It took only a short time to cross the peninsula to the eastern shore, and then the car turned north with Tomini Bay to the right. The receivers of the rectenna field were equipped with yellow blinking lights to mark the navigation hazard, and the sea looked like a vast meadow filled with fireflies, gently undulating up and down.
“We’re back in the tsunami zone,” the driver said, his tone of voice indicating that he very much disapproved of being there.
“Isn’t there a whole peninsula between us and the volcano?” Sula asked. “How’s a tsunami going to reach us?”
“The tremors could set off a more conventional earthquake, my lady, under the sea somewhere. You see—”
And then Sula’s eyes were dazzled by an enormous flash to the northeast, a searing light that glared off the low cloud cover. Everything that wasn’t in deep shadow turned to blazing fire. “Oh hell that’s it,” said the driver.
Sula remembered the antimatter weapons the Shaa had dropped on Zanshaas’s suburb of Remba, the flash followed by the furious concussion that sent roofs flying and turned windows into shrapnel.
“Careful of the shock wave!” she called to the driver. “Slow down, make sure we’re not under anything that can fall . . .”
Then it was on them, visible at the last instant as a great dark pall rushing down the highway, enveloping as a shroud. There was a sharp cracking sound like the biggest bullwhip in the world, and pain in the ears that made Sula cry out and slap her hands to the side of her head. Something snatched the breath from her throat. Tires screamed as the slab-sided vehicle was picked up and tossed back down the road. The van’s windows turned all to stars, and then the windscreen was battered by an airborne swarm of tree branches, stones, gravel, chunks of pavement, anything the shock wave had picked up as it flew along. . . . The windscreen caved in, and the van’s interior was flooded with humid tropical air bearing a cargo of leaves, twigs, and other debris. Sula covered her face in self-defense. There was a strong odor of vegetation.
The driver had been blasted back in his seat, but the van’s safety mechanisms took over, and though the vehicle rocked and swayed, it stayed upright. The vegetable torrent abated, leaving the van’s passengers gasping and spitting out leaves and twigs, and then the van bounced again as the ground wave passed beneath them.
Ahead was a hellish dawn, the horizon a vivid scarlet reflected by the clouds. Loud cracks and booms echoed through the trees.
Sula wiped grit from her face. “Is everyone all right?” she asked.
The driver was bleeding from both ears and reeling with vertigo; Spence punched out what remained of the window and took his place. No one else had been subjected to more than a minor cut. “Get on to Tinombala,” Sula said. “There will be an aid center or a hospital, I’m sure.”
The vehicle lurched into motion, weaving between fallen trees and branches. The red glow ahead waxed and waned. The air was dark and seemed to press in on all sides. More towns, more villages, broken glass and fallen signs. A large rescue boat powered along offshore, brightly lit, seemingly undamaged. And then, right in the road, a police vehicle that had fared less well than their own. It had turned over, and its emergency lights flashed dimly in the choked air. Spence drew the van alongside.
Both police were cut and bleeding and shaken, and also knew where the emergency clinic had been set up in Tinombala’s town hall, fortunately situated above any likely tsunami line. Sula took the stranded police aboard and got them to the clinic, where they also unloaded the former driver with his blown eardrums.
Looming above Tinombala’s darkened streets was a rearing, spotlit monolith, the access to the tunnel that led to the rectenna’s control room and the UnderSea Hotel. Spence brought the van to a halt under a scalloped concrete portico, and they disembarked to find the doors locked. Spence pressed the button, Macnamara banged on the door, and Sula called the underwater police station.
A hissing rose from the air around them. Something began to fall on the portico with the sound of softly sifting sand. Granules of ash, sighing down from the black, featureless sky.
Macnamara’s tactic worked, and an elderly Lai-own security guard opened the door. Her feathery hair had thinned to nearly nothing, revealing gray skin, and she walked with the mincing step peculiar to decrepit, footsore avians. “I was told you’d be coming,” she said. “Looks like you were lucky to make it.”
Sula stepped inside and was relieved to find the air cool and free of particulates. Her shoes echoed in a vast empty atrium only dimly glimpsed in the emergency lighting. She brushed dust from her tunic.
The building shook to another ground wave. Something metallic rattled overhead.
“I can put you on the train leading down below the bay,” the guard said. “There are only a few people down there, a couple at the hotel, a few police, and a small group at the power control station.” She offered Sula a sage nod. “Things go wrong, there’s a submarine escape vehicle at the power station. They’ll take you off.”
“Perhaps you’d better tell me how to find it,” Sula said.
“You can download a map to your hand comm,” the guard continued serenely, as if unaware of the interruption. “It will guide you where you need to go. I shall call the police and have them meet you at the station.”
Sula’s remaining constable spoke up. He was tall and fit, but his face under the smears of dust was pale, and dried blood smeared his chin. “Lady Captain? Are we actually going into an underwater structure? With earthquakes and an eruption going on?”
“Yes, we are,” said Sula. She turned to the Lai-own. “The designers of the facility knew full well that earthquakes and volcanoes were a possibility, did they not?”
The serene voice resumed. “Oh, yes, my lady. The structure is built to resist earthquake . . . and then of course there’s the submarine if there’s trouble.”
Sula turned back to the constable. “We’ve known for millennia how to build pressurized compartments. I flew here in one, all the way from Zanshaa.” She tried to look reassuring. “We won’t be long. We’re just going to pick up a prisoner.”
The constable took a deep breath and visibly steeled himself. “Very well, my lady.”
They followed the mincing Lai-own to the train station, triggered their sleeve displays to download a map of the facility, then took their places in a small, roofless electric tram car. When the tram started with a jerk, Sula couldn’t be sure if the jolt was the train or another shock.
Subdued emergency lighting lit the long tunnel, which was painted with gay figures of whatever creatures might be found at the appropriate depth, starfish and urchins near the surface, then down through parrot fish and eels and angels, turtles, jacks, sharks, and squid. The decorations would have been charming had they been seen in daylight, but in the near-darkness, they seemed shadowy, ominous figures, mostly teeth and eyes, inhabiting a dark, oppressive realm.
At the train station a Naxid police sergeant waited, his four feet planted on the platform, motionless as an equestrian statue. Sula’s hackles rose at the sight of an armed Naxid looming up out of the darkness, but at her appearance, the sergeant braced to attention and waited for the party to disembark.
“My lady,” he said. “May I escort you to the prisoner?”
“You may.”
The community’s little jail was a two-minute walk away, over paving stones carved from limestone, with visible impressions of seashells, fish, and aquatic plants. The roof was so far above that it was invisible. The resort looked eerie in the darkness, the hotel dark save for a glowing NO VACANCY sign; tables and chairs disordered at a sidewalk cafe; the seahorses, crabs, and sharks of an aquatic-themed merry-go-round lying still, listless eyes gazing into the void. Vertigo skated through Sula’s head from the almost-continual jolts.
A police cadet, another Naxid, waited at the police station. “I’ve run the prisoner’s fingerprints,” she reported. “She’s Anna Servilia Spendlove, originally of Chijimo. Seven years ag
o, she was indicted for fraud and theft, but the charges weren’t pressed, apparently because she informed on her accomplices. She was indicted two years later, for some kind of insurance fraud, but she skipped to Zanshaa ahead of the warrant, and she later turned up selling forged art under the name Costanza Vole. Again she escaped conviction, because her victims wouldn’t testify against her.”
“Why wouldn’t they?” Sula asked.
“We have to worry about confidence tricksters here at the resort,” the sergeant said. “They’re charming and make good friends of their victims—and often, their victims like them so much, they refuse to hurt them by testifying.”
“Or,” Macnamara added cynically, “the victims don’t want to admit to being fooled or admit that their art isn’t worth as much as they paid for it.”
“Is there a photo?” Sula asked. “May I see it?”
The picture was in three dimensions, and Sula could spin it to different angles with the touch of a finger. Anna Servilia Spendlove had a mass of dark corkscrew curls, brown eyes, and an attractive, intelligent face with a complexion several shades darker than Sula’s. The photo had been taken at her most recent arraignment, and she was overdressed for the occasion in a high-collared gown of some shiny dark red fabric, worn with just a touch of defiance. It looked as if she’d been arrested at a premiere at the Oh-lo-ho Theater in Zanshaa High City.
It would have taken work, and money, to turn Spendlove into Sula, but then, the whole scheme reeked of money. Just whose money was the important question.
“I would like to see the prisoner alone,” she said. “Or, rather, in the company of my own constable.”
The sergeant was all agreement. “As your ladyship wishes.”
Anna Spendlove was alone in a surprisingly large steel-walled room, painted a dreary dark gray—from the sharp smell of disinfectant and the oversized drain in the center of the room, Sula realized it was a drunk tank. Drunken tourists, she supposed, were probably the most common business of the police. There were toilets suitable for all species and a dim light covered by a grate.
Spendlove was lying on a metal shelf, and at the sound of the door opening, she sat up, blinking at the shadowy forms in the doorway. Sula’s pale gold hair framed Spendlove’s face. She wasn’t dressed as a Fleet officer but instead wore a dark blue blouse and cream-colored trousers, all suitable for a tourist on a tropical vacation. Sula stepped into the room’s dim light, and she saw the shock on Spendlove’s face as she recognized her visitor.
Sula also recognized a face, the one turned up to her, Caro returned from the dead and all grown up. Sula felt her throat clench, her heart give a lurch.
As if waiting for an appropriate dramatic moment, a temblor rocked the room, and all the metal beds rattled on their hinges. Water slopped out of the toilet.
Sula saw Spendlove blot the surprise from her face and craft a new, critical look to replace it.
“You look like hell,” she said.
Sula took a breath, let it out, tried to quell the pulse hammering in her throat. She groped in her mind for the questions she’d planned to ask Spendlove, and could remember none of them. But it was clear that Spendlove was trying to control the conversation, and that Sula couldn’t let her.
“You look like a dead woman,” Sula said. Caro’s face, worn by Spendlove, twisted in annoyance, and then opened its mouth to speak.
Sula took a step closer to the prisoner, and to keep from fidgeting, she clasped her hands behind her back. She looked down at Caro’s face and forced herself to remember she was facing an enemy, someone part of a scheme to kill her. No better than the Naxids she’d killed in the war.
“There’s a major volcanic eruption just north of here,” she said. “Thousands of people are going to be dead by sunrise. There’s martial law, and anyone caught in the commission of a crime can be executed.” She unclasped one hand and formed it into the shape of a gun. She pointed a forefinger at Spendlove, and another memory floated up, pointing the finger at herself in the bathroom mirror just after Goojie’s death. That’s what this is about, she’d thought. And this is who I am.
She wondered how often she’d have to kill Caro, and thought this might not be the last time.
“I can shoot you right between those phony green eyes,” she told Spendlove. She gave a glance at the drain set into the floor. “There’s even an oversized drain for your blood.”
Spendlove’s eyes flickered. Sula had shaken her confidence, but she tried to summon something like defiance.
“I haven’t hurt you,” she said. “I’m the one in jail, not you.”
“Tell that to my cousin Lady Ermina Vaswani.”
“I had nothing to do with any killing. I didn’t do it, and I didn’t know about it.”
Sula put her gun hand behind her back. “I can do worse than shoot you,” she said. Spendlove’s eyes flickered again. Sula permitted a tight smile to touch her mouth. “The fraud you’ve perpetrated was aimed at corrupting Fleet contracts, and a crime against the government is a crime against the Praxis—which means I can turn you over to the Legion of Diligence for interrogation and the most appalling execution you can imagine.”
Spendlove couldn’t conceal the look of horror that flashed across her face. “I didn’t harm the Fleet,” she said quickly. “I didn’t take a single minim from the government. I only dealt with contractors.”
Sula tried to look skeptical. “You could certainly make that argument,” she said. “But in my experience, the Legion is very reluctant to return cases to the civil authority.”
Spendlove took a breath, straightened, and put her hands on her thighs like a schoolgirl sitting obediently at her desk. “I’ll tell you what you want to know,” she said, “if you’ll agree to leave me in the custody of the civil police.”
“That depends on the quality of the information,” Sula said. “If it can’t be authenticated, I’ll have to bring the Legion in.”
“I’ll tell you everything,” Spendlove said.
Sula didn’t bother to hide her triumph. She flexed her hands behind her back. “All right, then,” she said. “Who’s behind this? A Naxid clan?”
Spendlove blinked up in surprise. “Naxids?” she said. “No. Everyone I dealt with was Torminel.”
Sula stared at her. And then, at that moment, the jail took a violent leap to one side, jumping right out from under Sula’s feet, and the lights went out.
* * *
The two Naxid police arrived with battery lights, just after a mild alarm had begun bleating. The door was opened, the lights shone in, and the sergeant said, “That is a decompression warning. We should evacuate.”
Sula had already felt the pressure in her ears. She gulped and the pressure faded.
“Secure the prisoner first,” she said.
Macnamara handcuffed Anna Spendlove and the party moved at speed out of the police station. The bleating was louder once they got onto the main concourse. Spotlights high on the invisible ceiling strobed red and green on the limestone street.
“Follow the green,” the sergeant said. “The red leads to the resort’s tourist submarines, and those have been removed to a safer location.”
Sula felt pressure building in her ears. “Better run,” she said. “We’ll follow you!”
The Naxids needed no urging: they sped off along the greenlit path with the ferocious clattering velocity of their species, whipping along while using all six limbs, and the Terrans followed as quickly as they could. Sula had to keep pinching her nose to clear her ears.
Sula wondered how many atmospheres were building up in this place. To compress the air this much, a truly vast amount of water must be coming in, and she wondered where it all was. Beneath them? Were there corridors and storerooms and basements below her feet, all now swimming with water?
The Naxid police ran to a green door marked with the symbol of the Power Services Authority, yanked it open, and dashed inside. Sula followed. She found herself in a bleak utilitarian
corridor of pale yellow, decorated by nondescript photographs of the receiver complex and various underwater creatures found in the vicinity. As she ran, broad windows opened up on the left, and she saw benches, screens, and readouts, the rectenna field’s control room. The Naxids ignored the control room and banged through a door at the end of the hall. The path turned right for a moment, then through a swinging door that led to a steel-grill deck overlooking a large metal-walled room. Lockers lined the walls, and equipment lay on racks.
For the first time, Sula saw water; it was ankle-deep in the room and bubbling up from somewhere below the floor. There was an overwhelming organic reek—seawater, sea plants, sea muck. A metal stair led from the deck to the floor below, and the Naxids ran down it without hesitation, their boots splashing in the dark water that covered the floor. When Sula followed them down the stair, she saw where they were running: under the deck was a pressure door to some kind of self-contained environment, possibly an airlock. It was shut, but a Terran, a man she’d never seen, was trying to tug the door open.
She leaped into the water. It was shockingly cold and already to her knees. A temblor nearly threw her into the water and caused the surface to leap. There was a clang, and Sula looked up to see Spendlove, still handcuffed, nearly topple down the stair, until Macnamara grabbed her shoulder and steadied her. And then she heard Spence give a cry, and turned to see water pouring through the door she’d just run through, gushing onto the decking and falling like rain through the grill, onto the man struggling with the airlock door.
The water was to Sula’s waist by the time the Naxid police and two strong Terran men finally wrenched the airlock door open, fighting against the pressure both of water and air until both the air and water equalized. The party piled in—the airlock was large enough for thirty people—and the door was swung shut and sealed.
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