Undercity

  Undercity

  Catherine Asaro

  Major Bhaajan, a former military officer with Imperial Space Command, is now a hard-bitten P.I. with a load of baggage to deal with, and clients with woes sometimes personal, sometimes galaxy-shattering, and sometimes both. Bhaajan must sift through the shadows of dark and dangerous Undercity—the enormous capital of a vast star empire—to find answers.

  BAEN BOOKS by CATHERINE ASARO

  Sunrise Alley

  Alpha

  THE SAGA OF THE SKOLIAN EMPIRE

  The Ruby Dice

  Diamond Star

  Carnelians

  SKOLIAN EMPIRE: MAJOR BHAAJAN

  Undercity

  UNDERCITY

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright ©2014 by Catherine Asaro

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4767-3692-1

  Cover art by Alan Pollack

  First Baen printing, December 2014

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Asaro, Catherine.

  Undercity / Catherine Asaro.

  pages ; cm. — (Skolian Empire: Major Bhaajan ; book 1) (Saga of the Skolian Empire)

  ISBN 978-1-4767-3692-1 (softcover)

  1. Skolian Empire (Imaginary place)—Fiction. 2. Women private investigators—Fiction. 3. Life on other planets—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3551.S29U53 2014

  813’.54—dc23

  2014034534

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-334-8

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  This book is dedicated to Quantum and Angel

  Who allow me to adore their esteemed Catness

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I gratefully acknowledge the following people for their invaluable input:

  the Aly Parsons writing group: Aly Parsons, Bob Chase, Charles Gannon, Carolyn Ives Gilman, John Hemry, J. G. Huckenpöler, Simcha Kuritzky, Mike LaViolette, Bud Sparhawk, Connie Warner, and Al Warner;

  Lina Perez and Kate Dolan;

  all the Baen team, including my publisher Toni Weisskopf, my editor Tony Daniel, also Danielle Turner, Joy Freeman, Hank Davis, Marla Anspan, and all the other great people who did such a fine job making this book possible;

  the folks at Spectrum Literary Agency, including my agent Eleanor Wood, Kris Bell, and Justin Bell;

  and my publicist Binnie Syril Braunstein.

  A special thanks to my husband, John Cannizzo and my daughter Cathy, for their love and support.

  BOOK I

  The City of Cries

  I

  The Offer

  The flycar picked me up at midnight.

  Black and rounded for stealth, the vehicle had no markings. I recognized the model, a Sleeker, the type of transportation only the wealthiest could afford—or the most criminal. If my client hadn’t told me to expect the car, I wouldn’t have gone near that lethal beauty. I just wished I knew who the hell had hired me.

  The Sleeker waited on the roof of the building where I lived. As I approached, an oval of light shimmered in its hull. A molecular airlock. Why? A vehicle needed that much protection only if it intended to go high into the atmosphere. We could be headed anywhere on the planet.

  I had no wish to leave town. I had a good setup here in Selei City on the world Parthonia, the capital of an empire, jewel of the Skolian Imperialate. Droop-willows lined graceful boulevards and shaded mansions under a pale blue sky. It was far different from the city where I had spent my girlhood, a place of red deserts and parched seas.

  The luminous oval on the flycar faded into an open hatchway. A man stood there, tall and rangy, wearing a black jumpsuit that resembled a uniform, but with no insignia to indicate who or what he served. He looked efficient. Too efficient. It made me appreciate the bulk of the EM pulse gun hidden in a shoulder holster under my black leather jacket.

  Normally I wasn’t one to attribute details of clothing to the way people looked at you, but this stranger definitely watched me with a hooded gaze. I couldn’t read anything from his expression. As I reached the vehicle, he moved aside to let me step into its cabin. I didn’t like it. If I boarded, gods only knew where I would end up. However, this request for my services had come with a voucher worth more than the total income for every job I’d done this last year. I’d already verified the credit. And that was purportedly only the first payment. Of course I’d accepted the job.

  However, certain types of clients didn’t like questions. If I asked too many, this pilot would leave. Without me. Credits gone. No job. I could walk away from this, but I needed the money. I didn’t even have enough to pay the next installment on my office loan.

  And I had to admit it: I was curious.

  I boarded the Sleeker.

  * * *

  Selei City spread out below the tower. The landing pad on my building was high enough that individual skyscrapers and magrails of the metropolis weren’t visible, just a wash of sparkling lights. I reclined in a seat with smart upholstery that adjusted to ease my tensed muscles with a finesse that only the most expensive furniture could manage.

  It didn’t help.

  I was the only passenger. The cabin had ten seats, five on my side separated by a few steps from five on the other side. The white carpet glinted as if it were dusted with holographic diamonds. Who knew, maybe they were real gems.

  Flycars usually had a pilot and copilot’s seat in the main cabin. This one had a cockpit. The membrane separating it from the cabin irised open for the pilot and he left it that way. Everything looked normal when he slid into his seat—until a silver exoskeleton snapped around his body. If that mesh worked like the ones I knew, it was jacking prongs into his body, linking the flycar to his internal biomech web, which would include a spinal node with as much processing capability as a starship. Few people carried such webs inside their bodies, only military officers, the exorbitantly wealthy—and those who worked for the most notorious criminal lords.

  “Hey,” I said.

  The pilot looked back at me. “Yes?”

  “I was wondering what to call you.”

  “Ro.”

  I waited. “Just Ro?”

  He regarded me with his unreadable dark eyes. “Just Ro.” His face remained impassive. “You had better web in, ma’am.”

  Ma’am. A polite crook? Interesting. I asked, “Where’re we headed?”

  No answer. I hadn’t expected one. Nothing in the message delivered to my office this afternoon had hinted at my destination. The recording had been verbal only, with no signature, just that huge sum of credit that transferred to my account as soon as I accepted the job.

  I pulled the safety mesh around my body. I was a slender woman, more muscle than softness, and the webbing had to tighten from whoever had used it before me.

  “Ready?” the pilot asked. He was intent on his controls, and it took me a moment to realize he had spoken to me rather than to the flycar.

  “Ready,” I said.

  With no warning, g-forces slammed me into the seat like a giant invisible hand. The chair did its best to compensate, but nothing could gentle a kick that b
ig. A noise rumbled through the vehicle that I wouldn’t have believed if I hadn’t heard it. Rockets had just fired. This “flycar” was a damn spaceship.

  The pressure built until black spots filled my vision. The webbing pushed against my body, countering the effects, but I still felt dizzy. Pinwheels spiraled in my vision and bile rose in my throat.

  As soon as the pressure eased, I said, “Where the hell are we going?”

  “Best relax,” the pilot said. “We’ll be a few hours.”

  I didn’t know how fast we were traveling, but given that rocket blast, we had to be moving at a good clip. We were still accelerating, less than before, but enough to feel the effects. A few hours of this could take us deep into the solar system.

  I regarded him uneasily. “I don’t suppose this flycar has inversion capability?” It was halfway to a joke. Starships went into inversion to circumvent the speed of light, which meant they could end up anywhere in space, light-years from here. A vehicle would only need such engines if it were leaving the Parthonia planetary system, which of course we weren’t going to do.

  The pilot looked back at me. “We invert in six minutes.”

  Flaming hell.

  II

  The Study

  In eons past, the Vanished Sea had rolled its waves on the world Raylicon. Now only a desert remained where those great breakers had once crashed on the shore. The empty sea basin stretched out in a mottled red and blue expanse to the horizon. The City of Cries stood on the shore of that long-vanished ocean. I knew that desert. I knew that city. I had grown up in Cries and lived here later as an adult.

  I had never intended to return.

  The Sleeker hummed through the night, banking over Cries, a chrome and crystal city that glinted in the desert. I could just make out the ruins of the ancient city farther along the shore, the original Cries, which my ancestors had built five thousand years ago. Beyond them, the pitted ruins of ancient starships hulked on the shore of the Vanished Sea, their hulls dulled over the millennia. They were shrines, enigmatic reminders that humanity hadn’t originated here on Raylicon, but on a blue-green world across the galaxy.

  Earth.

  It was the home we never knew, a legend grown misty with time until my ancestors called it a myth. Six thousand years ago, an unknown race of beings had kidnapped humans from Earth, left them on Raylicon, and disappeared with no explanation. Had a disaster killed them before they completed whatever they began with their captive humans? We never knew. They left my ancestors here with nothing.

  Primitive, terrified, and confused, those lost humans had struggled to survive. Their kidnappers left behind only those ruined starships. However, those ships contained the library of a starfaring race, and desperation drove my ancestors to learn those records. The library contained no history of the ships, but they detailed eerie sciences unlike anything we used today. Although it took centuries, my ancestors learned enough to develop star travel and went in search of their lost home. They never found the birthplace of humanity, but they built the Ruby Empire, an interstellar civilization that spread its colonies across the stars.

  That was five thousand years ago. Built on poorly understood technology and plagued by volatile politics, the empire soon collapsed. The ensuing Dark Age lasted four millennia, but we did finally regain the stars. We split into two empires then: the Eubian Traders, who based their economy on the sale of human beings, and my people, the Skolian Imperialate. Eventually our siblings on Earth also developed space travel. They had a real shock when they reached the stars and found us already here, building gargantuan and bellicose empires.

  I had left all that history behind when I left Raylicon. Yet here I was, back home. The flyer soared into the mountains. We landed on the roof of a solitary building high among the peaks. The crenellations bordering the roof were carved into mythical beasts, their fangs and horns sharp. Onion towers topped with golden spires loomed above the flycar, reaching into a sky brilliant with stars. I took a good long look through my portal, and sweat trickled down my neck despite the climate-controlled cabin.

  As I released my webbing, the pilot left the cockpit. I wished I could place his background. He had the black hair, smooth skin, and the tilted eyes of Raylican nobility, but that made no sense. A nobleman wouldn’t work as a private pilot no matter how upscale the transportation.

  The noble Houses traced their heritage back to the Ruby Empire. In this modern age, an elected Assembly ruled the Imperialate, and the Houses no longer held the power they wielded five millennia ago. The days when warlike matriarchs had kept their men in seclusion were gone; now both women and men held positions of authority. The Houses kept to themselves in their rarified universe and would never bring in a stranger to deal with their problems, especially not a commoner. Especially not me. So who else could afford this place? A crime boss. No wonder she had been cagey about her identity. She wouldn’t be the first underworld mogul to cover her operation with a phony aristocratic sheen.

  As I disembarked, warm breezes ruffled my hair around my shoulders, sending black strands across my cheeks. When I worked, I pulled back my hair, but in Selei City I had become used to letting it fall free. Not here. I clicked a band around the tresses, keeping them away from my face.

  Seven years had passed since I breathed the parched air of Raylicon. All that time in the gentle atmosphere of Selei City had spoiled me; the air here felt hot and astringent. It smelled dusty. Fortunately, the nanomeds in my body could deal with the differences. They also gave me the health and appearance of a woman in my late twenties, though I was well into my forties.

  “This way,” the pilot said behind me.

  Ho! My reflexes took over and I spun around, ready to strike. Although I stopped in time, the pilot had already raised his fists. He was unnaturally fast, another indication he carried biomech inside his body. Its system would include high-pressure biohydraulics, modifications to his skeleton and muscles, and a microfusion reactor for energy. It could give him two or three times the strength and speed of an unaugmented human. Given how quickly he had responded, he obviously carried a top-quality system.

  Mine was better.

  “My apologies.” The pilot lowered his hands. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “No harm done.” My thoughts hummed with warnings. Biomech webs cost as much as Jag star fighters and weren’t available to civilians. I’d received mine when I served in the Pharaoh’s Army. Either this pilot had been a military officer or else he worked for someone with more access to military technology than even some branches of the military. Illegal access. I was beginning to wonder if this job was worth even the huge cut of cream it put in my bank account.

  We crossed the roof and entered an onion tower through an elegant archway. Inside, stairs spiraled down, nothing mechanical, no modern touches, just a beautifully designed staircase. Lights came on as we descended, however, golden and warm. Tessellated mosaics inlaid the ceiling in gold, silver, and platinum. The place reeked of wealth.

  At the bottom, we reached a gallery of horseshoe arches. Our footsteps echoed as we walked through a forest of columns tiled in precious metals. I saw no sign of tech-mech, but golden light poured around us, and it had to come from somewhere. We left the gallery through another large archway and followed halls wide enough to accommodate ten people side-by-side. Mosaics patterned the walls, blue and purple near the floor, shading up through lighter hues, and blending into a scalloped border at the ceiling far overhead.

  The low gravity, sharp air, and exotic decor saturated my mind. As we forged deep into the maze of halls, my spinal node created a map. We walked in silence. I tried to talk with the pilot, but he never responded. Finally we climbed a staircase that swept up to a balcony. At the top, we passed two archways and went through the third. The door swung on ancient hinges that should have creaked but in this unreal place were so well oiled, they didn’t even whisper. In the study beyond, bookshelves lined three of the walls. And they held real
books. Not holobooks, mesh cards, or VR disks, but tomes with paper pages, the type usually found only in museums. One lay open on a table. Calligraphy in glimmering inks covered its pages, which were edged in gold. I had never seen even one such book, let alone a room packed with them from floor to ceiling.

  A dark-haired woman stood across the study gazing out an arched window with her back to us. She turned as we entered, and her presence filled the room. She stood two meters tall and had a military bearing. Dark hair swept back from her forehead with gray dusting the temples, and her chiseled features could have been on a classic statue with her high cheekbones, straight nose, and tilted black eyes. The elegant cut of her dark tunic and trousers showed no hint of flamboyance. She could have been any age from forty to one hundred and forty; I had no doubt she could afford the best treatments available to delay aging.

  The woman inclined her head to the pilot. “Thank you, Captain. You may go.” She spoke in Skolian Flag, a language adopted by dignitaries who interacted with many different peoples. However, she had an Iotic accent. It almost sounded authentic. Almost. No one spoke Iotic anymore except scholars, noble Houses, and pretenders who wanted to sound cultured.

  The pilot bowed and left the study. I wondered if my host expected me to bow. I didn’t move.