Release date: March 14, 2017
Subgenre: Space opera, space exploration
About The Enemy Within:
Two men went on a surfing trip in a remote area. Only one came back, accused of murdering the other.
Sounds simple, right?
Not
quite, because the alleged murder happened on another planet, the
accused is a member of the secretive Pretoria Cartel of super-rich
business tycoons--with illegal off-Earth ventures--and the only person
who can remotely be called a witness is an alien, the elder Abri from
the Pengali Thousand Islands tribe.
Diplomat Cory Wilson is asked to
accompany Abri to the Nations of Earth court, but when he and his team
arrive there, their contacts have been moved to different cases, their
rooms are bugged and their movements restricted. No one is answering
their questions, but it is when a lawyer is murdered and Cory's team
captures a mysterious stalker that things get interesting.
Just as well they are prepared in the usual way: alert and highly armed.
Excerpt:
Then there was a commotion in the hall, accompanied by Pengali
voices, followed by thunks and thumps and clangs and then Eirani
said, “But I’m sure Muri does not like you leaving all these things
here.”
What things?
I rose from the couch and met Eirani at the door, coming in with
the food trolley full of cups. “Tea will be ready very soon. Don’t
go too far away.”
“Just seeing what’s going on.”
The front door was open and something was being delivered to the
hall.
“Oh, Muri, these people will be the death of me.” She shook her
head and continued into the room.
The Pengali had indeed returned. Ynggi and Kita were carrying in a
giant eel-hide covered drum. Idda sat on Ynggi’s shoulder waving
her tail in his face. The front door was still open and through it
I spotted the building’s concierge with a trolley carrying the
hollowed-out tree branches of an instrument called an irrka which was the vital component of a betanka orchestra. The
concierge’s face carried a bemused expression, like he wanted to
say, Having a wild party in here?
I’d been to a betanka party a few times, because if you lived in
Barresh, you could simply not get away without going at least once,
but those were the sanitised tourist versions of it. They were
orchestrated, staged shows where one paid to see the orchestra and
they each had arranged parts of drumming, playing pipes or singing,
and none of the songs contained any rude words or gestures.
There were also the keihu-influenced city versions, where Pengali
played in seedy, airless cellar bars and keihu men gambled and got
extremely drunk and would embarrass themselves trying to sing or
dance to the music.
Betanka proper was a community performance, where the leader played
the five-beat rhythm on the irrka, tuned drum, and people improvised their parts.
This irrka drum was a huge thing, made up of a central barrel constructed
from a huge hollowed-out tree trunk covered on one side with
eel-hide leather. There were holes in the bottom half of the drum,
for slotting in hollow branches of different diameters so that the
whole thing looked like a giant spider. The betanka leader would
sit near the top of the barrel perched on two platforms on the side
of the drum for his feet, hitting the branches with a set of
drumsticks with a rubbery resin head. The different pipes produced
different notes.
The instrument came apart for transport, because Pengali measured
their possessions by how easy it was to transport an item in a
boat.
“They’re not wanting to take that thing, are they?” Sheydu asked
next to me.
“I think they are.”
Sheydu hadn’t spoken quietly, and now Abri turned to Sheydu, and,
as a Thousand Island Pengali, she understood and spoke Coldi. “How
else can we solve disagreements? We sing. We play betanka.”
Veyada’s eyes met mine. I could see he was thinking the same as I
was: And we thought we had it all sorted out?
Sheydu scoffed. “You can’t expect us to take this much luggage.
Besides, these people we’re visiting don’t sing their
disagreements. You’re asked to give a testimony and answer
questions by a bench of formal people. It has to do with their laws, not yours.”
Abri was not as easily put off by Sheydu’s curt tone as most other
people. “It does have to do with our laws. Hairy face killed
tribespeople. We are going to put in an official protest about
that. We will do that properly by putting it in a betanka.”
Put like that, it made perfect sense. The Earth lawyers had been
waiting for a formal claim in writing, but while the Pengali had understood very well what they wanted,
they responded in their manner. These people never disappointed
with their last-moment surprises.
Ynggi and Kita proceeded to stack the irrka tubes next to the pile of luggage in the hall.
“There,” Abri said when the door shut and the building’s concierge
had left with his trolley. “Now we have luggage.”
They did, indeed.
But still no clothes.
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About the Ambassador series:
- Ambassador 1: Seeing Red
- Ambassador 1A: The Sahara Conspiracy
- Ambassador 2: Raising Hell
- Ambassador 3: Changing Fate
- Ambassador 4: Coming Home
- Ambassador 5: Blue Diamond Sky
- Ambassador 6: The Enemy Within
- Coming soon: Ambassador 7: The Last Frontier
Ambassador Book 1: Seeing Red, is available for 99 cents until April 26!
About Patty Jansen:
Patty lives in Sydney, Australia, and writes both Science Fiction
and Fantasy. She has published over 15 novels and has sold short stories
to genre magazines such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact.
Patty was trained as a agricultural scientist, and if you look behind her stories, you will find bits of science sprinkled throughout.
Patty was trained as a agricultural scientist, and if you look behind her stories, you will find bits of science sprinkled throughout.
