Ambassador 12, page 9
Since I also didn’t disclose my identity, for fear of these calls being tapped, I couldn’t tell him who we were, and hoped that something would shake out by the time we arrived there.
I asked him how to go about applying to meet some delegates, hoping I might learn something from a different perspective. But I didn’t even want to name names of who I wanted to meet, also for fear of someone listening in.
It was a very odd conversation.
Twice thwarted, I booked a hotel much further away.
Amarru told us that her responsibility was with the Exchange, and that she preferred to stay and help the employees get back on their feet.
People were still assessing the damage and trying to salvage items from the collapsed parts of the building. Apparently, the foundations of the main tower displayed worrying cracks. A builder needed to assess it properly.
This would be a rather long process. I didn’t think that the Exchange would be up again soon. There would be no more meetings in the canteen on the top floor looking out over the city for a while, if not forever. Another building might rise in its stead, but it would almost certainly look very different.
Amarru took us to an underground room which contained a lot of Asto’s military provisions. I got jackets for the guards, who had shown no interest in taking on extra gear.
We tested our communication hub. It was only a compact unit strong enough for local coverage, rather than a unit that could communicate with traffic in orbit.
Deyu joked that she should have known that she was going to be carrying a communication unit again.
“I would prefer that someone else carry it,” I said. “I want to keep you and your hands free for fighting, in case that is necessary.”
So she gave the unit to Nicha.
Then we had a sparse meal and divided up the rest of our supplies.
In the middle of this, Sheydu got up, and got her reader. She placed it on the table screen up.
“I just got this package from orbit,” she said. “It’s probably the last communication we’re going to get from them. We should all watch it.”
She activated the projection, and Asha’s face sprung into the air. He was seated in the control chair in his command module.
“I am more than glad that all of you survived. This attack was not meant to have happened, and it was a major failure on our part. We have also taken some damage, and all our operations have retreated to the main ship for now. We cannot continue to give coverage in the way we plan. I’m afraid you’re on your own, and if you end up in trouble, I’m not sure how quickly we can be there to help you, or even if we can do that at all. We have sent all civilians to safe places, either to their homes on the planet or on their way to Asto or Barresh. We have become the focus of their attacks, and it looks like the way we developed to predict their actions has been breached already.”
It was the most sombre speech he had ever given in my presence.
I looked at Isharu. They would know what sort of damage the fleet had taken. The Asto military was not used to being defeated.
He continued, “We can only conclude that in addition to the communication point that we already knew about, and we are guarding, there has to be another one. If there is another one, there is likely to be a third one and a fourth one. Somewhere there has to be a nerve centre where all these infernal machines get their orders. We thought we knew where it was, but it turns out we were wrong. And gamra is breathing down our necks, so if we can’t get permission to stay, we will have no option but to withdraw.”
I looked at the solemn faces around the table. If we didn’t succeed in this mission, then we might not get home at all.
“We have already decided to go ahead with our expedition,” I said. “Leisha will back us up with my craft. We’ll be silent. If you need to contact us as a matter of urgency, you can do that through the usual channels.”
Meaning the Coldi register.
“I see.”
He sounded strangely subdued.
“I’m very, very sorry for having put you in this difficult situation.”
“Knowing that gamra has an ultimatum, I might have attempted this expedition, anyway.”
He didn’t reply to that.
“Are my children both there?”
“They are. Would you like to speak with them?”
“I just wanted to know that they’re safe. And Nicha’s boy and your daughter?”
“They are with my father.” I was tempted to tell him about the blackberries and shirt-singing incident, but his mood seemed too intense for that.
“Your father is a good man. If possible, I’d like to see him again in a less stressful situation.”
“I’m sure he’d welcome that.”
Heck, this was the weirdest conversation I remembered having with him for… well, maybe not forever, but certainly for a long time.
Usually, this meant he was deeply worried.
I said, “I’m committed to striking at the heart of this enemy and I may not command a lot of weapons, but I’ll do my best to play my part.”
“Weapons are not terribly useful, anyway. We can shoot installations to bits, and they just send a new drone, open it up, and a new installation unfolds quicker than we can shoot it down. You have our best weapons: your mouth and the ingenious members of your team.”
“Well… thank you.” I didn’t know what else to say, and then I realised there was only one thing that was appropriate to say.
“Iyamichu ata.”
Soldiers off to war.
He repeated, “Iyamichu ata.”
I signed off and looked around at the solemn faces of the members of my team.
“Let’s go.”
We turned off all our communication, extracted all feeders and put them away, made sure that all devices were powered down.
Then we went down to the car park.
Amarru lent us a bus and driver to take us to the station.
The bus took us down the hill through the streets of the suburbs where the signs of damage were everywhere. Apartment complexes where all windows had blown in, a community hall that had lost a roof. A car stood abandoned on the road. Bikes and scooters stood randomly propped up against walls when the owners had fled.
There was almost no one on the streets.
Some shops were open, and a long line stood outside one of them, but many other shops had been boarded over.
Many people had left, especially the Coldi people, and this was a part of town where many poorer Coldi families lived.
I only imagined the level of confusion and fear for these people, if not even we understood exactly why we were under attack.
The train station was quite busy. A train had just arrived and people streamed onto the platform.
Harassed looking Coldi families with children, groups of young people in gamra clothing, people travelling by themselves or in mixed groups with people from other worlds. Many spoke Coldi, but I also heard some other languages.
Almost no one was waiting to get on.
The employee who checked us for the ticket was surprised and asked if we were absolutely certain that we wanted to leave.
“We have some business to undertake,” I said.
“Just as long as you realise we can’t extract people from areas outside the enclave as well as we used to.”
“Don’t worry, we are prepared.”
But as we walked across the platform to the train, I wondered if these were to be our famous last words.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The train set off across the track where I had travelled many times before. Through further suburbs with highrise buildings, past the back of yards to commercial premises, along major roads, picking up speed all the way.
But the landscape was no longer familiar to me. Most of the outer suburbs of the city lay abandoned. In one place, there was obvious damage, and the drone strike had led to a fire which had gone into the hills, colouring the ground black.
The haze of fire still hung over the horizon.
The train gathered speed. The surrounding landscape became utterly desolate. Many of the towns we passed looked abandoned. Not all of them had taken damage, although a patchwork of fires had travelled through and turned the sparse gum tree and pine forest or grassland into a patchwork of black markings.
We didn’t seem to go as fast as I had expected, and indeed, when I checked the timetable on the screen next to the door, it turned out that the train would not travel at top speed. The journey would take almost 2 hours longer than it usually did. I didn’t ask why this was because I doubted my team would know, but I presumed it was as a precaution, because there might be damage to the tracks, or because there might be extra stops needed.
There were very few other people on the train. Just a group of young men with big packs. I suspected they were going to join a military base somewhere.
They kept a close eye on Ynggi, who stared out the window. He didn’t ask questions, but his expression looked disturbed.
“Anything the matter?” I asked.
“You said other parts of this world were different,” he said, and sounded disappointed.
At the ship, we’d had many discussions about our trip to America Free State and I’d assured him that not every part of the countryside was a desert in which rivers turned green and fish floated on the surface—I didn’t think Ynggi would ever get over that sight.
I said, “There are many different parts of this world. You’ve already seen some.”
“Just the towns are different. I don’t care about towns. In the landscape, I’m still seeing the same thing: dead trees and dry rivers and not much fish.”
“I promise, there are places where fishing is really good.”
“Are we going there?”
“Not right now, but later, maybe.”
“Why are the trees dead?”
“Because of fires and because there isn’t enough rain.”
“But it takes many seasons for a tree to grow. There must have been enough rain for the tree to grow to that size.”
“Yes, once, there was, but these trees have been dead for a long time.”
Old images would show the tree-covered hillsides. This area had always been dry, but it was now little more than a rock-covered desert with a lot of tree skeletons.
People had done so much damage. I’d tried to explain it to Ynggi, but he failed to understand, because according to him, it was impossible to take all the fish out of the ocean. It was not moral to catch that much fish, because you couldn’t possibly eat that much.
The same with forests. There were always more trees, especially if you were careful with only cutting down certain trees and making sure that you planted new ones.
Pengali tribes attached special karrit points to looking after trees.
What about the animals? he wanted to know. They could go somewhere else, so why did they stay to eat prickly plants in dry paddocks?
The concept of farming livestock was not entirely new to him, but he didn’t understand at a very deep level how one could own a sentient animal.
Especially when we got to the part where I had to tell him that unhappy animals couldn’t just leave if they didn’t like a farm because in the first place there were fences and they belonged to a person, and in the second place, there were few places that were within walking distance of a large animal where it could survive on its own without running into farms or villages, or where there was enough food for the animal to eat.
And then he looked at me with his large, deep brown eyes and said, “You must understand. I know you left this world as a boy and this…” He waved his tail at the landscape that whizzed past at high speed outside the train’s window. “… Is not your fault.”
At that, I had to look out the window while emotions raged inside me.
Ynggi had this uncanny ability to dole out emotional king punches to the gut.
Of course, it was my fault. It was everyone’s fault, and I was absolutely part of that society that had created this world as it was, a world in which large areas of continents were barely liveable, where a disease raged through a camp in Djibouti and killed hundreds of thousands, so many that not even international forces could burn them all in time, a world in which Nations of Earth security squads had gone into refugee camps in Morocco under cover and actively murdered thousands of people sleeping in rickety tents to relieve the desperate pressure on the settlement camps in South Spain, itself a country dangling at the top of the economic cliff by the grace of oranges and almonds and some very strong fingernails.
Of course it was my fault.
And also, I was a coward for fleeing the planet, and for returning to one of the very few places that had seen benefits from the upheavals, and that was only because New Zealand had slammed shut the borders during the wars in the second half of the last century and had never fully opened them again.
It was my fault, all right.
The spacefaring expat community pretended that settlement elsewhere was an option, but for the vast majority of people, going to space was not an option, nor was retreating to a comfortable city or hiding behind a diplomatic pass, or enjoying holidays in New Zealand, while people who had lost everything they owned died of hunger and disease.
And those people were the ones that Amarru supported. The Zhori clan were the only ones who had improved the lot of countries in Africa so poor that any semblance of a government had evaporated with the last water supplies.
It was absolutely my fault.
It was comforting that it grew dark, because the landscape was too depressing. All those abandoned villages and the scars of wildfires that had torn through the landscape unchecked, crops abandoned and animals turned loose. Bridges lay destroyed and roads blocked with debris or with fallen trees.
It was truly dystopian. Worse than I’d ever seen it. The drone attacks had pushed a lot of smaller towns over the edge. People had packed up, left their houses and travelled to the cities. Or they had… died.
At least when darkness enclosed us in the comfortable little cabin travelling across the utterly alien landscape, life seemed normal.
We folded out the benches.
The bench was narrow and hard, and during the night I woke up a few times disturbed by the smell of fire.
I would check that my bag still stood next to the bench, that Thayu was still asleep on the bunk below me, check that Sheydu’s reader wasn’t flashing any warnings before being happy enough to lie back down. I didn’t think the others were getting a lot of sleep, either.
But I must have drifted off because suddenly, a violent lurch pushed me into the back wall of the cabin. There was a big thump as someone who had been sleeping on the bench facing the other direction fell on the floor. The person cursed in Coldi.
Sheydu.
The train was still slowing down, and was now almost at a standstill. This was not the normal station. I thought we weren’t supposed to stop until Salzburg. It was too early for that. It was still pitch black outside.
But slowly, as the train hummed, slowed down, and the brakes hissed, I registered that roughly-hewn rock and sections of concrete passed the window: we were in a tunnel.
“What’s going on?” I asked, not expecting anyone to have the answers.
I peered out into the darkness, but apart from vapour hissing from under the train, presumably from water cooling the brakes, I saw nothing beyond the rock wall.
From memory, there was a long tunnel, in fact several of them, where the tracks crossed the Alps. I presumed we were in one of those tunnels and also that the train had encountered something unexpected on the tracks, triggering the emergency brakes.
The notification screen in the cabin remained blank.
Deyu wrenched open the window. It only opened enough to let out her hand, but she stuck out the reader and tried to use her camera to see if she could figure out what was going on at the front.
From memory, our carriage was the second or third one in the train.
Her screen showed an area of lights so bright that was impossible to make out detail. Shapes moved in the bright spot.
There were people in the tunnel.
“Is that the driver?” she asked.
“As far as I know, there are no drivers on these trains.”
“No one at all?” Coming from someone who had been a train driver, the horrified expression disturbed me.
“There might be someone in attendance, but these trains drive themselves.”
Yes, there probably would be people in attendance. It was unlikely that the staff numbered more than one or two people, not a handful, as I could see on her screen.
The people now moved out of the train’s headlights and walked along the side of the engine.
We had stopped in a slight bend where there was a bit of extra space. A box with blinking lights hung on the rock wall, with a metal door with a voltage warning sign next to it.
The people were coming in our direction. The sound of their voices echoed through the tunnel.
When I pressed the side of my head against the window and looked out, I could even see them.
They were definitely not railway employees or military. They were families with children, people dressed in civilian clothing carrying bags.
They called out to passengers in the carriage in front of us.
Someone climbed onto the section in between the carriages, but the flexible tunnel that allowed passengers to walk to the next carriage—marked “Emergency Exit”—was locked to those not holding a valid ticket.
When they saw us, a woman came to the window and knocked on it. She wore a coat and headscarf as if they were sheltering from the weather. Peeking out from the dark fabric, her face was pale and her cheeks bright red from the cold. She yelled something through the glass.
“Who are these people?” I asked.
But of course, my companions would not know the answer.
A couple of children joined her. They were carrying bags and wearing lots of jumpers over the top of each other. These people looked like refugees.
