Undercity - eARC

by Catherine Asaro

  “Good work at the Black Mark?” I asked.

  “Yah.” She led down the finely-tooled passage. “Enough for family.”

  I thought of the orphans she had taken in. “Got two more now.”

  “No worries.” She raised the cube, letting more of its light fall across me. “Better to have children than cubes, heh?”

  “Guess so.” The orphans were fortunate to end up here. Then it hit me. This family had another potential source of income, something people from all over the Imperialate would pay a great deal for. I doubted it would occur to them; it wouldn’t have to me when I lived here.

  “Got good tapestries in your home,” I said. “Glasswork, carvings, all of it. Nice.”

  “My husband makes them,” she said.

  Her husband was an artistic genius. And they were married. Although many couples here committed for life, most couldn’t afford a marriage license or simply didn’t fathom its purpose. We had our own ceremonies, none of which Cries recognized, but they meant more to us than a formal license. You also needed to go into Cries to get the license, which most of my people loathed doing. Some couldn’t even take the light, their eyes had become so accustomed to the dark.

  The Concourse, however, was more accessible. So I said, “Sell tapestries on Concourse,” and waited for the explosion.

  The woman swung around to me. “What! Crazy.”

  “Not crazy,” I said. “Tourists will pay more for one tapestry than Jak pays in a tenday.” At least they would if she and her husband knew they could get away with charging that much. “Your man can sell his carvings, too. And his glasswork.”

  “Got rocks in your head.” She resumed her walk down the tunnel.

  Rocks, pah. My people could make exquisite weavings, carvings, and glasswork, and nothing matched the haunting beauty of our music. Gods only knew how many were creating works that literally never saw the light of day. Tourists would pay huge sums for the arts of such an enigmatic, dangerous community. Beauty in the darkness. Yah, it would work. They would take the art home and talk about how they dared venture into the Cries undercity. Never mind that no one who actually lived undercity considered the tame, commercialized Concourse part of our world. Technically it belonged to us, and Cries vendors promoted it that way in their advertising.

  “It’s not crazy,” I said as I followed her.

  The woman just snorted. No matter. I’d work on the idea with both my people and Cries. Undercity vendors would need a license to set up a stall on the Concourse and that required a fee, not to mention approval by the city bureaucracy. It wouldn’t be simple, but we were citizens of Cries and we had the right to file.

  Somewhere in the distance, shouts reverberated, an echo that carried even to this secluded area, which was probably several kilometers away. The woman stopped, turning toward the noise.

  “Cartels,” I said. “Got to hurry. How far?”

  “Not much.” She glanced back at me. “These three, they took node-bliss only twice. After that, no more. They shook and jerked for days. Screamed. Cried. Begged for more.”

  If phorine induced a withdrawal that severe after only two doses, they must be powerful psions. “Are they all right now?” I asked.

  “Some.” The woman stepped into a crevice in the wall.

  I followed her into a small room. More tapestries graced the wall, fluffy pallets with quilts lay on the floor, and a carved table was set with food and water.

  Three people huddled on the beds. One was a young man. He lay on his side, curled in a fetal position, his arms wrapped around his stomach. An older teen in a clean tunic and loose pants sat on the pallet next to his, slouched against the wall, her knees drawn to her chest. A younger girl was sleeping on the bed next to hers.

  “Heya,” I murmured as I knelt next to the man. “Can you hear?”

  He opened his eyes. “Yah,” he whispered.

  “Had bliss?”

  “Before.” He closed his eyes. “No more.”

  I looked around the room. The woman who had brought me here was preparing three plates of food at the table.

  “How many days have they been here?” I asked.

  She turned to me. “Three, maybe four. They had a terrible time.”

  The older girl spoke in a raspy voice. “Bliss gone.”

  I hated seeing them like this. “It was bad?”

  “Very bad,” she whispered.

  I indicated the sleeping girl. “Is she okay?”

  The man sat up slowly, as if he ached everywhere. “Better than us.”

  “The bliss didn’t do so much for her,” the older girl said.

  Maybe the younger girl wasn’t as strong of a psion. “Why is it gone?” I asked.

  The girl fixed me with a cold stare. “Scorch dead.”

  “You bought from Scorch?”

  “She gave it to us,” the man said.

  No way would Scorch provide free drugs, not without some ulterior motive. “What did you give her?”

  The girl shrugged. “We moved crates for her.”

  As payment? Yah, right. Scorch had wanted them addicted. Why? Sure, she could make money off them once they were hooked, but given the low incidence of psions and the danger of pissing off the cartels, it didn’t seem worth the bother.

  “Anyone else do bliss?” I asked.

  The older girl shrugged. “Not know.”

  “Scorch had a place for us to live,” the man said. “To wait.”

  I suddenly felt ill. “Wait for what?”

  “Visitors.” He motioned toward the ceiling. “Away from Raylicon.”

  “Where was Scorch going to put you?” I asked, though I feared I already knew.

  “Never saw,” the girl rasped. “Never got to the Alcove. Scorch died.”

  I wanted to hit something. Scorch had meant to hide psions in the Alcove. Addicting them to phorine was nauseatingly brilliant. It not only let her find empaths and telepaths, it made them dependent on her, willing to do whatever she wanted. She hadn’t been some minor cog in a weapons smuggling operation. Her sins had been even uglier. She intended to sell psions to the Traders.

  “Scorch is fucked,” I said. “Sell you into slavery.”

  The older girl scowled at me. “Lying.”

  “Not lying,” I said flatly.

  In the distance, a rumbling began, rising into thunder and then dying away, the noise of falling rock. I had to get out here, find out what was happening.

  I stood up. “Stay here, yah?”

  “Don’t need to stay,” the girl said defiantly. “Almost better.”

  “The cartels are fighting out there,” I said. “Carbines, tanglers.”

  They all just looked at me. They knew better then to mess with the cartels, but they would never admit it out loud, especially not to me, the intruder who had cut off their phorine supply.

  I looked around at them. “You feel?”

  “Feel what?” the man asked.

  “Thoughts,” I said. “Moods.”

  The girl stiffened. “Not crazy!”

  That had certainly hit a nerve. “Not crazy,” I agreed. “But psion, yah?”

  “Psion?” the man asked.

  “Someone who feels moods,” I said. “Maybe thoughts.”

  The man and the girl looked at each other. Neither denied my words.

  “I’m tired,” the man said. He lay back down and closed his eyes.

  I looked at the woman who had brought me. She had left clean chamber pots in the corner and was holding the three that had been there.

  “You all need to stay hidden,” I told her.

  The woman nodded. “We will stay.”

  Good. I had to go, however. I had work to do, and I was royally pissed. Scorch hadn’t just broken the code we lived by, she had shattered it.

  I wished I hadn’t killed her, so I could kill her now.

  XIX

  Thunder

  In the aqueducts, we fought guerilla style, hiding in ruins that we
re over five thousand years old. The cartels wouldn’t care who they killed in their firestorm. Even if no one died, which seemed about as likely as no one cussing, the fighting could do serious damage to the aqueducts, an anthropological marvel unmatched by anything in our modern age.

  Laser carbines didn’t thunder, they hissed, but whatever the shot hit often exploded or collapsed as well as burned. Somewhere up ahead, rocks were crashing as walls toppled. I kept my pulse revolver up and ready as I eased through crevices in the walls, moving toward the noise.

  Max, I thought. Did that Kajada punker get my warning to Dig?

  Yes, he thought. She reached Dig about ten minutes before the Vakaars attacked.

  Ten minutes was almost nothing, but it could be an eternity compared to no warning at all. I hoped it had been enough.

  Toggle combat mode, I thought. Max would do it anyway the moment I started fighting, but I wanted the heightened senses it gave me now even though it meant my combat libraries might take over my actions if my node calculated I was in danger of getting whacked.

  I eased out of a crevice, staying behind a column on the midwalk. A flash of light up ahead threw the canal into sharp relief, and then darkness descended again. I used my IR vision and thermal imaging to study the area, a mid-sized canal. Dust covered the midwalk, and the bittersweet stench of fused grit filled the air. Hiding places were everywhere, not only in the walls, but also in the ceiling crusted with small stalactites, and the canal floor, which was riddled with fallen rocks and columns that had toppled from the midwalk.

  Three dimensional battlefield, Max thought.

  Unfortunately. Send my beetles to monitor places I can’t see, like the ceiling.

  A scrape came from behind me. I jerked around in time to see two figures in dark clothes sprint down the midwalk and dart into a crack in the wall. It was a good thing I moved, because a laser shot came from behind me at the same time, barely missing my body as it hit the wall. A fused chunk of rock flew out and struck my shoulder. Even as I stumbled, I was firing at whoever had used the laser. My node fine-tuned the shot based on its predictions of their location, and under the force of my shot, the wall exploded a few meters away. As rocks avalanched into the canal below, a woman tumbled with them, out of her hiding place, cussing as she fell.

  “You’re dead, Bhaaj,” a woman said behind me.

  I dodged the instant before she spoke. My enhanced ears picked up a noise and my node set me into motion. Even with all that, I barely leapt aside in time. Her shot whizzed so close, I smelled ionized air. She was above me, hidden in a crevice where the wall met the roof. I fired, and spinning projectiles from my gun flashed through the air.

  The bullets tore apart her body. As blood dripping from the ceiling, I stared at the remains of her hiding place. No matter how many deaths I had caused or seen during combat, I never became inured to killing another human being. I hated it. But I hated dying even more.

  I didn’t recognize what was left of the woman, but I knew the insignia that showed on the remains of her sleeve: a line of light cutting through a red orb. Vakaar. It had probably once been a gang tag, but now it symbolized the cartel. It gave warning: they were after me. Maybe they had heard that I had warned Kajada about their attack, or Hammer might want me dead on principle, because Dig and I went way back. Whatever the reason, a Vakaar punker had just tried to whack me.

  I stepped into a niche in the wall and stood still. In the distance, falling rocks crashed and rumbled and then petered into silence. I strained to pick up fainter noises, the scrapes that might come from snipers hiding in the rocks.

  Max? I thought.

  T*** **end**

  What?

  No answer.

  Well, damn. The EM pulse from my bullets must have affected my biomech. That wasn’t supposed to happen; my web had safeties and backups, besides which, the EM pulse was confined to a volume of space about the size of a body. Still, no system was perfect. At least Max managed part of an answer. I hoped that meant he could fix the damage.

  Yes, Max thought. I’m mak**+ repairs.

  Good. You see anything with my beetles?

  Fighting in this canal, up ahead.

  Show me.

  My perception shifted as he linked my optics to the beetle, so I saw what it saw. We were near the ceiling about one hundred meters down the midwalk. A man with a carbine lay stretched out up here on a hidden shelf, which from below probably looked like a flat part of the roof. The Vakaar insignia glinted on his gauntlets. Normally punkers didn’t flaunt their symbols. Dig and Hammer were too smart to identify their people, which was probably why their cartels had survived when others disappeared. But today Vakaar was making a statement: We own these canals.

  A woman stepped into view on the midwalk below, a tangler gripped in her hand. She wore no insignia, neither the Vakaar orb nor the Kajada ruzik. In fact, it looked like she had thrown on her clothes, her frayed tunic rumpled and her trousers with no belt or holster for her gun. Kajada, I’d wager, warned at the last minute that Vakaar was coming. The woman slipped behind a stone curtain and my beetle followed. Another man crouched back there, also Kajada, it looked like.

  I recognized none of these people. True, I’d been gone for years, but even so, with all the punkers I had seen in the past few days, how could Dig be the only one I knew? More people lived here than I had realized. The aqueducts formed a huge network under the city, the Vanished Sea, and the ruins of ancient Cries. Although anthropologists had spent generations mapping the area, the city didn’t consider our population worth the expense or risk of a census. Did anyone know how many people lived here? The police cared about the cartels and crime bosses, but no one bothered the gangs or riders as long as they kept off the Concourse. It was another reason the “Rec Center” was doomed to failure; even if my people wanted to go there, the police would stop them.

  A scrape came from above. Following the sound, my beetle flew back to the man’s hiding place in the ceiling. My fried systems still weren’t working right, because the bot flew too close to his face. He stiffened and batted at the air. Damn! Although Raylicon had species of tiny flying reptiles, my beetle wouldn’t pass a close inspection.

  Max, get the bot away from him, I thought.

  As the beetle darted away, the Vakaar man fired at the curtain where the Kajada punkers had hidden. The barrier collapsed in a blast of light, and fused rock rained over the midwalk. I twitched as if I had been there instead of a hundred meters away. Although the shot destroyed the curtain, no remains showed of the two punkers who had taken cover there. They must have moved on. That the sniper fired anyway could mean he didn’t have sensors that located people. I doubted it, though. The cartels traded, stole, or smuggled plenty of tech-mech. More likely, my beetle spooked him.

  Max, check the calibration for my bots, I thought. Don’t let them fly so close to the punkers.

  How do they identify a punker?

  Good question. Anyone in or near the fighting. I hoped Colonel Majda kept her word about not sending troops to fight.

  The Vakaar man dropped from his hiding place and landed in a crouch. He checked the area, kicking aside rock fragments that weren’t fused to the ground or each other. Finally he climbed over the debris and took off down the midwalk, striding away from my location. When he was gone, I ran to the debris and searched for signs of human remains. I found none. Relieved, I clambered over the rocks and set off after the punker. Up ahead, in the distance, I could see him jogging. I doubted he had augmented hearing, since he didn’t seem to realize I was following him. Somewhere farther down the canal, the rumble of an avalanche echoed in the canal.

  My spinal node sent a direct thought to my mind, its voice eerily metallic compared to Max’s more human tones: Terminate target? it asked.

  No, just follow. My intention was to stop deaths, not cause them. Hell, I even wanted the punkers to survive. The percentage of adults in the undercity was already too low. We didn’t need more of them
whacked, leaving a community run by hungry children and pissed off adolescents.

  My node took over my reflexes before I knew what happened, and I jumped off the midwalk the instant before a laser blasted the pathway. I landed on the canal floor in knee-deep dust, my legs bending, my hydraulics absorbing the impact. Powder swirled around me and the acrid stink of fused powder saturated the air, activating the filters in my nose. I sprinted down the canal, kicking up more dust, obstructing the view of whoever had fired. The jammer would shield me from their sensors—I hoped. Another shot hit the ground behind me. Damn! That was from the other side of the canal. I zigzagged in the clouds of powder. Shots came from the midwalks, the ceiling, the ground. The shooters were mostly firing at each other, but another blast hit the canal just meters ahead of me.

  I crouched down, hiding under an outcropping with an overhang. Max, can you tell who is shooting, and from where?

  A Vakaar is hiding in the canal floor to your right, he answered. Another Vakaar is on the opposite midwalk and someone is in the ceiling above her, Vakaar I’d guess since he isn’t attacking the punker below him. Two shooters on this side, identity unknown, probably Kajada.

  Got it. The dust was settling, so I edged farther under the overhang. Powder went up my nose and I choked.

  Clearing obstruction, Max thought. The dust stopped bothering me as my filters broke the particles down into molecules my body could absorb.

  A lightshow of shots suddenly crisscrossed the canal, flaring bolts that attacked the ground, the walls, and the columns that supported the aqueduct. Slagged rock flew everywhere, mixed with the swirling dust. I gagged on the stench of melted dust.

  Goddamn it! I lifted my gun. They’re going to destroy the canal.

  If you start firing, they will locate and kill you, Max thought.

  I’m not shooting at anyone. Damned if I didn’t want to, though.

  Good. Because you’re the only one with a pulse revolver, and both sides probably want you dead.

  Not Dig. I hoped.

  True. But her people are unlikely to have the same compunctions about killing you.

  Are you picking up anyone else in the area besides punkers?