by Judith Tarr
That wasn’t any sidearm bolt. It blasted the fighter out of the sky.
He didn’t stay to admire his work. He swept Aisha up, one-handed, and hauled her into the rapidly shrinking port—hatch—whatever it was.
~~~
She lay on a faintly yielding, faintly glowing surface and tried to remember how to breathe. Images kept flashing through her mind. How the people on the ground were dressed like ordinary citizens: port staff, workers, the odd person in a suit. And how he’d shot the fighter down, and he hadn’t had a weapon in his hand.
She dragged herself to her feet. Rama was already well down the tubular, curving corridor.
The light was getting brighter, or else Aisha’s eyes were adapting. There wasn’t much to see. No doors. No signs. No apparent way in or out or up or down. Just forward.
The place had a smell. It was faint and rather pleasant, a little like mushrooms and a little like the sea. Earth and salt and something sharply clean.
Starships never smelled like this. Experimental, the webstream had said. She was starting to wonder just what the experiment was, and what was being experimented on.
Rama was almost out of sight. She mustered as much speed as she could and plowed after him.
36
There was no rest for the wicked, still less for destroyers of worlds. Khalida had hardly settled into the shielded room with a bottle of local grappa and a plate of something that began, as usual here, with pasta and soared into a savory firmament, when the door pinged.
She ignored it. It opened regardless. She stared sourly at Lieutenant Zhao. “Weren’t we supposed to be rid of you?”
He inspected the bottle on the table. His eyes widened slightly. “That’s potent stuff.”
“So I gather. I haven’t tasted it yet.” She lifted her laden spoon. “Have you eaten?”
“Thank you,” he said, “I have.”
He did not sit, which surprised her. He stood like a cadet on review: a little too stiff, and a little too obviously trying not to be.
“Well?” she said when he kept on standing—hovering, to be strictly accurate.
“Captain,” he said. He bit his lip. Screwing up his courage, she thought.
He let it go all at once. “Your niece…we seem to have misplaced her.”
Khalida had not been expecting that. “I thought you had her stowed safely.”
“We thought so, too,” he said, “but she’s gone. She and the Dreamtimer. They might have gone separately. We suspect they went together.”
Khalida drew a slow breath. Bursting apart in a fit of rage and desperate worry would do nothing here, and in this room, no one could pry into her mind to see the fires roaring. She kept her voice low and perfectly steady. “May I ask how that happened?”
“Captain,” he said, “we don’t know. We had taken them to one of our safe houses, where they were monitored and thoroughly protected. They should not have been able to leave the house, let alone vanish.”
“Yet they did.”
“Yes,” he said in what seemed to be honest misery. “It’s a terrible failure. Not to mention the danger they would be in, with a world at war.”
“If anything happens to Aisha,” Khalida said, “I shall hold you personally responsible.”
“As you should,” he said. He sat down finally, as if his knees had let go. “Captain, do you have any idea where they might have gone?”
“If I did, do you think I would tell you?”
“Please, Captain,” he said. “Sera Nasir is still on this world; that much we can determine. But we haven’t been able to discover where she is or how she’s traveling.”
“I don’t know if I believe you,” Khalida said.
“Of course you wouldn’t,” he said. “Nevertheless, Captain, we are deeply concerned, and we will do everything in our power to find her and bring her back to you.”
“If you really do want to protect her,” Khalida said, “find her and get her back to her parents. All the way to Nevermore, Lieutenant, by the safest and fastest means possible. Promise me that—swear to it by whatever you hold sacred—and I’ll answer your question.”
Zhao barely hesitated. Which meant that he was either a hardened liar or a complete innocent. “I promise,” he said, “on my honor as an officer, that if I succeed in finding her, I will return her, safe and unharmed and as soon as possible, to her family.”
“Well then,” Khalida said. “Meser Rama has a certain archaeological interest in the Ara Celi. He might have taken it into his head to visit the site.”
“It is in a restricted area,” Zhao said.
“Do you think that would have stopped him?”
“No,” Zhao admitted after a pause. “No, it wouldn’t, would it?” He rose with a fraction of his usual grace. “Thank you, Captain. We will do our best. I promise you that.”
“You do that,” Khalida said.
~~~
Then finally she was alone with an unopened bottle of grappa and a plate of congealing pasta. She pushed them both away and lowered her aching head into her hands.
The room might be shielded, but its web connection was MI-grade and she, as commander, had the keys. She applied one, and waited while it worked its way though encrypted channels.
“Captain,” Tomiko said. Even on the web her voice was thick with frost.
“Captain,” Khalida answered. She could not equal Tomiko’s coldness, and she did not want to. “I need a favor.”
“Do you?” Tomiko opened the connection enough that Khalida could see her sitting in her quarters with a bottle and a plate of her own, and a vid paused on a scene of ancient warriors standing face to face and sword to sword.
Khalida appreciated the symbolism. “It’s all coming to a head here,” she said, “and the Corps seems to have misplaced my niece. Will you keep a shuttle on call? The instant we find her, I want her off this planet.”
“Only her?” Tomiko inquired.
Khalida chose not to answer that.
“There is one other thing,” she said. She had the dataspurt ready: her resignation, locked and coded to file when the call ended. Dumping it off on Tomiko was not exactly kind, but there was no one else in the system whom she trusted to register and execute it.
“Thank you,” she said as the data marked itself as sent.
Tomiko’s leaned forward, as if she could reach through the connection, get hold of Khalida, and shake her. “Khalida—”
Khalida cut the connection. She had time, she calculated, before her resignation worked its way through all the relevant channels. She had no expectation that it would be accepted, but it would create a diversion.
Meanwhile she was as free as she could remember being—even on Nevermore. No one could read her here; if she wanted the web, she had to open a channel to access it.
She ran a quick scan. The purge in the port continued. Rinaldi was out of the city and off the grid—which might have concerned her if she had not withdrawn herself from his pleasant little game. He could play it through with Colonel Aviram. She was done.
~~~
Khalida requisitioned a fresh set of riot arms and armor, and a rover with orbital capability. She waited for alarms to trigger, but her command codes were still valid. People she passed either ignored her or seemed to find nothing unusual about her.
Once she had the rover and a hundred meters of altitude, she said to the console, “Mem Aurelia.”
No response. Khalida had not expected one. She set a hook in the search’s tail and left it on the web, and programmed the rover with its own search grid.
She could still run MI-level encrypted searches. That was useful for finding one child with a limited web implant, and a man with none.
Her stomach rumbled. Now she was hungry. She found a packet of survival rations under the pilot’s cradle.
They tasted like sweetened sawdust. She choked down most of a bar and left the rest for later.
The search pinged. Target found, though th
e time stamp was a planetday old.
It was better than nothing. She locked on. The rover altered its grid to match.
~~~
The web tried to scream at her. Rinaldi, Aviram, MI itself—they all erupted on the other side of her barriers. None of them took control of the rover.
Of course not. They could reel her in at any point. Meanwhile, she could search, and they would watch.
She considered shutting that off, but they would only find other ways to do it. This one went both ways, which might turn out to be useful.
Lieutenant Zhao was not in range. Either he had been lying after all, or he was too far ahead of her to catch.
While the rover tracked a flicker on the worldweb, she tracked something else under multiple layers of encryption. It was brain-straining, exacting work, and she had to do it while seeming to doze and while maintaining a façade of harmless coasting on the web.
The targets did some of the hunting for her. She had the connections: Mem Aurelia; the woman with the wonderful hair, whose name was Marta; the network of corporations that manufactured and distributed the devices that, in aggregate, constituted the worldwrecker.
What she needed, and wanted, was the trigger. The entity or person or mechanism that set off the reaction.
MI had run its own exhaustive searches. What they had missed was the human connection: the two women who had left clues for Khalida to interpret.
They wanted her to stop them.
Or not. This could be revenge: torturing her with hints and cryptic bits of patterns too big for a single mind to hold.
Possibly it was both.
Connection met connection. So: Marta, the null. Mem Aurelia, the non—and the genetic parent of the null. Daughter, mother. Torn apart by the Corps, but maintaining contact in defiance of law and tradition. Finding one another when the conspiracy first began, and finding a common level of—genius? Madness? Plain and visceral rage against the Corps?
It could not be this obvious. If Marta was the trigger, or knew what and where it was, she would hardly have thrown herself in front of Khalida. She must be a blind of sorts. A diversion.
Maybe Khalida was the trigger. She had performed the office once already, for the Corps. Why not use her again, this time for the other side?
The web gave her a gift: a stream of Marta not more than an Earthyear ago, singing Old Earth opera onstage on Centrum itself. The set, the costumes, the grand and stately music, struck Khalida with exquisite irony: she was singing that great pseudo-Egyptian tragedy, Aïda.
Her voice was glorious. She had both range and control, and passion that made every note tear at the heart.
It washed over Khalida with the clarity of understanding. An opera company, a troupe of singers, a pattern of engagements and performances that took them all over the United Planets—and everywhere they went, they left minute and highly poisonous fragments of code in each world’s web.
They could do more than break Araceli. They could bring down the worldsweb—all at once or world by world.
They had not made that threat. Not yet. Not quite; though Khalida was meant to see.
Aïda loved and lost and died. Marta meant to do all three, but she would take the worlds with her.
That was hate, with all of the singer’s passion in it. Khalida collected the data in a report capsule and added her conclusions, but did not send it. Not yet. Not until Aisha was safe offworld, on the Leda that had its own web and its battery of formidable protections. Not least of which was its captain.
By MI regulations, Khalida was committing treason. Not to mention insubordination, desertion, and sabotage. She found it difficult to care.
The search string for Aisha broke, then re-formed. She had, for a number of hours, disappeared from the web, but that morning she had reappeared, and begun moving rapidly away from the port.
That was what Khalida had been looking for. It was clear where Aisha was going, and all too easy to guess who was taking her there. Voluntarily, Khalida suspected; which was a bit of a disappointment. Abduction she could have come down on with the full force of military and civilian justice.
That might still be possible. She reset the rover’s itinerary once again, toward the Ara Celi.
37
The tubular passage twisted and convulsed and spat them out into a space that Aisha at first took for a cargo bay. But the clusters of screens and the cradles and hoverchairs drifting across it looked more like a ship’s bridge.
People stood or sat around the screens, and others clumped together in a transparent-walled pen or roofless compartment near the far bulkhead. The people working the screens wore Psycorps green or black. The ones in the pen looked like civilians.
Both looked frantic in different ways. The screens showed the scene outside: the fighting had gotten worse, and there were still, crumpled shapes on the ground, and stains and pools that Aisha knew, with a sick knot on her middle, were blood.
The Corps officer with seven pips on the collar did something that Aisha felt in the center of that knot. The ship screamed.
She might have screamed with it. She couldn’t have heard herself if she had. But she could see, and not just with eyes.
Rama hadn’t seemed to move, but he was beside the psi-seven. The others surged toward him.
He disposed of them with a flick of the hand. The psi-seven gaped at him. The man was big, with broad shoulders and a mane of hair the color of summer grass on Nevermore. He looked as if he could fight as well as read people’s minds.
Rama for once looked small. He wanted that, Aisha thought. He smiled up at the psi-seven. “Commander Bowen.”
“Who in hell’s name are you?”
The smile widened to a grin. How he was doing it, while the ship screamed and screamed, Aisha could hardly imagine. “I am Death, destroyer of worlds.”
“You are insane.”
“That, too,” Rama said. He kicked the man’s feet out from under him, as easily as if he’d been half the size, and set his knee in the middle of that broad and helpless back. Then he lifted his head and sang.
It didn’t matter what the words were or where the song came from. It was a hymn, Aisha knew down deep, and much older than he was. The language it was sung in had been ancient when he was born.
He was using it to link to the ship. To hack into its song of agony with his hymn of healing and peace.
The ship was alive. The screens wired into its neural network, the controls that slaved it to human will, were torture beyond anything Aisha had ever known of.
Rama couldn’t rip the grafted-on mechanicals out. That would destroy the ship, mind and body both. He had to reinstall them instead. Smooth out the connections. Shut down the ones that made nothing but pain and neural disruption.
It was the most delicate surgery in the worlds, and he did it with the ship’s captain lying limp and barely conscious under his knee.
She crept across that vast expanse of—what? Stomach? Thoracic cavity? Muscle cyst?—and eased over toward the holding pen. The people in it were all lined up along the wall, staring at what must look to them like a scene from a pirate vid.
“You,” one of them said when Aisha came close. “Please. Let us out.”
Aisha was half in and half out of virtual reality. She had to think hard before she managed spoken words. “Tell me who you are first.”
“Dr. Alice Ma,” the woman said. “Principal scientist, experimental ship Ra-Harakhte.”
“So you’re the ones who slaved the ship,” Aisha said. “We heard it screaming clear across the continent.”
Dr. Ma stared at her. “You can’t be Psycorps. Or can they run renegade, too?”
“We are not Psycorps,” Aisha said coldly. “I’m not letting you out. You’re no better than they are. In fact I think you’re worse.”
“Now listen here,” said one of the other prisoners. “I’m not a scientist. I’m just trying to get to Beijing Nine.”
The gaggle of people with him
quacked and clacked agreement. “We’re travelers,” he said. “Tourists, if you want to be insulting. We were rounded up and shoved in here two days ago. If you could get a whiff of the facilities—”
“Ulrich!” snapped the woman behind him. “That’s not what she needs to hear. Here, Sera, let us out, please. This pen is hardwired to the ship’s controls. If your friend there shuts those down, that’s our life support gone, too.”
“But not mine?” Aisha wanted to know.
“You’re breathing ship’s atmosphere,” the woman said. “We aren’t.”
Aisha wasn’t sure she could believe that, but the expressions on the other side of the barrier were fairly convincing. Those people were afraid. The ones in the blue uniforms with the character for wisdom on the collar were downright terrified.
That decided it. Aisha worked her away down the barrier till she found the dimple in the surface that just fit her hand. Though it looked like glass, it was warm and yielding, like skin. She pressed until it folded and shrank away.
The first one out looked down the muzzle of Aisha’s pistol. It was Dr. Ma; she stopped and took a sharp breath, but she didn’t shriek or flinch.
She didn’t knock Aisha down and sit on her, either. Aisha took a breath of her own and stepped aside.
The rest of them came out in more or less orderly fashion, falling into gaggles once they were out. Scientists, passengers, a handful of people who must be crew.
None of them made a break for it. They could all see the screens and the battle still going on outside. They didn’t try to stop Rama, either. Aisha wondered if they could understand what he was doing: if they had any way to see or hear what went on underneath the long chant.
It was doing what he meant it to do. He kept his voice steady, but Aisha could feel the strength draining out of him, note by note and syllable by syllable.
Aisha eased Rama off the psi master and kicked one of the hoverchairs over for him, then unwound the cord that tied her robes at the waist and trussed the man up, ankles to wrists. In case he woke enough to find a way out of that, she knelt on the floor, set her pistol to stun and aimed it right between the man’s eyes.