The Vanished Seas (Major Bhaajan series Book 3)

by Catherine Asaro

  I took a deep breath and stepped back from the group. “Not interested.”

  “He didn’t ask if you were interested,” Cyber-arm said.

  The other woman shook her head at her friend, probably her equivalent of Max telling me to stand down. To me, she said, “Your loss.”

  Ear-plants looked me over avidly. “You got pump,” he told me, whatever that meant. He sounded like he intended it as a compliment. “Come with us. We’ll make it worth your time.”

  “Seriously?” He thought I’d go with them for gifts? I probably had more wealth than the four of them combined. After living the first sixteen years of my life in poverty and then twenty years in the austere life of the Pharaoh’s Army, I saved my earnings with an obsessive intensity these slicks would probably never understand, given the gilded life they most likely took for granted. I was annoyed enough, though, that I couldn’t resist baiting him. “Worth my time how?”

  “What do you want?” He sounded sure of himself again, in familiar territory, offering to buy whatever took his fancy. “Credits, jewelry, hack, bliss. You name it.”

  Bhaaj, cut it out, Max thought. Leave them alone.

  Oh, all right. “Sorry,” I told Ear-plants. “Not interested.”

  “You won’t find better,” he told me. “I mean it. Whatever you want.”

  A dark voice spoke behind me, sensuous and smooth, but with a steely undertone of eagerness that said, push me, go ahead, see what happens. “She already has everything she needs.”

  Their gazes shifted to a point beyond my shoulder—and they froze. I turned. A man stood there, tall and leanly muscled, dressed in black, from his sleeveless muscle shirt to his rough trousers to his thousand-credit belt. An old scar stretched down his cheek that he’d never bothered to get fixed, and a gnarled scar snaked across his left bicep. Violence simmered in his gaze. He was menace and sexuality incarnate, with the face of a threatening god and the aura of a man who’d earned his wealth from the dark side of human nature.

  Jak had arrived.

  He spoke to the cyb-fibs in a terrifyingly pleasant voice. “I see you met my wife.”

  His wife? Where the bloody hell did that come from?

  Ear-implants looked ready to shit platinum bricks. “My apology sir. We meant no offense. We were just leaving.”

  “Yes, just leaving.” Cyber-arm spoke fast, stepping back.

  “You’re welcome to keep enjoying my establishment.” Jak was practically purring. He lifted his hand, indicating the worst of his rigged roulette wheels. “Please. Be my guest.”

  The cyb-fibs all bowed to him, I mean, bowed, for freaking sake, after which they made a fast retreat, heading off to his tables to lose more money and make him happy.

  I swung around to him. “Your wife? Fuck that, Jak.”

  A slow, drowsy smile spread across his face. “Yah, Bhaajo, sure.”

  I strode past him, headed for the back of the room, to a discreet stairway without any gleams or glitz. I didn’t look back as I went up the stairs. Holos activated in front of me, just enough to light the way, and then went dark after I passed. I headed into the secret depths of the casino owned by Mean Lean Jak, the most notorious criminal kingpin in the Undercity.

  Jak leaned against the wall of his office, a darker shadow against its ebony surface. Diamonds glittered on bowls in niches in the walls, on the black furniture, and dusted across the plush black rug. Tendrils of smoke curled up from the bowls, scenting the air with carmina, a euphoriant that could make you feel as if you were drifting in clouds of pleasure. The nanomeds in my body were working overtime to keep me from having fun, because I felt no effect of the drug. I didn’t have Max tell them to stop, though. I needed my wits tonight.

  “Someone tried to shoot you?” Jak asked. “I thought these people hired you to protect them. Why kill you?”

  I paced back and forth, unable to stay still. “Fuck if I know.”

  Bhaaj, Max thought. You’re doing it again.

  Doing what?

  Cursing.

  So fucking what?

  You asked me to stop you.

  I wanted to use my choicest language to let him know just what I thought of that, but I held back. I had indeed asked him to help me clean up my act, at least with my elite clients.

  This is Jak, I thought. He’s smooth.

  You said you wanted to break the habit. That means with everyone.

  Yah, well, not tonight.

  At least come up with something more original. He sounded amused again.

  Max, go away. I walked over to Jak. “I got a new job. Find a missing glitz. Scorpio.”

  He looked suitably intrigued. “When she’d vanish?”

  “Tonight.” I banged my fist on my thigh. “We got no record. Zill, zilch, zig. Glit-flit is just gone. I searched, checked, talked to guests. Then I left. That’s when the shooter tried to nail me.”

  “Where?”

  “Garden. Glit-flit’s digs.” I lifted my hands, then dropped them. “Why nail me?”

  “Easy to see why.” Jak waved his hand as if to encompass more than the room. “The Undercity. You know it. All of it. Like no city slick.”

  He had a point; I alone of the Quida investigators could reach the true Undercity. No one from Cries could enter these ruins without one of our dust gangs escorting them, to keep their wealthy butts from getting mugged or worse. Sure, some city dwellers knew about Jak’s casino; it was the one place in the Undercity that slicks could visit. But they couldn’t do it by themselves. Jak required any outsider coming to or leaving his establishment to wear sight and sound canceling goggles. They went blind and deaf. If they refused, no one would bring them to his elusive casino.

  Nor could city monitors detect us in the Undercity. Our cyber-riders hid our community with shrouds that Cries engineers couldn’t even understand, let alone defeat. If Cries tried to raid the Undercity, our population would retreat deeper into the endless ruins that honeycombed the ground below the desert. With enough resources, the authorities would eventually find some of us, but to what point? They had little interest in our world.

  Until two years ago.

  That was when the army discovered we had something they coveted—the highest concentration of empaths in the Imperialate. No one knew that little gem of data, though, except for a few highly placed officials. I doubted anyone at the Quida gala fell into that select group. Although I didn’t think any of them knew I came from the Undercity, I made no secret of my history. Did my ability to come and go here threaten whoever had taken Mara Quida?

  Max, I thought. Find out if any of the other investigators were attacked tonight.

  Will do, Max answered.

  I considered Jak. “You hear anything tonight about missing city slicks?”

  “Nothing.” He shrugged. “I’ll keep an ear to the whisper mill.”

  I nodded, deep in thought, walking back and forth.

  Jak watched me. “Stay tonight. Relax.”

  I went over to him. “Think you can settle me down, eh?”

  He laughed, not with the menace everyone knew, but a deep, hearty laugh he showed no one else, a sound I’d loved since I first met him, when we were both three years old. “Yah, Bhaaj,” he murmured. “I can settle you down.”

  I felt like poking his chest and saying he wasn’t my husband. I mean, where the hell had that come from? Oh, I knew, he wanted to have fun with the city slicks. Maybe we were even married by common law. But of course we never discussed it. Marriage was a custom for the wealthy in Cries. Although my people did form bonds by a ceremony we called handfasting, Jak and I had never bothered. We knew what we had. I had to admit, though, if one of us ever did propose, he had chosen a dynamite way, pissing me off and making me want to laugh at the same time.

  I smiled, a genuine smile, as rare from me as from anyone else in the Undercity. “Yah. I should stay.” I never gambled here at Jak’s casino. I knew all too well how he fixed the games.

  The Black Ma
rk, however, offered better reasons for me to stay the night.

  CHAPTER II

  VETERANS ADMINISTRATION

  I sat sprawled in a chair in the sunken living room of my penthouse, my legs stretched across the floor and light pouring in the window-wall. Outside, far below the tower, the panoramic view of the Vanished Sea Desert spread to the horizon. Inside, the white carpet shimmered with a glossy finish that was actually a holoscreen. Currently, a holographic replica of the Quida mansion filled the room. The images came from Max’s recordings and the police analysis Talon had finally sent me. The scene looked the same as I remembered from last night.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Still no ransom demand?”

  “Not a word.” Max spoke using the comm in my wrist gauntlets. I preferred talking when we were alone. Of course, that was only after I’d deactivated any nosy Majda tech trying to watch the penthouse. It was the price I paid for accepting this gorgeous place; it belonged to the Majdas, so it included their security monitors. Fortunately, I was better at outwitting their spy tech than it was at spying on me.

  “Maybe Mara Quida went offworld,” I said.

  “Not according to any flight record I’ve found,” Max said. “The police, Majda security, and Scorpio Corporation also did checks, not just of who bought tickets or boarded ships, but also a visual analysis of every passenger on any flight.”

  “With her resources, she could have paid for anonymity.”

  “For what purpose? She had every reason to stay.”

  It certainly looked that way. Last night should have been a coup for Mara Quida. I got up and walked over to the holo of the crumpled scroll. “The negotiations were finished, right? Quida had already finalized the Metropoli deal.”

  “That’s right. The contracts have been signed and processed.”

  I passed my hand through the holographic scroll. “Her disappearance could make Metropoli doubt Scorpio Corporation, maybe even spur them to question the contract.”

  “According to every report I’ve received or intercepted, the deal is proceeding as planned.”

  Intercepted. That sounded like Max-speak for cracking other people’s secured systems. “Anything from the beetle bot I sent after whoever tried to shoot me last night?”

  “Nothing yet. Wherever it went, it’s either out of my range or shrouding its systems.”

  I noticed he left out the other possibility, that the shooter had caught or destroyed my bot. I scowled. I liked that little beetle. “Let me know when you make contact.” I paced through the holos as if they were ghosts. “Do you think Lukas Quida killed her? He inherits everything, all her assets, connections, real estate, even her place on the Scorpio board of directors.”

  “He is the obvious choice,” Max said. “Maybe too obvious. Several hundred people saw him at the gala before, during, and after her disappearance.”

  “Yah, well, he could have hired someone to whack her.”

  “True. But why be so obvious about it?”

  “Maybe that’s the point. Make it look absurd to suspect him.”

  “No body has been found,” Max reminded me. “We don’t know she is dead.”

  “I hope not.” Her husband had seemed genuinely agonized last night. He didn’t strike me as a good suspect, but I did have some questions. “Set up a meeting with Lukas Quida later today.”

  “What about your appointment at the Veterans Administration?”

  I stopped pacing. “What appointment?”

  “With Adept Sanva.”

  “Oh, that.” I shifted my weight. “Reschedule it.”

  “You’ve already rescheduled twice.”

  I went to the wall console and smacked my palm against a panel. The holos in my living room disappeared like an Undercity thief evading the cops. It left me surrounded by the elegance of a penthouse I never would have chosen myself, as much as I liked it. I’d always felt like a visitor here, never truly at home.

  “Bhaaj?” Max asked.

  “What?”

  “You should go to your appointment with Adept Sanva.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you don’t, you’ll be angry at yourself.”

  What, now my EI was analyzing me? “You’re a biomech brain, Max. Not a psychologist.”

  “I have entire libraries dedicated to psychology. I also have many years as your EI. I know you.”

  Great. My EI was pulling the I know you card. Even worse, he was probably right. His brain evolved as we interacted, and after more than ten years together, it did sometimes seem like he knew me better than I knew myself.

  “All right,” I grumbled. “I’ll go see Sanva. But get the meeting with Lukas, too. I want to talk to him as soon as possible.”

  The Veterans Administration stood in the Commodore’s Plaza in Cries. All the buildings here served the army, fronting on an open area paved in white and blue stones. A fountain in the center showed the ancient goddess of war with her wings spread and her head tilted back as she blew into a battle horn. Water spumed out of the horn into the air and cascaded down her body in glistening drops.

  It never ceased to amaze me what people in Cries took for granted. We lived on a dying world where the seas had dried up ages ago. Raylicon had no surface water; you had to dig deep to find it even here in the north, the most livable area of the planet. Deadly chemicals poisoned the water, making purification plants the most lucrative business on the world. In the Undercity, we had several grottos, even an underground lake, but none of those contained drinkable water. To survive, we scrapped together filtration machines and siphoned energy from Cries to run them. Yet this city boasted so much wealth, her people could waste water in a fountain that sprayed huge amounts of the life-saving liquid into the air. Cries probably even filtered it. No one wanted to get sued if someone drank from the fountain and ended up in the hospital or died.

  I crossed the plaza to the VA building. In Cries, the army topped the city hierarchy, separate but equal to the corporate big dealers. The VA reflected that status, a tall building with displays on its outer walls showing confident soldiers in spotless fatigues, their heads lifted with pride. Too bad we’d never actually looked like that. Most of my time in combat, I’d been dusty, covered in mud, soaked to the bone, or drenched in sweat. Nanites in the cloth tried to clean our fatigues, which maybe helped boost morale, but it didn’t stop you from dying, both literally and emotionally, bit by bit, until you built so many defenses, you became numb.

  Inside the VA, I found a lobby with consoles at chest height. Benches lined the walls and four people sat on them, two women and two men, all looking bored. They were like the soldiers I’d enlisted with. Like me. None of us had been considered officer material. Many of the higher-ups hadn’t believed I’d survive basic training. A dust rat? Ludicrous. My response had been Just watch me. I refused to give up, and eventually I’d made the supposedly impossible leap to the officer ranks. The army used my skills well, putting me on task forces to solve problems in weapons and strategy. I retired after twenty years and became a PI, intrigued by the idea of solving problems for a living. But I never forgot where I came from, below the city.

  I stood at a console and pressed my finger against the screen.

  “Name and rank?” the console asked.

  “Major Bhaajan, retired. I have an appointment with Adept Sanva.”

  “ID verified.” A holo flashed, the Majda insignia, a hawk soaring through the sky. It vanished as fast as it came. Huh. It looked like the console had flagged me as a Majda employee.

  “An escort will be out to take you to your appointment,” the screen said.

  I glanced toward the bored vets waiting their turn. “Other people are ahead of me.”

  The screen didn’t answer, probably since I hadn’t asked a question, or maybe it just found my comment irrelevant. I scowled, then stalked over to the bench and sat down with the others.

  A man in fatigues walked under the archway across the room and headed in
my direction. He looked like the people in the images on the walls, perfect and professional. He stopped in front of me. “Welcome, Major Bhaajan.” Lifting his hand, he invited me to follow him. “This way please.”

  I motioned toward the other people, who were watching with varying degrees of irritation and resignation. “They were here first.”

  The man blinked, looking confused. “You are next.”

  I didn’t want to give him a hard time. He was just doing his job, following orders and the city hierarchy. Apparently my Majda connection or my retired officer status put me on top of this little pecking order. Screw that. I’d spent a substantial portion of my life being treated as if I were less than nothing, and I wasn’t about to inflict that on other people.

  “You can take them ahead of me,” I said. “I’ll wait my turn.”

  He stood awkwardly, as if hoping I’d change my mind. When I stayed put, he left the room. One of the other vets nodded to me, the barest motion. Then we all went back to our boredom.

  The console’s voice spoke in the air. “Sergeant Mazo, proceed to room fourteen for your appointment with Doctor Raven.”

  A man stood and left the room through the archway. The rest of us continued to wait.

  Eventually, after the other three people were called, the console announced my name, to meet Adept Sanva in room three. I headed for the archway, reminding myself I didn’t feel nervous about talking to a neurological adept. I normally had no problem with healers, including doctors who specialized in neuroscience and psychology. But she applied her training to empaths. Psions. Kyle operators. Whatever you called them, it meant the same thing. I had absolutely no desire to use my abilities as an empath. The last thing I wanted to experience was other people’s moods. Hell, I had enough trouble understanding my own emotions. I’d always suppressed my empathic ability.

  It made survival easier.

  Adept Sanva turned out to be an older woman with gray hair and an unlined face that suggested her body carried nanomeds to delay her aging. The large desk where she sat had glossy holoscreens for its surface. The room was airy, with flowering plants in pots and windows that let in sunlight.