The Bronze Skies

by Catherine Asaro

  Singer tilted her head toward the sun. “Light.”

  “Yah,” I murmured. Such a miracle, to live beneath the bronze skies of Raylicon. It hurt. I had escaped the Undercity in time, before it destroyed my life. Singer would never know that freedom.

  “Other dark, not here,” Singer added.

  “What other?” I didn’t think she meant a lack of sunlight.

  “In the aqueducts.”

  “Where?”

  “All places.”

  “Alive?”

  Singer thought about. “Yah. But not human.”

  It sounded like she meant the EI Hack had detected. “How long?”

  She shrugged. “Thirty days, maybe more, maybe less.”

  It didn’t surprise me she could only estimate how long she had felt something was wrong. In the aqueducts, we never thought in terms of days. We didn’t live under a sky. We sometimes used hours, but often we didn’t bother with time at all. I’d left Raylicon soon after I enlisted, shipped to an offworld base, so I tended to think in Skolian standard units of time, the twenty-four hour day of our birth world, Earth. Thirty days on Raylicon equaled about one hundred Earth days. If she meant the Vanished Sea EI had begun to awake about thirty Raylicon days ago, my estimate agreed with hers. Yet it had slept for six thousand years. Why stir now?

  I motioned around at my apartment. “No darkness here?”

  Singer grimaced. “Just me.”

  I met her gaze. “Not you.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “You have a visitor,” the EI suddenly announced. “Shall I let her up?”

  I jumped to my feet before I could stop my reflexes. “Don’t do that!”

  “You don’t want me to tell you if a visitor arrives?” the EI asked.

  “No, never mind.” This EI never seemed to learn the nuances of human interaction. It did a good job running the penthouse, though, so I was trying to be less annoyed.

  “Who is the visitor?” If the Majdas wanted to talk to me, they’d summon me to their offices or the palace. No one came to visit me in Cries except Jak, and he definitely wasn’t a she.

  “She says her name is Dehya,” the EI said.

  “I don’t know any Dehya. Tell her to go away.”

  “I can’t,” the EI said. “They are in the lift.”

  I crossed my arms. “How did ‘they’ get access to my lift?”

  Singer stood up next to me. “Light comes.”

  I glanced at her. “Light?”

  The doors of my apartment opened up without my permission. I whipped out my gun—

  And nearly shot the Ruby Pharaoh.

  XVI

  Oblivion

  Dyhianna Selei stood in the doorway, a small woman in a blue jumpsuit surrounded by four Abaj warriors in black, all with their jumblers out and aimed, miniature particle accelerators that could annihilate me with one shot. Great. I was an idiot.

  I spoke with care. “I’m putting my weapon on the ground.” I’d retrieved it up from the cops yesterday, and now here I was, losing it again. Moving slowly, never taking my gaze off them, I crouched down and set my revolver on the floor. As I stood again, I raised my hands and stepped back.

  Dyhianna scowled at her bodyguards. “Put those guns away. She isn’t going to shoot me.”

  They didn’t speak. They didn’t lower their guns. One of them, the leader apparently, walked over and picked up my revolver.

  “Give it back to her,” Dyhianna said. “I need to talk with Major Bhaajan, not arrest her.”

  The Abaj leader turned to her. “I’m sorry, Your Majesty.” His deep voice sounded like a distant, rumbling earthquake. “We can’t do that.”

  I realized the other Abaj were looking past me. Glancing back, I saw Singer by the window, doing nothing threatening, just looking at Dyhianna. Then again, Singer didn’t have to do anything to look threatening. I doubted she had any clue who had just opened my door.

  The pharaoh walked into my living room casually, as if interstellar potentates showed up at my door all the time. The Abaj kept pace with her, one with his gun trained on me, the others covering Singer. Dyhianna stopped in front of Singer and looked up at the massive assassin. I wondered how the pharaoh felt, with all of us looming over her. She didn’t seem the least bothered.

  “Are you planning on assassinating me?” she asked my guest.

  Singer squinted at her. “Eh?”

  “Kill me?” Dyhianna asked in a marginally passable version of the Undercity dialect.

  “Nahya,” Singer said. “Not kill.”

  “Good.” Dyhianna turned to her bodyguards. “Please put your damn guns away.”

  After a moment that went on too long, the Abaj leader nodded to the others. They holstered their particle accelerators, but they left their hands on the massive stocks of those guns.

  “Your Majesty,” I said. “You honor my home with your presence.” She and her Abaj. Between the four of them and Singer, we had a room filled with some of the most highly trained killers in the empire. Yah, just another ordinary day. My headache was growing worse.

  The annoyed cry of a child came from across the room. We all spun around, the Abaj drawing their guns so fast, it seemed like one moment they were holstered, the next they were all trained on the doorway of my bedroom. Taz stood there holding his daughter, staring at us as if he had just walked into the middle of a raid he hadn’t realized was happening.

  Shit. I spoke fast. “Not here for you!” I told him. “Came for me.”

  He answered in a voice flat with anger. “Guns.”

  I tilted my head toward Dyhianna. “For her. Protect. Like Dust Knights.”

  “They shoot?” he asked. His daughter squirmed, trying to get down, but he held her tightly.

  “Nahya.” I really, really hoped I was right. “No shoot.”

  Singer was walking toward Taz, and I recognized her deliberate stride. She was poised on the edge of violence.

  “Down!” Singer’s daughter yelled.

  “A word,” Singer said. From her, that was a gushing exclamation of maternal pride in her daughter’s newfound ability to speak. She went to Taz and faced us, putting herself between her family and the rest of the room. She looked ready to attack, and this time I didn’t doubt she meant the threat. She would protect her family even if it meant suicide against the Abaj.

  “Your Majesty,” the Abaj leader said. “Perhaps you should move back.”

  “For flaming sake,” Dyhianna said. “That little girl isn’t going to assassinate me. Stand down.”

  The Abaj didn’t look happy, if I could read anything from their impassive faces, but they holstered their guns. I wouldn’t have in their situation. They knew Dyhianna far better than me, though, apparently enough to trust her judgment with regards to Singer and her family.

  “Down,” Taz’s daughter stated firmly, echoing the Ruby Pharaoh of the Imperialate.

  “Later.” Taz kept her in his arms. “When no guns.”

  I wondered what he told her when she saw him toting around that massive machine gun he had threatened me with outside their home.

  “My greetings,” Dyhianna said to Taz.

  He squinted at her.

  “He may not understand you,” I said. “I don’t think he knows above-city speech.”

  “Bove sit peach,” his daughter said.

  I froze, and both Taz and Singer did as well. Their daughter was only parroting sounds she heard, but she did it in a perfect imitation of the above-city dialect.

  Taz paled. “Too much talk,” he told his daughter.

  Singer said nothing, but I could guess her thought: if Taz and their daughter left the aqueducts, they would have to learn above-city ways and speech.

  Dyhianna was standing by the couch, next to the Abaj leader. Two of the others were between her and me, and the fourth stood near the double doors of the lift.

  The pharaoh glanced at me. “They are all psions?”

  “Yes.” I wondered if
she could always tell this easily.

  “Why are they staying in your home?”

  I couldn’t answer that, so I said nothing.

  Dyhianna tried again. “They came to escape the influence of the Vanished Sea EI.”

  “Did the Majdas tell you about our talk?” I asked.

  “I was watching on a remote link.”

  That made sense, but I hadn’t mentioned Singer in that meeting. “Why do you think that EI involves my guests?”

  “I suppose you could call it an educated guess.” She rubbed the palm of her hand over the knuckles of her other hand. It was a small mannerism, one I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been so focused on her. But I recognized the signs. Dyhianna Selei—the ultimate cyber-rider—feared the Vanished Sea EI.

  “The riders!” I said. “That’s why you wanted them to be careful. They’re the humans that EI most wants destroyed.”

  “Not exactly,” she said. “I just sensed something was wrong, and that it connected either to Calaj, or to everyone with neural enhancement.”

  “Did the Majdas send someone to the location of my last detection for Calaj?”

  She nodded. “They’re checking the trajectory your EI gave them. They haven’t found her yet.”

  “Calaj is headed for the Vanished Sea starships. Your Majesty, you need to get away from here.” The Abaj couldn’t protect her from that EI out in the desert. Hell, they were its targets, too. “It wants to rid Raylicon of all other EIs. It sees three of them, Izu Yaxlan, the Lock, and humanity. If it gets control of our meshes, it could cripple civilization, turn off flyers in midair, corrupt environmental systems, crash magrails, you name it. You’re the—I don’t know what to call it. The mind of the mesh. Destroy you, and it destroys our ability to create interstellar networks. The rest—deleting us pesky humans—is clean up. It would kill everyone.” I took a breath. “Like it killed Tavan Ganz.”

  Dyhianna didn’t scoff, laugh, or patronize, nor did she do that eyebrow-raising thing the Majdas were so good at. She just said, “Ganz was on another planet, too far away for this EI to affect.”

  “If it can access meshes in Cries, it can reach a Kyle gate to our offworld systems. That’s how it found Calaj. Right now, it’s erratic, only partially awake. But it’s getting stronger.” I regarded her steadily. “I’m sure it wanted you, but you protect yourself too well. So it found Calaj. She’s a powerful psion. She and you share genetics found nowhere except in the Undercity. That’s how it knew her, you, the Abaj, even me. We’re enough like our ancestors that it recognizes us.”

  She shook her head. “I saw Secondary Calaj kill Tavan Ganz.”

  “You saw her shoot him with her jumbler. It’s not the same thing.”

  Dyhianna wasn’t buying it. “How is annihilating his body not the same as killing him?”

  I didn’t know how to convince her. I had nothing to support my theory beyond my ability to see connections among disparate facts. “To commit murder, she has to have the intent. If an EI accessed her spinal node and drove her to shoot Ganz, the intent belongs to the EI, not her.”

  “It’s impossible to crack a Jagernaut’s node.” She paused. “It’s supposed to be impossible.”

  Maybe she was considering the idea after all. “Years ago, I was the army’s contribution to a task force that studied potential attacks on a Jagernaut’s spinal node.” I’d enjoyed that job. It was when I realized I had a talent for problem solving. “We found weaknesses.”

  “And fixed them. That was the point.”

  The Abaj leader spoke. “Your Majesty, this room isn’t secured.”

  Dyhianna looked past me to Singer and her family. “Do you understand us?”

  “Say again?” Singer asked.

  “Do you understand what Major Bhaajan and I are discussing?”

  Singer glanced at me.

  “You ken her?” I asked.

  “A little here,” Singer said. “A little there.”

  “Taz?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Nahya.”

  I spoke to the Abaj leader. “They mostly don’t understand us.”

  “They could be lying,”’ he said. “Regardless, ‘mostly’ isn’t security.”

  “They aren’t lying.” Dyhianna turned to me. “I need to go.”

  “Yes.” Relief washed over me. “Offworld. To the most protected place available.”

  “You misunderstand.” She regarded me steadily. “It’s time I met this Vanished Sea EI.”

  The flycar hummed as we flew over the desert. The leader of Dyhianna’s bodyguards was piloting, another of her Abaj sat in the copilot’s seat, and the one other sat in a passenger seat. The large flyer accommodated their large size. Singer and her family stayed at my apartment with the fourth Abaj. She had seemed more puzzled than anything else, but she kept her thoughts to herself.

  “You can’t!” I told Dyhianna, yet again. This conversation felt like the verbal equivalent of banging my head against the wall. “You can’t put yourself in that danger.”

  “It’s my job,” she said. “A modern civilization doesn’t need an anachronistic monarch sitting on a red throne. It does need an Assembly Key. The whole purpose of my being a Key to the meshes is to deal with mesh problems. I’m good at it.”

  “All the more reason to keep you the hell away from that EI. You’re too valuable to risk.”

  The pharaoh leaned forward. “The mesh is my realm. I won’t have it threatened. I’ve felt this Vanished Sea EI. If it intends harm to Raylicon, the Skolian Imperialate, or humanity, I need to stop it now, before it regains its full power.”

  “And if it kills you?” I demanded. “What then?”

  “My nephew Kurj can also create the web, as the military Key. And if I die, my sister can become the Assembly Key.”

  I seriously doubted that the changing of the guard was anywhere near as easy as she made it sound. We had four Ruby psions capable of acting as Keys: Dyhianna Selei Skolia; her nephew Kurj Skolia, the Imperator; his mother Roca Skolia, who served as an Assembly Councilor; and apparently Roca Skolia’s new husband, a farmer from one of the rediscovered colonies. Four. And none of that spoke to the fact that the pharaoh had eight decades of learning the mesh. No one else knew it as well. Kurj Skolia’s bailiwick was the military and Roca Skolia was a politician. Dyhianna was the Kyle adept.

  “We need you.” I said. “Not someone else. Besides, your life has value beyond the meshes. You’re more than a Key. You should live because you deserve to have a life.”

  She spoke quietly. “Thank you.”

  I had an odd feeling then, as if I had said a thing more important than I realized, something she never heard. She deserved her own life? It seemed simple, but I wondered how often anyone told her.

  The Abaj copilot looked back at us. “We’re landing.”

  The first humans on Raylicon built the pyramid called Tiqual, but no one knew the origins of its architecture. No trace of any culture from six thousand years ago on Earth bore any resemblance to what we had created here; those cultures were too primitive. The Virus Wars during the late twenty-first century on Earth, however, had wiped out its entire mesh structure and a quarter of the world’s population. In the forty years since that crippling devastation, the people of Earth had made impressive strides in their recovery, but great swaths of their history had vanished, including whatever linked them to us, their lost children.

  Tiqual rose out of the desert, a solitary temple bronzed by the setting sun. No other buildings surrounded it, only a courtyard tiled in mosaics of armored warriors, lizards in flight, spears in the air, and images of ancient goddesses and gods. The wind sent whirls of red sand spinning across the tiles.

  An arch headed the one path that led to the pyramid. Mirror images of the goddess Ixa Quelia served as the columns that held up the arch. Neither figure wore anything more than a sword sheathed at her hip. Each goddess had her arms raised above her head to support the arch, her breasts lifted, her ha
ir streaming back as if in the wind. A giant statue of the god Azu Bullom stood beyond the archway, to one side of the path. His head was human, with a hooked nose and heavy-lidded eyes, forever half-closed. Horns curled around his ears, their tips as sharp as a spear. His powerful body, four-legged with a heavy tail, bore no resemblance to any of the reptilian animals on Raylican. My ancestors had no concept to describe the body of Azu Bullom.

  At least, not until that day, seventy years ago, when Earth found us.

  Both of our civilizations had reeled from the shock of that meeting. The explorers from Earth never expected to find humans already out here among the stars, and my people no longer believed the legends of Earth held any truth. We considered our tales of a misty green world no more than mythology. A scout ship from the Allied Worlds of Earth entered out territory, and an ISC Fleet vessel found them. When the ships began sharing data, the picture of a jaguar came up in the files of the Earth ship, and our universe shifted on its foundations. Azu Bullom had the body of a jaguar. That day, my people—the lost children of Earth—found their home.

  Today I walked with the pharaoh and her bodyguards in silence past the statue of Azu Bullom. Rays from the setting sun slanted across the path, turning the mosaics. We continued to the entrance of Tiqual, an archway sculpted into the head of a giant ruzik with its mouth open in a roar. It faced away from the sun, so we entered into darkness. The Abaj took torches from scrolled claws on the wall and lit them with a modern igniter stick, creating a sphere of yellow light around us. We headed into the pyramid then, following a tunnel that curved often, with many cross passages. I would have been lost without Max creating a map. Carvings of strange animals jumped into view as the torchlight hit them, lizards with six legs and humans with ruzik heads. It felt as if we were walking through an age that had passed into history everywhere else, but still lived within these ancient walls.

  Up ahead, light suddenly flooded the pyramid, flowing back here. The Abaj doused their torches and left them in claws on the walls. We followed the dimly lit tunnel toward the light and ended up in the cavernous chamber in the center of the pyramid. More of the Abaj waited for us there. This evening, instead of using mirrors to fill the place with sunlight, someone had turned on wall panels that glowed. The pyramid sloped to a point high overhead, where the skylight showed a patch of darkening sky. Around the walls, transparent columns with gleaming metal gears and ceramic tech-mech glittered as lights spiraled within them like sparkling beads.