Forgotten Suns (29 page)

Rama had honestly expected to find one here. Or a guide to
one. What that told her about the world he’d come from, the culture that made
him—Bronze Age, Pater had estimated, give or take and allowing for differences
between worlds and species…

Civilization wasn’t just technology. She’d managed to forget
that. This living atavism with his golden treasure and his edged weapons was a
psi master above anything she’d ever heard of, and now she understood why space
travel hadn’t baffled him, either. Ships he hadn’t known or needed, but
interstellar travel was nothing new to him at all.

He thought Psycorps was a pack of amateurs and poorly
educated children. Was that what he thought of spaceships, too? Slow and
cumbersome and oh, so primitive.

It would have been humiliating if it hadn’t been so horribly
funny. She couldn’t laugh; she was past that. She was even past being scared.

“So,” she said. “A ship. Navigation systems can process the
maps here, and plot courses from system to system. It won’t be instant, but it
can be done.”

“It could take years,” he said. “Lifetimes.”

“Or not.” She tapped a system halfway up the nearer curve of
the arch. “This looks like the one we’re in. The one on the bottom, with four
others in between—isn’t that Nevermore? So we’ve jumped a handful already. If
we figure out how to bypass the rest, and where it’s all leading us—what we’re
supposed to find—it could take no time at all. Relatively speaking.”

“That supposes the map is linear,” he said, “and the way is
straight from world to world. And that this”—he stooped and brushed the
bottommost swirl of star-dots on the farther side—”is where we’re meant to go.”

“That’s why we need a ship, and a navigation system. To plot
the course and see where it leads.”

“It can’t be that straightforward,” he said, stubborn. “Or
they’d have left all this on Nevermore, and not sent me half across the
galactic arm to find it.”

“So get a ship and run the coordinates,” Aisha said. She
could be at least as stubborn as he could.

“That easily? On a world at war? That may not even be here
tomorrow?”

“Why not?”

He glared. Then he laughed. “By the good god, child, you’re
starting to talk like me.”

“That’s a bad thing?”

“Very.”

“We’d best get at it,” she said. “Can you keep all the maps
in your head or do you need web access for that?”

“It’s here,” he said, but he didn’t tap his head; he touched
his chest over his heart.

Different culture. Different ways of seeing the world, and
the worlds.

“So,” she said. “A ship. Back to the port?”

“Maybe,” he said. He paused for one last long scan of the
Ara, and especially the arch; then he turned toward the rover.

They had an instant’s warning this time, like a storm wind
gathering itself to roar.

The song that had been silent since they left the port broke
over them with such force that Aisha looked wildly around, expecting to see
whatever had sung it. Then she realized that the rock underfoot was swaying,
and a slow crack spread upward through the carvings in the wall past the arch.

They both dived into the rover. The hull was no protection
from the song, but at least it held together, and the engine fired when Rama
hit the controls.

The rover lurched. Stones rattled on the roof. The Ara was
coming down.

Aisha couldn’t even squeeze her eyes shut, let alone
breathe. The passenger cradle strapped her in, jerkily, while the rover lurched
again, then leaped forward.

There was no flight plan. No plan at all except to get out
as fast as mechanically possible.

The Ara Celi buckled and folded and collapsed on itself. The
rover tried to go down with it, sucked into its vortex, but Rama extracted
every last bit of power out of the straining engine and his own psi, and held
it to a rocking, bucking, groaning hover.

Dust billowed over them, darkened the sun and slowly
dissipated. The song still screamed all around them.

Rama aimed the rover straight at it. Aisha might have
squawked—she couldn’t tell; no other sound in the world could penetrate that
vast and appalling cry.

It wasn’t growing louder. It took her a long while to
realize that. Little by little, it was starting to fade.

When Rama tried to turn the rover aside from it, it erupted
again. The rover’s hull warped visibly. He wrenched it back in the direction
the song wanted him to go.

~~~

Everything was completely out of control. Maybe Rama knew
what it was all coming to, but Aisha’s imagination had lost its ability to keep
up.

She ventured a tiny poke at the rover’s web access. It was
weak and intermittent, fading in and out, but with a little effort she could
make it make sense—enough to get the maps working, and activate the forward
screen.

They were flying away from the port, deeper into Corps
territory. The map called it Montecito: a ring of mountain ranges around a wide
flat valley.

The mountains were clear enough, but the valley refused to
come into focus. The far west end wouldn’t record at all, except as a blur of
mist and rogue pixels.

Wrestling with the web helped keep her sane. She teased out
a set of older maps that showed the valley more clearly.

Well, she thought. No wonder it was shielded.

It was a spaceport. Part of it looked like the larger port
she’d landed in from the
Leda
, but
the far end was different. Instead of open landing fields and long, wide, high
shuttle bays, it held wells for deep-space ships. Those almost never came down
into atmosphere, but when they did, they flew under null-g and settled into
gravity-controlled cradles.

It said something for how important this place was, that it
had half a dozen of these enormously expensive wells, which meant the tech and
the staff and the capabilities that went with them. Psycorps had to have built
them, and be using them, too.

She hacked a connection from the old map to the new one, and
then patched it in to an observation satellite that had a tiny spark of
bandwidth available. The connection was rough and blurry, but she persuaded it
to zoom in.

Five of the landing wells were empty. The sixth, the one on
the very end, looked like a piece of starless space floating above the deep
curve of the well.

Aisha rubbed her eyes. They kept wanting to see the
blackness, but when she looked directly at it, all she saw was the shape of a
much more ordinary ship in a cradle: long and tubular, with rows of ports like
a planetary skyliner.

Spaceships could look like anything they wanted to. This one
was downright boring. No frills or nacelles. No shiny metal or clusters of
modules like shimmering bubbles, no wings or struts or solar sails—though those
wouldn’t hold up to a planet’s gravity.

The awful song came from the ship, or from something inside
it. It was pulling them in.

One of the screens in front of Rama came alive, streaming
data off the web. Aisha hadn’t done that. Rama had his own hacks going, and she
hadn’t even picked up that he was doing it.

The stream was a lot of official data: ship’s registration,
cargo and passenger manifests, flight plans and routes traveled.

Research vessel Ra-Harakhte, commissioned out of Beijing
Nine, assigned to—

Then like what she’d seen in the well, the stream jumped and
lurched and settled, and what it said was completely different.

Experimental ship, commandeered from scientific expedition,
passengers and crew detained, interim commander—

Pirated. Though since it was the Corps, which could do
whatever it wanted, they used that other word. Commandeered.

The words didn’t matter. All that mattered, and all she
could hear or see any more, was the song. She felt as if it had lodged in her
bones and set her blood on fire.

She fought to see through it. The ship wasn’t just sitting
there. Things were happening around it. Cars flitting back and forth. Shapes
moving on the ground.

Fighting?

“Rama,” she tried to say. “Rama, we have to turn around. Or
stop. Or something. We can’t—”

He ignored her. His back was rigid.

Aisha concentrated on breathing. The rover skimmed the
mountaintops and slid down the slopes into the valley, passing over knots and
clusters of buildings and the occasional road. Whatever protections the place had—and
they must be strong—didn’t seem to see or touch them.

The screens kept working. The web feed came clearer now they
were in the valley. Energy weapons flashed, and knots of struggling figures
pushed up against the landing cradle.

Whatever was in the ship had stopped screaming, but the soft
moan of agony made it worse. Rama stopped pretending to operate the controls;
he made his way to the rear and dug in a locker back there, coming out with two
sidearms and a fistful of charging belts.

Aisha took the ones he handed her. Her fingers felt numb.
She knew how to shoot. Mother had insisted on it, as long as she was going to
live on a planet full of wildlife and almost empty of humans. The thought of
shooting at people made her sick to her stomach.

“You won’t be shooting anyone unless they shoot first,” Rama
said. “Once we’re down and out of the rover, stay behind me. Don’t break; don’t
go off on your own. We’ll use the fighting as a cover.”

“For what?” Aisha demanded.

“We’re going in,” he answered.

~~~

The rover floated down on the far side of the landing
well, away from the worst of the fighting. No one tried to stop it.

Rama swayed a little getting out: the first sign Aisha had
seen that he was pushing his limits. She’d started to think he didn’t have any.

He got his balance and took a breath, then ran lightly along
the edge of the well. The ship loomed over him. It was huge: Aisha couldn’t
even see the top, or either end. From where they were, it blocked out the sky.

The fighting was concentrated on the other side, where the
entrance must be. Rama had his eye on something else—cargo port, Aisha guessed,
from what she knew of starships.

This one, close up, wasn’t like any she’d ever seen, with
her eyes or on the web. Its hull was a weird, shifting color, like oil on dark
water. The ports looked like eyes: the same kind of liquid curve, and the
faintest hint of motion.

That had to be an illusion. The hull curving and flexing
toward them—that wasn’t. The well curved with it, irising open directly in
front of them.

Rama never even hesitated. He ran straight in.

Aisha did stop. It was dark inside except for a faint glow.
She couldn’t see anything but Rama’s shape against it, getting smaller as he ran
deeper.

Someone shouted: words she couldn’t catch. A knot of people
ran toward her down the length of the ship. A fighter buzzed down on them,
blasting them with plasma bolts.

She fumbled for the pistol Rama had given her. She didn’t
have any thought on her head, just a kind of blank
Oh, shit.

He sprang past her, pushing her back toward the ship with
one hand while the other swung up and aimed. Above the running people. At the
fighter with its Corps logo.

That wasn’t any sidearm bolt. It blasted the fighter out of
the sky.

He didn’t stay to admire his work. He swept Aisha up,
one-handed, and hauled her into the rapidly shrinking port—hatch—whatever it
was.

~~~

She lay on a faintly yielding, faintly glowing surface and
tried to remember how to breathe. Images kept flashing through her mind. How
the people on the ground were dressed like ordinary citizens: port staff,
workers, the odd person in a suit. And how he’d shot the fighter down, and he
hadn’t had a weapon in his hand.

She dragged herself to her feet. Rama was already well down
the tubular, curving corridor.

The light was getting brighter, or else Aisha’s eyes were
adapting. There wasn’t much to see. No doors. No signs. No apparent way in or
out or up or down. Just forward.

The place had a smell. It was faint and rather pleasant, a
little like mushrooms and a little like the sea. Earth and salt and something
sharply clean.

Starships never smelled like this.
Experimental
, the webstream had said. She was starting to wonder
just what the experiment was, and what was being experimented on.

Rama was almost out of sight. She mustered as much speed as
she could and plowed after him.

There was no rest for the wicked, still less for
destroyers of worlds. Khalida had hardly settled into the shielded room with a
bottle of local grappa and a plate of something that began, as usual here, with
pasta and soared into a savory firmament, when the door pinged.

She ignored it. It opened regardless. She stared sourly at
Lieutenant Zhao. “Weren’t we supposed to be rid of you?”

He inspected the bottle on the table. His eyes widened
slightly. “That’s potent stuff.”

“So I gather. I haven’t tasted it yet.” She lifted her laden
spoon. “Have you eaten?”

“Thank you,” he said, “I have.”

He did not sit, which surprised her. He stood like a cadet
on review: a little too stiff, and a little too obviously trying not to be.

“Well?” she said when he kept on standing—hovering, to be
strictly accurate.

“Captain,” he said. He bit his lip. Screwing up his courage,
she thought.

He let it go all at once. “Your niece…we seem to have
misplaced her.”

Khalida had not been expecting that. “I thought you had her
stowed safely.”

“We thought so, too,” he said, “but she’s gone. She and the Dreamtimer.
They might have gone separately. We suspect they went together.”

Khalida drew a slow breath. Bursting apart in a fit of rage
and desperate worry would do nothing here, and in this room, no one could pry
into her mind to see the fires roaring. She kept her voice low and perfectly
steady. “May I ask how that happened?”