Ambassador 12, page 28
Anyu would again look after our communication. She would have to transfer to a military craft that was going to stay close, because the large command ship would be otherwise engaged, and it needed to stay further out. Veyada was going to stay with Anyu, so were Nicha and Ynggi, because we needed a few people to answer questions for us.
We said goodbye to them, and Asha’s guards, knowing that this was probably the most dangerous thing, and the most important thing, that I had ever done in my life.
“You always say that,” Thayu said.
“But this time it is really true. If we get through this, I’m going to take some of those trips that we have promised the team to take. I am going to help Erith sort out her family’s affairs at Damarq, and we will go to Indrahui to help Evi and Telaris and their family.”
So we were left alone with just part of my association and the children, who would stay with my father.
In the morning, I first went to see the White Bay community doctor and asked her to cut the chip out of my leg. The procedure was rather more graphic than I bargained for and left me feeling rather ill. The chip was a tiny little pellet no bigger than a mouse dropping. After having bandaged me up, she gave it to me in a paper packet that I put in the pocket of my jacket.
I stumbled back to my father’s farm and was met by an equally stiff-legged Fred on the driveway. My leg was sore, and I was still tired from the frantic past few days. I had never felt less prepared to go out to war.
Inside the house, I found everyone busy packing. Thayu was in the spare bathroom drying her hair. She’d dyed it black, like Nicha used to do when I first met him.
I stopped at the door and looked at her, kind of horrified.
“We need to blend in,” she said, in reply to my unasked question.
Yes. Of course. But I still hated this.
When we had finished packing, we said goodbye to the children with Erith on the beach. My father took us out in the dinghy around the point.
The sea was getting choppy. It was about to get dark and it was hard to see where other boats—or aircraft—were. An Asto military aircraft was in a special class of invisibility all on its own.
The only reason we could see it was because they told us where to look, and when we came closer, someone opened the door, which made a weird dark rectangle appear on the waves.
Someone walked over the craft’s wing—visible only where it touched the water.
The person wore a full military uniform and a second person appeared in the door opening, also in military uniform. So much for my statements that they only wore uniform when they were with other military.
There was much I got wrong about the Asto military.
The first person—a woman, I thought—helped us out of the dinghy, handing all our luggage to the second person. Then we balanced and half-slid over the wing to the craft’s entrance.
I waved to my father, although I wasn’t sure that he could still see me.
The craft was a very basic model, with seating along the sides and storage racks in the middle.
The light only came on when the door to the craft shut.
The storage racks contained tanks, vacuum suits and packs—containing batteries, I assumed.
The craft took off.
As we flew through the night, the crew distributed suits to us, as well as tanks and power packs. There were also rations of food and supplies for the group as a whole, including a first aid kit and a water purifier.
We were going to split up into smaller teams. I was with Thayu, Deyu, Mereeni and Evi would go together, and Sheydu with Reida and Telaris.
The Lunar travel hub was inside an enclave of Nations of Earth near Cairo, protected by a no-go zone and heavily guarded from the surrounding hostile country.
When we arrived at the space port, it was very early in the morning, having been dropped in a small town outside the city and taken through the checkpoints by someone I assumed to be from the Coldi register. I was too tired by this stage. Days of too little and poor sleep were starting to catch up with me. My leg was still sore.
I had been to the Lunar Travel hub before, as a young boy, excited to go into space for the first time when my father and Erith and I were going to Midway Space Station.
Back then, I would have been far too young and too excited to see the incredibly stark difference between the despair and poverty outside the enclave—where I would have travelled through because the airport was outside the enclave—and the sleek modern world inside.
To be frank, it was obscene.
Had I truly never seen this even as I travelled to Ethiopia to chase Romi Tanaqan?
Had I just become so much more attuned to it after having added Deyu and Reida to my association?
I remembered about the Lunar travel hub that I found it an intimidating and frightening place with guards with guns, and in that respect not that much had changed. It was still an intimidating place, populated by far too many people carrying heavy weapons.
I now understood that they were there to keep desperate refugees and smugglers out. The people in the camps outside the gate. People waiting for an unlikely chance to secure passage across the Mediterranean, people who believed that this would solve all their problems.
Inside the enclave, it was business as usual. There was even very little indication that the drone attacks had disrupted the liftoff schedule.
But twenty years without major investment—years in which Earth had hoped to be able to buy gamra equipment—was showing in the dated terminal, the functional but battered shuttles, the worn seats and that distinct old space craft smell.
The shuttle that took us to the launch station in orbit was still quite new, but I heard that the old vehicles were still flying if it got busy. Of course, with the drone attacks, the volume of passenger travel had diminished, although I had also heard that placings on the Moon had become coveted because it seemed to be a place fairly safe from attacks. Surely, there was still all the political unrest, but it seemed to be a small price to pay in relation to the other troubles.
Until you found out that even going there compromised your neutrality. Like people put chips in your body when you were unconscious.
They would be tracking us through this thing. They would know we were coming. But I couldn’t discard the chip too soon, because they would grow suspicious.
The little packet in my pocket felt heavy. I would have to dispose of it, but I also had to hang onto it for as long as I dared, to leave them in the illusion that I didn’t know about it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
It was rather strange to move through this old bit of human space settlement infrastructure in the company of gamra people. We were pretending to be regular travellers, so we couldn’t discuss any of the old hardware.
But I didn’t miss Reida’s raised eyebrows at some of the old devices or Sheydu’s frowns at outdated security equipment.
It simply surprised me that this old technology still worked.
The structure of the launch station predated Earth’s relationship with gamra. When Earth fully joined, the space program would become obsolete, and the signs of delayed maintenance manifested everywhere.
Most of the human space program had become a kind of weird anachronism maintained for the sake of stubbornness, a sense of achievement and for those who found this important, independence. Of course, the Independence Force was intertwined with the program, but ironically, it couldn’t function independently, because the space program was run and managed and paid for by Nations of Earth.
The authorities kept the lunar settlements as research bases, although whatever research one could do that was not possible in less costly places became ever harder to defend.
People settled on the Moon because of its proximity. Because they didn’t have access to the Exchange network and didn’t even know about the Exchange way back when the space program started, and the Moon orbited barely two days from Earth. Easy.
Human settlement in space? Tick.
But this sort of space settlement was utterly alien to most of gamra except the most secretive arms of the Asto military.
No one at gamra would give a celestial body like the Moon more than a few seconds’ consideration. Ceren had two small moons. No one had ever set foot on them. Why would they when with the Exchange they could keep looking for habitable worlds?
But not the Earth space program. They colonised the Moon because it was easy to get to and not too far away.
Then they justified spending the effort getting there by trying to find a purpose for the settlements.
Mining had been big in the beginning.
When flying over the surface before coming in to land, I spotted Reida recording and making notes of the old mining facilities. Selena Base would be a similar place.
Large concrete bunkers for ore gathering trucks and equipment. Larger concrete bunkers or a dome for the habitat. The lunar authorities encouraged employees to bring their families to create a feeling of community.
Today, many of those settlements lay abandoned, surrounded by a landscape ravaged through mining, the surface depleted of whatever scarce materials it once held.
Luna City, the first and biggest civilian settlement, however, was still a vibrant and busy place.
I had been here before—when my father briefly held a position here—and it was comforting to see that not all of Earth’s space settlement effort had fallen into disrepair. The space port was modern and busy, with no hint of the threat from drone attacks that was so obvious on Earth.
There had been no drone attacks on the Moon bases. I had assumed this was because the drones needed an atmosphere to fly, but the lack of attacks on the Moon could also be interpreted in many other ways.
Like, that the enemy wouldn’t attack their own settlements. When we thought they might be based in America Free State, we’d wondered how to justify the attacks there, but now it made sense. Patterson might have asked the invaders to send some drones to communities within their borders whom they considered unsupportive of their point of view. Those attacks would make it look like America Free State was also a victim.
Because at its core, this was the underlying conflict of the war: the people who occupied Earth’s space program fighting back at being made obsolete and having their entire lives discarded. To them, gamra had done this, and yes, gamra actually had. And they’d been unwilling to adapt to change and accept gamra as a partner.
This conflict had so many layers.
We were supposed to be tourists in Luna City. We had booked into overnight accommodation in our three groups. I would have preferred to keep going, but we needed to wait for Asha’s military backup to manoeuvre into a place from where they could protect us and also, we’d now been going for far too many days with too little rest.
When the shuttle landed, Thayu and I walked to our accommodation separately from the others, pretending not to know them. We dumped our stuff in the modern and airy room and next needed to find something to eat in the domed settlement of Luna City. I took the GenCode chip out of my pocket and put it in the cupboard in the room. For days, I had debated with myself about what to do with it. I’d thought about casually dropping it into someone else’s bag, but it would be discovered as soon as that person went through a security checkpoint, and there were many. On the other hand, GenCode ID chips were not mandatory, so it was plausible that someone—like me and Thayu—walked through these checkpoints and didn’t return a reading. We needed to buy ourselves time, so I decided to leave that chip on the shelf and let the enemy circle the accommodation, thinking we were inside, wondering when to pounce, while we made our final move.
It was quite busy in the streets of the settlement. About two hundred thousand people lived in Luna City these days, a number that had been stable for years. Most of them serviced the space ship building industry, mostly for space mining operations. There were also training facilities, schools, the Lunar Tech University, and the services that serviced the base, like shops and restaurants.
It was a sizeable town, and it was still as I remembered: modern and pleasant.
But while walking through the main thoroughfare close to our accommodation, I found it painfully obvious that there were almost no gamra people, and Coldi people in particular, on the streets.
With her dyed hair, Thayu reminded me of Nicha all those years ago, Asian enough to pass as being of Chinese heritage.
The thought that we were back to pretending to be Asian made me feel sick.
I thought we’d left that garbage behind.
Since Thayu and I had entered the settlement as a prospecting party, we visited a mining hire shop to hire a vehicle. This was not as easy as I thought. The rental shops asked for mining company endorsements and permits.
I was doing all the talking, but listening to the people in the businesses and streets, I realised that my accent stood out. If someone was looking, and we should assume that they were, they would easily pick us as non-local.
So I changed my tactic, and used one of my other cover stories, that we were looking for some people who had gone missing, a brother of mine who was last seen in this area and had a penchant for wanting to live independently. I knew this would also attract some attention, but hopefully wouldn’t require as much administrative stuff as the prospecting story. By the close of business, we had a truck and an air machine.
On the way back, we found a very nice eating house close to our accommodation, but the clientele were all Earth-based workers, and I didn’t feel comfortable staying any longer than necessary because people kept looking at Thayu. So we took the food up to our room.
This was just as well, because in the time we’d been away, a message had arrived from Reida. It contained a large file with registration data for students at Mars University for the year that I had been attacked there.
The list contained over twelve thousand students, not including the staff or university employees. Yikes. It was going to be hard to find my mysterious messenger.
I eliminated students enrolled in unrelated degrees. People like engineers wouldn’t lower themselves to do courses in international politics. That still left me with close to four thousand names to check. And I didn’t even know what I was looking for. A familiar name. Someone from the enemy camp who had been there with me. Who I remembered as being aggressive.
I eliminated another thousand students from a different campus. It was a blunt elimination, because the two campuses were within the same settlement and students often travelled between the two. But I needed to get this down to a manageable level.
Thayu offered to help, but I didn’t know what I was looking for. A familiar name. I couldn’t give her a list.
She fell asleep, and I sat in bed next to her, knowing that I should also go to sleep because tomorrow was a very big day, but I couldn’t get over my curiosity. I wouldn’t be able to sleep, anyway. My brain was just too active.
So I scrolled through list after list of names, occasionally forgetting to read and having to scroll back to the names I last remembered checking.
I came across some familiar names, mostly of fellow students I’d long since relegated to the back of my mind as distant memories. I entertained a large and active circle of friends and a reputation as a shit-stirrer. People who studied journalism liked to hang around me. They were all people from my year. I didn’t know terribly many people in older years.
But the lists were too long, even for my curious mind.
I was about to turn the reader off when I spotted another familiar name. And it was of someone I didn’t even know was at Mars University.
Joseph Sullivan, son of the head of security at Midway, Don Sullivan, who was a known Independence Force supporter.
Well… that was odd. I’d never noticed Joseph in my classes. He was an older kid at the Midway Space Station school.
Back then, I was ten, and he must have been eleven or twelve. He was a gangly, shy kid, and I felt sorry for him because his father was an authoritarian bully who used to frighten me.
He kept a pet rabbitooh, an artificial creature normally kept in space settlements for meat production. Productive like a rabbit, with quality meat like a kangaroo. They were not particularly suitable as pets, but he owned one anyway, which he hid from his father. It escaped—which was my fault in a weird kind of way. And this episode chasing after this damn escaped pet was the start of my current career when it brought me face to face with Joyelin Akhtari, then Chief Delegate of gamra. She was ancient even back then, and my ten-year-old self looked at her and thought the world of her, and I wanted nothing more than to learn about the gamra worlds. We used to call it Union back then.
Life had a funny way of reconnecting.
The space community was not large. Did this mean that Joseph Sullivan had taken over from his father as the leader of the group of people who wanted to kill Joyelin Akhtari and escape to a newly discovered world with the station’s only shuttle?
I’d forgotten about the episode, especially Joseph, because he was a good kid—I thought—or at least he had been back then.
Well, holy crap.
I’d probably come to their attention as a kid and had resurfaced when I came to Mars University. They’d wanted to shut me up. They’d sent thugs to attack me. They’d bugged me. I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure I was right, but in my mind I was sure: this was Joseph Sullivan sending me these childish messages, never having gotten over a grudge he’d held since primary school.
Thayu was already fast asleep, so I couldn’t tell her about my discovery. She might not care all that much, either. How significant was it that Joseph Sullivan was in the enemy camp? I hadn’t interacted with him since leaving Midway. For me, it just put a face to the enemy. I wondered if back then when a discovery I made stopped their plan to steal the shuttle, they had been planning to go to Barresh.
