The Vanished Seas (Major Bhaajan series Book 3)

by Catherine Asaro

  What struck me most were the patterns engraved in the bulkheads, all silver, blue, and gold lines. They looped in overlapping circles that resembled wheels, crossing in so many places, you couldn’t tell where one ended and another started. It reminded me of the “op art” I’d read about, which relied on illusions to fool the observer, creating a sense of movement or vibration. These gleamed in the light. I rubbed my eyes and squinted at them. The designs weren’t moving, they just gave that impression.

  “Dizzy.” Jak stood at a bulkhead and traced his fingertip along the curves.

  I joined him. “Seen before.”

  He glanced at me. “Where?”

  “Can’t remember.” I almost recognized the curves. It was like the visual equivalent of catching a whisper at the edge of your hearing, words not quite loud enough to understand.

  From the outside, the ship had looked half buried in the desert, but the deck where we stood was level with the ground. That suggested more of the ship lay below us, underground. I turned to the lieutenant. “Does this ship have another deck?”

  “One other, yes.” She came over to us. “Would you like to go down?” When I nodded, she knelt by a circle in the center of the deck and tapped a code against its edge. The circle slid aside, revealing darkness. When she tapped another code, lights came on below.

  I peered at the lower deck. It looked just like this one. “How do we get down?”

  She stood up next to me. “Professor Roy uses a ladder. I think he left several down there.”

  Jak snorted. “That’s no help up here.”

  Ruzik came over, regarding the lieutenant with curiosity. “You made a hole.”

  “Need to go down.” I looked around for materials to make a ladder.

  Ruzik didn’t bother. He crouched down, grabbed the edges of the circle, and lowered his body into the hole until he was hanging there.

  “Wait!” the lieutenant said.

  Ruzik let go and landed with a thud on the lower deck. It didn’t seem much different than dropping from the midwalk of a large canal to its floor, except that here his landing didn’t send dust swirling in the air. Instead, it vibrated and echoed through the ship.

  “Strange acoustics.” Jak spoke the Cries word in the Undercity dialect.

  The lieutenant called down to Ruzik. “You all right?”

  “Fine.” He stood below us, looking around. “Empty.” He didn’t have to raise his voice. With the silence of the desert and the shelter of the ships, no sounds invaded this space. We’d have heard him if he whispered.

  “Safe.” He looked up. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” I asked.

  He said, “Aboveground,” as if that explained why nothing here would be safe.

  “Ladder?” I asked. I wanted to drop down the way Ruzik had done, but the wound in my abdomen still ached.

  “I check.” He walked out of view.

  I knelt next to the hatchway. “Ruzik?”

  He came back and held up a knotted contraption constructed from desert vines. “Ladder.”

  “Toss up,” I said.

  Ruzik hefted up one end and I caught it. It was indeed a ladder woven from vines, with rungs and everything.

  “I’ll get some clamps,” the lieutenant said. “I can attach it to the rim here.”

  As the lieutenant went to a pile of modern equipment by one bulkhead, Jak dropped to the lower deck. His athletic grace reminded me of our youth. He didn’t have the muscular bulk of fighters like Ruzik or Angel, but he moved faster. Although he’d never enjoyed the rough-and-tumble as much as he liked games of chance, he was one hell of a fighter.

  I went to the hatchway that opened into the desert. Angel was still outside, pacing back and forth as she scanned the area. She turned to me. “Eh, Bhaaj.”

  “We go down in ship,” I said. “Lower level.”

  She didn’t look surprised. The Undercity existed as a series of levels, from the Concourse down through the various canals all the way to the Down-deep, where the inhabitants had become so accustomed to the dark, they could no longer endure lights without protective goggles.

  “I keep watch,” Angel said. “Trouble comes, I let you know.”

  I nodded, satisfied, and went back inside. The lieutenant had clamped the ladder to the rim of the hatchway in the deck. When she gave it a hearty tug, it stayed in place.

  “Thanks.” I climbed down, then stepped off at the bottom and looked up. Her head was silhouetted against the light from the upper deck.

  “You good?” she asked.

  “Yah.” I didn’t want her down here while we explored. “Can you stay on guard up there?” Angel would keep an eye on her.

  “All right.” She sounded puzzled. “On guard against what?”

  “Probably nothing. But three people came out here yesterday without clearance.”

  “I heard about that,” she said. “I’ll keep watch.”

  I turned to Jak and Ruzik. “We search.”

  “For what?” Ruzik asked.

  Good question. “Don’t know. I search. You guard.”

  Ruzik nodded, accepting the role of guardian with the ease of a leader who had spent his life protecting his circle. Jak, who had spent his life learning to clobber people at games of chance, seemed more intrigued by the ship. I turned in a circle, looking around. Those etched curves covered every surface of this deck, red, blue, diamond, gold, silver, copper, and bronze, especially in an area that looked like another cockpit. Instead of panels, this “cockpit” had a denser set of curves, as if they themselves were the controls. The beauty of it took my breath. That the patterns remained clear even after six thousand years said a great deal about both the construction of the ships and the efforts the army took to preserve them.

  Jak came over to me. “You think that trio yesterday came to see this?”

  “It’s hard to say.” I walked with him to the cockpit. “Max, can you bring up your recording of their conversation yesterday? What exactly did they say about finding the lower chambers?”

  “Here it is,” Max said.

  A man’s voice rose into the air. “Without Bialo, we can’t go any further. Only he can reach the under-chambers from here.”

  Jak snorted. “They thought they could get to this deck from out there when the ship had both a guard and Ken Roy working here? Are they stupid?”

  “No.” I thought about the attempts against my life. “Desperate, yes, but I don’t think they’re fools. I get more the sense of smart people without experience in covert operations.”

  “Bialo hardly strikes me as a genius,” Jak said. “He’s tactless, underestimates people, and he can’t play cards worth shit. The only time he’s taken home winnings was that night you showed up, because you made him leave before he could gamble it all away.”

  “He’s overconfident,” I said. “But he follows through. If they came here expecting him to reach these under-chambers, whatever those are, then he can probably do it.”

  Ruzik stood listening to us. When I paused, he said, “Angel liked.”

  We both blinked at him. “You mean she liked Daan Bialo?” I asked.

  “Yah.” Ruzik shrugged. “Said he has good mox.”

  She thought Daan had charm? Seriously? “City slicks have city mox.” I didn’t mean it as a compliment.

  “His mind,” Ruzik told me. “Like Angel.”

  “He feels moods?” Jak asked.

  “Yah.” Ruzik spoke as if it were perfectly normal for Daan Bialo to be an empath.

  Huh. I hadn’t picked that up. Then again, I had no clue how to use whatever minor abilities I possessed. Something tugged at me about all this, but I couldn’t figure out what. “Max, who said that about Bialo, that he could get into the under-chamber?”

  “The man Bessel.”

  “Bessel!” I yelled. “That’s it!”

  Jak looked at Ruzik and Ruzik looked at Jak. “Loud words,” Ruzik told him.

  “Too much.” Jak agreed. “Bring dow
n ship.”

  I grinned and tapped my temple. “Loud word, good thought. Bessel. Bessel function.”

  They regarded me, waiting to see if I had something to say that made sense.

  “Math.” I motioned at the curves on the bulkheads. “Bessel functions, spherical harmonics, Laguerre curves, all those gorgeous eigenfunctions.”

  Ruzik frowned at me. “Jibber.”

  “It’s not gibberish.” I studied the curves. Yes! They showed stylized math functions using a system of curvilinear coordinates unfamiliar to me, one that distorted their appearance from what I knew. But I’d seen plots like this in my classes on differential equations, quantum theory, and Selei transforms. I’d also seen them in neuromathetics, that bizarre discipline we’d inherited from our Ruby Empire ancestors, an abstract combination of neuroscience, quantum physics, Hilbert space mathematics, and psychology. Our ancestors had learned it from the libraries on these ships, but they hadn’t really understood it. Although we’d lost a great deal during the dark ages, some ideas of neuromathetics had survived, what we now called Kyle theory.

  “Why is his name Bessel?” I paced across the cabin. “It can’t be coincidence.”

  Ruzik spoke to Jak. “Jibber?”

  “Not sure,” Jak told him. “Bhaaj thinking.”

  “Ah.” Ruzik nodded, apparently willing to accept the concept that I could think.

  I stopped in front of them. “Ruby Empire science.”

  “Eh?” Ruzik asked.

  “Dead science,” Jak clarified.

  Was it? I went back to pacing. Neuromathetics involved the quantum wavefunctions that described a human brain. That by itself wasn’t a big deal; any physics student worth their salt could learn to calculate atomic and molecular wavefunctions. Where neuromathetics lost me was when it applied Hilbert space theory to the wavefunctions that described a thought. What happened when you transformed those functions to a different space, a “thought” space, just like we could transform functions that described the position of an electron to a space that described its momentum? You got Kyle space. I needed to find a theorist I could grill. I had an engineer’s mind; I dealt best with concrete puzzles, not abstract mathematics.

  “Max,” I said. “Did you discover anything else about Bessel? You said he was a computer analyst as well as a personal assistant. What does he analyze?”

  “He develops financial models to maximize investment profits.”

  “Oh.” That seemed to be pretty much what everyone in the High Mesh did or wanted to do. “Nothing about him being a mathematician?”

  “He must be, and a good one,” Max said. “His models are quite successful.”

  “What about that facial recognition analysis you were doing? Is he a Vibarr?”

  “One moment.” Then Max said, “Yes, the analysis shows a high probability he is a member of a noble House, with Vibarr as the most likely.”

  “Hah! I knew it. They’re challenging the Majdas.”

  “Seriously?” Jak said. “You think the Vibarrs want a war with the Majdas?”

  “Financial war,” I said.

  Ruzik was listening closely. “You ken all this?” he asked Jak.

  “Yah, some,” Jak said.

  “The Vibarrs started some project here,” I said. “I don’t know what. But something went wrong. Now they’re afraid of losing control.”

  “Control of what?” Jak waved his hand at the ship. “A bunch of curves?”

  “Maybe we’re looking at this wrong,” I said. “Or in the wrong place. They said ‘under-chambers.’ Ken Roy said something about that, too, about mysteries below the ships.”

  Jak looked around. “I thought this was the lowest level.”

  I went to stand under the hatchway to the upper deck. “Lieutenant?”

  Her face appeared above me. “Yes?”

  “Does this ship have a third deck below this one?”

  “Well, no. Anything below where you are standing is buried in the desert.”

  “I think Professor Roy has gone under the ships.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m on at night and he works during the day.”

  Jak came over and scowled at me. “I hope you don’t plan on dragging this Roy fellow out of bed.”

  I was tempted. But I didn’t want to make Ken a target. “Lieutenant, can you help us look for a hatchway here? You know more about how to work them.”

  “Sure.” She climbed the ladder to us. “I rarely come down here. There’s no need during my shift.”

  “Sounds exciting,” Jak said.

  She spoke wryly. “Like watching sand dunes is exciting.”

  “Does anyone come out here during your shift?” I asked.

  “Never. Except you.” She glanced around the ship. “I suppose this place is interesting in a museum sort of way. It doesn’t have much to see, though.”

  Ruzik came over to us. “Found another hatch.”

  “Show,” I said.

  He took us across the deck and indicated a circle in the floor. “Goes down, maybe.”

  The lieutenant knelt and tapped a pattern on the circle. “It does look the same.”

  Max, I thought. Are you getting a record of the codes that open these hatches?

  Yes. However, I received a message from Majda security telling me that any records I make here are confidential and may not be distributed to anyone besides you, under penalty of my being erased as an EI.

  Gods! I’m sorry. Erasing an EI was like killing it. I had backups of him, but they weren’t the real Max. Don’t take any risks.

  No need to be sorry. It’s standard army procedure. I’ll be careful.

  The lieutenant tried several codes. On the third one, the hatch slid open.

  I knelt next to her. “Any lights down there?”

  “Let’s see . . .” She tried another pattern, with no success. She played her fingers across the rim for several moments, different patterns—

  Light flooded the area below us.

  “Hah!” She grinned at me. “There you go.”

  I peered into the chamber. It reminded me of caves in the Undercity, those where my people lived. A rock formation stood to the left of this hatchway, a cone of some sort. An artist had carved it into a totem of lizard heads stacked up on one another, several with their mouths open in roars, fangs bared, and others with their eyes closed as if they slept.

  Ruzik looked down the hatchway. “Like aqueducts.”

  “It’s a storage area,” Jak said. “I see boxes. Or something.”

  Ruzik went to a nearby bulkhead, grabbed another ladder from a pile there, and came back to us. “You climb,” he told me. “Need more healing.”

  So it came to this, the student took care of the teacher. He was right, though; I shouldn’t jump. After I climbed the ladder to the cave, Jak dropped down next to me, making the coilgun bounce on his shoulder.

  “I guard,” Ruzik said. “Up here.”

  “Yah, good,” I said. That put Angel on the first level and Ruzik on the lower. The lieutenant was up there too, but at least I had one person I trusted on both levels.

  My breath caught as I looked around the cave. Ancient sculptors had carved the stalagmites rising from the ground into beasts with horns curling around their ears, and they’d sculpted the stalactites hanging from the ceiling into great winged lizards. In places where a stalactite met a stalagmite, forming a column, the builders had formed them into arches that supported the ceiling. Mosaics inlaid the arches, gleaming silver, gold, bronze, blue, purple, white, and red. Crystals also glittered in the stone everywhere, blue, white, and the purple of amethyst, not the perfect gems created in labs, but natural stones. The floor, level and smooth beneath our feet, was engraved with more of the math curves.

  “Gods,” I murmured. “This is gorgeous.”

  The cave contained nothing else—except three coffins against the far wall.

  CHAPTER XVII

  HIDDEN KEY

 
The boxes sat on a ledge that jutted out from the far wall at waist height. Jak and I approached with caution. Up close, they looked less like coffins and more like ornate containers constructed from a glossy black material and engraved with unfamiliar symbols. Rounded moldings ran along their edges, elegant despite the layer of dust that covered them. Each box had a transparent lid that rang when I tapped it. Crystalline bars lined their tops, all with intricate workings inside, gold and copper gears, crystal levers, ebony rods. A bronze crank engraved with spirals jutted out from the side of each, and bronzed hinges held the lids closed.

  “Strange,” I said. “Who would put these under a starship?”

  “Probably whoever left the ships here,” Jak said. “Or maybe our ancestors.”

  “They do look ancient.” I tugged on the crank of one, but I couldn’t move it. “Stuck, too.”

  Jak ran his finger along one of the lids, leaving a trail in the dust. “It seems dead.”

  I grimaced. “Or for the dead.”

  “Maybe we’re looking under the wrong ship,” Jak said.

  I went back to the hatchway, where the lieutenant was watching us.

  “Anything there?” she asked.

  “Just those boxes. Do you know if the other ships have chambers like this?”

  “I can go look, if you’d like.”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  After she left, Jak said, “She’s friendly.” He sounded surprised.

  I smiled. “Not all city slicks are arrogant. A lot are just normal people.”

  “Maybe. Still, Angel should follow her.”

  “Good idea.”

  He tapped his gauntlet, and Angel’s voice came out of his comm. “Yah?”

  “City guard comes up,” Jak said. “Go with, yah?”

  “Will do,” Angel said.

  “Good.” Jak tapped off his comm.

  Ruzik’s head appeared in the hatchway above us. “The third box. Look. Not same.”

  Puzzled, I went to the third box. Someone had wiped it clean of dust.

  “Good see,” I told him. Even without enhancements, he had damn good eyesight. I pulled on its lever, and this one moved. The lid of the box opened on bronzed hinges.

  “Hey.” Jak set his hands on the rim. “I could lie in there.”