He had a point. I couldn’t stay here, though; they’d search until they covered this entire area. I took a breath—and sprinted across the open area. I reached the other ridge within seconds.
Did they detect me? I continued my retreat into the desert.
I’m not sure, Max said. I’ve moved the beetle out of their range. Based on their search pattern, I’d say they have no idea you’re here. They are trying to monitor the people in the ships.
Good. The logical assumption, if they were hiding from the soldiers, was to assume my bot had come from inside the ruins. I wish I knew why they came out here.
They must want something with the ships.
Apparently. But they can’t do anything here. I’d retreated to an area with dunes, enough to slow me down. I walked behind a ridge, hidden, my feet slipping in the sand.
You’re leaving a trail, Max thought. You need to hide your footsteps.
I pulled out my green bot and tossed it into the air. Have the bots smear away my tracks.
They are rather small for that job.
True. But they move fast. And it will be a while before the trio gets this far in their search.
Smearing commenced.
Most of the land I’d crossed when I came out here from Cries consisted of rocky ground where my footsteps wouldn’t show. I set off running. I could go for hours, my legs eating up the distance. I hid in plain sight, alone in the vast desert as it cooled toward the night.
I sat in my big, comfortable chair in my penthouse living room, resting after my trek through the desert. “Maybe the House of Vibarr wants to dethrone the Majdas.”
“I see no indication they have that kind of power,” Max said. “If they tried to overthrow Majda, it would be a huge political upheaval. They’d be inciting a civil war.”
“I don’t mean politically. Financially. Right now, Majda dominates the interstellar markets. But Vibarr isn’t far behind.” I put my feet on the low table in front of my chair. “So reporter Sav Halin, a Majda agent, is working with the High Mesh. And Detective Talon, too? No wonder they want me dead. I could blackmail their sorry asses.”
“Blackmail, spying, and insider trading.” If an EI could scowl, Max was doing it. “What other laws do you plan on breaking?”
“I didn’t do either.”
“‘Either’ implies you didn’t do either of two things. I mentioned three.”
“Yah, well, Max, if I need to spy on the Majdas to stay alive, so be it.”
“You have to decide if you trust them.”
“I don’t trust them. What about our circus performer, Tandem Walkerdale? Was she a spy?”
“I haven’t found any record of it, but I can’t search most of the secured army networks.”
“Replay what she said about Daan when she was tailing me on the Concourse.”
Walkerdale’s voice came into the air. “Bialo left with the cop.” She fell silent. Then she said, “Why would he give his guards the slip?” Another pause. “All right. I’ll take care of him.”
“She didn’t say she’d kill him,” Max said. “Just ‘take care of him,’ whatever that means.”
“Yah.” Whoever blew up the tunnels could have been after me instead of Daan. I doubted anyone knew about Angel; the Undercity existed off the grid, including the dust gangs. “My guess is that Walkerdale is working for the High Mesh.”
“A circus seems an odd profession for a spy.”
“It’s different, I’ll give you that.” Standing up, I stretched my arms, then went to the window and gazed at the desert. The ruins of the Vanished Sea starships were out there, too far to see from here. “Walkerdale comes from Metropoli. Scorpio just arranged a huge deal on Metropoli. Coincidence?”
“A lot of people come from Metropoli,” Max said. “Ten billion of them.”
“Yah, but almost no one comes here. Tourists, but they have to get permission. The only settlements of any size on Raylicon are Cries, the Undercity, and the Abaj Tacalique warriors who live out in the desert, running the planetary defenses. No villages, no other modern cities, a few science stations, a few outposts, and the ruins of the Vanished Sea starships. Nothing here is viable, not the biosphere, the economy, the social structure, none of it. It’s a bunch of privileged people living in a beautiful city that couldn’t exist without an exorbitant inflow of resources.”
“You underestimate Raylicon,” Max said. “The ruins on this planet—the Undercity, the starships, and the city of Izu Yaxlan—those are among the most important in the Imperialate.”
“Yah. But most people can’t visit those places.” Although a small back and forth existed between the populations of the Undercity and Cries, offworlders never came to the aqueducts.
“I don’t see your point,” Max said.
“You can’t immigrate to Raylicon.” I stared at the spectacular landscape, forbidden to most of the Imperialate. “You can only visit if you’re invited or a tourist, and those visas are hard to get. So why would Walkerdale come from anywhere to Raylicon, let alone a world like Metropoli that has everything we lack?”
“She might really be a spy, working for the army.”
I thought back to the scene in the police station. “I didn’t get the impression Lavinda recognized her.”
“Colonel Majda masks her reactions well. How would you know?”
“Intuition, I guess.” Lavinda had revealed more than I’d ever expected when she told me about Chiaru. “And no, I didn’t sense it as an empath. Those exercises Adept Sanva gave me don’t do shit.”
“I suspect you use your abilities at a low level without realizing it.”
“Maybe.” I shifted my weight. “You find anything on this Bessel fellow?”
“A bit,” Max said. “He’s a mesh analyst in addition to being Lukas Quida’s personal assistant. And I think he’s associated with one of the noble Houses.”
That didn’t sound right. If Bessel came from nobility, he wouldn’t take a job as a personal assistant. “Why do you say that?”
“When I analyzed his voice, I found traces of an Iotic accent. You can’t hear it in his normal conversation, but it shows up in a more detailed check. His accent is pure, as if Iotic were his first language. Only the Ruby Dynasty and the noble Houses speak Iotic as a first language.”
“That’s odd.” Maybe he was a Vibarr. “He must deliberately suppress his accent.”
“Maybe he is also working undercover.”
An interesting idea. “Can you do a facial recognition on him?”
“I’ll try. I can compare him to public images of members from various noble Houses and royalty.”
I continued to gaze at the Vanished Sea, soothed by all that panoramic space. “I wonder where he got his name. Bessel was an Earth mathematician. What people on Earth call Bessel functions we call Selei functions. Why name him after an ancient Earth theorist?”
“He can’t call himself Selei,” Max said. “It’s the family name of the Ruby Pharaoh.”
“Well, yah. But I’d have thought he would just pick another Imperialate mathematician.”
“I will see what I can find out.”
“Good.” I pressed my palms against the window. “What about that melted chunk of rock I picked up after the tunnel exploded? Can you tell me anything about it?”
Max switched subjects with an ease most humans lacked. “I managed a cursory analysis using the lab niche of your gauntlet. To do a better job, you need a real lab. If you don’t want anyone in Cries to know what happened, you could ask Gourd to look at it.”
“I might. What did you find?”
“I verified the rock came from the Undercity. It has the right percentages of minerals.” He paused. “I did find one odd result. I don’t think it actually melted.”
I’d wondered about that as well. “It didn’t seem hot enough in that tunnel.”
“Silicates become molten between six hundred and twelve hundred degrees centigrade.”
Ho! “No w
ay did it get near that temperature.”
“It is strange,” Max said. “I think the molecular structure of the rock was rearranged.”
“That’s just a fancy way of saying it melted.”
“Not necessarily. It’s not igneous.”
“Ig-what?”
“Volcanic. Igneous rock forms through the crystallization of magma, which is molten rock.”
“And you don’t think this rock fits that description.”
“Not at all.” He stopped. Given that his processes worked far faster than the human mind, such a pause usually meant he was searching large databases. I waited, patient. He was the ultimate confidant for a PI. Years ago, when I’d installed him in my gauntlets, I’d considered calling him Watson, after a character in an Earth mystery series. I’d chosen Max instead because, well, I wasn’t sure. Maybe for Maximum. Or Maximillian.
He spoke again. “This may sound strange, but I think the rock looks melted because it was taken apart at the molecular level and put back together incorrectly.”
I blinked. “That’s impossible, especially in that short of a time.”
“I’m actually not sure how much time passed. My record of the explosion has a glitch.”
I thought back to the recording he’d shown me. “I don’t remember any glitch.”
“I determine time according to an atomic clock, specifically the oscillation of an atom.”
“I’m sensing a ‘but’ in there.”
“I think my record of the incident has a gap in time.”
“The record looks continuous.”
“Yes, it does. But it is just slightly off from the planetary atomic clock, as if the atomic oscillation stopped for about one second.”
That sounded nuts. “You can’t stop atoms from oscillating.”
“I’m not phrasing this well,” Max said. “I read the time of day by linking to a standardized atomic clock. It works by electrons changing their energy level. For one second during the explosion, the atoms in the clock didn’t change energy levels.”
“Atomic clocks don’t just stop.” I thought about what that would mean. “You can’t run mesh systems without them. If the official clock for this world stopped for one second, it would be a disaster. You know how often an atom resonates in one second? I’m sure it’s millions of times.”
“Actually, more. A cesium clock, for example, has 9,192,631,770 cycles per second.”
Ho! “A lot.”
“Yes. A lot.”
“It couldn’t have stopped for one second.”
“I know. However, it did stop, and at the same time the tunnel exploded.”
A chill went through me. “Max, is it possible you were the one who lost a second, rather than the clock?”
“I don’t follow your meaning.”
“Could you have been in a quantum stasis?”
“I don’t have the capability to create a quasis field. That requires a starship generator or similar. It is beyond my ability.”
“Not you. Maybe something else put the tunnel in quasis for one second.” It was how pilots survived the killing accelerations of space battle. The quantum state of a ship in quasis remained fixed. The ship didn’t freeze; its atoms continued to vibrate, rotate, and otherwise behave as they had when the quasis activated. But no particle in quasis could change its quantum state. On a macroscopic scale, that meant the object became rigid. Nothing could deform it. Ships used quasis for only a few seconds, and only in the relative vacuum of space. If your environment altered too much, then when you came out, the abrupt shift in the forces acting on you would tear you apart.
“It seems unlikely,” Max said. “However, it could explain the glitch. Starship controls can correct for quasis pauses, but your gauntlets aren’t sophisticated enough. If they went into quasis, my record of what happened would stop and only pick up again when I came out of quasis.”
I grimaced. “If some idiot turned on a quasis generator in a planetary environment, gods only know what that could do.”
“It was only one second. I doubt the tunnel changed enough in that time to cause the explosion we experienced.”
He had a point. “Quasis doesn’t change the atomic structure of an object, certainly not enough to make the stone look melted.”
“I wouldn’t think so. Besides, the energy required to put even a small section of the tunnel into quasis would be huge. Where would it come from?”
“I don’t know. The High Mesh does develop new technologies.”
Max spoke dryly. “Blowing things up is hardly new.”
“Maybe it wasn’t meant to explode.” I turned around and leaned against the window-wall. I could never have done that in my youth, when I first left the Undercity. Back then, even drop offs of only a few stories unsettled me. The idea of turning my back on a view more than fifty levels up in a tower would have left me paralyzed.
“Can you send a message to Gourd?” I asked. “If you contact Royal Flush, he or Jak can get in touch with Gourd. Tell him what you found with the rocks in the tunnel. Ask him to analyze that crystal sphere again, this time to see if its molecular structure shows subtle signs of changes.”
“Message sent.”
“Thanks.” I thought about what had happened in the tunnel. “Maybe the High Mesh is trying to develop quasis tech for use in a planetary environment.”
“Why? It would be like using a planet smasher to crush a shimmerfly.”
“For troop combat, maybe?”
“Combat armor would be more effective for close-in ground fighting.”
“I suppose.” In space, a ship could take two to four strikes from major weaponry before the quasis broke down. Huge strikes, far more than you’d get on a planet unless you were trying to destroy a substantial portion of its surface. In theory, nothing worked as well as quasis because an object in quasis couldn’t change. Period. You could explode an antimatter bomb on top of it with no effect. But using weapons like antimatter bombs for infantry combat was dumb. They destroyed everything on both sides of the fight. For close-in combat, body armor or reinforced drones made more sense than a quasis field.
I pushed away from the window. “Whatever they tried to do, I think it failed. Miserably.”
“What do you think they are trying to do?”
“I have no clue.” I lifted my hands, then let them drop. “I wonder if even they know.”
It was time to find out.
Cries University stood in the shadow of the Saint Parval Mountains on the western outskirts of the city. The starport lay to the south, far enough away that the noise of ships taking off didn’t disturb the residents of Cries. As I walked to the Anthropology Department, I watched the sliver of a starship arrowing into the sky, the distant rumble of its leaving barely audible here in the foothills.
Every now and then I passed a bench shaded by feather-trees where students sat and debated whatever caught their interest. Columns fronted the buildings, suitably traditional, but sweeping curves of modern art also graced the quadrangles. The campus presented its elegance to the universe as if nothing illicit ever happened here, which I didn’t believe for a second, but what the hell. It all looked civilized and right now I needed to feel civilized. It offered a respite from wondering when the High Mesh would try to whack me again.
I’d told the Majdas almost nothing. I had no evidence to support my conviction that both Mara and Chiaru were dead, blown up by some bizarre creation developed by a secret alliance of financiers without ethical constraints. I couldn’t keep sneaking around, discovering more of what looked like a conspiracy, without telling some authority. Unfortunately, if I picked the wrong people, I could be signing my death warrant.
I needed answers. So off I went, to the university. The Terraforming Division took up the south wing of the Archeology Department. The halls had an antique quality, as if this stately building with its high ceilings had remained unchanged for centuries. A curving set of stairs led up from the lobby to a rotunda, an
d you could walk around up there until you found halls leading to whatever room you sought. Of course the building had plenty of tech, including lifts for people who didn’t feel like taking the stairs. That was all out of view, though, so it didn’t mar the atmosphere.
Ken Roy’s office was on the third floor. I paused at the doorway. He was sitting at his desk reading a holomap of Raylicon that floated in the air. He looked so scholarly that I felt like a villain by intruding.
After a moment, I said, “My greetings, Professor Roy.”
Ken looked up with a start. “Major! My greetings.” He stood up. “Come in, please.” He indicated a table across from his desk. The chairs there appeared exceedingly comfortable with their worn upholstery and plump cushions. Shelves stood against the walls crammed with books, real books, antiques, the kind that had words printed on a page. It was like being in a museum, except he actually used all this stuff. He matched my idea of a scholar, fit and athletic, but casual, dressed in a rumpled blue shirt and trousers. His hair had grayed at the temples. He also had a humble quality I’d always liked.
As we sat in the chairs, he asked, “What brings you to my world?”
“It really is like another world here,” I said. “So different from the Undercity.”
He smiled. “Less interesting, I’d say.”
I supposed that depended on your point of view. “I wanted to let you know that my tykado students are testing for their belts in a few days. You helped sponsor several of them. If it wouldn’t be an imposition, I’m sure they’d appreciate your coming to see the physical demonstration.”
“Of course! That’s wonderful.” His face seemed to light up. “Which ones are testing?”
“Ruzik and his girlfriend are going for their first-degree black belts. Darjan is testing for brown.” Several younger students were also testing, but Ken didn’t know them.
“I’m afraid I’m still learning their names.”
“My people don’t give our names unless we know someone well.” They had to use their names for the tests, or I couldn’t register them with the ITF, but I didn’t feel comfortable telling him without their permission. I’d had time to ask Ruzik and Darjan before I came here, though, and that was enough. It offered a good cover for the other reason I wanted to see him.
The Vanished Seas (Major Bhaajan series Book 3) Page 20