Undercity

by Catherine Asaro

  I nodded. “Three hours.”

  * * *

  During my previous searches of Scorch’s operation, I’d looked for the guns or clues to what happened to them. Today I was searching for drugs. I walked the tangled pathways of the Maze methodically, looking for anything out of place. Eventually I neared the cave where Scorch had stored the guns, also the place where I had given that dust gang a tykado lesson.

  Max, I thought. Is anyone in the cavern up ahead?

  No one, Max thought. Then, Yes, they are. Then, No.

  Which is it, yes or no?

  It’s hard to tell with all these rock formations. They cast sensor shadows.

  Do you think that dust gang will come back?

  It seems unlikely.

  I had to agree. Trust didn’t come easily here, and regardless of my origins, I was a stranger, a novelty that spurred them to ask come for one tykado lesson, but I doubted it would go any farther.

  Have you ever heard of node-bliss? I asked.

  You mean phorine? It’s a prescription medicine.

  I had never heard of phorine, either. What does it do?

  It’s a neural relaxant. Apparently it doesn’t show up in routine exams.

  That sounded odd. Why not?

  To detect its use, you need to compare the user’s neural map with their map when they aren’t affected. Max paused. I imagine that is a rather involved process.

  Jak said it didn’t do anything for him.

  I don’t have any effects listed for it.

  So what’s the point of the stuff?

  I can’t say. I don’t have any details.

  It sounds like a scam. That would be like Scorch, to sell useless junk while she convinced her buyers they were doing some high-powered “neural relaxant.”

  Bhaaj, Max thought. You asked me if anyone was in that storeroom.

  That’s right. I was almost at the entrance. Are you picking up someone?

  Yes. Max thought. They are gathering.

  They? Maybe all four had come back. I walked into the cavern—and stopped stock still.

  They stood waiting by the walls, the outcroppings, in front of me, children ranging in age from about six to young teens. Even as I counted twelve of them, a girl jumped down from a hiding place in the back and a young man stepped out from behind a ragged rock wall. The water-bottle girl stood in front with an older boy and girl, both about fourteen. The older girl was a leanly muscled with lighter hair, brown more than black, that barely touched her shoulders. I recognized her, though it took me a moment to remember why. She had stood with the Oey dust gang that day they had let me pass in the canal. I remembered them in particular because their gang had include a cyber-rider, which was rare in the aqueducts, the youth with the Oey cyber-tracings on his arm. She nodded to me, a gesture I had used at her age, acknowledging our fight Trainer.

  The older girl spoke. “Ready, all.”

  The group called out their answers. “Ready, all!”

  Well damn. Ready, all meant they were ready to train. They stood waiting for my response. How the blazes did I answer? No simple Sure, I can show you a few moves would work here. If I accepted this unexpected trust they offered, I was agreeing to do more than teach them tykado. I was offering leadership. I couldn’t make that promise, not when I had a life elsewhere. If I worked with them and then left Cries, it would betraying their trust. They had no idea they were asking me to make a much bigger decision, one that would tear apart my life. You can never go home: I had known, absorbed, lived that maxim for decades. I couldn’t stay on Cries.

  And yet . . . was it possible that here in front of me stood the glimmering of an answer to the broken pieces of the undercity. Like the light before dawn, a fledgling solution was coming to me.

  That solution, however, demanded a sacrifice I couldn’t make. I meant to tell them I had to leave. But somehow when I spoke, different words came out. In saying them, I made a decision, one that until this moment I hadn’t realized I intended.

  “Small ones here.” I pointed to my left. “Older, bigger here.” I pointed to the right.

  The children moved, a jumbled shifting of position.

  “Straight lines,” I barked.

  They snapped to attention, straightening out their lines. The Oey girl and the older boy remained at the front, assuming the position of leaders.

  “Ready, all,” I called to them.

  “Ready all!” They answered together, just as Jak, Dig, Gourd, and I had done with each other so many years ago, playing at being troops when we were small children, becoming more serious as we matured, four children supporting each other and our small circle of kin and kith. As unsettling as it was to hear those words from so many voices, it also felt familiar. Except this wasn’t a game. I intended to ask more from them. If we did this right, perhaps they could form a network of support for the undercity, giving these young people a purpose beyond running and fighting. My only experience came from the army, and I doubted most of these kids were interested in ISC, but the discipline I had learned as a dust ganger had meshed well with my life in the military. Maybe I could give back to the aqueducts a little of what had helped me.

  I raised my voice. “Ready to train?”

  “Ready to train,” they called in unison. They looked like they were enjoying themselves.

  “Ready to honor the Code,” I called.

  They hesitated at this new addition to the routine. Then the older girl called, “Ready to honor the Code!”

  They others immediately shouted after her. “Ready to honor the Code!”

  “Protect,” I said.

  “Protect,” they called.

  “Live with honor.”

  “Live with honor!”

  “Never abuse that honor.”

  “Never abuse that honor,” they called. I had gone way off script, but they were caught up with it now.

  “Ready?” I called.

  “Dust rats, ready,” they shouted.

  “No!” The old anger surged in me, one that had become new again since I returned to Cries. “Not dust rats!”

  They stared at me.

  “Answer, ho!” I shouted.

  They looked uncertain. Then Oey girl called, “Not dust rats!”

  “Not dust rats!” the others said. Confusion showed on their faces. If I wanted to keep them with me, I had to give them something to call themselves, because I had just taken their identities.

  I stepped up on a stump of rock. I didn’t shout, but my voice carried throughout the cavern. “You are human. Rats are vermin. You aren’t vermin. You are better than rats!”

  They watched me, waiting to see what I would give them to replace what I had taken away. They weren’t rats. They were better than that. What could I tell them?

  What?

  And then I knew.

  “Lift your chins,” I told them. “You are the dust knights.”

  They watched me with the hint of something on their faces, a thing I wanted them to shout in defiance to the unforgiving city above.

  Pride.

  The Oey girl raised her voice, her words echoing in the cavern. “Dust knights, ready!”

  The rest of the children shouted together. “Dust knights, ready!”

  A chill went through me. The military said I had no Kyle abilities, but if any hint of precognition existed in my bones, it was whispering now of the future, of a time when a legendary movement would someday change the Imperialate, becoming a force for protection throughout the empire—a force born when a ragged group of impoverished children stood on a dying planet and shouted their name.

  The Dust Knights of Cries.

  BOOK III

  The Phorine War

  XVI

  A Third Realm

  The arched entrance to the Concourse was on the outskirts of Cries, beyond a terraced plaza. The entry stood at the top of the stairs that led down to the Concourse, which at its start lay only one story below ground level. The entrance was always
open, with pennants snapping in the breezes and colored lights glowing on the arch at night. Gatekeepers looked after the entrance, welcoming visitors at an information kiosk at the bottom of the stairs. Beyond the kiosk, the Concourse stretched out in a wide avenue. Establishments lined the avenue, most at street level, though in a few places the shops and bistros were a few meters higher than the street, creating a terrace ideal for cafés with tables outside. A few lanes wandered off from the main avenue to areas with nightclubs. The main street sloped down in a gradual incline at first, but the ceiling stayed at ground level, until it was three stories above the street. Skylights up there let in sunlight, and police patrolled the area to ensure that tourists and above-city visitors were safe.

  Exits from the Concourse into the true undercity were far different.

  In one short hike, from gleaming entrance to ragged exit, the Concourse changed from a wonderland of lights and festive shops to a grungy alley. The street extended for over a kilometer, narrowing bit by bit, until at its end, it was no more than an uneven lane. The ceiling sloped down and a haze filled the air, coming from braziers in the market shacks, stoves where vendors were cooking their goods, and mist that formed when cooler air from the aqueducts below met the warmer Concourse. Aromas of cooking meat and pizo spice saturated the air. This was the only portion of the avenue my people visited. Technically the entire Concourse was part of the undercity, but only people in Cries believed that. No one in the aqueducts considered it part of our world. In fact, the police usually ran off any undercity intruders they caught on the boulevard.

  Most exits from the Concourse to the aqueducts were hidden behind the rickety stalls that crusted the lower end of the street. Only archway offered a visible exit. It stood at the very end of the street, with a sign that warned citizens not to venture beyond that point. Today I walked by that sign and into the rocky area beyond. We called this area the Foyer because it felt like the entrance to a house, a natural “room” hollowed out of the stone by whatever water had run through here in past ages. Jagged rock walls enclosed the area. On the far side, a walkway sloped downward, leading to the aqueducts. A street lamp shone at the head of the path, one of the few additions that Cries maintained for the aqueducts. I had always liked those lamps. They had an antique quality, not only the aged appearance of the metal, but also in the way the top curled around in a scrolled loop. A lamp hung by a chain from that curve.

  Sometimes anthropologists from the university used this path to visit the aqueducts. I had known one in my youth, Professor Orin. The first time he came down, I followed him in secret, fascinated by the way he explored the niches and crannies in the walls. When a dust gang tried to mug him, it pissed me off that they interfered with my discovery. I had shouted at them from hiding places, throwing rocks and insults as if I were four gangers instead of one, until they decided Orin wasn’t worth the trouble and went away. Orin was clearly flustered by the incident, which involved a lot of noise between people he mostly couldn’t see, but he continued his research trip. I was so impressed when he didn’t run back to Cries, I stayed with him the entire day, hidden and silent. After he left, I convinced Jak, Gourd, and Dig to help me protect him. Word of our taking him into our circle spread through the whisper mill, and after that people left Orin alone when he visited.

  Orin had known I was following him. He lured me out with offers of cocoa sticks and water. He built enough trust that after a while I walked with him, talking about my life in my terse dialect. Eventually I led him to hidden artifacts. He let me work on his digs and he taught me the language of the above-city. I learned more from him about anthropology, the history of Cries, the world Raylicon, and our ancestors than I ever would have in a traditional school class.

  Without realizing it, at least not at first, Orin stumbled on the only way to work with one of us. In the undercity, we hated charity. We made bargains. My interactions with Orin benefited both him and me, so I didn’t feel he was giving me charity or taking advantage of me.

  I had loved those visits, better than any school. Formalized education would never work in the aqueducts. I couldn’t imagine gangs or punkers sitting still for traditional classroom instruction. Sure, the cyber-riders might try virtual classes, but they would spend more time screwing with the system than learning. Many of them already knew more about tech-mech and neural surgery than the teachers, knowledge they passed to their younger acolytes. They learned by doing, including on themselves. They were wizards, yes, but no safeguards existed beyond what they had worked out over the generations. If they ignored the safeties that time and experience had warned them to respect, they could pay a dear price. When they were at their best, however, no one could match them. They had also accumulated a body of arcane knowledge about biomech technology beyond anything known by even the best adepts in Cries.

  I crossed the Foyer to the walkway that led to the canals, but instead of heading down to the aqueducts, I sat down on a truncated cone of rock. From there, I could look across the Foyer to the archway that opened onto the Concourse and the shacks clustered out there. Even as I watched, a boy snuck from the Concourse into the Foyer, smooth and stealthy, clutching meat sticks he had probably filched from a stall. He glanced at me as he ran by, headed to the aqueducts. After he disappeared around a curve of the path, the place was silent again.

  “Heya,” a voice rumbled.

  I looked around. Jak was standing in the shadows nearby, near the wall.

  “Heya,” I said.

  He came over and sat on a cone next to me. Some undercity gang had made these seats long ago, breaking off the top of rock formations and smoothing them into flat surfaces. The seats were in good condition because so few people used this exit. Above-city types didn’t come here much and my people usually used hidden entrances to visit the Concourse.

  “My circle is packing up,” he told me. “Going to safety.”

  That was good news. His “circle” included the employees of the Black Mark and their families, also Gourd and the kids he looked after.

  “I talked to some gangers and riders,” I said. The newly minted dust knights, in fact. I had tasked them to spread the word: Kajada and Vakaar are going to war. Take shelter.

  He nodded as he looked restlessly around the foyer. “Good.”

  “Jak.”

  “Hmm?” He had that jumpy quality that came when he couldn’t concentrate. His fingers twitched where they rested on his legs. It was no wonder, given that anyone could see us sitting here. When he felt stressed or in danger, he preferred the shadows.

  “How many children do you think live in the undercity?” I asked.

  “Dunno. Thirty, maybe?” He shifted his weight. “Plus the punkers.”

  “I think it’s more.” I thought back my tykado session with the dust knights. “I saw fourteen today. Mostly gangers and a few riders. And that wasn’t half of them, I’m sure.”

  “Don’t see why it matters.”

  “That’s a lot of children.”

  He was watching me now with a scrutiny I dreaded, because he always saw too much. “Did something happen?”

  I didn’t know how to tell him about the knights. Today I’d given them an unspoken promise that I would stay in Cries, but I wasn’t ready to tell Jak. I wasn’t even sure how I felt about it. So I changed the subject. “What about Braze, the commander who gambles in your club?”

  He frowned at me. “What about her?”

  “You got a lot of above-city types coming to the Black Mark.”

  “Sometimes.” A dangerous smile quirked his lips. “You want dirt on the dandies?”

  “No.” Not that it wouldn’t be useful, but this was about something else. “I wondered if other ISC officers go to your place.”

  “A few. Mostly Braze. Why?”

  “We’ve all assumed Scorch was part of an offworld smuggling ring. Maybe we’re wrong.” I thought of how she murdered everyone connected to her operation. “She seemed obsessed with keeping her oper
ation a secret.”

  “She had to. She had a Majda prince.”

  “Yah.” It would be a long time before I stopped seeing the way she had slaughtered that guard in the desert. “But if she was involved with an offworld ring, she wouldn’t have control over who knew her business. She couldn’t do anything about them. That doesn’t fit.”

  “You’re saying ISC is wrong?”

  “Could be.” I grimaced, remembering Scorch’s psychotic stare. “She had an obsessive need to stay in control. I can’t see her agreeing to act as some minor cog in a big smuggling machine. It wouldn’t give her enough control.”

  Jak was sitting completely still now. “Then where’d she get the guns?”

  “Braze lost a lot in the Black Mark,” I said. “More than she could pay, eh? She needed more credits, and fast, before you screwed with her. So she sold guns to Scorch.”

  “Braze fucked up,” Jak said flatly. “That fault is hers. Not the Black Mark.”

  “Your casino enables gambling addicts.”

  He stood up, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “Got to go.”

  “No, you don’t got to go,” I growled. “You just don’t like what I’m saying.”

  “Not argue this, Bhaajo.”

  I wished he wouldn’t call me that when I was trying to be angry. I laid my hand on his vacated seat. “All right, let’s leave it for now.”

  “Leave it for never,” he muttered. But he sat again. “Why would Scorch want the weapons, if not for the smuggling ring?”

  “I don’t know. She could sell them to punkers.”

  He snorted. “Or kill them. Kajada, Vakaar, other bosses. Her rivals.” His voice roughened. “Me.”

  “Not you.” I would have strangled her first.

  He spoke wryly. “She’s a smuggler who smuggles guns to help her smuggle guns.”

  I wouldn’t put it past her, but it still didn’t fit. “Dead people couldn’t use those weapons, and she kept killing anyone who knew about her operation.” I thought of the Alcove. “Maybe she was smuggling people.”