Ambassador 4: Coming Home (20 page)

They only tended to shoot from a distance anyway. Whatever Tamerians were, smart didn’t appear to be one of those things. And so every artificial race had its problems. Fancy that.

He put the key in my palm, hesitant. I walked past him to the door—

—and it opened from the inside, almost hitting me in the face.

An armed man ran out. I jumped aside. He shouted and pointed the gun at me. Lowered it again.

He blew out a heavy breath.

It was only a Barresh guard. “What were you doing?’ he yelled at his colleague in keihu. “I’d almost shot him. I thought this was one of those . . .” Then he looked at me, as if realising that I understood him. “What are they doing here?” Then he frowned at Reida. “He’s the one normally behind bars.”

The first guard said something to him in a low voice. The second guard nodded, again glancing at me. “He said they’d take him?”

The first guard gave his colleague a warning look.

I said, “You do have Marin Federza here. I want to see him.”

The first guard wiped sweat off his upper lip. Unless I was mistaken, they appeared nervous and very much on edge.

“Come.” The second guard jerked his head and disappeared through the heavy door behind the counter. I handed the key back to the first guard and followed him. Thayu was close behind me. Reida and Lilona followed him.

We plunged into the darkness down the circular staircase that reminded me strongly of a medieval dungeon. The steps were made of limestone blocks that had become slippery with the constant seeping moisture.

“That smell,” Reida said. His voice sounded disturbed.

The smell was typical for many of the old cellars of Barresh. These were not cellars for dry storage. They were for drainage and cooling, as most of them were below the ground water level and water seeped through the stone and evaporated. These structures always smelled of algae, wet stone and must.

The guard waited at the bottom of the stairs until all of us were down and the door had shut behind us. He was a tall fellow, broad in the shoulders rather than round-waisted. He possessed several tattoos on both sides of his neck, visible because, unlike most keihu men, he wore his hair short.

“I don’t know how keen he’ll be to go outside with you,” he said. “To be honest, he’s paranoid. He says there are people with military-grade weapons waiting to pick him off outside. We’ve tried to get him to leave several times already, but he’s flatly refused.”

“How long has he been here?”

“A week or two.” He scratched his head. “Seems longer than that.”

“Is there another way out?”

He laughed, spreading his hands. “What do you think? This is a jail.”

“Was a jail. This is no longer the main jail.”

“No, but we hold miscreants here to cool their heels after a brawl or rowdy night out.”

Didn’t I know about that.

“The other building is newer and may smell better, but it’s much worse for the inmates.”

True. That jail had a “termination room”. Local judges favoured the death penalty over long prison terms.

The winding staircase was on one end of the passage and from where we stood, we could see all the way to the other end. The doors to the cells consisted of metal grates and all of them were dark, some closed, some stood open.

A glow of light came from an open door at the end of the passage.

“I guess he’s down there.”

“Yup. I hope he’s not going to blow up when he sees you.” Clearly, the prospect terrified him.

We set off down the corridor.

Reida muttered some words as we walked past the cells. Occasionally, when he was stressed, he reverted to
zeyshi
dialect, and this was one of those occasions. I now wondered how he had found out that Federza was here, and was unsure I wanted to know. Asha had said that Reida was gold, but that didn’t stop me feeling deeply disturbed by certain parts of the young man’s life, such as the times when I’d come here to rescue him from one of the cells.

The rooms at the end of the passage were not cells. They looked to have been a guard’s station. This seemed a stupid place for a guard station—I would have put it next to the stairs—but then I realised that the wall at the end of the passage dated from a much more recent period than the jail itself, and from memory, it was not the new jail on the other side of the wall. That institution was at the back of the corner block.

After the darkness of the corridor, the light in the guard station seemed impossibly bright. The room contained a pair of scruffy couches and a low table, the surface stained with moisture spots.

Federza sat in the far corner at a dining table that had been turned into a desk. When I came in, he rose.

I couldn’t work out whether the expression on his face was happiness or annoyance or all of the above. I remembered him the last time I had seen him, when he came into my apartment scared. Was there anything I had missed then? He’d obviously been more scared than he’d let on.

“Delegate Wilson.” He shook my hand, Earth-style. He had travelled there. His grandfather was the legendary Daya Ezmi, the founder of the Barresh Aghyrians.

He gestured at the couch and I sat down. The cushion released a waft of musty air. He sat on the other couch. Thayu and Reida remained near the door while Lilona sat on one of the chairs at the table.

Federza frowned at her. “Is that . . . ?”

“She’s from the ship, yes.”

He stared at her, and she looked back at him, pale as she was. From his looks, Federza did not belong to the dark-haired, Pakshari, group of Aghyrians, even though his family heritage said otherwise. His hair was bronze and his eyes the colour of beach sand: beige, almost yellow.

He rose again and bowed to her. “I cannot offer you much in the way of refreshments, but I have clean water.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I haven’t been feeling very well.”

“Do have it checked out.” He sat down again, still looking at her.

Something intense about the exchange went beyond words.

Thayu frowned at me. We were under the ground so the feeder didn’t work. I would have loved to know what she made of this.

“Tell me what happened and what led you to coming here,” I asked Federza.

He blew out a breath and leaned his elbows on his bony knees. “It goes back a long time.”

“Something like twenty years when your people first started talking to the ship?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t involved. I didn’t become aware of it until a few years ago. At first I thought it was just too silly for words, but then I saw the proof and wondered why no one had told
gamra
about the ship. But our leaders said the information and the ship was ours and no one else had a right to speak to it.”

“Except they did speak to others, didn’t they?”

Federza glanced at Lilona. She shrugged. “I work in the lab. That’s what I do. The captain makes decisions about which information to give out.”

Proof that she knew at least something, and felt uncomfortable discussing it.

I asked her, “Did you, at any time, know who he was communicating with?”

“No. Just the new inhabitants of our home planet, he said.”

And he’d lied, unless he had been talking to the
zeyshi
group, too. That was a distinct possibility.

“I don’t know how much of a setup it was,” Federza went on. “I still don’t know. I don’t know what their aims are, but when I started questioning, people became defensive.”

“ ‘People’ meaning the Aghyrian leadership?”

He nodded.

“I became more and more convinced that the approaching ship should be mentioned to the
gamra
assembly, but they continued to overrule me. In the end, I copied the information and took it out of the compound, but they found out. That’s when they sent the Tamerians after me. When you disappeared to the ship, I had nowhere to go. I came to the island but it was full of Tamerians. I couldn’t leave a message for you because they would have intercepted it. They have bugs everywhere. Except here.”

“You went to the guards for protection, and they put you in jail.” Which, all things considered, was a pretty smart thing to do. “But you can’t get out.”

“They will kill me.” He sighed. “Since our last meeting, I’ve learned more disturbing material.” He passed his reader to me. I tilted it so that the image faced the right way up. It was a block of unfamiliar code.

“Look at the date,” Federza said.

I did. It was twenty years ago. I would still have been in high school at Taurus, before I went to Mars, before I lived in Athens with Nicha. “What is it?”

“Genetic code and instructions.”

“Where did this come from?”

“The Exchange picked it up but never released it, because they looked and couldn’t find the origin, and because nothing else ever came from that direction, they filed it and forgot about it. But someone received this data and worked on it for years. That man you killed in my office, I had his genetics analysed. It matches with this.” He gestured at the screen in front of me. “This is Tamerian. No one knew where it came from, no one knew where it went. No one recognised it for what it was. No one worried about it.”

No one had known about the ship.

“They were communicating with people back then.”

I looked at Lilona. She sat staring into the distance. With her limited understanding of societies, what was the chance that she had no idea what we were talking about?

“They were. It all went to Tamer, although the Exchange doesn’t have any proof for that. They used old satellites that had been floating around amongst other space debris.”

I nodded. “The Asto military destroyed them as soon as they sprang to life.” Asha hadn’t told me how long they’d been doing that for and how long each satellite had been transmitting when they destroyed it. Hell, information like this could be transmitted in a few minutes.

Federza said, “I’m not sure there would have been that much point in destroying them after the fact. They have so many of these potential relays that we can’t keep track of them. Even if each communicates only once before it is destroyed, they still get a lot of material through before all of them are gone.”

“But I don’t quite understand why they’re after you.” I would have said he was just paranoid, if there hadn’t been that attack on him while he was in my apartment, and if his apartment hadn’t been ransacked.

“No. Most of this was known already, even if no one did anything about it.” He met my eyes squarely.

The sandy colour always made me feel strange. The ship Aghyrians didn’t have such interesting eye colours. Theirs were more human: brown or blue.

“They were after me because I know who made the Tamerians. I’m not the only one who knows, but because I was going to take the communication with the ship to the assembly, they judged me a risk.”

“This is about the Barresh Aghyrians, isn’t it?”

“Yes and no. It’s a cartel, not a single person, and mostly they’re investors, they don’t do any of the work. That’s why they’re doing it at Tamer. Because if they did it on a
gamra
world, it would be traceable.”

Tamer was a dreadful, dangerous world that colonists had left mostly alone. It was inhabited by impenetrable thickets of live forests, trees that were half animal, half plant; and by fierce predators. There was a research base somewhere on a tall mountaintop, but that was the only settlement I had ever heard of. Tamer was about as Wild West as they came. “So these investors are mostly Barresh Aghyrians?”

“Again, not all. Some names I’m certain of, others I can only guess.”

A series of loud pops sounded above our heads. Thayu and Reida looked at the ceiling. Reida formed his hand in the shape of a gun.

Gunfire? Up there?

“Any chance of sharing names before we go out and get ourselves killed? The more people know, the less chance the secret dies.”

“They’re very secretive.” He sighed. He had aged a lot in the past few weeks. Yes, he still cared too much about his appearance, but damn it, I hadn’t given the man enough credit.
That’s what happens when you behave like an arrogant dick. People take a long time to warm to your good deeds.

I appeared to have misjudged him badly.

He said, staring at his hands. “The one I’m completely certain about is Joyelin Akhtari.”

I blew out a breath. She would still have been Chief Delegate if she hadn’t been pressured to resign. Then again, maybe the pressure had provided her with a perfect excuse. And I should have seen it. I’d even suspected her, but never had any proof. Never had any reason to look for it, and probably wouldn’t have found any had I tried.

“She has provided a lot of money for the project.”

“Tell me honestly. Do you know if she was ever involved in Amoro Renkati who killed President Sirkonen?”

“No.”

“But she never took active steps to discourage them either.”

He shook his head. “No, she didn’t. I was quite friendly with her at the time, and she knew they’d eventually implode, so she left them alone and pretended she never heard of the organisation.”

“You’re not friendly with her anymore?”

He laughed, not in a happy way. “Would I be here otherwise?”

“Well, I don’t know. There seems to be an entire shadow society that’s dedicated mostly to ending the Coldi domination in
gamra
.”

“Pretty much.”

“That’s why the ship Aghyrians helped them by making Tamerians.”

He completed the train of thought. “Except the shadow society didn't realise that these ship people aren’t interested in helping them end the Coldi domination at all. The ship people hate everything about what our society has become. Because it’s not ordered, and we’re dirty, and we—heaven forbid—interbreed. That man is a fucked up nutjob. He probably always was, even in his day when he neglected to save the thousands he could have saved.”

At his point, looking into his sandy eyes, I finally realised—much too late—that Marin Federza and I had always been on the same page, and that I’d just been too blinded by some of his behaviour that annoyed me to see it.

Lilona was watching this exchange with wide eyes.