Forgotten Suns (27 page)

Major Li turned in the empty street. “What—”

“Down!”

She dropped before the word was fully out. A bolt pierced the
air where her head had been and blasted the facing from the building across the
street.

Khalida’s troops were moving before she could get the words
out, tracking the source of the shot and converging on the wall.

There was no one there. No heat signature. Nothing but the
track of a bolt, and a sense of…direction. That was the best word Khalida could
lay on it.

“That way,” she said.

Major Li said nothing. Her eyes had narrowed, maybe with
anger, maybe with concentration. She set her lips together and followed where
Khalida led.

The marines spread out as much as the street would let them,
covering land and air and the walls between. The back of Khalida’s neck
prickled, but she kept her head up and her riot shield over it.

She was moving fast, not quite running. The thing she aimed
toward had started to move, too, sidling away from the direct line of the
street. Side alleys, connected tunnels—in this part of the port, it could be
anything.

Khalida stopped abruptly. “I’m going in alone. The rest of
you, keep on with the sweep. Make it look good. Catch a rat or two if you can.”

She got no argument from the unit, though the sergeant’s
lips had gone tight. Major Li’s dissent was equally physical: when Khalida
handed off her shield and slipped through the massed and armored bodies toward
the shadow of the wall, the Corps agent did the same.

Khalida had expected that. She set her own pace and let Li
work to follow. Which, to be fair, she did well enough.

The trail of nothing led down an alley so narrow Khalida
could touch both walls with outstretched hands. The sense of being funneled
into ambush was strong enough to make her breath come short, but deeper
instincts told her the walls and roof were clear. If anyone was lying looking
to take another shot, the aim was outward, toward the unit.

This alley was no more than middling foul, which for this
part of the city was worth noticing. It ended in a blank wall.

“May I?”

Khalida moved aside. Major Li slipped past her and laid both
hands on the wall.

Her face twisted briefly; her fingers flexed. The wall
shifted, divided, opened.

There was nothing supernatural about it. It was a door
concealed behind the façade. It led to a corridor, dimly but adequately lit,
and perfectly anonymous.

Major Li took the lead. Khalida loosened her sidearm in its
holster and slipped the safety.

The passage had no exits: no doors on either side, and
another blank wall at the end. To Khalida it felt like one of her less
memorable nightmares, a cascade of blankness culminating in nothing.

Between one step and the next, the walls opened. A room
formed itself around her. It was the same room in which she had met with Mem
Aurelia, or a close facsimile.

That place was nowhere near the part of the city in which
she had thought she was. Psi tricks, she thought. She was too tired of it all
to be angry.

It was some small consolation that Major Li looked ever so
slightly disconcerted. The room was empty. The shields must be up: Khalida’s
ears ached faintly.

“This is illusion,” Li said.

“You think so?” Khalida turned completely around. “Suppose
she’s right,” she said to the walls. “The game’s up. You’ve trapped us. Now
show yourselves.”

The walls said nothing. There was no door; no sign of entry
on any side. They stood in a bubble, and there would stay, until their captors
were inclined to let them out.

“I don’t think so,” Khalida said. She raised her pistol and
took aim straight ahead: one direction being as good as any other.

A coiling in her backbrain brought her half around away from
Li, flicked the pistol from kill to stun, and fired into blankness.

The walls melted. She caught a flash, a flicker of shadow,
but the living presence she had been sensing was gone.

This must be a warehouse, abandoned for some time, by the
thickness of dust on it. Major Li crouched in the middle of it. Her arms were
over her head; she rocked back and forth as if in agony.

Khalida knew better than to touch a psi in crisis, but her
voice, even at its sharpest, won no response. She dialed down the power in her
pistol, aimed and fired.

Li dropped as the shadowy presence had, but stayed solid
once she hit the floor. Khalida hauled her up and heaved her over a shoulder.

The unit was halfway to the other side of the sector, and
time had gone strange. Khalida would have admitted to half an hour at the most,
but the worldweb marked three hours since she entered the building.

She set her teeth. Maybe she was not so tired after all.
Maybe she had had enough and more than enough of this world and its tricks and
its damned bloody wars.

~~~

Major Li would wake with a killing headache, but she would
live. Khalida leaned against the wall waiting for the transport, pistol set
back to kill, and drafted her letter of resignation in her head—over and over,
in a dozen different ways.

Building and street and, for all she could tell, sector were
completely deserted. All the people had drained out of it, sucked like
infection from a wound.

The deep sense of unease was back, throbbing at the base of
her skull. She meant to ignore it, but the thirteenth iteration of her
resignation had turned into a rant. She began to delete it, paused, saved
instead—absently, as she moved away from Major Li.

The transport was almost there. Khalida set a finder beacon
over the psi agent, laid her spare pistol in the slack hand, and went hunting.

~~~

Alone, without the taint of Psycorps around her, Khalida
walked more easily. The thing she hunted had stopped moving. It was close,
though still some little distance through the empty streets.

She must be walking outside the world. The city was too
densely populated and the web too pervasive to tolerate this kind of emptiness.

Consider the ramifications, she thought. Psi and non-psi,
and then a third thing. Psi-null. A thing the psis had made, that was neither
psi nor not, but something…other.

Did they need a worldwrecker out of a pirate vid, or even
Pele Syndrome, if they had this?

Plots within plots. Wars and enmities twisting on one
another like the turns of a tesseract.

Khalida turned and walked through a wall.

~~~

The air was full of stars and singing. Khalida kept
walking until the stars went away. She intended to walk until the game ended
and she came to whatever point she was meant to come to.

“You must have been an exasperating child.”

Mem Aurelia floated in front of her, a cloud of shimmering
pixels.

Khalida walked through that, too. “You’ve hacked the
worldweb,” she said. “That I can see. Now let me out. Or am I supposed to die
here?”

“We want you alive.”

That was not Mem Aurelia. She was younger and darker and
somewhat less tall. Her hair was a cloud of black curls.

The room was ordinary, in the style of Ostia Magna: walls
painted with a dreamlike landscape, floor a holomosaic, furnishings available
on web command. The woman occupied a woven mat in front of a low table. On the
table was a bouquet of stars.

Khalida sent table and stars flying. “No more,” she said. “I’ve
been a pawn in every game that’s running on this sinkhole of a world. I’m done.
Either settle your war or let the world go to hell. I don’t care which.”

“I think you do.”

“Can you read my mind?”

“You know I can’t.”

“I think you extrapolate. Cross-reference. Hack. Turn worlds
into weapons. Psi was going to be the next stage of human evolution. But it’s
not the only one, is it? They made you for their use. You’ll use them—somehow.
I haven’t found the answer to that yet.”

“You don’t think that’s fair?”

“I don’t know what fair is. I just want to be done with all
of you.”

“On that,” the woman said, “we can certainly agree. Shut
down Psycorps, rid this world of them, restore our children, and then it will
be over. No more war. No more Corps.”

Khalida sighed. “All you want of me is the impossible. Or
this world ends.”

“Worlds end. Entropy rules. Do you blame us for saying we’ve
had enough?”

No matter how hard she had tried, Khalida was caught in a
trap she had been trained strictly to avoid. She must be objective. She must
not judge, only adjudicate. Above all, she must not allow herself to fall into
sympathy, let alone empathy, with one side of a war.

“I recuse myself,” she said. “I withdraw. I refuse.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Watch me,” Khalida said.

She turned on her heel, but the woman caught her. The hand
on her arm was warm and strong.

“I won’t speak of what you owe us,” the woman said. “You did
the only thing you knew how to do. This time, you know more. I would like you
to know everything. To be able to judge fairly.”

Khalida turned back to her. “I am the last person you want
sitting in judgment over you, or trying to negotiate anything either for or
against you. I’ve already been used to destroy a city. Now I’m to be held
accountable for destroying a world.”

“That, no,” the woman said. “They miscalculated, you know.
Invested resources here that can’t easily or feasibly be transferred elsewhere.
They need this world.”

“In a negotiation,” Khalida said, “the party that can afford
to walk has the upper hand.” She shook her head. “They’re still playing games
with me. Setting impossible conditions. They don’t believe they can lose.”

“They can’t afford to.” Finally the woman let her go. “Three
days. Then it ends.”

One way or the other.

Khalida felt oddly light. Relieved. There was no possible
way to meet Rinaldi’s conditions before the core tap went rogue. Which absolved
her of that responsibility. Of all of them, really.

Except one. Her brother’s daughter.

She paused. “You have a name?” she meant to ask.

The room was empty.

More games. More impossibilities. She resisted the urge to
spit.

The door, at least, opened, and the city beyond it was the
one she knew. The worldweb offered her a map when she asked for it, and a route
back to headquarters.

She took it, because there was nowhere else she would rather
be. She could think there, in the shielded room. Make arrangements to get Aisha
back offworld. Maybe even care enough to find her own way out of this multileveled
trap.

Rama ran web searches with speed and efficiency that would
have impressed even Jamal. Aisha shadowed him. Maybe he was aware and maybe he
wasn’t, but he didn’t block her.

He had the whole planet’s maps and surveys drawn up and one
spot marked: the Ara Celi. The Altar of Heaven, which the planet was named for.

Aisha flew with him up the virtual valley, while the datastream
ran through, repeating over and over what little anyone knew.

Alien. Old. Older than he was by some disputed number of
millennia. It stood on what had been a tableland once, but was a column of
granite now; the softer rock around it had eroded away.

It looked like a grotto, a cave in a mountain long since
gone. Its walls were thick with carvings so worn they were barely visible.
Simulations and enhancements offered suggestions, but it was obvious that no
one knew what they really were.

Maybe Rama did. He spoke so suddenly Aisha jumped. “Marta.
Plot a course to these coordinates, and arrange transport.”

“That area is restricted,” the not-quite-human voice
answered, “and currently closed. The Institute for Psychic Research—”

“I require transport,” he said. Calmly. The code he ran
through the web as he spoke made Aisha stare.

“That area is restricted,” the bot repeated.

“But the rest of the planet is not.”

“Approximately thirty-eight percent of the planet’s land
mass is restricted, proscribed, banned, or uninhabitable,” the bot said. “Of
the sixty-two percent that remains—”

“Transport,” he said. “Hire. Or buy if necessary.”

“Planetary law requires that all visitors be escorted by a
licensed guide. Restricted, proscribed, banned, or uninhabitable areas are—”

“Marta,” he said as if to a living person. “If I wanted to
be legal or traceable, would I be here?”

“No,” the bot said. Then: “Your illegal and untraceable
transport will arrive in one hour.”

Aisha could have sworn the bot’s voice was just a little bit
dry. Bots weren’t supposed to have personalities, but that didn’t mean they
didn’t.

She was barely making sense, and now she knew when Rama
intended to bolt. She slipped out of the web with extreme care.

She was ready when Rama called her out for katas. Ready and
packed and as casual as she could possibly be.

He was as easy as Aisha could remember him being, loose and
free, but with a snap and power to his movements that told her everything she
needed to know. She didn’t try to mirror him. She’d have worn herself out. But
she kept up, and she was proud of that.

~~~

He didn’t cut the session short, but he didn’t let it go
on past time, either. “You rest,” he said, still light and free, but underneath
he felt like the edge of a sword. “Eat. Sleep if you can.”

Aisha bit her tongue before she asked him what he was
planning to do. He was going to slip out while she slept. That was as clear as
the smile on his face.

He hadn’t needed this place to hide in. He could have gone
anywhere. He wanted a safe place to stow Aisha. She’d wake up and find her aunt
looking down at her, or someone else from MI, and then she’d be picked up and
carried back to Mother and Pater. And that would be it for Nevermore.

She’d thought he knew her better than that. She pretended to
be as stupid as he thought she was, yawned and stretched and retreated toward
her room.