Ambassador 11: The Forgotten War by Patty Jansen

Author:Patty Jansen [Jansen, Patty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781925841060
Google: rgJ0zgEACAAJ
Amazon: B089N8YPRH
Publisher: Capricornica Publications
Published: 2021-05-24T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

We followed him back to the living room.

In a corner, Clay and Marisol had set up a large screen on a stand. It was paper thin and had been rolled out from a cabinet in the wall.

Everyone at the house gathered at the couches that faced it, and others sat on the floor, stood behind the couches, or collected extra chairs from elsewhere in the house. The sheer number of people surprised me.

Besides my not inconsiderable team and Clay, Marisol and Vanessa, there were seven military people—a complete association—and the family I’d seen before, as well as an elderly couple, two young men who seemed to be friends, a woman with a teenage daughter and a family of five, all adults.

I hadn’t been aware that there were quite this many people in the house.

It got very busy in the room.

Deyu and Reida had positioned themselves as close to the screen as possible, on the floor in front of it, with all their recording and monitoring devices spread out on the carpet in front of them.

The screen showed a presenter seated in front of a logo of a news service I hadn’t considered for a long time: Flash Newspoint, the obnoxious gutter press that Melissa Heyworth used to work for. Of course. Their head office was in Los Angeles.

They were deeply political, anti-Nations of Earth, and forever tried to buy themselves credibility by appointing decent journalists like Melissa. And those decent journalists often had no option but to work for them because jobs in journalism were scarce.

The feed cut to a gathering of many people in front of a white-columned building, where an empty dais waited for a speaker to appear.

Somewhere off-screen, music started playing a kind of oohm-pah march with lots of blaring trumpets.

Then people in the audience started singing. They were not just singing along, but singing in rousing voices, with open mouths and balled fists.

Was this some kind of national anthem? It felt weird.

While the song finished up, a woman came out of the doorway behind the dais, flanked by two security guards.

She was of squat and stout build, in her middle age, pepper and salt hair cut into a bob. Her face was round, her cheeks full, and she squinted out of her eyes over the heads of the gathered crowd.

I recognised governor of Atlantia Celia Braddock from the pictures. A couple of people followed her out of the building and lined up behind her, including a man in a heavily decorated military uniform.

Celia Braddock waited until they had taken their places on a couple of seats to the side of the dais. During this, she nodded at a few people in the audience, but very little emotion displayed on her face.

Since I’d decided we were going to come this way, I had read a lot about her. She seemed like a shrewd operator, from a “proper” family, well-educated, well-spoken, a de facto spokesperson for this fractured, infuriatingly opaque and contradictory continent. There were a lot

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.