The Vanished Seas (Major Bhaajan series Book 3) Page 6

  I set off at a jog, relieved to get moving. Air brushed my cheeks, hot and dry. “Why?”

  “Your shadow has speeded up.”

  “Won’t my jogging give away that I know someone is there?”

  “She probably can’t tell how fast you’re moving, since you’re also shrouded.”

  “She?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  I kept running. Although it strained my bandaged abdomen, it wasn’t too bad. To save energy, I thought to Max instead of talking. Any sign she’s armed?

  She hasn’t drawn a weapon.

  Send me a heads-up display of whatever my beetle is recording.

  Done.

  An image appeared in front of me like a ghost moving through the air. It showed a woman jogging across the plaza. She looked fit and athletic, but without the upright carriage I associated with the military. Like most people in Cries, she had dark hair. Her eyes were harder to see in the blurred image, but they looked hazel, which suggested she wasn’t related to a noble House.

  Can you ID her? I asked.

  Not yet. She’s hidden her mesh footprint. No worries; I will defeat her obfuscations.

  I smiled. I didn’t know anyone else who actually used the word obfuscation. Good work. Let me know if she does anything threatening.

  I will. Right now, I detect no weapons on her person.

  Although that didn’t mean she had none, Max had excellent sensors, especially with the beetle augmenting them, and the city had ramped up security since yesterday. My shadow would be hard-pressed to hide anything dangerous.

  I reached the edge of the plaza and ran down the short staircase to the desert. Red sand swirled around my feet. A few meters away, an archway rose out of the ground, glowing like moonstone, a contrast to the barren land that surrounded it. It had no door, just a shimmer that hid whatever lay beyond. I tried to step through the shimmer, as I had done hundreds of times—and it pushed back, refusing me entry.

  “What the hell?” I said. “What’s with the barrier?”

  Max spoke aloud, taking his cue from me. “The shimmering effect you see is a molecular airlock, a modified lipid bilayer with nanobots doping its structure. Applying an electric potential across the membrane causes enzymes within it to alter shape and lock into receptor molecules. That changes its permeability. Such airlocks can be made impermeable to air, solids, even people—”

  “Max, for flaming sake, I know how it works.” I pushed the membrane. “It’s not supposed to stop anything here. It’s just for show or an emergency.” I stiffened. “What’s going on? Is there a problem down on the Concourse?”

  “I find no indication of a problem.”

  I glanced toward the city. I couldn’t see my pursuer.

  “She is still there,” Max said. “I calculate a ninety-percent probability that she hacked this archway and sent a signal to change its permeability. She’s trying to slow you down. I am sending a signal to reset the membrane.”

  I was tempted to go ask my shadow why she was following me. Toggle combat mode.

  Toggled, Max thought, unfazed by the way I switched between thought and speech. I’d become so used to communicating with him, even I didn’t always know why sometimes I wanted to talk and sometimes I wanted to think.

  As my body switched into combat mode, I became aware of every sound. The wind keened. Pyro-geckos scuttled through the sand and hissed out their fiery breath. The desert came into sharp focus, its grains of sand distinct, with the sparkle of blue azurite scattered in the red.

  I’d advise you not to engage your pursuer, Max added, as if he could read my mind, which he sort of could.

  Maybe she just wants to talk to me.

  Max wasn’t fooled. It’s not her I’m worried about.

  He knew me too well. After the attempts on my life, talking ranked low on my list. I wanted to hit something.

  If she just wanted to talk, Max continued, she could easily contact you. You shouldn’t take risks. You could tear open your wound, damaging your internal organs and suffering a blood loss that could become life-threatening—

  All right! I’ll behave. My hand, which was resting against the membrane, suddenly passed through the shimmer. You fixed the molecular airlock.

  Yes. You can use it now.

  As I walked through the membrane, it trailed along my skin like a soap bubble. I came out at the top of a staircase, and I ran down the stairs to the spacious lobby below. Bright images glowed on the sky-blue walls of the lobby, ads showing people laughing, dining, and shopping. Soft voices told me I wanted to buy this or that, especially expensive bottles of filtered water.

  I jogged across the lobby and through a wide archway that led to the Concourse. The many tourists who thronged the wide boulevard spared me no more than a glance. In my trousers and pullover, I probably looked like a guard. A few did watch me uneasily, as if they weren’t sure I belonged here. Even when I dressed like a Cries citizen, apparently I never looked fully civilized.

  I passed many upscale boutiques at first, but I soon entered the maze of back streets behind the glitzy shops. Narrow alleys snaked between the buildings, with arches spanning the roofs above, turning the passages into tunnels. The Concourse sloped downward slightly. The avenue was long enough, over a kilometer, that by the time I reached the end, I would be hundreds of meters below the surface. As I ran, the buildings became dingier and the clamor of voices from the main boulevard receded. Even the most naive tourist knew better than to go this far down the avenue.

  Max, I thought. Is my shadow still following me?

  No, you lost her after you left the main Concourse.

  Good. Have you figured out who she is?

  Not yet. But I will.

  I kept going, headed for my true home—assuming no one else showed up to kill me.

  CHAPTER IV

  THE AQUEDUCTS

  Darkness that engulfed my senses. No light reached this far underground, not even a stray hint that might reveal the barest outline of my hands when I held them in front of my face. Silence filled the air, deeper than a sea, as if the world had gone mute, unable to speak its secrets. I brushed my hands along rocky walls on either side of my body as I walked, and the faint whisper of their touch might as well have been thunder. No voices broke the silence, no footsteps, nothing to indicate anyone existed in this dark, cool realm.

  I knew better.

  I’d hung a light stylus around my neck, but I didn’t flick it on. My hands hit a barrier. I felt along it until I found a tall crack in the stone. After I squeezed through the crack, I continued walking. My hands scraped over rippled rock formations. If any light had revealed their stark beauty, I’d have seen stalagmites that rose in cones from the ground, and stalactites that hung like stone icicles from the ceiling. Mineral-saturated water had created them eons ago, dripping relentlessly. No trace of that water remained; this cave had dried out long ago. The air smelled of dust, an aromatic scent from traces of benzene compounds, nothing poisonous, but enough to tinge the air. I loved it. I’d grown up assuming dust smelled good. That was before I shipped offworld at seventeen to train with all the other grunts in the stinking grit of other worlds.

  Even in the darkness, I knew when I reached an open space. I tapped my stylus and light flared. After all the darkness, it might as well have been the blinding glare of a flood lamp. Gradually, as my eyes adjusted, the intensity eased until it was no more than a dim sphere around my body. I could see again—and it was worth the wait. I’d always loved to come this way, through the dark, revealing the beauty at the end in a flare of radiance.

  This was the Undercity.

  I had come out into an underground canal, part of what we called the aqueducts, though I’d never understood that name. This conduit was far too big to be an aqueduct, besides which, if water had ever flowed through here, it had disappeared ages ago. All that remained was a wonderland of canals, caves, and stone lacework that honeycombed the ground below the desert for many
kilometers in every direction near the City of Cries. The Undercity dwarfed Cries, but most of it remained inaccessible unless you knew the ways and people of this hidden world.

  I stood on a midwalk, a pathway large enough for two people to walk side by side. It was about halfway up the wall of the canal, midway between the ground and the rock ceiling. Arched supports reinforced the canal. At intervals, a long-dead artist had carved statues into the wall, ancient and detailed, work that survived the eons with the careful attention of the Undercity population. The statues showed deities and their spirit companions from the pantheon our ancestors had worshipped millennia ago.

  Ixa Quelia, goddess of life and fire, stood near me with her hair streaming along the wall, engraved into the stone, her features chiseled, the high cheekbones, straight nose, and large eyes associated with the nobility. She held the embers of life, a quartz circle embedded in the rock. The statue beyond showed her spirit companion “Chaac,” a name my people spoke in the ancient manner, with glottals at the start and end of the word, a pronunciation rarely heard among modern Skolians. Chaac looked human from the waist up, but she had tufted ears and the body of a hunting cat. She held the axe of lightning and a shield painted with gold, red, and white rings, the colors kept bright by those of my people who tended these statues.

  Modern sculptures stood in the canal below, shaped from dust and hardened by chemical applications we’d had passed down for generations. One showed a woman and man standing back to back, both turned forward. Muscled and beautiful, with their daggers drawn, they were modern-day warriors. They mirrored an ancient statue above them on the midwalk, a female warrior in a similar pose, holding a sword at the ready, her body turned forward. She had one hand on the shoulder of a man who sat facing the canal, his head lifted, his clothes those of a barbarian prince. The contrast of the men in the two statues spoke volumes. Cries might struggle to reconcile modern society with the ancient ways, but my ancestors had left those traditions behind thousands of years ago when they retreated to live underground. We had neither the interest nor the luxury of secluding our men. Even the older statue on the midwalk had a different quality. Although the man had a less aggressive pose than in the modern sculpture, he leaned forward with a fierce intensity that hardly fit the notions of cloistered, protected princes from the history books.

  The entire scene glittered as the light from my stylus struck crystals embedded in the stone, thousands of them sparkling like a multitude of tiny stars. It was breathtaking, and it was ours, hidden deep beneath the desert. Even the archeologists who came to study the ruins, those few my people allowed to visit the aqueducts, had never discovered these depths of the ruins.

  I set off jogging along the midwalk, settling into a familiar rhythm. An entire city of ruins existed here. Our ancestors had built some of this thousands of years ago; the rest dated from a time before humans came to this world, a reminder our species hadn’t originated on Raylicon, but on a blue-green paradise called Earth.

  The legend of our home world had grown misty with time. Six thousand years ago, an alien race had taken humans from Earth, stranded them on Raylicon, and then vanished, leaving the lost humans fighting to survive. Nothing remained of that unknown race except three crumbling starships on the shores of the Vanished Sea. However, those ships contained the library of a starfaring race. Much of it had been destroyed; what remained described sciences unlike anything we used today. Although it had taken centuries, my ancestors developed star travel from those libraries and went in search of their lost home. They never found Earth, but they built an interstellar empire. Based on poorly understood technology and plagued by volatile politics, the Ruby Empire had soon collapsed, and the ensuing Dark Ages lasted for millennia. Eventually we regained space travel and formed today’s Skolian Imperialate.

  When Earth’s people finally reached the stars, they found us already here, building empires. We rejoiced to reunite with our lost siblings. Our origins remained a mystery, however. No civilization from six thousand years ago on Earth matched our culture. Our ancestors seemed too advanced to have come from any group in that time frame. But we could never be sure. Before they achieved space travel, the people of Earth had fought what they called the Virus Wars, which acted in both the cyber and biological arenas, devastating Earth’s population and her digital history. If a memory remained of our ancestors there, we had yet to find that record.

  Here in the Undercity, my people lived with famine and wonder, pain and joy, deep below the desert in the magnificent ruins of an alien civilization that had been ancient before humans ever walked this world.

  Torches shed light across the canal, set into the walls in metal scones that looked like roaring beasts. Their fiery light revealed two fighters on the floor of the canal locked in a sparring match. Red dust swirled around them and only the thud of muscle on muscle broke the silence. Three other fighters stood back, intent on the bout. Together, these five ranked as my top tykado students. They were in their early twenties, considered adults in the aqueducts even though by Imperialate law, they wouldn’t reach the age of majority until twenty-five. Down here, children grew up fast.

  The two in the sparring match were members of the Ruzik dust gang, a tall woman named Tower and a man called Byte-2. Ruzik himself stood leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, studying the fighters. At twenty, he was the youngest of the five, but that took nothing from his leadership. Tats covered his shoulders, stylized depictions of his namesake, the giant reptilian beasts called ruziks that ranged across the desert above. People from Earth compared the creatures to a Tyrannosaurus Rex. So maybe a ruzik looked sort of like that dinosaur, but its front limbs were longer and more powerful, and iridescent scales covered its body.

  Ruzik’s girlfriend Angel stood next to him. Dressed in dusty trousers and a torn muscle shirt that showed her well-defined abs, with her muscular arms crossed, she looked about as angelic as a barbarian warrior-goddess from Raylican mythology. The third fighter watching the match was Hack, Ruzik’s best friend. Hack fought well, yah, but his true genius was at creating tech-mech. He had become a cyber-wizard unequalled by anyone else in the Undercity even among the surreally tech-savvy cyber-riders.

  These were my tykado experts, five violently beautiful youths, all surviving into adulthood, a rarity here. I stood by the wall, dressed like them, studying their technique as they fought. They called this canal Lizard Trap and claimed it as their territory, which they marked with dust sculptures of ruziks rearing up on their back legs. It reminded me of the gang I’d run with in my youth, protecting our circle of kith and kin. Ruzik’s gang looked after a large circle: ten children ranging in ages from a baby to older adolescents, and also a group of adults that included Hack. As the cyber-rider for the circle, Hack played the meshes for them like a virtuoso.

  Tower dropped into a roll and kicked Byte-2 in the ankles. With a grunt, Byte-2 tripped and slammed into the ground. As Tower jumped up, I walked over, holding up my hand to stop her. I spoke in the Undercity dialect, short and succinct. “Illegal move.”

  Tower scowled. “Good move.”

  Byte-2 stood up. He looked more pissed at me than at Tower, even though she was the one who had cheated against him. “Smart move,” he said in his gravelly voice.

  “Illegal,” I said. “Tykado rules forbid.”

  Angel glowered at me. “Screw the rules. Move works, move good.”

  Patience, I told myself. They knew tykado wasn’t the rough-and-tumble of their gang fights. Sure, they were good street fighters, and they’d been refining their skills all their lives, practicing every day for the sheer love of the challenge. They’d learned tykado fast when we started two years ago, but that didn’t mean they were ready to earn their first-degree black belts. Tykado was about more than knocking down your opponent. It was a way of life.

  I crossed my arms. “No rules, no black belt.”

  “Fuck black belt,” Angel rumbled.

  I knew they’d never adm
it they were nervous about testing with an elite Cries Tykado Academy, grouped with city students who came from a wealth and privilege these five could barely imagine. So they blustered. They also worked hard, practicing every day.

  A wicked smile played around Ruzik’s lip. “Not the belts,” he told his girlfriend.

  Angel laughed, her tension easing. Then she remembered she was pissed and gave me a look that could have melted steel. “Tykado rules shit.”

  “Only one rule,” Byte-2 offered. “Win.”

  “Yah.” Tower brightened. “We fix tykado rules. Make them better.”

  I could just imagine what the ITF, or Interstellar Tykado Federation, would say to that idea. “Tykado rules fix you. Make you better.”

  Angel gave me an exasperated look. “Always you say this. How am I better?”

  “Smarter than city slicks,” I said.

  That answer got approving looks from them all. Ruzik spoke quietly. “We’ll do their rules better than them. Don’t need special treatment.”

  The others quit arguing then. Ruzik had chosen a good approach; it was a point of pride for them to achieve the same honors as Cries students without special consideration.

  I called a rest, and they gathered on stone benches by the wall. Statues of winged reptiles supported the seats, their heads tilted back, their fanged mouths open in roars, their massive tails curled on the canal floor. The works sold by Concourse vendors didn’t come close to this artistry. I couldn’t interest any of those vendors in taking work by our artists on commission, though. Even if they’d been willing to share profits with Undercity artists, which they weren’t, they didn’t believe my people could make anything worth selling. They thought the craftwork I showed them was fake, that I meant to cheat them. The few who realized they were seeing the genuine article were even less willing to sell them. They’d rather refuse whatever they could earn than admit Undercity artists created better works than them. Well, screw that. It just strengthened my determination to get Concourse licenses for my people.