Forgotten Suns (22 page)

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.

“Don’t,” said Tomiko. “Don’t try that. Don’t even think it.”

Khalida stared at her. Somehow, while Khalida’s thoughts ran
on, Tomiko had caught hold of her wrists. They stung. There was blood under her
nails, so fresh it glistened.

Tomiko’s eyes glistened, too. Tears? Khalida would have
wiped them away if she had had a hand free.

“Maybe you need that stasis pod,” Tomiko said. Her voice was
hard.

“Maybe I do,” said Khalida. “I won’t have to suffer through
all the briefings. I can go in cold. Will that be better or worse, do you
think?”

Tomiko dropped Khalida’s wrists with a sound of disgust,
turned and left her there. Where the captain had been, Khalida looked into the
faces of a pair of marines, as flat and hard as if made of metal. One held up a
pair of manacles.

That was clear enough. Khalida spread her hands. “I’ll
behave,” she said. “Am I confined to quarters?”

“For the moment,” said the one with the manacles.

She had brought it on herself. She could hardly complain.
And all the while she had faced Tomiko and then the marines, the download
continued, filling her head with the minutiae of a world.

There was a way to let it break her. A way to die.

Either she was impossibly brave or she was a perfect coward.
She shied away from it, from the thought and the memory.

She could die of this. She wanted to. But not by her own
hand.

Cowardice, she thought. Courage would fling itself headlong
into the dark.

There was only one thing left to ask. “Why me?”

No one was there to answer. Khalida had to do it for
herself. “Because I’m the one they could use. I’m the one they broke. If I
refuse, either the planet dies or Ostia does. I’ll be a mass murderer all over
again.”

Once was enough. She compacted her orders into a tight,
small blip of data and marked them
Received.
Acknowledged.
And after a pause that she could not help:
Accepted.

Jump from Centrum to Araceli was indecently short: half an
Earthday to the outer edges of the system, and the rest of the Earthday
cruising at sublight toward the inner planets. Khalida badly wanted to spend
the time locked in her cabin, but she was damned if she could keep on hiding.
She saw the end of jump in a cradle on the bridge, facing the screen that
showed the shift from nothingness to crowding stars.

The hum of the bridge went on around her. Everything was
ordinary, quiet, unexceptional. No ambush. No armada waiting to blast the
Leda
out of space. All their clearances
were in order. The system was open, waiting for them.

And yet...

Something felt off.

Of course it did. Everything about Araceli was off. The
tightness between her shoulder blades was as much memory as warning.

She pushed herself out of the cradle and stowed it. Tomiko
was leaning over the comm, exchanging rapid spits of code with planetary
command. Khalida had an almost irresistible urge to run a hand down her back.

That would not have been wise. At all. Even if they had been
on speaking terms.

A shadow caught her eye. She held back from spinning to face
it. She let the corner of her vision take it in instead.

How long he had been there, she could not have said. He
should not have been there at all. Passengers were barred from the bridge
during and immediately after jump.

Rama was the last person in the universe to care about
Spaceforce regulations. He was also the last person she would have expected to
be invisible in the middle of a brightly lighted bridge.

She saw him because he was letting her see. His eyes were on
the viewscreen. His expression was distinctly familiar: he was linked in to the
ship’s web. Khalida refrained from asking how he managed that.

His voice spoke inside her skull. “This is a trap.”

She answered him in the same way. “I know.”

“Yet you say nothing?”

“What’s to say? It will spring when it springs. All we can
do is go in and hope we’re ready for it.”

“And if you’re not?”

She shrugged. “We die.”

She felt his eyes burning on her. “I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t care.”

“Now that I believe.”

He got out of her head then. It was an odd feeling, half
relief and half emptiness, and odder for that he was still all too physically
there.

Intentionally or otherwise, he had mutated from shadow into
substance. Tomiko turned from the comm to find him standing behind her.

Her eyes widened slightly. Her voice lashed out. “What are
you doing on my bridge?”

Khalida braced for royal wrath, but Rama smiled and said
amiably, “Good day, Captain. That world yonder wants to eat your ship whole.
Are you doing to let it?”

Tomiko looked him up and down. He was wearing both halves of
a
gi
, as if he had been doing katas
in jump. And, Khalida thought, during emergence: as if the distortion of
spacetime meant nothing to him at all.

Tomiko jabbed her chin toward her office. “In there. Now.”

Clearly he was in a mood to be cooperative. Khalida was not,
but no one was asking. She followed them without a word, and got none from
either of them.

~~~

In the much smaller, dimmer room, Tomiko and Rama between
them seemed almost too much for one space to hold. The privacy shields when
they locked down made it even worse. Khalida managed to find air to breathe,
but it was an effort.

“All right,” said Tomiko, and her glare fixed not on Rama
but on Khalida. “No more games. If you know something about what’s happening on
Araceli, I need you to tell me now. Clearances be damned. I’m not losing my
ship because of something you could have told me.”

“I don’t know any more than you do,” Khalida said.

Tomiko’s glare did not lighten even slightly. Khalida opened
her mouth, but Rama spoke first. “She’s telling the truth. The world and its
rulers are playing a game of masks and shadows. They like to think they’re
playing the universe for fools. Mostly,” he said, “they are.”

“And you,” said Tomiko. “What exactly are you? Intel? Corps?
Both? Neither?”

“Most certainly neither,” he said.

She moved in close. As small as she was, she almost made him
seem tall, but no one in that room made the mistake of thinking it mattered.
She tilted her head back and searched his face, taking in every line of it,
noting it, cataloguing it with a taxonomist’s precision.

“You’re not human,” she said.

His smile was wide, white, and dizzily joyous. It erupted
into full-bodied laughter.

She let him finish. Eventually he did, still grinning, as if
he had never heard a more hilarious or more delightful thing.

“Genetically you’re close,” she said. “So close, there’s no
distinguishing you from one of us. What differences there are, anyone would
think that’s modification. But it’s not. Is it? You’re just as accidental an
organism as the most determinedly backwoods Earther.”

“Just so,” he said.

“You don’t even try to hide it,” she said. “That’s genius.”

“Only if it works,” he said. “How did you guess?”

“I don’t guess,” said Tomiko, “and I don’t pay attention to
the hand tricks or the curtains. When I look, I see. Where are you really from?
Nevermore?”

He bent his head.

She nodded. She never took her eyes from his face. “This is
my ship,” she said. “Those people you’re seducing with your katas: they’re my
crew. You don’t get to keep them. Do you understand?”

“Perfectly,” he said.

“Then you also understand that whatever you’re up to,
whatever you’re passing through in order to do, if you’re any kind of threat to
my ship or my command, or to the force I serve, I’ll do whatever it takes to
stop you.”

“I’m no threat to you unless you threaten me,” he said.

His voice was soft. There was nothing dangerous in it. It
was a fact, that was all. But Khalida shivered.

Tomiko was perfectly still and perfectly focused. It seemed
she was satisfied with what he had said. “Now tell me what you know about
Araceli,” she said.

“Nothing,” he said. “But there is a smell to it that makes
my hackles rise.”

“What kind of smell?”

“Carrion,” he said.

She snorted. “Serves me right for asking that, doesn’t it?
Yes, it stinks, but I need something solid. Something I can get Spaceforce’s
teeth into. Otherwise we’ve got orders to submit ourselves to planetary
authorities, offer such aid and comfort as we can, and resolve the situation to
the best of our ability.”

“You should still do that,” he said. “Running would help
you, but not the ship sent in after you. This isn’t going to end until someone
takes the bait.”

“Granted,” said Tomiko, “but if I’m looking at a ripe worm,
I want to know who’s dangling the hook. You’re psi. How high?”

The shift seemed not to rattle him at all. It did rattle
Khalida, who should have expected it, considering what else Tomiko had seen.
She blurted out the answer before he could. “High. Which, if he isn’t picking
up whatever’s behind this, means—”

“It’s shielded.” He dropped back and down into the
hoverchair that happened to be nearest. “I know it’s there. What it is, what it’s
meant for, who’s behind it—those things I can’t touch. They’re too well concealed.”

“You can’t break it down?” Tomiko demanded.

His head shook, sharp and short. “Not until I know what it
is. I don’t even know what part of it concerns us, and what part is simply the
Corps being the Corps.”

“Weapon?”

He frowned. Khalida could feel him seeking: a dull ache at
the back of her skull. She felt the wall, too; crashed into it with force
enough to split her head in two.

He held his together with his hands. His lips were the color
of ash. How he managed to shape words, let alone have them make sense, she
barely knew. “Not weapon. Not exactly. Not... harmless, either.”

“Neither are we,” Tomiko said.

“Bravura.” His grin was back, wide and crazy. “If you go in
now, and whatever it is attacks, your backup won’t get here in time.”

“Maybe not,” said Tomiko, “but if this really is a trap and
we really are the quarry, we’ll be all the proof Spaceforce needs. Araceli may
have Psycorps behind it, but United Planets is bigger.”

“Yes, but is it nastier?”

“Much.”

“Well then,” said Rama. “Would you like to dangle bait of
your own?”

Tomiko sat opposite him, leaning forward. “You?”

He smiled.

“Why? What’s in it for you?”

“I owe a debt,” he said.

Khalida blinked. Her head was suddenly, brutally clear.

“Bronze-Age honor.” She had not meant to say that aloud.

It would hardly have mattered if she had not. He would have
heard.

“What,” he said, “have you grown out of it? I hope I never
will.”

“My family hasn’t. Nor,” she said with a glance at Tomiko, “has
hers. But do you really want the Corps to see what they’ve been missing?”

“It might be good for them,” he said.

She quelled an urge to spit. “God, you’re arrogant.”

“Is it arrogance if it’s true? Those are weanling children
who dream they hold the power of kings. They keep a hundred worlds in terror
with their little tricks and sleights of mind. What they did to you and all who
are like you I will never forgive. I’ll bring them down, and gladly.”

“All by yourself?”

Her mockery was so bitter she gagged on it. He actually
flinched. But he came back as hard as his ancient steel. “I’ve done it before.”

Tomiko spoke outside the circle of their combat, wry and
bracingly practical. “Don’t tell me Nevermore is empty because of you.”

“Apparently not,” he said. He sounded as tired as Khalida
had ever known him to be. “I don’t know why it’s empty. This world may hold a
clue. Or not. I don’t know. I can’t find it if the world is shattered, or if it’s
so torn with war that nothing can get near it. If I have to spring this trap in
order to get where I need to go, I’ll reckon it a fair exchange.”

Tomiko took her time in responding. She rocked gently in her
hoverchair, frowning. Her brows were knit, her eyes dark, focused inward.

Neither Rama nor Khalida broke the silence. He tilted his
head back and closed his eyes. Khalida sat on her heels on the floor, since
both the chairs were taken.

She felt strangely light. When Tomiko asked the question she
had known was coming, she was ready for it.

“Do you trust him?”

“No,” Khalida answered.

“But you think he can do this.”

“I think he’s too proud not to.”

“And if he gives us all up to the Corps?”

Khalida’s eyes were on Rama, who had not moved at all. “He
won’t do that. He may try to take them over, but he won’t sell our souls for
that. We’re not worth enough.”

“Not to them,” he said without opening his eyes.

He sounded more than half asleep. He was in a trance, she
realized: wandering away from his body, trying to penetrate the walls that the
Corps had raised around Araceli.

“Don’t do that,” she said. “Hack the web instead. Easier.
Faster. Lots less dangerous.”

His eyes opened. For an instant so brief she almost missed
it, there was nothing of flesh or blood in them at all. It was like looking
into the sun.

He blinked, and they were human again, or close enough: dark
eyes in a dark face. “I’m not as good at that as Jamal,” he said.

“Not much of anybody hereabouts is,” she said. “Except me.
Who do you think taught him?” Her glance flicked to Tomiko. “Permission to
access ship’s web?”