Forgotten Suns (21 page)

The storm looked ready to break. So did Lieutenant Zhao. But
he was tougher than he looked. “I was right about you,” he said.

“To a point,” said Rama. “You’ll be taking me to Araceli.
But not to dance to Psycorps’ drum. I have other uses for you.”

Lieutenant Zhao had gone pale, but he kept his head up. “I’m
not usable, I’m afraid. Go any deeper and you’ll find the blocks. I’ll break
before I’ll bend. It’s built into the system.”

“I see,” said Rama. He meant exactly what he said. He tilted
his head. “Does none of you have the faintest sense of how your powers work?
You’re like a pack of apes in a goldsmith’s shop.”

Lieutenant Zhao did not like that at all. He reared up; he
actually snapped the words. “Who are you? What right do you have to say such
things?”

“Who am I?” Rama said softly. “In this age, I am no one. I
pass from dark into dark. I hunt a track gone cold as stone.”

“Poetic,” said Lieutenant Zhao. “You have a passion for
heroic-fantasy vids and a flair for drama. We might be able to use that.”

“I’m sure you could,” said Rama, “if I would let you.”

“Show me more,” Lieutenant Zhao said. He was getting cocky. “What
else can you conjure up?”

“What would you like to see?”

It was hardly Aisha’s place to warn Lieutenant Zhao when he
was getting into trouble. He wouldn’t have listened anyway. “Take us back to
the ship,” said Lieutenant Zhao, “but bring something from this reality. Make
it as real as you can.”

He didn’t believe anyone could do that. Aisha could hear it
in his voice. He thought he was asking the impossible.

She tried to will Rama not to do it. It was useless, of
course. With no fanfare at all, they stood in Lieutenant Zhao’s cabin on the
Leda
, and Lieutenant Zhao was wearing
much the same thing that Rama had been wearing when Aisha first saw him.

The kilt stayed whole—it was made of leather dyed deep green—and
the necklaces and armlets and rings and earrings and the massive belt were
mostly copper instead of gold. There were so many necklaces that they weighted
down Lieutenant Zhao’s narrow shoulders; he had to strain to lift his arms and
stare at all the bracelets and rings.

“What in the—”

“I did as you asked,” Rama said. His voice was terribly
gentle.

He was back in his grey suit again. No more golden armor.
Aisha was a little sorry. But there was life in his eyes: not as much as there
had been when he rode down the line of the army, but more than she had ever
seen in him.

Lieutenant Zhao started pulling off ornaments. His hands
were shaking so hard he could barely keep a grip on anything, but when Rama
moved to help, he backed away so fast he crashed into the wall. “No,” he said. “No,
don’t. Don’t touch me.”

Rama stepped back and lowered his hands. Lieutenant Zhao got
everything off, even the kilt, throwing it as far away from himself as he
could. But then he dropped to his knees and scrambled the scattered bits
together, hunting down the last ring and bead, till he had a pile in the middle
of the floor.

He sat back on his heels. “This is real,” he said much too
calmly. “As real as I am. Which must mean—”

“This is the universe you were born in,” Rama said.

Lieutenant Zhao picked up one of the copper bracelets. It
was made of twisted wire, set with green glass beads. Pater would kill to get
his hands on it. “No one can do this,” he said.

“No one in your Corps,” Rama said.

“What are you?”

“I am nothing the Corps would understand,” said Rama.

“Obviously. What
are
you?”

“You wouldn’t understand me, either.” Rama pulled a handful
of something out of the air. When he dropped it in front of Lieutenant Zhao, it
had the shape and color of a Psycorps uniform.

There was nothing left of the things that Lieutenant Zhao
had brought back from the memory or dream or whatever it was. But there was
Lieutenant Zhao with nothing on and a look of deep shock on his face, and a
sick feeling in Aisha’s stomach that was not going to go away.

~~~

“That was the craziest thing I ever saw you do,” Aisha said.
She waited till they got to their cabin to say it.

“I was perfectly safe,” Rama said.

“You’re perfectly arrogant. You may be stronger than any one
of them, but there’s a whole universe out there, and we’re about to jump back
into it. You try too many stunts like that one, you won’t last long enough to
start hunting. Then you’ll be gone and I’ll be stuck here and Nevermore will be
turned into a tourist trap. And it will be all your fault.”

Rama let her wind down, but nothing she’d said had sunk in
at all. “He won’t betray me. Even now he’s telling himself he drank too much of
his sour wine and watched one too many of his epic-fantasy vids. I should have
told him what I really am. Then he would never believe anything strange of me
at all.”

“So you’re not letting him take you to Araceli?”

“I didn’t say that.”

She picked up the nearest thing, which was a water bulb, and
threw it at him. He caught it out of the air. She spat at him. “You—are—
crazy
!”

“Always,” he said.

Khalida swam through jump in a sea of wine. She woke to
the blare of the alarm and a command override, downloading urgent orders into
her numbed brain.

MI was done with coddling her. She was ordered forthwith via
the
Leda
to Araceli. They were not to
stop at Centrum. A transport waited to take the cargo that had been meant for
that part of the quadrant; nanoseconds after the ship emerged from jump, the
transport had docked and begun offloading.

There were no orders for disposal of her wayward niece.
There should have been. Khalida could well guess who was to blame for that, but
she would have to rip him apart later. MI was doing the ripping now,
force-feeding her the entire dossier on Araceli.

Most of the download overwrote files she already had, but
one file refused to drop down out of sight.
Eyes
Only,
it said.

That was never a good sign. If Khalida had been in her right
mind she would have deleted it on contact. But she triggered the
Open
function and dropped back in her
bunk as the blue-green sky of Araceli arched over her in all its virtual glory.

A man stood under it, posed on a long strand of white sand.
Waves crashed just short of his booted feet. He smiled, baring white teeth in a
face that had been modified with exquisite subtlety. “Captain,” he said. His
voice was rich and melodious. “May I congratulate you on your promotion. It is
well deserved.”

Khalida suppressed her first impulse, which was to destroy
the message before it delivered one more oily, lying word. Rinaldi was as crazy
as he was dangerous. When she first came to Araceli, he had decided, somewhere
in the convolutions of his psi-nine brain, that she was the only intelligent
member of MI’s deputation.

That intelligence had played directly into his hands. A
quarter of a million people were dead because of it. And he was smiling as if
he had never done anything in his life to cause him a moment’s guilt.

She hit the override on the message. It was petty, but it
killed the special effects. He addressed her from a much more mundane cubicle
somewhere on Araceli, dressed in a plain suit and ordinary shoes instead of
pirate bravura. But his face and voice were still their expensively modified
selves. “I sincerely beg your pardon for calling you back from your extended
leave—and on so fascinating a planet, too. But it seems our solution to the
problem of Ostia Magna was neither as compelling nor as final as we had hoped.
The Ostians are being obstreperous again—insisting that their status as
psi-normal entitles them to equal protection under our law. Which of course it
does, but their definition of equality, as you know, is somewhat skewed.

“The nuclear missile that you were able to detonate was no
more than a feint—a mockery, if you will. Now they threaten us with a weapon
that should not exist, which our intel assures us not only exists, it can do
what they claim it can. They are threatening, my dear Captain, to destroy the
planet from the core outward unless we surrender to their demands. One of which
is that you and only you be permitted to negotiate with their emissaries.” He
lowered his voice; his expression altered to one of somewhat overplayed
concern. “We do fear that their intention is not negotiation but revenge—but
they are intractable. They will speak with you or they will speak with no one.
And Araceli will be a band of dust among the stars.”

“Dramatic,” Khalida said to the ceiling as the message cut
off. The ceiling persisted in showing her the link embedded in the message: a
reference to a weapon called, among other things, a worldwrecker.

The last time Khalida had heard that word, she had been
slumming in one of Jamal’s pirate vids. The dread pirate Gallifrey had won a
worldwrecker from the evil overlords of Maldonado and kept it in the cargo hold
of his legendary cruiser—never to use, of course, but it was a terrible and thoroughly
convincing threat.

Ostia Magna’s version had none of the baroquely gleaming
architecture of the pirate’s weapon. It was much less concrete and much more
deadly.

It was, at its simplest, a flaw in a system. Perfect power:
tapping the planet’s core, feeding power to the grids on the surface and in
orbit, and drawing up rare and enormously valuable elements that just happened
to be essential for starship drives, worldsweb systems, and terraforming
planets. It was perfectly safe and ecologically sound.

Except for that one, tiny, potentially catastrophic flaw.

Khalida had a tendency to blank on scientific jargon, but
this she managed to remember, because she appreciated irony. Pele Syndrome.

The core tap, under certain highly specific conditions,
could create a runaway chain reaction that blew the tap out of the crust, with
apocalyptic results. Earthquakes, eruptions, storms of radioactivity that
sterilized the planet.

Rinaldi had been exaggerating about the band of dust, but the
consequences would be much the same. No carbon-based life form would live on
Araceli for the next few million years. As for those that already inhabited it…

She had seen the first victim of the syndrome from the
safety of space: Pele, actively volcanic to begin with, now an object lesson in
greed and corporate overreach.

“That was a confederacy of idiots activating the system
before all the tests were done and the firewalls in place,” Khalida said to
Tomiko.
Leda
’s captain stood in the
doorway, looking as harried as Khalida felt. “There are failsafes now: layer on
layer on layer of redundancies and preventive measures. There’s no feasible way
to trigger the Syndrome. You’d need a database the size of U.P.’s. No single
world has that much bandwidth.”

“It does if that world has turned its entire network of
machines, along with a truly remarkable range and variety of devices and
implants offworld, into one massive computer. Stealing a few cycles here, a few
bits of code there, steering the tap just to the edge of Pele Syndrome.
Monitors? Alarms? Corrupted just as thoroughly as all the rest. It only needs
one command, one single trigger, and the reaction is irreversible. Once that
trigger is hit, Araceli has a handful of tendays at most, of escalating
ecological and planetological disaster. Then it’s gone.”

Khalida shook her head slowly. It was beautiful. Diabolical.

Machines were everywhere, performing their functions,
exchanging their codes, linking and connecting and serving the manifold needs
of the United Planets. They all had firewalls, of course. Shields and barriers.
Controls on access. But who paid attention to their constant and ubiquitous
web-chatter? Or took the trouble to examine every byte of code?

“How long have they been at this?” she asked. “Decades?
Centuries?”

“Ten years, give or take,” Tomiko answered, “plus another
twenty or so of building the framework. Ostia Magna holds the contract for all
the electronics used in the core tap, along with household systems, rovers and
shuttles, web implants…. Remember the slogan? ‘Who needs psi when you have
P.S.I.’?”

“Perrier-Souza Implants, Unlimited,” Khalida said as the
pieces clicked together, “of Centrum, Terra, and Ostia Magna.” She drew a long
breath. “It’s brilliant.”

“Isn’t it? You hit Ostia before they could get the thing up
and running, but they don’t appear to have lost any critical systems.”

“I don’t think they intended to,” Khalida said. “That was a
feint. Concealing what they were really up to. Gambling—and losing—on our
inability to make the hardest choice.”

“Or sacrificing a city to push us over the edge; to drown us
in guilt, so that when the greater threat was ready to go live, we’d give in to
their demands.”

“That’s why they insisted on bringing me back,” Khalida
said. She felt very little; it was so inevitable, and so perfectly, cruelly
logical. “Ostia bets that I won’t commit mass murder again. The Corps
postulates that I will. It’s an impasse.” She fixed Tomiko with her most
unrelenting stare. “What would you do?”

Tomiko lifted her hands and let them fall. “There’s no good
choice here. I can guess what MI wants. Find the trigger and disarm it. Crush
the insurrection. Protect this world—and oh so coincidentally, Psycorps’ people
and installations here.”

“But of course,” Khalida said with a bitter twist. “You’ve
got half the planet breeding psis and the other half feeding them—and the
feeders woke up, saw what they’d been lied into, and said, ‘No more.’ We can’t
have that, now, can we? We need our psis to keep the universe safe from only
they know what.”

“Itself,” Tomiko said.

“Is that what you believe?”

Tomiko shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what I think. I have
orders. If I don’t follow them, someone else will. You’re going to Araceli if MI
has to slam you in stasis and shoot you there in a life pod. Both sides want
you. Both sides get you. That’s going to happen regardless of anything you or I
may want or try.”