Forgotten Suns (23 page)

“Granted,” Tomiko said. Her face was completely blank.

Khalida remembered to breathe. She would have hacked the
system regardless, but it was much less complicated with the captain’s
permission. “You rest,” she said to Rama. “Be ready. I may need you.”

His assent shivered through her synapses. He was in the web,
woven into it as securely as if he were a part of it.

Not as good as Jamal? Khalida had a feeling he might be
better.

Khalida crawled out of the web with a pounding headache
and a head full of data, some of it useful, none of it close to what she had
been looking for. Tomiko was back on the bridge, but with Khalida, too, like a
hand holding hers through the ship’s web.

Rama sat cross-legged in the corner of Tomiko’s office,
watching her with calm intentness. He was on guard. When she scowled at him, he
took a breath and visibly relaxed. “An army of mages would have been easier,”
he said.

“Not for me.” She winced at the sound of her own voice.

He handed her a cup. It was full of scalding-hot coffee.
There was no way to brew it here, and he had been in front of her, fixed on
her, for the better part of an hour.

Some things were best not looked at too closely. The coffee
was real, it was hot, and it tasted fresh. She drank it in grateful sips,
savoring the rich and bitter taste.

With that in her stomach, she could stand up and walk back
out to the bridge. Rama followed, soft-footed, padding like a big cat.

They were an hour out from Araceli. The traffic of the
system hummed around them, an intricate stream of data flowing through the web.
It was all perfectly normal, considering that there was a war below.

Whatever the trap was, all they could do now was walk into
it. “If there’s anything you want to take with you,” Khalida said to Rama, “get
it while you can. The minute we get clearance, we’re going down.”

He dipped his head and vanished, moving almost too quickly
to see. She shivered, caught Tomiko’s eyes on her, forced herself to slow down,
breathe, be calm. There was nothing she could do now but wait. She was as ready
for this as she was ever going to be.

~~~

Planetary Control took hold of the
Leda
as it locked into its assigned orbit. Araceli’s own shuttle
waited to take passengers planetside. It was not exactly standard procedure,
but it was common enough. Planetary governments and Spaceforce shared, at best,
an uneasy alliance.

Rama had brought his baggage to the shuttle bay: a slight
figure wrapped in black.

Khalida should have known. “No,” she said. “Aisha, back to
the cabin.”

Aisha neither moved nor spoke. Her eyes within the veils
were openly rebellious.

“She’s safer with us,” Rama said, drawing Khalida’s fire.

“You,” she said, “are insane. I’m not much better, but
neither am I crazy enough to take that child into the middle of a war.”

“The war is all around us,” Rama said. “It’s not being fought
with the kind of weapons a starship can stand against. I promise you, while I
live I shall protect her.”

“And when you get killed?”

“I don’t intend to die here,” he said.

Khalida was not sure if she could say the same. “She’s
staying here,” she said.

“No,” said Rama.

Khalida’s teeth set. “You are neither her parent nor her
guardian. You have no right or authority—”

“Captain,” said a voice in her ear. She spun on its owner.

Lieutenant Zhao flinched, but only slightly. “Captain,” he
said, “Control has instructed that all passengers be removed from the ship. If
Meser Rama’s assurance isn’t enough, will you take mine? I’ll take
responsibility for your niece’s safety.”

Khalida had the satisfaction of seeing the horror in Aisha’s
eyes—but it was a small spurt of pleasure, and vanishingly brief. If Rama was
bad, Psycorps was worse.

As always with Araceli, there were no good choices. Only a
cascade of bad ones. Khalida hissed at the lot of them.

Tomiko stood between Khalida and the shuttle. Khalida had
not seen her come into the bay; there had been too much else to fixate on.

Khalida saluted stiffly. “Captain,” she said.

“Captain,” Tomiko replied. Her face was set, her voice
clipped.

There was little else to say, even if they had not been
quarreling. Khalida said it regardless. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Likewise,” Tomiko said.

She stepped aside. Khalida had a brief urge to knock her
flat, and an equally brief one to hug her till she gasped.

She did neither. She marched past Tomiko into the shuttle.

~~~

Aisha was in the worst trouble she had ever been in in her
life. Squeezed in between Rama and Khalida, dropping away from
Leda
to the blue-and-white ball in space
that was Araceli, she had a sudden, powerful, and completely impossible urge to
get up and walk away and not stop until she found herself on Nevermore again.

Of course that wasn’t happening. Khalida was perfectly still
and perfectly silent. Rama stared out the port, watching the world grow till it
blocked out the blackness of space.

They were coming down on the day side, right along the line
between night and morning. A continent stretched below, with sparks and flashes
of light that were lakes and inland seas. A deep blue ocean curved away toward
the bottom of the planet’s arc, flaring white at the utmost bottom, where the
polar caps where.

Cities spread like neurons across the night side, linked by
chains of smaller lights. The day side was almost all green and dun and brown,
with only a few grids or circles that marked the places where humans lived.

It looked empty, like wilderness—almost as empty as
Nevermore. But that was deceiving. The cities were full of non-psis: feeder
cities. The psis lived where people were few and far apart, with shields to
protect themselves from each other.

Aisha looked for the crater that her aunt had made, but it
wasn’t on this side of the planet. Everything here was peaceful and whole.

She was supposed to be deceived. She was just a child, after
all. But Aunt and Rama weren’t supposed to know as much as they did, either. None
of them was playing the game the way Psycorps and Araceli expected.

That could be either good or bad. Aisha’s stomach was in
knots. She took deep breaths the way Vikram had taught her. “Breathing is
important,” his voice said in her head. “Breathing is everything.”

In her head, he sounded like Rama. Warm deep voice with a
lilt underneath. Rama’s sun surrounded her, shielding her.

They were dropping fast. Somewhere outside the sun, Aisha
was screaming with panic.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

The darkness of space around them felt like Rama’s hand. The
shuttle, cradled in it, fell down and down into the deep well that was Araceli.

MI waited in the shuttle bay, backed by a detachment of
armored marines. They surrounded Khalida as soon as she stepped out of the
shuttle. Even though she had expected it, the snap of the restraints around her
caught her off guard.

She could not even look back to see what had happened to
Rama and her niece. The web was still alive behind her eyes, but external links
were blocked. All she could access was the direct feed from MI, and that
contained a copy of her orders, a precis of the situation as it had evolved
since she left the
Leda
, and a dataspurt
from local command.

There was nothing she could do about the rest of it.

Not yet
, she
thought, deep inside, where no one could come.

Except one. And he was keeping to himself.

Biding his time.

The dark part of her was glad. The rest had work to do,
whether she wanted it or not. Nor would MI care overmuch if it killed her.

There was comfort in that, of sorts.

~~~

None of the marines or the escort from MI was familiar.
They were all new since Khalida left Araceli: fresh faces, new victims for the
old war. She caught some of them sliding glances at her, then looking quickly
away. It seemed her reputation preceded her.

Even MI headquarters had changed. The old building in a
somewhat seedy section of the port was gone: a casualty of war, taken down by a
suicide bomber after the fall of Ostia Magna. The new one had moved well inward
toward the wealthier quarter, a squat block of fortified stone with levels of
security that raised her brows higher as they penetrated each one.

“Just a little bit spooked, are you?” she inquired when, at
considerable length, she found herself in the commander’s office.

He was a new face on this world, too, though hardly
unfamiliar. Shimon Aviram had his own reputation, and that was as the court of
last resort. When he took charge of a situation, it had already begun to spin
out of control.

“Captain Nasir,” he said. He had a smooth cool voice and a
face modified to match, but his eyes were perfectly level, unwavering, still and
cold. For an instant as Khalida met them, she imagined she saw a second
consciousness staring out, one she almost recognized.

She knew better than to dismiss the thought, but she buried
it below a babble of undisciplined mind-noise. “Colonel Aviram,” she said. “I’d
salute, but as you see…”

The restraints sprang free. The marine on her left caught
them and stepped back conspicuously out of fist-snap range.

If Khalida hit anyone, it would not be one of her escort.
She flexed her numbed fingers but otherwise made no move.

“Give me your word,” said Aviram, “that you are not a flight
risk.”

“I might be,” she said. “If it seems advisable. In the
meantime, I have orders. Do I have your permission to execute them? Colonel?
Sir?”

“I can neither permit nor deny,” he said. “You are, for the
duration of this operation, my superior officer.”

That set Khalida back on her heels. She had managed, in the
flood of data, to overlook that particular and crucial fact.

“I did insist,” said the man who deigned at last to show
himself. He might have been there from the beginning: for a psi of his level,
that was hardly impossible. He only had to encourage the unwitting eye to pass
on by.

Rinaldi in the flesh was both more and less prepossessing
than he chose to seem in vid. He was tall and well built but somewhat soft: a
man who had no need for action other than the virtual sort, and no inclination
to alter his body to look as if he did.

That was a mask, like everything else about him. “Isn’t this
a conflict of interest?” she asked. “If I’m mediating for both sides, where is
your worthy opponent?”

“Waiting,” Rinaldi said. “She requested we meet on neutral
ground.”

“Which this port allegedly is,” Khalida said.

He smiled. “Allegedly, Captain?”

She had no reason in this world to trust him, but no choice
but to let herself be taken where her orders commanded her to go. It was small
consolation that Aviram had the same orders—and even less autonomy. If and when
this fell apart, he would go down with her.

“I will go,” she said, “after I have eaten, rested, and
reviewed the situation. An hour, Meser Rinaldi. Colonel: I suppose you have a
kitchen here?”

Aviram nodded stiffly. Rinaldi was amused. She was dancing
in chains, and they all knew it.

It made a point. She was hungry, to her surprise, and she
did want as well as need to examine her orders more closely. Aviram’s
revelation might not be all that was hidden in the knotwork of official
phrasing.

~~~

As far as she could tell while she worked her way
methodically through a small vat of pasta alla vongole and a bottle of rather
pleasant red wine, her orders were no more or less complicated than they had
seemed at first scan. Meet, separately and together, with representatives of
the warring parties. Talk Ostia down off the ledge. Get the keys to the
worldwrecker and relay them to Tech. Use the resources of MI on-world and the
Leda
off it.

And there it was. In collaboration with the Interplanetary
Institute for Psychic Research.

Psycorps.

Officially, Psycorps and the city-state of Castellanos were
separate entities. The fact that Castellanos was founded, inhabited, and
governed by Psycorps, and only by Psycorps, was never, officially, acknowledged.

Khalida spoke aloud to the apparently empty office. “You’re
not even pretending that there’s any hope of objectivity here.”

“We all do what we must,” Rinaldi said. His voice came from
everywhere and nowhere, but her uplink found him in the hallway just outside
the door, leaning against the wall. Loitering; or eavesdropping.

“And if I decide that we have to lock you up and find for
Ostia by default?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. His amusement made her skin
shiver.

“I begin to understand,” she said, “why Ostia would rather
see this world dead than in your hands.”

“Understanding is the beginning of wisdom,” he said.

If she hated him, he won the skirmish. She made herself cold
and quiet and still. He was nothing to her. An obstacle, that was all. She
would find a way over or around him. Or not.

Nothing mattered. This war was nothing. This man, this
psi-nine—nothing. Nothing at all.

Was that a gasp from the hallway?

She must be imagining it. “I’m ready,” she said.

~~~

If the envoy from Ostia had not insisted on meeting
Khalida alone in a shielded room, Khalida would have done it for her. These
negotiations could not be the normal and ordinary meeting of opponents across a
table or a webspace. Khalida would speak with each party in that room, where
psi was blocked and blanked. Then, if and when she was ready, she would bring
them together. She might not even do that at all.

For now there was the representative of the people whose
relatives and children she had murdered. Mem Aurelia was a woman of size and
presence, composed and still. She sat on a cushion with her feet tucked beneath
her skirts. Her hands were folded in her lap; her eyelids were lowered.