Ambassador 8: The Alabaster Army by Patty Jansen

Author:Patty Jansen [Jansen, Patty]
Language: eng
Format: epub

14

JAYTEN TOLD US that since Lilona had stayed behind in Barresh, and the captain had made himself so unpopular that the ship had been banished from all gamra worlds, never to return to inhabited space, there had been a lot of problems aboard.

For the many years that they travelled, the captain had reigned unchallenged, not because he was such a good leader, but because what he did was sensible, and the ship had a goal.

But once the goal—to return to their home planet—had been reached and they had found their home world occupied by the Coldi, things started to unravel.

From the moment the ship had left, a good number of the Aghyrians had held up the ideal of returning to Asto. They had designed their journey with the sole purpose of bridging the fifty thousand years needed to return their home planet to liveable condition. They had slowed time aboard the ship by pushing close to lightspeed and by performing certain types of anpar jumps.

They knew how many years had passed on Asto and that the climate would be getting back to liveable, yet had never considered that there would be people who had lived on Asto all of that time, and who did not know that some of the original inhabitants had survived.

After the ship had been told to leave by us, some people aboard the ship wanted to make an agreement with one of the non-gamra inhabited worlds, and find a place to settle. The idea of living in space was wearing thin.

They had been shown pictures of what their home world of Asto used to look like, and wanted to return to a place like that. Some of them even accepted the fact that their original home world was now owned by different people.

But the captain wanted none of it. And he had a couple of powerful allies.

“He was going to lead us on a never ending quest to find the perfect world where he could rule for ever. He had a list of requirements. Most importantly, the inhabitants needed to be intelligent, but not too intelligent. They needed to be thankful for what he brought them, because he didn’t think the people of gamra appreciated us enough.”

Nice story, but I wasn’t buying it as the whole truth. Everything we had seen from Lilona pointed to the fact that, though the people aboard this ship might have a lot of knowledge, they were also incapable of detecting emotional nuances in people outside their fellow ship-bound Aghyrians. I didn’t think they were interested in what gamra, or anyone else for that matter, thought of them.

But I decided to play along with it, and poke him a bit more. “So when the captain couldn’t find a suitable world with suitable people, he gave instructions to produce a new artificial race just like someone had once produced the people who are today the Coldi?” And I gestured briefly at Thayu, Nicha, Deyu and Reida, all of whom could kill this pathetic Aghyrian with the single press of a button.

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