Ambassador 4: Coming Home (35 page)

He said, “You have the captain there with you.” It was not a question.

“We do indeed.”

“Tell him to put that ship into a stable orbit. Tell him that he will have one last chance to speak to us. Tell him that any move towards the planet will be seen as hostile and will draw fire.”

I wasn’t going to mention the fact that we had nothing to destroy the ship with. He knew that. I saw it in his eyes. This was going to be classic Coldi bluff.

“Can the captain and his companions be brought here?” I asked Ledaya.

“They can.” And he ordered, “Bring the hostages. Blindfolded.” A cabin lackey hurried off to do it. Or maybe he wasn’t a lackey. The disturbing part about the Asto military was that they rarely displayed ranking on their uniforms. Coldi
knew
who was ranked high and low. It was in their instinct.

I said, “Is the ship speaking to anyone?”

“No,” Ezhya said. And then: “Their engines are running at low speed. They will want to execute a series of short burns to insert themselves into a stable orbit. We’ll allow them to do that as long as they don’t come any closer. After that, I rely on you to keep him talking. They’ve made it clear they’re not interested in any form of communication with us. Keep him occupied.”

“Until the sling turns up?”

“Until they come within range of the station. The sling can’t be here before that time.”

Shit
. No one came close to the station. Not even the commercial flights did, and everyone aboard those were Asto’s citizens.

“Is the station . . . armed?”

“There is a plan.” All right so he was not going to answer that. “All I want you to do is make the captain believe that we’re still interested in negotiating.”

“Yes.” I believed with all my heart that we should still try to negotiate. “As far as I can tell, the ship is slaved to the captain and one other crew member we have here. I am unsure what their tasks are. They haven’t been very helpful.”

“Talk to them. Keep them busy. I don’t care what you say to them. I don’t care what the result is. Just keep them busy.”

“What if I can broker an agreement?”

His face hardened. “The time for agreements is past. If they were going to agree to anything we offered, they already would have done so. If there was anything they wanted that we could give them, they would have asked.” The
miyu
pronouns unsettled me deeply, but oh, I understood. It was just that I would have considered him a friend, and now he was deciding over matters of war that would affect the lives of many. It was disturbing.

I signed off, and saw his face disappear from the screen, wondering if, when and where I would see him again and how much the world would have changed by then.

A couple of soldiers floated in through the square entrance in the base of the funnel shape of the command room. They pulled with them a platform with a plain flat base, unlike the mushroom-shaped one where we had been given seats. This particular one was probably used for moving freight through the ship. There were no seats, no stalk, only hooks on the “floor” to tie down the cargo so that it didn’t go drifting into space. Four people “sat” on this floor, secured around the waist, wrists and ankles by brightly-coloured cargo straps: Kando Luczon, Tayron Kathraczi, Lilona Shrakar and Marin Federza. Their eyes had been covered by blindfolds.

“Do they really need to be blindfolded?” I asked Thayu in a low voice.

“You know the rule:
no one
sees the room of the upper command in Asto’s military, unless you’re upper military.”

Kind of silly, but pointless to discuss. This was not my territory and not my terms.

I felt chilled that Ezhya’s use of pronouns of war triggered my association to do the same.

I detached myself from the seat and floated through the control room. To one side—it was pointless to speak of left or right anymore—navigation crew were monitoring the progress of the ship, in particular in the giant formation of military ships that floated with us. Thayu had once explained the intricate systems of controlling where everyone jumped and how fast they moved when large sections of the fleet were in motion.

I grabbed the edge of the platform that held the hostages and swung myself up. I attached my tether to the hook I recognised to be destined for that purpose and reeled in the wire so that I didn’t go floating into space.

One day I was going to be an expert on this.

To be honest I was astonished that I’d so far been able to hang onto my breakfast. Running ragged on high adrenalin apparently suppressed motion sickness.

“I’ve been given one last chance to come to an agreement with you about our future interactions,” I started. “Ezhya Palayi of Asto has given you his position. Your ship is allowed to stay in orbit at its current distance from Asto for the duration of the negotiations, but—”

“What negotiations?” Kando Luczon turned his head towards me. His eyes were covered but his mouth was set in a stubborn line.

My mind flooded with a sudden revulsion and a feeling of deep hatred. This man had been given the most amazing life, a dream that people had died for: to make a jump in time and see what the future brought. He could have used it to help people, to warn people or simply to tell interesting tales. But no, all this man had ever done with the astonishing gift he’d been given life was be an utter dick. Frankly I was out of patience with him. “You’re right. The time for negotiations is over. My allies keep telling me that, but I guess I was too stubborn to see it. I understand it now. Once I would have wanted to help you and your crew. I would have given you a place to live in safety—”

“We are not interested in anything you can offer us.”

Frustration boiled over. “Then why did you come here? To disrupt our peaceful lives and to manipulate some of us into fighting against each other? How long has this been going on? Twenty, thirty years? Why? Do me a pleasure and tell us that.”

“We made mistakes.” His voice sounded prim.

“And you come here to make them worse? What do you care anyway? It’s not your life anymore. None of us here are your problem or remotely your property. I was moved by your plea of an old man wanting to see his home once more, but I can see it for the lie it is. I don’t believe anything you say anymore. The best thing you could do is leave us alone because if you stay here, things will end badly.”

“Those people out there, they have nothing that can damage our ship.”

“I would not want to put that to the test. Have you seen the size of the fleet out there? Do you know how many people are watching you? Do you know that they will try and try again until they can find a little hole, and they will rip it and make it bigger until it’s so big that no one can plug it.” That was how Coldi society worked: they kept trying, they waited until someone made a mistake. Above all, they worked together, as one.

“You still have nothing that could damage our ship. We refuse to let ourselves be dictated. We will go exactly where we want.”

This was predictably not going well. Lilona was vigorously shaking her head. It didn’t matter. Keep him talking, Ezhya had said, so that’s what I did.

Marin Federza sat next to Lilona, holding her hand. He said, “It could be that the captain might consider retreating in exchange for permission to live on one world.” What he said was nonsense. We already knew that he wasn’t interested, but damn it, Federza appeared to understand what I was trying to do. I had never considered that possible.

I added to his words, “My colleague here is right. We could provide a community for all of the crew to live in, give them care and clothing and food—”

“We don’t need worlds to live on. We don’t need anyone’s permission. The ship has been self-sufficient for generations.”

“But it isn’t!” Lilona cried out. “We’re sick, and we’re made to believe, every time things get worse and we  become weaker and more sickly, that this is normal. Yes, we can live to very old ages, but we are too weak to enjoy it. I can’t walk as fast as everyone. I feel sick all the time. I’m one of the healthier people, but compared to everyone here, I’m so weak. We get told that we’re all healthy, but we can’t even reproduce naturally anymore.”

Tayron snapped at her in Aghyrian. She replied in an equally angry tone.

“I am trying to assist a peaceful solution.” Federza sounded weary. I could only imagine what he had been going through since I’d come here and he had been left behind in the shuttle with the three Aghyrians.

Kando Luczon said, “The solution is that if everyone leaves us alone, there will be no problems and no weapons fired.”

“You can’t go wherever you like. This is not your world anymore.”

“According to your own laws, it is. According to those laws, there is a group of people still waiting for a response to their legal claim against the occupiers.”

Wait
. The Aghyrian claim, had the captain been behind it? Had he contacted the
zeyshi
Aghyrians with promises of riches or land or power? Was that why, despite a few vocal voices, the claim had been largely forgotten since news of the ship had broken?

Holy shit.

I gestured for Veyada to come over. I absolutely needed to have a better witness than just the recording of this conversation, but at that very moment, an officer in the communication division yelled, “Action!”

In various parts of the command centre, people sprang into frenzied activity.

What the hell did that mean?

Ledaya took the projection off the schematic map and showed a live image. The quality was poor, shown at higher magnification than the image was intended for. I had no idea what the bright spots meant. Except they appeared to be moving. A spot in the middle flared with white and four other spots ejected a trail of bright sparks. Damn, the ship’s engines had increased burn.

I whirled at Kando Luczon. “What are you doing?”

“We are resuming our planned course.”

Damned if I understood this man, damned if anyone could get through to him. “There are hundreds of ships here that will fire at you if you come any closer.”

He did not respond to that in his usual non-communicative mood. Did he even understand the concept of war?

“Call the ship to resume its earlier orbit, now,” I yelled at him. “We have one chance to stop a fight.”

Damn it, damn it. The vector already showed that the ship was dropping in orbit, on a direct route to the station. There was no way that anyone could tell me that the Aghyrians didn’t know about the station. This was deliberate and provocative. Someone was going to fire. A lot of people were going to die. . . .

He said, in a dry tone, “Processes have been set into motion. It’s inevitable.”

“Stop those processes! If you’re bound to the ship you have means of communicating with it.”

They might even be aiming for the station. The ship might not have weapons of the calibre to make any impression on Asto’s fleet. But they could use the ship itself, built to safely traverse intergalactic debris clouds at speeds we could not comprehend. They would have no trouble with a space station. Did the military even have enough time and docking space to take their giant workforce off the station? Surely they had some means of changing the path of the station? If they did, would it be agile enough?

This started to sound like Asto all over again.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

I pressed the button on my tether and reeled myself in until my knees were firmly jammed against the cargo platform facing the captain. My mind overflowed with the things I wanted to do to him: shoot him, pull him up by that stupid robe of his and punch the teeth out of his mouth, or at least slap him in the face.

But I couldn’t do any of that.

Because I was a negotiator and I never lost my temper. Because, if I would attempt to do those things, I wouldn’t be very good at it. Because it was not my style.

So I just sat there, like a hunting cat ready to spring. I was trembling all over. One day, when Kando Luczon was no longer important to the peace, I was going to go up to his front door, and when he opened, I’d shoot the fucking bastard. Just like that. Until then, I was a coward.

“Cory,” Thayu said, her voice soft. She was floating towards me.

I turned around, and almost lost it at the look of concern on her face. Even though our feeders didn’t work, she acted like she knew what was going on. I loved her so much. I didn’t care what she wanted me to do. I’d do it.

She put her hand on my arm. The warmth of her palm radiated through the fabric of my sleeve.

“Leave them for the time being. The ship will probably move soon, and we have to be secured.”

She accompanied me back to our upside-down mushroom with seats.

The weapons command below my feet was in a state of frantic activity. Ledaya enlarged the view of the Aghyrian ship and surrounding space. A few ships were already lining up, small specks against the behemoth.

“What can they do against anything that size?”

Veyada said, “I suspect they’ll try to create a diversion so that a small crew can break into the ship from the outside and disable the shield.”

I remembered how we had entered the ship, and how the pilot of our shuttle had no control over where we went. How could anyone try to breach the shield? What did they know that we, having visited the ship, hadn’t seen? That ship knew exactly what was going on around it.

A couple of smaller craft flew in formation quite close to the Aghyrian ship.

I thought I spotted a burst of fire from one of them. I presumed it was firing at the big ship, but I couldn’t see whether or not it hit its target. All I could see was the futility of it.

A flash bloomed out from the big ship. That definitely hit the target as the small ship disintegrated. And another one and another one. The small ships had disintegrated into a cloud of debris.

“That seems like a stupid move,” I said, feeling sick.

Thayu said, “Those were drones. There were no crew aboard those ships.”

“Who told you that?”

“Standard engagement manoeuvre. I’m surprised they’re falling for it. Watch what they’re doing down there.”