Undercity

by Catherine Asaro

  “There’s risks and there’s insanity,” he said. “Scorch has a lucrative operation. She wouldn’t risk it by rizzing-off the General of the Pharaoh’s Army.”

  I slid into the pool until only my shoulders were above water. “That depends on the stakes.”

  Jak leaned against the doorframe. “The undercity survives in the shadow of Majda. We don’t bother them, they don’t notice us. Why would Scorch upset that balance?”

  “Maybe she’s selling to Traders.”

  “I hope you didn’t say that to her.”

  I squinted at him. “I might have, uh, implied it.”

  He stared at me. “And you’re still alive?”

  “She fired a damn laser carbine at me.”

  “I take it she missed.” He grinned suddenly. “Or maybe she didn’t. You’ve a harder head than anyone else I know.”

  “Ha, ha. Funny.”

  “Scorch wouldn’t sell a Majda prince.”

  “I don’t know, Jak. A Majda guard pulled Scorch’s recorder off Krestone’s body.”

  “You think this Oxil guard works for Scorch?”

  Good question. “Could be.”

  “Why kill Krestone?”

  “I’ll bet the captain was figuring out some of this.”

  “Still makes no sense.” He shook his head. “Scorch hates the Traders. Why endanger her operation in a way guaranteed to bring down Majda’s wrath? It’s crazy.”

  I thought about that. “Not if Scorch disappears off-planet. If she’s sold Dayj, she can afford to go anywhere.”

  “I’m surprised she didn’t fry your ass.”

  I smirked to cover my unease. “She likes me.”

  “Yah, the same way Chief Takkar likes you.”

  “Oxil works for our dear captain.”

  Jak made an incredulous noise. “You think the Majda police chief is involved in a conspiracy to sell Majda princes to slave traders? What mental asylum did you escape from?” He came over, sheet and all, and crouched by the pool. “Scorch is going to kill you.”

  “No she won’t. I saved her life once.” Of course, in her view that debt was now repaid. “Besides, if I disappear, people will look for me. It will draw too much attention to her.”

  He pulled off the sheet and slid into the water. “Maybe.”

  I swam over to him. “Hey, it’s fine.” So was he.

  As we drifted together, though, I wondered who I was trying to convince, him or myself.

  * * *

  Jak took off after our bath, but not before extracting a promise that I would have third-meal with him, which most people ate before they slept at noon. Interesting timing. He wanted to come to the penthouse, too, which meant either he liked the place more than he would admit or else he didn’t want me knowing where he had moved the Black Mark.

  Out on the balcony, I released my beetle-bots, the red one to look for Oxil and the green to find Scorch. Then I went inside, sat at the console, and data-mined the meshes for info on Scorch. I found zilch: she hid better than a special ops agent. After an hour of work, I finally located a news holo with her in the background. The colorful image floated above my console showing a crowd of people gathered in a Cries plaza. They were watching a broadcast playing above a public holo-pedestal, a story about some government event in Selei City on the world Parthonia. That was why I had set up my business in Selei City; it served as the seat of an interstellar government, offering plenty of opportunities for a discreet investigator.

  Scorch watched the broadcast with an odd look, a mixture of fascination and loathing. I didn’t see why; the story looked boring, just images of people filing into a building. The reporters went on and on about the excitement of the event. It must have been a slow news day. Given that the Assembly met four times a year, every year, and that half the delegates only attended as VR simulacrums, the broadcasters were really pushing it with all this supposed excitement.

  After the holo finished, I sat rubbing my chin. Why would Scorch care about who went to a routine Assembly session?

  A light flickered on my gauntlet and Max’s voice rose into the air. “Want to chat?”

  I recognized the code phrase. “Go ahead. We’re secure.”

  “I have a trace on Oxil,” he said. “The red beetle picked her up by a lake at the palace.”

  “Good work. Link me in.”

  Max connected me to the beetle through his comm network. As I closed my eyes, a scene formed; I was on the shore of the Lake of Whispers, one of the few fresh water bodies on Raylicon. I wasn’t actually seeing the feed real-time. The beetle recorded the scene, digitized the data, and sent it to Max, who relayed it to my spinal node, which converted the data into signals that my brain could process as optical input. So I “saw” the scene. With all that going on, a delay existed between what was happening and when I saw it, probably a few minutes in this case, when I wasn’t that far away from the scene I was watching.

  The lake spread out before me like a green mirror rippled with breezes, reflecting the pale sky and surrounding foliage. Imported trees grew around the edge of the lake and dropped silky green streamers into the water. Huge, flat flowers floated on its surface like red and blue disks. It was beautifully alien, all the more so because that profusion of plants didn’t naturally occur in Cries. Raylicon hadn’t dried out completely; we had fresh water underground if you went deep enough, but it wasn’t easy to find.

  Oxil stood gazing at the lake. She wasn’t doing much except enjoying the view. Breezes ruffled her spiky black hair. Probably she was on a break from work.

  After five minutes, I said, “Max, this is boring.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Bring me out.” I opened my eyes as the scene faded. “Let me know if anything happens.”

  “Will do. I have a report now from the other beetle.”

  I sat up straighter. “It found Scorch?”

  “Partially.”

  “How partially?”

  “She is well shrouded. The bot can’t record her voice or actions. However, it did locate her in the Vanished Sea.”

  “Why is she out there?” Few people braved that barren desert.

  “I don’t know.”

  I stood up. “Think I’ll go for a visit.”

  * * *

  I jogged across the sea basin, doing my best to keep to the shadows cast by ridges that rose from the parched ocean floor like giant wrinkles. My feet pounded the ground, my smart clothes cooled my skin, and the jammer in my pack shrouded my progress. Max registered my speed as seventy kilometers per hour. Going on foot afforded better security than a flycar; it was easier to hide a person than a vehicle. I would have to walk at least part of the way back, though. At these speeds, my body built up damage faster than my nanomeds could do repairs. Even with high-pressure hydraulics to support my augmented skeleton and a microfusion reactor to provide energy, my body couldn’t handle the stress of such speeds for long before it began to break down.

  It took me twelve minutes to cover fourteen kilometers. As I neared my destination, Max thought, Best to hide now.

  I focused my vision on a bluff ahead. How about there?

  Yes, that would work. Scorch is on the other side.

  I climbed the jagged rock formation to a cleft at the top. By wiggling through the opening on my stomach, I reached a point where I could train my spyglass on the other side of the bluff. Scorch was down there with a woman I didn’t recognize, the two of them partially hidden under an overhang mottled with blue and green mineral deposits. A flycar also waited in its shadow. Both Scorch and her companion wore clothes patterned in colors like the desert, offering yet more visual camouflage. I couldn’t hear them, either. My beetle was circling the bluff, but even this close it only managed to send me a few random words of their conversation.

  Easing down the bluff, I crept nearer, silent and shrouded. When I crouched in the shadow of a rock spike near the ground, I finally picked up their conversation.

  “. . . on th
e ship,” Scorch was saying. Her spike of hair stood up behind her ear and glistened with oil. She still had the laser carbine, which she held down at her side.

  “The ship is gone,” the other woman said. She looked like a drifter from the port, with her ragged jumpsuit and scuffed boots. However, she wore a top-notch shoulder holster that held a tangler snug against her body.

  “What about the passenger manifest?” Scorch asked.

  “I took care of it,” her companion said. “The manifest has his fake name. Caul Wayer.”

  Scorch frowned. “The name on that ID I sold him was Caul Waver. Not Wayer.”

  The other woman shrugged. “Waver, Wayer, the port made a mistake. Happens all the time. You’re set.”

  “Good.” Scorch indicated the woman’s tangler. “I’ll take that back.”

  Her companion pulled out the gun and tossed it to her. Scorch grabbed it out of the air, flipped it around—

  And shot the drifter.

  VII

  The Caverns

  Once before, I’d seen someone die by tangler fire. It wasn’t any easier to take this time than the first. The drifter fell to the ground in a violent seizure as the shot scrambled her brain. She convulsed so hard that her body arched high off the ground. It took several minutes for her life to end, and it seemed like eternity. I didn’t realize that I’d lunged forward until my foot hit a rock and I sprawled on my stomach. The thudding of the drifter’s convulsions covered my fall; otherwise my futile attempt to stop the murder could have ended with Scorch shooting me, too.

  Scorch wasn’t done yet. She used the laser carbine to incinerate the drifter’s body, leaving nothing but a few ashes. Even as I watched, the breezes stirred them into the air. It wouldn’t be long before they dispersed altogether.

  Without a backward look, Scorch boarded the flycar. Seconds later it soared away over the desert.

  I didn’t move at first. When Scorch’s flyer was no longer visible in the parched sky, I walked to where the drifter had died. Most of the ashes were already gone. I clicked a hollow disk off my gauntlet and scraped a bit of the remaining powder into the container.

  I headed back to Cries.

  “Message incoming,” Max said.

  I jerked, surfacing from the trance I had fallen into during my fourteen-kilometer hike across the Vanished Sea. I had just reached the outskirts of Cries, exhausted and numb.

  “Message?” I asked.

  “From Jak,” Max said. “Do you want to receive?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Jak’s voice growled on my gauntlet comm. “Got dinner, Bhaaj. Alone.”

  Damn. I had forgotten to meet him at the penthouse. “Sorry.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Muttering Lane. Near the seashore.”

  “Be there in—” He paused. “Three minutes.”

  “Thanks.”

  I kept walking, headed into a deserted industrial district. After a while, a sleek black hover car edged around a warehouse and settled on the cobblestones up ahead. I activated the dart thrower in my left gauntlet and kept walking. You could get a license to carry darts, which only stunned, or even a pulse gun, but not a tangler. Never a tangler. You couldn’t trace tangler shots and they made death into a slow torture. Police hated them. I hated them. Right now I didn’t like myself, either. How many people had died by Scorch’s hand because I saved her life all those years ago? And for what? So I could call in the favor decades later and figure out that she had sold or killed a Majda prince. If I had let her die, maybe Dayj would be all right.

  Right, I thought bitterly. If Scorch had died, someone else would have risen to fill the vacuum she left in the ugly side of the aqueducts, and I was a fool if I thought otherwise. This was what I had hated about the undercity, one of the reasons I had never wanted to come back.

  When Jak jumped down from the hover car, I deactivated the dart thrower. I walked up to him and put my arms around his waist. He held me, my head against his shoulder.

  “Want to tell me about it?” he asked.

  “Not now.” I let him go. “Take me home?”

  “Yah.”

  I slid into the passenger seat and he took the driver’s side. Not that it mattered where we sat; neither of us drove. He entered our destination and the car headed back to my place. Its sleek black upholstery shifted under me, trying futilely to ease the tension in my muscles.

  “Not hungry for dinner,” I said.

  Jak was watching me. “What happened, Bhaaj?”

  I took a breath. Then I told him.

  When I finished, Jak said, “You could be next.”

  I stared out the window at the outskirts of Cries passing below us, long stretches of stone terraces that went on and on, aesthetic and empty. I said only, “I know.”

  “That name, Caul Waver, it sounds like an alias.”

  “Apparently.” I shook myself mentally and said, “Max, any luck in finding either the name Caul Wayer or Caul Waver on the passenger manifest of any ship?”

  “Sorry, nothing.” His voice came out of my gauntlet comm. “The port mesh system is well-protected.”

  “I can have Royal check,” Jak said.

  I squinted at him. “Who?”

  “Royal Flush.”

  “Oh. Yah.” I’d forgotten. He had named his gauntlet EI after the legendary poker hand that earned Jak the money to start the Black Mark. He’d been training that EI for decades. It was famous. Or maybe infamous was a better word. Jak never offered its services for free. “What price?” I asked.

  His gaze darkened. “That you don’t get yourself killed.”

  I managed a smile. “Deal.”

  While he spoke into his comm, telling Royal what we wanted, I watched, intrigued. Jak had one of the best networks in the undercity. Rumor claimed his system was even more extensive—and more shadowy—than the Cries military network. I didn’t try to see what pass codes he entered. Honor among thieves and all. I no longer stole from anyone, and I hadn’t since I entered the army, but I never forgot the code.

  Jak glanced at me. “Can you give me the ashes of the woman Scorch killed? If Royal can ID them, it might help his search.”

  I handed over the disk. “Max got a partial analysis. The DNA doesn’t correspond to anyone he recognized.”

  Jak clicked the disk into his gauntlet. “You believe this Caul Waver is Prince Dayjarind?”

  “Possibly.” I thought back to Scorch’s meeting with the drifter. “They said the name was on some manifest. It could be a ruse. Scorch killed that drifter so she wouldn’t talk. I’ll bet the drifter killed Krestone.” Thinking about the case helped me regain my equilibrium. “I want to know what that pin on Krestone’s body recorded.”

  “Whatever Lavinda Majda talked about in the car.” Jak frowned at me. “You think Colonel Majda helped Dayj escape?”

  “I suppose anything is possible.” It seemed about as likely, though, as me sprouting a new head. I thought about the other people in the flycar. “If I had to guess, I’d bet Scorch was spying on Krestone rather than Lavinda Majda. I can’t imagine one of the sisters betraying the family.”

  Jak snorted. “Freeing a demoralized young man is hardly a betrayal.”

  “I know. But they don’t see it that way.” I pushed back my dusty hair. “They have a point, Jak, however much we don’t like it. No way could Dayj deal in the undercity. Scorch would make byte fodder out of him.”

  “You think she sold him?”

  “I’m hoping I’m wrong.”

  Max suddenly spoke. “I have new data on Oxil. Incoming.”

  “Oxil?” Jak peered at me. “What is that?”

  “Not what. Who. Just a second.” I closed my eyes as my node translated Max’s feed into images I could see. A forest of drooping trees and wild flowers formed. Oxil was walking a few paces ahead as she spoke into her gauntlet comm. The beetle-bot hummed in closer so I could hear.

  “. . . nothing more,” Oxil said. “Her dinner date ga
ve her a damn alibi.” A pause. “They may arrest her anyway. The source of her alibi isn’t at all reliable.”

  I smiled, my eyes closed. “Majda police don’t like you, Jak.”

  “Feeling is mutual,” he muttered.

  Oxil leaned against the mossy trunk of a tree. I missed her next words, but then the beetle hummed in closer.

  “—best if I don’t talk with you from here,” Oxil was saying. “The risk of detection is too high.” She paused. “All right. The cavern. One hour.” She lowered her arm, and the view receded as my bot flew away before Oxil noticed it hovering about.

  I was about to withdraw when the beetle sighted two people through the trees. Follow, I thought to it.

  We moved past the branches and came out at the Lake of Whispers. Corejida and Ahktar were standing on the shore together, their hands clasped as they gazed at the water.

  Corejida was crying.

  She made no sound, but tears ran down her cheeks. Ahktar slid his arm around her waist and she put hers around his. They held each other, their heads leaning together.

  “They’ll find him,” Ahktar said. His voice caught.

  “Yes,” Corejida whispered. “Surely they will.”

  I felt small. Their son’s disappearance was killing them and I hadn’t done a damn thing to help. Not knowing if he was alive or dead had to make it even worse for them.

  The scene faded and I opened my eyes to see Jak watching me.

  “Oxil works for Scorch,” I said. “She must have been Dayj’s inside contact at the palace.”

  Jak lapsed into dialect. “Scorch got him ID. Scared shitless Majda will find out.”

  “Then should have killed me,” I said.

  “Knew people’d look for you. And she owed you.” His gaze darkened. “Won’t stop her a second time. Paid her debt.”

  He had a point. “If I don’t find Dayj, Majda fires me. Then Scorch kills me.”

  “Yah.”

  I wished he had a reason to argue the point.

  Jak’s gauntlet hummed. He tapped the comm. “What?”

  Royal Flush answered in that sleek, sensuous voice of his, the one that women fell in love with before they realized he was an EI. “I have data on Caul Waver.”