Undercity

by Catherine Asaro

  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.

  “EI,” I said.

  “Attending.” It spoke in slightly nasal voice.

  “Do you have a name?” I asked.

  “Not yet. I was installed this morning.”

  “What should I call you?”

  “I have no preference.”

  I’d have to think of a name. Anything was better than Hey, you. “Can you answer questions about the Majdas?”

  “Yes, I have a great deal of data on their House.”

  We would see about that. “I was wondering how the general reconciles the way her House treats Majda princes with the fact that most Skolian men have equal rights with women.”

  “Majda princes hold to a higher standard.”

  “That so?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who appointed the team that programmed you?”

  “General Vaj Majda.”

  That figured. I buckled down and set to work, researching the House. They had more corporations, investments, and financial connections than I could count—and as far as I could tell, it was all legit. I delved into data grottos unknown even to ISC intelligence and found nothing. Majda came by their wealth legally. It added to their invulnerability; they couldn’t be blackmailed. If someone wanted to manipulate them, kidnapping one of their princes might be the only way.

  They threw me a few surprises with their husbands. Prince Paolo had the rank, heredity, and looks expected of a Majda consort, but he lacked the supposed “moral” background. Granted, if all grooms among the aristocracy truly had to be virgins on their wedding night, the noble Houses would die out for lack of mates. They were discreet, however. Paolo, however, had openly enjoyed love affairs as a bachelor, yet Lavinda married him anyway. It didn’t take long to see why. He excelled at business as well as architectural design. He knew how to make money, and I had no doubt he was doing it in buckets for Majda.

  Nor was Paolo the only one. The general’s consort, Izam, had lived in seclusion his entire life, but that didn’t change his genius for finance. His name was associated with the boards of a good fraction of their corporations. Vaj might be rigid in how she expected her consort to live, but she was too savvy to ignore his prodigious business acumen.

  “What about Ahktar?” I asked. “Dayj’s father. Does he do finance?”

  “I see no indication of such,” the EI said. “However, I have almost no data on him.”

  “Can you connect me to the EI at the palace called Jan?”

  “Yes, I can create this link.”

  “Good. Set it up.” I made sure my security fixes were in place. I didn’t want any Majdas eavesdropping on my talks with Jan, either.

  A mellow voice came out of the console, the same EI that I had spoken to about Dayj’s holo landscapes. “My greetings, Major Bhaajan. What can I do for you?”

  “Hello, Jan.” I settled back in my chair. “What do you have on Prince Ahktar’s education?”

  “He has none.”

  “He must read.”

  “He rarely uses the library.”

  “Does he involve himself with Majda finances?” His wife ran the corporations, after all.

  After a moment, Jan said, “I find no indication that he has either an interest or the talent for such an involvement.”

  I tapped my chin. “Almost no rank, money, or skills. He’s not handsome. No business sense. Why did Corejida marry him?”

  “You wish me to offer a theory?”

  “I wish.”

  “She loves him.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “She loves him. This is an acceptable reason to marry.”

  “Sure, for the rest of us. Majdas live in another reality.”

  “I have no records of any aptitude tests for him. Informally, however, I can offer conclusions based on his behavior.”

  “Go ahead.” This was fascinating.

  “He nurtures. He probably has a great aptitude for nursing or social work. It also makes him a good parent.”

  “Oh.” Was I that cynical, that I hadn’t believed Majdas could feel love?

  In my youth, I had feared, envied, even hated the Majdas, who lived in their stratospheric world of privilege. I’d been born in the undercity and left at an orphanage in Cries, what we called the above-city. I’d lived for three years before I ran away with an older girl, a “mature” orphan all of five. She had lived in the aqueducts until the city inflicted one of its periodic sweeps on us, rounded up a handful of undercity kids, and dumped them in an orphanage. We always ran away as soon as we could, back to the aqueducts. Back home.

  Unlike most of my people, I had always wanted out, but on my terms, not those of some Cries authority. The day I reached my sixteenth birthday, I enlisted, and after that, I’d worked like a fanatic to qualify for officer training. People said it was impossible for an enlistee with no connections to win a place in that program, but I’d done it, more out of sheer, cussed determination than because I was better qualified than the other applicants. I had resented those cadets with the advantages of a privileged birth that made it so much easier for them to advance. With Dayj’s parents now, however, I only saw two desperate people who loved their son. I couldn’t forget their haunted expressions as they entreated me to find him.

  “Jan,” I said, “do you know any reason why one of the Majdas might help Dayj escape?”

  “Escape implies he was in prison.”

  I didn’t bother to deny it.

  After a pause, Jan said, “I can think of no reason why any member of his family would facilitate his departure.”

  “Has anyone connected to the Majda family or the palace staff ever shown any indication they might sympathize with Dayj if he wanted to run away?” I thought for a moment. “Have any of them donated to a cause that supports ideals consistent with any wish he might have to break tradition? Made grants to such institution? Invested in a company? Supported either an individual or an organization, legal or otherwise, that might have helped Dayj leave?”

  Jan was quiet for a while. Finally she said, “I find no such connection.”

  “That can’t be.” With a business empire as vast as the Majda holdings, it would require a deliberate effort to exclude every such person or group.

  “Such a link would be offensive to the House,” Jan said.

  So it was a deliberate exclusion. “Someone must have helped him. He’s smarter than they think, a lot smarter, but even given that, he couldn’t have done it alone. Security is too tight.” I thought about negatives. “Who in your opinion is least likely to help him leave?”

  “General Majda,” Jan said.

  “Not his parents?”

  “They, also. But if he were truly unhappy, it would affect them more than the general.”

  “Doesn’t she care about his happiness?”

  “Yes,” Jan said. “Despite her reserve, she shows great affection for her nephew. I would call it love as far as I can determine that emotion.”

  “What about the other princes?”

  “Of the consorts, the one least likely to help Prince Dayj leave is probably Prince Paolo.”

  That was the last name I expected to hear. “I would have thought the opposite. Paolo knows what freedom is like.”

  “And he gave it up. Why, then, should Dayj have
it?”

  “I see your point.” I sat up, planting my booted feet on the floor, my hands clasped between my knees. “What about his uncles? One of General Majda’s brothers teaches psychology at a university.”

  “Tam might help. However, he no longer lives on Raylicon.”

  “Tam?”

  “Tamarjind Majda. The psychology professor.”

  “He wouldn’t need to live on Raylicon to help.” He could use the Kyle meshes to talk with his family. That web bypassed spacetime, making it possible to communicate via a universe where light speed was irrelevant. It allowed people to converse across interstellar distances.

  “I have no record of any communication between Prince Tamarjind and Prince Dayjarind,” Jan said.

  “Who does Tamarjind talk to when he contacts the palace?” It used to be his home, after all.

  “His sisters and nieces. Never his male relatives.”

  “Why not?”

  “General Majda forbade such communications.”

  I scowled. “Because he’s a bad influence?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know, Jan, I’d feel better if you said, ‘In the general’s opinion’ rather than just ‘Yes.’”

  “That would be inconsistent with my programming.”

  “Yah, well, that’s the problem.” Then I added, “But thanks for the information.”

  After I signed off, I sat in the dark and pondered. I had an idea how to find Dayj.

  If I was lucky, it wouldn’t kill me.

  V

  Scorch

  I hid in the mountains above the palace and spent the day spying on my employers. The jammer in my backpack shrouded me from sensors, and I had dusted my face with holo-powder. Smart dust. Nanos in the dust and in the cloth of my clothes formed a network I could link to the jammer, which then projected holos around my body of whatever lay behind me. In other words, I became invisible, provided no one looked too closely. The inner surface of the jumpsuit kept me warm and the outer surface matched its air temperature. It confused infrared sensors; if they couldn’t register the heat I generated, I became invisible to them. Sonic dampers in the jammer interfered with sound waves. It even created false echoes to fool neutrino sensors, which could penetrate almost anything. If Majda security made a concentrated effort, they could still find me, but I hadn’t given them cause for such a search. Not yet, anyway.

  I sat on a ledge against a cliff and watched the palace with my spyglass, checking everyone who went in or out of the building. I spent hours up there, protected from the icy wind by my climate-controlled jacket. Although Raylicon had a ninety-three-hour day, atmospheric churning and weather machines kept the climate from becoming too hot or cold for human life. I began my vigil before dawn and kept at it for hours. When boredom set in, I played Bulb Blaster, a game on my gauntlet that consisted of blowing up sky balloons with ludicrously creative guns. Mostly, though, I watched the palace.

  No one used the main entrance, a great arched affair fronted by imposing columns. Two other entries were visible from my vantage point, a servants’ door around the back and a family entrance on the side facing me. Servants came and went all day, but none of them did much. Mostly they stood around and chatted in a garden just overgrown enough to look artistic. They probably didn’t have many duties, given that robots could do most tasks as well as humans.

  Eventually I felt drowsy. Most of us on Raylicon slept three times a day, once at noon, once when night started and once toward its end. I fastened a cable from my belt to a ring I drilled into the cliff wall. The cable would judge my safety and reel me in if I rolled too close to the edge of the ledge. Next I set my gauntlet to alert me if anything interesting happened. And then I went to sleep.

  When I awoke a few hours later, the sun had barely moved. I resumed my vigil. And finally someone came out of the family entrance: Colonel Lavinda Majda, the youngest sister. She and three people in black clothes walked down a driveway bordered by trees. The woman in front was Captain Krestone, who was also a pilot, and I recognized the man in civilian clothes as one of the colonel’s aides. The second man was Duane Ebersole, the ranking officer among Lavinda’s guards.

  The driveway sloped away from the palace, and a flycar stood on the lawn at the base of the slope. Beyond that landing field, or landing meadow actually, mountains rose into the sky, including the one where I sat hiding.

  I spoke into my gauntlet. “Max, get me a tracer on Colonel Majda.”

  “Done,” a male voice said. It came from Max, the Evolving Intelligence in my gauntlet. Most people couldn’t afford a gauntlet EI, but in my line of work, he was invaluable. I could even “think” to him; he connected to the threads in my biomech web through sockets in my wrists, and those biothreads linked him to the node in my spine.

  “Send the green bot to follow them,” I said. I had two beetle-bot tracers, one with green wings and the other with red, both small enough that they fit together in the palm of my hand. I could only afford those two, but they were well worth the investment.

  “Dispatching,” Max told me.

  “Good.” I started down the mountain then, headed for Cries.

  * * *

  “A message is waiting for you,” the EI at my penthouse announced as I walked in the door.

  I stepped down into the sunken living room as the doors closed behind me. “Who’s it from?”

  “I don’t know,” the EI said. “I can’t ID the message.”

  I frowned. It should be easy to read the sender’s ID—unless they deliberately hid their information. “Did you scan for traps, viruses, or mesh plagues?”

  “Yes,” the EI said. “The message is clean.”

  As I crossed the living room, its window-wall polarized to cut down glare from the setting sun. I stood before the window and stared out at the Vanished Sea, a red desert streaked with blue mineral deposits left by the dried-up ocean. Whatever terraforming had made this world habitable before we humans arrived was slowly failing over the millennia. We could still live in this region, but eventually all of Raylicon would become hostile to human life. Someday we either had to heal this planet or leave.

  “Shall I play the message?” the EI asked.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  A familiar voice rose into the air. “Heya, Bhaaj. Got dinner.”

  I went over and flopped down on the couch. I put my feet up on the glass table in front of the sofa. The table polarized to mute reflections of the sunset.

  After a few moments of silence, however, I asked, “Is that all?”

  “It appears so,” the EI said.

  Pah. “Send this reply,” I grumbled. “I got work to do.”

  “Send it where?”

  Good question. If the EI couldn’t ID the message, it couldn’t reply.

  “Never mind.” I stood up again. It seemed I wouldn’t get any rest after all. “I’ll do it in person.”

  * * *

  The gambling dens at the Black Mark were no less notorious tonight than the last time I had seen them, seven years ago. Jak took me through the main room, no doubt to show off the place. We followed a raised walkway that skirted the central den, and a glimmering rail separated us from the pit. The players at the tables below wore evening dress or stranger couture, spiky-shouldered tunics and skin wraps that left more parts of the body exposed than covered. Waiters served drinks while Jak’s patrons spent millions. Other more sensual pursuits would be going on in private rooms. The Black Mark was discreet. Criminal, but circumspect.

  I tried not to notice Jak as he walked at my side. He had on black pants and a ragged black tight-shirt with no sleeves. He looked like a thug. One hell of a sexy thug, but I wasn’t noticing.

  Not noticing. Really.

  “You like my new art?” He motioned at the holos that swirled in spirals and twists on the walls. If I looked too long, I felt sick.

  “What’s it for?” I asked. “To make people give back whatever they ate downstairs?”

&
nbsp; He slanted a look at me. “Disgusting, Bhaaj.”

  “Yah. Well.”

  He smiled, the barest hint of that killer grin. “It increases their susceptibility to suggestion.”

  “Makes me dizzy.”

  “Really?” He seemed intrigued. “I wonder why it doesn’t work on you.”

  I scowled at him. “The army trained me to resist coercion, Jak. Programmed it into my biomech. Your dastardly attempts to lure your customers into spending large sums of money won’t work on me.”

  A wicked gleam came into his eyes. “Shall I lure you elsewhere, Bhaaj, my sweet?”

  “Call me ‘your sweet’ again and I’ll flip you over this railing.”

  He laughed, his voice rumbling. “Might be fun.”

  No way would I risk answering that one.

  We reached a dark hall with galaxies swirling around us, and after a few minutes of those demented stars, we entered a black room with niches in the walls like in the entrance foyer. Instead of skulls, however, these held exotic drinks lit from within by lasers. The glass table in the center of the room was set with black china, goldware, and goblets. A decanter of red wine sparkled next to several covered platters.

  “You like?” Jak asked.

  “It’s different,” I said. Eerie décor, but gorgeous in its own dark way. The undercity nurtured its own unique ideas of beauty.

  “Same as always,” Jak said.

  “Doesn’t all this black depress you?”

  “Never.” He nudged me toward the table. “Sit.”

  So I sat. Jak settled across the table from me and uncovered the platters, revealing steaks in pizo sauce, tart-bubbles, and sweet clams. He had always set a good table.

  I poured the wine. “You going to tell me why I’m here?”

  He was all innocence. “What, I can’t invite an old friend to dinner?”

  I gave him a goblet of red wine. “Your motives are always ulterior.”

  “Just got dinner, that’s all.” He leaned back in his chair, letting the muscles of his torso ripple under his thug shirt. He knew what it did to me when he moved like that, slow and languorous, danger contained but never controlled.