The Vanished Seas (Major Bhaajan series Book 3)

by Catherine Asaro

  “Detective Talon isn’t interested in my view of my own life. She likes hers better.” Anger edged his words. “Mara wasn’t faking how she felt about me. And gods, I’d never hurt her.”

  “What did Talon say?”

  “She thinks I killed Mara.” He lifted his hands, then dropped them. “My lawyer believes the police are going to arrest me for killing Mara.”

  “What the fuck?” Remembering myself, I added, “My apology for my language, but that’s bullshit. They have no evidence to arrest you for anything, let alone murder.”

  “My DNA is the only trace they found of anyone else in our room.” He grimaced. “Talon has brought me in for questioning twice since the gala. She keeps telling me they will ‘go easier’ if I confess.”

  Damn it. Talon had “neglected” to tell me they were interrogating him as a primary suspect. “Lukas, listen to me. Don’t ever talk to them without your lawyer.”

  “I haven’t.”

  More gently, I added, “And it’s a good sign no one has found a body.”

  “I hope so.” He sounded miserable, not hopeful. “Why are you up so late?”

  “I get restless when I’m trying to solve a case.” At least I did when I cared about it as much as this one. I liked to think of myself as hardened, and I fooled most people into believing it, but I couldn’t fool myself. “I wanted to know if you had any updates. I’m sorry I don’t have more news.”

  “Nothing here, either.” He let out a breath. “It helps to hear from someone who doesn’t think I’m a monster or a toy.”

  “Gods, Lukas, never let them make you believe that.”

  He breathed in deeply. “I’m trying.”

  We talked a bit longer and then signed off. I sat then, thinking about Talon. Yah, Lukas was the most obvious suspect, but he hadn’t done it, and the detective was an idiot to think otherwise.

  Then again, I wasn’t the most impartial observer.

  “It’s hard to be objective in this case,” I said to the cool air. “He’s so appealing, I don’t want to believe he did anything wrong.”

  “Appealing?” Max asked.

  “You know. The beautiful, grieving spouse. Maybe I’m letting that influence my judgment.”

  “What beautiful?” Max sounded confused. “He looked and sounded like hell. And that was a raw holo feed.”

  “A what?”

  “His holo wasn’t doctored,” Max said. “With sophisticated enough techniques, an advanced EI can tell if the images coming in on a holo feed are genuine. Yours weren’t; they were doctored to make you look rested and alert.”

  “Well, yah.” It wasn’t the first time I’d pulled those tricks. “His wasn’t?”

  “Not at all. If he were trying to play on your sympathies, he could have easily presented a more compelling image.”

  “He didn’t look so much like a kid tonight.”

  “He’s actually a year older than Mara Quida.”

  “Really? That I wouldn’t have guessed.” Then again, very few people in Cries looked their age. “Her colleagues seem to think he’s a lot younger. You think he does that on purpose?”

  “Based on my analyses, I doubt he cares what they think. He’s just blessed with good genetics.” Dryly he added, “And good health nanos.”

  “Yah, well, so am I.” As much as I might resent the access the Cries elite had to such superb health care, I’d be a hypocrite to deny how much I appreciated it now that I had it too. “I don’t believe Mara Quida ran out on him, that he killed her, that someone kidnapped her, or that a guest at the gala ambushed her. So what the bloody hell happened?”

  “A good question.”

  “Someone somewhere did something,” I muttered.

  “That was certainly specific.” Max sounded amused.

  Just what I needed, my EI razzing me. I had to find answers soon, before Talon destroyed Lukas Quida’s life by accusing him of a murder he didn’t commit. His behavior could be a well-crafted act, but my instincts said otherwise.

  “I have to figure out what happened,” I said. “For his sake. Hell, for mine. If I’m wrong about him, I’m nowhere near as good of an investigator as I think.”

  “Actually, you’re supposed to figure it out because the Majdas hired you to do so.”

  “Well, yah.” I had to report to them, but I had nothing to say, at least not without risk. “Did you find anything in the files you got from their palace about why they might want me killed?”

  “Nothing. Just the opposite, in fact.”

  I sat forward. “What do you mean?”

  “If anything, they are exceptionally motivated to keep you alive.”

  “Seriously? That’s hard to believe.”

  “Apparently it connects to an insult you gave last year to the Ruby Pharaoh.”

  “For gods’ sake.” Not this again. “I did not insult her. The fact that the Majdas think I did says more about their prejudices than anything about the Pharaoh. She didn’t mind at all.”

  “Bhaaj.”

  I stood up and stepped out of the pool, dripping. “‘Bhaaj’? What does that mean?”

  “You suggested that Her Majesty the Ruby Pharaoh descended from the Undercity.”

  I stalked into my bedroom, flinging around drops of water. “I don’t consider that an insult. Besides, it turned out to be true.” I smacked a panel in the wall, and the light came on. A cabinet opened with my clothes.

  As I dressed, trying not to aggravate my wounds, I thought about the Pharaoh. She had developed the interstellar meshes that spanned human-settled space—and the meshes controlled civilization. People called her the Shadow Pharaoh for good reason; she knew the opto-digital world better than anyone else alive.

  I hadn’t understood until I went offworld that our civilization couldn’t exist without the meshes that networked our lives. They ranged from webs spanning entire star systems all the way down to the nano-nets within our bodies. They even extended into another universe. People called it Kyle space or psiberspace. Either way, it existed as a Hilbert space spanned by the quantum wavefunctions that described a person’s brain. In other words, your thoughts determined your location in the Kyle. It operated according to different laws than our spacetime universe. You couldn’t physically visit; you accessed it through a neurological link. People thinking about the same subject in the Kyle were “next” to each other there even if light years separated them in our universe. In other words, Kyle space made instant communication possible across light years, defying the speed of light. It held our interstellar civilization together. Unfortunately, only trained Kyle operators could operate the network, and they were prohibitively rare.

  Enter the Undercity.

  We were no more than a footnote in scholarly texts, if we appeared at all. People outside our insular world had no idea that a thriving, hidden culture existed under the desert, not only in the aqueducts, but even below the canals, in the Down-deep, where the population had become so isolated, their skin and eyes were almost translucent from millennia of living in the dark.

  We wanted nothing to do with the rest of the Imperialate. They didn’t like us and we didn’t like them. However, a good bargain always appealed to my people. Last year, in exchange for a free meal and medical care, hundreds had agreed to let the army test them for Kyle traits. I suggested the exchange when I began to suspect that the strong Kyle abilities among the nobility might have origins no one wanted to admit, specifically, in the genetics of my people. No one expected any drastic result, however, including me.

  We had all been wrong.

  Historians claim my ancestors retreated into the ruins under the desert because they were homeless and unable to endure the heat without technology they couldn’t afford. So they sought refuge in the cooler aqueducts. We knew the truth now. They fled the rest of humanity because they were psions and couldn’t bear the pressure of so many minds. The Undercity offered mental surcease. Over the ages, psions in the wider Skolian civilization learn
ed to protect themselves by blocking other minds, but before those techniques were developed, the Undercity must have seemed the only escape for my ancestors. And so we had lived for thousands of years, interbreeding within our population. New genes came into our pool from sporadic trysts between my people and partners outside the Undercity, but we still carried a great deal of our original DNA.

  In modern Skolian populations, the rate of empaths was one in one thousand at best, and became rarer for stronger empaths. Telepaths, those psions who not only felt moods but could pick up a few of the strongest thoughts associated with them, were one in a million. Those strong enough to work the Kyle webs were one in ten million.

  And in the Undercity? One third of us were empaths. One in twenty were telepaths, a rate fifty thousand times greater than the rest of humanity.

  It was one of the most valuable discoveries in known history. Of course the authorities wanted us to work for them. Well surprise, almost none of my people wanted the “opportunity.” Where did the powers of Skolia get the whacked-out idea we’d suddenly give up our lives, culture, and everything else that mattered to labor for a government that had neglected, ignored, suppressed, and even denied our existence for thousands of years?

  Last year, the Ruby Pharaoh had hired me for a job. When I met her, I was struck by the almost translucent quality of her skin and her green eyes. It reminded me of Down-deepers, so I asked her about it. To say my idea displeased the Majdas—who revered the Ruby Dynasty and no one else—was the understatement of the year. Of the century. Of forever. I thought they would eviscerate me. They didn’t, because the Pharaoh told them to cool it. She had herself tested and surprise, her DNA included Down-deeper stock. It reversed that fairy tale where the pauper girl discovers she’s a queen. Our queen was a pauper. After that, the Majdas went silent on the subject. I had to sign the nondisclosure agreement from hell. In fact, they buried the data so deep, no one else would ever discover that little factoid about the Pharaoh.

  “Bhaaj?” Max asked.

  “Sorry. I was thinking. Why does that change how the Majdas feel about me?”

  “You also have some Down-deeper DNA.”

  “So?”

  “So you come from the same stock as the Pharaoh, albeit distantly.”

  I shrugged. “That doesn’t mean squat. She sits on the Ruby Throne. I don’t.”

  “Actually there is no throne. It was destroyed thousands of years ago.”

  “Max.”

  “Your DNA makes them more likely to want you alive.”

  Yah, right. “So why did a Majda flyer pick up my would-be assassin in the mountains?”

  “I don’t know. According to the palace files, you weren’t the only Majda agent at the gala.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Not at all. They also sent someone named Sav Halin. She matches the description I’ve put together of the person who shot at you.”

  I recognized the name from the list of guests. “Halin is a Majda agent? I wouldn’t have guessed.” She’d seemed as nondescript as her name, a reporter for a popular mesh publication. I snapped on my gauntlets. “Why would they tell her to shoot me?”

  “Nothing in the files indicates they even wanted her to notice you. She was just supposed to do her job, writing an article about the event. They wanted her to make everyone look good.”

  No surprise there. Majdas never stopped optimizing their finances. I thought of what Jak had said about my being the only person on the case who knew the aqueducts. “Does this Halin person have Undercity connections?”

  “I haven’t found any.”

  “I take it I’m not supposed to know she works for Majda.”

  “The only reason she appears in your files is because you were both assigned to the gala.”

  I walked into the living room. The window-wall facing north had turned transparent as the sky lightened with sunrise. The panoramic view of the predawn desert soothed the jagged edges of my thoughts, all of that distance stretching to the edge of the word. Now that I’d rested, I could think more coherently about the palace.

  “Max, I need to look into Halin without revealing I know about her.” I thought for a moment. “It’s natural for me to check the background of everyone at the party. I’ve been meaning to do it anyway. So try this. Do the checks according to occupation.” I needed to be oblique about my approach, to avoid suspicions I’d seen the Majda files. “Don’t start with reporters. Check other jobs first. When you do get to Halin, find something that gives me a valid reason to ask the Majdas about her. Mix it up with other people so it doesn’t sound like I’m investigating her in particular.”

  “I can do that,” Max said. “Also, a message just came in from Jak.”

  I blinked at the abrupt subject change. “What does he say?”

  “Here’s the recording.”

  Jak’s voice came into the air. “Bhaaj, I just saw Gourd. He looked at the crystal sphere you gave him. He didn’t find anything unusual.”

  Oh, well. “Send Jak a message. Ask him to thank Gourd for trying.”

  “Can’t you tell Gourd yourself?”

  “He never responds to a page from outside the aqueducts. He stays off-grid.” I finally asked the question that had tugged at me since we cracked the Majda palace security. “Max, what about those Majda files from my birth? What do they say?”

  “If you mean, did the Majdas identify your parents, the answer is no.”

  “Oh.” The disappointment hit hard, more than I expected. No records existed for most people in the Undercity. It was one of the few places a person could live free of the interstellar meshes. I realized now I’d secretly hoped my father was an Imperialate citizen who had a liaison with an Undercity woman, that he might still be alive or have family somewhere. If my DNA linked to any such Skolian citizen, though, the Majdas would have discovered it.

  “No big deal,” I lied. It wasn’t to anyone else, just to me.

  Max spoke in an unexpectedly gentle voice. “I’m sorry.”

  “No need to be.” I had to change the subject. “Make sure you keep those files secured. I’ll look at them in more detail later.” Max rarely missed anything important, but he lacked an ability to think outside the box, whereas I pretty much lived beyond its confines.

  Another thought came to me. “What about that person General Majda and her husband were talking about in the palace garden? Some CEO named Bak Trasor. You have anything on him?”

  “No. And I don’t intend to look him up.”

  “Why not?”

  “We heard his name when you were at the Majdas committing semi-treason.”

  “Semi-treason?” I smiled. “As opposed to what, pseudo-treason?”

  “Bhaaj, listen to me. You can’t do anything that might suggest you were at the palace. So far I’ve no indication they suspect you, but they’re surely focusing all their resources on the search.”

  I stopped smiling. Majda resources were formidable. “I see your point.” Trasor probably sat on the board of some company the Majdas controlled. “Max, you regularly look over my financial holdings, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Every day.”

  “I think you need to look over them now.”

  “I could. Why?”

  “Well,” I said, “maybe while you are doing that, you might notice if Bak Trasor sits on the board of any corporation where I have assets.”

  “Ah.” He sounded satisfied. “It’s true, you’ve invested in many places.”

  I didn’t know the full shape of my portfolio; Max kept tabs on its constant flux. But I never spent a single credit I didn’t have to part with. I knew what it was like to live in poverty, scrabbling just to eat. Never again.

  “Analyses done,” Max said. “Bak Trasor is the CEO of Suncap Industries.”

  “I take it that means I have holdings in Suncap.”

  “Yes. Fairly significant, in fact.”

  I grimaced. “I should sell them now, before Trasor gets deposed
in a corporate coup. The value of the stock will probably drop.”

  “You aren’t going to sell squat,” Max said flatly. “You want another reason to get arrested? You don’t have enough already?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s called insider trading. Using confidential information to your financial advantage that you obtained through trespass into the residence of the General of the Pharaoh’s Army is so feloniously criminal, my normally unemotional processors are feeling ill.”

  Unemotional, my ass. I knew he was right, both ethically and for common sense, but after the way I’d grown up, the fear of losing everything never left me. I also hated to think what that loss could mean to the resources I was so carefully building in my efforts to help the Undercity.

  “How badly do you think it will damage my holdings?” I asked.

  “Your investment firm uses top-of-the line trading algorithms to manage your portfolio. They will minimize your loss as much as possible.” More quietly, he added, “You’ll be fine. This sort of thing happens. Normally you wouldn’t even know.”

  Quit overreacting, I told myself. “I think I’ll get breakfast.”

  “Wait, I’m getting a page.” Max paused. “You have an incoming from Majda.”

  I froze. Shit! Had they figured out what happened?

  “It could be nothing,” Max added.

  Nothing the Majdas did was nothing. “Put it through.”

  The confident voice of Lavinda Majda rose into the air. “My greetings, Major Bhaajan.”

  “And mine to you.” It amazed me how calm I sounded. “Do you have more information about the Scorpio case?” I didn’t know why Lavinda would contact me; she wasn’t one of the investigators. But I had to pretend everything was normal. I couldn’t say what I wanted to ask, which was, You know, don’t you? You found me out.

  “I’m afraid we have a new problem,” Lavinda said.

  I felt as ill as Max’s unemotional processors. “What’s the problem?”

  “Another person has disappeared.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  SHADOWS

  “She was here!” Inna Starchild stood in her living room, her white tunic and trousers a soft contrast to the blue rug. Her furniture consisted of elegant antiques, from tables carved with vine patterns to wingchairs with gilded upholstery. She came from old wealth, nothing sleek or modern here. Her artwork glowed in the air above crystal tables, delicate holos of desert-stalk blooms. I’d heard that her work, and the protections needed to prevent it from being copied on the meshes, went for millions. She had little in common with Lukas Quida except that her powerful executive spouse had also disappeared.