Ambassador 4: Coming Home by Patty Jansen Page A

story for another day. Why are you here? Is it safe for you to visit?”
    “I have to be a bit careful. I told them at the dig site that I was from the northeastern barracks, except I’m not, and sleeping on the street makes you dirty, so I had to go somewhere to wash. I’ll be gone before daylight.”
    “Did you find out anything interesting?”
    “That’s what I was hoping I could tell you.”
    “Come.” I pulled him into the living room where I turned on a small light. Ouch— that hurt my eyes. Reida was still wearing black council gear. He wore his hair loose, kept out of his face by the clip that held his earpiece in place. Very much like the local young men wore it. But he was right. He did look a bit scruffy and smelled of marsh mud.
    We sat down on the couches in the living room facing one another. His belt bristled with guard equipment.
    “You’ve actually done a really good job of looking like a council guard,” I said.
    He snorted. “This?” He indicated his belt. “Most of this doesn’t work. It just looks good.”
    “Yes, it does.” Although I assumed that the equipment was probably dated and a real guard would be able to see the difference straight away. “What have you found out?”
    “There is some really strange shit going on.”
    “Tell me something new.”
    “Well, it was actually quite easy to station myself at the dig site. All I did was claim to have been sent there from the northeastern guard division. I expected checks—yes, I have a pass—but the guards are clueless. No one ever asked me for identification. They just told me to stand on the footbridge to the station and stop anyone wanting to access the site. The fellow in charge of the dig is someone named Adaron Namitu. He’s an academic and seems to know what he’s doing, but he’s very slow. People keep putting pressure on him to work faster. I don’t understand why they don’t get people in from the Outer Circle. At Asto, people have been digging up this stuff for hundreds of years.”
    “That’s the question, isn’t it?”
    “At night we all have to leave. There were rumours that the Council was getting Tamerians to do the night shift, and we all have to leave before they arrive. I was curious, so I hid in the reeds—which is why I look like this.”
    The dried mud on his uniform made grey patches on his knees and lower legs. There were also splatters on his shirt.
    “Tamerians did arrive all right. There were two. They pulled down all the side flaps and stood outside. That was pretty boring. I had to crawl all the way to the beach and it was really muddy.”
    I restrained the urge to laugh. “Do you know who hired them?”
    “They’re saying the Council. It’s not because of the Tamerians or the night shift that I’m here.”
    I raised my eyebrows.
    “I actually managed to wander into the tent yesterday and I had a look at what they’re doing. They’ve sealed off the site by driving plates into the ground and pumping the area dry, but there is nothing much to see except stinking mud and roots and rotting weeds. They’re taking the mud up in buckets and rinsing out the dirt until only sand is left. Then they dry it under all these lamps that you can see lighting up the tent at night, and pick all the little fragments out. It takes forever and most of the things they’re finding are tiny metal fragments. They pick them all up with tweezers and then they go into a little jar. One per grab sample. They record exactly where each sample came from. It’s all very slow.”
    Yes, that was how it was done.
    “Then yesterday, they started uncovering this rock-looking thing.”
    “Thing?”
    “Yes, it’s in the middle of the site. It looks like a rock with stuff growing all over it.”
    “What sort of stuff?”
    “Oh, I don’t know, the rubbish that grows on rocks that lie in the water. Slimy plants and all that.”
    “Water life?”
    “Something like that. They all seemed very excited about this rock.