Undercity (12 page)

XI

The Grotto

I had liked being in the army. It suited me, especially after I made the supposedly impossible jump from the enlisted to officer ranks. I liked being out of the army even better; I preferred to be my own boss. But my years in ISC had given me an education, a resume, and skills I’d never have learned as a dust rat. A life.

I could have said no to General Majda. I was a civilian now. My reasons for considering the job weren’t only because angering Majda was a lousy idea; it also had to do with honor and yes, gratitude. Down undercity, you didn’t talk about emotions. Admitting them was weakness, and weaknesses got you killed. I couldn’t say how I felt about what the army had done for my life, but I could show it. Besides, someone had to provide a link between ISC and the undercity, and far better me than Takkar. So I went to General Majda’s meeting about the smuggled weapons.

We convened in the Selei Building, a skyscraper in downtown Cries with a spacious lobby partitioned by glass panels. The tower served as a conference center, purportedly for any group that wished to reserve the space. Given that the only symbols in the lobby came from branches of the military, and that the tower was named after Lahaylia Selei, the Pharaoh of the Skolian Imperialate, I had a good guess as to what “any group” meant. The seal of the Pharaoh’s Army dominated the back wall, a striking ruby pyramid.

The walls had smaller emblems of the other branches of ISC: the ancient sailing ship of the Imperial Fleet; a Jag starfighter from the J-Force, the elite fighter pilots of ISC; and the two crossed stalks of grain of the Advance Services Corps. My branch of ISC, the Pharaoh’s Army, had the longest history, six millennia of service to the empires birthed by Raylicon. As an enlisted woman, I had served in the troops fighting Trader forces, and as an officer I had led those troops.

A receptionist sat at the gleaming counter in the lobby, a man rather than a robot, and he had my security badge ready. I rode a titanium lift to the forty-second floor. The conference center had glass walls, letting me see inside as I stepped out of the lift. Men and women filled the room, talking or drinking kava, most in green army uniforms, but some in Fleet blue, the russet of ASC, or the black leathers of fighter pilots. It didn’t surprise me that General Majda wasn’t there; she had probably gone offworld to ISC headquarters. I did see Lavinda, with the gold colonel’s bars glinting on her shoulders.

Max,
I thought as I walked into the conference room.
How many people are here?

Fifteen
, he answered.
Counting you.

With so many officers involved, the smuggling ring had to be a lot bigger than just Scorch’s operation. I didn’t know anyone in the room except Lavinda. She glanced at me and inclined her head. I appreciated that; subtle, no overt attention, but an acknowledgement that I had shown up.

She rapped a laser gavel on the oval table that filled much of the room. “If you’d all take your seats, we can get started.”

The higher brass sat at the table and the rest of us took chairs against the wall. A woman in Fleet blue sat on my right, and a fellow in an unmarked shirt and trousers settled on my left. He glanced at me with a slight smile and I nodded, relieved I wasn’t the only civilian. Given the way he held himself, though, with the telltale upright posture, he had almost surely once been an officer. Majda made no bones about who they wanted to work for them.

Unfortunately, these were also the people least likely to find anything in the undercity. Yes, they could walk the arid canals and map the caverns. But the dust gangs, cyber-riders, drug punkers, and everyone else in our complicated, convoluted population would remain ciphers, hiding, watching, avoiding, or mugging the intruders in their domain.

Lavinda began with a description of what I already knew and added what they had found since yesterday. “Apparently this woman Scorch intended to sell those stolen arms to ESComm,” she said. “We don’t believe the Traders yet have the technology used by our latest generation of carbines or tanglers, so the smugglers were selling military secrets as well as weapons.”

An angry murmur went through the room. I agreed. “ESComm” meant Eubian Space Command. In other words, the Trader military. Scorch had committed treason, and the moment she betrayed the Imperialate, I stopped seeing her as a civilian. She became an enemy combatant.

I had seen the torture rooms kept by Trader Aristos, the pavilions where they took pleasure in making their slaves scream. Every person in their empire was property, everyone on hundreds of worlds and habitats, all except roughly two thousand Aristos. Those Aristos owned everything: people, government, industry, military. A few thousand of them couldn’t control trillions of people with only brutality, and many slaves lived relatively normal lives. But none had freedom. If any group did revolt, the Aristos wiped out the entire population. Better to commit genocide than risk an uprising. ISC had sent me to stop the slaughter on one such world, but we arrived too late. Heat-bar sterilization. Nothing remained of the colony. No people. No plants. No animals. Nothing. Two billion people had once lived there, and the Traders had slaughtered them all.

I hoped Scorch was rotting in hell.

Lavinda continued, setting up the Raylicon arm of the task force investigating what was apparently an interstellar smuggling ring. Eventually she turned to me. “Major Bhaajan.”

I straightened up. “Yes, ma’am?”

“Your assignment,” she said, “is to find out what you can from the undercity.”

* * *

The cavern was empty.

The last time I had been here, crates had filled the cave. Someone had heisted them between the time when Jak and I helped Prince Dayj out of the Maze and when the Majda police arrived. Whoever moved the crates couldn’t have been far away during my shootout with Scorch, because they had grabbed the crates so fast. They must have witnessed the fight, yet for some reason they let me and Jak leave with Dayj.

I studied the scrape marks on the ground where crates had stood the last time I came here.
Max, can you analyze the erosion of these tracks? I’d like to know how long ago they were made.

I need more light. IR wavelengths are too long for a good analysis.

I turned on my stylus and the darkness receded.
Better?

Yes.
After a pause, he said,
Based on the sharpness of their edges, I’d say they were made within minutes after you left here with Prince Dayjarind yesterday.

I rubbed my chin. These were the only tracks, which implied no one else used this cave besides Scorch. So why did I feel otherwise right now? I was sure I wasn’t alone.

Crank up my hearing,
I thought. It was quiet enough that the magnification wouldn’t hurt my ears. I stood listening . . . yes, there it was again, a rustle at the far wall of the cavern. Half-broken cones of rock jutted up there, some taller than me, others no higher than my knee. Plenty of cover.

Someone is hiding in the back of the cave,
I thought.

I might be detecting breathing
, Max thought.

Might?

It’s hard to tell with the irregular terrain. The texture is chaotic, almost like a fractal in rock. It reflects sound.

Interesting comparison with the fractals. Max’s evolution constantly surprised me.
It’s someone small,
I thought.

A child perhaps.

A child. I sat on the flat top of a cone, facing sideways so I wasn’t staring at the chaotic back wall. I could still see it in my side vision. I shrugged off my pack and took out my lunch, two meat sandwiches rolled up in pancakes and soaked with pizo sauce. My kept my holstered gun on the side of my body away from the back of the cave.

“Got food,” I said, lapsing into dialect. I set one of my meat rolls on a nearby rock stump and went about eating the other roll.

A small figure crept out of shadows. I couldn’t see her clearly in my side vision, but it looked like she had tousled black hair and wore clothes that had turned gray. She could have been me at eight or nine. She inched forward, grabbed the meat roll, and scuttled back into the shadows.

I kept eating.

After a moment, I said, “Got water.” I took two snap-bottles out of my pack, broke the seal on one, and put the other on the stump. Then I took a long swig of the cool water in my bottle.

The girl came out again, a little bolder this time. She walked over, put her hand on the snap-bottle, and stood looking at me, defiant.

I regarded her. “Clean water,” I added. It was a valuable commodity here.

She glanced at my holster. “Got gun.”

Now that I could see her better, I realized she was older than I’d first thought, eleven maybe. Her clothes were clean, and someone had repaired the worst tears. Wild hair tumbled over her shoulders, ragged but well-washed and brushed. Her dark eyes seemed too large for her face.

“Not shoot you,” I said.

“Killed Scorch.” She was clenching the neck of the snap-bottle.

“Scorch screwed up,” I said. To put it mildly.

“You screwed up.” She swept up the bottle and ran back into the shadows like wind whistling past the outcroppings. The sound of her retreat faded within seconds.

That went well
, Max thought dryly.

At least she showed herself.

Did you come here to find dust rats?

I shook my head, on odd response given that I was conversing with an EI via a node in my spine. His question bothered me. It didn’t seem right for an EI to call our children rats.

Not really,
I thought.
But duster kids go everywhere here. They could probably tell me a lot.

Good luck with that
, Max thought.
You’ll need it.

Yeah, I know.
I wouldn’t have told me squat either, when I had lived here.

In any case, right now, I had someone else to find.

* * *

Gourd took his name from the gourdex vines that grew in the Vanished Sea, one of the few plants that thrived in that wasteland. They were muscular reeds, big and low the ground. Their gourds held moisture, and their tendrils dug deep into the desert, mining fresh water. The human Gourd filtered water. In our youth, he had been part of my dust gang, along with Jak and Dig, the girl who freed me from the orphanage. The four of us grew up together, inseparable, as tight as a fist holding gold swag. But now? I had no idea if Gourd would even talk to me.

The Grotto wasn’t the only body of water in the aqueducts, but it ranked as the largest, a lake fifty meters across, far underground. The brackish water was undrinkable, poisonous to those foolish or desperate enough to swallow too much. Gourd built equipment to make the water drinkable. He bartered for parts with the cyber-riders who mined the garbage lines under Cries or stole tech-mech from shops on the Concourse. Every generation here produced wizards who drew miracles out of dilapidated, mismatched tech-mech. Gourd put together low-pressure distillation machines, reverse-osmosis devices, or super-filters. He had a knack. That was what we had said.
Gourd has a knack.
I knew now it was far more than “a knack.” He was a brilliant engineer, better than even most professional technologists in Cries.

The Grotto lay deep, four levels below the city, in complete darkness. I wore my stylus around my neck, creating a sphere of light. Crusted minerals on the nearby rocks glittered like a million spark-flies, red and blue, with accents in white, green, and purple. Lacy rock formations surrounded the water, stone columns riddled with holes, small and large. Max was right, they did resemble fractals repeating their patterns at ever finer detail.

I sat on a rock stump by the lake and fooled with my stylus, shining it across the dark water. The grotto was eerily silent, just my breathing and the drip of water somewhere. Memories poured through me. One of my closest friends had drunk from this lake when we were both six. She nearly died. Back then, our circle had included a dust gang in their twenties, and they took care of her. She recovered, but I never forgot the terror of seeing her lying in the dark, shaking with illness.

Another memory came, this from the only time the Cries police had actually ventured all the way down here on one of their raids. They scooped up duster kids and hauled them off to Cries. The children trickled back to the aqueducts over the next year, bringing tales of holding cells and work farms. We celebrated their return to freedom. The irony didn’t escape me, that we rejoiced in having a tougher life here than what they had left behind. The farms were hard labor, yes, cheaper to use children rather the bots to bring in water mined from the beneath the desert. Even so. They fed you regularly and didn’t ask for more than a person could give. I had probably worked harder in my army training than I would have on a farm. But who cared? It wasn’t freedom, and that lack destroyed us, parching our spirit like the dry air of the desert.

In the undercity, we came of age with our bitterly won freedom and the emotional scars it bequeathed us. Yes, we lived in caves and the ancient ruins of a dead civilization, and we used canals as throughways instead of roads, but it was a community,
our
community, not a slum, as they called us in Cries. The undercity was unique. In all my travels, I had never seen another culture like this one. Our world had its own beauty, one as haunting as the reed music that often drifted through the canals, those ancient melodies played by some unseen piper.

Rattles came from my right. A pair of eyes gleamed in the light over there, behind a pillar of stone. As soon as I looked at them, they disappeared with a scraping noise.

I set one of my snap-bottles on a nearby shelf of rock crusted with minerals salts. “Got water,” I said. “Three bottles.”

My voice echoed in the dark spaces of the Grotto. I pulled the half-empty bottle out of my pack and took a swig of water. Then I sat holding it, my boots braced against a cavern floor thick with minerals. The snap-bottle I had left on the ledge caught glints from my stylus and gleamed in the darkness.