The Bronze Skies

by Catherine Asaro

  “General Majda, thank you,” Dyhianna said. “I will let you know when we are done.”

  Vaj Majda inclined her head and withdrew from the room, leaving me with the four guards. I had thought everyone had to bow to the Ruby Pharaoh, but apparently not the Majda Matriarch, who was a queen in her own right. That realization pulled me out of my daze. I bowed from the waist, which I would have done when I’d first met her if anyone had bothered to mention that this person was the freaking empress of not one, but two universes.

  Dyhianna smiled. “Major, come sit with me.”

  As I crossed the room, I shored up my mental barriers. She indicated a chair across the table and I sat down facing her. Swirling holos separated us, so that I saw her through the translucent images. At least this time I’d had a chance to look up the proper form of address.

  “My honor at your presence, Your Majesty,” I said. “You grace me with your notice.”

  I expected her to incline her head the way they all seemed to do or some other regal gesture that no one but the aristocracy could make convincing. Instead, she just said, “Thank you.” She touched a panel and the holos disappeared. Diffuse light came from the chandelier above, adding to the starlight.

  “Where would you like to start?” she asked.

  Straight and to the point. I liked that. “I need to know everything about what you saw.”

  “Are you recording?”

  “Yes.” I showed her my gauntlet. “I have an EI.” I thought, Max, are you getting all this?

  I’m recording everything, he answered.

  The pharaoh rubbed her eyes, looking very human and tired, not at all what I expected for an interstellar potentate. She set her hand back on the table. “Aide Ganz was in his office in Selei City. Secondary Calaj walked into the room and shot him.”

  I still wasn’t sure why they wanted me in on this. “That makes the crime the jurisdiction of the J-Forces internal affairs office in Selei City on the world Parthonia.”

  “Yes. They are working on the case.” She paused. “Many people are working on it.”

  “Then why me?”

  She considered me. “Calaj came here. We believe she is hiding on Raylicon, possibly in the ancient aqueducts under the city.”

  Ho! If a murderer had invaded the Undercity, my territory, this became personal. “How do you know she went there?”

  “I’m not sure.” She exhaled. “We’ve tracked her to Raylicon. As far as her going under the city, that’s just a—well, I suppose you could call it my intuition.”

  “All right.” I didn’t know what to make of that, at least not yet. “Do you know why she shot Tavan Ganz?”

  She pushed back her hair, a tousled black mane that fell over her shoulders and arms. It looked like she hadn’t bothered to cut it in decades. “It wasn’t her.”

  “Secondary Calaj didn’t shoot him?”

  “No.”

  “But you just said she did.”

  “She pressed the firing stud.”

  “Isn’t that shooting him?”

  The pharaoh shook her head. “The other did.”

  I tried another tack. “Do you mean someone else was in the room with Calaj and Ganz, and that person forced Secondary Calaj to fire?”

  “No.” Her gaze took on a distant quality. “The other one.”

  “The other what?”

  “In the Secondary.”

  “You mean an alternate personality?”

  “I suppose it might feel that way. But no.”

  I had the oddest sense, as if she were only partly here. “Your Majesty, you need to concentrate yourself back into this room.”

  She focused on me. “What?”

  “You’re drifting.” I had no idea if I were allowed to address her this way, but it was the only way I knew how to speak, so I forged ahead. “You’re not all here.”

  “Where do you think I am?” She didn’t sound offended, only curious.

  “In Kyle space.”

  She tilted her head. “I can’t be in Kyle space while I’m talking to you.”

  “Perhaps not literally.” I had no clue how it worked. “You’re doing something, swapping back and forth with your mind. I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me, and I think it’s because you’re partly in a place where you see things that are clearer to you than to me.”

  “Ah, well.” She rubbed her eyes. “I was thinking of Tavan Ganz. Gods, what must he have thought in that moment she fired? His life held so much promise, all extinguished in one instant.”

  I had thought similar when I read his file. “I’m sorry.”

  Dyhianna regarded me steadily. “Secondary Calaj is a Jagernaut, which means she has a node in her spine. That node has an EI. The EI killed Tavan Ganz.”

  “Do you mean the EI took over her mind?” That was supposed to be impossible.

  “No.” After a moment, she added, “It was her.”

  “She and her EI became one personality?”

  “Not literally. But yes. In a sense.”

  “What sense?”

  “It’s hard to explain.” She glanced at the tech-embedded gauntlets on my wrists. “When you communicate with your EI using thoughts, you feel as if you are talking to it in your mind, yes?”

  “Well, yes, I do.”

  “You aren’t, actually. The EI sends signals to the biomech threads in your body, which carry the signals to bio-electrodes in your brain. They fire your neurons in patterns you interpret as thought.”

  That made it sound so impersonal, not at all like Max. “Tech-induced telepathy.”

  “Essentially.” She grimaced. “Calaj’s EI is corrupting the neural firings of her brain.”

  “Turning her into a murderer.”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t think that could happen.” Before I had a biomech web implanted in my body, I researched them in excruciating detail. They were safe. The biomech webs carried by Jagernauts had even more security than my system. The J-Force had an entire division dedicated to ensuring the symbiosis between the EI and its human host worked.

  I shook my head. “Calaj’s system would have deactivated at any hint of trouble.”

  “Apparently it didn’t.”

  Maybe, but that seemed unlikely. Regardless, whatever happened between Calaj and her EI, it was internal to the Jagernaut, not the pharaoh. “How can you know it altered her thoughts?”

  “I was there.”

  I squinted at the pharaoh. “In her mind?”

  “No. Yes.” She sounded frustrated. “In the web.”

  “You mean the Kyle mesh?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that put you in her mind?” I felt stupid asking the question, it sounded so odd.

  “It didn’t. I am—” She blew out a gust of air. “I don’t know how to describe it, Major, except that I was linked to her mind when she killed Tavan Ganz.”

  “But how?” I needed to learn more about telops, the telepathic operators who manipulated the Kyle mesh. “Were the two of you connected through Kyle space?”

  “In theory, that isn’t possible. She wasn’t linked to the Kyle when she killed Ganz.”

  “In theory?”

  The pharaoh rubbed her neck, working at the muscles. “Sometimes I get more than I should.”

  Get more? “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  She watched me with her sunrise eyes. “Sometimes I get more from the Kyle than I should be able to pick up. I can’t link to someone who isn’t also jacked into the Kyle mesh. But I was linked to her mind during the murder.”

  It sounded like a nightmare. “Can you describe how it happened?”

  “I was working in the Kyle.” She took a breath. “I felt the violence in her mind. Somehow it pulled me to her. Or she drew me in. I don’t know how. I’m not sure she realized we connected. We were in a neural link when she killed Aide Ganz.”

  Despite her outward calm, I could tell she was upset. The experience had hit he
r at a deep level. All Jagernauts were psions—empaths and telepaths. Those traits served them in battle, helping them predict what their enemies intended and strengthening the neural links they made with the EI brains on their star fighters. It gave them an edge no other fighters could claim, but that great strength was also their greatest weakness. They had the highest suicide rate of any members of the armed forces, despite all the techniques they learned to protect them from the cognitive dissonance of turning empaths into weapons. If the pharaoh had actually experienced what she described, then as an empath in the mind of an empath, she would have felt everything the killer felt, not only what drove the Jagernaut to commit murder, but also what the victim felt—his shock, his fear, his death.

  No wonder Pharaoh Dyhianna was so shaken.

  I spoke as gently as I knew how. “I’m sorry.” For her and especially for Ganz, a vibrant young man who had done nothing but prevent Calaj from entering the office of the Finance Councilor of the Imperialate. He might very well have saved the Councilor’s life.

  “Calaj is going to kill again.” Dyhianna regarded me steadily. “Find her, Major. Before it’s too late.”

  Izu Yaxlan. City of ruins.

  I walked through the shadows of late afternoon. Weathered structures surrounded me, widely spaced, aged and cracked. These ruins had stood in the desert for thousands of years, built by the first humans stranded on this world. Some people called these ruins the true City of Cries, a silent tribute to our ancestors, who had wept for their lost home. In modern times, the City of Cries had become the name for the modern metropolis of glittering towers and boulevards many kilometers west of these ruins. Someday the powers of Skolia would change the name of that gilded city to one more palatable for tourism. For those of us born here, those of us whose lineage went back six thousand years on this world, Izu Yaxlan would always be the true City of Cries.

  Almost no one came to Izu Yaxlan. Tourists were banned. Although no formal laws prevented citizens of Raylicon from coming here, our unwritten laws discouraged people from visiting the sacred ruins. I came alone, aware I was trespassing on traditions that went farther back in our history than any of us remembered. I walked with care and respect.

  I couldn’t imagine my ancestors living here. They had built Izu Yaxlan as a tribute to their lost homes, but Earth soon became a myth, faded with time. We had known only that an unnamed race of beings had left humans on Raylicon and vanished. Whatever their reasons, they stranded my ancestors here with nothing more than the empty shells of their abandoned starships.

  Those first humans barely survived. Their one hope; the starships left by their abductors contained the library of a starfaring race. Desperation drove them to learn those records. Many of the records were corrupted, but my ancestors managed to unravel the details of eerie sciences unlike any we used today. Although it took centuries, they eventually figured out star travel. They built new ships and went in search of their lost home. They never found Earth, but they built the Ruby Empire, an interstellar civilization that spread its colonies across the stars. The Ruby Pharaohs rose to power then. Those warrior queens differed so much from Dyhianna Selei, it was hard to believe she descended from them. Had the millennia weakened the dynastic line? At first glance, it looked that way, but I didn’t understand the pharaoh. She was the endpoint of six thousand years of genetic tinkering and drift, and I had no idea how to interpret the results.

  And then Earth found us, their lost children.

  Our DNA proved our relationship, but nothing on Earth from six thousand years ago even vaguely resembled a civilization implied by these ruins. They were too advanced. We might never learn our origins; the Virus Wars during Earth’s late twenty-first century wiped out a substantial portion of her population, including whatever clues remained about my people. This much we knew: when Earth was just entering its Bronze Age, my ancestors raised an interstellar empire. Built on poorly understood technology and plagued by volatile politics, the Ruby Empire survived only a few centuries before it collapsed, plunging my people into a barbarism that lasted four thousand years.

  Barely a day had passed since I talked to the pharaoh, but on Raylicon that meant eighty hours, enough time for me to interview the other members in Calaj’s Jagernaut squad. It didn’t help. They didn’t understand her actions, either. I needed a different approach.

  The ruins of Izu Yaxlan lay at the base of a cliff that rose straight up from the desert, the first in a series of mountains stepping into the sky. I walked through the city on a broad path in the direction of those peaks. Sand covered the broken flagstones beneath my feet, red grains that glinted with blue minerals. I passed crumbling stone houses, plazas with dry fountains, and a ball court. Doorways gaped, each frame carved like a beast’s mouth open in a roar, its horns curving up in an arch. An octagonal pillar stood like a sentinel by the path. Wind blew through the ruins, keening as if it held the ghosts of all those lost souls who had raised this city while grieving for their lost home.

  “Shrine of the desolate,” I murmured, recalling an Undercity song from my youth. Hidden paths, forever gone, forever lost, vanished like the seas, vanished like the cries of the lost children. Music filled the Undercity, mournful and elusive, but we sang only for ourselves, when no one from the above world could overhear our laments.

  Eventually I reached the tower I sought, a spire encrusted by red sand and glinting blue specks, its paint long ago eroded off its walls. Inside, it consisted of one room about thirty paces across. The flagstone floor was broken in places, but still intact. Cracks jagged through the walls, which tapered to a point several stories above the ground. Parts of the roof had collapsed, letting the sepia rays of the setting sun slant across the interior walls.

  I waited.

  A rustle came behind me. I turned to see a man who stood more than two meters tall. Despite his broad shoulders, his great height made him seem long and narrow. His ascetic face commanded attention, with his large, hooked nose, dark eyes and skin, and high cheekbones. He wore a black robe as protection against the blowing sand, but here in the tower, he left it untied, showing his clothes, black trousers and a green shirt embroidered around the collar with gold thread. His hair hung in a queue down his back.

  He regarded me with an ageless gaze. “We rarely have visitors in Izu Yaxlan.” His voice rumbled like muted thunder. He used Iotic, a language almost no one spoke except royalty, nobility, and scholars. I knew it for two reasons: in the army, they expected officers to speak the language of the dynasty we served, and as a PI, I needed to know the language of my most elite clients.

  “I come with honor for the city,” I said. “I apologize for my trespass.”

  He nodded. “You are Raylican.”

  “Undercity,” I said. “Then Pharaoh’s Army. Major.”

  He had no reaction, at least not that I could read. Most people found my story absurd. I had been born in the Undercity. They called us dust rats. No one even expected me to enlist, let alone become an officer. I wouldn’t have believed it, either, if I hadn’t been the one who clawed my way up the hierarchy. People said I didn’t have what it took, that I wasn’t likely to achieve anything, let alone the almost impossible jump from the enlisted to officer ranks. They laughed at the idea of a dust rat as a military commander. Well, screw them. I had succeeded.

  This man, however, had no such reaction. He said only, “You are here for the army?”

  “I’m retired now,” I said. “ISC hired me as a private investigator.”

  “Investigating what?”

  “A murder.”

  “Why did you come to Izu Yaxlan?”

  “To talk to the Uzan.”

  His voice cooled. “Why?” No one demanded an audience with the Uzan.

  “The killer is a Jagernaut,” I said. “We think she’s hiding on Raylicon.”

  “We don’t hide murderers.” His gaze never wavered. “We don’t murder.”

  We don’t murder. A simple statement with a wo
rld of complications. He belonged to an ancient tribe of warriors called the Abaj Tacalique, led by the Uzan. You didn’t enter this sacred city without their permission, much less involve them in a criminal investigation. They descended from the original bodyguards of the Ruby queens and swore their lives to protecting the dynasty and Izu Yaxlan. In this modern age, they were Jagernauts, all of them, some living here, others scattered among the stars.

  He considered me in silence. I waited.

  Finally he said, “Come.” He turned and strode out of the tower, through its crumbling archway.

  At least he hadn’t kicked me out of the city. I joined him outside in the darkening shadows of evening. We set off through Izu Yaxlan, and I had to lengthen my stride to keep up with him. Wind scented with the fragrance of desert-stalk plants rustled our hair and swirled sand along our path. A small beast squawked in the sky above us, a flying ruxin, its body smaller than the palm of my hand, its wing span long and wide. Little dragon.

  We entered a building through the gaping jaws of a gargoyle with stone fangs framing its arch. Most of the structure lay open to the sky and rubble covered the floor. The Abaj walked to the one area still covered by the roof. A staircase there spiraled into the ground. As we descended the ancient stairs, the stone walls pressed in with barely enough room for us go single file. Their surfaces felt cracked under my hand. My boot hit a chunk of stone and it clattered down the stairs. No matter. I had grown up in worse. The Undercity mostly consisted of aqueducts, some huge, others as small as underground pipes. Claustrophobia never bothered me. Darkness? I didn’t care. The broken pieces of life had no power to inspire my fear.

  Eventually the light disappeared, and I made my way with my hand on the wall, using one foot to check each step before I put down my weight. Max, I thought. Activate infrared.

  Done, he answered.

  The world took on an eerie, blurred glow. IR filters in my eyes let me see at wavelengths longer than visible light, those that produced heat. Colder areas looked dark and heat showed in brighter hues. The walls were dark blue, but the Abaj in front of me blazed white-gold.