I froze, afraid to say the wrong thing. Then I spoke with care. “Weaver will do this?”
After a moment, she nodded. “Yah. We all do.”
I walked over to her. “That’s good.” I wanted to shout, rejoice, make a fuss, but I held back, knowing it would put her off. Maybe we could finally get Weaver his Concourse license. It might be a tiny event compared to the prospect of three ancient EIs acting like vengeful deities, but I didn’t care. For the Undercity, that license was a huge step.
Dara spoke softly. “Afraid.”
“I too. Always.” The fear never left me, not even after the decades I’d spent proving I could succeed against the odds. Inside, I’d always feel like the dust rat doomed to fail.
Dara snorted. “What fear? Bhaaj cocky as a lizard queen.”
I laughed. “Pain in the ass, eh?”
“Sometimes.” Her looked gentled. “Today, good talk.”
“Yah. Good words.”
She motioned at the canal. “Go!”
So I went, running down the midwalk.
When I reached the Foyer, I tore off my backpack and turned off the shroud. Its warning lights activated, telling me I was being scanned. I didn’t care. I activated my comm. Answer. Be there.
Lavinda’s voice rose into the air. “Colonel Majda here.”
I shouldered my pack and took off, running out into the Concourse. “It’s Major Bhaajan.”
“Twice in one day.” She sounded in a good mood. “That’s progress.”
She wouldn’t think so for long. “Colonel, listen. You need to turn off your mesh systems.”
“What?” She sounded more puzzled than angry.
“All of them. Every mesh system in Cries.”
“For flaming sake. You can’t be serious.”
I ran down the Concourse, ignoring the vendors, keeping my voice low. “I need to talk to the pharaoh. Her life is in danger, but it isn’t from Calaj. I think Calaj is trying to protect her.”
“Where is this all coming from?” She no longer sounded at all happy.
“Send a flyer to meet me outside the Concourse,” I said. “Tell the police not to stop me.” A lot of people were out at this hour, and they stared as I ran past them. If I started spouting military secrets while I raced through the Concourse, there’d be hell to pay. “I can’t talk now.”
“I’ve sent the flyer,” Lavinda said.
“Good. Listen, I know this sounds crazy, but everyone needs to stop using the mesh.” It was absurd. No one would disconnect from the mesh that tied civilization together. But I had to try. “Have you had any trouble with your systems?”
“No. Why would I?”
Maybe so far only the Undercity was affected. If so, I doubted that reprieve would last long.
“I’ll tell you more when I get there,” I said.
The flyer let me off at the Selei Building. I ran inside wearing my fatigues and muscle shirt, the pack slung over one shoulder, my holstered gun visible, my boots pounding the floor. The receptionist frowned, but he extended an already prepared badge. I grabbed it as I ran by his counter. When the lift let me out on Lavinda’s floor, I strode by the lieutenant, holding up my badge. As I went down the hall to Lavinda’s office, I saw the colonel standing inside by the window—with her sister, General Majda.
Fuck. I slowed to a stop as I entered the room. “My honor at your presence, General.”
“Major.” Vaj Majda took in my appearance. “You say Pharaoh Dyhianna’s life is in danger. Why? And don’t give me any of that ‘I can’t talk about the Undercity’ bullshit.’”
Not an auspicious start. “Is this room secured?”
Lavinda spoke. “Yes, completely.” She and Vaj stood in front of the window, both in uniform, and I should have been intimidated, but today I was more afraid of what was waking up in the desert.
I dropped my pack on a chair. “Izu Yaxlan is an EI. The Uzan lives within its control center. The Abaj secure the ruins because, yes, the city is sacred, but also to make sure the EI is maintained and never disturbed. The Lock is also an EI, different from the city, less sympathetic to human life. It and Izu Yaxlan co-exist. They have since the time of the Ruby Empire.” I stopped for a breath, then said, “Does anyone even know what they do out there? Or are we just their caretakers?”
They both stared at me. “How the hell did you find all that out?” Lavinda said.
“I’m good at my job.”
Vaj spoke coldly. “Good at your job and in possession of highly secured military secrets are two very different things.”
I met her cool gaze. “General, forgive my questions, but I need to ask more. Are you aware of any other EIs in the desert besides the Lock and Izu Yaxlan?”
For a long moment she just looked at me. Then she said, “No, we are not.”
We were screwed. “A third one exists. It’s the abandoned ships on the shore of the Vanished Sea. They form a single EI. It’s been deactivated, asleep, dormant, I don’t know the right word. Now it’s waking up. And it doesn’t like us. It’s—” I needed a better word than the wrong everyone kept using. “It’s hostile to Izu Yaxlan, to the Lock, and to human life.”
“A third EI?” Vaj crossed her arms. “I assume you have proof?”
I couldn’t reveal what I knew about Hack, Ruzik, and the Undercity, but if I didn’t tell her, she had no reason to believe me. I pressed the heels of my hands against my temples and tried to rub away my headache. Then I lowered my arms. “You have to trust that I’ve seen the proof.”
“Enough!” Vaj came to the table so she was standing directly across from me. “I won’t have any more of these evasions. Start talking, or I’ll have you arrested.”
She was forcing me into an impossible decision: betray my people or betray the Imperialate. Of course I had no choice. I couldn’t put the Undercity before the Imperialate. The Vanished Sea EI had somehow managed to reach Calaj when the Jagernaut was on another world. I didn’t know how, or what it had done to her, but the ramifications went far beyond the Undercity. To give Vaj Majda the answers she demanded, I had to betray my people. You couldn’t keep that a secret, not with all the high flyers who frequented Jak’s casino. Some of them would know. Word would get out. It would explode in the Whisper Mill. Bhaaj lied. Bhaaj is one of them. No one would ever trust me again. I’d lose the Dust Knights. They wouldn’t disband, they’d become another gang, one far better trained than anyone else in the Undercity. I’d just have succeeded in creating better criminals. My dream would die, my hope for a better life born out of the Undercity itself, my people creating their own new world.
Neither the general nor the colonel spoke, but for some reason, Vaj suddenly turned and looked at Lavinda. For a moment, they stood that way. Then Vaj went over to her sister.
“Why?” Vaj said.
“We hired her because she can go places we don’t know exist.” Although Lavinda spoke in a low voice, she wasn’t trying to keep me from hearing. “She can get answers for questions we don’t even know to ask. If we force her to tell us how, it compromises her ability to find those answers. No one in the Undercity will trust her if they think she’ll report them to us.”
Vaj looked like she wanted to throw me in the brig and be done with it. It rattled me to see her legendary restraint slip. She said nothing more to Lavinda, however. Instead she came back to the desk, facing me across its width. “Very well, Major. Continue with your report.”
I was afraid to glance at Lavinda, for fear that if I even glanced away from Vaj, she would change her mind about giving me this reprieve. “The Undercity is part of Izu Yaxlan.” For all I knew, that was another highly secured military secret. I doubted it, though. Had ISC known, they’d never have ignored us.
“That makes no sense,” Vaj said.
Lavinda joined her sister at the desk. “The Undercity and Izu Yaxlan aren’t connected.”
“Actually, they are,” I said. “You can get from the Pharaoh’s Last Tomb to the aqueducts
via tunnels under the desert. It’s almost impossible because of the maze at the end.” People had died, lost in that warren of spaces and passages that went nowhere.
“You’ve been in the Last Tomb?” Vaj asked, incredulous. “That’s sacrilege.”
Telling her the Uzan took me didn’t seem like a great idea. I’d never figured out the relationship of the Abaj to the military. They were Jagernauts, which meant they were in the J-Force chain of command. The Majdas were army, not J-Force, but still. They were in charge here. Whatever the hierarchy, the Uzan seemed to answer to the pharaoh, a civilian, before the Majdas.
“Does anyone else know this route to the tomb?” Lavinda asked.
“No, I don’t think so.” I couldn’t be one hundred percent certain; you never knew who had wandered where. But it wasn’t anything our histories recounted. It wouldn’t be much of a tale, given that the route ended at a blank wall unless the Abaj left that tomb entrance open, which I doubted they had any reason to do when they weren’t trying to catch murderous Jagernauts.
“What does this have to do with turning off the meshes?” Vaj asked.
I’d dug myself such a deep hole, I might as well finish it. “I think the three EIs—the Lock, Izu Yaxlan, and the Vanished Sea EI— are going to war. We humans are in the way, and our mesh activity is what an EI most ‘sees’ about us.”
I expected another scoff from Vaj, maybe even Lavinda this time. Instead, they just looked at each other. Vaj nodded slightly, and in response Lavinda sat in the large chair at her desk. A console rose out of the surface of her working space. As Lavinda went to work, Vaj strode around the long desk and came up to me, so we stood eye to eye.
“You make a lot of claims,” she said.
I met her gaze. “Valid claims.”
“And Calaj?”
I could hear Lavinda working at her console, but I didn’t risk turning to see what she was doing. “I think she’s in the desert, about a kilometer west of the Vanished Sea ships. I’ve projected trajectory for her path that I sent you. She’s headed to the ships to confront the EI.”
“And you know this how?”
Good question. “It’s a guess.”
“A guess.” If this Majda queen could have bottled her look of disdain and sold it to the rest of us who could never in a million years master it so well, she could have made billions. Not that she needed billions. She was already one of the wealthiest people in the history of the human race. I felt smaller than a beetle-bot.
Lavinda spoke. “Vaj, we’re getting some strange reports from the Vanished Sea ships.”
We both turned to her. “What reports?” the general asked.
Lavinda touched a panel and a holo formed above her desk, the ruins of three vast starships crumbling on the shore of the Vanished Sea. “We have a skeleton staff on site, one army lieutenant and a few anthropologists from the university. One of the scientists thought a system in the cockpit of the smallest ship activated, but when he went to check, he found nothing unusual.”
“Bring up the report,” Vaj said.
Lavinda flicked her hand over the holos and the interior view of one ship grew larger, replacing the others. It was my first glimpse inside those legendary ships, which were off limits to most Skolians. The dimensions seemed wrong, designed for something larger and differently shaped than a human being. Several stools occupied the position where we would put a pilot’s chair, but if a human being sat on any of them, they couldn’t reach most of the controls.
“That screen,” Lavinda indicated a dark curve of metal facing upward. “Doctor Orin thought it started to operate earlier today.”
“It looks dead.” Vaj glanced at her sister. “It has been for six thousand years.”
Lavinda shrugged. “His sensors may have malfunctioned.”
“His? So this anthropologist is male.” Vaj waved her hand in dismissal.
“For flaming sake,” I said. “What difference does that make?”
Behind Vaj, Lavinda shook her head at me. Okay, so maybe this wasn’t the time to argue equal rights with one of the Imperialate’s most conservative generals, but dismissing Orin’s report because he was a man was just too stupid for words.
“I know Professor Orin,” I said. “When I was a kid, he came to the aqueducts to study the ruins. He gave me sweet bars to show him around.”
“This is a ringing endorsement,” Vaj said dryly. “A scientist who gives a child living in a slum sugar-loaded foods as a bribe so she will be his tour guide.”
I stiffened. Those bars had been practically the only sweets I ate in my childhood. Yah, sure, they had no redeeming nutritional value, but I had liked them, damn it.
Lavinda spoke quickly, before I had a chance to tell the general what I thought of her comment. “Vaj, he’s one of the leading experts on the Raylicon ruins. If he thinks something is off with the ships, we should listen.”
The general frowned. “What does he think is ‘off’ exactly?”
Lavinda flicked her finger and the holos vanished, replaced by data glyphs scrolling across her desk. “They’ve had a lot of glitches.” She read the data. “Several times they thought systems activated on the ships, but the readings disappear too fast to verify. The mesh systems we installed are having problems—lost files, corrupted records, delays in response times, that sort of thing.”
Max, I thought. What did your diagnostic tell you about that glitch you experienced when we were looking for the casino?
A time-evolving bug infected my systems, he answered. I cleaned it out. I haven’t located the source of the bug yet.
“Contact the staff at the ships,” I said. “Ask if a time-evolving bug infected their systems.”
Lavinda glanced at me. “Actually, yes, that’s what their diagnostics say. They cleaned it up.”
“And they don’t know where it came from,” I said.
“That’s right.” Lavinda studied me with that intent gaze of hers. “You’ve experienced this?”
“I think it’s the EI, probing our systems.”
Vaj leaned over to study Lavinda’s data. “Nothing here indicates a problem in Cries.”
“It’s going after Izu Yaxlan, not Cries,” I said. “It probably wants to rid the ships of people, like one of us swatting a bug.”
Vaj considered me. “Major, let’s put aside the absurdity of all this for a moment and assume it’s true. What does Calaj have to do with it? Why do you say she’s trying to protect the pharaoh?”
I made myself speak with a calm I didn’t feel. “I’ve come close to Calaj several times now. Every time, she slips away. She’s hidden from the best searchers any of us can summon. Something is helping her. In every way I’ve encountered her, with one exception, she has gone out of her way to do no harm. Does that sound like a crazed killer to you?”
“What exception?” Vaj asked.
“Someone shot at me with Calaj’s jumbler,” I said. “I’ve assumed it was her because her gun should be keyed to her brain waves. But I never saw her. I have no proof it was Calaj.”
“You don’t seem to have proof for any of this,” Vaj said.
“And if I’m right?” I said. “You want those three EIs going to war?”
They both just looked at me, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that even they barely knew what the EIs had been doing out there in the desert for more than five thousand years.
“I need to talk to the pharaoh,” I added. “If this isn’t her bailiwick, I don’t know what is.”
Lavinda and Vaj exchanged a glance. Then Vaj turned back to me. “We will contact you.”
Well, that certainly sounded like Dismissed. “General, I mean no disrespect—”
“Then don’t give any,” Vaj said sourly.
So I shut up. We said our good-byes and I left, because whatever discussion they wanted to have didn’t include me. I had no intention, however, of just waiting for them to act.
My penthouse was empty.
“Singer?” I
called out as I entered the living room.
No answer.
Had she gone outside? I hoped not. She had to know the authorities would pick her up.
“They are in the bathing room,” the EI said.
Oh. Of course. I doubted either Singer or Taz had ever seen that much fresh water in one place. OF course they gravitated toward the pool. As I walked into my bedroom, I spoke to the air. “Singer?”
She walked out of the bathroom. “Eh, Bhaaj.”
“Taz?”
She tilted her head toward the room she had just left. “With baby.”
“Take bath?”
“Bath?”
“In water.”
She scowled at me. “No. Big waste.”
“No waste. Got lots.”
“Drink. Good water.”
I blinked. Sure, the pool had plenty of filters. It was probably the purest water she’d ever tasted, but I’d never drink it. I needed to show her a faucet. She would like it. I tried not to think about the possible execution she faced. I had no answer from the Majdas about a bargain, but whatever they decided, it would most likely only be for Taz and their daughter. Even if the courts stayed a death sentence, Singer would go to prison. Whether it would be on a penal asteroid or somewhere less severe remained to be seen, but I didn’t have much optimism.
“Taz safe?” I asked.
Singer lifted her hand, inviting me to look. So I walked to the doorway. She and Taz had taken the largest, fluffiest towels from the cabinets and laid them on the tiled floor next to the pool, layer upon layer, until they had a deep carpet of cloth. Taz was sitting up, dozing against the wall, his eyes closed, their daughter in his lap.
Singer smiled. “Safe, eh?”
“Yah.” I turned to her. “Need talk.”
“Sun room.” Singer walked past me, headed to the living room, where the miracle of sunlight flowed through the window there. She didn’t go to the sofa, but instead sat on the floor by the window-wall. It had darkened slightly to mute the sun, which hung low in the sky, but we could see through the glass. I sat next to her, the two of us bathed in the sun’s bronzed rays.