Ambassador 11: The Forgotten War Page 7

  “Is that African?” I asked him.

  Ever since he had discovered the use of Indrahui technology during our illustrious trip to Ethiopia that had ended in the infamous “nuke from orbit” incident, he’d developed an interest in gyrocopters and related technology.

  The brothers never spoke much of the time that they tried to escape Indrahui war lord Romi Tanaqan, but I understood that solar gliders featured in the story. Those gliders were also common in Ethiopia.

  He nodded, slowly. “Sudanese make.” His voice was dark.

  A generation’s worth of illegal imports encapsulated in two words. If ever there was an issue that illustrated the need for Earth to join gamra, this was it. African warmongering funded through the sale of technology illegally imported from off -world.

  As soon as we had carried all our bags into the shelter, and the kids were blowing dust off the seats, a woman came from the vehicle. She was in uniform and introduced herself as Rosa.

  “I’ll be taking you for the first part of your trip today.”

  “I thought we were going to catch two vehicles,” I said.

  Also, with a craft of this size it would be impossible to get in an out of places quickly, besides the fact that this craft needed a lot of space to land.

  And these gyrocopters were hardly silent.

  “Oh no, we will transfer you to the smaller craft later. We need to cover quite a distance and we cannot fly those small craft all the way here. This is a big country.”

  Fair enough.

  We followed her across the dusty tarmac. As we were walking to the craft in a long line, a gust of wind blew dust around us. I had to close my eyes to make sure the sand didn’t get in.

  “Windy day today,” I said.

  “Oh, this isn’t too bad. You should have been here a few days ago. That’s when all this dust blew across here.”

  I looked at the edges of the field where the cracked paving blended into the dirt. Pale pink drift sand merged with the asphalt. A few dead blades of grass still stuck up out of the sand, but it was clear that this place had last seen rain a very long time ago.

  We arrived at the vehicle and climbed up the stairs. I made sure that none of the kids carried anything that would disturb the pilots.

  Again, we had to carry Larrana’s wheelchair up, because the steps were too steep for the wheels to negotiate.

  The inside of the cabin was well appointed, with a central aisle and seats on both sides.

  We occupied every seat, especially when counting all the bags that Sheydu and her team insisted on taking into the cabin.

  When we had all sat down and had strapped in, Rosa came in after us. She pulled up the stairs, closed the door, and then walked through the aisle to the cockpit. I assumed she was going to notify the pilot that the passengers were all ready, but when the door opened next, she came out in the company of a heavily armed man. He wore a traditional khaki military style outfit, a wide belt with many pockets for weapons and explosives, and carried an impressive gun.

  Several people in my group stiffened. Hands went to upper arms.

  Rosa also came out again.

  “Because we are going to cross the border, America Free State requires us to carry a border patrol guard for your safety. This here is Chaz. He’ll be with us until the first stop.”

  He nodded at us, his grey eyes roving over our assembly without emotion, not even when they lingered at the Pengali.

  No one said anything. The children gave this heavily armed man puzzled looks. No doubt some of them were wondering whether this was another strange fake outfit.

  He sat down at the front bench in the cabin.

  Rosa went back into the cockpit, and moments later the blades of the machine started up.

  I spotted Reida taking some measurements. He had also taken pictures of the craft. He was listening with keen interest.

  I had never flown inside one of these machines and had to push aside the discomfort that came with associating gyrocopters with certain corrupt governments. The engine sounded like a PanAf gyrocopter, because this was exactly the same type of vehicle, and just the sound of it triggered my flight response. I’d spent most of my trip into Ethiopia running away from these things.

  Outside the window, I could see the rotor blades go up and down, while the engines roared.

  Then we were off the ground. The airport receded to be replaced with the streets and buildings of the community that surrounded the New World park.

  You could see the park precinct as a green oasis, a community of interlinked covered spaces and domes in the middle of a desert.

  Mariola’s home suburb had to be that area on the other side, with its colourful houses that stood crowded along the streets. But the riot of colour still didn’t dispel the dust bowl feeling.

  I hadn’t realised just how stark the difference between the park precinct and the outside world was.

  In some other places, the drifting sand had invaded suburbs that were no longer in use. Houses poked half out of the dunes, their roofs fallen in.

  A couple of people on motorbikes traversed a road with cracked paving, potholes and partially covered in drift sand.

  Behind us, I could see the vague outlines of the city centre where we had been two days ago, an ugly concrete jungle.

  I enjoyed the beach a lot more, but even it exuded an atmosphere of faded glory and many people who lived there were very poor.

  The gyrocopter was not going in that direction. We gathered height. The noise from the engines became a drone in the background. The sun rose over the dusty landscape. Ahead, mountains peeked out of the haze. We soon crossed them and then flew over a dusty and desolate landscape.

  The kids were playing games, but Nalya was looking out of the window.

  Thayu had only re-established contact with her son recently, and that had only happened through a chance meeting when he and I had been welcomed into the Domiri clan together. My impression was that the poor kid was clamouring for guidance and an adult he could trust. After the debacle where his uncle had tried to grab Ezhya’s position and had been killed, his family had fallen from grace.

  It was customary that if a non-residential parent asked for their right to spend time with the child, the parent who normally looked after the child objected strenuously, and this led to long negotiations where favours and future favours could be extracted from either party. But Nalya’s family had done none of this. They’d seemed happy to pass him off to someone else.

  No one wanted to fight over him.

  In the twisted ways of Coldi society, that was a sad thing for a child old enough to start mentoring.

  It was not that he was a troublesome child.

  Nalya was a thinker. He was quiet and studious. Someone I could draw into my circle of confidence, if only I could get him to trust me.

  I sat next to Veyada, who briefed me on everything they had been doing to make sure that we went to the right places.

  Since the previous trip to the office in San Diego had been so disappointing, I had hoped that we might meet people who still remembered the Southern California Aerospace Corps, because fifty years was not that long ago, was it?

  Because everywhere we asked during our useless trip to San Diego, we had met with a deafening silence.

  In space? People would say. We know nothing about space. Some people would even laugh in our faces, assuring us that the capability of building vehicles to travel in space was long gone.

  Sometimes, we had to tell them their own history, which they would then dismiss as propaganda. Because apparently anything I thought or said was untrue and said only to sell Nations of Earth or—heaven forbid—gamra ideas or power to gullible people.

  “We stopped being gullible many years ago,” those people then said.

  So after that disaster, we concentrated on this complex in America Free State. My team had done a
good amount of preparation, comparing old maps with satellite imagery, and filling in details provided by old photos we had found.

  They had reconstructed a model of the complex and filled in the likely purpose for each building. They had labelled buildings as offices, as assembly plant, as electronics lab, even a chip-printing plant. According to old photos, there had been a good number of industrial 3d printers, and Reida had reconstructed a series of images showing what the full complex in operation might have looked like, complete with cars from fifty years back in the employee car park.

  I was impressed, but Veyada added a warning.

  “Mind you, the picture that forms the basis of this model is extremely old, and I don’t know how much use the simulation is going to be, or what state the buildings will be in.”

  He informed me that my team had been unable to get more recent satellite imagery, because, apparently, there was an agreement that Nations of Earth would not spy on North America for as long as no one from the North American countries bothered Nations of Earth.

  I’d had so little to do with this part of the world that even my study of its turbulent history hadn’t brought up any information about that agreement. But as a lawyer, Veyada had uncovered it.

  “It was Mereeni who told me,” he confessed.

  I had to stifle a chuckle. This stuff would make for interesting bedroom talk between the two of them.

  He disliked being away from Mereeni and Ileyu as much as I disliked being away from Thayu and Emi.

  I studied Reida’s model despite the warning, familiarising myself with the layout of the complex. We’d have to visit the equipment assembly hall and the electronics plant.

  After a while, I noticed that the craft was going down.

  Outside the window, I could make out a small town with the streets laid out in a perfect grid pattern. Each house lay in its own little dusty plot of land. There was not a tree in sight.

  This was where we were going to transfer to our two separate craft.

  In fact, I could already see the airport with the two craft waiting for us.

  Chapter Eight

  Our gyrocopter came down next to the two small craft and their crew.

  On the far edge of the field stood a couple of dusty buildings with signs that were too flaked-off to read. The field looked clean and well used, and the control tower that overlooked it was well-maintained. People who had said that America Free State was all in ruins had given me the impression that we were about to fly into a war zone. It didn’t feel like that at all. It felt like we had landed in a dystopian landscape.

  The people who met us when we landed were a younger man with blond hair and a short beard in a neat shirt and trousers, and a middle-aged man old enough to be his father.

  They both greeted our surly border patrol guard, who made straight for the building that held the control tower.

  The young man turned out to be an airport employee, and the grizzled guy was our guide.

  He dressed in camouflage gear, wore a shirt with the sleeves hacked off and fraying, wore his grey hair in a ponytail and had some kind of knitted ear warmer band on his head. His skin had the weathered appearance of someone who spent a lot of time in the sun. His dark eyes were set in a permanent squint.

  He wore a broad belt on which he carried a large knife in a leather sheath and a serious gun.

  He introduced himself as Junco.

  I looked it up, re-typing the spelling a few times.

  It was another bird.

  He seemed to be a bit wary, glancing at the more unusual members of our team, in particular the Pengali and Evi and Telaris, when he started speaking.

  “We have two smaller choppers for you. The very large ones are not as agile as the smaller ones and won’t be able to get into the canyon as far as we can get down with the smaller ones. I understand that one half of the party will continue on after we’ve seen the canyon. You’re with me. The young fellow here will take the other party. We’ll be stopping at a couple of places and will serve refreshments at those places.”

  He continued with the safety briefing, which I had to translate for my team, because his accent was so strong that the translation module made a mess of it.

  We boarded both craft.

  Ileyu had been asleep on the other flight and was most displeased to wake up suddenly, to find herself in a sunny field about to be separated from her father Veyada. She made that displeasure known as Mereeni carried her up the stairs into the other craft.

  I waved to Thayu and Emi as they went in. Emi looked around, bright-eyed. I was wondering if she’d remember this trip when she was older. I hoped she’d remember my father when we visited him.

  The craft were both the same size, but the back seats of our craft were full of bags and crates stacked up and strapped into the seats with a transport harness.

  “Camping gear,” Nicha said.

  I noticed Sheydu inconspicuously checking some of her equipment. She met Anyu’s eyes and made the security hand sign for negative.

  I assumed they wanted to know if there was any reception.

  We were further away from any civilisation or rescue than I had ever been on Earth.

  Junco took the pilot’s seat.

  While the engine started up, he gave us a description of the route, but it was very hard to understand him over the noise of the engine.

  Then we were off.

  The craft rose quickly, and not long after, we flew over the first rock formations.

  They were round and jagged shapes, carved from dark red rock, enveloped in the misty haze that hung over the landscape. The ground was barren, covered in rocks with a few remaining skeletons of dead trees.

  A road snaked in between the rock formations, but its cracked surface, subsided patches and encroaching sand dunes showed that it had seen little use, not to mention any maintenance, for many years.

  A row of poles next to the road probably belonged to a power or communication line, but many no longer stood straight, and some had even fallen over altogether.

  Way back when I was young and went to high school in Arcadia at New Taurus, we had a teacher who was very much into the rise and fall of empires and made us suffer through—so I thought at the time because I was no gifted pupil—countless lessons and essays about the downfall of Rome and that of the United States. Besides a lot of common political factors, they were different in one major aspect: a changing hostile climate. Extensive regions in the south of the former United States had grown so dry that they could no longer support a significant population. People fled to the cities on the coast and were treated like dirt. The wealthier ones made it across the border to Mexico and found employment in the massive solar farms, under terrible conditions with low pay, but they were the lucky ones.

  Entire regions went empty of people. Towns were abandoned, industries died. Fertile agricultural land turned to dust.

  We were seeing evidence pass underneath us.

  The rock formations were pretty, but I could only see them through the lens of sadness. I remembered the pictures my teacher had shown of a landscape covered in grey-green vegetation with gnarled pine trees on rocky outcrops. It had never been lush, but wasn’t desolate either. It was now.

  In New Zealand, we had never suffered this badly.

  The landscape grew more and more rugged, and after a while the canyon came into view: a deep cleft in the surface surrounded by rocky shelves and peaks eroded over many billions of years. The walls consisted of dark pink rock, hazy in the dusty air. The canyon narrowed down the bottom and to my surprise water flowed at the canyon’s deepest point, fringed by ribbons of green.

  The gyrocopter dived into the canyon until it flew at the height of the furthest cliff tops.

  Everyone was looking out the windows now.

  The other gyrocopter was just ahead of us.

  Reida, next to me, took in t
he landscape with his dark eyes.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “It’s a bit like the landscape in the Outer Circle,” he said.

  That had been my thought as well. We had spent some time in the canyon between the Outer Circle boundary and the military base. Although that canyon was broader, not so deep, and the riverbed was now used for agriculture. People were moving into the area instead of abandoning it.

  “It’s pretty,” Reida added. “Are there any animals?”

  “I’m sure there are.” Wherever there was water, there would be animals.

  Both craft followed the windy path of the river. Sometimes the cliffs were close, at other times, they were further away. Impressive formations of red rock zoomed past. Flocks of birds took flight. We flew over stony rapids and deep, mirror-like pools, where the air disturbed by the craft in front made little waves on the water.

  The two craft landed on a beach in a bend in the river next to a drop-off where a thin veil of water trickled over a rock shelf to join the main river.

  We got out and walked along the beach for a bit.

  After the sound of the engines had died down, it was deathly quiet. Every crunching footstep in the pebbles echoed between the rock walls.

  The amount of water coming down the rock shelf was not enough to create a noise.

  We climbed to the top and found a pool of vivid green water where a putrid smell of rot hung inthe air. A couple of dead fish floated in the water amongst foamy rafts of algae. Ynggi watched with wide eyes.

  “This place is dying,” he said. The sound of his voice echoed between the cliffs.

  “It’s like Asto, but the other way around. Athyl is becoming wetter. Creeks are flowing that haven’t contained water for thousands of years. This landscape is drying up, going in the other direction.”

  “It’s so sad. Are there any live animals left?” Deyu asked.

  “There should be.” I hoped.

  Back at the craft, the pilots had set up refreshments for us, trays with fruit and sandwiches.

  Unfortunately, Ayshada had discovered the echoes. He and the Pengali kids ran along the beach yelling at the tops of their voices.