Feb 25, 2057, 1227 Hours (UTC +3)
Massawa, Pan-Republic of the Horn
Massawa International Airport
Araari had never enjoyed flying, enjoyed the cargo hold of a V-30 even less, and while seven months pregnant least of all. The pilots had promised as smooth a ride as possible, but the V-30 was a VTOL aircraft designed to violate as many rules of aviation as it could, so regardless of pilot skill, the ride was not smooth.
As she stepped out on aching legs, the air hit Araari like a wall of heat. After the relatively cool winter in Addis, Massawa’s 33C with humidity was downright oppressive. She felt chilly pinpricks down her legs and back where her sweat glands were waking from their long slumber. Even Sudan had not been this bad.
“Pardon our delay, Colonel,” said one of the soldiers awaiting her on the tarmac. “Admiral Tesfai has ordered a convoy for you. It should be here momentarily.”
It wasn’t here immediately, she realized, because the Admiral was reminding the Ground Forces that Massawa was a navy town, and that their visits were dependent on his hospitality.
One of the more annoying elements of Pan-Democratic radical contingency was that every city, town, and village had quirks which the federal government deliberately overlooked unless they became a federal issue. In this case, Tesfai’s predecessor, Admiral Saf, exploited the emergency weatherization project to turn Massawa into a naval fiefdom. Had either of the men taken the extra step to turn it into a dictatorship under themselves, there would’ve been a problem, but the Chairwoman let it be because it was the larger institution of the navy who had annexed the town.
After an appropriately symbolic five-minute wait in the heat, a black sedan pulled up on the tarmac and she was made to wait another minute as she was introduced to Commodore something-or-other. She didn’t bother remembering his name because he was only there so the navy had someone of higher rank to follow her around and countermand anything they didn’t want her doing. Not that she had any such plans, the navy was simply paranoid. He did, however, scare the junior officers off from coming over and asking her for pictures and autographs.
Once the navy’s face-saving ritual was over, Araari was finally allowed into the air-conditioned car. The first thing she did was crank the AC up and avail herself of the water bottles in the back seat mini-bar. Even if the Pan-Republic had cleaned up corruption in the military as best they could, flag officers had inherited quite a bit of pre-revolutionary opulence. The commodore was tactful enough to select water for himself as well.
The first pleasant surprise of the trip came as the sedan pulled off the tarmac and onto the newly-paved highway. The last time Araari was in Massawa was during the emergency weatherization initiatives when the town and its roads were still heavily damaged from the revolution and ensuing Chinese and American invasions. It was impossible to drive a kilometer without going over a plank bridge covering up an artillery crater. She was happy to see—both for herself and for her unborn child—that the road was now fresh asphalt along the entire journey.
“The rebuilding efforts seem to be going well,” Araari said, watching the white sea-towers of Massawa rise in the distance.
“Quite well, I should say. The Europeans have been extremely generous. They like having a friendly naval power in the Red Sea to keep the Egyptians honest, no doubt,” the Commodore said.
“Perhaps they also wish to see their Pan-Democratic brothers and sisters prosper,” she said, offering a more optimistic reading of the UES’ geopolitical motives.
“Perhaps,” the Commodore replied.
Soon the white sea-towers of Massawa were dancing in the windows of the car. Built in rapid fashion to counteract rising sea levels consuming the city’s famous seafront, the sea-towers were a modern engineering marvel even on the global scale.
They consisted of an unbroken line of apartment and commerce towers in alternating four and six story arrangements with bottom floor common areas in each which were submerged on the seaward side at high-tide. Every five towers, a canal plunged inland which channeled the sea into a desalination plant which fed the clean water back into a municipal supply, providing both tap and irrigation water for the orchards and vegetable plots in the hinterlands. All of this was powered by solar panels taking advantage of the desert city’s near-constant sunshine.
Araari could hardly see now the war-torn city she fought in two decades prior.
Eventually they came to a bridge which spanned the largest of these canals along which ran a long, thin, inclined beach. This was the replacement for the beaches lost to climate change and had become the focal point for community and recreation. Midday on a Sunday, it was packed with people escaping the heat. By surface area, towel and umbrella dominated sand.
“How have the separatists been?” Araari added, noting the presence of Eritrean flags staked in the sand.
The Commodore stared at her for a moment, no doubt trying to gauge whether this was some tactic by Addis to probe at the navy’s monopoly on Massawa. Separatist rebels would make a good pretext for relieving the navy of their duty, Araari supposed, but in this case it was her personal curiosity.
“Some trouble,” the Commodore replied, his eyes following hers to the Eritrean flags fluttering on the artificial beach. “Nothing the navy can’t handle. They lost a lot of their bite after the first wave of Isaias loyalists were killed. Now it’s just rowdy young men with nothing to do. You know how it is.”
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Araari suspected there was more to it than that but let the topic slide. Investigating Eritrean separatists was not why she was here. At that thought, she turned and looked out the back window at the two APCs following their sedan.
“Is there any chance we could go to Isak’s house in just the sedan?” she asked.
“I’m afraid not. The APCs are for your protection and mine,” the Commodore replied.
“This is related to the “trouble” you mentioned earlier?”
“Yes,” the Commodore said without bothering to look back at the convoy. “And this is the navy handling it.”
Necessary as it was, military convoys did not set a good tone for the conversation to come.
When they arrived, the Isak family compound was exactly as Araari remembered it. The three-story house and its limestone walled courtyard had miraculously survived three consecutive invasions from the Ethiopians, Chinese, and Americans with only minor roof damage which remained unrepaired two decades on.
Until the Pan-Democratic revolution, the Isak family had been reasonably wealthy by Eritrean standards, making their money brokering mining licenses with foreign corporations on behalf of the Isaias regime. If they had been any less lucky, however, their line might be extinct. Plenty of families of similar status had been dragged out into the street and given citizens’ trials, the outcome of which was often a lynching. What saved the family was their daughter, Ciham Isak.
In the early days of the revolution, when the Americans still thought they could steer it to their own advantage to dislodge China’s position in East Africa, they sent military advisors over to find suitable pilots for the outdated TOCUs they brought with them. In the short time they had, the Americans found three prospective pilots: A 24 year-old Oromo woman named Araari Ahmed, a four-year old Amharic boy named Tarik Haile, and a 16 year-old Tigrinya girl named Ciham Isak.
Though Tarik was too young, the Americans exploited the fact that the revolution lowered the age to “volunteer” down to 14 and pressured Ciham into piloting a TOCU. Her unwilling service to the revolution was all that kept her family and their compound out of the hands of the revolutionary mob. But as soon as the Chinese and Americans had been repelled, Ciham resigned. The HDU Sheba remained empty thereafter.
“I would ask to go in alone,” Araari said as she stepped out of the black sedan onto the dusty streets of Old Messawa.
“As you wish,” the Commodore replied.
Even for the short walk to the gate the sun came down like a hammer to an anvil and she not only hot, but tired. This was weather to rest on a chair with a fan and sip an iced drink. Conducting military business in it was a blasphemy against God.
She pressed a plastic button on the gate, an electric clang sounded across the complex which excited children, dogs, and chickens alike. After a minute, a boy in his late teens with a small afro opened the gate a few inches until a chain wrapped around the other side pulled taut.
“Yes? Who is it?” he asked in Tigrinya, making his voice artificially deep.
“Could you tell Ciham that Araari is here to see her?” Araari replied in the same language.
“We’re having the coffee ceremony. Come back in an hour,” he said.
The boy moved to close the gate but Araari jammed her hands in them and jerked them back open. The teenager looked surprised that this strange, pregnant woman was somehow stronger than him and his newly-developed muscles.
Araari switched to Hornya. “Tell her Araari is here. That is all you have to do.”
Whether the boy had been taught any Hornya or not, it was enough that the official language was being wielded by an important-sounding woman in a military uniform. Leaving the gate chained, the boy sprinted back to the main house and in a few minutes returned with a greeting party of Ciham, her husband, her parents, and a gaggle of interested children.
Her father, Abraham, shouted a boisterous ‘Selam!’ through the gate and moved to unchain it. As soon as the gate was open he thrust out his hand for Araari to shake and then brought her in to kiss her cheeks. Araari repeated this with Ciham and her mother, though Ciham’s husband elected for a simple handshake.
“My sincerest apologies for leaving you out in this awful heat, but we had no idea you were coming!” Abraham said in Tigrinya, guiding her by the shoulder. “Please, come inside. Let’s cool you and the baby down. Would you like some coffee?”
“No thank you, I’ve met my caffeine limit for the day,” Araari replied in the same language. “A glass of water though, please.”
The inside was filled with the smell of burning sandalwood incense. The living room, which Araari had last been in over a decade ago, was packed to the brim with relatives sitting around a grass-strewn floor with cups of coffee in their hand. Conversations stopped as they caught sight of the military officer from Addis.
“We’re on the kale’i right now, if you would like to join,” said Ciham’s mother, Ella.
Ella was a slender, graceful woman with high cheeks and a head of curly grey hair parted down the middle. She had on gold jewelry and a lurid yellow and blue dress no doubt worn to church service that morning. Ella Isak was, Araari reflected, a breed of women rarely seen after the revolution. People still wore colorful, traditional clothes, but gold jewelry and middle-class etiquette were long out of fashion with women of Araari’s age and younger. If anything was fashionable now it was a tasteful lack of culture. The goal was to break a few, but not too many rules of taste and manner. Ella’s bourgeois refinement was a museum piece now.
“I can’t stay long, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, but just for a little, won’t you?” Ella replied, grasping Araari by the arm.
Araari was increasingly aware of how powerful a magic this ‘bourgeois refinement’ could be as her guilt grew over the conversation to come. Fortunately, the military had trained her for a hard life of saying no to people.
“My deepest apologies, Ella. I am due for a visit when things are better, but at the moment there is a great… erm… disturbance,” Araari replied.
Ella patted her arm. “That is okay, dear. And no need to be so formal with us. You are family here.”
Araari hadn’t been trying to sound formal, but her Tigrinya was split into things learned out of a textbook, and a rude, frank tongue haphazardly cobbled together to communicate with Ciham during the war.
Seeing she was drowning in a sea of hospitality, Ciham threw Araari a lifesaver.
“Mother, I think this is state business. I’ll speak with the Colonel on the balcony.”
There was a coldness in Ciham’s tone. Her husband leaned in and asked her something in a dialect Araari couldn’t understand to which Ciham responded by waving him off. Araari followed her former comrade-in-arms up the stairs on aching feet and paused to rest on the third story landing.
“I apologize for making you climb, but this is the most private space in the house right now. Even then, I cannot promise your discretion is a match for the ears of my aunts and uncles,” Ciham said.
“This will be alright,” Araari replied.
Ciham opened the balcony door and the outside heat burst from it like an open oven. In the distance, chickens clucked lazily.