Ambassador 4: Coming Home (11 page)

T
HAT NIGHT,
I discovered that babies don’t like sleeping when adults do. Twice, Nicha came into our room with the screaming baby for Thayu to calm down. Thayu, being Thayu, went back to sleep immediately, but I lay awake, worrying about things that might be happening where I couldn’t see them, things that would happen if I didn’t achieve certain other things, and things that had already happened, but I didn’t know about.

I worried about control of my
gamra
message account and messages Delegate Namion’s assistant said weren’t there, and potential ones that
would
be there and I didn’t want him to read.

The second time Nicha entered the room, I got out of bed intending to go to the kitchen to find something to eat, but when I let the door to our bedroom rattle shut behind me, I sensed movement in the hall. Someone was just shutting the door with a soft snick.

“Devlin?” The figure was too short to be either Evi or Telaris. They would be outside, and they would have let this person in, wouldn’t they?

“What is everyone still doing up?” a Coldi voice said. Young, male.

It was Reida. He found it necessary to make a subservient greeting. I touched him on the shoulder. Both he and Deyu had trouble dropping that behaviour, no matter how many times I told them. Maybe I should just ignore it and get used to it.

I said, “The baby has been keeping us awake. He needs feeding all the time and Thayu is helping Nicha with it.”

“Isn’t it in the contract that she should stay for a while?” I had sort-of expected him to make a surprised remark about the birth, but of course, being Nicha’s second, he would already know.

“That’s another story for another day. Why are you here? Is it safe for you to visit?”

“I have to be a bit careful. I told them at the dig site that I was from the northeastern barracks, except I’m not, and sleeping on the street makes you dirty, so I had to go somewhere to wash. I’ll be gone before daylight.”

“Did you find out anything interesting?”

“That’s what I was hoping I could tell you.”

“Come.” I pulled him into the living room where I turned on a small light. Ouch— that hurt my eyes. Reida was still wearing black council gear. He wore his hair loose, kept out of his face by the clip that held his earpiece in place. Very much like the local young men wore it. But he was right. He did look a bit scruffy and smelled of marsh mud.

We sat down on the couches in the living room facing one another. His belt bristled with guard equipment.

“You’ve actually done a really good job of looking like a council guard,” I said.

He snorted. “This?” He indicated his belt. “Most of this doesn’t work. It just looks good.”

“Yes, it does.” Although I assumed that the equipment was probably dated and a real guard would be able to see the difference straight away. “What have you found out?”

“There is some really strange shit going on.”

“Tell me something new.”

“Well, it was actually quite easy to station myself at the dig site. All I did was claim to have been sent there from the northeastern guard division. I expected checks—yes, I have a pass—but the guards are clueless. No one ever asked me for identification. They just told me to stand on the footbridge to the station and stop anyone wanting to access the site. The fellow in charge of the dig is someone named Adaron Namitu. He’s an academic and seems to know what he’s doing, but he’s very slow. People keep putting pressure on him to work faster. I don’t understand why they don’t get people in from the Outer Circle. At Asto, people have been digging up this stuff for hundreds of years.”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“At night we all have to leave. There were rumours that the Council was getting Tamerians to do the night shift, and we all have to leave before they arrive. I was curious, so I hid in the reeds—which is why I look like this.”

The dried mud on his uniform made grey patches on his knees and lower legs. There were also splatters on his shirt.

“Tamerians did arrive all right. There were two. They pulled down all the side flaps and stood outside. That was pretty boring. I had to crawl all the way to the beach and it was really muddy.”

I restrained the urge to laugh. “Do you know who hired them?”

“They’re saying the Council. It’s not because of the Tamerians or the night shift that I’m here.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“I actually managed to wander into the tent yesterday and I had a look at what they’re doing. They’ve sealed off the site by driving plates into the ground and pumping the area dry, but there is nothing much to see except stinking mud and roots and rotting weeds. They’re taking the mud up in buckets and rinsing out the dirt until only sand is left. Then they dry it under all these lamps that you can see lighting up the tent at night, and pick all the little fragments out. It takes forever and most of the things they’re finding are tiny metal fragments. They pick them all up with tweezers and then they go into a little jar. One per grab sample. They record exactly where each sample came from. It’s all very slow.”

Yes, that was how it was done.

“Then yesterday, they started uncovering this rock-looking thing.”

“Thing?”

“Yes, it’s in the middle of the site. It looks like a rock with stuff growing all over it.”

“What sort of stuff?”

“Oh, I don’t know, the rubbish that grows on rocks that lie in the water. Slimy plants and all that.”

“Water life?”

“Something like that. They all seemed very excited about this rock. It’s right in the middle of the site.”

“In the middle of where the ship used to be?”

“Yep.”

That was odd. I had not heard of any meteorite strike that would either have brought the ship down or would have hit it afterwards. “What were they saying about this rock?”

“That’s the thing: it’s not a rock. It’s got all sorts of . . . stuff inside.”

“Stuff?”

“Yeah, machinery. Electronics. I couldn’t see it very well.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, a couple of the academics had a deep scanning machine and the image was coming up on the screen. I was sort of standing to the side, pretending not to be there. I couldn’t come too close, because I didn’t want to show them that I was interested.”

No. That was true.

“But I got a copy of the scan.”

That was Reida: he would get to the important part in a roundabout way, but when he did get to it, the wait would have been more than worthwhile.

He pulled out his comm and an eyepiece projector—which I didn’t even know he had—and scrolled through the menus on the apparatus. Then he passed the eyepiece to me. “Just move with your eyes where you want it to go,” he said.

I
had
worked with eyepieces before, but admittedly that was a while back. The projection that seemed to hang in the air before me was blurry. The two little buggy antennae hung so close in front of my sleep-affected eyes that I blinked, which sent the projection flying through the menus.

Crap.

“Sorry. I’m not awake yet. That kid has been keeping us up.”

I relocated the image and redisplayed it. It was a white and blue monochrome . . . something. A blobby indistinct shape that resembled a cloud, or maybe a giant peanut, if the scale down the bottom was anything to go by.

“Is this it?” That was a disappointment. How could anyone tell what they were looking at, let alone draw conclusions from it?

“Blink.”

I did. The image changed. It was still blue-white and blobby but the blobs were in different places.

“What’s the idea of this?”

“Blink again. They’re cross-sections, like you were cutting the thing into thin slices, but without actually damaging it.”

I blinked, and now a square shape materialised out of the indistinct blobs. Another blink and it became thicker.

“It’s an encasing.”

He nodded.

I blinked again, and now some of the inner content of the “rock” became clear: a section of straight lines with interconnecting wires, a couple of slabs that looked like boards with plugs, some cross-sections of cylinders of some description.

I scrolled through the whole thing, and then reversed the order. The shape of the—clearly artificial—contents came out clearly. I didn’t have enough technical knowledge to even begin thinking about what all this was for.

“Can I make a copy of this?” I’d show it to Thayu in the morning.

“You can have it.”

I pulled the eyepiece off. “The whole thing?”

“It’s all yours.”

I wondered where he had gotten the eyepiece. Those things were not cheap. Surely someone would miss it?

Reida announced that he needed to wash and go back, so he went to the bathroom and I went back into my bedroom where Nicha had gone.

Thayu stirred when I came into the bed.

“Hmm, what’s going on?”

“Reida came back.”

“What did he have to say?”

I told her in a few sentences what Reida had told me. She sat up, a silhouette in the dark against the faint glow that came in from starlight and lamps outside. I gave her the eyepiece and she blinked through the images as I had. The glow from the tiny projector lit her face. I could only see light spots, no details of the image.

“I have no idea what this thing is. I’ll get some people to run functional analyses on it.” If she said “some people” she almost certainly meant high-level Asto intelligence officers.

“We could simply ask our captain.”

Thayu snorted. “What is the chance that he’d tell us the truth? Or that he’d let us analyse these images? He could make such a stink about this data that everyone knows who’s got it, who’s supposed to have it and who doesn’t. He’ll probably find out about this anyway, and we’d best send it off before he starts complaining about information being in enemy hands. I’d think the assembly would argue against him and in favour of us, but with this idiot in charge, I don’t know anymore.”

“Exactly where do you want to send it? First Circle intelligence?”

“Nah. There is a group in the historical wing of the Inner Circle that does models of similar scans. If someone discovers an object at their building site, they notify these people and they turn a scan into a three-dimensional shape that you can test to see what the function of the object is and how important it is that it be preserved.”

“Send it.”

“I will.” She grinned. “Of course they work for the fleet as well.”

Of course.

She shifted to the edge of the bed and swung her feet over the side—and froze. “Wait. What’s Joyelin Akhtari’s name doing on this document?”

“Is it?” I didn’t recall seeing that. To be honest, I didn’t recall seeing text at all.

Thayu pulled the eyepiece off and gave it to me. She had the projection paused at the very last slide, which just contained the last fuzzy section of the layer that contained the marine growths. “Where is it?”

“In the top corner.”

There were a number of lines of blue text in that corner, all of them in Aghyrian—which I hadn’t mastered very well. The text was in Aghyrian script, too, not in Coldi notation, and I was even shakier on that subject. But yes, now that Thayu told me, I saw it, too. “What else does it say?”

“Not much. Just something about where it’s meant to be sent, I think. We need to have this translated.” Again, to be done by the army.

Thayu left the bedroom in her nightshirt. I followed her across to the hub where we sat by the dim glow of a couple of lights. If I found it hard to see anything, I could only imagine what Thayu would see. She couldn’t switch the main hub on, because Delegate Namion still had control of the account, and he would be unimpressed if we passed this information to the Asto military.

I used the special line I had with Ezhya, which I couldn’t use too often because someone would pick it up. It was the middle of the day in Athyl and we received an immediate acknowledgement of receipt. Ezhya sent these messages without even thinking. I had no doubt that he would process the material later.

For us, it was time to go back to bed.

When were about to climb into bed, the baby started crying in the next room. We heard Nicha get up and mess about with the bottles.

“I should go and help him,” Thayu said.

“He’ll call us if he needs help.” I slid my hand under her thin nightshirt. Her skin glowed with heat. I ran my hands over the soft mounds of her breasts. Was I crazy or had they become fuller?

“This is another thing you should do,” Thayu said in the dark.

I rested my hand on her stomach.

“You should write to the Azimi clan and complain about her departure from Barresh before her contract was even completed.”

“Oh, I don’t want to—”

“Yes, you do. Breach of contract is a serious clan matter. Nicha is deeply offended.
I
am offended by her behaviour. Ask my father. He will tell you what to do.”

I was afraid he would, very much so.

I even sort of agreed with them. Xinanu had been rude and didn’t leave us with much choice, but on the other hand, I was getting annoyed.

All this stuff—the Council’s refusal to let us visit the site, Federza missing, Xinanu’s behaviour—was keeping me away from dealing with the actual problem at hand: what to do about Kando Luczon and his companions and thousands of crew on the ship.

B
ECAUSE
GAMRA
operated on its own time of twenty-three and a half hour days and Barresh operated on Ceren time of twenty-eight hour days, the
gamra
assembly meeting was on before dawn.

I didn’t think I’d slept much when Eirani woke me and I sat up with a shock, feeling all sweaty and shivery. It was still dark outside and the air that came in through the open window carried a definite bite. Urgh.

I let myself roll out of the bed, poking Thayu in the side. She went, “Hmmm?” and lay back down while I went into the bathroom.

The light, when I flicked it on, hurt my eyes, and lit a red welt on my chin where an ingrown hair was starting to make its displeasure known. For crying out loud. That always happened when I was stressed. At some point I was going to have to go back to Auckland for another treatment of my skin. Most of my facial hair was gone, but every now and then, a nasty sucker like this sprang up.