Ambassador 5: Blue Diamond Sky by Patty Jansen

Author:Patty Jansen [Jansen, Patty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: space opera, Thrillers & Suspense, Colonization, Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, science fiction, Ambassador series, Spies & Politics, Thrillers, Patty Jansen, Political, Science Fiction & Fantasy, First Contact
Amazon: B01C3V6RQ4
Publisher: Capricornica Publications
Published: 2016-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

* * *

WHILE WE WERE discussing the details of travel, Devlin asked the office downstairs for safe places to hire boats. This whole episode had been highly educational to me. Previously I would have thought you “just” hired a boat, and that boat hire was a service you paid for and someone delivered in the same way you ordered groceries or laundry services, and that the quality and timeliness of the product or service was the main consideration in choosing a service.

But that was not the way with boats in Barresh.

We couldn’t hire from any of the companies associated with Clovis. I still wasn’t one hundred percent sure that Clovis personally had anything to do with Robert’s marooning on the island—he just didn’t seem the type of person who would do this—but I sure as hell didn’t trust him. I didn’t really trust Jasper’s version of events, either. He had been too forthcoming with his accusations.

But we needed boats and this boat war meant that hiring someone was a political statement.

This made me wonder about the other boating companies and what affiliations they had and what data about us they had passed on to their owners every time we had hired a water taxi. And it made me think that maybe we should just buy the damn boats and be done with relying on others. That was an educational thought, too, because all of a sudden I saw why those extended keihu families living in their obscenely large mansions with obscene numbers of staff had come to operate in the way they did: they kept everything in-house. Because having to deal with sabotage as a result of this type of rivalry got old, fast.

Not just that. I realised I had a big, gaping hole in my household: I desperately needed Pengali workers. I had always shied away from hiring them, because the silly Earth human in me felt uncomfortable with the “colonial” aspect of hiring “noble savages” as domestic staff. Seeing Pengali work and live with those rich keihu families, toiling away at the menial tasks, always made me feel a bit ill. But of course that was a silly notion that came from my cultural background, that I pretended I didn’t have, but that, at times, proved stubbornly resilient.

Pengali were neither noble nor savage. They were very different. That was the most important reason that I needed one or two in my office or other staff.

Unfortunately, this was not going to help me now.

Devlin found a company happy to let us have three boats without drivers, and then Reida found three drivers for us, none of them boat owners themselves. It seemed a decent solution to the problem.

“They’re still from the Washing Stones tribe,” he warned, “But they say all this tribal stuff is highly overblown. It may be important for the older folk, but the younger ones just want to get jobs, and they don’t see any problems in working alongside other tribes.”

I hoped he was right.

Those Pengali came to the apartment in the afternoon.

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