by Judith Tarr
Aisha gave up then. Whatever happened after this, it wouldn’t have anything to do with her. She just had to hope she didn’t get caught in the backlash.
It was not the same as Aisha’s testing. There was no uplink to the worldsweb in jump. Lieutenant Zhao was alone, with only his own powers to draw on.
He had a good share of those, and no way of knowing what he was getting into. He leaned forward in his chair.
The air started to hum. The hairs on Aisha’s arms stood up. She shivered all the way down inside.
Rama sat perfectly still. Whatever Lieutenant Zhao was beaming at him, he was like deep water. Nothing rippled the surface.
Lieutenant Zhao frowned. He was almost touching Rama now, eye to eye and nose to nose. His breathing was quick and shallow. Rama’s was deep and slow.
Lieutenant Zhao sucked in a single enormous breath. He almost choked on it. When he started again, he was matching Rama.
So was Aisha. It was impossible not to. The air in the room pulsed in the same rhythm.
Her nose wrinkled. She caught a faint smell of hot metal.
She squeezed her eyes shut. There were wide rolling plains behind the lids, and a sky stretching from horizon to horizon, dark with storm clouds. Shapes of metal moved under it, pouring over the dry brown grass.
They were people and animals. Men, mostly, in armor, and giant antelope under saddle or pulling carts or chariots. The hubs of the chariots’ wheels were set with bronze blades, sharp and whirling and deadly.
Banners flew over them. Aisha would never in her own life have recognized them, but in this waking dream, she could put names to the lords and domains that they belonged to.
She stood in a chariot. Its floor was woven leather, firm but yielding. She was dressed in armor, and her team of golden duns were mares and therefore hornless, but their headstalls were set with horns of sharpened bronze. When she looked down at her hands, they were rounder than her own, and not as brown. They were the color of the honey that Blackroot tribe harvested from hives in their orchard.
She looked from side to side down the line of chariots, people and animals that she knew. They were all waiting on the command to charge. She could feel the eagerness in them, and taste the sharp tang of fear. But none of them was so afraid that he couldn’t bring himself to fight.
They were angry. The army that stood against them had sworn treaties and promised loyalty, then gone home and bred treason.
A flash of gold and flame sped down the line: a man in golden armor on a red-eyed black stallion, with a blood-red cloak streaming out behind him. Aisha knew him in her bones, long before she recognized the lion helmet or the face under it.
The Rama she knew when she was awake was a dim and faded shadow of this warrior king. He drew every eye and focused every mind on both sides of the battle. When he called out to his own army, he hardly needed to raise his voice. Every one of them heard him.
He halted not far from Aisha. His stallion snorted and tossed his horns and pawed the grass.
He was looking down at something in it. Far down—much farther than a man on a horse-sized animal might ordinarily look.
Lieutenant Zhao stood in an empty circle, surrounded by men in chariots. Most of the men looked like Rama, but they were much, much taller. The smallest of them must be over two meters.
Those were the people the doors in the ruined city were made for. In armor and in chariots, they were gigantic.
Rama was not. Nor was his mount. But he managed to tower over everyone.
He smiled at Lieutenant Zhao. Lieutenant Zhao stared blankly back. “This isn’t real,” he said.
“It was,” said Rama.
Lieutenant Zhao shook his head. “You won’t control my reality. I won’t let you.”
Rama swung his leg over the pommel of his saddle, which had no stirrups, and slid down. He paused to stroke the antelope’s neck, lingering over it, but only for a moment. When he stepped away from the stallion, his hand flicked.
The army vanished, all but Aisha. The plain was still there, an endless stretch of windswept grass.
The storm looked ready to break. So did Lieutenant Zhao. But he was tougher than he looked. “I was right about you,” he said.
“To a point,” said Rama. “You’ll be taking me to Araceli. But not to dance to Psycorps’ drum. I have other uses for you.”
Lieutenant Zhao had gone pale, but he kept his head up. “I’m not usable, I’m afraid. Go any deeper and you’ll find the blocks. I’ll break before I’ll bend. It’s built into the system.”
“I see,” said Rama. He meant exactly what he said. He tilted his head. “Does none of you have the faintest sense of how your powers work? You’re like a pack of apes in a goldsmith’s shop.”
Lieutenant Zhao did not like that at all. He reared up; he actually snapped the words. “Who are you? What right do you have to say such things?”
“Who am I?” Rama said softly. “In this age, I am no one. I pass from dark into dark. I hunt a track gone cold as stone.”
“Poetic,” said Lieutenant Zhao. “You have a passion for heroic-fantasy vids and a flair for drama. We might be able to use that.”
“I’m sure you could,” said Rama, “if I would let you.”
“Show me more,” Lieutenant Zhao said. He was getting cocky. “What else can you conjure up?”
“What would you like to see?”
It was hardly Aisha’s place to warn Lieutenant Zhao when he was getting into trouble. He wouldn’t have listened anyway. “Take us back to the ship,” said Lieutenant Zhao, “but bring something from this reality. Make it as real as you can.”
He didn’t believe anyone could do that. Aisha could hear it in his voice. He thought he was asking the impossible.
She tried to will Rama not to do it. It was useless, of course. With no fanfare at all, they stood in Lieutenant Zhao’s cabin on the Leda, and Lieutenant Zhao was wearing much the same thing that Rama had been wearing when Aisha first saw him.
The kilt stayed whole—it was made of leather dyed deep green—and the necklaces and armlets and rings and earrings and the massive belt were mostly copper instead of gold. There were so many necklaces that they weighted down Lieutenant Zhao’s narrow shoulders; he had to strain to lift his arms and stare at all the bracelets and rings.
“What in the—”
“I did as you asked,” Rama said. His voice was terribly gentle.
He was back in his grey suit again. No more golden armor. Aisha was a little sorry. But there was life in his eyes: not as much as there had been when he rode down the line of the army, but more than she had ever seen in him.
Lieutenant Zhao started pulling off ornaments. His hands were shaking so hard he could barely keep a grip on anything, but when Rama moved to help, he backed away so fast he crashed into the wall. “No,” he said. “No, don’t. Don’t touch me.”
Rama stepped back and lowered his hands. Lieutenant Zhao got everything off, even the kilt, throwing it as far away from himself as he could. But then he dropped to his knees and scrambled the scattered bits together, hunting down the last ring and bead, till he had a pile in the middle of the floor.
He sat back on his heels. “This is real,” he said much too calmly. “As real as I am. Which must mean—”
“This is the universe you were born in,” Rama said.
Lieutenant Zhao picked up one of the copper bracelets. It was made of twisted wire, set with green glass beads. Pater would kill to get his hands on it. “No one can do this,” he said.
“No one in your Corps,” Rama said.
“What are you?”
“I am nothing the Corps would understand,” said Rama.
“Obviously. What are you?”
“You wouldn’t understand me, either.” Rama pulled a handful of something out of the air. When he dropped it in front of Lieutenant Zhao, it had the shape and color of a Psycorps uniform.
There was nothing left of the things that Lieutenant Zhao had brought back
from the memory or dream or whatever it was. But there was Lieutenant Zhao with nothing on and a look of deep shock on his face, and a sick feeling in Aisha’s stomach that was not going to go away.
~~~
“That was the craziest thing I ever saw you do,” Aisha said. She waited till they got to their cabin to say it.
“I was perfectly safe,” Rama said.
“You’re perfectly arrogant. You may be stronger than any one of them, but there’s a whole universe out there, and we’re about to jump back into it. You try too many stunts like that one, you won’t last long enough to start hunting. Then you’ll be gone and I’ll be stuck here and Nevermore will be turned into a tourist trap. And it will be all your fault.”
Rama let her wind down, but nothing she’d said had sunk in at all. “He won’t betray me. Even now he’s telling himself he drank too much of his sour wine and watched one too many of his epic-fantasy vids. I should have told him what I really am. Then he would never believe anything strange of me at all.”
“So you’re not letting him take you to Araceli?”
“I didn’t say that.”
She picked up the nearest thing, which was a water bulb, and threw it at him. He caught it out of the air. She spat at him. “You—are—crazy!”
“Always,” he said.
25
Khalida swam through jump in a sea of wine. She woke to the blare of the alarm and a command override, downloading urgent orders into her numbed brain.
MI was done with coddling her. She was ordered forthwith via the Leda to Araceli. They were not to stop at Centrum. A transport waited to take the cargo that had been meant for that part of the quadrant; nanoseconds after the ship emerged from jump, the transport had docked and begun offloading.
There were no orders for disposal of her wayward niece. There should have been. Khalida could well guess who was to blame for that, but she would have to rip him apart later. MI was doing the ripping now, force-feeding her the entire dossier on Araceli.
Most of the download overwrote files she already had, but one file refused to drop down out of sight. Eyes Only, it said.
That was never a good sign. If Khalida had been in her right mind she would have deleted it on contact. But she triggered the Open function and dropped back in her bunk as the blue-green sky of Araceli arched over her in all its virtual glory.
A man stood under it, posed on a long strand of white sand. Waves crashed just short of his booted feet. He smiled, baring white teeth in a face that had been modified with exquisite subtlety. “Captain,” he said. His voice was rich and melodious. “May I congratulate you on your promotion. It is well deserved.”
Khalida suppressed her first impulse, which was to destroy the message before it delivered one more oily, lying word. Rinaldi was as crazy as he was dangerous. When she first came to Araceli, he had decided, somewhere in the convolutions of his psi-nine brain, that she was the only intelligent member of MI’s deputation.
That intelligence had played directly into his hands. A quarter of a million people were dead because of it. And he was smiling as if he had never done anything in his life to cause him a moment’s guilt.
She hit the override on the message. It was petty, but it killed the special effects. He addressed her from a much more mundane cubicle somewhere on Araceli, dressed in a plain suit and ordinary shoes instead of pirate bravura. But his face and voice were still their expensively modified selves. “I sincerely beg your pardon for calling you back from your extended leave—and on so fascinating a planet, too. But it seems our solution to the problem of Ostia Magna was neither as compelling nor as final as we had hoped. The Ostians are being obstreperous again—insisting that their status as psi-normal entitles them to equal protection under our law. Which of course it does, but their definition of equality, as you know, is somewhat skewed.
“The nuclear missile that you were able to detonate was no more than a feint—a mockery, if you will. Now they threaten us with a weapon that should not exist, which our intel assures us not only exists, it can do what they claim it can. They are threatening, my dear Captain, to destroy the planet from the core outward unless we surrender to their demands. One of which is that you and only you be permitted to negotiate with their emissaries.” He lowered his voice; his expression altered to one of somewhat overplayed concern. “We do fear that their intention is not negotiation but revenge—but they are intractable. They will speak with you or they will speak with no one. And Araceli will be a band of dust among the stars.”
“Dramatic,” Khalida said to the ceiling as the message cut off. The ceiling persisted in showing her the link embedded in the message: a reference to a weapon called, among other things, a worldwrecker.
The last time Khalida had heard that word, she had been slumming in one of Jamal’s pirate vids. The dread pirate Gallifrey had won a worldwrecker from the evil overlords of Maldonado and kept it in the cargo hold of his legendary cruiser—never to use, of course, but it was a terrible and thoroughly convincing threat.
Ostia Magna’s version had none of the baroquely gleaming architecture of the pirate’s weapon. It was much less concrete and much more deadly.
It was, at its simplest, a flaw in a system. Perfect power: tapping the planet’s core, feeding power to the grids on the surface and in orbit, and drawing up rare and enormously valuable elements that just happened to be essential for starship drives, worldsweb systems, and terraforming planets. It was perfectly safe and ecologically sound.
Except for that one, tiny, potentially catastrophic flaw.
Khalida had a tendency to blank on scientific jargon, but this she managed to remember, because she appreciated irony. Pele Syndrome.
The core tap, under certain highly specific conditions, could create a runaway chain reaction that blew the tap out of the crust, with apocalyptic results. Earthquakes, eruptions, storms of radioactivity that sterilized the planet.
Rinaldi had been exaggerating about the band of dust, but the consequences would be much the same. No carbon-based life form would live on Araceli for the next few million years. As for those that already inhabited it…
She had seen the first victim of the syndrome from the safety of space: Pele, actively volcanic to begin with, now an object lesson in greed and corporate overreach.
“That was a confederacy of idiots activating the system before all the tests were done and the firewalls in place,” Khalida said to Tomiko. Leda’s captain stood in the doorway, looking as harried as Khalida felt. “There are failsafes now: layer on layer on layer of redundancies and preventive measures. There’s no feasible way to trigger the Syndrome. You’d need a database the size of U.P.’s. No single world has that much bandwidth.”
“It does if that world has turned its entire network of machines, along with a truly remarkable range and variety of devices and implants offworld, into one massive computer. Stealing a few cycles here, a few bits of code there, steering the tap just to the edge of Pele Syndrome. Monitors? Alarms? Corrupted just as thoroughly as all the rest. It only needs one command, one single trigger, and the reaction is irreversible. Once that trigger is hit, Araceli has a handful of tendays at most, of escalating ecological and planetological disaster. Then it’s gone.”
Khalida shook her head slowly. It was beautiful. Diabolical.
Machines were everywhere, performing their functions, exchanging their codes, linking and connecting and serving the manifold needs of the United Planets. They all had firewalls, of course. Shields and barriers. Controls on access. But who paid attention to their constant and ubiquitous web-chatter? Or took the trouble to examine every byte of code?
“How long have they been at this?” she asked. “Decades? Centuries?”
“Ten years, give or take,” Tomiko answered, “plus another twenty or so of building the framework. Ostia Magna holds the contract for all the electronics used in the core tap, along with household systems, rovers and shuttles, web implants…. Remember the slogan? ‘
Who needs psi when you have P.S.I.’?”
“Perrier-Souza Implants, Unlimited,” Khalida said as the pieces clicked together, “of Centrum, Terra, and Ostia Magna.” She drew a long breath. “It’s brilliant.”
“Isn’t it? You hit Ostia before they could get the thing up and running, but they don’t appear to have lost any critical systems.”
“I don’t think they intended to,” Khalida said. “That was a feint. Concealing what they were really up to. Gambling—and losing—on our inability to make the hardest choice.”
“Or sacrificing a city to push us over the edge; to drown us in guilt, so that when the greater threat was ready to go live, we’d give in to their demands.”
“That’s why they insisted on bringing me back,” Khalida said. She felt very little; it was so inevitable, and so perfectly, cruelly logical. “Ostia bets that I won’t commit mass murder again. The Corps postulates that I will. It’s an impasse.” She fixed Tomiko with her most unrelenting stare. “What would you do?”
Tomiko lifted her hands and let them fall. “There’s no good choice here. I can guess what MI wants. Find the trigger and disarm it. Crush the insurrection. Protect this world—and oh so coincidentally, Psycorps’ people and installations here.”
“But of course,” Khalida said with a bitter twist. “You’ve got half the planet breeding psis and the other half feeding them—and the feeders woke up, saw what they’d been lied into, and said, ‘No more.’ We can’t have that, now, can we? We need our psis to keep the universe safe from only they know what.”
“Itself,” Tomiko said.
“Is that what you believe?”
Tomiko shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what I think. I have orders. If I don’t follow them, someone else will. You’re going to Araceli if MI has to slam you in stasis and shoot you there in a life pod. Both sides want you. Both sides get you. That’s going to happen regardless of anything you or I may want or try.”
That, Khalida thought, was why she and Tomiko would never be more to each other than they were now. It was an old thought, worn smooth, with most of the sadness and even some of the anger gone from it. Tomiko was a good soldier. Khalida, even before she vaporized a city, was not.