. She leaned against the side of a bench and rested her forehead on her knees.

No one said much while the train rushed low over the water. This was now the second night without much sleep, and all of us would need to rest soon. I could schedule rests for everyone in turn, maybe. Before the shuttle turned up. After we’d secured the captain and Tayron in my apartment. I’d probably have to keep Lilona separate. They might consider her a traitor.

My mind was jumping all over the place.

I hoped I wasn’t forgetting vital things. I hoped Veyada and Thayu and Nicha were in a state to pick up my mistakes.

At the
gamra
station, we were met on the platform by a puzzled railway worker. She had, evidently, turned up to work early so that she could do some maintenance before the first commuter trains arrived.

She watched all of us, dirty and bedraggled, stepping out of the carriage.

“This is not a scheduled service?”

“Nope,” Deyu said, handing her the engine’s master control comm.

“Where did you get this? It’s an offence to steal train controls.”

I decided to step in. “The carriage is undamaged. None of us sat on the seats and we didn’t make anything dirty or wet. There’s going to be some major shocking items hitting the news today. I don’t think a harmless joyride in a train is going to register high on the list.”

Her eyes widened. “Delegate?” I didn’t think she had recognised me up until then. I guessed looking in the mirror was going to be a shock to me.

“We might need the carriage later to take us to the airport. It’s a very important mission. Is there a chance that it can stay here until that time?”

“Well that . . . depends on where you got it. Most of our vehicles are in use in the morning commute.”

“If we need it before then?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. I might be able to move it further into the tunnel so that it doesn’t disrupt the early services.”

I thanked her and we continued up the stairs.

“It never ceases to amaze me how you talk your way out of trouble,” Thayu said. “She was all about calling the guards on Deyu before you started speaking. How do you even do that?”

“That’s because I have a reputation of doing silly things and people are curious so they give me the benefit of the doubt.”

“No,” Veyada said. “That’s because you don’t make melodramatic claims that later turn out to be nothing but hot air. When you say that something is serious, it actually is. That’s called judgement. Up here.” He tapped his head. “That’s why all of us are here with you.”

I met his eyes and damn it, near lost it. I was pathetically bad at accepting compliments. I only ever expected to get blowback because that’s the only thing I usually got.

But damn.
Damn it, Veyada
.

It’s true
.

But I just failed the entire team.

No, technology failed us. Delegate Namion was an idiot. Many things went wrong. It was not your fault. Maybe the relay could never be destroyed that way in the first place.

He was probably right about all those things.

We emerged from the stairs onto the wide boulevard that crossed the island.

I sent Telaris, Veyada, Reida and Deyu to collect the captain and Tayron, while allowing the others to go home for a change of clothes and a snatch of sleep.

Everything was quiet in the apartment, and even all of us coming in at the same time did not bring Eirani upstairs. It would probably be at least an hour before she started stirring, and complaining about the dirt we’d traipsed into the hall.

“Go get cleaned up and to bed quickly, before the staff wakes up.”

Nicha made a beeline for his room and his son, and Thayu declared that she would have a bath first. Her voice carried an edge that betrayed her utter fatigue.

Reida agreed to leave Eirani a note that we possibly wanted an early breakfast.

I hesitated in the hall, seeing the blinking lights in the hub, knowing that there would be messages for me, even ones that had
not
been filtered through Delegate Namion’s office. Possibly
important
messages.

But a voice in my head that sounded like Thayu’s said,
Go to bed
.

I guessed that if it was urgent, like
really
urgent, they would know how to reach me.

I looked at the door to the guest bedroom in despair. I’d notify Lilona immediately before we’d leave. No need to do that now. She might freak out. Hell, in her situation,
I
would freak out.

I walked into the bathroom to find Thayu in front of the mirror, digging with a pair of tweezers in a wound in her side. Her face was white, her lips set and her hand trembled.

Damn. I hadn’t even known that she was injured.

I ran to her side. “Wait. Let me do that.”

She made a weak protest. I guided her to the bench, easing her down on her side with the wound facing up. Whatever it was had gone straight through her suit.

“It went between the front and back plates of the armour. Bad luck, I guess. It’s not deep. It hurts like fuck.”

“We need to glue this. You might have to stay here.”

“No way. We live together, we die together.”

“Thay’ please.” I extracted the first aid kit out of the cupboard along the back. I was feeling sick, too tired to deal with this.

Evi came in and similarly recoiled at the door. “Oh, fuck. What happened?”

Thayu said, “I don’t know. I fell on something. A branch I think.”

Evi nodded. “Megon tree wood. The splinters give off a sap that hurts like blazes. This will probably get infected.”

“Never mind that. I’ll go to the hospital when we’re done with this emergency. Just stick a bandage over it.”

Evi helped me pick fragments of wood out of the wound, clean it, glue it and bandage it up. I scooped a bowl of water from the pool and washed Thayu while she lay on her side. She had fallen asleep.

I left her to rest, briefly dived under the water, came back and lay face down on the bed in our bedroom.

The next moment, someone was at the door.

“Cory, get up. The military is here.”

Shit. I rolled from the bed, feeling terrible. My face felt bumpy with the creases from the sheets. Eirani came in, complaining about fuss and all these people in the apartment without her knowledge.

Thayu snapped at her, “You don’t have to feed them. Just let them wait.”

She fussed with my clothing while one of the other staff brought breakfast. It was indeed getting light outside. Eirani very much disapproved of eating breakfast on the run, but it happened regularly, especially when the
gamra
assembly sat at awkward times.

She also disapproved of my battle gear. “That is protection worn by guards,” she said of my armour, and she purposely avoided the guns on the table.

Thayu was ready and came briefly into the room, stole a slice of bread off my plate and went back out.

“The captain is ready,” she said.

“What about Lilona?”

“Not yet. You said you’d wait until we were about to go. Do you want me to go to the room and call her?”

“No, I’ll do it.” I set the empty plate on the dressing table and rose.

In the hall, I was met by two Coldi in dark clothing. Their faces were blank, their words few, their weapons clearly displayed. Asto military. Women both, I thought, but couldn’t be sure about that.

They stood on either side of the antique bench that was only used for ornamental purposes, but where today Captain Kando Luczon sat with his companion. They had not bounds his hands, but both wore leg braces that would not allow them to run.

The soldiers greeted me briefly, the captain and Tayron ignored me, as usual. The captain’s face was blank, but I couldn’t help suspect that he knew something was going on. We couldn’t discover how their readers connected with their ship, but they had to communicate with the ship in some way. I thought. I hoped. Because if the captain saw the size of Asto’s fleet, he might realise he could never win, even if he destroyed all of them today. There would always be more ships.

I went down the corridor and knocked on the door to the guest room.

Eirani hadn’t told me anything in particular about Federza and Lilona, and I presumed they had been asleep while we crawled through the mud.

Why didn’t he open the door?

There was no time to wait, so I rolled the door aside and went, Coldi-style, into the room.

It was dark and stuffy inside, with the blinds over the window. These blinds were the ones that came with the apartment and I had removed them in our bedroom because I liked to wake up when daylight came.

I knew that the large bed stood close to the window even if it was too dark for me to see it, but the staff had put a smaller bed against the wall near the door—and it had not been touched.

My heart jumped briefly but then my eyes had adjusted, and the low light that filtered through the curtains revealed Marin Federza and Lilona Shrakar both in the large bed, sleeping, as Thayu and I sometimes did, spooned against each other. Federza’s arm, pale-skinned with the Trader Guild emblem tattooed on the shoulder, lay over Lilona’s side.

He stirred briefly but relaxed again.

Whatever I had expected to find, this wasn’t it. Yet in a heartbreaking way, it made sense. Here was a man whose world had been destroyed by the very people he had grown up with, people he had trusted. Here was a woman who was scared, escaping a situation akin to slavery, also having lost all that was dear to her.