Ambassador 4: Coming Home by Patty Jansen Read Free Book Online

in a quiet voice in the hub, Eirani singing while bringing around the clean laundry.
    Hopefully, Xinanu had gone to sleep. Nicha went to his room, and with a bit of luck, he could do so without setting her off again.
    I went into the office where the first thing I did was send an official complaint to the Barresh Council. I could have written it in keihu, but I chose Coldi because it had a far greater array of looking-down-your-nose pronouns. I could have made it informal, but I chose to use the official gamra channels so that the gamra stamps would show up on all future correspondence as well. The more I thought about it, the angrier I got, so when I finished that complaint, I wrote one to the new gamra Chief Delegate as well, expressing in the strongest possible terms that this wasn’t going to be acceptable. Let him do something useful for a change.
    Meanwhile, Nicha and Thayu had started wading through the morass of correspondence that cluttered my data storage system. A bit later, Veyada slipped into the room and sat next to Nicha to help him.
    “Wow, there really is a lot of it,” Thayu said. “I don’t understand where it all came from. I see no relationships between the addresses. I don’t even know where some of these places are.” That was saying something. I would have rated Thayu’s knowledge of inhabited worlds better than mine.
    She flicked through a couple of messages. “They all want assurance that we’re not going to give the Aghyrians significant control over the Exchange.”
    If I ever needed a reminder of how much the Exchange outage had spooked everyone, this was it.
    “I don’t even know why anyone would think that,” Nicha said.
    “Because people are stupid,” Thayu said. “They weren’t on that train with us. They didn’t hear what the arsehole said. If they had, they’d know that we’d never give that idiot anything over our dead bodies.”
    Veyada was curious about what happened on the train and Nicha recounted Kando Luczon’s words.
    Veyada was one of the most patient, even-tempered and gentle Coldi I knew. He swore. “He said all that?”
    “Pretty much in those words,” Nicha said.
    I nodded. There was nothing wrong with Nicha’s ears.
    Veyada blew out a breath and shook his head. “It’s almost like he’s here to deliberately cause as much conflict as possible.”
    “I said he’s an arsehole.” Thayu crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m impressed with Cory for still trying ‘to make him see’ what effect he’s having on us. I’m pretty sure that it’s all deliberate. Whatever we know about Aghyrian history is full of this sort of stuff. They were—are—manipulative people, whose aim it was to ‘win’ discussions, political shitfights or actual armed conflicts.”
    “Which makes it very hard to have any kind of meaningful negotiation with them,” Veyada agreed.
    I could see in Thayu’s face that she didn’t want a negotiation. Nicha was probably leaning that way, too. Veyada’s expression was grim, as if he realised that likely there wouldn’t be a meaningful negotiation, and Ezhya had probably asked me to intervene on the remote off-chance that I could stop a bad situation sliding into a war.
    And damn, it, I hated letting Ezhya down, but it sure as hell wasn’t looking good.
    I sighed, leaned my head into my hands and sighed again.
    I had to try. I had to keep my cool and keep plodding along. I had to keep a straight course. Take things one step at a time. Concentrate on the little things in the hope that they would add up to a big thing.
    Change of subject. I gestured at the screen. “Veyada, legally, what am I allowed to do with all this correspondence?”
    “What would you like to do with it?”
    “Dump it in Delegate Namion’s account so at least I can work again. I don’t understand why all these people are asking me these questions—well, no, that’s not true; of course I do know—but he’s Chief Delegate, so if he wants to play