Solar Heat

by Susan Kearney

  “Yeah. All of us are. You, too.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. Soon.”

  As much as Azsla would have liked to worm out answers from Yawitz, she suspected the woman was mostly telling the truth. She couldn’t answer because she truly didn’t know more. Flights back home to Rama left from the third continent, the portal shielded by a cloaking device that took huge amounts of energy. The cloaked portal couldn’t be used often because of the vast expense. It made sense that Yawitz wouldn’t know details . . . and yet, Azsla sensed she was hiding something.

  Because rushing her mission made no sense. Firsts had monitored this world for years. Why would every First suddenly be recalled? “Why are all of us going home?”

  “I’ve heard only rumors. Nothing solid.”

  “And?”

  Yawitz looked right, left, as if someone could be hiding out of sight on the stairwell. “Originally slaves and Firsts were all going back to Rama. But the plan changed.”

  “When?”

  “Last week. Now only Firsts get to go home. The slaves stay.”

  “We’re letting the slaves go free?” Even as she said the words, her hopes rose, but she knew her suggestion was impossible. Firsts kept what was theirs. And that meant their vidscreens, their clothing, and their slaves.

  “We have a secret space weapon. The slaves will all die.” Yawitz sounded quite satisfied with the new plan.

  Quark. Azsla wanted to curse aloud. The idea of those children she’d seen in the streets all dying felt like sharp knives slashing her guts. She imagined the ladies in the shops, the shopkeepers, Derrek, her crew . . . all of them dead.

  Sweet Vigo. It couldn’t be possible. And yet . . . the Firsts of Rama must be up to something for all the changes to have worked down the line to Azsla’s mission. “What are you talking about?”

  “I told you. It’s only a rumor. Don’t blame me if it makes no sense.”

  Since her mission had begun, nothing had gone right. The ship blowing up. The Zoran government locking them up. Now the change of plans. The big rush.

  If only she could talk to her superiors. Wishing she could use a com unit to call home wouldn’t make it happen. She didn’t dare use a signal that could be traced. So she had to make do with the resources available to her—even when they stank like slug slime. “Did you hear anything else?”

  “Yeah. Every building will be pulverized. The planet totaled.”

  Surely the plan had to be more than a mere rumor, or the Corps wouldn’t have ordered Azsla to go in tonight. But, planet busters? Every slave dead? All the buildings smashed? Rama didn’t have that kind of technology. At least they hadn’t when she’d left.

  Still . . . if they did plan to annihilate this planet . . . the Ramans would want to know if Zor was capable of retaliation. The Zorans might have counterstrike abilities—on other moons or in their space fleet.

  My God. The timetable must have been moved up because Rama was really planning to destroy this planet. Azsla couldn’t banish the thought of these industrious people, the men, the women, the happy children—all of them dying. The gorgeous buildings smashed to rubble and dust. This planet with its balmy climate wiped out.

  What a waste. It was one thing to bring the slaves home. Another to kill them all. The tactic was brutal. Extreme. Sickening.

  Especially since there were other worlds where slaves could escape to. The need for freedom seemed to burn within them. She couldn’t imagine Derrek working as a slave. The idea shot horror skidding through her veins.

  People like Derrek who wanted to be free, people willing to risk their lives for freedom, would always find a way to escape or die trying. But what in Vigo hell could she do?

  Killing them all was so unimaginable. Vile. Wrong. And yet stunning in its audacity. The idea of taking out an entire world made her stomach churn with queasiness. Dizzy, upset, and angry, she tamped down her Quait and fought to keep her feelings from exploding onto her face. “How is that kind of destruction possible?”

  Yawitz shot her an I-don’t-know-or-care frown. “Just do what you’re told, then get off this world. Or you’ll die a slave’s death.”

  “What about guards?”

  “I’ve seen to them. No worries.”

  “Understood.” She straightened and began marching upstairs to the tenth floor, determined to find out as much as she could about the Zoran capabilities. Below her Yawitz left the stairwell, headed for the elevators. When the door slammed shut, cutting her off from Yawitz and leaving Azsla alone on her mission to find out if the Zorans could retaliate, she wondered what the hell she was doing.

  She told herself the dark stairwell was spooking her out. Each footstep echoed, no matter how softly she tread. The dim lighting cast odd shadows, and the steady climb raised her heart rate. But it was the fear that the Raman plan might succeed that had her nerves sparking with worry, her Quait buzzing in wariness.

  No place would be safe if the entire planet blew.

  The idea still boggled the mind. The forces needed to harness such destruction had to be immense. Where could the Raman Firsts even have tested such a weapon? The Raman solar system was stable. If they’d lost a planet, it would have upset the gravitational forces and natural orbit of the home planet, wouldn’t it?

  Besides, Firsts weren’t into space exploration. Why bother going elsewhere when on Rama there were millions of slaves to do a First’s bidding? Home had been comfortable. Safe. The Raman civilization was old and established. Those in charge were the fittest, strongest, most intelligent. There had been peace for tens of thousands of years until the rebellion a decade ago.

  But here on Zor, with adequate salt, the slaves had grown more powerful. Smarter. Perhaps happier. The latter disturbed her the most.

  She’d always believed that the underfirsts needed the Firsts to tell them what to do. To care for them. But obviously that had been a lie brainwashed into Firsts’ consciousnesses since birth. Not only could the former slaves take care of themselves, they seemed happy to do so. The entire Raman society now appeared to her to have been built on a planetary-wide falsehood. Given enough salt, slaves had created a world that worked for them as well if not better than the one on Rama. Plus it was new and shiny. Exciting. Industrious.

  She almost yearned to be a part of it. She most certainly didn’t want to see it destroyed.

  While her own life should have been one of luxury and comfort, in retrospect that lifestyle bored her. She enjoyed challenging her abilities, learning new things.

  But sometimes she tired of working alone. And blind. Or close to it. Proceeding ahead to the tenth floor, her information based solely on an outdated three-year-old schematic, didn’t exactly give her confidence. Neither did Yawitz’s assurance of the lack of guards. Long ago she’d learned to trust her own judgment. If a guard surprised her, it was her neck on the line.

  Since this building had gone up, walls could have been moved, changes could have been made—including the installation of security systems she didn’t know how to disarm. If an unaccounted guard took her by surprise, she’d have to deal with it.

  Her entire life—all the years of training and all the hard work of learning to suppress her Quait—was leading up to this moment. Turning back wasn’t in her makeup. But between the rushed operation with its new timetable and the lack of data, it was natural to feel as though she were about to jump out of an airlock without a space suit.

  Heart pounding, she climbed the last of the stairs and reached the tenth floor. Very slowly, she cracked open the door and peered into a hallway. A water cooler cycled on. A com unit beeped. An emergency exit light cast a green glow over a long and empty corridor.

  Azsla stepped into the hallway. And immediately noted the motion detector that would set off an alarm if she took another step. Rooting h
er feet in place, she withdrew an alarm deadener from the backpack Yawitz had given her. After shooting the pen-like deadener’s laser light at the motion detector, she held her breath until the blinking red light turned yellow—effectively freezing the device and preventing it from sending an alarm announcing her unauthorized intrusion.

  When she breathed again, she set her com device for four hours, the amount of time she had before the motion detectors would recycle. Four hours was more than enough time to scout out the layout, log into the Space Ministry’s computer system, and hack into what she needed. Moving down the hallway, keeping a wary eye out for guards, she took her time to jam one motion detector after another. Lucky for her, Yawitz really did seem to have pulled off the guards. Azsla saw no one.

  Heading straight to the offices at the end of the hall, she triggered the lock with a different light beam. When it clicked open, she stepped into the command center. The dark room lit by computer systems was eerily silent. Dozens of blank consoles hooked into a mainframe. All unmanned. The place was devoid of any life.

  She worried over the lack of guards. Either Yawitz had taken them out by mixing up the schedules or these Zorans were way too trusting. Or their world was one of peace . . . where people went home at night to their families and didn’t worry over war or invasion or planet-busting weaponry that still seemed like a concoction fabricated out of a terrible nightmare. It also worried her that the guards who should have been here could possibly be either hurt or dead.

  She shoved the thought to the back of her mind. Whatever she ultimately decided to do with the information she discovered, she needed facts to form a good decision.

  But would the facts be clear cut? Look at what had happened to her mind ever since that strange waking hallucination. Although she knew she hadn’t made love, it felt as if she had, both physically and emotionally. And she was finding it impossible to ignore that her feelings may have altered somewhat due to a vision. Now that Derrek’s scent and touch were branded into her mind, she couldn’t stop thinking about him. When she did, it was way differently than she had before the dream. If she chose to stay, would they meet again? Would they become lovers?

  Stow it. Now was not the time.

  Sliding behind a computer terminal so that a wall guarded her back, Azsla placed her weapon within easy reach on the desktop. Another spy had already registered her fingerprint and blood type. Azsla placed her fingertip on the bloodsucker, felt the tiny prick, and waited for the machine to analyze her blood. The machine hummed. She held her breath, waiting for it to find her tranq free. Only the fingerprints of someone tranq free would be allowed to boot in. This was the safety mechanism that she had trained for a decade to bypass.

  The whirring continued and Azsla tensed. Had the Zorans set up new safeguards? Would the machine detect some kind of subtle difference in her blood type and identify her as a First?

  Finally the machine clicked a go ahead. She was in!

  No computer specialist, she’d nevertheless been trained to search for encrypted files. Azsla found the disk Yawitz had given her and slipped the “hack” program into the computer and let it do its thing.

  While it hummed, automatically searching for Zoran weapon capabilities, she slid to another unit. Although the system had a keyboard, these computers were voice modulated. “Give me a quick list of available jobs and vacant apartments.”

  Azsla, fearing that tranqed Firsts might find Jadlan, Micoo, and Rak in her apartment, needed to move her crew. Her plan to save them by sending them to the back continent wouldn’t work if the planet was to be destroyed. So she returned to her original idea of sending them out to the asteroids. But she had to hide them first. Then contact Derrek to see if he’d help.

  “Within how large a distance?” the computer asked, its mechanical voice pleasant, efficient, and too loud.

  She turned down the volume. “Search within the capital and average commuting areas.”

  The computer ran through the data in no time and printed out the results without her asking. She folded and stuffed the list into her pocket for later reading.

  “Computer, search for Azsla, Jadlan, Micoo, and Rak.”

  “What kind of search?”

  “I wish to know their current location.”

  The computer’s drives whirred. “I have no knowledge of those people.”

  All the computers on this world plugged into one giant mainframe which was underground, making her task easier than she’d expected. “Has anyone else plugged those names into your search engines within the last thirty hours?”

  “Yes. I have four hits. Three from Archer Intersolar Mining and one from the Space Ministry.”

  Interesting. Yawitz may have logged in here at the Space Ministry to see if anyone was after Azsla, but would she have also typed in the names of her crew? Unlikely.

  Or was Pres Laurie after them? If so, Azsla had done her damnedest to hide their tracks. But who at Archer Intersolar was interested in their activities? That had to be Derrek. At the thought that he was looking for her, a glow of happiness warmed her. Maybe he missed her.

  Yeah right.

  He was probably suspicious as hell that there had been no announcement about their arrival on Zor. And as much as she would have liked to see him again on a personal level, she couldn’t afford to let him know her current whereabouts.

  The first computer dinged. “Search complete.”

  “Where’s the printout?” she asked, coming around the desk. She’d bet her ride home that if the Zorans had progressed in weaponry at the same rate they had in everything else, the home-world might be in trouble.

  And then another thought occurred to her. Had Derrek somehow used a trick to place that vision in her mind? If he had deliberately done so, why had he picked that particular vision? She couldn’t think of any reason why. The idea disturbed her on a level that hummed through her blood. Yet, excited her. And the contradictory emotions confused her, making her feel as if she were standing in quicksand.

  The computer spoke softly, but with conviction. “There is no printout.”

  She started to open the paper tray. “You out of paper? Or ink?”

  “Negative.”

  “So where’s the report?”

  “I have nothing to report. There are no Zoran weapons systems capable of reaching Rama. Would you like me to print out a statement to that effect?”

  “No.” The search had run without a hiccup. And the results were negative. Zor could not retaliate. That meant Rama was free to employ their planet-annihilating weapons without fear that these people could strike back.

  The news was good. With her mission over except for the wrap-up details, she should have been elated. But she felt as if she’d taken a hammer blow to the head, her thoughts jarring.

  As soon as she reported . . . if she reported what she’d learned . . . this planet and everyone on it would be a goner.

  Voice shaky, she ordered, “Erase all evidence of my search.”

  “Compliance.”

  “Erase all indication that I ever entered this room.”

  “Compliance.”

  She popped out the disk, pressed a destroy charge on the face, then set it down on the floor. A tiny flash indicated the disk’s self-destruction. Good. There was now no evidence she’d ever been here or why she’d come. So far, so good. The op was going smoothly, but that didn’t mean she could relax. She needed to exit the building before she could assume she’d gotten away with the rush job.

  Azsla backed out of the hallway slowly, retracing her steps to the stairs. For once, luck seemed to be with her. Apparently the Zorans had put all their efforts and resources into building this world—not preparing for war.

  How could they be so naive? So stupid? As she sneaked down the stairs, her anger engaged. It wasn’t as if these slaves didn’
t know that the Firsts they’d left behind were furious. That they had the capability to come after them. Why hadn’t they prepared?

  Unless . . . she slowed her frenetic pace . . . unless the Space Ministry didn’t have the intel she’d come after. Was it possible these Zorans kept intel on their weapons systems elsewhere? The tranqed Firsts might have assumed the weapons would be dirtside, but suppose they were hidden on one of their moons? On another planet in this solar system? Or in the asteroid belt?

  Derrek might know. The man was connected. The thought flashed into her mind as she picked up her pace. Was she simply looking for a reason to seek him out again?

  Possibly. She couldn’t ignore the effects of that weird hallucination.

  Was she looking for a reason to stay, instead of returning to Rama? She groaned. The longer she stayed on Zor, the more problematic second-guessing herself was becoming. At home, everything was right or wrong, red or yellow, with no shades of orange in between.

  But on Zor, life was much more complicated.

  She could open the exit door and be shot by President Laurie’s troops, or arrested by the Zorans whose military base she’d just infiltrated, or taken into custody by the tranqed Firsts who may have discovered she’d hidden her crew from them. Guards might materialize out of nowhere. Or she might have another sexy fantasy vision.

  Azsla had never had an easy life, but she’d never been in such a mess. Worst of all, she didn’t know her own mind. Should she report her findings? Her suspicions? And if she dared mention the hallucination, would anyone believe her report? Surely, they’d question her sanity.

  And what of the weapon the Ramans were pointing at this planet? Even if she wanted to warn the Zorans, how could she? They wouldn’t believe her. She had no proof, and if she tried, she’d blow her cover. She didn’t think anyone on this planet would take kindly to a First in their midst. They’d have no reason to believe a First would want to help.

  To think that the lives of hundreds of thousands of people depended on her decision was a burden she’d never expected to carry. And it weighed heavily on her aching heart. She slowed to slip through the exit door but again encountered no difficulty and hurried down the street.