Undercity - eARC

by Catherine Asaro

  He inclined his head. His strained expression was one I had seen before, an expression that was the same regardless of person’s rank or wealth, the anguish of a parent faced with the loss of a child. Whatever else I thought of the Majdas, they genuinely seemed to love Dayj.

  Ahktar spoke. “Major, can you find my son?”

  “If it’s humanly possible,” I said.

  He extended his arm and his sleeve fell down, revealing the jeweled cuff of his shirt. A carved box lay in his palm, wood with enameled panels. “I don’t know if it will help, but Dayj valued this.”

  I took the box. Tiny mosaics covered its sides. “What’s inside?”

  “Dirt. I couldn’t open it, but I analyzed it with a mesh system.” He pushed his hand through his thinning hair. “Dayj has had it for several years. I don’t know why he kept the dirt, or if it can help you find him, but anything is worth a try.”

  I rubbed my thumb over the box’s tiled panels, which showed birds in flight, blue, green, and red against an ivory background. I had seen plenty of puzzle boxes, but none like this. “Thank you.”

  “Just find my son.” In a low voice, he added, “Alive.”

  So. Ahktar had acknowledged what none of us wanted to admit. Dayj’s chances of staying alive and unharmed on his own might be as vanishing as the ocean beyond the City of Cries.

  IV

  The Black Mark

  I spent the endless Raylicon evening in the penthouse of a tower. The building belonged to the Majdas. Its sunken living room was larger than my whole apartment in Selei City, and one entire wall consisted of dichromesh glass, which polarized during the day to mute sunlight. Tonight it gave me a panoramic view of the City of Cries to the east, the Vanished Sea stretching everywhere else, and the gloriously crimson sunset that flamed on the horizon where the sea met the sky.

  I sat sprawled in a white chair near the window while I fooled with the box that Dayj’s father had given me. I could have a mesh node figure it out, but its solution might offer a clue to Dayj. After twenty minutes of my poking and sliding its panels, the top opened with a loud click. Ahktar was right: the box held dirt. Or dust, actually. That was it. Just dust.

  Red and blue dust.

  I knew where to look for Dayj.

  * * *

  No water had flowed for millennia in the aqueducts beneath Cries. The empty conduits networked the subterranean spaces under the Vanished Sea and the ruins of the old city. They were actually more like underground canals, but what few records we had of ancient Cries referred to them as aqueducts. The people who lived here used that name to mean the entire undercity, a world of ancient waterways, yes, but also mazes of tunnels and caves. In past ages, mineral-laden water had trickled through the stone, dripping from the ceilings to form stalactites that hung like stone icicles, or forming stalagmites on the floor, gnarled cones of rock that thrust up from the ground. Those eerie formations filled the caverns like a huge lacework of rock created by some mad giant.

  The ancient builders had created stone mosaics on the walls, artwork so well designed it had survived for thousands of years. Totem poles of gargoyles grimaced at corners, and pillars stood like sentinels at the junctions where canals met. Those long-dead architects had been geniuses, using beams, supports, and arches to support an underground network that lasted for millennia. But to what purpose? These canals couldn’t have all carried water even when the sea existed, and they had been built after the Vanished Sea did its vanishing act. The canals were too large and on too many levels, stacked at least three, even four levels deep. Such a gargantuan system would transfer incredible amounts of liquid. For what? No one had an answer. Like so much of our history, their reason for existence had vanished in the Dark Ages after the collapse of the Ruby Empire.

  Today I walked along an edge of one canal. I wore black trousers, a black muscle shirt, and black boots, and no jacket hid my shoulder holster or its pulse gun. A laser stylus hung from a cord around my neck. Its actual purpose was to write on holographic displays, but I used it as a lamp. One of my many quirks. The stylus created a sphere of light around me, pushing back the gloom. Nothing, however, could push back the shadows this place had left in my memories. I shook my head, turning away those thoughts. I didn’t want to remember.

  My route ran along a wall of the canal. The path, what we called a midwalk, was a ledge set about midway from the floor to the canal roof. The dropoff from here to the bottom of the canal was deeper than most, maybe four meters. This was one of the largest aqueducts; the distance to the midwalk on its other side was about eight meters. Dust crusted the path and piled up in the canal below, a distinctive powder unlike anything I had seen anywhere else.

  Red and blue dust.

  How had Dayj ended up with a box filled with grit from these aqueducts? I couldn’t imagine him just walking out of the palace, yet he had apparently done exactly that three days ago without leaving a trace.

  I was only a two levels down from the surface, close enough that Cries had put in a few lampposts to light this area. One glowed a ways up the path, both here and on the midwalk across the canal. A trio of musicians had gathered on the other side. Two were singing, harmonizing in minor tones, and the third played a bone-reed pipe, its notes drifting through air. Their haunting song echoed in the open spaces like an ancient chant. A fourth youth was working in the canal below them, tagging their territory with a dust sculpture fashioned into a flying lizard, its wings spread wide, dark red but veined by blue streaks.

  Up ahead on my side, a dust gang lounged on the midwalk, two girls and two boys in their teens, leanly muscular, dressed in leather and dark muscle shirts, with knives in sheaths on their belts. Two of them gripped broken metal bars. They all had a hieroglyph tooled into their wrist guards, the symbol for “Oey.” The taller girl stood at the front of the group. A cyber-rider stood with her, the silvery tracings of conduits on his arm forming the Oey glyph. They watched me with cold stares, ready to repel my intrusion from their world. No strangers allowed.

  Without thinking, I jerked my chin. The motion was instinctual, an acknowledgment that this was their territory. I didn’t even realize I had done it until I finished. Their reaction was almost invisible, just the barest relaxing of their posture. I didn’t touch my gun. I could draw it faster than any of them could move, but I had no desire to shoot anyone. They watched as I walked by them, no one speaking, their gazes cold—but they let me pass.

  Like knew like.

  I had been born in the ruins beneath a dead sea. We were a sparse population in the undercity. Cyber-riders manipulated tech-mech and the Cries meshes from the shadows. Punkers ran drugs for the cartels, either the Kajadas of Vakaars, the wealthiest undercity bosses. Dust gangs learned to fight, as I had done in my youth. We had trained rigorously to perfect our skills, not only to protect those within our circle of people, but also for fun. Gangs ran in packs of four, usually two girls and two boys. Our fights with other gangs were often a challenge more than a threat. If we were lucky, we grew up. Adults bartered for jobs in the shadowy undercity culture, where the economy worked on trades rather than Imperial credits. They started families, set up ventures to support their circle, or became artisans or tech-mech wizards. Some graduated to hardcore crime.

  Almost no one left the aqueducts. The above-city, the City of Cries, considered us a slum. They had no idea of the depth in our culture. We wanted it that way. We didn’t bother them and they didn’t bother us. Ironically, when I enlisted in the army, the intense training of the dust gangs and our code of loyalty served me well, helping me survive and eventually even thrive in a military culture where at first no had believed I would last even a season.

  What had happened to my parents? My mother died giving me birth and I had never found my father. Too many of the dust rats from my youth were also gone. Murdered. In prison. Dead by disease, illness, accident, poverty, or poisoning from unfiltered water. The memory of their faces haunted me in the gloom and parched air.r />
  A few had survived.

  * * *

  I found the Black Mark at the junction of two hidden tunnels. I was surprised to see it in a place I remembered from so many years ago. Jak constantly shifted the location of his casino and he rarely used the same place twice. He could fold it down, pack it away, and vanish as completely as the sea above had done eons ago, under the desiccated sky of Raylicon.

  Gambling was illegal on Raylicon, especially in Cries, a place that defined the bastion of conservative tradition. You couldn’t find the Black Mark unless you knew where to look, and you wouldn’t know unless Jak invited you. He didn’t need a crowd; the expense accounts of his clientele more than made up for their limited numbers. They wanted an exclusive establishment and he was more than happy to oblige. He had the cream of the criminal elite at his fingertips.

  Tonight the intersection was dark except for the casino’s faint glimmer. It nestled in a crevice of the tunnel wall, no windows showing, nothing except sleek black walls. No one intercepted me as I approached, though security was surely monitoring my approach. The building seemed part of the tunnel, just barely visible due the iridescent sheen of its black walls. No entrance appeared.

  “Jak,” I said to the empty air. “Open up.”

  Silence. I waited.

  A wall of the casino shimmered. When the light faded, Jak stood framed in a doorway there. He was dressed in black as always, both his trousers and pullover. His black hair spiked on his head and his coal eyes smoldered with energy.

  “Major,” he drawled. “You’re back in Cries, I see.”

  “Looks like it.” Seeing him stirred up memories I wanted to stay hidden.

  He lifted his hand. “Come in. Improve the decor.”

  I walked past him into a dimly lit foyer with a hexagonal shape. “I never did before.”

  His lips quirked upward. “Good to see you, too, Bhaaj. What brings you to haunt my life?”

  Haunt indeed. We were ghosts from each other’s past. I looked around the foyer as the entrance faded into a solid wall. The only light came from several niches at different heights that gave off a dim red glow. Each held a jeweled human skull inset with rubies, emeralds, or diamonds. The skulls gaped with their glittering smiles and bejeweled eye sockets.

  “Looks like you already have people to haunt your life,” I said.

  “Not like you.” His voice was dark molasses.

  Damn. That voice had always been my undoing. In the dark of the canals, in our youth, he would whisper to me in those dusky tones, calling me a warrior goddess, and I would be done for.

  Stop it, I told myself.

  “I got haunted by Majda,” I said, slipping easily into the terse undercity dialect.

  His smile vanished. “I’ve nothing to do with them.”

  “Glad to hear.” Restless under his gaze, I crossed the foyer and traced a pattern on the wall. Nothing happened. He had changed the combination. I wondered why the Black Mark was here in a place I knew from so long ago. He never used a location for long. Might be coincidence. Might not.

  Jak came up beside me. “Been a long time.”

  I looked at him, really looked. It hurt. I recognized the scar over his left eyebrow, but he had a new one on his neck. I touched it, remembering other scars in places that didn’t show right now.

  “You’ve been busy,” I said.

  He grasped my hand and brought it down to his side. His fingers tightened around mine, clenching. When it began to hurt, I activated my biomech web and extended my fingers, prying his hand open.

  He let go of me with a jerk. For a moment I thought he would say painful words. Instead he leaned against the wall by a skull with sapphire eyes and crossed his arms. “What about Majda?”

  “They hired me.”

  “Over their own people?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Not bad.”

  I grimaced. “If it doesn’t kill me.”

  “Majda won’t kill you.” His voice sounded casual, but it didn’t fool me. “Might ruin you, though. Get on their bad side, you got nothing. They make sure you live to know.” Dryly he added, “Unless you offend their men. Then you’re dead.”

  That was too close to my thoughts. “Met two princes.”

  His eyebrows went up. “And you’re alive?”

  “For now.” I shifted my weight. “You got an office?” He would have the best security in the place where he did his work.

  “We’re in it.”

  “The entrance to the Black Mark?”

  His grin flashed, with a hint of menace. “Only an entrance when you came in. No more. The room moves.”

  I didn’t doubt it. I still didn’t believe it was his office, but it would have to do. “Secure here?”

  “Yah. Why? Majda got problems?”

  “It’s private.”

  “I ken.”

  I recognized his meaning. He would keep whatever I told him private. So I said, “They lost a prince.”

  He stared at me. “For ransom?”

  “Nahya. He ran off.”

  Wicked pleasure sparked in his eyes. “Good for him.”

  “Jak.”

  “Majda princes live in prison. Not good, Bhaaj. You shouldn’t help put him back.”

  I scowled at him. “They hired me to do a job. I took their money. So I’m doing the job.”

  He returned my glower. “Why would I help them oppress him?”

  “That a no?”

  “You didn’t ask a question.”

  “I need to know if he bought passage offworld.”

  His expression shuttered. “People don’t announce they’re Majda. Even someone who’d spent his life in seclusion ought to have more sense.”

  I paced across the hexagonal room to the wall where I had entered. Gods only knew where it would let me out now. “Probably tried to sell his clothes.”

  Jak laughed in his whiskey voice, deep and inebriating. “You think people’d pay to wear clothes worn by a Majda prince?” His tone became thoughtful. “Actually, they might. Could be lucrative, making that claim.”

  I turned around to him. “Jak.”

  “Why would I care about his clothes?”

  “They got diamonds. Sapphires, gold, opals. Real, not synthetic.”

  He gave an incredulous snort. “He went undercity dressed like that?”

  “I don’t know. You hear anything?”

  “Nothing. I’d like to, though.”

  “I think he went offworld. Couldn’t leave as a prince. He needed a new identity.”

  Jak stalked across the foyer to me. “So you came here, asking me to find out?” His lean muscles rippled under his clothes and he emanated a sense of barely controlled aggression.

  “Depends,” I said.

  He stopped in front of me. “On what?”

  “The price.”

  “You got a Majda expense line?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you don’t care about price.”

  I touched the cleft in his chin. “I wasn’t talking about that kind of price.”

  He caught my hand and held it in his tight grip. “What, Bhaaj?”

  I was too aware of how close he was standing. “Seven years ago you vanished.”

  “Someone owed me money. I went to get it.”

  “They were killers.”

  “Didn’t scare me.”

  “Yah, well, I thought you were dead.” I pulled away my hand. “Selei City has been restful.”

  “You’re bored there, Bhaaj.”

  “Want to be bored.”

  “Why did you come here?” he demanded. “For my help or my apology?”

  I wasn’t sure myself. “Whatever you got to give.”

  He considered me. Unexpectedly, his mouth quirked up. “I dunno. I help you with Majda, will you try putting me in seclusion?”

  What an alarming thought. He’d pulverize me. “Gods, no.”

  He burst into his intoxicating laugh. “Good.”
His smile faded. “If I hear anything, I might let you know.”

  It was more than I had expected. I nodded, sealing our bargain, and then stood there, uncertain what else to say. When the moment became awkward, I said, “Guess I better go.”

  He touched my lips. “Come back sometime when you don’t want anything.”

  I resisted the urge to kiss his fingers. I had no intention of asking him for anything except information. For some reason, though, when I opened my mouth, what came out was, “Might do that.”

  “Good,” Jak murmured. He tapped a panel by a gold-plated skull. The wall shimmered and vanished, revealing the junction outside where I had entered. I hadn’t felt the room turning, but that entrance was across the foyer from where I had entered.

  He spoke in a shadowed voice. “See you, Bhaaj.”

  “Yah.” I headed back out into the canals. Oddly, I felt lighter.

  Damned if I wasn’t glad to see Jak—which could only mean I had flitflies for brains.

  * * *

  I fell asleep on the couch in my new penthouse and woke up about seven hours into the forty-hour night. Through the window-wall across the room, I saw the lights of Cries glittering to the east. I went to the console, settled into its exorbitantly comfortable chair, and activated its EI. General Majda had promised me freedom from surveillance, but I believed that like I believed Jak was a paragon of virtue.

  At least I could do something about the EI. It took almost no time to find the spy codes they had installed to monitor me. It took a lot longer to deactivate them; Majda security did good work. After I finished neutralizing, blocking, or distracting the spies, I told the EI to search the Raylicon meshes and any offworld systems it could access. My goal: investigate the three Majda sisters.

  They made quite a trio. As General to the Pharaoh’s Army, Vaj Majda commanded the oldest branch of Imperial Space Command. The army had served the Ruby Dynasty for six thousand years. After the Imperator who oversaw the entire military, Vaj Majda was arguably the most powerful officer in ISC. I wondered how she felt about answering to a male Imperator. If she was against men serving in the military, she gave no public indication of that belief. She was no fool; to succeed in her career, she had to accept the realities of modern Skolia, where nearly as many men as women served in ISC. It even affected her staff, as evidenced by Major Ebersole’s position of authority on her staff, or the man who had brought me to Raylicon on the flyer, probably a retired military pilot.