Ambassador 2: Raising Hell

Chapter 2-1

2

“DELEGATE, can you come with me for a bit, if you please,” someone said at my shoulder.

Heart still thudding from watching that curious exchange, I turned around and looked into the serious moss-green eyes of Telaris, one of my Indrahui guards. Back at the scene of the disagreement, the two had separated. Federza, his face disturbed, rubbed his arms. Ezhya was making his way to the other side of the room.

Throughout the room, a number of guards had returned to duty, mingling oh so casually with the guests. One of the Aghyrian guards spoke softly to Delegate Akhtari. She gave him the clearest What the hell? look I’d ever seen from her, before guarding her expression again.

I did not miss those cues. Something had twigged an alarm. Ezhya did not lose his temper easily.

I went with Telaris into the hall where I found that Asha hadn’t yet left my apartment. He stood with his guards in the hall, discussing something. He raised his eyebrows at me as I went past following Telaris into the communication hub.

On occasions like these, when important people came together, guards often had meetings where they discussed protocol and tools of the trade. A few of them were still sitting at the hub bench and on chairs they had dragged into the room. When I came in, many rose, and there were bows and nods and respectful mumblings. “Delegate.”

“Mashara will vacate the room.”

A bunch of them rose and, with respectful nods, made for the door, following their fellows into the living room.

I sat at the bench, still warm from where the guards had been sitting. From my position, I could see Asha Domiri’s military guards in the hall, in deep and serious discussion.

Evi, my other Indrahui guard, had remained at the hub controls. This morning, to the great hilarity of some of the staff, Evi had been subjected to Eirani’s hair styling skills. He still wore his hair in many tiny braids which wove intricately over his head and ended in small silver beads just above his armour’s neckline. His hair normally covered a tattoo in his neck of something vicious and fanged. He’d gotten this in his youth with the rebel gangs of Indrahui. I thought it suited him, but he preferred to cover it up. It now showed in faintly fluorescent dye.

“Right, what’s going on?”

“Delegate, we just received this.” His hands went over the hub controls.

A projection of text sprang into the air, made to look like a formal, hand-written document, such as written out by calligraphers for official gamra correspondence or voting documents. It said,

Many years ago, our forebears the Aghyrian people founded the greatest civilisation there ever was. They laid foundations for technology still in use today. Most of them died in the meteorite strike on Asto. The world recovered, the Coldi people emerged, expanded quickly, and took our place. But we Aghyrians are not extinct. For many generations, we have been hounded, vilified and kept away from our rightful home. The world of Asto is legally ours and this document details our official claim to it.

I scrolled through a long list of points written in legal language. There was no name on the document, only an ID.

Shit.

I stared at Evi, then Telaris, then my staffer Devlin who sat on the other side of the bench.

The voices of people in the hall reached me as if coming through a sheet of glass.

An Aghyrian claim on Asto.

We’d known this was coming.

I’d been talking to the Aghyrian contingent in Barresh, their headquarters.

The claim was rightfully theirs to make, until gamra changed the citizenship laws, which were geared towards giving a voice to native minorities being repressed by native or non-native majorities. In practice, the law had led to some of the most violent and longest-running conflicts in all the settled worlds.

We were in the process of changing the laws so that it would be much harder for a small minority to make huge claims over a majority, especially if both would satisfy the definition of native, which was the case with Asto.

But we hadn’t changed the laws yet. It was a tedious process.

We’d judged that there was no point in making a claim for Asto, because Asto was too hot for anyone except Coldi to live.

This document was going to require the full legal response: the court, the lawyers, a formal hearing, and all the bells and whistles.

The Aghyrian faction in the compound in Barresh had given me assurance that they had little interest in lodging a claim.

Why this, why?

This, of course, was why Ezhya had torn into Marin Federza.

Damn it.

I pushed myself from my seat.

Thayu was just coming into the hall, eyes wide.

“What’s going on?” She looked so pretty and unusually feminine in that dress that it pained me to yank her back to work. I’d seen such a change in her since making our relationship official.

I told her in a few sentences what had happened, and her expression changed from one of wonder to horror.

“But Marin Federza said to you that the Aghyrians had little interest in doing this.” She’d sat next to me during our talks. “Does this mean that he lied to us?”

I had visions of the first time I’d met the man, downstairs in the gamra clothing store, which he loved to visit. His words had been full of barbs and double meanings which, at the time I’d been unqualified to identify.

“I don’t know. I don’t think he’d lie. He’s smarter than that. He just got rattled by Ezhya. I think I’ll go and talk to him, too.” I nodded towards the living room, where the tone of talk had become more excited.

She glanced at the bedroom, where she kept her work clothes—armour and clothing that would allow her to run better than the dress she was wearing—and I gave her a leave it sign. I didn’t want to spoil her rare day off.

In the living room, I found Marin Federza in Delegate Akhtari’s company.

They sat on the couch in deep discussion and her secretary was making copious notes. I gave Thayu a signal to turn up the listening equipment. She made her way to the cupboards where the dining table normally stood, and I went to join the pair. They stopped talking.

Delegate Akhtari met my eyes. I shifted a few cups aside on the low table that stood in front of them, and sat down, facing them. Neither of them looked guilty or self-assured. In fact, Federza still had that bewildered look on his face that Delegate Akhtari might be far better at hiding.

Marin Federza rose from his seat. “You’ll have to excuse me.”

“Actually, I wanted to talk to you.”

He froze, guarding his expression better. He was a Trader after all, although it had probably been a long time since his business had seen any commercial action.

“I have to return to my people. I cannot comment on this situation until I’ve had advice. My official position is that I have no official position.”

All defensive pronouns. Oh, how delicious.

“Can I make an appointment to see you then?”

“Yes, yes, sure. I’ll get in touch as soon as I know more.” He took out his comm. The little box in the corner of the screen said 10456 messages and in the few seconds I saw it, the count had jumped by a hundred.

He entered a reminder to contact me. His hands were sweaty.

He nodded to me and his jaw worked with tension. “I will see you later, then. Have a nice day.”

He left after a polite bow to Delegate Akhtari, leaving me to look at his well-clad back.

Crap. He’d go to his Aghyrian fellows in town and once he was at the fortress-like Aghyrian compound on the other side of Barresh’s main island, the slippery bastard could hide there for as long as he wanted. The Aghyrian Council ruled in there, and we were mostly stabbing in the dark as to who exactly was on it and how they influenced Delegate Akhtari, despite her assurances that she had no ties to them. I’d mostly dealt with Federza, but I was certain that he was only a representative. Dealing with a group that had been secretive for that long wasn’t easy at the best of times.

I folded my hands on my knees and met Delegate Akhtari’s gaze squarely. “This is unexpected.”

“It is,” she said.

Meaning what? “I would very much like an explanation.” I used the most respectful pronouns, reverting to the hyper-formal forms of Coldi that were standard with gamra protocol.

“The Delegate might want an explanation, but there isn’t one.” Her voice sounded harsh.

Um . . . excuse me? No explanation because she wasn’t going to give one? “I was under the impression that we had an agreement that the Aghyrian faction would not claim any part of Asto or their judicial process until we sorted out the legalities. Or was I mistaken?”

Hell, some of my anger had to show through.

“You were not.”

Meaning?

“This claim has nothing to do with us. It’s as much a mystery to me as it is to you. And, I should add, to Trader Delegate Federza.”

“Then where does the claim come from? Are there other Aghyrians?” Any influential ones I didn’t know about? There were only very few left of the original inhabitants of Asto. Most of them were in Barresh. There were some in Miran, but those tended to side with the Mirani view of politics and preferred to stay loyal to their place of birth rather than join the push for a united Aghyrian faction. There were still some at Hedron who did the same thing for the same reasons. Knowing about these people, who they were and what they wanted, was part of my new job, damn it. Had I really missed something?

“The group in Barresh may be the most important Aghyrian and certainly the most powerful group, but we’re not the only ones. This claim originates on Asto. We’re suspecting that it comes from a section of the zeyshi rebels.”

“Zeyshi?” Those were the rebels who lived along the fringes of Asto’s big cities. My voice must have lost all pretence of formality by now. Seriously, what the hell was going on?

“There are some Aghyrians amongst the zeyshi.”

“There are?” I wanted to scream, How can that be? It’s too hot for them on Asto!

“Aghyrian children are born to all sections of Coldi society, but the only place where they can survive on Asto is in the underground warrens of the zeyshi.”

True, and, damn it, something I hadn’t thought about. I had forgotten about the Aghyrians born on Asto, because there were never many and they belonged to the most deprived part of Asto’s society in the Outer Circle. And yes, most of those children died soon after birth. The only news anyone off-world ever heard of zeyshi was that they caused trouble.

“How many of them are there?” I felt weak.

“Not many.” But I sensed the implications. Aghyrians were very cunning. They used to go mad and kill themselves, or each other, in the time before the group in Barresh led by the legendary Daya Ezmi worked out how to neutralise their bodies’ ability to absorb and store energy. Those practices were standard everywhere. Aghyrians lived full lives. They lived longer than any of us. They were manipulative. They accumulated knowledge, money and power. The zeyshi rebels, without the safeguard of the Coldi loyalty networks, would be a rich breeding ground for their ideas.

I felt chilled just thinking about it.

“And this group has made the claim? Do you know any of these people? Can you do anything about this?”

“No, to all your questions. As for the claim, once gamra has received the correspondence, the plenary assembly will have to deal with it, unless the claim is retracted by the claimants themselves.”

And the next assembly session was not until next solar. “Will the Aghyrian faction or gamra contact these people?”

“Likely. You will have to wait for Delegate Federza to establish exactly what is going on. I don’t know what they hope to achieve. To me, it seems that they are a small band of rogues. I certainly don’t agree with this course of action.” And that was about as direct an I as I was going to get from her. “I assure everyone here that I will spare no effort in trying to get to the bottom of this. You will have to excuse me while I go and do just that.”