The Vanished Seas (Major Bhaajan series Book 3)

by Catherine Asaro

  “I have work to do,” she said.

  “Just give me five minutes. Then I’ll go.”

  At first, she said nothing. Then she let out an annoyed breath and motioned to a chair across the table. As I sat down, she settled into her big chair. “What do you want to know?” she asked.

  “Were you surprised Mara Quida invited you to her party?”

  “Why would I be surprised? She invited all the execs.”

  “My understanding was that the two of you weren’t on good terms.”

  “I didn’t think she deserved the Metropoli account, if that’s what you mean.” Oja frowned with impatience. “It doesn’t matter. We all knew she would get it.”

  Interesting. Most people I’d spoken with liked Mara Quida and considered her an excellent choice for the job. “Why would she get the account if she wasn’t qualified?”

  Oja met my gaze. “She puts on the pleasant act, the hard-worker, loving wife, all that. It’s bullshit. People aren’t that nice in our profession.”

  “No one last night mentioned that.”

  “Mara isn’t the only one who plays that game. Everyone pretends. Gods, that pretty husband of hers. Where the hell did she get some kid like that to marry her?”

  Ho! Jealousy reared its vicious head. “You don’t like him?”

  “How would I know? He never talks to anyone.”

  “He’s shy.”

  “It’s all an act.” She snorted. “You can’t look like him and be shy. I mean, seriously? People practically fall over their feet when he walks into the room. And Mara knew it.”

  “You think she held that over other people?” That didn’t fit with my impressions.

  Oja spoke grudgingly. “Actually, no. She was surprised he’d married her, too.” She exhaled as if she were releasing a defense. “Major, it’s true, I don’t trust her. Would I like her to go work somewhere else? Yes. But I don’t wish her ill. I would certainly never cause her harm.”

  That sounded more genuine than her other comments. “What about the other three execs she pushed out of line for the Metropoli contract? How do they feel?”

  She regarded me as if I had the intelligence of a scuttling lizard. “I’ve no idea.”

  I waited. When the silence became awkward, she added, “I doubt they did anything, at least not Zeddia Vixer or Daan Bialo. I’ve known them for years. They’re crafty, sure, but not vicious. I can’t see them arranging a kidnapping.”

  Max, are you getting these names? I asked.

  Yes, I’ve recorded them, he thought. Both were at the party and both were downstairs in the ballroom when Quida disappeared.

  “That’s only two people,” I said to Oja.

  “The third was Exec Tallmount. I don’t know her. She’s new.”

  I thought of the artifacts Oja had on display here. “How did you feel when you learned about the destruction of the scroll Mara Quida planned to give to the Metropoli reps?”

  “It’s a crime.” Oja leaned forward. “It’s not just the monetary worth, but the loss of such a rare item. It can never be replaced.”

  For gods’ sake. She cared more about the scroll than Quida. “It must be hard to arrange for such a valuable gift.”

  She waved her hand in dismissal. “Some professor at the university helped her.”

  “Do you know her name?”

  “His. Roy, I think.” She drummed her fingers against the table. “Major, I’m busy.”

  If Ken Roy had helped her arrange the deal, it would be an honest one. I stood up. “Thank you for your time, Del Oja.”

  She nodded, her mask of cold composure in place again. “You can show yourself out.”

  So I did, out of the cool office and down to the ocean-blue lobby of Scorpio Tower. I wondered who had come up with the bizarre idea to name this cool-as-the-sea corporation after an Earth desert creature that killed with its sting.

  Then again, it did seem apt for the people who worked here.

  I ate my steak in pleased silence. The dinner table stood near the window-wall in my living room, letting the bronzed rays of the setting sun bathe me in light. The mosaic of a sunset also inlaid the table, and the legs were blue, lighter at the top and shading into the purple of oncoming night at the bottom. Even after decades of living aboveground, I’d never lost my love of the sky. Or of steak. Normally I was a vegetarian or I ate synthetic meat, which tasted all right, but every now and then I treated myself to the genuine article, despite its huge cost. The health nanomeds in my body got rid of bad cholesterol and any other junk the doctor told me to avoid.

  “So Max,” I said. “Why is it taking so long to decode the records from my beetle bot? When will I know what it saw when it went after the asshole who shot at me?”

  “The files are corrupted,” Max said. “I don’t know why. I’m still working on them.”

  I speared a chunk of desert-succulent drenched in pizo sauce. Who’d have ever thought cactus could taste so good? “What about the woman who followed me out of Cries this afternoon?”

  “I haven’t identified her yet, either. The image resolution is terrible.” He sounded frustrated. “I’m trying to clean it up.”

  “Show me what you have so far.”

  “This is the woman who shot at you in the garden.” A holo formed in the air across the table. It showed a blurry figure running along a garden path under trellised arches draped by vines. The runner must have been wearing a skin-suit woven from holoscreens that analyzed the surroundings and projected images to match the landscape. For someone moving so fast, the suit couldn’t completely hide her, but it blurred her beyond recognition.

  “It looks like a woman,” I said. “Dark coloring.” That didn’t help, given that it described pretty much the entire female population of Raylicon. Those of us native to the Undercity were a bit paler since we needed less melanin in our skin, but almost no one had light brown or red hair. I’d never seen a blond until I shipped offworld. “Could she be the person who followed me today?”

  “I don’t think so. Your shadow today was stockier than this woman.”

  The runner in the holo left the mansion and jogged along a lane that wound through the foothills of the Saint Parval Mountains. Every few minutes she passed a driveway that curved up to a mansion set back from the street.

  “Can you clean up the resolution?” I asked.

  “I already have as much as I can,” Max said. “Watch this next part. It’s odd.”

  I watched the woman for a few more moments. “She’s just running.”

  “Yes, but where?”

  Good question. The street sloped upward. “She’s going into the mountains. Those mansions are in the foothills. If she goes any higher, she’ll be above them.” Wryly, I added, “She won’t find anything there except even thinner air than in the city.”

  “She spent an hour jogging,” Max said. “She stopped at a hut and slept for a few hours. Then she continued into the mountains.”

  “What for? Nothing is up there.” I stopped, feeling cold. “Except the Majda palace.”

  “A flyer eventually picked her up,” Max said. “A gold-and-black vehicle.”

  Damn. Majda flyers were gold and black. Only theirs. I didn’t want to believe it. “Why would the Majdas send her to shoot me? I work for them.”

  “I don’t know. It’s also odd they made her run for so long first.”

  “Maybe they didn’t want anyone to see them pick her up.”

  “Your beetle saw them.”

  “Did it follow the flyer?”

  “It tried. Something happened that corrupted its record. Its AI isn’t advanced enough to fix the problem, so it came home.”

  “I can’t believe the Majdas are involved.” I ate the last piece of cactus. “They want that Metropoli contract. It makes Scorpio look good, and since Scorpio is headquartered in Cries, that makes Cries look good, and anything good for Cries is good for Majda. They sent me to the gala to help make sure it all went according to p
lan.”

  “The attack on you doesn’t make sense to me, either.” He paused. “I have a partial ID on the woman who followed you out of Cries today.”

  I sat up straighter. “Who is she?”

  The holo of the blurry runner swirled away, replaced by the image of a woman with a face that looked as if it were molded from clay without details.

  “That doesn’t look real,” I said.

  “It’s the best I’ve managed so far. I’ve narrowed her ID to about three hundred people.”

  “Can you pare it down more?” I had no desire to investigate three hundred people.

  “I’m working on it. Her physique suggests she’s an athlete.”

  I took a swallow of ale, tart and golden. “Think she could be in the army?”

  “Some of the possibilities are military personnel, active or retired.”

  “Let me know if you find out more.” I pushed back from the table.

  “You should sleep,” Max said. “It will help your injuries heal.”

  I stood, leaving my dinner for the house bots to clean up. “I don’t have time to sleep.”

  I had another matter to attend to—figuring out why the Majdas might want me dead.

  I’d stayed at the Majda palace two years ago, when they first hired me. They’d given me a suite to make my work easier, or so they said, but it also made it easy for them to keep an eye on me. They had wanted me to find their runaway prince.

  The House of Majda cloistered their men in full seclusion. On the rare occasions when a prince left the palace, he went robed and cowled, covered from head to toe, accompanied by guards. If a woman trespassed, even just trying to glimpse his face, her sentence was execution, or at least it had been thousands of years ago. I doubted the Majdas were going to kill anyone just for looking at one of their men, but they could make her life miserable.

  Two years ago, Prince Dayj had run away. His lack of experience with anything beyond the palace nearly got him killed when an Undercity weapons dealer kidnapped him, but I managed to find him in time. Although it took his nearly dying for his family to realize they had to let him live his life the way he wanted, they finally accepted his wish to attend university. Last year, he’d left Raylicon to attend college on the world Parthonia.

  During my investigation, it had fast become clear I couldn’t do my job with Majda looking over my shoulder. So I moved out. They gave me the penthouse in Cries, where they still looked over my shoulder, but at least they were discreet about it. Fortunately, I was even better at avoiding them. I doubted they realized just how well I’d learned to outwit their monitors.

  Today I hiked up the mountains. Nothing grew at this high elevation. The thin air never bothered my Raylican-bred lungs; the atmosphere on other human-habitable worlds seemed too rich to me. I came out on a ledge about half a kilometer from the palace. The mountains plunged down from my feet in black stone streaked by red. The palace stood on a mesa below, surrounded by a valley and lush with the green canopy of the imported trees. I had no idea how the Majdas grew plants this high in the mountains, but what the hell. Managing miracles was their forte, or at least they liked the rest of the universe to think that. Mirror Lake shimmered in the sunlight, with trees trailing vines into the blue water, and red water lilies floated in their shadowed bower. And yah, “bower” was the right word, not that I’d ever known what it meant before Max used it to describe these gardens with their leafy, shaded alcoves.

  Terraced gardens stepped up from the forest to the palace. The building reminded me of images I’d seen of the Taj Mahal on Earth, with towers that rose at its corners and a majestic dome topping the roof. Sunlight bathed the golden work of art, making it glow like a testament to the glory of human architecture. I could almost forget that the their ancestors had built it during one of the most barbaric eras known to my people, when the queens of Raylicon were atavistic warriors who spread mayhem with their conquering armies.

  Majda security should have stopped me long before I got this close to the palace. However, when I’d lived here, they’d given me the security codes so I could come and go. Although they’d changed them since then, Max had created a trapdoor into their systems that allowed him to access the new codes. I approached without incident. So far, so good.

  I made my way down a steep trail, using the jammer in my backpack to shroud my presence. I’d dusted my face with holo-powder, which networked with the holosuit that covered me from foot to neck to wrist, projecting holos so I looked like my surroundings instead of like me, at least from far away. The suit’s inner surface kept me warm while the outer surface matched the temperature of the icy air. It confused infrared sensors; if they couldn’t register the heat I generated, I became invisible to them. Sonic dampers in my jammer muted sounds. It could even fool neutrino sensors, now that neutrino detection had become feasible for smaller devices. If someone searched using the full palace resources, they could probably find me, but so far I hadn’t given anyone reason to look.

  At the bottom of the trail, I walked onto a lawn. I kept to the shadows under overhanging trees, making it easier for the shroud to hide me. Curling fronds brushed my face, fragrant with the scent of rich green life. A gardener had sculpted the trees to resemble mythological creatures, like Azu Bullom, spirit companion of the god Izam Na, with the powerful body of a mountain cat, a human head, and horns that spiraled around his ears. It was easy to climb the terraces, using staircases of blue stone with sculpted railings. Pink and gold flowers bloomed everywhere. Most of the plants were imported from gentler worlds, but desert stalks grew here, too, with red blossoms hanging from their curved tips like bells. Gods only knew what resources it took to provide enough oxygen to grow these gardens in such a harsh environment. It was too lovely, so exquisite it hurt, a painful reminder that this dying world had once been a place of beauty.

  On the top terrace, I crossed to the garden behind the palace, still in the shadows. Voices drifted through the air. I froze under an arch with hanging vines. Max, crank up my hearing.

  Done.

  Every noise became louder. The spray from a sprinkler pattered. Crackles came from closer by, what sounded like a smart-rake sweeping up dried leaves. The distant voices jumped into focus. A man was speaking Iotic, an ancient language used in modern times only by royalty or the aristocracy. I’d learned it in the army because some of our COs came from the noble Houses. Everyone spoke Skolian Flag of course, the universal language of our people, but an ability to use Iotic made you look good, and I’d been an ambitious young fireball in those days.

  “—so the vote of confidence against Bak Trasor is coming up tomorrow in the meeting for the board of directors.” His deep voice rumbled. “I think we’ve enough support to get rid of him.”

  “Good,” a woman said. “It’s about time.”

  Damn! I knew that woman’s voice. It had as much power today to scare the hell out of me as it had the first time I’d heard it, two years ago. It belonged to General Vaj Majda, Matriarch of the House of Majda, General of the Pharaoh’s Army, a joint commander of Imperial Space Command and one of the most powerful people in the Skolian Imperialate.

  I was dead.

  CHAPTER VI

  IN THE HALL OF THE

  MOUNTAIN QUEEN

  I held my breath, afraid to inhale, even though they were far enough away, at least fifty meters across the garden, that they couldn’t hear me.

  “It won’t be easy,” the man said. “We don’t want to antagonize his supporters.”

  “You’re the expert,” the general said. “I’ll trust your judgment.”

  Breathe, I told myself. In the two years I’d known Vaj Majda, I’d never heard her talk in such a relaxed manner. I’d met only the authoritative General, a force to reckon with in the halls of Imperialate power. I’ll trust your judgment. I couldn’t imagine her saying that to anyone, let alone a man.

  Unless—

  Ah, hell. Yah, she might say that to one man, someone rumored
to sit on the boards of several powerful corporations. Of course he never appeared at any meeting, but he was present even though no one could see him. Vaj Majda would take his advice because he would only ever give it to her in private, when no one else could hear them. Yah, one man fit that bill. Izam Kaaj Majda. Her husband.

  The Majdas no longer ruled Raylicon. Supposedly. In truth, their power had become even more formidable in this modern age. Now they held sway over a financial empire, controlling more wealth than the combined governments of entire planets. The arranged marriage between General Majda and Izam Kaaj had involved many factors, including his high birth, background, appearance, and fertility. He was a son of the House of Kaaj, which also cloistered their men. Almost no one realized he was also a financial genius. Vaj might be conservative, but she was no fool. She knew the advantage of having a husband who could increase the already stratospheric wealth of her House. Izam was a power hidden behind the metaphorical throne of her influence.

  Yah, like the Majdas needed more wealth. They already had more than any other family in human history, including even the Ruby Dynasty, whose members seemed more interested in math than finances. While the Ruby Pharaoh solved equations, the Majdas made money.

  Are you talking to me? Max asked.

  I hadn’t realized my thoughts had become intense enough for Max to pick up. No. I’m just panicking. I’m dead.

  You don’t look dead to me.

  I’m spying on the most powerful woman and the most guarded man in the Imperialate. If they find me, I’m dead.

  You are indulging in hyperbole. Besides, the Ruby Dynasty has more power than General Majda.

  General Majda is more experienced at wielding it. I wondered how she felt knowing the Imperator was a man. He commanded Imperial Space Command, the combined military forces of the Imperialate, so as a joint commander, Vaj answered to him. I’d always figured it must bother her, but I wondered now if she accepted his title because of his dynastic heritage. He was the nephew of the Ruby Pharaoh. Although Prince Izam operated in secret whereas the Imperator was a public figure, they had more similarities than I’d realized. Power stayed in the family. Regardless, right now I had trouble. I hadn’t even realized General Majda was on Raylicon. I certainly hadn’t expected to run into her chatting with her husband about some corporate coup. My presence here had become more than simple trespassing; it verged on treason.