Forgotten Suns (45 page)

The hall was full. So was the feed to the rest of the
system. Marta was that famous out here, and people were that curious about her
new production.

Aisha stood backstage, pressed up against a strut while
chaos whirled around her. She’d much rather have been high up in the balconies,
like being in a starship on the edge of a system, where she could see
everything and everybody, and look down on the stage. But unless she learned to
fly and not just float above her bed at night, that was much too far away from
Rama.

She could feel the pressure of watchers on the web feed,
with more coming in the closer they got to showtime. Ship was there, too, more
awake than it had been in a while. Watching. Curious. Interested. A little
wary.

There was no telling what would happen once the performance
began. Aisha was ready for anything, or nothing. They would all be leaving as
soon as it was over—they were packed and ready, and their shuttle was booked.

Rama had done that, abruptly, this morning. He wasn’t
twitching the way Aisha was, but he was done here. If it hadn’t been for his
promise, he’d already be gone.

Aisha stayed as close to him as she could, dressed in the
most practical clothes Alexandra had sent her—close enough to riding clothes that
she found herself missing her horse.

She wished she’d kept her swords, too. But she had the web
and her brains, and her eyes keeping track of the hall as it filled.

The musicians trooped down into their bay. The hum and buzz
of people moving and settling started to slow down.

The lights dimmed. Silence fell. Aisha realized she was
holding her breath. She let it go.

She’d seen all the pieces of the performance before, but not
together. Not with the sets in place and the lighting all working and the music
doing what it was supposed to.

She had to work to keep from getting caught up in it. To
stay alert, and keep watching.

The beginning was all Marta and the musicians’ guild. Her
songs, their music. Those were wonderful, but no one was here just for them. They
were waiting for the new piece and the new singer.

Word was out. People had heard about the traveler with the
living ship.

MI was mostly out of the system, but not quite. There was no
telling which agents were still there undercover, or which agency they reported
to.

It might not just be U.P., either. Ship was something
different—something valuable. So was Rama, if anyone knew or guessed.

Everything was quiet on the web. The music wound on. Marta
wasn’t making the magic she could make. She was just a beautiful voice, singing
beautiful songs.

She’d deliberately ramped the performance down. Or maybe she
was saving it for the second half.

In the intermission, the shuffle and shift of people had an
unusual quality to it. They were holding their breath. Nobody went too far or
stayed away too long, even on the web.

~~~

When the lights went out, the hall was absolutely silent.
No one so much as breathed.

Aisha had thought they might dress Rama in something
spectacular, but he came out in the same plain black robe he’d worn in
rehearsals.

It was all he needed. His voice seemed so soft, but it
filled every corner of the hall, and soared out onto the web, and echoed in the
system.

He could have been his own statue, or a broken shard of a
pedestal, or a featureless cylinder like Ship, and it wouldn’t have mattered,
once that sound began to pour out of him.

He was singing to the stars. Marta’s music was only the
beginning. When he shifted to Old Language, that was another music altogether.
His music. Music from a world only he remembered.

It was a call. A challenge. I am here. Where have you gone?
Show your faces. Lead me onward.

He put all his power into it. He drew from the sun, and from
every starship’s drive and engine in Kom Ombo, and from Ship, which gave even
while it fed.

No one moved, anywhere. The hall and the web were absolutely
silent. Absolutely rapt.

It was a wild, crazy, lethal gamble. If his people had had
to destroy every shred of evidence about themselves and their history, filling
truespace and subspace with their music, in their language, with his of all
voices, was completely insane.

That was why he did it. He always did the wild thing, the
crazy thing.

When it was the right thing, as far as he could know. It
might be completely and hopelessly wrong, but he had to trust that it wasn’t.

He sang till his heart must be like to burst, till his bones
turned to stellar dust and his veins were laced with fire.

Finally Aisha saw him clear, without his masks and his grief
and his eons-old exhaustion. He was terrifying, but she wasn’t afraid.

~~~

The attack came straight down through the roof and in
through every entrance.

They’d put everything they had into it. The web crashed,
taking the lights and most of the life support. System traffic ground to a
halt.

The people in the hall didn’t panic. Aisha noticed that
particularly. In the pale blue of the emergency lights, they stayed put. A
rumble rolled through the crowd, like a mass growl, but no one attacked the
attackers.

There must have been fifty of them in riot gear with
night-vision helmets, running down the aisles and rappelling off the roof. They
aimed for the stage.

Rama stood as still as the audience. Pale gold light
shimmered over him. His head was lifted, his eyes following the attackers as
they converged on him. He smiled.

He was the only light in that place. He seemed to glow
brighter, the longer the dark lasted.

Boots thudded on the stage. A bolt flashed off into the
rafters. Rama’s voice said in Aisha’s ear, “Stay close. Be quiet.”

She nearly jumped out of her skin. He held her down with his
hand on her shoulder. As far as she could see or feel, they were alone
backstage. The musicians and Marta and all the techs and stagehands had
disappeared.

He
was
there. But
she could see—

—through the one on stage. When she really, deeply looked.
The one next to her was solid, warm and breathing.

More and more invaders crowded the stage. Rama’s fetch stood
in a circle of empty space. It flashed a grin, and laughed, and said, “Catch me
if you can!”

It flew straight up, just as the roof directly above came
down and the floor of the stage curved to meet it. The snap of beam fire
flickered like lightning, most of it inside, a few out: blasting the smooth
curved surface that had been a stage and a dome.

The rumble in the floor swelled to a deep, angry roar.
Shadowy figures surged up and over the handful of invaders who’d eluded the
trap.

Rama tugged at Aisha’s shoulder. In the open space that had
been the roof, a shuttle hovered. A line snaked out of it, glimmering in the
dark. Rama caught it in one hand and Aisha on the other arm and swung up into
the air.

Aisha laughed. It was the worst possible place and time to
do that, but she was flying through the air on the arm of a pirate. Jamal would
be horrendously jealous.

They arced out over the place where the stage had been. It
sank away below the floor of the hall. While she stared, astonished, the floor
closed over it with a bone-shaking boom.

The audience erupted in applause and cheers. Faint
underneath it, Aisha heard Jonathan calling from the shuttle: “Here, up!”

Rama surged as if he’d spread wings. Aisha’s skin prickled
all over, almost sharp enough for pain. They flew up the last few meters, and
landed lightly inside the shuttle.

Jonathan turned in the pilot’s cradle and smiled his
sweet, serene smile. In a fist-sized cradle above his head, an image of
Alexandra floated in a silver bubble. “My dears!” she sang. “Oh, my dears!
Wasn’t that glorious?”

Aisha had no words. She tripped and fell into the cradle
nearest the hatch, while Rama claimed the one beside Jonathan.

The hatch irised shut. The shuttle flew straight up and out
through the hollow center of Central.

Aisha took time to just breathe. Finally she had enough
breath to ask, “Marta?”

“Safe.” Rama sounded like himself—or the self he’d been
since Araceli. Calm. Somewhat remote. “She’s making her own way to the ship.”

Aisha sucked in another handful of breaths. “What just
happened down there? What—”

“We closed a trap,” Rama said. “Before you ask, all the
civilians got out. MI is truly done in this system—with all its allies,
including some who hadn’t been open about it before. It won’t be following us
when we go.”

“I don’t believe you.”

The stare he aimed at her was a little more sincerely there
than she’d seen in a while.

She aimed her own straight back, and the thrust of words
with it. “Everything you do makes sure they’ll keep coming after you. You can’t
stop them. They won’t ever let go. Now you’ve got this system on their kill
list, too. And they will kill it. They won’t have a choice.”

“We have our own kill list,” Alexandra said. Her voice was
as musical as ever, but it had stopped with the soaring sweetness. “We’re
fighting our own war. If this hadn’t happened, something else would have. We’ve
been waiting. Planning. Hoping. This is a gift, and we are glad to take it. And
oh, what a beautiful show we gave our people!”

“Legendary,” Jonathan agreed.

The universe was bigger than Aisha could ever understand.
She knew that. People were more complicated, too. Which she had to keep
reminding herself.

“Still,” she said. “This is bad.”

“So is United Planets,” Alexandra said.

She hated them. Really, deeply hated them. That was another
revelation. Aisha slumped back into her cradle and tried to wrap her mind
around all of it.

It wasn’t easy. Her head hurt, again. Bad enough that she
had to swallow hard to keep from throwing up.

While she fought to keep her stomach where it belonged,
Jonathan said to Rama, “You’re cleared for immediate departure. Any personnel
left behind, we’ll keep safe for you.”

“As safe as we can,” Alexandra said.

The shuttle lurched. Aisha started out of her own head.

They were flying through the middle of the sphere, aiming
straight toward Ship’s bay. Another flier had buzzed them—accidentally, maybe.

It veered off. The shuttle kept going. Jonathan’s face had
gone still, but his hands were steady on the controls.

He was flying on manual—crazy in this tight and crowded space,
but what did Aisha know? She wasn’t a pilot.

All she knew was that they were on their way out of Kom
Ombo. System’s web wasn’t saying anything about the concert hall that had
turned into a trap, and maybe a tomb. Everything was quiet.

She had to stop seeing awfulness ahead for this system. She
wasn’t precog. She was just scared, and completely out of her depth.

“My dear,” Alexandra said. She spoke through the top layer
of the web, on a tight connection: as private as those things got. “We won’t
let harm come to you here. Or to ourselves, either. U.P. has enough troubles of
its own to keep it busy for years. It’s not going to come after us at any time
soon.”

“I hope you’re right,” Aisha said.

“I am always right,” said Alexandra. She was laughing, but
not at Aisha. “You will go out there and see things no one of your world has
ever seen. I’m jealous.”

“We’ll report back,” Aisha said, “if we can.”

“I know.” Alexandra’s web presence was warm, like a smile. “Swim
well. Swim far. May the great-toothed ones glide past and the sweet-tasting
ones dart into your jaws.”

That was strange and rather bloodthirsty. Alien. But weirdly
comforting. “Stay with God,” Aisha managed to answer. “Stay safe.”

“Always,” said Alexandra.

~~~

Ship was ready. Its stomach tanks were full; sparks of
spare energy ran up and down its sides.

Those also happened to function very well as shields. They
parted just enough to clear a hatch and let the shuttle in, then quickly out
again.

Rama didn’t wait for goodbyes. He was gone almost before
there was a space for him to get out of the shuttle, aiming for the bridge.

Aisha needed to go, but wanted to say something. She couldn’t
think what.

“Go,” Jonathan said. “Quickly.”

She was barely out of the shuttle before it backed through
the already closing hatch and out into Central.

Khalida had been prepared for a rapid departure, and she
knew the ship was capable of entering jump from anywhere it pleased, but she
was still taken aback by the speed of the exit from Kom Ombo.

There was no pursuit that she could detect. The system was
quiet. She could almost swear that there was a sense of satisfaction about the
ship, as if it had completed a successful hunt and fed well on the quarry.

The
Ra-Harakhte
had set a course toward Starsend. The distance was as far as most ships could
manage in a single jump, but this was not an ordinary ship. It was fully
fueled, strong and, in its alien way, eager.

Just as they entered jump, she happened to be in her cradle,
downloading what amounted to a passenger manifest. The data blurred and
stretched and disintegrated into random bits and bytes.

In the midst of jump they fell into the configurations of a
star map. She had almost recognized it when the distortions of jump settled
into the dead-air calm of jumpspace.

The map faded like the memory of a dream. She counted names
on the manifest, and hissed half in temper and half in appreciation. Nearly all
of the science team had happened to be in Central when the ship left. Only Dr.
Ma was still on board, along with Robrecht and Kirkov and one or two of the lab
techs.

Most of the crew had managed to come back in time. The ship
had its full complement of immediately useful personnel.