Ambasadora (Book 1 of Ambasadora)

by

Heidi Ruby Miller

Ambasadora

Heidi Ruby Miller

Copyright Heidi Ruby Miller 2011

Published by Union City Publishing

Cover image Copyright Byron Winton 2007

For Jason—Even after all these years I still have an
emotional fallacy for you.

Because
Ambasadora
was my
thesis for Seton Hill University’s Writing Popular Fiction Graduate Program, I
have more people to thank for the completion of this novel than I have room
for, but here are some of the highlights:

Thank you first to my critique
partners, Mary SanGiovanni and Christopher Paul Carey. Mary, you lived in the
world of my novel with me, getting to know my characters until they became
real. You are my Jersey sister and a best friend. CPC, our common background in
anthropology allowed me to create a culture with real world rules and all the
drama and fascination they entail. You understood my vision better than anyone
else.

Thank you to Michael A. Arnzen.
You are a dear friend and confidant. Those many hours drinking coffee and
talking about books and life kept me inspired and motivated.

Thank you to my mentors and final
readers, Thomas F. Monteleone, Tobias Buckell, and Lawrence C. Connolly, who
each brought their individual expertise to my manuscript while helping me to
maintain my vision.

Thank you to Mike Resnick,
Patrick Picciarelli, and Timons Esaias for taking time to be unofficial
mentors.

Thank you to Becca Baker,
Kristina Buchanan, Hanna Gribble, KJ Howe, Russ Howe, Jared Maraio, Mike
Mehalek, Rachael Pruitt, Bruce Siskawicz, Maria V. Snyder, Steven LaTullipe, and
K. Ceres Wright for read-throughs of drafts that should have never been read.

Thank you to all the Seton Hill
Writers who workshopped parts of this book over two years. We had fun coming up
with names and techiness. I know this isn’t all of you, but here are some whose
comments helped to transform this story: Mike Brendan, Penny Dawn, Ron Edison, Elaine
Ervin, Lee Allen Howard, Adrienne Kapp, Chun Lee, W. D. Prescott, and Shara
Saunsaucie White.

Thank you to Liz Coley. You were
there with me to the very end of this one!

Thank you to my brother Tom Ruby,
my brother-in-law Mike Miller, and my cousin Michael Ruby, who will forever
have their old gamer tags immortalized in the V-side.

Thank you to my parents Albert
and Sharon Ruby and my grandparents John and Wanda Hawk for supporting me in
writing and all of my life’s adventures and for passing down the creativity
gene accompanied by an insane work ethic. I couldn’t have done this without
both. And, special thoughts for my Grandparents Ruby, Albert and Anna, who
never got to see this project come to completion.

Finally, thank you to my husband
Jason Jack Miller. J, you read, you listened, you encouraged, and most of all
you loved. How did I get so lucky? Oh, wait, that’s right, I picked you. You
didn’t really have a say in it all.

“They’re watching us
again,” Sara whispered against the smoothness of Chen’s cheek. His soft
bergamot scent mixed with her vodka-tinged breath.

A voyeur hovered six meters above
them, narrowly missing the snaking track of blue lights suspended from the
hippodrome’s ceiling. A man from the balcony overhead reached out in a drunken
swat for the voyeur, but came nowhere near the mass of cameras and directional
microphones. His mates pulled him back with loud guffaws when he almost toppled
over the railing.

Sara laughed, too, basking in the
celebratory atmosphere. Hot pink swirls of light traveled along the floor and
walls in complex patterns, painting the opulent furnishings and beautiful
guests with dizzying, ephemeral artwork. The hypnotic beats pulsing through the
speakers worked in time with the lighting, enhancing the dream-like quality of
the evening. She found it hard to believe this cavernous playground, this
entire stunning complex, was once part of an ancient worldship.

The voyeur descended closer,
several of its cameras telescoped through the darkness to capture the couple
from varied angles. Chen pushed Sara up against the bar and nuzzled her neck,
hiding his face and hers for the third time since they’d arrived tonight. His
actions annoyed her. The whole point of coming here, at least in her opinion
and every other Socialite worth her birth right, was to be seen, and not just
by the party guests.

She wanted the whole system to know
she was at a function for the Sovereign’s nephew, even if it was an honorable passing
celebration. Normally she declined invites to suicide parties because she felt
a morose mixture of jealousy and pity for the guests of honor. Jealousy because
of the lavish attention bestowed upon the celebrants; pity because the next
morning the honorees would take the passing drugs, choosing to die honorably
than to live sterile lives and bring shame to their family circles.

She much preferred the charm of
formal dinners and the exhilaration of techno-dances, and even the one sex
party she had attended a few months ago for her eighteenth birthday, but Chen
was insistent, finally winning her over by mentioning that her cousins and
half-sister would never turn down this opportunity.

Plus, she was going with a
contractor—though still part of the Upper Caste Socialites, contractors may as
well have been their own sub-group with very strict marriage and family
traditions. Her mother, who didn’t approve of Chen, perpetuated the gossip that
contractor children underwent secret reconstructive surgeries to look so
perfect, and to hide the inevitable consequences of a shallow gene pool.

Apparently her mother chose to
ignore the little tweaks the doctors did during Sara’s matriculation through
the nursery, and the bigger tweaks to her half-sister when they hit puberty.
Laws regarding reconstruction were often overlooked in this society, unless you
were a Lower, then the Embassy assumed you were trying to hide your birth
caste. That warranted a Writ of Execution.

Sara pushed those thoughts from
her mind. If she left them wander around inside her head too long, she started
to question the traditions, the History. That could only lead to trouble.

“You’d think the voyeurs
would be more interested in the guy who’s about to kill himself and head to the
Otherside,” Chen said.

“I guess the Media will take
news and gossip wherever they can get it.” Sara ran a hand through her
short chestnut hair, showing off the new obsidian cuff on her forearm, just in
case one of the cameras was still interested.

With his usual warped sense of
timing, Chen decided this occasion was the perfect way to celebrate his gift to
her. The coveted offering of black jewelry meant Chen was ready to marry her,
take her on as his third amour, and have a child with her. So, tonight they
would celebrate the linking of their genetic lines while the party’s honoree
pretended not to mourn the end of his.

Another tenet of their society
she barely understood, but was she to question if a man wanted to kill himself
rather than live with the shame of being a non-breeder?

“There are so many people
here,” Sara said. “Maybe five or six hundred.” She scanned the
sea of gowns and formal suits, looking for familiar faces, either friends or
rivals.

“It’s the place to be
tonight,” Chen said. His tone was distracted. He had been this way from
the moment the transport dropped them off here in Palomin, not even rising to
the bait when a contractor still employed by the Embassy chided Chen about his
rogue status, the type of subject which normally led to heated arguments or
physical confrontations.

Contractors went rogue all the
time, especially those in their twenties, but many of the older generation
stuck to the idea that contractors had traditionally been the Embassy police
force and that’s the way it should always be, punctuating the sentiment by
marrying only other contractors, homogenizing their family circles with dark
hair, blue eyes, and olive skin in varying shades.

Chen shared those same physical
features, but differed in his allegiance to the government, especially when
independent contracting promised higher monetary compensation and faster
occupational mobility than the Embassy could offer. It wasn’t illegal to leave
the Embassy, but most rogues broke as many rules as they enforced and ended up
on the wrong side of the law eventually.

Sara looped an arm through
Chen’s. She had never witnessed Chen doing any rule-breaking, but admitted it
was his air of danger that originally attracted her. On occasion he expressed
regret at leaving the Embassy, but said returning was next to impossible. Rogues
had shown they couldn’t be loyal, and the Embassy demanded the utmost loyalty.

“See anyone we know?”
Sara noticed Chen scrutinizing the dark hippodrome with purpose and
calculation. She followed his gaze to the illuminated exits at the far end.
“What’s wrong?”

Chen looked at her as though
snapping out of a daydream. “Nothing. Old habits.”

Now that they were enamoured to
one another, she no longer liked his
old habits
. In fact, if he kept
them up, she might threaten to find another prime. She’d had plenty of offers,
boring as they were. If she gave Chen an ultimatum now, it could provide him a
way out. Her mother’s warning came back to her about never trusting a
contractor. She tried to ignore it.

He pressed his lips to her forehead,
a benign gesture that any man here could have bestowed upon her in formal
greeting. She wondered if he was having second thoughts about their
relationship, then chided her paranoia. Chen was stubborn and wouldn’t do
anything out of a sense of duty. If he wanted her, he wanted her. The marriage
token confirmed it.

Shouts at the other end of the
long granite bar sent the voyeur floating toward three arguing men. This drama,
feigned or genuine, would ensure the trio some precious broadcast minutes on the
Media channels, helping to build their minor celebrity status and making them
more desirable mates.

Chen relaxed a bit now that the
cameras had found new subjects. Before the interloper could return, he said,
“I’ll be back in a bit. Enjoy yourself. Have another drink.” His gaze
lingered on her bracelet for a moment before he left.

Sara noticed the purple glow
highlighting each individual filament deep inside the cuff. Maybe the
phosphorous lights in the hippodrome caused the effect, the same way they made
the pink calcite fluoresce in the arabesque designs on the floor and walls.

A quickening tempo from the
percussionists brought her attention to guests entering the dance area to her
right. The guest of honor, a man in his twenties, moved among the dancers,
gyrating and laughing. Though all of his amours were in attendance, none of
them shared in the antics. The rumor was that his third had gone public with
his sterility in an attempt to save face for their childless relationship. Sara
wondered if he would eventually be reunited with these same amours on the
Otherside.

The honoree seemed not to notice
his inattentive amours, knowing he could count on one or more of the anonymous
young women surrounding him to make his last night memorable, if only to give them
a chance to tell the story at parties. To be someone’s last, now that was
special.