Undercity (7 page)

You have no evidence to support that.

Yet.
I couldn’t prove it, but I had no doubt Oxil had set up Krestone’s murder.
Can you identify that pin Oxil took off Krestone’s body?

I’d say it’s a data storage device.

It looks familiar.
I couldn’t recall why, though.

Max asked,
Shall I forward this recording to Chief Takkar?

Hell, no. Oxil works for her.

You can’t withhold evidence.

I’ll send it to General Majda.

Shall I do that now?

No.

Why wait?

I have my reasons.
Before Max could push anymore, I thought,
I wish I could remember where I’ve seen a pin like that before.

I have a suggestion.

Yes?

Your vital signs indicate extreme fatigue. Go home and sleep.

I smiled wanly.
A good idea.

I headed to the penthouse.

* * *

“Major, wake up.”

I grunted and turned over in my airbed.

“Major Bhaajan, you must wake up.”

“Go away,” I muttered.

“You have a visitor,” my tormentor said.

I flopped onto my back. The voice belonged to the EI that ran the penthouse. Too bad I hadn’t named it yet, because at the moment I would have liked to take that name in vain.

“I’m asleep,” I said. “I don’t want visitors.” Only the Majdas knew I lived here, and right now I had no desire to see anyone connected with the palace or their charming police force.

“He is rather aggressive,” the EI persisted. “He says he will stand outside until you, as he put it, ‘goddamn deign to acknowledge my existence.’”

That
wasn’t Majda. I sat up in the dark, the covers falling around my hips. Then I remembered I didn’t have on any clothes. I lay back down and pulled up the blanket. “Fine. Let him in. But I’m not getting up.” Closing my eyes, I endeavored to sleep.

“Let him in?” The EI sounded confused.

“That’s right.” I had no intention of explaining myself to a machine.

I had started to drift off when someone walked into the room. I’d have recognized that booted tread anywhere. “I’m asleep,” I muttered. “Go away.”

The bed shifted as he sat down. “Bhaaj, come on.” Jak pulled the pillow off my head. “You know you’re glad to see me.”

“Like hell.” I turned onto my back under the covers. Light trickled in from the living room and cast his face in planes of light and shadow. “How did you know where to find me?”

“I have sources.”

I glowered at him. “Did your sources tell you I’m dangerous when bat-brains wake me up?”

His wicked grin flashed. “Sounds interesting.”

“You make me crazy, Jak.”

His smile faded. “I also heard the Majda police chief tried clinching you on a murder rap.”

“She doesn’t have any evidence against me.”

“That’s right. I just got back from the station.”

“What?” I sat up so fast, I forgot I wasn’t wearing any clothes. Then I grabbed the metallic blanket and smacked my fist against my chest, covering myself. “Why did they bring you in?”

“They didn’t.” He was watching my gyrations in the blanket with a great deal of interest. “I went in on my own.”

“What for?”

“To tell them you had dinner with me.”

I gaped at him. “You gave me an alibi?”

“Yah.”

“If they start sniffing around the Black Mark—”

“They won’t find shit. I moved it.”

“Even so.”

“Even so.” His gaze was dark.

I had never known Jak to put anything ahead of the Black Mark. To risk Majda attention so he could give me an alibi was so far off from what I expected, I just stared at him.

“Major Bhaajan, stunned into silence?” He smiled. “That’s one for history.”

I scowled at him. “Ha, ha.”

“That sounds more like the Bhaaj I know.”

“Jak.” I spoke awkwardly. “Thanks.”

He stabbed his finger at me. “Just be careful.”

“All right.” I tapped his chin. “You still got that cute dimple.”

He folded his hand around my fingers. “You’re going to ruin my reputation, you go telling people Mean Jak has a cute dimple.”

“I hear Mean Jak has other attributes, too.” I let go of the blanket, and it fell onto the bed, around my hips.

His gaze turned dusky as he stared at me, good and long. Then he pulled me into his arms. “You’re looking good, Major.”

“So are you,” I murmured as I slid my arms around him. He moved his palm up my back, making my skin prickle. Then we lay together on the air mattress. I rolled with him onto my side while we tangled our legs in the sheets. He felt good in my arms, his body lean and familiar. His kiss was hungry, seven years hungry, but I remembered it as if it had been yesterday.

They say night lasts forever on Raylicon. This time, I was glad for the endless hours. Jak and I had plenty of time. Maybe I wasn’t thinking clearly, but tough. When the sun came out we could deal with the reasons we shouldn’t be doing this.

For tonight, we would forget.

* * *

I sat up with a jerk. “Scorch!”

“Ungh,” Jak mumbled. He pulled a pillow over his head against the sunlight streaming through the windows.

“Max,” I said. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes.” His voice came from my gauntlets, which I had dropped on the floor last night.

“Check the EI for this place. Is its spyware still blocked?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I remember where I saw the pin that bodyguard took off Krestone. Scorch smuggles them. It’s a recording device.”

“You think Scorch was spying on Lavinda Majda?” Max asked.

I swung my legs off the bed. “Could be.”

“Scorch wouldn’t be that stupid,” Jak mumbled under the pillow. “She gets busted for spying on Majda, she’s sorry she’s alive.”

“She’s a risk-taker.” I padded across the room and into the bathing chamber. The tiled pool was bigger than my living room in Selei City. As I slid into the water, soap-bots swam around me, glittering like silver and blue fish. They even matched the color scheme of the tiles. Welcome to the Majda universe.

Jak appeared in the doorway, framed in its horseshoe arch, holding the sheet around his hips. His lean chest with its chiseled muscles and dark hair showed above the wrinkled blue cloth. Nice.

“There’s risks and there’s insanity,” he said. “Scorch has a lucrative operation. She wouldn’t risk it by rizzing-off the General of the Pharaoh’s Army.”

I slid into the pool until only my shoulders were above water. “That depends on the stakes.”

Jak leaned against the doorframe. “The undercity survives in the shadow of Majda. We don’t bother them, they don’t notice us. Why would Scorch upset that balance?”

“Maybe she’s selling to Traders.”

“I hope you didn’t say that to her.”

I squinted at him. “I might have, uh, implied it.”

He stared at me. “And you’re still alive?”

“She fired a damn laser carbine at me.”

“I take it she missed.” He grinned suddenly. “Or maybe she didn’t. You’ve a harder head than anyone else I know.”

“Ha, ha. Funny.”

“Scorch wouldn’t sell a Majda prince.”

“I don’t know, Jak. A Majda guard pulled Scorch’s recorder off Krestone’s body.”

“You think this Oxil guard works for Scorch?”

Good question. “Could be.”

“Why kill Krestone?”

“I’ll bet the captain was figuring out some of this.”

“Still makes no sense.” He shook his head. “Scorch hates the Traders. Why endanger her operation in a way guaranteed to bring down Majda’s wrath? It’s crazy.”

I thought about that. “Not if Scorch disappears off-planet. If she’s sold Dayj, she can afford to go anywhere.”

“I’m surprised she didn’t fry your ass.”

I smirked to cover my unease. “She likes me.”

“Yah, the same way Chief Takkar likes you.”

“Oxil works for our dear captain.”

Jak made an incredulous noise. “You think the Majda police chief is involved in a conspiracy to sell Majda princes to slave traders? What mental asylum did you escape from?” He came over, sheet and all, and crouched by the pool. “Scorch is going to kill you.”

“No she won’t. I saved her life once.” Of course, in her view that debt was now repaid. “Besides, if I disappear, people will look for me. It will draw too much attention to her.”

He pulled off the sheet and slid into the water. “Maybe.”

I swam over to him. “Hey, it’s fine.” So was he.

As we drifted together, though, I wondered who I was trying to convince, him or myself.

* * *

Jak took off after our bath, but not before extracting a promise that I would have third-meal with him, which most people ate before they slept at noon. Interesting timing. He wanted to come to the penthouse, too, which meant either he liked the place more than he would admit or else he didn’t want me knowing where he had moved the Black Mark.

Out on the balcony, I released my beetle-bots, the red one to look for Oxil and the green to find Scorch. Then I went inside, sat at the console, and data-mined the meshes for info on Scorch. I found zilch: she hid better than a special ops agent. After an hour of work, I finally located a news holo with her in the background. The colorful image floated above my console showing a crowd of people gathered in a Cries plaza. They were watching a broadcast playing above a public holo-pedestal, a story about some government event in Selei City on the world Parthonia. That was why I had set up my business in Selei City; it served as the seat of an interstellar government, offering plenty of opportunities for a discreet investigator.

Scorch watched the broadcast with an odd look, a mixture of fascination and loathing. I didn’t see why; the story looked boring, just images of people filing into a building. The reporters went on and on about the excitement of the event. It must have been a slow news day. Given that the Assembly met four times a year, every year, and that half the delegates only attended as VR simulacrums, the broadcasters were really pushing it with all this supposed excitement.

After the holo finished, I sat rubbing my chin. Why would Scorch care about who went to a routine Assembly session?

A light flickered on my gauntlet and Max’s voice rose into the air. “Want to chat?”

I recognized the code phrase. “Go ahead. We’re secure.”

“I have a trace on Oxil,” he said. “The red beetle picked her up by a lake at the palace.”

“Good work. Link me in.”

Max connected me to the beetle through his comm network. As I closed my eyes, a scene formed; I was on the shore of the Lake of Whispers, one of the few fresh water bodies on Raylicon. I wasn’t actually seeing the feed real-time. The beetle recorded the scene, digitized the data, and sent it to Max, who relayed it to my spinal node, which converted the data into signals that my brain could process as optical input. So I “saw” the scene. With all that going on, a delay existed between what was happening and when I saw it, probably a few minutes in this case, when I wasn’t that far away from the scene I was watching.

The lake spread out before me like a green mirror rippled with breezes, reflecting the pale sky and surrounding foliage. Imported trees grew around the edge of the lake and dropped silky green streamers into the water. Huge, flat flowers floated on its surface like red and blue disks. It was beautifully alien, all the more so because that profusion of plants didn’t naturally occur in Cries. Raylicon hadn’t dried out completely; we had fresh water underground if you went deep enough, but it wasn’t easy to find.

Oxil stood gazing at the lake. She wasn’t doing much except enjoying the view. Breezes ruffled her spiky black hair. Probably she was on a break from work.

After five minutes, I said, “Max, this is boring.”

“Sorry.”

“Bring me out.” I opened my eyes as the scene faded. “Let me know if anything happens.”

“Will do. I have a report now from the other beetle.”

I sat up straighter. “It found Scorch?”

“Partially.”

“How partially?”

“She is well shrouded. The bot can’t record her voice or actions. However, it did locate her in the Vanished Sea.”

“Why is she out there?” Few people braved that barren desert.

“I don’t know.”

I stood up. “Think I’ll go for a visit.”

* * *

I jogged across the sea basin, doing my best to keep to the shadows cast by ridges that rose from the parched ocean floor like giant wrinkles. My feet pounded the ground, my smart clothes cooled my skin, and the jammer in my pack shrouded my progress. Max registered my speed as seventy kilometers per hour. Going on foot afforded better security than a flycar; it was easier to hide a person than a vehicle. I would have to walk at least part of the way back, though. At these speeds, my body built up damage faster than my nanomeds could do repairs. Even with high-pressure hydraulics to support my augmented skeleton and a microfusion reactor to provide energy, my body couldn’t handle the stress of such speeds for long before it began to break down.

It took me twelve minutes to cover fourteen kilometers. As I neared my destination, Max thought,
Best to hide now.

I focused my vision on a bluff ahead.
How about there?

Yes, that would work. Scorch is on the other side.

I climbed the jagged rock formation to a cleft at the top. By wiggling through the opening on my stomach, I reached a point where I could train my spyglass on the other side of the bluff. Scorch was down there with a woman I didn’t recognize, the two of them partially hidden under an overhang mottled with blue and green mineral deposits. A flycar also waited in its shadow. Both Scorch and her companion wore clothes patterned in colors like the desert, offering yet more visual camouflage. I couldn’t hear them, either. My beetle was circling the bluff, but even this close it only managed to send me a few random words of their conversation.

Easing down the bluff, I crept nearer, silent and shrouded. When I crouched in the shadow of a rock spike near the ground, I finally picked up their conversation.