Ambassador 9: Red Crystal Desert

Chapter 2-1

2

SO IT WAS DECIDED.

While we made our way through the living quarters back to the main entrance, I could already imagine the members of my association spreading out and relaxing here. It was a pleasant place.

The position was easy to defend. The house stood quite isolated on the hilltop. It was connected to the surrounding platform through a narrow tongue of land with steep drop-offs on both sides. The path from the door wound through a rocky garden to a paved area that was just big enough for two or three aircraft.

Asha’s craft stood there with the two guards from his association, who travelled everywhere with him outside the military base. When we came back out of the house, they opened the door and let us in.

The craft was Asha’s military vehicle, with the small inconspicuous military emblem next to the door. None of the men wore uniforms, as was customary. I had been assured that if there was conflict, they would.

Asha was a pilot, but he had chosen to let one of his staff fly the craft for the very short trip across the valley.We took our places in an alcove with a semicircular couch and table that I imagined might be used for discussing war plans. More realistically, the craft would most often be used to ferry Asha and his association to the massive military station that orbited Asto and to all the other military deep space vessels that I didn’t know about.

Over his shoulder I could see the controls, and as we took off, the screen displayed the rocky surroundings, followed by the soft grey-purple of the valley floor.

It was indeed astonishing to see this landscape return to life.

We spoke about the growth of plants on the valley floor, and he said there was quite a bit of it. I should go and have a look. He was chatty, as if there wasn’t some sort of plan behind moving us here.

The craft turned. Through the windows, I could see the skyline of the city in the distance. We were quite close to the outskirts of Athyl, known as the Outer Circle.

In the time that the rivers had contained water, this valley—if it had existed in its present form—would have been in a key position, since this would have been prime agricultural land.

“Why was this house built here?” I asked Asha. “It seems to occupy a highly strategic position.”

“There was always a house at this position,” he said. “We have uncovered evidence that the position was inhabited by figures of authority in the time of the Aghyrians.”

Which of course didn’t answer the question at all, because this house was new. “How are you going to use it?” I used possessive pronouns, assuming the house was his.

“It will be yours for the time being,” he said. “As you have seen, you will have everything you need.”

The tone of the conversation signalled the end of this line of discussion.

I wanted to know who owned the house, but property ownership was a very complex matter on Asto. One could own a house, own the land it stood on, or own the lease on either or both. Most property was owned by the entity that could broadly be called “the state” even if it was nothing like state ownership on Earth.

I wondered if in his haste to get me and my mixed-up association out of his vicinity, he had made some deals that Thayu would call “interesting”.

It never ceased to amaze me how distant Coldi parents could be to their children. Thayu hadn’t been to her father’s house for many years. Being in the very last days of her second pregnancy, after the sadness of having lost all contact with her son, she needed some help right now, and the first thing he did was send her away?

But no, that was an Earth sentiment.

Despite his legendary bluntness, I knew that he was neither cold nor a dumb brute, and he must sense that his suggestions baffled and disappointed me.

He had invited me to join his clan and had planned the upcoming initiation ceremony for the sole reason that I could be there. Because of the position of the stars or something equally obscure.

The man continued to be an enigma.

The craft turned again, giving me another view of the magnificent rocky landscape and sheer cliffs that hemmed in the gorge on both sides. Then a collection of low blocky buildings on the clifftop came into sight. These were the outskirts of the vast military camp.

Not much later, the craft landed in the dusty compound of Asha’s house in the military settlement.

The house was two storeys tall, a square blocky thing, nothing like the elegant designs of the buildings that housed the high society in the Inner Circle or the sheer historic grandeur of the house on the knoll. It was functional, and could serve as a bunker in case some imaginary war broke out.

As soon as the craft landed, one of Asha’s guards opened the door. We descended the ramp into the hot and dusty courtyard, where a number of people approached us. These were all military officers who wanted replies from Asha about issues that had developed in our absence.

I went into the house, through the square open door and the dark low-ceilinged hallway. The house had no climate control, and the air inside was stale, hot and stuffy.

We had been given an entire wing of the house. There were now quite a number in our group. My association consisted of Thayu, Nicha—with his son Ayshada, who was a delight and a charming rascal at the same time—Deyu, Reida, the lawyers Veyada and Mereeni and their baby daughter Ileyu, who was nine months old.

Our group also included Sheydu and her own association of six security people, who, besides Isharu and Naru, were still a bit unfamiliar to me. At home in Barresh, they lived in the adjacent apartment. They had come with us on this trip for the first time.

We occupied the rooms at the end of the corridor, while Sheydu and her six-strong guard association had taken the rooms closest to the entrance. They had set up a security station—goodness knew why, because we were inside one of the most secure places on Asto—where, each time I passed, data scrolled over multiple screens piled haphazardly on top of one another, watched by Anyu.

She was sitting there now, a severe-faced woman with more wrinkles and grey hair than Sheydu. I had to admit to feeling a little intimidated by her, with her sharp observation skills, which she used to pick out one single anomaly in data that scrolled across the screen almost at the speed of light. She would slam her hand into the screen—making me fear that she’d break it—and then give a triumphant look, as if we should all know what she had just discovered.

Her earrings with the lime green gemstones—Vonayi—would dangle in the hollow under her earlobes, an oddly feminine display from someone I could hardly imagine less feminine.

“All is well?” I asked her, although I still didn’t know what should be well, and what not being well would entail, and not really wanting to know about either option.

Deyu was also present, but I only noticed her when I stepped into the room. She leaned against the wall, her formidable arms crossed over her chest. She wore a dark form-fitting rubbery suit and a gun in each of her arm brackets and another—bigger—gun in a bracket on her thigh. She was possibly a third of Anyu’s age but one and a half times the size.

“A message came for you,” Deyu said.

“Oh? An important message?”

But it had to be, because back in Barresh, I’d fought a massive losing battle in favour of handling my own correspondence.

Anyu would not allow it, because it was how I’d previously ended up in trouble, according to her. She had studied my correspondence from the past years and determined patterns by which people who wanted ill could identify my words, could determine when I was being truthful or not, and could pinpoint where I was, because the encryption level of my various devices was “appalling”.

Yet, Anyu sat here and failed to react to Deyu’s mentioning of the message. It had to be a sanctioned message.

“Show me,” I told Deyu.

“I took the reader to your room,” Deyu said.

So someone had hand-delivered a message. Most likely, it would have come through a military courier.

Yes, this was important. I dreaded what it could be. Some disaster from Barresh?

I went into the corridor.

A squeal came out of a room further down the passage. Next, Ayshada ran out carrying a piece of construction foam with tubing attached to it so that the ensemble looked like a gun. When he saw me, he dropped it on the ground, sank to his knees, picked the mock weapon back up and pointed it at me, making shooting noises.

“Ayshada, what are you doing?” Nicha came to the doorway. Then he laughed when he saw me.

“Oh, it’s you. I was wondering if it was that humourless housekeeper again. She already made two remarks today about Ayshada’s supposed ambushes in the corridor. She says he bothers her with his screaming.”

“Ah. Some people have no sense of humour.”

“Well, normally I’d agree with you, but . . .”

“But what?”

“You wouldn’t want to hear what he got into today.”

“Let me guess: the maintenance shed.”

Ayshada had been fascinated by this part of the building where weapons were taken apart and maintained. It was a classified military area, and Nicha had told him—several times—that he was not allowed down the narrow corridor that led from his grandfather’s living areas to that part of the complex. Not even we could go in there.

“You guessed it,” Nicha said. “Not only that, but the technicians thought he was cute and let him play with some empty gun housings, so now he has to have a gun to shoot everyone.”

I laughed. “Apparently, the fascination of little boys with guns is universal.”

“It’s easy for you to laugh. The military officer who came to return him to me wasn’t so happy.”

I laughed even more. But yes, I could see how Asha preferred to get us out of the house. There were too many of us, from too many rival or unknown clans, and we took up too much space, made too much noise and upset this very orderly household.

Let me know who they are and I’ll reprimand them, indeed.

The door to our room opposite Nicha’s was open. “What’s going on?” Thayu asked from inside.

“Ayshada keeps getting into all kinds of mischief,” I said, walking into the room.

“Wait until Ileyu gets to that age.” Thayu sat with her feet up in an easy chair by the window, overlooking a very dusty courtyard.

“She can’t possibly be any worse, can she?” I couldn’t imagine. Ileyu was such a cute girl even if at the moment she was a bit of an unguided missile.

Thayu started laughing. Her stomach, round to bursting, shook when she did this, and she placed her hand on it, as if laughing hurt.

We were getting so close to the birth that every sign of her discomfort sent a little chill through me. I’d even stopped asking her if she was all right, because she had told me to quit being nervous, and that she would definitely let me know if something was up.

“So, what was this trip all about?” she asked.

Before Asha had taken me out to the house in the valley, he had been quite mysterious, mentioning that he had something important to show me.

I sat down opposite her. “We went to see this rebuilt old house on the hill in the valley. Your father wants us to move in there.”

“Yes. He has told me he was looking for somewhere else.”

“Doesn’t that disturb you?”

She frowned. “Should it disturb me?” She attempted to push herself up from her half-lying position, but she was so big that she couldn’t sit properly anymore and proceeded to hang sideways in the chair. It looked intensely uncomfortable.

“You’re just kidding me, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m not. We’re his guests. He can tell us to go wherever he wants us.” Thayu had already gone through the legendary cranky period that Coldi women suffered before birth, and had been much better for the past few days.