Ambassador 5: Blue Diamond Sky (Ambassador: Space Opera Thriller Series) Read online

  I looked up, realising that a chunk of time had disappeared and I’d been so busy that I’d missed Eirani coming up with the breakfast things. The plates were already on the table and the members of my association were coming in.

  “Melissa,” I said.

  “Heard anything from her?”

  “No. The boat is still on the beach in the same spot.”

  She stared at the image.

  “Something has happened. We’re going to have to help her.”

  She stared a bit more, her eyes blinking.

  “Thay’?” I knew she didn’t like this. I knew she didn’t want us to be involved, but she knew Melissa. It was hard to guess what she was thinking.

  She breathed out. “Why don’t we discuss it at breakfast?”

  We went across the hall into the living room, where Sheydu and Veyada and Reida and Deyu already sat at the table. Nicha was at the door to his room, talking to the nanny, who, by the look of things, had just arrived. Her hair was wet from the rain.

  We sat down at the table.

  “Call Evi and Telaris in here,” I said.

  Reida got up and went into the hall. A moment later, he returned with both men. Eirani bustled around pouring tea and bringing extra plates and cups.

  “We have a problem,” I said, when everyone was eating. I went on to explain the situation with Melissa. I ended with, “So she is out there, and some of you may disagree with me, but I think we have a moral duty to help her, because she is out there because of us.”

  “No,” Sheydu said. “She is out there because your president makes both of you nervous. Why don’t you ask your president why, if this man is so important to her, she isn’t offering any assistance.”

  “She can’t, officially. She has no people out here except Melissa, and no authority to command any kind of skilled, military-type assistance for the logistics of this operation.”

  Sheydu snorted. “There are ways. I hear Tamerians are for hire for anyone who requires them.”

  “Maybe, but she is not familiar with this situation, because that’s what Melissa is for. Her influence stops at pleading the Chief Delegate for assistance, and I don’t know that she could make a strong case that he should give her that assistance.”

  “Excuses,” Sheydu said. “All it would need would be for her to contact Federza with an official request, with an explanation. If she really wants you to retrieve this man, why doesn’t she provide you with the proper documents and a budget?”

  Sheydu was right, much as I hated to admit it. Get him back here was an order Danziger would have given, and he had suffered badly in the election, because people thought he was aloof and distant and didn’t appear to know what he was talking about. I desperately wanted to believe that Margarethe was not like that, but I had to admit there were aspects of this mystery that I didn’t like at all.

  I sighed. Spread my hands and let them sink again. “Look, I don’t know. All I know is that a man is out there, lost. I have no idea why he came, but clearly when he wrote with sulphuric ochre on the back of a ferry timetable, he had been abandoned, left for dead, and he was afraid of dying. And we have Melissa out there, and the president urging us to do something.”

  A heavy silence followed my words. At least no one protested. That was progress, wasn’t it?

  I continued with that hopeful sign. “We can hire an aircraft and be there and back within a day.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Thayu said.

  “I’ve had two days to recover. I’m fine. I’m bored with all this doing nothing.”

  “It’s out of range for the solar planes to fly in one go,” Veyada said. “Especially if we’re heavy, and we will be.”

  That was a bigger problem. “I was wondering about that. Is there anything else we could use?”

  “Boats are a much better option. Planes are vulnerable to weather—” He looked out the window where it was still raining. “—and suitable landing spots. Most of the islands have sheer cliffs and tiny beaches that may even consist of only rocks. If the sea is too choppy and there is no nearby shelter, we can’t even reach the location.”

  The beach where Melissa’s boat was looked safe enough, but I got his point. If we needed to go somewhere else, we wanted to have a versatile vehicle.

  “We could take a boat and a plane.”

  Veyada and Sheydu gave each other a meaningful look.

  Sheydu said, “You would need two boats, one especially to carry the plane.”

  “I suggest we take three boats: two for us, and one for the folded-up plane.”

  Another meaningful look.

  “You have thought a lot about this, haven’t you?” Thayu said.

  “Tell me what else I was supposed to have done, lying in bed staring at the ceiling in the hospital?”

  “All right,” Thayu said.

  Sheydu looked like she wanted to protest, but Thayu waved her hand. “Let him have his expedition, or he’ll never shut up about it.”

  She didn’t like admitting that she cared about Melissa’s fate, but I thought she did, even if only because I did.

  “Are we all going?” Reida’s eyes were shining. “I’ve always wanted to see beisili. I hear you can ride them.”

  “I hear that you will attempt nothing of the sort, young man,” Sheydu said.

  “Goodness, no,” Eirani said. “It’s their breeding season and the big females get very territorial.”

  “Don’t worry,” Sheydu said. “I will personally see to it that he keeps out of the water.”

  Reida grinned.

  All of a sudden, the narrative had changed. Someone had decided that we were going. Was it because of my proposal to take three boats and a plane?

  After the kitchen staff had cleared the table, we all went into the hub. Devlin pulled up all the maps of the area, and none of them were terribly detailed. The reason was given as Thousand Islands tribe territory.

  “What are we going to do about getting a permit and a guide to visit?” I asked.

  Thayu grinned. “Do you want to ask any of Clovis’ Pengali helpers?”

  “No way.”

  “There is our answer,” Thayu said. “We go in, we get them out and leave quickly. If they turn up, there are enough of us to get out of trouble if necessary.”

  I couldn’t help having a dig at the members of my association who had berated me for doing ill-prepared things. “That sounds like an excellent plan. What can possibly go wrong?”

  CHAPTER 14

  * * *

  WHILE WE WERE discussing the details of travel, Devlin asked the office downstairs for safe places to hire boats. This whole episode had been highly educational to me. Previously I would have thought you “just” hired a boat, and that boat hire was a service you paid for and someone delivered in the same way you ordered groceries or laundry services, and that the quality and timeliness of the product or service was the main consideration in choosing a service.

  But that was not the way with boats in Barresh.

  We couldn’t hire from any of the companies associated with Clovis. I still wasn’t one hundred percent sure that Clovis personally had anything to do with Robert’s marooning on the island—he just didn’t seem the type of person who would do this—but I sure as hell didn’t trust him. I didn’t really trust Jasper’s version of events, either. He had been too forthcoming with his accusations.

  But we needed boats and this boat war meant that hiring someone was a political statement.

  This made me wonder about the other boating companies and what affiliations they had and what data about us they had passed on to their owners every time we had hired a water taxi. And it made me think that maybe we should just buy the damn boats and be done with relying on others. That was an educational thought, too, because all of a sudden I saw why those extended keihu families living in their obscenely large mansions with obscene numbers of staff had come to operate in the way they did: they kept everything in-house. Because ha
ving to deal with sabotage as a result of this type of rivalry got old, fast.

  Not just that. I realised I had a big, gaping hole in my household: I desperately needed Pengali workers. I had always shied away from hiring them, because the silly Earth human in me felt uncomfortable with the “colonial” aspect of hiring “noble savages” as domestic staff. Seeing Pengali work and live with those rich keihu families, toiling away at the menial tasks, always made me feel a bit ill. But of course that was a silly notion that came from my cultural background, that I pretended I didn’t have, but that, at times, proved stubbornly resilient.

  Pengali were neither noble nor savage. They were very different. That was the most important reason that I needed one or two in my office or other staff.

  Unfortunately, this was not going to help me now.

  Devlin found a company happy to let us have three boats without drivers, and then Reida found three drivers for us, none of them boat owners themselves. It seemed a decent solution to the problem.

  “They’re still from the Washing Stones tribe,” he warned, “But they say all this tribal stuff is highly overblown. It may be important for the older folk, but the younger ones just want to get jobs, and they don’t see any problems in working alongside other tribes.”

  I hoped he was right.

  Those Pengali came to the apartment in the afternoon. There were two young women and a slightly older man, all three dressed in neat, clean clothes, minus all the tribal gear—the belt with the skulls and teeth and glass-stone knives I always found a little intimidating. They were polite and quietly-spoken. Their names were Maray, Della and Langga. I made up some excuse for them to sleep in the guest quarters, mainly so that they could not pull any last-minute tricks on us. They chose one of the rooms downstairs, one of those Melissa had used at times, and rolled out their mats on the floor. No matter how much Eirani urged them, they would not use the beds.

  I was unsure of their diet, but they went out and came back with fish and lizard eggs which they cooked themselves in the kitchen, while being extremely quiet and polite to the kitchen staff.

  “They’re the strangest people to have in the house,” Eirani said. “It’s like I can’t do anything for them.”

  Coming from her, a lifelong Barresh resident, this was a telltale remark. I truly needed to employ some Pengali.

  I went into the hub to check with Devlin if any messages had come in. I had written to Margarethe that we were about to go and retrieve Robert.

  She had not replied, but two solicitations had come in to the link that we had left open. Both were for boating companies.

  Devlin stared at me. “How did you know that was going to happen?”

  “I didn’t, but I suspected. This data-gathering process looks automated, and clearly someone neglected to go through to delete us from their list after gamra made it public that we’d been breached. Or maybe someone else had already taken possession of the list with our data on it. Keep an eye on it while we’re gone. Track what comes in, or who or what tries to access the link. Try to find out who they are.”

  He said that he would.

  Evi and Telaris had collected a veritable pile of survival equipment in the hall. With satisfaction, I noticed a large first-aid kit, since this was their secondary capability.

  We had dinner—without the Pengali—where Devlin reported that the weather was expected to be partially overcast but otherwise fine for the next few days, and we decided to leave early the next morning.

  During dinner, a message from Margarethe came in.

  It was as short as it was uninformative.

  Robert Davidson is a respected member of the South African community. His wife has taken a strong anti-gamra stance and is gathering a lot of support. Until the time that we can investigate how he ended up in Barresh, public opinion will focus on the side of “evil aliens”. The longer this case lingers on, the more damage it will do.

  She added a news article that showed Fiona Davidson agitating and claiming that she and her husband were innocent victims of people who had ulterior motives, wanting to get their hands on their money. The holiday brochure, she said, was a scam. The aliens had abducted her husband, who was innocent.

  It was almost believable.

  But no one said anything about Robert’s position with a mining company, or about diamond smuggling.

  And yes, Margarethe could be right. I could fully imagine how public opinion would savage her and the assembly over the disappearance of an “innocent” man, but it didn’t address a couple of key questions. The most important one: why would anyone in Barresh be interested in abducting this man? He had nothing that was of use to them.

  The media were selling it as a sob story, and it was clear to me, this wasn’t a sob story. When her husband went missing, Fiona Davidson had gone straight to an Exchange agent in Athens, and she couldn’t have done that unless she knew where to find such a person. Fiona Davidson clearly knew a lot more than an average partner in the same situation, had her husband’s disappearance been as accidental as she suggested.

  But Margarethe clearly wasn’t able to tell me what I needed to know.

  Melissa might have been able to, but this stupid delegate had jumped the gun and sent her away to solve this mess much too early. Yet I desperately needed some independent information.

  When I first came to Barresh, I had been able to see the news as reported on Earth. But since I no longer worked for Nations of Earth, I had lost access to this network. Nations of Earth paid for the transmission of this information, and it was accessible to their employees. It was stupid, but it was their policy, and I hadn’t been able to change their mind on how stupid it was.

  All I could get was a poorer version compiled by the Exchange, in which news items from Earth had to compete for space with thousands of other news items from all over the inhabited worlds—all of which were freely accessible to me if I was interested and could read the language—and it should come as no surprise that other events were judged more important than one single missing man.

  Melissa had access to the Nations of Earth network. How could I get into her apartment?

  I asked gamra security, but they wouldn’t open the door for me unless I had written permission from a higher authority. When I grumbled about this, Sheydu remarked that gamra security only existed to make our lives harder: they botched operations where they should stop people accessing certain data or locations, and they stopped people having access to data or locations who should have access. This pretty much reflected my recent interactions with them.

  I didn’t press the point with them, because we had a secret weapon: Reida.

  When I told him I wanted him to break into Melissa’s apartment, he grinned at me. “How come every time someone berates me for doing stuff, the next thing someone comes around and wants me for that very skill?”

  “I appreciate your skill. Just don’t expect me to approve of it publicly.”

  I went with him and Deyu to the apartment after dark, and he had the door open in no time.

  “Quick, go in and do your thing,” he said. “I don’t know how long it will be before someone comes to check out the break-in.”

  “I won’t be long,” I said, and went inside.

  Reida and Deyu would keep a look out on the balcony and warn me in case someone came.

  It was dark in the apartment and the air smelled stale and musty. I stumbled through the hallway in the pitch dark, until I came to the living room, where the very faint glow of the city lights from the other island produced just enough light for me to see the outlines of major items of furniture.

  I remembered the pearl lights with the little lampshades, and ran my hands over the wall until I found a lever and pushed it up.

  Light flipped on.

  The room was tidy, clearly left like this by someone going on a trip. The apartment didn’t have a luxurious hub like mine, but it did have a small, windowless study that Melissa had set up as such. There was o
nly room for one chair, in the middle, and the wall space was taken up by desks and shelves with equipment. A couple of lights blinked in the darkness.

  Wow, this was really ancient equipment.

  I switched on the receiver. I had feared that I might need a passcode, but the Exchange recognised Melissa’s apartment and I was able to get through into the Nations of Earth portal without any trouble.

  Sheydu would be impressed with the lack of security.

  The portal had changed a fair bit since Danziger had banned me from it. I suspected I could probably organise being reconnected, but I hadn’t wanted to test my good relationship with Margarethe, because she would probably get in trouble if that came under scrutiny.

  But damn, seeing all those news services lined up filled me with irrational nostalgia, laced with a good number of stressful memories. When Danziger had cut me off from communication, this was the only way I could access the news.

  There was World Newspoint, which usually delivered dry and boring stuff. Flash Newspoint, Melissa’s former employer, which was entirely the opposite. There were two news services I hadn’t heard of and there was also a general feed, which consisted of an amalgam of all of them. That opened up a huge long list with articles about disasters, politics and various flotsam from all over the world. I stared at it for a while before realising that I barely recognised any of the names and even fewer of the issues. Whatever the hell did the headline Strange In Many Pots even mean?

  Oh. Strange was the name of a man suspected of being involved in bribery.

  Sheesh, this was like looking at an entirely different planet.

  Since when, for example, did travellers need to submit to full profiling before being able to leave a country?

  Amarru had said nothing about that. I was guessing that she had ways around it that she used when I came to visit my father. It also brought home the point that I hadn’t even been to Nations of Earth, my former employer, since my contract ended, and that I had no desire to do so.

  I went to Flash Newspoint, and searched Robert Davidson.