Forgotten Suns (26 page)

“Rest? Or hide?” she inquired. “There are hotels by the
dozen around the spaceport.”

“I could hide there if I were minded,” he said. “This is
where I need to be.”

“Need?”

“Need,” he said.

“I should refuse,” she said. “If I discover you’ve put a witching
on me, I’ll call the Corps. Do you understand that?”

“Perfectly,” he said.

“Then come,” she said.

~~~

Aisha should have known better than to expect anything in
this place, but she’d seen too many vids; they’d marked her for life. She stood
in a suite of rooms as big and bright and clean as any she’d ever stayed in,
with a view of the spaceport and the shuttles taking off, that she only
realized after a long few minutes was on a screen and not a wide, very clean
window.

There were no windows, but screens everywhere. The place was
like a fortress. It was shielded in as many ways as she could imagine, and
probably a few she couldn’t.

The terrible singing was still there, but muted almost to
silence. Rama stood a little straighter; his shoulders were a fraction less
tight. “This will do,” he said.

“You haven’t asked the price,” the woman said.

“They tell me I’m wealthy,” he said. “You can have it all,
if you insist. I’ll find more.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I’ll ask for something that matters to
you.”

“Not my companion,” he said.

Aisha was somewhat pleased at how quickly he said that.

“I don’t think that is yours to give,” the woman said. “You
may rest. When the time comes for payment, you’ll know.”

“We could simply walk away,” he said.

“I think not,” she said. She turned to go, but paused. “My
name is Marta. Speak it, and the system will provide whatever you ask for.
Within reason, of course.”

“Of course,” said Rama. Aisha couldn’t tell if he was being
ironic.

~~~

After Marta left, Rama said, “Katas in an hour. Meanwhile,
rest if you will. Eat.”

“You sound like my grandmother,” Aisha said. “Always telling
us to eat.”

“Food is life,” he said. And that
was
ironic.

Aisha didn’t trust him. The way he’d tried to provoke people
down below, the quiet he was cultivating now—he was up to something.

She could play the game, too. “Marta,” she said, “I want a
bath. With real water. And soap. And then I want dinner. Something good, with
chicken. Can you do real chicken?”

“
Gallus gallus
redivivus
thrives on Araceli,” the air replied in a sweetened version of
the living Marta’s voice. “Have you a preference as to cuisine?”

“You choose,” Aisha said.

“Heard and recorded,” said the air.

“Thank you,” Aisha said, though it was only software.

“The port is full of pirates,” Rinaldi said.

Khalida had been expecting a delegation. It consisted,
apparently, of Rinaldi, a pair of aides so bland as to be invisible, and a
prickling in the nape of her neck that made her feel as if she was being
watched by a multitude.

Rinaldi seemed unperturbed by room’s shields, though his
aides held themselves tight and still. He sat where Mem Aurelia had sat, with
no sign of sensing the presence that had been there before him. To Khalida’s
eye he seemed small beside that memory of calm and composure, like a little yapping
dog that wants to be a king of wolves.

That was interesting in itself. She sat on a cushion of her
own, deliberately relaxed, and raised a brow. “You have new enemies, then? I’m
to negotiate with pirates, too? Does MI know?”

“Military Intelligence is well apprised of the situation, I
would hope,” Rinaldi said. “As for what they might choose to share with you…”

Khalida knew better than to let him provoke her. “Tell me
what pirates have to do with the reason we are, ostensibly, here.”

“Oh,” said Rinaldi. “Such steel in that spine. Pirates, my
dear Captain, have taken advantage of a peculiarity in planetary law, which
allows them free access to the port city and limited access to the rest of
Araceli—excepting our territories.”

Khalida was not going to give him either aid or ammunition.
If he wanted anything said, he would have to say it himself.

“The port is now full of them,” he said, obligingly, “and
there are reports of ‘touring parties’ throughout Ostia Magna and its
neighbors. There’s a fair conclave of ships in orbit. All with letters of
marque, or safe-conducts from one or more of the carefully neutral worlds.
Geneva Nova, most notably.”

“Isn’t that a little obvious?” Khalida asked.

“One would think,” he said. “But considering the ultimatum
under which we all labor, and the cargo capacity of the various ships, I do
wonder…”

“Pirates,” Khalida pointed out, “or free traders, as they
prefer to call themselves, don’t believe in charity. If your opponents are as
poor as all evidence indicates, can they be planning anything close to what you
imply?”

“Poor they may be,” he said, “but if all of them have
gathered what resources they have and—even more to the point, perhaps—their
talents—”

“Talents?”

“Technical skills,” he said. “Such as are rare and highly
valued in the outer worlds.”

“Speculation,” she said.

“Informed speculation,” he said.

“Which is well and good,” said Khalida, “but I’m here, at
your insistence, to resolve this conflict. I am not your speaker to pirates.”

“Even if your mission requires you to do so?”

Khalida took care to breathe slowly; to cling to calm. She
had never taken kindly to being manipulated—and he was not even trying to hide
it. “I take orders from Military Intelligence,” she said. “You are here to
present your terms.”

“Well then,” said Rinaldi, “those are my terms. Clear the
port of pirates. Prosecute those who can be prosecuted, and remove the rest.
Then we’ll come to the table.”

He was smiling, damn him. Like the king in the old story,
demanding impossible tasks for the hand of his daughter.

This would not be the only one, Khalida thought. Oh, no. He
was just beginning.

~~~

Logically Khalida would go to Colonel Aviram, and then
through channels to MI, and try to make sense of this game Rinaldi was playing.
She was not here to run security sweeps through a spaceport.

Unless of course she was. Her orders dropped as soon as she
left Rinaldi sitting in the shielded room, sitting and smiling.

The last time she had to cope with this nightmare of a
world, she had had Max and Sonja, Kinuko and John Begay. They were all inside
her, capsules of memory, but none of them was speaking, or had spoken since she
dropped the bomb on Ostia.

All she had now was herself.

Delegate,
her
orders said. Port Security was at her disposal. Aviram had the roster of MI
personnel for both remote surveillance and boots on the ground. There was
little enough for her to do but sign off on authorizations already prepared.

Khalida had never been good at signing off on orders. MI
knew that.

~~~

She caught Aviram on his way out of HQ, in riot gear with
his helmet under his arm. “No,” she said. “Mine.”

“Surely we can share,” he said.

“Unless it’s a ploy to get both of us out of HQ.”

He barely blinked. “There’s nothing here to attract a spy.
Everything’s encrypted on the Worldsweb.”

Which she should know, his tone implied—gently, but
nonetheless. “Everything but us,” she said, equally gently. Then she shrugged,
shaking off the shudder under her skin. “Do what you will. We’ll sweep both
ends against the middle, shall we?”

Even while she spoke she was scanning duty rosters on the
web, calling up teams, some with names that swam up out of memory, others whom
she did not know at all. Aviram saluted and went on his way. Khalida strode
where the web directed her, in search of her own gear and the dozen MI
operatives who would sweep the port under her command.

~~~

They were waiting in the ready room: twelve and one. The
thirteenth met her stare with the faintest of half-smiles. Khalida counted the
pips on the woman’s collar with a kind of acid pleasure. “A psi-five? We’re
honored.”

“Major Li,” the agent named herself, “detailed to Military
Intelligence.”

Very much by the book, that one. Without the stiff carriage
and the stern expression, she would have been a remarkably pretty child. Though
surely she was not as young as she looked.

“I am not,” she said. Crisply, but with a flicker of
bone-dry humor. Not so stiff, then, either. And making a clear point of what
she was and could do.

Khalida stiffened her own spine. Best she not see any of
these agents as human. Allah knew, the Corps itself was not.

“You are here,” she asked of this agent, “for what purpose?”

Major Li replied with a ping on the web, a packet that
unfolded itself into a set of short and remarkably concise orders.

Khalida has received the bulk of them already. Door-to-door
sweeps. Executing warrants against the freer of the free traders—some of long
standing, others suspiciously new. Clearing out the bars and brothels.
Encouraging holders of letters of marque to hold them elsewhere. And, most
directly to the point, searching for signs of psi-nulls—triangulating those
signs with psis attached to other units, and agents at Corps HQ.

“Since,” Major Li said, “nulls are, as the term indicates,
blank. Non-presences. Not there to the sight that I can bring to bear.”

“Rogue nulls?” Khalida wondered aloud, as pieces fell into
place and patterns took shape. “Is any of you at all surprised?”

Major Li chose not to answer that. Instead she said, “Nulls
are a sort of cloaking device. Whatever is being done around them, neither psi
nor MI can detect. Therefore—”

“That must be terribly frustrating for you,” Khalida said.

“I enjoy a challenge,” said Major Li.

Khalida, at this stage in her life, did not. But here she
was, playing policeman for Psycorps. It might be better than playing
executioner for them—just.

~~~

Major Li refused to lead. She would follow. Khalida
shrugged and took second, with the unit’s sergeant at point: a solid,
foursquare, no-nonsense woman who managed without moving a muscle to convey her
utter contempt for the Corps agent in the rear.

The rest of the unit did not even offer her that much. She
could come or go, they said with turn of shoulder and angle of eye. It made no
difference to them.

Khalida was a different matter. They knew who she was, and
what. From some she had a sense of admiration. From others, almost fear. But
none of them offered contempt.

That was something, she reflected as they advanced into the
port. Word had gone out, of course. This being a spaceport, that meant more
people in the streets rather than less, a succession of clogs and blockages
that could have been completely accidental, but were ongoing and persistent.

Major Li looked for zones of nothingness. Khalida and her
unit aimed toward the opposite: firmer obstruction, heavier crowds. Those were
protecting something, as often as not.

Interesting how often Li and Khalida agreed as to where to
go. It was slow going, and fruitless. Every knot they unraveled had nothing in
its center. Every crowd evaporated once they had penetrated its outer circles.

Khalida held tight to patience. Door to door, her orders
said. Door to door it was, no matter how many bodies tried to set themselves in
the way.

She mapped their progress through the web. From HQ east
toward the port proper, and then north, into the old city. Parts of that were
as old as the human occupation of Araceli, built of native wood and stone and
what looked like cannibalized shuttle parts.

They caught their first rat there: a small one, with a
warrant out in three systems, and enough cheap liquor on board to float him
through a fourth. Major Li had no interest in him; she barely deigned to wait
for him to be wrapped and sealed and shipped off to Deportation.

“Trouble?” Khalida asked, leaving the unit to deal with the
rat and taking station with Major Li in the street outside the tavern. It was
suspiciously empty, and silent: not even the sound of a snore from the gutter.

Major Li frowned. Her lips were tight, her face pale, as if
she nursed the mother of headaches. “No more than I expected,” she answered.

Her expression belied the words, but Khalida kept her mouth
shut. The prickle in her nape told her there were eyes behind every door and
window.

Between her unit and the rest, they had pirates running to
the spaceport from every corner of the city. It had a slightly rancid smell
about it: a script they all ran through, with everyone knowing her part, and no
one minded to improvise.

The unit emerged from the tavern, minus the rat’s escort, which
would deliver him to the nearest Port Security post and then rejoin the rest.
Major Li had that look again, the hunter’s glare, aimed still deeper into the
old city.

Major Li had stopped pretending to do anything but hunt a
single quarry. Khalida kept her mouth shut and her troops in line, and let her
lead them toward the real target.

Not a pirate. Those were running like a herd of antelope,
bounding toward whatever shelter they could find. Major Li pursued a different
prey.

Triangulating emptiness. Khalida felt it ahead of her. The
world around it was ordinary, the sun sliding down the sky but still casting a
painfully bright light on the nether parts of the port. The place toward which
they were going was blank. Simply, starkly blank.

Trap.

“Too obvious,” Khalida said, though she knew what she was
doing to herself by saying it. She found she no longer cared. “It’s not the
empty you’re looking for. It’s the imperceptible.”

They were fanned out across a wider street than most, with
Major Li on point and Khalida behind her. Doors were shut and windows blanked.
Any vehicle that had not got out of there long since was pulled over and shut
down.