Undercity (15 page)
Authors: Catherine Asaro
Tags: #Fiction, #science fiction, #General, #Action & Adventure, #Space Opera
None of them had anything to say to that.
“You all punk for Kajada?” I asked.
“Maybe,” the leader said.
“Jadix Kajada?” I asked. She had ruled the cartel with an iron hand during my day.
The leader spat to the side, her response a commentary on my question rather than the drug queen. “Jadix is dead. Long time.”
“What Kajada then?” I asked. “Dig?” She had been Jadix’s daughter, but she had run with our gang rather than with the punkers.
“Maybe.” The leader frowned, obviously trying to figure out how I fit into her universe. And she did know Dig. I could read her tells. Not only hers; the other girls also knew who I meant. Damn. I had hoped Dig would find a better life than running a drug cartel. I doubted she knew what her punkers had just tried to pull. The code that bound Dig and I together was stronger than cartel ties, as strong as blood kin.
“You tell Dig,” I said. “Tell her that Bhaaj said to cut the shit.” I motioned with my gun. “Now go on. Get out of here.”
They took off, sprinting back the way they had come. Within moments, they dodged into a crevice in the wall, knocking broken stone from its edges. Then I was alone again on the midwalk.
Combat mode off,
I thought.
Toggled
, Max said.
I set off again, thinking. So Dig had ended up in the family business after all. It hadn’t been a given when we were young, and I had hoped she would find a different life. She had never much liked her mother, a drug queen who hadn’t even shown up at the orphanage after the police caught Dig in one of their roundups. Instead of telling the authorities she was Dig’s mother, Jadix had sent one of her punkers to smuggle supplies to her daughter. Why? So Dig would organize an escape at the mature age of five-freaking-years-old. Dig succeeded and took me with her, but she never forgave Jadix. It was why she had run with our dust gang instead of the punkers.
“Damn fool kids,” I muttered. I wasn’t sure if I meant us or drug punkers from today.
They aren’t “kids,”
Max thought.
They are hardened criminals. That one with the rifle would have killed you for the gear you’re carrying.
It’s all wrong, Max,
I thought.
In another life their only worries would be what university they’re going to attend.
I doubt they have any interest in attending a university.
That’s not the point.
Bhaaj
, Max thought abruptly.
You have another stalker.
I tilted my head, listening. Someone was breathing nearby. I concentrated, turning in a circle. Yes, it was there, inside another rockslide that blocked the path, where the rubble piled against the wall. A dark cavity showed near the ground, half-hidden. It didn’t look big enough to hide a person, but when I pointed my stylus at it, the light drew a gleam from within. Crouching down, I peered into the hole. A small child stared at me with a frightened gaze.
I used a much gentler voice than when I spoke to the punkers. “Come out?”
He continued to stare at me.
“I won’t hurt you,” I said.
No answer.
Shrugging out of my pack, I sat down and took out my half-finished bottle of water. Setting it on the ground in front of the hole, I said, “Done with this. No room to carry it anymore.”
A scrambling came from inside the hole, and a small boy crawled out, a fellow of about five. He sat on his haunches and picked up the bottle, peering at it with a furrowed brow. Then he looked at me. “Water?”
“Yah,” I said. “Fresh water. You take.”
He put the closed top of the bottle into his mouth and bit down hard. When the top cracked off, he spit it onto the path. Then he gulped down the liquid with barely a pause. After he finished, he put the bottle in the exact same place where I had set it down. He crouched there, all dirt smudges and ragged clothes, and waited.
I tapped my chest. “Bhaaj.” We never freely gave out our names, but if he knew mine, he might give me his, especially at his young age.
He patted his chest. “Pack rat.”
I titled my head at the rock fall that blocked the path. “Play in rocks?”
“Got no play.” His dark eyes looked too big for his gaunt face.
“Who do you run with?”
“Got no run.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant. That he had no circle? Although he looked thin, he was alive, which at his age implied someone was taking care of him.
“Got gang?” I asked.
“Nahya.”
“Got who?”
“None.” He mouth worked as if he were struggling not to cry.
Damn. “What happened?”
“New yell make old yell go away.”
“Who yell?”
“Old yell, gone. New yell make old yell go away.”
It sounded like a turf fight. Someone must have run off his guardian, who for some reason had left this boy behind.
“Come with?” His chin quivered.
He looked so scared. “Yah,” I said. “I go with.” As I stood up, he scrambled to his feet. Gods, he didn’t even come up to my waist.
I pointed to the snap-bottle and its broken top. “Take.” We kept our spaces clean. No one else would take away the litter if we didn’t ourselves, and contrary to what the above-city believed, the undercity was neither dirty nor a slum.
He gathered the litter. After a hesitation, he offered it to me.
I nodded as if he were grown up, adult to adult. Then I stuffed the junk into my backpack and shrugged back into the straps, settling the pack on my back.
We set off, headed deeper into the aqueducts.
* * *
I heard the crying before we reached Pack Rat’s home. We were two more levels down from where I had fought the punkers, walking along a narrow tunnel. The darkness was complete, pitch black except for the light from my stylus. The crying drifted through the tunnel, reedy and forlorn.
I looked at the boy at my side. “Who cries?”
He looked up at me with his frightened gaze. “New yell.”
An unwelcome chill ran up my spine. I had thought I was walking into the middle of a turf war, but this sounded even worse. I suddenly wanted to leave,
needed
to leave. But I forced myself to keep going.
“Here.” Pack Rat came to a halt.
I stopped, peering into the dark. The rough tunnel looked no different here than anywhere else. The crying was a little louder, but still faint with distance. Wait—yes, to the left, an opening showed in the wall, a crevice about two-thirds my height. The boy slipped through it. I squeezed after him, crouching down, and my pack caught on the upper edge. Pulling it free, I pushed through to the other side. The crying was louder now, not distant, I realized, but close by and weak.
As I straightened up, my head scraped the ceiling. I scanned my light across the small cave, and it played over wall hangings and carpets, all gracefully woven in grey, blue, black, and white threads. Someone had created them with loving attention. A filtration machine caught water dripping from in a niche in the wall and let filtered liquid trickle out of spouts on its other side. One stream ran into a planter filled with pizo stalks growing in modified dust. Piles of wrapped food were neatly stacked against a one wall. My light played over several balls on the floor, a stick doll, two music reeds, candles and a flint, blankets bunched up near the back—
Ah, gods, no.
The blankets half covered a young woman. I couldn’t move. I stood there, my heart slamming in my chest, and for one moment I could think only of whirling around and running from this place, running and running until I couldn’t think any longer.
I drew in a rasping breath. Then I went over and knelt by the woman. She looked as if she were sleeping, her gaunt face at peace. Her skirt covered her knees and legs. Blood soaked it and had dried into dark splotches. She had probably been dead less than a day.
A baby lay cradled in her arms, crying weakly.
Someone was whispering in a ravaged voice, the same words over and over,
Gods, oh gods, oh gods.
My voice, my whispers. I picked up the dying baby and she whimpered. My arms were shaking so hard, the child quieted as if I were rocking her. I wanted to scream, but I could only kneel there, my voice frozen in my throat.
Pack Rat came to my side and put his hand on the baby. “New yell.” He looked at the woman and tears ran down his face. “Old yell. Much yell. Then no more.”
Yelling. Birth. No child should go through what this boy must have witnessed, his mother’s death while she brought his sister into the world. How could this have happened? Where the bloody hell were this woman’s people, her circle? How could she have been alone here, dying in the dark?
Somehow I moved. I had no idea what I was doing. I slid down against the back wall holding the woman and her baby in my arms, and the boy against my side. Tears rolled down my face, tearing out of me, tearing me apart, Major Bhaajan, the ganger who never wept. I sat there rocking the mother and her children, crying for them—and for another baby who had been born in these tunnels decades ago, deep down in the dark.
I wept for my own mother, who had died in this same way, giving me birth.
XIV
Dig
Streamer-leaves hung from trees in the park and rustled as breezes stirred them under a sky rich with stars. I sat in a gazebo designed from an iridescent white lattice. Although the night had passed well into the first sleep period, the park sparkled with lights. Somewhere in the distance, a man laughed and a woman spoke in a lighthearted voice.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t even hate all these beautiful people living in their perfect city, unknowing that a woman had died in the Down-deep below Cries. I wanted to rage at them all, to rage at a universe that could let mothers die in the dark, but I had gone numb.
“Bhaaj.” The deep voice spoke from shadows beyond the gazebo.
I didn’t move.
A man stepped into the gazebo and walked over. He sat next to me, but I kept staring ahead.
“We found a family to take care of the baby and the boy,” Jak said. “A bartender in the Black Mark and her husband.” He used above-city speech, and somehow it helped, creating distance from what had happened, like a veil over my memories.
I glanced at him. “Is the baby still alive?”
“Yes, they say she’ll make it.”
I couldn’t speak. I opened my mouth, but no words came out, so I shut it again.
“Bhaaj.” He was watching me with his too-perceptive gaze. “You did a good thing.”
“I didn’t do shit.” My voice cracked. “Who left her alone down there?”
“She was a cyber-rider.”
“So what?” I was starting to feel, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop it. I wanted to rip something apart, anything, or to hit a wall over and over until I couldn’t feel any more pain. “I don’t care how much riders like to work alone, they still have support circles. They wouldn’t let one of their own give birth alone. Where is the father?”
He lifted his hands, then let them drop. “No one knows him. No one knows her. She stayed away from everyone, even created her on mesh networks so she didn’t have to interact with people.”
“Everyone is supposed to have a circle. People should have checked on her.”
“Yah,” he said softly. “The system broke down.”
“The system is fucked.”
“Bhaaj—”
“Stop.” I was shaking with an anger so big, I had nowhere to put it. “I can’t. Not now.”
He didn’t push. We fell silent, gazing at the park. Across several lawns, a pavilion stood with glowing lanterns strung along its roof. Why I had come here, I didn’t know. Down below, I had sent my green beetle to find Jak, and by the time he arrived at the cave with the dead mother and her orphaned children, I had stopped crying. But those tears left a hole inside me. Or maybe they forced me to see the emptiness that already existed. How long had my mother lain dead in a cave after my birth? Had my father left me at the orphanage, a squalling baby protesting the indignity of life? That wasn’t the way of the undercity, to seek help from above. I had tried to find him, but no one knew anything. Whoever he had been, wherever he came from, I would never know.
“Enough,” I said.
Jak glanced at me. “Of what?”
Unbidden and unwanted, words tore out from deep within me, jagged like shards of broken glass. “The criminals aren’t the dust rats or the riders or the punkers. It’s everyone up here living their magical lives, oblivious to the children dying in the dark.”
It was a long time before Jak answered. Finally he said, “Maybe.”
“Maybe?” I wanted to shake him. “How can you say ‘maybe’?”
“We let the system break,” he said. “Us. The undercity. We don’t need the above-city to fix us. It’s our world to make better, not theirs.”
“Asking for help isn’t a crime.”
“They ‘help’ by stealing our children. What do you think they would do if we kidnapped theirs?” Anger edged his voice. “Our children always come back. You did. You came home.”
I didn’t want to hear him. “It’s home because we don’t goddamned know any better.”
“Maybe.”
“Stop it.”
“Why, because you think you know better?” He spoke in perfect above-city speech, contrary to the prejudice in Cries that our language was the result of stupidity and poor education rather than the evolution of an ancient dialect. “The aqueducts won’t stop being home because you say they should. Why do you want the above-city? People here, in those rare times they deign to notice us, claim they
know
us. They don’t know shit. They discount our lives, our histories, what we feel, they even tell us, when we recount our experiences, that those experiences aren’t valid. No matter what they say, that won’t stop the undercity from being our home.”
“And it’s such a great home.” I rounded on him, shaking with that terrifying anger I had always channeled into anything else so I wouldn’t feel it crushing me. “Dying in secret. For what? The only way I could ask for your help tonight was to send out a spy beetle, which found a dust ganger who helps Gourd, who found Gourd, who had to search you out because you’re so damn secretive, lately even I can’t find you. What the bloody hell are we all hiding from?”
“It’s not hiding,” Jak said. “It’s a way of life.” His voice was unrelenting. “Yours, too. You can leave the physical aqueducts, Bhaaj, but you can never take them out of your heart.”
“I never wanted to come back.”
He looked away, his expression shuttered.
I exhaled. I had left him, too, that day I walked out of the aqueducts. We were talking in above-city speech because it was too difficult to say these things in the undercity dialect. But for this moment, I needed the language of our youth. In its lack of words, it would speak volumes.
“Got one reason to come back,” I told him. “One damn good reason.”
He looked at me, the hint of a smile curving his lips. “Yah, Bhaajo.”
That nickname brought a flood of memories. He had called me Bhaajo the first time we made love, the two of us twelve years old. I had loved Jak, and denied that love, for my entire life.
We sat together, staring across the park at the glowing lanterns that bobbed in the breezes.
After a while, Jak said, “You find anything about Scorch in the Alcove?”
I shook my head. “Just some artifact. Plumbing.”
“Yah.” He didn’t sound surprised.
“Seen the pipes?” I asked.
“Heard about. Never cared to look.” He shrugged. “Ruins are all over Cries. Dying cities, dying world.”
And dying mothers. I felt so tired. “Got to go home,” I said in a low voice. The penthouse wasn’t truly home, and it never would be, but I couldn’t go back to the aqueducts. I needed this night to push away the shadows, and I knew only one way to defeat them. I spoke softly. “Come with?”
Jak smiled then, that terrifying smile, the one he never showed anyone else. It wasn’t cocky or smug or any other part of the Black Mark’s owner. This smile was gentle.
“Yah,” he murmured. “I come with.”
* * *
The dawn lined the horizon for what seemed like forever. It had been there when Jak left this morning, after our many warm hours together, and it was still here an hour later. Raylicon turned too slowly for the sun to rise in any sensible manner.
I sat sprawled on the couch with a virtual terminal floating above the table in front of me. “EI,” I said.
The penthouse EI answered. “Yes?”
“I have a name for you.”
“What is it?”
“Interface.”
“Is that a command or the name?”
“The name.” It still didn’t feel right, but it was the best I had come up with.
“Why do you want to call me Interface?” it asked.
“It’s what you are,” I said. “My interface with the above-city world. With Cries.”
“I don’t think it fits.”
I blinked. “What did you say?”
“I don’t believe it is an appropriate name.”
For flaming sake. The EI was arguing with me. “Why not?”
“It refers to a single technical aspect of my functions.”
I supposed it had a point. “All right. I’ll think some more.”
“What can I do for you this morning?”
Good question. “Yesterday Max sent you a recording of an artifact in the ruins.”
“Yes, I have it. I did a preliminary analysis on the symbols etched onto its surface.”
Although I had thought of asking it for an analysis, I hadn’t yet. This EI wasn’t designed for that sort of investigation. “Why did you do that?”
“In case you weren’t logical enough to ask me to do it.”
Maybe I should name it
Annoying.
“What did you find?”
“The hieroglyphics are ancient Iotic, the labels for a plumbing system.”
“Well, that’s exciting.”
“My voice analysis suggests you are speaking with irony.”
I smiled. “You think?”
“Not literally. I simulate thought.”
I sighed. I didn’t believe General Vaj Majda had programmed this EI. She had far more subtlety. “Tell me something. Who designed you? I don’t mean who specified the parameters, but who actually set up your programming?”
“Captain Takkar and her techs.”
That
made sense. However, it also made me wonder. The EI could be irksome, sure, but it wasn’t unreasonable. It tried to help. If Takkar had wanted to bedevil me, she could have done a lot worse. My view of the chief shifted like an optical illusion where stairs going in one direction suddenly appeared as if they were going the other way. Maybe Dayj was right that Takkar had no link to Scorch’s operation. I wasn’t ready to give her a pass yet, but it made me think.
“What I don’t get,” I said, “is why anyone thought I’d find something useful in the Alcove.”
“Perhaps the evidence was removed before you went there.”
My gut said no, and so did Max’s analysis of the dirt in the Alcove. “No one has disturbed that cave since before we rescued Dayj.”
“Then I don’t know the answer to your query,” the EI said.
I sat watching the horizon, a red line below the dark sky. “This is what I know. Scorch was funneling weapons through the undercity for some arms dealer whose main operation is offworld. Now Scorch is dead.” A strange feeling came over me. Remorse? It couldn’t be. She had tried to kill me, she’d tortured and assaulted Dayj, and someday she might have sold him. The Traders would pay an unimaginable price for a Skolian prince, a man whose looks would make him a top pleasure slave and whose Kyle abilities would let them steal access to the Kyle net.
Even so. Something was off. “It doesn’t add up,” I said. “Scorch’s operation was one cog in a much larger ring with no other links in the undercity. My job here is almost done. I just need to find the missing weapons. And that drug punker had a nice, new carbine. So the Kajada cartel probably stole the weapons. That explains why they didn’t act against me or Jak. Dig would never shoot us.”
“It sounds like it adds up quite well,” the EI said.
“I feel like I’m missing something.”
“You still have to recover the weapons.”
“Yah.” But that wasn’t what bothered me. “Gourd said something was in the Alcove.”
“Gourds do not speak.”
I sighed. “It’s a name. A man.”
“Ah. What did he say was there?”
“He didn’t know.” I sat pondering. “What’s unique about the Alcove? Really old plumbing, but who would care except a scientist?” An unwelcome thought formed in my mind. “EI, bring up the images of that plumbing system.”
Holos of the artifact appeared, floating above my table. They rotated slowly, showing me the silvery curve from various angles.
“You know,” I said, “that pipe is intact.”
“What we can see,” the EI said. “Most of it is hidden in the rock ceiling.”
“If the rest of it is like what we see, it probably still works.”
“Works?”
“As plumbing. It could bring water to the Alcove.”
“Possibly. The artifact appears sound. It’s designed from a material known for its durability.”
Indeed. “So Scorch could have imprisoned someone in the Alcove and used the pipes to provide water.” Tightly I added, “Or to withhold it.” That offered a way to control her prisoner.
“Do you think she kept Prince Dayjarind there?”
“No, actually not.” It still wasn’t adding up. “He was in a cave two levels above the Alcove.”
“Then who?”
“I have no clue.” Maybe I was just talking into the wind. Or the sunrise. Out across the dead ocean, the sun was finally lifting its golden orb above the horizon.
“I’ve been wondering something,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me that Dayj and his father were full empaths, and that most of the Majdas were psions to some degree or another?”
“It isn’t data they wish made known.”
“You shouldn’t withhold facts. You never know what might turn out to be useful.”
“I will file your response with the Majdas.”
So it did report back to them. No surprise there. I picked up a tumbler of kava I had poured for Jak and took a swallow. It went through me like a jolt of fire. Ah yes, that was good.
“Tell me about this empath thing,” I said. “Do the Majda’s breed it into their line?”
“Most native Raylicans carry traces of Kyle DNA. Probably including you.”
“Yeah, right.” I was as empathic as a rock. “The army tested me. I don’t manifest any traits.”
“You descend from the original Raylicans. They were all psions.”
“Hardly anyone here is now.” The occurrence wasn’t any higher in the general Raylicon population than anywhere else. “What happened to them all?”
“Genetic drift. Natural selection. Many negative mutations are associated with the Kyle traits.” Then it added, “However, two populations here have bred for them over the millennia.”
“The Majdas.”
“That is correct. Also, the Abaj Tacalique.”
“Huh.” I had heard the Abaj were psions. That was why they kept to themselves, living out in the desert. I supposed it also made sense about the Majdas. It wasn’t only them, but all the noble Houses and the Ruby Dynasty as well. Royalty and the aristocracy could be compulsive about who they married, with reasons that rarely seemed connected to love.
* * *
I sent my beetle-bots to scour the Alcove, and I searched the cave where Scorch had stored her cache of stolen guns. I even lay on my stomach at the back and mapped out the warren of cracks, crevices, and rocks there, hoping to find any stray debris left behind. No luck. I couldn’t unearth a single clue about who had lifted the weapons or where they took the crates.