Ambassador 10: Lost Forest Secrets

Chapter 2-2

“Present from his mother,” Nicha said.

I’d spotted the two of them leave the apartment in the morning, presumably on their way to visit Ayshada’s mother.

He continued, “Apparently I don’t give him enough stimulating toys and he’s behind on his speech. Like she would know, having no children to look after. He can speak two languages fluently.”

In fact, Ayshada had been most upset to find that the domestic worker who looked after his room didn’t speak keihu, because it was clear in his mind that you ought to speak keihu to a nanny.

I added, “He can turn off all the security cameras, he can get Eirani to give him all the food he wants, he can make your father laugh.”

Nicha laughed. “Those are essential and highly specialised skills.”

“He can catch a fish.”

“Yeah, well, let’s not talk about that.”

At home in Barresh, Ynggi, my Pengali worker, was Ayshada’s hero and Ynggi loved fishing and eating fish. Nicha, like many Coldi, held staunchly to the Asto tradition of not eating vertebrate animals, but was having a hard time pretending to be horrified about the concept of eating fish for the sake of keeping in Sheydu’s good books, because she definitely didn’t approve of eating fish.

I asked Nicha, “Anyway, has Xinanu made any claims on Ayshada yet? Does she want him to spend time with her at all?”

“Nothing. She just likes to criticise me.”

“I’m sure it will come.”

“I’m sure of that, too. Right now, he’s probably too much of a handful for her. She’s lazy.”

Yeah, I’d noticed. Lazy. A drama queen. Entitled. Coldi had a word for that: eyli, an opportunistic gold digger.

Then he said, “She did ask me something.”

“Yes?” Here we had it. The first of many unreasonable demands they would make from us, based on a completely overblown small transgression against Xinanu during the few months she lived with us, when she was being a rude, entitled drama queen.

“Her brother is a Second Circle administrator.”

“You told me before.” And I really “loved” how this statement usually preceded some kind of demand, staking out the position of power before mentioning the demand. As if saying: I’m a really powerful person and if you don’t give me what I want, I can hurt you.

“He’s been to Earth a few times and likes it.”

“Just Athens?” Many visitors never made it past the boundaries of the Exchange enclave.

“No, he’s travelled quite extensively, but he has a young son who was injured badly in an accident. The boy can’t walk anymore, and now his father has to stay home to look after him. Which means he can’t easily make additions to the collection that is the passion of their lives. Xinanu was asking, for the young boy’s sake, if we could suggest a way to obtain figurines outside the trashy overpriced and fake collector catalogues. The boy really loves them. Here, I’ll show you.”

He took his reader and brought an image to the screen of a boy seated in a chair with a rug over his legs, next to a shelving unit full to bursting with these “collector items”: plastic figurines of comic and animated movie characters from Earth. The entire middle shelf was taken up by small figurines of mice, ducks and dogs: Mickey, Minnie, Donald and other characters whose names I didn’t remember, all originals. Some of those little things had to be more than a hundred and fifty years old. This collection was worth a fortune.

I was kind of blown away. This was not at all the type of request I’d expected. I knew of the extortionate prices Athyl collectors paid for these collections, many of the items fake.

“I thought it was something we could do, perhaps,” Nicha said. “It seemed a harmless request, and I thought you wouldn’t mind. The poor boy is very lonely and he really likes his collection.”

“Yeah.” Maybe Xinanu had a heart after all. “Yeah, let’s make some investigations.”

After we finished eating, I wandered off into the study.

One of the advantages of this apartment was its size.

Rashanu Omi, the leader of the Omi clan, had first alerted me that it was under construction in the new Eighth Circle business district. The apartment had been designed for a local business owner who wanted to house his family, staff and business partners, but he had to pull out due to ill health, putting the half-finished apartment on the market for a fire sale price.

Because of the size, we were able to spread out and still have visitors without disturbing each other. The apartment went over two floors, and all of the windows looked out over the city. On one side, there was the station; and when the trains were in operation during the day, it might get a bit noisy, but just seeing the trains glide along the tracks was quite a sight.

When I came into the office a train had just departed, and it zoomed across the rails to the next tall building. The tracks bent under the weight of the vehicle and the construction became a swing that added speed to the train.

I stood in front of the window until it had disappeared into the next building which contained another station.

The area was booming. The signs of new development were clear everywhere. Many other office blocks and apartment towers were under construction. The hanging railway would be extended to other buildings.

I tore myself away from the view and sat down at the desk and started looking into the material Ezhya had given me. The letter from Simon Dekker to Melissa was quite short and not very informative. It mentioned some locations that I was unfamiliar with in Mexico, Atlantia, Prairie and America Free State. The supporting document included details of the attack and photos of the devastation, as well as fragments of foreign, off-Earth materials they had been able to recover. There wasn’t much to go by, but a forensic report said that bullet holes contained traces of chemicals that were known to be used by off-Earth people. Except the vast majority of off-Earth weapons didn’t use bullets.

One attack was a clearly politically motivated move against a local politician, Celia Braddock. I looked up her name. Before becoming governor of Atlantia, she was heavily involved in running community movements against “foreign alien interference” in local government.

Not that there was any in that part of the world.

She had written a few articles that accused the neighbouring state of Prairie of allowing foreigners to buy up farms so that they could “carry off all our food to foreign places”.

It was typical alarmist, poorly informed nonsense that I’d come to associate with people like her from that part of the world.

A few other reports covered nightly attacks, carried out with a few heavily armed people, seen as dark figures on security footage, too blurry to tell their origin, let alone identify any of them. In one recording, security interrupted the intruders, and a gunfight had broken out. One security guard had been killed. None of the perpetrators had been caught, but subsequent explosions had left traces of the type of weaponry used.

During another raid, one attacker had lost a type of bracket, photographed from a number of angles. It might possibly have been used for a gun.

It was a bit worse for wear, bent, painted grey, and it bore a half-eroded brand of some kind, a small picture that looked like an arrow pointing down in a circle.

The agency that had analysed the item had also produced drawings of some possible weapons that would fit in the bracket. They also commented that the largest diameter of the barrel would be bigger than that of any known Earth-made weapons.

They suggested the brand looked like the tribal markings that some people from Indrahui wore, but I thought the likeness was far-fetched. A circle with an arrow wasn’t that specific. And those markings were worn as tattoos, not painted on weapons.

I still didn’t see much support for the conclusion that the weapon would therefore need to have been made by Coldi people and fired by Coldi people, or any people from gamra. For one, why hadn’t they questioned any of their own Zhori gangs and their illicit import channels through countries with less than ideal border protection?

Even if the bracket was from a Coldi weapon—which I was sure it wasn’t—there was no guarantee about the identity of the person using the weapon.

I was even more puzzled by the locality of these alleged attacks. No one from gamra had anything to do with that part of the world.

What advantage would any gamra people gain from attacking government offices in America Free State? The country was extremely reclusive. No Coldi person would get in. If they did, who would sympathise with them? If there was somehow a group inside America Free State that supported gamra, the Zhori clan or Pretoria Cartel, then what was their motive?

Thayu came in while I was still looking at the material. She stood behind me and read over my shoulder. I glanced up at her several times, wondering if she was going to volunteer her thoughts.

“It seems rather far-fetched to think that we were responsible for these attacks,” she said after a while.

“Yes.”

I was going to say more but I noticed a sentence in Dekker’s letter that I hadn’t given much attention:

It seems to me that we may be dealing with a group based off Earth.

He said may.

His accusation was only a suggestion. He didn’t know.

“Wait.”

I put my reader aside and rose.

“What are you doing?”

“Checking these events against third-party media reports. I should have done that straight away.”

“Haven’t Ezhya’s people done that yet?” Thayu asked me as we walked across the hall.

“They may have, I don’t know. But Ezhya assumed that these ‘attacks’ were made up, and I’d been looking for evidence to prove that. I’ve not actually looked for ways to prove that they weren’t made up.”

Devlin had gone to his room and the hub lay deserted.

It took me less than five minutes to find third-party data about the attacks: baffling, frustrating for authorities in countries that were trying to quell the amount of unnecessary violence within their borders, and real. Several news services had reported the same things. There might have been one report if the attacks never happened or if details were wrong. Not like this.

I let out a sigh. “Well, crap. There goes that theory.”

But I was beginning to suspect that this was why Dekker had only sent this message to Melissa and not to everyone. He wasn’t sure. He wanted her advice.

“It’s dumb I didn’t see this. I guess I was taken because Ezhya is upset. But it’s an intercepted internal document not intended for him. And the translation is probably not perfect. Someone in the Inner Circle has told Ezhya what they think it means.”

“Most likely, he translated it himself.”

Yeah, she was probably right about that. “Whoever it was, they missed the implications of the word may.”

Coldi were not terribly good at maybes anyway. Once they put their opinions in writing, they were pretty well formed.

Thayu said, “I’m still not sure I follow your way of thinking.”

“These attacks are real. These secondary reports prove that they happened. Nations of Earth don’t know who is behind them. It seems that Dekker is asking Melissa whether she thinks that anyone from gamra may have something to do with it. The wording is clumsy.”

“He didn’t have you.” She grinned.

But I felt too annoyed to smile. Despite the fact that I’d spent the last fifteen-odd years warning them, Nations of Earth still made the mistake of using electronic messaging for secrets that should never be committed to print.

I wondered if Amarru had heard about this.

If Dekker thought that the attacks came from off-Earth, then he had to have a good reason to suspect it. We didn’t know that reason. We should find out first. Were we dealing with rogue sections of the Tamer Collective or the Pretoria Cartel? If so, why? Had all our efforts in negotiating with them been for nothing?