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

  A list of about twenty articles came up.

  Apparently, there was also a Robert Davidson who was a tennis player. Awesome.

  In between reports of his latest tournament win, I found an article with the title,

  Davidson’s Wife Claims: No Help From Nations of Earth.

  Hmmm. Interesting interpretation.

  I opened that one.

  Fiona Davidson, wife of missing mining executive Robert Davidson, claims that she was forced to seek help directly from the Athens Exchange when Nations of Earth was stonewalling her requests for assistance in finding her husband. Mr Davidson went on an adventure trip with a travel company called Exclusive Adventures, which specialises in adventures for the very rich.

  “When I asked Nations of Earth to help me locate my husband when he failed to return, they said it was outside their influence and that was the end of their help,” Ms Davidson said.

  The article went on to complain about how unfair it was and how Nations of Earth had a moral obligation to look after its citizens everywhere. The journalist had concluded with a parting remark, This process would become much easier if Nations of Earth could get over its indecision and finally decided to join gamra.

  It said gamra, not Union. That was a step in the right direction.

  At the bottom, there were lists for keywords and a few related articles. One of them said, Execo to shut diamond mining operations in southern Africa.

  That article explained how the company, and its predecessors, had a long history of exploitation of the local workers it employed, in many cases, to hand-dig for jewellery-grade diamonds. Over the past two hundred years, the soil in the area had been turned over so many times that good finds had become increasingly rare.

  My attention skipped to a snatch of dialogue.

  “We understand that a good percentage of the local economy is dependent on the mine,” Davidson said, “But we have continued this operation for as long as it was feasible.”

  Davidson?

  He was introduced earlier in the article as Mr Davidson, head of mining operations, Execo Africa.

  That had to be the same one, right?

  So, could I conclude that, having closed mining operations in Africa, the company wanted to sell premium diamonds from Barresh? And that it was pushing for Nations of Earth to do so legally? That was a valid cause, wasn’t it? Maybe when he found out, Clovis was unimpressed with that. Unimpressed enough to maroon Davidson on an island?

  On a whim, I searched for Fiona Davidson’s name, since she seemed to be more forthcoming with information. After a few false positives, I found her: Dr Fiona Rachelle Davidson, General Practitioner.

  Besides pictures of her at work, there were pictures of her brandishing a gun and standing with one foot on—I wasn’t sure what that animal was, some sort of antelope.

  There was also a picture of her and her husband at a gun show.

  Educational.

  I went back to the main list of articles, but it wasn’t very informative.

  Oh well, at least I had tried.

  I was about to go, when I had another idea. I searched, missing rich people. Because if this was an adventure tour, there would have been others. The Pengali woman at the Pengali Office had said as much.

  The search brought up a lot of socialite shenanigan rubbish that—well, I had no idea how the hell the search thought it was relevant. But in the middle of articles about misbehaving princesses, actors, animators or film producers, I found a small article.

  Gusamo Sahardjo still missing.

  I opened that one.

  There has still been no sign of Gusamo Sahardjo, the Jakarta-based owner of CreativeMinds.

  Damn it, I had used CreativeMinds in the past. It was a great place to pretty up your correspondence with designs and interactive graphics and logos for a small fee.

  Mr Sahardjo travelled to Europe four weeks ago to join a tour that indulges in one of his passions: extreme surfing.

  Shit.

  It looked like I might have found another of the participants in the tour.

  Gusamo was a short, thin man with an open smile. He called himself an artist first, despite spending most of his time on his business. According to him,

  Indonesians are blessed with a developed sense of art that is both practical and adaptable for business purposes and attractive to all cultures. The use of colour, the use of modern imagery and the latest digital techniques are not unique to us, but the combination of all three plays a large role in our success. In short: we produce design that the entire world can relate to.

  He was talking up his business, of course, but from what I remembered, if you wanted to have something designed—for a hefty price tag—the hip digital art community in Jakarta was your go-to place.

  Gusamo also had a love for anthropology and the ocean. He had contributed extensively to a sea turtle conservation project, and—

  My reader sent a warning beep.

  Security on the ground floor, Reida said through the feeder.

  All right. I could read this sort of stuff all day, following links from links to other links, but at this point, I couldn’t do much more, and sadly I was still little wiser about Robert Davidson or about what it could be that Margarethe was hinting at.

  Well, at least I had tried.

  I shut down the hub and I joined Reida and Deyu on the balcony not much later. Reida relocked the door and he assured me that no one would ever know we’d been there. I hoped so.

  On the way home, we passed the jetty outside the front of our building. The three boats lay there, ready to go, guarded by Evi and Telaris.

  “All quiet?” I asked.

  “Nothing interesting happening whatsoever,” Evi said. In security speak, that was a good thing.

  I glanced at the boats. They were sturdy vehicles, bigger than the one we had taken out before, with more powerful engines. The solar plane lay folded up on one of them, hidden under a thick waterproof cloth.

  At home, Veyada and Nicha were in the hall with a big stack of camping gear and some basic food supplies for twelve people. Sheydu came to drop off a tightly shut crate. Explosives, I assumed.

  She grinned. I wondered what had happened to her being terrified of water. She had not protested or thrown up any excuses for not going and had, in fact, said very little.

  I hoped the issue was not going to surface at an inopportune moment.

  I told them that there might be a second person in need of rescue.

  “Not a problem,” Sheydu said. “We’ve got enough for an expedition double the size.”

  We were packed. We were ready. I had done the right thing and involved all of my association. No lives would be risked.

  CHAPTER 15

  * * *

  STILL, I SLEPT BADLY that night.

  My mind kept churning over things that might possibly go wrong; and in the dark, at night, those things had a habit of multiplying. It might rain, we might not get enough sunlight to charge the engine, the sea might be so rough that one of the boats would flip, and few in my association could swim. Or we might find that the boat we’d seen on the satellite image was there, but no people, and the island was guarded by a bunch of vicious Pengali from the Thousand Islands tribe who would only communicate through the use of weapons.

  When I did doze off, my active mind provided me with a plethora of absurd, far-fetched and just plain horrible dreams.

  A herd of beisili chased us from the island, overturning the boat that contained all the people in my association who couldn’t swim.

  They all fell in the water and were bobbing around screaming in their life jackets, when a beisili decided that it liked to test its teeth on the jackets. When we tried to chase them off, they came and overturned the boat with the plane, which was our only means of getting back home, because somehow the other boat had disappeared. Everyone was in the water, and everyone was screaming. Nicha grabbed onto me, and then Veyada and Sheydu as well. I started sinking and
Thayu couldn’t even reach me.

  I yelled, “Thayu!” but water came into my mouth.

  I woke up, sweating. I sat up in the dark, panting. Stupid dream. Stupid overactive brain. Beisili were scared of people. Only the young ones ever came close. They were certainly not strong enough to overturn boats and I very much doubted they’d be interested in life jackets.

  Thayu lay next to me, out cold, on her stomach with her face pushed into the pillow.

  I wiped my face and lay back down, staring at the ceiling, feeling numb. This expedition worried me. I was missing something, and I wished to hell I knew what it was.

  I mentally ticked off all the preparations we needed to have made. Tents, food, water, guns, first aid, emergency beacon, solar chargers, fishing gear, ropes . . .

  I dozed off briefly and then woke up with a shock to Thayu getting out of bed.

  “Time to go,” she said.

  I stumbled out of bed and looked out the window. The suns had not yet cleared the escarpment, and a soft layer of mist lay over the water. At least the weather was cooperative.

  Damn it, I felt woolly-headed and ill. Eating a quick breakfast only marginally improved things. Eirani was bustling about, making sure we ate enough, asking Veyada whether we had packed this or that or the other, because Veyada was the only one not to snap at her questions.

  Nicha was at the door to his room, giving instructions to the nanny. Little Ayshada had not yet woken up. I could see him in his cot, sleeping on his belly.

  Telaris opened the door, and one of the kitchen staff brought in a trolley—because we used the building’s lift for moving large items between the ground floor and upstairs in the apartment.

  We loaded everything on the trolley, or I should say that the others did, because Thayu wouldn’t allow me to help.

  I protested. “I’m not an invalid.”

  “The medico would have a fit if she knew that you were going on this expedition.”

  “But she doesn’t. They always think that you have all the time in the world to spend lazing about recovering.”

  “Sometimes, there is a point to these warnings, Muri,” Eirani said. “You should take it easy, because you were very sick.” She stood at the point where the hallway opened into the foyer, her arms crossed under her considerable bosom. I suspected that she spoke to me because she had given up trying to appeal to any in my association.

  And yes, she was right, but there was no way I’d let everyone go without me. It was my project, my idea, my people and you just didn’t let members of your association go off to an important task by themselves. That was not the was associations worked

  Everything was on the trolley, and Evi and Deyu wheeled it out onto the gallery observed from the foyer by Veyada. The big tottering pile of things just fitted through the door.

  “Well, there we go,” I said to Eirani and Devlin and the others of my staff who stood watching in the hall.

  “Good luck, Muri, and please take care.”

  Devlin merely waved. We’d be talking to each other as soon as we were on the water, and until we were out of reach of the Exchange, which was usually just before the sand bar. After that, we would have no connection until Thayu set up the satellite transmitter.

  The trolley took up all the space in the lift so we went down the stairs and then helped Deyu and Evi wheel it out of the lift. It was a slow and cumbersome procession through the atrium, out the building’s entrance and down the sloping walkway to the jetty, but finally we arrived, everything was loaded in the boats, covered with oiled cloths and tied down.

  It had been decided that one of the Pengali women, Della, would take the boat with the plane, and that Nicha would go with her.

  We divided the rest of the group between the other two boats. I went with Langga, Thayu, Telaris and Reida. Veyada, Sheydu, Deyu and Evi went with Maray in the last boat.

  By the time the boats finally pulled away from the jetty, sunlight streamed over the roof of the building onto the quay and jetty. A couple of gamra guards watched our departure. I wouldn’t be surprised if they knew exactly what we were doing and where we were going. Little as she thought of them, Sheydu would not keep them in the dark about these kinds of operations.

  For a long time, the boats moved in convoy at a steady pace. The weight of people and gear made our pace much slower than on our previous trip.

  We stopped for lunch at the island with the ruins. Pengali would rarely drive a boat without trailing a few lines with hooks and bait, and we had caught a couple of medium-sized fish.

  Langga took them to a tree trunk that lay at the high tide line on the beach. The top of the trunk’s curve formed a flat surface that he used to clean and gut the fish and cut the pink meat into wafer-thin slices. The blade of the knife was glass-stone, diamond, polished only around the cutting edge. The rest was dark, covered with a gummy substance, into which a row of signs was engraved.

  He noticed me looking at it.

  “In our traditional ways, we use the land, but don’t change it. When a tree washes up, we make the top flat so it’s a table. We don’t move the tree, we don’t cut it into planks. We just use the tree.”

  “I was looking at your knife.”

  “I made it myself.” He gave it to me, enveloped in a fishy smell. “When I was a boy, the elders would make me sit there and grind it by hand for many, many days. It teaches angry young men patience. I would have to recite old stories while I did it, and they would berate me if I got it wrong. I was a very angry young man back then.” He laughed, which sounded like a kind of piggy snort in Pengali.

  I turned the knife over in my hands. It was an instrument made with incredible patience and skill with a meticulously sharp edge. It looked very old and well used.

  Meanwhile he pulled apart some kind of fruit, and squeezed juice from the individual parts out over the fish slices. Then he took a little pouch from his belt and sprinkled some red powder over the fish. He massaged it into the flesh with his fingers.

  I recognised the dish. I’d had it before.

  I returned the knife to him. I felt like it needed to be handled with reverence. This was not just a carving knife; it was the evidence of a young man’s journey from impatient youth to an adult.

  He stuck it in his belt, pushed all the fish together onto a large leaf which he presented to the group.

  The fish was delicious. The juice was sour, which complimented the salty taste of the fish.

  Veyada, Evi and Telaris also enjoyed it, but the others preferred Eirani’s bread. That was their loss, but at times I got a little annoyed at the Coldi unwillingness to try different foods. Being able to eat red-coded food, few foodstuffs would be harmful to them.

  Seeing us enjoy it, Reida got curious, so he tried some, too. We all laughed at the face he pulled at the uncooked, soft texture. But then he wanted more, and the pile of fish slices was soon gone.

  It was time to move on. We clambered into the boats, pushed off and soon came to the channel. By now it was well past noon and the tide was rushing in. The boats slowed to a crawl, engines going full blast against the mass of churning water making its way into the delta. Being the heaviest, the boat carrying the plane had the most trouble getting through, but we all made it out to the ocean. The water was clear, the waves small, despite a bank of clouds sitting over the islands in the distance. It looked like there might be small storms out there, too. Langga steered the boat in a lazy circle while studying the sky before setting off in a southerly direction, apparently satisfied.

  To our left was the sand spit with the patch of rainforest where we had camped. The wind, rain and waves had long since erased all evidence of our presence.

  Once we’d left this part of the coast behind, we were in utter wilderness where very few people from the city ever came.

  The boats maintained a steady pace. Thayu checked our location on the map on her reader. We no longer had connection to the Exchange, so our location wasn’t being logged other than
through the engine’s beacon, but that was all automated and a one-way communication.

  “There,” she said, pointing. “It’s that island, in between those two bigger ones.”

  I squinted against the sunlight. Like all offshore islands, it rose out of the water with steep sides. “Why would anyone go out there to surf? The best surf is at the spit.”

  “That piece of land to the left is not an island. It’s a peninsula.” She used the Isla word. The oceans on Asto were not nice: too salty and with poisonous upwellings. Few people went there and, therefore, Coldi had little terminology that dealt with water and boats and shores.

  The lay of the land became clearer when we had come closer. In this section of the coast, the escarpment, the tall cliff on the eastern side of the Barresh delta that marked the edge of the huge Mirani plateau, lay much closer to the ocean, and it formed an outcrop that sloped into a long finger pointing west into the ocean.

  I looked in amazement at the vast display of untouched wilderness. Ceren was an agricultural world, and yes, it was sparsely populated. This was also because, the tropical climate of Barresh aside, it was a cool world with extensive ice caps and a lot of rugged, mountainous terrain that was either too high or too cold for farming.

  A sight like this was what old explorers would have seen when they first came to the coasts of Africa or South America: vast swathes of untouched jungle, sluggish, silty rivers, pristine beaches.

  Oh, I understood why people from Earth wanted to come here.

  “What’s that?” Reida said.

  I followed the direction he was pointing. We had just rounded the tip of the peninsula and had a view down a silvery beach on the southern side. At the far end, something white stuck out from the tree canopy.

  Thayu used the magnifying lens on her reader to have a closer look. “Some sort of tower.” I looked at the screen over her shoulder. It was a structure made of wood, a raised platform over the canopy.