Ambassador 4: Coming Home (2 page)

When I left with Ezhya to go to the massive Aghyrian ship that the Asto military had cornered in a distant part of the galaxy, it was bad enough that I’d left the negotiations about the Aghyrian claim in limbo. My account had failed to send out updates to all the people who wanted them.

Bloody hell.

What a disaster. As if having the
zeyshi
Aghyrians walk out furious about a week after I disappeared wasn’t enough. Fortunately, I had received their latest statement yesterday, because I don’t think my system would have survived having it re-sent without scorch marks.

Three. Fucking. Weeks.

Thousands and thousands and thousands of messages.

With one tap of a button, I sorted everything according to the mandatory
gamra
priority levels. This system was only used within
gamra
, so any correspondence from outside automatically fell to the bottom of the priority scale, where, ironically enough, it was easiest to find.

As I scrolled to the top of the list, there were a couple of priority one messages, all of them from Ezhya Palayi’s account.

That was weird.

Ezhya didn’t use the
gamra
account. If he wanted to contact me, he would use the direct link through the Exchange which reached me through the hub, not via the
gamra
system. I opened the oldest message. It said,

Daddy tells me not to be upset that you left suddenly, but I cannot be ‘not upset’ when I am upset. You promised me that we would go to the beach if I did all my work. I finished all of it, and I even helped Eirani with her things. I know how to make bread and how to fold the laundry. I did everything she said, but I did not even get to see you before Daddy’s guards came to take me home. It’s so boring here. There is no one to talk to. I don’t like my sister. She screams too much and my parents give her too much attention. They tell me I have to have more lessons, but my tutors are all boring old men. I understand that you’re busy and that what happened is important for now. I would like to make a time that I can come back soon and you’ll be able to teach me how to surf.

She used the Isla word for surf, with Isla characters.

I chuckled. At only eight years of age, that little rascal Raanu was fast starting to outsmart her father, learning how to use his top priority message privilege.

There were a couple more messages from her, each sent a day apart. None of them were identical.

Another said,

I got into an argument with my tutor today. He says that the
zeyshi
Aghyrians are nothing but opportunistic sleazebags taking advantage of a loophole in gamra law. I asked him has he seen how these people live, in holes in the ground, guarding the old treasures? I think they deserve better than what we have given them so far. I don’t know. I could be made to agree that the Aghyrians in Barresh are sleazebags, although their sense of fashion is impeccable.

I laughed out loud at that one.

Another message said,

After you left, I was so bored I actually went to sit in the public gallery at the assembly meeting. I saw how they elected Delegate Namion. He got the votes basically because a lot of people hated Delegate Ayanu so much. I felt sorry for the poor guy who put his name in after the first round of voting. He seemed a decent sort, but by that time, the race was between Delegate Ayanu and Delegate Namion and he came in too late.

I laughed at that analysis, too. That “poor guy” had been Delegate Samarin of Miran, a very serious gentleman who would have had to be extremely stressed out by the situation to put his name forward. Its turbulent history notwithstanding, Miran was usually a quiet bystander in most conflicts, a major agricultural export powerhouse that saw no sense in upsetting too many of its customers.

Raanu had sent the last two messages this morning. The first one said,

I am very sorry to have bothered you. I should not have wasted your valuable time with my childish complaints.

Raanu Palayi

Hmm, that was oddly formal.

Coldi rarely signed their clan name, preferring to go by first name only—their first names were unique. A register was kept to let expectant parents see which names were available. A Coldi person would only sign with a clan name for very serious occasions.

The second message said,

Daddy made me write the previous message. He discovered that I’d been using this account, and he wanted me to apologise, although I’m not aware that I did anything wrong.

I laughed. The rascal.

Privately I was sure Ezhya was laughing as well. Raanu was every bit her father’s daughter.

My good mood lasted until I saw that underneath the last message from Raanu, arrived barely an hour ago, was another priority one message from an unfamiliar account in the
gamra
security group.

What the hell? Why would security send me anything urgently?

I opened it up, feeling sick. It was bad enough that we’d had Tamerians running around the supposedly secure island, a fact which I didn’t expect security to openly acknowledge. Was this about some other problem?

The message was very short. It said,

I heard you found it. Please confirm at your earliest opportunity and arrange a visit.

There was no name, but the location tracking showed that the message had been sent from a unit on the ground floor of my building. I knew who was in that particular apartment. I guess I’d better inform
gamra
security that Captain Kando Luczon had been here less than a week and had already cracked their system.

Add that to the growing pile of disasters. No, actually, it was something I needed to address right now.

I
WOULD NORMALLY
have left the room in search of Thayu, but I was hesitant to brave the situation outside, so I sent her a message instead. She came into the room not much later, again letting in a wave of yelling.

“Seriously, does that woman ever get tired of it?”

Thayu shrugged while she sat down. “She’s very stressed.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

She gave me her famous cold dead fish look.

“What? She’s been behaving terribly ever since we came back. I can’t find any good excuse for it, especially not when most of the abuse is directed at Eirani and the staff who have been going out of their way—”

“It’s not unusual for Coldi mothers to become extremely stressed just before the birth. Their bodies are telling them that they should seek safe places and make everything perfect before they go into labour.”

Oh. Variation number six thousand and fifty-nine of putting my foot in it. Thayu had given birth. Thayu wanted another child. Despite having no love for Xinanu, Thayu understood what she was going through, about to bring a child into the world in an essentially hostile household.

I sighed. Boy, I was an arse. “Well then let’s hope it all happens speedily and safely.”

She looked out the window.

I sighed and put my hand over hers on her knee. She didn’t respond at first, but then turned her hand palm up and squeezed.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess we’re
all
stressed. We just seem to be going from monumental fuck-up to monumental fuck-up.”

“What happened now?”

I showed her Kando Luczon’s message.

Her eyes widened. “He broke into security?”

“It seems so.”

“Have you let security know?”

“I will, unless something else fucks up in the next few minutes.”

She was still frowning at the message. “What is this thing that we’re supposed to have found?”

“He’s talking about the location of the old ship that brought the first Aghyrian refugees here.”

“Didn’t they find it even before we left? I mean, we did go to that site on the other side of the island and people were walking around with scanners. And somebody’s back wall had collapsed from the sound waves. We knew it was there.”

“We knew where the wreck was likely to be. Apparently the Barresh historians have now uncovered the precise site. I saw it on the news channels yesterday.”

“Oh. Would there be anything left of the ship for us to look at? I mean, it’s been submerged in marshland all that time.”

“I doubt much of the main structure of the ship will have survived, but something obviously has, because it responded to the signal that the main ship sent out.”

“He seems really keen to see it.”

“Yeah.” The captain had asked to see the site of the ship as soon as we had told him that it was there.

“Wouldn’t you be keen, in his situation?”

“Keen? I don’t know. Would I be keen to see the site where people I knew and used to work with, or who were my friends, landed, spent the rest of their lives watching the ruin of our planet become enveloped in a cloud of dust? To know that those people died fifty thousand years ago while by some fluke of physics, I was still alive? I don’t know how keen I’d be.”

Thayu pressed her lips together. No, she couldn’t have followed that train of thought.

Coldi were absolutely never sentimental about their roots or history. I had gotten the impression that the Aghyrians were a lot more like Earth people. Sometimes, they were disturbingly like humans, down to the nasty, vindictive streak.

Thayu gestured at the screen, which still displayed Kando Luczon’s message from the security account. “So, do you want me to go to security and give them the bad news?”

“We’ll go downstairs with a detour via security.”

“Downstairs?”

“I have to address his questions. He came with us on the basis of our willingness to show him the old sites and ruins. Judging by his efforts, he’s clearly getting impatient.”

“I thought you were going to let him cool his heels after that assembly meeting.”

I shuddered at the memory. I’d taken the captain to attend a plenary session. The assembly had honoured him by allowing him to use the title Primary Delegate.

And what had he done?

The speech he’d given had to go down as the single most offensive address ever held in the history of
gamra
. He’d called the Coldi a substitute race that could be retired now that the original inhabitants of Asto were back. He’d called all non-Coldi backwards because they couldn’t possibly understand the intricacy of Aghyrian thoughts. He said that the very institution of
gamra
was an exercise in mediocrity because it would never be smarter than its dumbest member entity.

And so on and so forth.

Every time I thought we’d run out of toes that he could step on, he’d found another big foot of them. It was a wonder that he managed to get out of the building alive.

“I was going to let him cool his heels.” Even if only for the reason that someone would pull a gun on him if he kept going this way, and I couldn’t guarantee that this someone wouldn’t be me. “But if he’s getting into the security systems, we need another plan. When he goes back to that ship, we don’t want him to do so with schematics of our entire security operation and goodness knows what else he can get his hands on if we don’t keep him busy.”

Thayu said, her voice low. “I don’t understand why people are still talking about letting him return to the ship.”

“You think he shouldn’t?”

“Of course not. As soon as we allow him to go back, that ship will attack the military vessels that guard it. I do not particularly look forward to my father’s sling being fired in anger.”

No, having seen the equipment in question, I didn’t, either. And of course I should have realised that, apart from a means of transportation, the military sling was also a weapon. “What if the ship wakes up and comes after the captain if he’s not back by a certain time?”

“The military will destroy it.”

I huffed. “You don’t destroy something that old.”

“That is the problem with
gamra
and this whole situation. People go stupid over this issue of preserving history at all costs. That’s rubbish. If the ship is a threat, it should be addressed. People crawl at this man’s feet not because of what he’s said or done, but because of who he is. He knows that. The guy is arrogant enough to have had people crawl at his feet since he was born. People are hanging off his lips, watching his every move.”

I was going to protest, but she was right as usual. In all truth we still knew little of the captain’s motivations. I’d randomly selected his two companions for the sole reason of finding out what I could about the ship and its occupants. Better the devil you know, my mother used to say. But so far both companions had been quieter than the proverbial corpse.

“Don’t trust him, Cory. This is the guy who refused to take on extra passengers in the days before the meteorite hit. How much effort would it have been to pick up a couple of thousand people from Asto? He could have dropped them on Ceren, if he was that concerned about the ecosystem of his ship.”

“It was a long time ago—”

“It’s the same guy. He’s a first class arsehole. And he’s had four hundred years’ ship time to cultivate his arseholery. We need to make sure that we keep him harmless.”

“That’s what I’m doing. Keeping him busy with stuff that interests him. Make sure he keeps out of the fucking security systems.” I spread my hands in frustration.

A deep silence followed my comment, in which the sound of the argument in the hall drifted through the door. Someone slammed a door, and opened it again, and Xinanu yelled, “Suit yourself!” Someone replied. I wasn’t sure if it was Nicha, but I felt so incredibly sorry for him right now. Xinanu had torn a strip off him when he returned after three weeks.

“Seriously, Thay’, is all we can do in this house lately yell at each other?”

“We do plenty of other things.” She pulled me close and kissed me. For a moment, I hovered in blissful oblivion. Then she withdrew. “So. What’s the plan?”

“Well, clearly the captain is getting bored, so I was going to visit him to see if we can go to the dig site and show him what we found. I have no doubt that he has a fair bit of information that historians would kill for.”

“If they believe him.” The impostor rumours were all still going strong.