Undercity (14 page)

XIII

Memory

The Alcove was in the Down-deep, several levels below the Maze where Scorch had locked up Dayj. No passages led there; you had to ease your way past stone walls and outcroppings. You wouldn’t find the Alcove without previous knowledge, luck, or just plain cussed determination. I’d found it when I was ten. I had decided to memorize the Maze, and I stayed with the project until I could go places few people knew existed. Over the years, though, the pathway had changed. I wasn’t sure today if it become more encrusted with minerals or I was just bigger, but I had a hard time squeezing between the walls and rocky cones, especially with my backpack stuffed by the jammer and filtration equipment.

The Alcove, however, didn’t look much different than I remembered. Smaller, maybe. It was a few meters across with no real open space, just rock formations sticking up or hanging from the ceiling. I set up my desalination equipment next to the only section with a solid wall rather than a lacework of rock. I had bought the best apparatus available for personal use in homes. The heavy-duty get-ups used by the city would have been better, but I’d need a license to purchase anything that big, and those permits weren’t easy to come by. Regardless, Gourd could perform magic with this little gem.

While I worked, I brooded on my talk with Lavinda. I’d always be on guard with her now, knowing she could feel my moods if I slipped up. And yet it was true, I was more comfortable with her than with the other Majdas. That empaths felt other people’s moods wasn’t the same as saying they empathized with people, but the two traits often seemed to go together.

I knew about psions from the army; ISC tested every soldier for the traits. Telepaths could access the Kyle, a universe where physics as we knew it had no meaning. The constraints imposed by the speed of light didn’t apply there. Your thoughts determined your “distance” from someone else; think a similar thought and you were next to each other regardless of your location in real space. Telepaths didn’t enter the Kyle, they accessed it with their minds. Once there, they could communicate across interstellar distances with no delay.

At least, we of the Skolian Imperialate communicated that way. The Traders and the Allied Worlds of Earth couldn’t use the Kyle webs unless we gave them access. The Traders had a bigger military, one better armed than ISC, but we had better communications. We were faster. With that advantage, we just barely held our own against them. That advantage came from the Ruby Dynasty, the strongest psions known. Only Ruby psions could power the Kyle web; it would kill anyone without their mental strength. Four of them existed, five if you counted Roca Skolia’s new husband, who supposedly descended from the ancient Ruby dynasty even though he was a simple farmer. If he was a full Ruby psion, that explained the marriage. Nothing else mattered. The dynasty no longer ruled, but they were irreplaceable. They were the only reason we could use the Kyle.

Although only Ruby psions could build or maintain the Kyle web, any telepath with training could use the network. In fact, it took more of them than existed to keep the communications of an interstellar empire flowing. They were notoriously difficult to clone, impossible in the case of the Rubies. It made psions among the rarest, most valued resources of an empire. Without them, the Kyle web would disintegrate, and without it, we would fall to the relentless war machine of the Trader slave empire.

I didn’t envy the Ruby Dynasty. They paid for their privileged lives with an inhumanely high price; they could never let up, not for a season, not for day, not for an hour. If they died, so did the Imperialate. Seen in that light, I didn’t resent the Majdas, either. They had the responsibility to see that the Ruby Dynasty survived.

I couldn’t solve the problems of an empire, but at least I could help people get clean water. I sat back, regarding my work on the filtering equipment. I’d set out the parts and ensured they worked according to spec, especially the osmosis membranes, which were the most sensitive. I didn’t finish putting the equipment together, though. Gourd would decide what he wanted to do with the pieces, incorporating them into his wizard’s creations.

I stood up, rubbing the small of my back. It seemed unlikely Gourd would send me here without a reason, but I saw nothing Scorch might have left in this place. I walked around the cave, stepping between the outcroppings. Nothing unusual showed, not on the floor, columns, or rippled stone curtains that formed partial walls. What had I missed?

Of course. The ceiling. Looking up, I saw a chaotic landscape of silicate icicles crusted with salts that glittered in the light of my stylus. Shadows filled in the crevices above me, sparkling here and there—but wait, that gleam looked different. I pulled off the stylus and reached my arm straight up, pointing the light at the silvery glint. It revealed curve of metal, some round thing embedded in the rock up there.

“Huh.” I hung the stylus back around my neck, then clambered up a rock formation and stood on its flat top. That brought me close enough to the ceiling that I could reach into the crevice. As I brushed away the crusted dirt and mineral salts on the silver curve, grit rained down on me.

Max, are you getting this?
I thought.

Yes. Just keep the lenses in your eyes clear of the dirt.

I’d hope so.
The silver curve looked like a fat pipe sticking out of the rock, its surface pitted with age. It wasn’t metal, but a composite. I had seen that material in a few other places around the aqueducts, part of the ancient ruins. Although that was interesting, it told me nothing about what Scorch had wanted with a place as inconvenient as the Alcove.

How old is that pipe?
I asked Max.

My spectral analysis suggests thousands of years.

It looks like part of the original City of Cries.

Probably. This cave is beneath those ruins.

I scanned my light over the symbols etched into the pipe.
Translate those glyphs.

I can record them
, Max thought.
However, I doubt my translation attempts would be useful. Neither anthropology nor ancient languages are among my specialties.

He had a point. I had acquired Max to help me investigate crimes, not ancient civilizations.
Do what you can.
I should tell someone at the university about this pipe. Maybe Doctor Orin was still there, the anthropologist who had studied these ruins when I was a kid. He bribed me back then with cocoa bars to show him artifacts. Gods, I had loved those treats. Never mind that he should have given me healthy food instead.

I needed to wait, though, before I looked up Orin. He would come here to study the artifact, and right now I couldn’t risk disturbing any evidence this place might reveal about Scorch.

* * *

After I returned to the aqueducts, I walked alone along a deep, narrow canal. Its walls had collapsed in several places leaving ragged holes, as if the canal had frayed like an old shirt worn for too many years. I stopped, straining to hear a sound that barely registered on my senses, the distant rattle of pebbles.

Someone is following us,
I thought.

It is hard to judge, given the echoes
, Max answered.
But I believe they are on the other side of the wall and about fifty meters behind you.

Send the green bot to spy on them.

A rustle came from my backpack as its flap lifted by my ear. The bot whisked out and darted into a crack in the wall.

I kept walking. After a moment, I caught a faint scraping from the other side of the wall.

Three women are stalking you
, Max thought.
Two are carrying knives and the third has a laser carbine. They are wearing the insignia of a dragon-hawk. I believe that refers to the Kajada drug cartel.

Well, shit.

Do you want me to do anything?

Keep the beetle spying on them.
A thought came to me.
How’d you know about the cartel?

It’s in your memory files.

Those files are old.
Like from my childhood.

The insignia is unchanged.

It didn’t surprise me that the Kajada cartel had survived. Running drugs was as lucrative here as anywhere else, maybe even more so given the concentration of wealth in Cries. It was Raylicon’s only modern city. The Abaj Tacalique, the traditional bodyguards of the Ruby Dynasty, lived in ruins far out in the desert, following a strict life of asceticism and military training, but they were the only other substantial community on the planet, and like Raylicon itself, they were dying out.

I continued along the midwalk, my ears so hypersensitized that they picked up a trickle of water far in the distance. Another scrape came from the other side of the wall.

They’re getting closer,
I thought.

Yes
, Max said.
They are about four meters back now.

My augmented hearing went into overdrive and the noise became a rumble. One of the women was moving ahead, probably to come out in front of me. I knew the ploy; distract the target from the front while the others came in behind. Crafty thieves, eh? My pulse gun and jammer would be a goldmine for them, even worth killing for. My other supplies had value, too, especially the water, food, and tech. My climate-controlled leather jacket would be a real highlight. And gosh, here I was, all alone and unsuspecting. Idiots.

Hadn’t they listened to the Whisper mill that spread news in the aqueducts? Maybe they just felt like fighting. Cyber-riders depended on their brains and gangs mixed force and smarts. Neither group had bothered me. I wouldn’t have messed with me either. Drug punkers, however, liked overt force. These punkers were too cocky, but that didn’t mean they weren’t also dangerous.

Up ahead on the midwalk, a woman stepped out from a crevice in the wall, dominating the pathway. She was nearly two meters tall and gods only knew how many kilos she packed of solid muscle. Beyond her, an old rock fall blocked the midwalk and spilled down into the canal.

She held a laser carbine aimed at me.

Combat mode on
, Max thought.

The woman grinned at me like a dust wolf. “You’re fucked, babe.”

Yeah, right.

I jumped into the canal with enhanced speed, down a few meters. My node figured out how I needed to bend my legs to minimize the impact, and my augmented knees cushioned the landing. I ended up in a crouch, facing the midwalk with my pulse gun drawn and ready.

The other two drug runners were on the midwalk a few meters behind where I had been a moment ago. One of them yelled, her voice eerily distorted to my ears. All three punkers were turning in my direction. The girl with the carbine snarled and slowly brought her carbine to bear on me. Except she wasn’t actually slow, she was whirling around with exceptionally fast reflexes.

I was faster.

I fired my gun, aiming to disable rather than kill. Under the force of my shot, the carbine flew out her hand and shattered against the wall. The EM pulse from my bullets didn’t have enough range to affect me, but it ought to fry her electronics.

The other two punkers stood there gaping, obviously trying to figure out how I was suddenly on the floor of the canal. For freaking sake. They should at least throw their knifes. They wouldn’t hit me; my node was calculating trajectories based on their movements and fine-tuning my reflexes to avoid any projectiles they might heft my way. But still. Their reaction time sucked dust.

All those thoughts went through my head as I sprinted to the rockfall behind the punker whose gun I had pulverized. She turned, trying to follow my progress as I ran up the rock fall. The debris shifted under me, starting a miniature avalanche into the canal, but I was going fast enough to outrun its fall. By the time she finished turning, I was on the midwalk again, on the other side from where I had started, with the sliding mound of debris at my back and my gun gripped in both hands, aimed at her head.

The punker stared at me with her mouth open. Her hardened features made her look older, but I doubted she was more than eighteen, seven years shy of her majority according to Skolian law. Yeah, right, a kid. Down here she was a full adult. Her shirt left the lower half of her muscled torso bare, revealing silvery-black conduits in a star pattern on her hard-as-rock abdomen, and one of her arms looked like tech-mech. It wouldn’t surprise me if she had been born without the arm and had stolen the parts to make the limb. Many of my people used implants to compensate for such problems. I hadn’t realized until I took genetics classes in the army that the rate of birth defects was unusually high in the undercity. It was no wonder, given our inbred population. Hopefully my pulse gun had disabled whatever tech-mech she carried in her body. Beyond her, the other two girls stood staring at me.

I scowled at them. “You stupid shits.”

They looked like cornered warriors poised to jump, but none of them moved a hair’s breadth. One of the two girls farther back seemed familiar, though I couldn’t figure out why. They hadn’t been born when I left the aqueducts the first time, and they would have only been ten or eleven the last time I was here.

I called to the girls farther back on the walk. “You two. Get over here.”

They came forward, wary and careful. The girl in front of me, the leader probably, tensed up, her fingers twitching.

I glanced at the knife on her belt. “Don’t bother,” I told her. “I can fire before you reach it.”

She glared at me, but she relaxed her hand.

The other two joined her, and they stood like a trio of surly war goddesses with a feral beauty, their hard abs showing though tears in their muscles shirts, the oil on their biceps gleaming in the light of my stylus.

The leader spoke. “You kill?”

“It’s not worth the bother.” I had no intention of killing anyone. They needed to learn better judgment, though. “Unless I get pissed again.”