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

a thing is a certain way, then it is like that. There is no need for a question.”
    “We don’t have a captain.”
    “What about . . . the man in the blue robe?”
    I felt like laughing. Delegate Namion couldn’t be further removed from a captain if he tried. “He is the leader of the assembly. Nothing else. He does not control this island. He does not control my life.”
    “Then who is your captain?”
    “We don’t have any captains.”
    He frowned.
    I felt chilled.
    “But let’s go back to the question I asked. What did you see when you were in the other galaxy? I can’t believe that there would not have been anything worth mentioning.”
    “You want to know this—why?”
    “We know where you’ve been and we’re curious. We want to know what the place looks like.”
    “We can report the differences in chemical composition and the differences in the nature of force fields. Is that what you want?”
    “Just what it looks like would satisfy many people, but also things like maps to complement the ones we have.”
    “The captain will have to do that.”
    “Can you ask him?”
    He returned a wide-eyed stare. Apparently, no one asked the captain anything.
    We spoke for a bit longer, but I didn’t get anything else useful out of him. Even when we spoke about Barresh, it was as if he completely missed my points. He twisted everything back to his ship and captain. He seemed to be incapable of discussing anything without mentioning his captain.
    I blew out a deep breath when he was gone.
    “I don’t trust him,” Thayu said, coming into the room. She had been working in the hub but of course had heard—and recorded—everything we said. “There is something he’s not telling us.”
    “You say.” I laughed. “Do you think there is something he is telling us? Because I don’t know that he said anything useful.”
    “All those years cruising at high speed finding nothing, only to turn around and go back home with nothing more than a few chemical and mathematical data? It makes no sense at all.”
    “Well, we can’t go and check. We have to take his word for it.”
    Thayu said, “How about we try to get that woman by herself and ask her some questions?”
    “I don’t know that we’ll get a chance. Both of them seem to be glued to their captain.”
    I had randomly picked two of the captain’s crew members so as not to give him the chance to bring accomplices, but I seemed to have picked the wrong people. I had never thought that the captain would be cooperative, but I had at least hoped that the two companions would be more informative, but they seemed incapable of thinking for themselves. Both of them were all my captain says this, the captain says that with no sign of their own thoughts or even a skerrick of personality. Brainwashed seemed to be the word for it.
    I sighed. “I have to think about what we’ll do with them. Right now, I think we might need to go into town. I should probably put in a regular application to see the Pengali sites to keep him busy, but it will take a while, not to speak of trying to visit Miran.”
    Thayu snorted. “What would you put down in the application as ‘purpose of visit’? Study early Mirani settlement and change the course of history?”
    We laughed. Those stupid Mirani forms. The nation of Miran surrounded the Barresh enclave, but most of those regions, like most of Miran, were sparsely-populated. They didn’t want a flood of illegals coming over the border from Barresh and subjected visitors to ridiculous questionnaires.
    Thayu said, “You know what? It would be far easier to apply for him to look at Asto. There are no rules for looking at a planet from orbit.”
    “Right. Your father does it all the time.”
    She grinned.
    But she had a point. Although . . .  “It would worry me to take him there. For all I know he’ll try to do something stupid to force us down.”
    “He would be extensively searched before boarding any aircraft.”
    Except