Forgotten Suns (41 page)

~~~

“That was a pretext,” Aisha said when they were out of
sight and into a market square. All the booths had free trader marks on them,
family crests and company logos and the black slash of the ancient syndicate
called Anonymous. U.P. wouldn’t dare make a move here.

“Of course it was a pretext,” Rama said, pausing to inspect
a table full of sharp and deadly things. “Your father wants you home. The Corps
wants me stripped down to the last molecule, in as much pain as mortally
possible.”

He wasn’t any more afraid of that than he was of anything
else in this universe he hadn’t asked to wake into. “I want to go home,” Aisha
said, “but not now. Not till I’m done. I’ll send Pater a message. I’ve been
ducking it. I should stop.”

“That would be a good thing,” he said.

Of course they’d keep coming after him anyway, because of
what he’d done to the Corps. But Aisha would feel better.

He wandered down through the market. He was making sure to
be seen, Aisha realized: the same as he’d been in the garden. Buying a trinket
here and a cup of exotic liquor there. Feeding pastries to his shadow, who had
to eat under her veil.

It was all theater. She didn’t know why, unless for its own
sake. He had as much crew as he needed. More, in her opinion. Wherever he went
next, it wouldn’t have anything to do with this nest of free traders.

“A commander never wastes resources,” his voice said in her
head. “These might be useful someday.”

Aisha couldn’t very well argue with that. It was more
entertaining than sitting in the principal’s house, and she got to see actual
aliens—walking right out in the street, sometimes in atmo-suits and sometimes
with breathing mechanisms and sometimes simply walking or crawling or
slithering or fluttering like any other oxygen-breather.

Like Rama. Which made her wonder how many other apparent
humans in this place were not actually from Earth stock.

Her head had started to hurt again. The sun’s image that
Rama had taught her helped a little, but it was getting harder to keep her
thoughts in and everybody else’s out.

She was tired, and she wanted to go home. That was all it
was. This adventure went on and on, but they were closer to an end, and an
answer, than they’d been before.

She tripped and almost fell, but caught herself before
anybody noticed. The map on the web had them nearly back to the principal’s
house.

MI was waiting outside. Besides the sergeant and his unit
who had tried to stop them before, there was a lieutenant and a major and two
more units. They blocked the streets on all sides and spilled over into
doorways and down alleys.

They didn’t try to stop Rama from going in. The way to the
door was clear. Equally clearly, once he went in, he wouldn’t get out again.

He laughed. It was the purest mirth Aisha had ever heard,
and it was perfectly terrifying. He sauntered down the narrow path, mocking
them with every line of him.

They weren’t used to being laughed at. Some looked ready to
leap when he went by. They closed in behind him, rank by rank, until the door
was in front of him and opening to admit him.

He turned in it. A shiver ran across Aisha’s skin, but she
felt as if she’d been brushed with fire. “Go home,” he said. “All of you, go.”

Their faces went perfectly blank. They turned in formation and
marched. Away. Every one of them. Not one even hesitated.

~~~

Once he was inside, Rama staggered. Fire brushed over
Aisha again, but different this time: stronger. It felt like Ship, and like the
sun on which Ship was feeding.

Rama steadied. It was beginning to sink in on Aisha what he’d
done to the MI units, and what kinds of trouble they could all be in because of
it.

She tried to say something, but he was already most of the
way to his room, and there were people coming and going, looking for the
principal. The moment slipped away.

She waited another moment. Then she went down the hall and
through the door before he could shut it.

“That was stupid,” she said. So was saying it, knowing what
he’d just done, but she didn’t let that stop her.

“I used to have patience for idiots,” he said. “I slept too
long. Time is short. I won’t stay here any longer than my promise keeps me.”

“That won’t stop U.P. from going after you,” she said. “The
Corps wants your blood. You’ve made sure they want your brain, too. In a vat.
Slaved to them forever.”

He dropped onto the bed that must be meant for honored
guests: it was huge, and the wood it was carved from must have cost a fortune
to bring all the way out here. “They think I’m better than a living ship now?”

“After what you just did? If they can control that, they’ve
got more power than they dared to dream of. When they find out what else you
can do—”

“What else can I do?”

“That’s what they’ll want to know.”

“I don’t care.”

“I know you don’t.” Aisha pulled off her veils and dropped
them on the floor. “I hope you learn to care about something again. Someday. In
the meantime, could you at least try not to get anyone else killed or
mind-slaved? Not that you care, but we do.”

He lifted himself on his elbow. “So now you’re done with
me.”

“Don’t you wish.” She dropped her swords on top of the
veils. She’d have dropped her robe, too, but all she had on under it was a
shift. “If time is really that short, you don’t need to waste any more of it
fighting the Corps.”

“What should I do, then? Apologize?”

He really seemed to want to know the answer. “It’s awfully
late for that,” she said. Then paused. “Did you send them
all
the way home?”

His eyelids lowered: a yes.

“Can you make sure they don’t let the Corps know what
happened until they get there? If they haven’t already?”

“It was stupid of me to do what I did, and now you want me
to do more of it?”

“That was stupid,” she said. “This is damage control. I can
hack their system, I think. Or Aunt can. If you’ll do the rest of what’s
needed.”

“That would make you a criminal,” he said.

“Not if we do it right.” She wasn’t as sure as she tried to
sound. But she had a very bad feeling about what would happen if she didn’t do
it.

He dropped back flat. At first she thought he was asleep.
Then she felt the shiver under her skin again.

Making magic. Or using psi. There wasn’t any difference.

“What does he mean, time is short?”

Khalida had heard Aisha out with a certain sense of
inevitability. From the moment she realized what the being called Rama was, she
had expected something like this. Destroying the Corps to end a war—that was
justice. Mind-bending an entire MI garrison was no more or less than royal
whim.

MI’s access codes were not especially hard to find, if one
still had one’s own codes that with the slowness of subspace communications had
not yet been voided. She simply wanted to prevent the troops here from
notifying Centrum that they were abandoning Kom Ombo. Centrum would get that
news when the ships emerged from jump.

Fifteen Earthdays. Then another fifteen at least before Kom
Ombo could expect a reprisal. Longer, probably, with the amount of chaos Rama
had already caused.

That was a given. What caught her attention now was that he
was feeling the pressure of time. After six millennia and a handful of tendays,
suddenly he was in a hurry to find whatever he had set out to find.

“Why?” she asked Aisha; not expecting the child to know.

But Aisha surprised her. “When he woke up, it was like
tripping a trigger. Something started. He has to get to the end before—whatever
else does.”

“You don’t know what that is. Does he?”

“Not as far as I can tell.”

“Lovely.” Khalida rubbed her eyes not because they were
aching but because they were not. She felt strange.

Alive.

She could leave Rama to it. Let him live or die on his own.
The Corps would gut him if it could.

She would gut the Corps if she could. If helping Rama solve
his mystery would make that happen, she was glad to do it.

For the first time since her first tour to Araceli, she had
a mission she was actually glad of.

That was what was strange. She was happy. It was dark and full
of shadows, but there was no mistaking what it was.

“Right, then,” she said. “I’ll take care of communications.
You watch him. If he tries to take off without us, don’t let him. He’s going to
need backup wherever he goes. No matter what he thinks.”

Aisha nodded. “He has enormous powers, but they’re not
unlimited. He does these impossible things, and then he crashes. He’ll never
find what he’s looking for if he tries to do it alone.”

“
You
should go
home while you can,” Khalida should have said. The words would not come. If
Rashid ever got hold of her, he would throttle her for keeping quiet.

Maybe Marina would, or maybe she would not. Aisha was young,
but she knew her own mind. Marina would understand that.

Khalida understood familial duty. She also understood the
need to do what was necessary. Rashid was a man, and traditional at that—a long
and ancient tradition of protecting the women and children. Regardless of
whether the women and children either wanted or needed protection.

None of which Aisha needed to hear. Khalida said instead, “I
don’t think he’ll go before the concert. His honor won’t let him, even if his
ego would.”

“I’ll watch him anyway,” Aisha said.

“You do that.”

~~~

Aisha went off to be a guard. Khalida had a different kind
of guarding to do, once she had worked her way into MI’s web and set the codes
that needed to be set.

Whatever Rama had done, he had done it thoroughly. MI was
pulling out of the system altogether—calling in scouts and surveillance
vessels, shutting down bases. Packing up all their kit and loading it for
transport.

“Impossible,” Khalida said through the heavily shielded uplink
to the
Ra-Harakhte
’s web. “Six
thousand trained personnel with all their support staff and infrastructure, and
another ten thousand shadow ops agents scattered across the system and out into
the Great Beyond. All following orders without a word of objection. All—”

The former Lieutenant Zhao had not been visibly pleased to
receive her ping, but he was conditioned to be amenable. He heard her out,
until she stopped in frustration.

“All chipped,” he said. “Linked to MI’s systems. Connected
on the web.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” she demanded—angrier
than she wanted to be, but unable to help herself. “You’re a psi-three. Beside
him you’re a spark in a plains fire, but you understand these things. The kind
of manipulation that can move an army—how is he still on his feet? Why hasn’t
he burned himself out?”

Zhao sighed over the link. He sounded terribly tired. “This
is nothing I have ever heard of, let alone seen, but I can tell you the
expenditure of psi was minimal. I barely felt it. It was like a tug on the hem
of my mind: enough to notice, but certainly not strong enough to bend my will
as he bent theirs.”

“You never knew the ship was in pain, either,” Khalida said.
“I don’t know why I expected you to be any different with this.”

He flicked the link from audio-only to visual. She saw the
matte darkness of one of the ship’s bulkheads, and a screen full of stars, and
almost incidentally, his worn and hollow-eyed face.

“You are not seeing the obvious,” he said. He was trying to
be severe, but it was not in him. It came across as prim. “They are all
chipped. Connected on the web. He hacked their implants, Captain. It’s no more
complicated than that.”

“Those implants are not hackable. There is no way—” Khalida
broke off. “All right. Suppose he could do that, and even manage to keep my
implants out of it, which implies a level of control that—well.” She hauled
herself back on course. “Between what he’s learned from my excessively talented
young relations, and what he’s seen of the rebels on Araceli, he might have had
examples to follow. But the sophistication of it—it’s downright elegant. It
reads as orders from Centrum. Properly formatted, solidly supported, and
absolutely incontrovertible. Centrum says withdraw. Therefore they withdraw.”

“‘Theirs not to reason why,’” Zhao said.

She snarled at him, but absently. She had been thinking mind
control in the raw sense of psi acting on the human consciousness. This was
much more. The Bronze Age warlord had not only taken to cyber technology, he
had treated it like a subset of psionics.

That, she could not say to this agent of the Corps. “I’m
surprised your people haven’t tried it.”

“It’s banned,” Zhao said, and he seemed honestly horrified.

“That would stop them?”

He blinked. She was pushing, she knew it, but no Corps agent
deserved better. “You must have had the same lessons in manipulation that I
did. The most effective intelligence agent thinks faster, thinks deeper, and
thinks around corners. She steps beyond the tidy box of
everyone knows
. She stands outside and looks in, and sees what
those inside lack the perspective to see.”

More than that, she thought as Zhao frowned, pondering what
she had said. The being called Rama was an alien in a universe and a time that
meant nothing, that was all new, without ingrained understanding or underlying
assumptions. He took the nulls, the Corps, and the web, and turned all their
variations on power into a weapon that could empty a system of its military
presence.

“Genius,” Zhao said slowly.

For a moment Khalida was sure he had read her mind, but then
she remembered to breathe again. If he had, he would never have been so close
to calm.

“Really,” said Zhao. “It’s brilliant. He’s run a master con
on an entire system’s worth of armed forces, cleared the system for long enough
to do what he has in mind, and then he’ll go. By the time United Planets can
begin to act, he’ll be long gone.”