Forgotten Suns (30 page)

“Captain,” he said, “we don’t know. We had taken them to one
of our safe houses, where they were monitored and thoroughly protected. They should
not have been able to leave the house, let alone vanish.”

“Yet they did.”

“Yes,” he said in what seemed to be honest misery. “It’s a
terrible failure. Not to mention the danger they would be in, with a world at
war.”

“If anything happens to Aisha,” Khalida said, “I shall hold
you personally responsible.”

“As you should,” he said. He sat down finally, as if his
knees had let go. “Captain, do you have any idea where they might have gone?”

“If I did, do you think I would tell you?”

“Please, Captain,” he said. “Sera Nasir is still on this
world; that much we can determine. But we haven’t been able to discover where
she is or how she’s traveling.”

“I don’t know if I believe you,” Khalida said.

“Of course you wouldn’t,” he said. “Nevertheless, Captain,
we are deeply concerned, and we will do everything in our power to find her and
bring her back to you.”

“If you really do want to protect her,” Khalida said, “find
her and get her back to her parents. All the way to Nevermore, Lieutenant, by
the safest and fastest means possible. Promise me that—swear to it by whatever
you hold sacred—and I’ll answer your question.”

Zhao barely hesitated. Which meant that he was either a
hardened liar or a complete innocent. “I promise,” he said, “on my honor as an
officer, that if I succeed in finding her, I will return her, safe and unharmed
and as soon as possible, to her family.”

“Well then,” Khalida said. “Meser Rama has a certain
archaeological interest in the Ara Celi. He might have taken it into his head
to visit the site.”

“It is in a restricted area,” Zhao said.

“Do you think that would have stopped him?”

“No,” Zhao admitted after a pause. “No, it wouldn’t, would
it?” He rose with a fraction of his usual grace. “Thank you, Captain. We will
do our best. I promise you that.”

“You do that,” Khalida said.

~~~

Then finally she was alone with an unopened bottle of
grappa and a plate of congealing pasta. She pushed them both away and lowered
her aching head into her hands.

The room might be shielded, but its web connection was MI-grade
and she, as commander, had the keys. She applied one, and waited while it
worked its way though encrypted channels.

“Captain,” Tomiko said. Even on the web her voice was thick
with frost.

“Captain,” Khalida answered. She could not equal Tomiko’s
coldness, and she did not want to. “I need a favor.”

“Do you?” Tomiko opened the connection enough that Khalida
could see her sitting in her quarters with a bottle and a plate of her own, and
a vid paused on a scene of ancient warriors standing face to face and sword to
sword.

Khalida appreciated the symbolism. “It’s all coming to a
head here,” she said, “and the Corps seems to have misplaced my niece. Will you
keep a shuttle on call? The instant we find her, I want her off this planet.”

“Only her?” Tomiko inquired.

Khalida chose not to answer that.

“There is one other thing,” she said. She had the dataspurt
ready: her resignation, locked and coded to file when the call ended. Dumping
it off on Tomiko was not exactly kind, but there was no one else in the system
whom she trusted to register and execute it.

“Thank you,” she said as the data marked itself as sent.

Tomiko’s leaned forward, as if she could reach through the
connection, get hold of Khalida, and shake her. “Khalida—”

Khalida cut the connection. She had time, she calculated,
before her resignation worked its way through all the relevant channels. She
had no expectation that it would be accepted, but it would create a diversion.

Meanwhile she was as free as she could remember being—even
on Nevermore. No one could read her here; if she wanted the web, she had to
open a channel to access it.

She ran a quick scan. The purge in the port continued.
Rinaldi was out of the city and off the grid—which might have concerned her if
she had not withdrawn herself from his pleasant little game. He could play it
through with Colonel Aviram. She was done.

~~~

Khalida requisitioned a fresh set of riot arms and armor,
and a rover with orbital capability. She waited for alarms to trigger, but her
command codes were still valid. People she passed either ignored her or seemed
to find nothing unusual about her.

Once she had the rover and a hundred meters of altitude, she
said to the console, “Mem Aurelia.”

No response. Khalida had not expected one. She set a hook in
the search’s tail and left it on the web, and programmed the rover with its own
search grid.

She could still run MI-level encrypted searches. That was
useful for finding one child with a limited web implant, and a man with none.

Her stomach rumbled.
Now
she was hungry. She found a packet of survival rations under the pilot’s
cradle.

They tasted like sweetened sawdust. She choked down most of
a bar and left the rest for later.

The search pinged. Target found, though the time stamp was a
planetday old.

It was better than nothing. She locked on. The rover altered
its grid to match.

~~~

The web tried to scream at her. Rinaldi, Aviram, MI
itself—they all erupted on the other side of her barriers. None of them took
control of the rover.

Of course not. They could reel her in at any point.
Meanwhile, she could search, and they would watch.

She considered shutting that off, but they would only find
other ways to do it. This one went both ways, which might turn out to be
useful.

Lieutenant Zhao was not in range. Either he had been lying
after all, or he was too far ahead of her to catch.

While the rover tracked a flicker on the worldweb, she
tracked something else under multiple layers of encryption. It was
brain-straining, exacting work, and she had to do it while seeming to doze and
while maintaining a façade of harmless coasting on the web.

The targets did some of the hunting for her. She had the
connections: Mem Aurelia; the woman with the wonderful hair, whose name was
Marta; the network of corporations that manufactured and distributed the devices
that, in aggregate, constituted the worldwrecker.

What she needed, and wanted, was the trigger. The entity or
person or mechanism that set off the reaction.

MI had run its own exhaustive searches. What they had missed
was the human connection: the two women who had left clues for Khalida to
interpret.

They wanted her to stop them.

Or not. This could be revenge: torturing her with hints and
cryptic bits of patterns too big for a single mind to hold.

Possibly it was both.

Connection met connection. So: Marta, the null. Mem Aurelia,
the non—and the genetic parent of the null. Daughter, mother. Torn apart by the
Corps, but maintaining contact in defiance of law and tradition. Finding one
another when the conspiracy first began, and finding a common level of—genius?
Madness? Plain and visceral rage against the Corps?

It could not be this obvious. If Marta was the trigger, or
knew what and where it was, she would hardly have thrown herself in front of
Khalida. She must be a blind of sorts. A diversion.

Maybe Khalida was the trigger. She had performed the office
once already, for the Corps. Why not use her again, this time for the other
side?

The web gave her a gift: a stream of Marta not more than an
Earthyear ago, singing Old Earth opera onstage on Centrum itself. The set, the
costumes, the grand and stately music, struck Khalida with exquisite irony: she
was singing that great pseudo-Egyptian tragedy,
Aïda
.

Her voice was glorious. She had both range and control, and passion
that made every note tear at the heart.

It washed over Khalida with the clarity of understanding. An
opera company, a troupe of singers, a pattern of engagements and performances
that took them all over the United Planets—and everywhere they went, they left
minute and highly poisonous fragments of code in each world’s web.

They could do more than break Araceli. They could bring down
the worldsweb—all at once or world by world.

They had not made that threat. Not yet. Not quite; though
Khalida was meant to see.

Aïda loved and lost and died. Marta meant to do all three,
but she would take the worlds with her.

That was hate, with all of the singer’s passion in it.
Khalida collected the data in a report capsule and added her conclusions, but
did not send it. Not yet. Not until Aisha was safe offworld, on the
Leda
that had its own web and its
battery of formidable protections. Not least of which was its captain.

By MI regulations, Khalida was committing treason. Not to
mention insubordination, desertion, and sabotage. She found it difficult to
care.

The search string for Aisha broke, then re-formed. She had,
for a number of hours, disappeared from the web, but that morning she had
reappeared, and begun moving rapidly away from the port.

That was what Khalida had been looking for. It was clear
where Aisha was going, and all too easy to guess who was taking her there.
Voluntarily, Khalida suspected; which was a bit of a disappointment. Abduction
she could have come down on with the full force of military and civilian
justice.

That might still be possible. She reset the rover’s
itinerary once again, toward the Ara Celi.

The tubular passage twisted and convulsed and spat them
out into a space that Aisha at first took for a cargo bay. But the clusters of
screens and the cradles and hoverchairs drifting across it looked more like a
ship’s bridge.

People stood or sat around the screens, and others clumped
together in a transparent-walled pen or roofless compartment near the far
bulkhead. The people working the screens wore Psycorps green or black. The ones
in the pen looked like civilians.

Both looked frantic in different ways. The screens showed
the scene outside: the fighting had gotten worse, and there were still,
crumpled shapes on the ground, and stains and pools that Aisha knew, with a
sick knot on her middle, were blood.

The Corps officer with seven pips on the collar did
something that Aisha felt in the center of that knot. The ship screamed.

She might have screamed with it. She couldn’t have heard
herself if she had. But she could see, and not just with eyes.

Rama hadn’t seemed to move, but he was beside the psi-seven.
The others surged toward him.

He disposed of them with a flick of the hand. The psi-seven
gaped at him. The man was big, with broad shoulders and a mane of hair the
color of summer grass on Nevermore. He looked as if he could fight as well as
read people’s minds.

Rama for once looked small. He wanted that, Aisha thought.
He smiled up at the psi-seven. “Commander Bowen.”

“Who in hell’s name are you?”

The smile widened to a grin. How he was doing it, while the
ship screamed and screamed, Aisha could hardly imagine. “I am Death, destroyer
of worlds.”

“You are insane.”

“That, too,” Rama said. He kicked the man’s feet out from
under him, as easily as if he’d been half the size, and set his knee in the
middle of that broad and helpless back. Then he lifted his head and sang.

It didn’t matter what the words were or where the song came
from. It was a hymn, Aisha knew down deep, and much older than he was. The
language it was sung in had been ancient when he was born.

He was using it to link to the ship. To hack into its song
of agony with his hymn of healing and peace.

The ship was alive. The screens wired into its neural
network, the controls that slaved it to human will, were torture beyond
anything Aisha had ever known of.

Rama couldn’t rip the grafted-on mechanicals out. That would
destroy the ship, mind and body both. He had to reinstall them instead. Smooth
out the connections. Shut down the ones that made nothing but pain and neural
disruption.

It was the most delicate surgery in the worlds, and he did
it with the ship’s captain lying limp and barely conscious under his knee.

She crept across that vast expanse of—what? Stomach?
Thoracic cavity? Muscle cyst?—and eased over toward the holding pen. The people
in it were all lined up along the wall, staring at what must look to them like
a scene from a pirate vid.

“You,” one of them said when Aisha came close. “Please. Let
us out.”

Aisha was half in and half out of virtual reality. She had
to think hard before she managed spoken words. “Tell me who you are first.”

“Dr. Alice Ma,” the woman said. “Principal scientist,
experimental ship
Ra-Harakhte.
”

“So you’re the ones who slaved the ship,” Aisha said. “We
heard it screaming clear across the continent.”

Dr. Ma stared at her. “You can’t be Psycorps. Or can they
run renegade, too?”

“We are not Psycorps,” Aisha said coldly. “I’m not letting
you out. You’re no better than they are. In fact I think you’re worse.”

“Now listen here,” said one of the other prisoners. “
I’m
not a scientist. I’m just trying to
get to Beijing Nine.”

The gaggle of people with him quacked and clacked agreement.
“We’re travelers,” he said. “Tourists, if you want to be insulting. We were
rounded up and shoved in here two days ago. If you could get a whiff of the
facilities—”

“
Ulrich!”
snapped
the woman behind him. “That’s not what she needs to hear. Here, Sera, let us
out, please. This pen is hardwired to the ship’s controls. If your friend there
shuts those down, that’s our life support gone, too.”

“But not mine?” Aisha wanted to know.

“You’re breathing ship’s atmosphere,” the woman said. “We
aren’t.”