The Vanished Seas (Major Bhaajan series Book 3)

by Catherine Asaro

  “I’m upping your pain meds,” Max said. “Also, I’m having your nanomeds use more resources in their repair of your rib.”

  I didn’t answer, just steeled myself. Yah, my meds could fix the broken bone. With Max forcing them to accelerate their healing, they’d probably already partially repaired it. But I was going pay a dear price, draining what little energy reserves remained to my body. The microfusion reactor that powered my biomech hydraulics and reinforced my bones had so many safeties, it might still be operating, but even if that were true, it couldn’t create physiological energy reserves. I’d have a healthy rib and be dead from sheer depletion of my body.

  An hour more, I told myself. Just keep going an hour more.

  Angel jumped down next. Jak stayed up top to guard Bessel and watch for anyone coming at us from that direction. Starlight filtered through the hatchway, enough to show the lieutenant working on the hatch to the cave. I shivered in the cold air. My climate-controlled clothes weren’t working. It had to be that. I wasn’t in trouble. If falling down a cliff and getting hit by a knife didn’t stop me, I could handle a broken rib.

  “It doesn’t look like this hatch got much of the dust, with the upper one closed.” The lieutenant stood up, watching me. “How do you want to do this? Get Talon’s flyer and fly to the palace, or get you to the quarry so you can deactivate it?”

  Decide, I thought. If I went down there, I had nearly an hour to turn off the quarry, but I had no idea how to do it. Even if I thought I’d deactivated it, I could be wrong. The High Mesh hadn’t realized it was active when it tried to transfer Mara, Chiaru, and Daan. Reaching the palace would take longer, but all we had to do was warn the Majdas. If we were right, then as long as Lavinda didn’t access Kyle space, she’d be safe.

  I answered in a low voice. “If they’re down there, get them up here. We’ll knock out Talon, get her flyer controls, and go to the palace.”

  Relief flickered across her face. Apparently I wasn’t the only one with doubts about my ability to work with the boxes. She nodded to me, then knelt again and tapped the rim on the hatch in a code. It slid open with a hiss.

  “Detective Talon?” the lieutenant called out. “You down there?”

  Talon’s voice came from below. “Yes. Can you catch the ladder if I toss it up?”

  “Sure.” When the ladder came sailing up, the lieutenant easily grabbed it out of the air. She clamped it to the rim of the hatch and let down one end. “You’re all set.”

  “Who is with you?” Talon asked.

  “Bessel,” the lieutenant said. “We had to shoot Major Bhaajan and the man with her. The other woman is locked in another ship.”

  Rustles came from below, what sounded like someone climbing the ladder. Angel and I moved back in the darkness. No sound came from the upper deck; whatever Jak was doing to keep Bessel silent was working.

  Light suddenly flared around us. Ah, no! With my vision so attuned to the night, I went blind. Someone must have set off a handheld flare, which only used chemicals, not circuits the dust could fry. I whipped up my gun, but I managed to stop my reflexes before I fired. Even if the revolver worked, I could just as easily hit Angel or the lieutenant.

  “Don’t shoot!” someone shouted.

  Someone else ignored them. A bullet grazed my waist, or at least that’s what it felt like. With a groan, I stumbled backward, dropping my gun. I couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see. I would have passed out if I hadn’t been in combat mode, pumped full of stimulants. What hit me had to have come from an old-fashioned gun without any tech-mech the dust could foul up. Although it didn’t tear apart my body like a modern pulse bullet, it hurt like the blazes.

  I backed into a bulkhead and braced myself against the barrier. Another gunshot rang out and hit a bulkhead somewhere. Squinting, I struggled to see. Angel was fighting someone. A large man—Ruzik!—grappled with someone else. Who? I clamped my hand on my waist where the bullet had torn my side. The smell of blood saturated my senses, and my palm felt slippery.

  Talon. Ruzik had taken on Talon. She tried to roll him to the floor, and he twisted out of her hold. Angel went to the circus, also known as Tandem Walkerdale, punching her hard and ducking away. Even as Walkerdale struck at the air where Angel had been a moment before, Angel kicked like a dancer and slammed her foot into Walkerdale’s head. Ruzik sparred with Talon, street boxing, pummeling her with power punches, going full out in a way I’d never seen from city-trained fighters. Talon and Walkerdale fought well, but Ruzik and Angel fought dirtier, as deadly as they were graceful.

  As my eyes adapted, I saw Daan making a fast exit, climbing the ladder to the deck above. Well, good. Jak could hold him with Bessel. If I could just . . . think. I slid down the bulkhead until I was sitting on the deck. Ruzik had knocked out Talon and it looked like Angel was finishing off Walkerdale. The lieutenant lay on the deck, still and silent.

  “Get the flyer activator.” I rasped out the words. “From Talon.”

  Angel came over and knelt next to me. “You got to hold on.”

  “Yah.” Bracing myself, I tried to push back up the bulkhead. “Got—activator?”

  “Acta-what?” Angel helped me stand up.

  “For fly thing.”

  “Not ken.”

  “Lieutenant?” I rasped out the word.

  Ruzik moved away from Talon’s still form, keeping watch on her and Walkerdale as he stepped over to the lieutenant. Angel kept her body turned toward them even as she held me up.

  “Lu Ten alive?” I asked.

  Ruzik turned to me. “Yah. Breathes. Not awake.”

  “The other two?” I asked.

  “Sleep, also.”

  We couldn’t leave the lieutenant with Talon and Walkerdale. Gods only knew what they would do to her if they recovered first. I had no intention of killing anyone, which meant we had to bring the lieutenant with us.

  “Wake up Lu Ten,” I said.

  “Bhaaj.” Jak spoke from the deck above. “Can you get up here?”

  “Yah. I’m fine,” I lied.

  Ruzik shook the lieutenant. “Wake up, city slick.”

  I limped over to them. My head felt light, dizzy. Gods I needed to lie down. I knelt next to the lieutenant. She opened her eyes and stared at Ruzik.

  “Lieutenant?” I asked. “Can you understand me?”

  “Yes.” She sat up, pressing her hand against her shoulder. “I’m all right.”

  I doubted it, given the blood leaking from her shoulder all over her hand. “Can you walk?”

  “I think so.”

  I spoke to Ruzik. “Get her up, yah?”

  Max spoke. “Bhaaj, your meds are releasing more painkillers and stimulants.”

  “Good,” I muttered.

  “It’s not good,” he said. “It will keep you going now, but when you crash, your internal organs could start to fail.”

  “You got a better idea?”

  After a pause, he said, “No. You all need to leave this place as fast as possible.”

  “Right.”

  As Ruzik helped the lieutenant up, I checked on Talon and Walkerdale. Although both were unconscious, neither seemed in trouble. They’d recover soon. I went through Talon’s jacket and found the activator, a handheld wedge. I held it up. “Activator. We go.”

  No one argued. With Angel helping me, and Ruzik helping the lieutenant, we climbed to the upper deck. It felt excruciating, taking forever, though logically I knew no more than a few minutes had passed since the flare blinded us.

  “Bhaaj, you can do it,” Jak said.

  “Of course I can,” I mumbled as I crawled onto the deck. With his help, I stood up, swaying.

  The flare was dying below, dimming enough that I could see better. Jak had both Bessel and Daan Bialo, with Bessel’s hands still locked behind him. We should have locked Daan too, but we only had one set of restraints. He stood watching us, his face as pale as starlight.

  I limped over to him. “D
on’t use the Kyle functions of your gauntlet.”

  Daan tried to look innocent. “What Kyle functions?”

  “Bialo, you’re a crappy liar,” I said. “It’s for your own safety. One of the quarries is awake. If you access the Kyle web, it will try to transfer you, like it did with Quida and Starchild. You want to get exploded?”

  “No.” His face turned even more ashen. “I don’t think my gauntlets work now, anyway.”

  I looked from him to Bessel. “Do either of you know how to reach Talon’s flyer?”

  “I can,” Daan said.

  “Good.” I pushed him toward the exit. “Go.”

  We all walked out into the chilly desert night beneath the glorious starscape that ruled the sky. Jak stopped, facing northward—

  And raised his gun.

  “Hey!” the lieutenant said. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing is out there to shoot,” Bessel said.

  Jak ignored them, sighting on the desert beyond the ships, his gun aimed in the direction of the long trek to the Undercity.

  I recognized his hardened expression. “Jak, no.”

  He pressed the firing stud.

  The bullet ripped through the air with a huge crack. It hit ground and exploded, shattering the silence, followed by the thunder of the desert collapsing into the tunnels below. Jak fired again, and another explosion ripped through the dunes. More ground fell, obliterating the cavity-ridden conduits beneath the desert.

  “Are you insane?” Daan yelled.

  The ground shook under our feet and the thunder continued as more tunnels collapsed.

  “Stop!” the lieutenant shouted. “You’re obliterating it!”

  “No,” Bessel said. “How could you destroy those ruins?”

  Angel and I just stood there. Jak had shot far enough away from the ships that he didn’t harm them, but whatever paths might have led from here to the Undercity, no matter how convoluted, were gone now, crushed into debris.

  Jak’s stare burned with a furious intensity as he turned to the others. “The aqueducts are ours.” His voice rumbled like an echo of the falling ground. “For thousands of years. We take care of the Undercity. Us. Not Cries. Not the military. Not Skolia. Not nobles, royalty, or the Assembly.” His gaze was so intense I could almost feel it searing my skin. “Never will any of you come from this place to invade the Undercity. Never.”

  I said only, “Yah.” I’d buried my resentment for years. It was the only way I could work with the powers of Skolia, the only way to convince them to deal with me rather than trying to wrest what they wanted from my people with no care for our culture or identity. I hid my anger, but it had never cooled. It burned within me like a furnace.

  Jak met my gaze and nodded. We understood each other.

  I laid my hand on his arm. “No more shoot.”

  He lowered his gun. “No more ammo.”

  “Good boom,” Angel told him.

  He slung the empty gun over his shoulder.

  I turned to the others. “We should go.”

  Daan stared at me. “Just like that? ‘We should go’ after he fucking blew up the desert?”

  “You want to stay?” I asked.

  He stared at me, at Jak, back at me. “No.”

  “Surreal,” the lieutenant muttered. She headed south, and we all followed.

  During our hike to find the flyer, my night vision mostly returned. Talon had set the craft down far from the ships to avoid the effects of the spy dust, or so we hoped. I could only think of the time rushing past. It was almost morning, at least in terms of when people got out of bed, despite the darkness. Majda would launch their security update regardless of whether or not I showed up. They needed a Kyle operator to work on the Kyle mesh, and that meant Lavinda.

  The pain of my wounds receded some as the meds did their work, but my mind kept going around in circles. As much as the Vibarrs were the greatest financial rivals to the Majdas, both Houses kept politics out of their challenges. They had too much at stake. But if the House of Vibarr caused the death of Colonel Lavinda Majda, heir to the Majda throne, it would be a political assassination as well as a personal disaster. If the blast caught the General of the Pharaoh’s Army, it became treason at the highest level, involving noble Houses with power that rivaled the elected Assembly. It could tear apart the Imperialate.

  The lieutenant managed to walk on her own after Jak used his undershirt to bandage her shoulder. He was good at that, given all the times in our youth we’d been injured in fights. The temperature continued to drop, and we all shivered even with climate-controlled clothes. We kept going because, well, it was either that or die. Talon had to get rid of us or risk life in prison, even execution. The worst of it was that she could get away with murdering Angel, Ruzik, and Jak because no formal record existed of them in Cries. Powerful people knew Jak, sure, but they weren’t about to admit an association with the Undercity’s crime lord. Although records existed for the lieutenant and myself, Talon could easily blame our deaths on unknown Undercity gang members or drug punkers or whatever.

  The flyer finally loomed ahead, large and dark. Very large, in fact, more than I’d expected.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Daan asked.

  “Good question,” Bessel muttered.

  “What do you mean?” the lieutenant asked.

  “It doesn’t look right,” Daan said. “It’s too big.”

  “Moving,” Angel said.

  Ho! I saw it now, too, the back of the craft shifting—

  I stopped. The others stopped with me, except Ruzik, who continued on for a few more steps, then realized we weren’t with him and came back to us.

  Jak was watching my face. “What is it?”

  “Ruzik,” I said.

  He came over to me. “Yah?”

  “Not you.” I motioned toward the flyer. “Your namesake.” We weren’t close enough to see the shadowed forms clearly, but I had no doubt.

  “Saints almighty,” the lieutenant said. “She’s right.”

  “I don’t understand,” Bessel said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Ruziks,” I said. “Two of them, I think.”

  “What?” Daan stiffened. “They’ll kill us! We have to get out of here.”

  “Calm down,” Jak told him. “They won’t attack unless you attack them. They probably think the flyer is some weird-smelling creature that invaded their territory.”

  “A colony of them does roam the desert south of the starships,” the lieutenant said. “But we almost never see them, not even from a distance. They avoid us.”

  “How are we going to get to the flyer?” Bessel asked.

  Good question. “Anyone ever approach them?” I asked.

  “Not that I know of,” the lieutenant said. “I’ve never seen one up close. Supposedly warriors rode them during the Ruby Empire.”

  “I’ve heard tales about them,” Bessel said. “Each ruzik formed a bond with its rider.”

  “The hell with that,” Daan said. “This isn’t some child’s tale.”

  “I need my arms free.” Bessel’s voice shook. “In case we have to run.”

  I doubted we could outrun a ruzik, but he had a point. Jak apparently agreed, because he released him, and Bessel let out a strained breath.

  “Feel them,” Angel said.

  “Are you crazy?” Daan said. “Why would you touch one?”

  “I don’t think that’s what she meant,” I said. “She feels their minds.”

  Ruzik didn’t bother to comment—he simply headed toward the flyer. Angel joined him and they strode across the sand, which was flat here rather than the rolling dunes.

  “Hey.” I limped forward, trying to catch up with them.

  The others came too, though Jak had to prod Daan with his gun. Maybe Daan didn’t realize the gun was out of bullets, but I suspected he’d have moved even if Jak just scowled at him.

  As we approached, the ruziks took form out of the silvery night, wa
tching us now instead of the flyer. They resembled the Tyrannosaurus rex, and some scientists believed they were engineered from the DNA of Earth dinosaurs. Others thought they were native to Raylicon. As we drew nearer, their differences became more obvious. Their scaled forearms were much larger and longer than for a T-rex, enough that a ruzik could easily use them to run on the ground. The claws on those massive limbs were as big as my lower arm, daggers that could tear a human to shreds. Scales covered their bodies. They looked monochrome in the starlight, but holos I’d seen showed them glittering in gold, green, and blue. They had a terrifying beauty, the most magnificent animals on Raylicon. I didn’t believe our ancestors had ever ridden these creatures.

  We stopped a few meters away, none of us daring to go closer. They smelled of musk, spice, and citrus. One of the animals snorted, and the other shifted its weight, scraping the sand with its clawed feet. Plumes of condensation curled up from their snouts into the cold air. They watched us out of large eyes, one on either side of their great heads.

  “Gods,” Bessel whispered. “They’re glorious.”

  “Yah,” I murmured. I just hoped they didn’t eat humans.

  I didn’t realize Ruzik was walking again until it was too late to stop him. He halted below one of the animals. His namesake lowered its head, and mist from its nostrils swirled around his body. He stayed perfectly still, letting it explore him. Angel came up to his side, and the other animal butted her shoulder with its snout. I felt an odd sense then, a curiosity that wasn’t my own. At my side, Daan Bialo exhaled, and I actually felt him relax.

  “What the bloody hell are they doing?” the lieutenant said. She sounded about as relaxed as a desert lion with indigestion.

  “I think those animals are Kyles,” I said. “Sort of.” I didn’t sense anything human, not emotions as I knew them, but they recognized a kinship in Ruzik and Angel. “Come on.” I limped forward. “They’ll let us by.”

  Everyone else stayed put. Then Daan caught up with me. His terror had gone, shaded into a respectful fear. The others finally moved as well, their steps whispering in the sand.