Ambassador 3: Changing Fate: Ambassador Space Opera Thriller Series (Ambassador: Space Opera Thriller) Read online

  At the moment, this desk was covered in electronic devices, bits of paper and various plates and cups. Before Devlin came to tell me that Menor had turned up, I’d been reading through the text of the zeyshi claim for Asto for the umpteenth time, and the document was still open on my reader. The full text of the document took up only ten pages. It listed a number of references to witness accounts and studies on the history of Asto’s treatment of the zeyshi people, who were, in short, people lacking the sheya association instinct that defined Coldi society. Studies had found that there was a spectrum of characteristics between Coldi and Aghyrian people, from muscular, broad-shouldered people with a strong sheya instinct, Coldi hair with its metallic sheen and gold-flecked eyes to taller people with dark eyes, dark hair, no sheya instinct. The most Aghyrian of all had even lost the Coldi ability to vary their body temperature. Most importantly, the distinction Coldi versus Aghyrian was not black and white and the document was written from that standpoint. In a nutshell, it said, These are your own people and you have treated them like crap for millennia. They have the right to establish their own legal entity where they see fit and claim ownership of the products of their labour.

  The trouble with all of this was, of course, that gamra would absolutely agree with the statement, that ownership of the products of their labour could be taken to mean that they would control the Exchange, and that wherever they see fit could mean the entire greater Athyl basin, the home of close to one billion native Coldi people.

  So we’d been testing the document for legal loopholes, of which there were many, and different interpretations, of which there were many as well.

  There were two paper copies of it on the desk, one annotated with Chief Delegate Akhtari’s notes, and the other full of legal references scribbled by Veyada.

  I put them side by side.

  If I’d learned anything about the claim document by going over it so many times in the last few months, it was that it had been written by a skilled lawyer and politician. The text was full of tricky wordings which could have different meanings depending on how you interpreted the surrounding text.

  Yet the delegation that the zeyshi had sent, and that had arrived a few days ago, didn’t match the calibre of the text, something Veyada and I had discussed a lot.

  It included the zeyshi leader Nayu Omi and the Aghyrian woman Evala Sadet Arwan, whose temper didn’t seem to have improved since I saw her in the zeyshi warren on Asto. The other delegation members, Chyana, Daranu and Emi, seemed little more than guards and scribes. I’d met the delegation briefly when taking them to their accommodation, and those three had barely said anything.

  “None of these people are capable of writing an intricate legal claim like this,” had been Veyada’s first observation.

  “They’re negotiators, not lawyers.”

  “I know, but I don’t think they even understand why the claim cannot so easily be dismissed. The sophistication is far beyond anything people without formal legal training could produce.”

  “Maybe it’s s fluke.”

  Veyada laughed. “You’re not a lawyer either, or you wouldn’t say this.”

  True. “That’s why I have you.”

  Veyada’s words struck a chord with me and served as warning for the negotiations yet to come: these people were a scouting party for the real deal, and I hadn’t a clue who these smart zeyshi lawyers could be. I suspected they had sent me the very people I had already met, presumably to make me feel at ease, and they clearly had some big guns kept under wraps until the real negotiations started.

  In the past I might have felt sorry for the zeyshi and the tales of their mistreatment, but this reminded me to never, ever trust them.

  The problem was that while I knew a fair bit about law, I wasn’t a lawyer either. Veyada had combed over the document and all his notes made my head spin. They dealt with Asto law, gamra law and a little bit of Barresh law. Some of his comments were in direct conflict with what Delegate Akhtari had said. She was probably three times his age, and had lifelong experience at gamra. Who did I trust? Her or him?

  She was Aghyrian; he was from Asto’s Inner Circle. They were on opposite ends of the debate over this claim and let no opportunity go wasted to inform me of that fact. It made for an interesting negotiation environment.

  And meanwhile, I was sitting here at my desk staring into the golden afternoon outside. A couple of lily harvesting boats returned from the fields with bulging nets of flowers. Some days, I would happily trade my position with theirs. My head was filled with worry, and I wasn’t doing much work on this damn document that, to put it mildly, baffled me.

  There was a small noise behind me. I turned around, expecting Eirani with tea. It was Eirani, but instead of tea, she had a you have to come sort this thing out expression on her face. Please, not another argument with Xinanu.

  But she said, “Muri, Devlin needs you to come.”

  Devlin? That likely had something to do with the hub. Please not another Exchange outage. Or something else that we really, really couldn’t use at the moment.

  I left the office and walked down the corridor to the hub, which was off the main hall opposite the living room. Devlin sat in the semidarkness on the main control bench, with the blue light from the screens and projections reflected over his oh-so-serious face.

  He nodded when I came in. He was keihu, young and not as rotund as many of his kinsmen. He wore the hair around his face in little plaits of different lengths adorned with beads and ribbons in the colour of his family—golden yellow. The loose curls at the back of his head fell to his shoulders. The staff had insisted that they needed a house uniform, and I’d let Eirani choose what it would look like. A simple light grey tunic stitched through with thread in gamra cobalt blue. That thread looked black in the low light.

  I sat on the bench next to him. “Is there a problem?”

  He was looking at something on one of the screens. An Exchange log, I thought.

  Devlin met my eyes with his dark brown ones. “It’s that boy again.”

  Chapter 2

  * * *

  “THAT BOY”, OF COURSE, was Reida, Deyu’s zhayma. The two reported to Nicha, balancing Sheydu and Veyada who were subordinate to Thayu. I’d asked Veyada if the two lots of zhaymas weren’t better off having similar experiences and being of similar age, but he’d said that large age and experience differences were very common.

  Both youngsters were the result of Nicha’s trip to the Outer Circle, where I’d suggested he find some people with knowledge of the zeyshi to complete our household. Both Reida and Deyu were Coldi, but had a fair bit of Aghyrian blood. Deyu came from a respected family in the Outer Circle. This was another surprise to me, that there were respected families in the Outer Circle. Sometimes the people in power spoke as if the lower-ranked citizens were all criminals, but in fact each Circle had its own ecosystem, and being the most populous of all, the Outer Circle’s power structures were by far the most complex. Deyu’s family owned businesses and there was food on the table in her house every night. Reida, however, was zeyshi and was proving all the bad clichés about those people to be true.

  “What has he done this time?” I should have wondered why he wasn’t in the room with us earlier, and sent someone out to check on him. With Reida, any absence was cause for suspicion.

  Devlin said, “I just spoke to a city guard. They’ve detained him at the guard station.”

  “Again? Which councillor’s daughter’s bedroom did he climb into this time?” I spread my hands. I was getting pretty sick of this, to be honest.

  “They didn’t say. They requested that someone come to pick him up and sign for his release.”

  “Pay the bond more likely.” And of course I had to go. Last time, Nicha had tried to collect him, but they wouldn’t let him go until the person who was “the head of the household” signed that the miscreant would be berated and told not to do it again.

  “What does he think he’s doing? It�
�s the third time they’ve locked him up. Does he think I have nothing better to do than go and rescue him?”

  “I don’t know, Muri. I’m just reporting what they said.”

  I sighed. “I know. Thank you, Devlin. Guess I’ll have to get him, then.”

  I left the hub.

  Deyu occupied the small bedroom opposite the entrance to the bathroom. She sat on the comfy chair next to the window studying.

  When I came in, she flung her reader aside and rose to greet me in the subservient position. Because she was in training, she wasn’t allowed to wear gamra colours yet, so she wore our house uniform.

  “It’s all right, relax,” I said.

  Her shoulders went down a tiny fraction.

  “What did Reida say to you about where he went this morning?”

  “Oh. He didn’t say anything.” Her cheeks went red. I told her repeatedly not to flinch when someone asked her a direct question, but that was proving very hard to unlearn. The instinct was very strong in her.

  “You should ask him when he goes out. Where is he going, when is he planning on coming back? Does he need any help? Especially the latter. He’s your zhayma.”

  “I . . . didn’t think about that.” She looked down. “I’m sorry. I’ll do better next time.”

  “Never mind. Come with me.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “He’s got himself arrested.”

  “What? Again?”

  The surprise was evident in her voice. He clearly hadn’t communicated his intentions to her.

  “We’ve got to go and pick him up. I want you to come with me. Maybe you can get some information out of him.”

  “Yes, yes. Sure.” She hurried across the room and put on her sandals. “I’m ready.”

  Being Coldi and female made her smaller than me. As a healthy Coldi female, she would be a lot stronger than I was, but she cut a very timid figure while walking next to me. Her body temperature had long since dropped and she no longer wore her temperature retaining suit underneath the loose, local grey trousers and kaftan of our house uniform. As an Outer Circle inhabitant, she was used to spending a lot of time outdoors and her skin was still quite dark compared to that of Thayu or Xinanu.

  Nicha told me that he had picked her up while working in one of the toughest bars in the Outer Circle. I’d asked her about it, but she didn’t seem to want to talk about it, speaking in general platitudes like “It was all right,” and “It was very busy.” I never could get through that wall that she built inside her, behind which she’d hidden what had happened in this place, because obviously something had happened that had made her as jumpy and nervous as she was.

  I didn’t see Nicha anywhere, but I met Thayu in the corridor, and she asked if she needed to come.

  “No, I want you to keep working.” She was still doing background checks on the members of the zeyshi delegation. Their personal files hadn’t been released to us—they probably never existed—and there were big gaps in their data. Thayu was scarily good at this type of work. I explained briefly to her what I was going to do and she gave me the what, again? eyeroll.

  Sheydu came into the hall and said she’d come instead of Thayu. She had probably heard me talking to Devlin and had already strapped on a gun and put on her boots. And Sheydu was happiest when holding a gun or blowing something up.

  The three of us left the apartment not much later, picking up Evi at the door. We crossed the wide avenues and courtyards of the gamra complex on the way to the station. It was mid-afternoon and the air had that pressing pre-monsoonal tension, the combination of high humidity and higher than average temperatures in which people sweltered and trees and plants let their leaves droop. Big clouds were building at the top of the escarpment in the distance, but they merely mocked us, because they would just hang around up there until they collapsed later in the day. It would be a couple of weeks yet before they developed enough strength to start rolling in and bringing the thunderstorms.

  Trains were a recent addition to Barresh. Their most important function was to provide a link between the two natural and half a dozen artificial islands that made up the city-state, which lay in a vast marshy delta. As a result, all lines went over the water and all stations lay at the shore. Usually, there was also a harbour with jetties for ferries and water taxis and anchorage for private vessels and commercial agricultural or fishing boats. Commercial ships were absent from the jetty at the gamra island, but a tour boat lay moored on the other side of the station. One day, when all this madness was over, I would hire one of those and take the entire household for a trip to the beach. Maybe we could go to the Crystal Pools, too. If ever we got the time. I’d been promising everyone this trip for years. In fact, if ever we got the time, we should probably hire a larger boat and go right offshore to the tropical seas of the Thousand Island Ridge, where apparently you could swim with creatures that looked like scaled dinosaurs.

  If only. Stop daydreaming, Mr Wilson.

  A smattering of people milled around on the platform, mostly domestic staff going shopping in town. There was also a senior admin officer with an assistant, both carrying bags, probably on their way to the airport, and a couple of administrative workers on their way home. I was the only person in full blue uniform and got the polite treatment with little bows and nods that I had gotten used to, but couldn’t say I liked.

  The train arrived, a sleek affair with carriages that looked like bullets. There were only three. The morning, afternoon and early evening trains were the busiest and the trains usually had five or six carriages.

  Inside the carriage, the air was cool and smelled of paint.

  We sat down in one of the cubicles where seats faced each other. Deyu next to the window, me next to her, and Sheydu and Evi opposite us.

  The train took off with a barely perceptible judder and soon we zoomed over the wetlands: marshy fields with reed clumps in shallow water, occasional small islands with megon trees with their characteristic drooping branches, and the occasional canal. Later, there were fields of floating lilies, their leaves bright green.

  None of our group said anything.

  I hadn’t expected much conversation from Sheydu and Evi, and Deyu had a very strong sheya instinct and avoided looking me in the eye at the best of times, but today she seemed even more timid than usual.

  “Do you know if Reida had any kind of problem?” I asked her.

  “He didn’t say,” she said into the window.

  “Deyu, I would like to remind you that you can always tell me or Nicha if anything is wrong.”

  “Yes. I know. Thank you very much.” She glanced briefly at Sheydu who watched with her usual passive face. Sheydu’s expression looked quite angry and disapproving in its relaxed state. She had never said so, but I had no doubt that she disapproved deeply of my appointing two Outer Circle people to the household. She had, however, complained openly about the two of them being kids, not even old enough to be provided with a feeder. Not old enough to receive weapons training and carry a proper gun.

  My eyes met Sheydu’s.

  You’re not helping. She’s petrified of you. But I wasn’t wearing my feeder and she couldn’t hear me and that was probably just as well. Petrified of her was just the way Sheydu liked people.

  In response to my question why Nicha had chosen such young people as subordinates, he had said that it was common practice amongst the middle classes on Asto to take trainees into an association, something Veyada had confirmed. Nicha’s mother was Second Circle—a lot older than his father, who would have been an adolescent rising star at the time of Nicha’s birth. Second Circle was solidly upper middle class in Athyl. They were the engine room of Coldi society, that hid behind the posturing of the Inner and First Circles. They were the people who controlled the assets that kept Asto running. If there was such a thing as philanthropy in Asto’s society, Second, Third and Fourth Circles was where it could be found.

  I liked Nicha’s thoughts behind choosin
g the pair of them, but I wasn’t sure if it was working as well as he’d hoped, and I had the feeling that we were headed for some sort of blow-up, which I was sure would come at the most inconvenient time for everybody.

  * * *

  The Barresh guard station was on the ground floor of one of the city’s oldest buildings. It was a cramped, bare office with a tiny window under an overhanging balcony.

  Besides a counter where a guard stood, there was no furniture. The only other door out of the room consisted of a metal grate, behind the counter that led to the dungeons. The concrete floor bore stains from the filth of ages.

  The moment I stepped inside, and breathed the humid, stifling air with its stale smell, I was reminded of how much I hated this circus. The Barresh guards were going to play stupid games with us. They were a toothless tiger showing off dentures. They wouldn’t charge, they would just make empty threats to show how much they disliked us. The stupidity of it hurt my brain.

  The guard at the desk was the same guy from last time, too, a huge fellow with a shortage in the brains department that made him painfully slow at completing electronic questionnaires. A brain shortage which he took pride in displaying.

  How long had Reida lived in my household?

  I answered him, but his system should tell him from last time I’d collected the boy here.

  Where did he normally live?

  Previously on Asto, Outer Circle, now in my house. The system should tell him that, too, since I’d already answered that question twice in recent months.

  Who employed him and in what capacity?

  I did. He was Nicha’s assistant. Same thing. I’d told him this twice before.

  And so on and so forth. It was a surprise that the man could hear my replies through the gnashing of my teeth.

  While he was picking out my responses on his screen with a single finger—whatever happened to thought readers or feeders?—I tried to get information out of him in return: what had the young man been arrested doing? What was the charge?