Forgotten Suns Read online

  Khalida saluted stiffly. “Captain,” she said.

  “Captain,” Tomiko replied. Her face was set, her voice clipped.

  There was little else to say, even if they had not been quarreling. Khalida said it regardless. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “Likewise,” Tomiko said.

  She stepped aside. Khalida had a brief urge to knock her flat, and an equally brief one to hug her till she gasped.

  She did neither. She marched past Tomiko into the shuttle.

  ~~~

  Aisha was in the worst trouble she had ever been in in her life. Squeezed in between Rama and Khalida, dropping away from Leda to the blue-and-white ball in space that was Araceli, she had a sudden, powerful, and completely impossible urge to get up and walk away and not stop until she found herself on Nevermore again.

  Of course that wasn’t happening. Khalida was perfectly still and perfectly silent. Rama stared out the port, watching the world grow till it blocked out the blackness of space.

  They were coming down on the day side, right along the line between night and morning. A continent stretched below, with sparks and flashes of light that were lakes and inland seas. A deep blue ocean curved away toward the bottom of the planet’s arc, flaring white at the utmost bottom, where the polar caps where.

  Cities spread like neurons across the night side, linked by chains of smaller lights. The day side was almost all green and dun and brown, with only a few grids or circles that marked the places where humans lived.

  It looked empty, like wilderness—almost as empty as Nevermore. But that was deceiving. The cities were full of non-psis: feeder cities. The psis lived where people were few and far apart, with shields to protect themselves from each other.

  Aisha looked for the crater that her aunt had made, but it wasn’t on this side of the planet. Everything here was peaceful and whole.

  She was supposed to be deceived. She was just a child, after all. But Aunt and Rama weren’t supposed to know as much as they did, either. None of them was playing the game the way Psycorps and Araceli expected.

  That could be either good or bad. Aisha’s stomach was in knots. She took deep breaths the way Vikram had taught her. “Breathing is important,” his voice said in her head. “Breathing is everything.”

  In her head, he sounded like Rama. Warm deep voice with a lilt underneath. Rama’s sun surrounded her, shielding her.

  They were dropping fast. Somewhere outside the sun, Aisha was screaming with panic.

  Breathe in.

  Breathe out.

  The darkness of space around them felt like Rama’s hand. The shuttle, cradled in it, fell down and down into the deep well that was Araceli.

  28

  MI waited in the shuttle bay, backed by a detachment of armored marines. They surrounded Khalida as soon as she stepped out of the shuttle. Even though she had expected it, the snap of the restraints around her caught her off guard.

  She could not even look back to see what had happened to Rama and her niece. The web was still alive behind her eyes, but external links were blocked. All she could access was the direct feed from MI, and that contained a copy of her orders, a precis of the situation as it had evolved since she left the Leda, and a dataspurt from local command.

  There was nothing she could do about the rest of it.

  Not yet, she thought, deep inside, where no one could come.

  Except one. And he was keeping to himself.

  Biding his time.

  The dark part of her was glad. The rest had work to do, whether she wanted it or not. Nor would MI care overmuch if it killed her.

  There was comfort in that, of sorts.

  ~~~

  None of the marines or the escort from MI was familiar. They were all new since Khalida left Araceli: fresh faces, new victims for the old war. She caught some of them sliding glances at her, then looking quickly away. It seemed her reputation preceded her.

  Even MI headquarters had changed. The old building in a somewhat seedy section of the port was gone: a casualty of war, taken down by a suicide bomber after the fall of Ostia Magna. The new one had moved well inward toward the wealthier quarter, a squat block of fortified stone with levels of security that raised her brows higher as they penetrated each one.

  “Just a little bit spooked, are you?” she inquired when, at considerable length, she found herself in the commander’s office.

  He was a new face on this world, too, though hardly unfamiliar. Shimon Aviram had his own reputation, and that was as the court of last resort. When he took charge of a situation, it had already begun to spin out of control.

  “Captain Nasir,” he said. He had a smooth cool voice and a face modified to match, but his eyes were perfectly level, unwavering, still and cold. For an instant as Khalida met them, she imagined she saw a second consciousness staring out, one she almost recognized.

  She knew better than to dismiss the thought, but she buried it below a babble of undisciplined mind-noise. “Colonel Aviram,” she said. “I’d salute, but as you see…”

  The restraints sprang free. The marine on her left caught them and stepped back conspicuously out of fist-snap range.

  If Khalida hit anyone, it would not be one of her escort. She flexed her numbed fingers but otherwise made no move.

  “Give me your word,” said Aviram, “that you are not a flight risk.”

  “I might be,” she said. “If it seems advisable. In the meantime, I have orders. Do I have your permission to execute them? Colonel? Sir?”

  “I can neither permit nor deny,” he said. “You are, for the duration of this operation, my superior officer.”

  That set Khalida back on her heels. She had managed, in the flood of data, to overlook that particular and crucial fact.

  “I did insist,” said the man who deigned at last to show himself. He might have been there from the beginning: for a psi of his level, that was hardly impossible. He only had to encourage the unwitting eye to pass on by.

  Rinaldi in the flesh was both more and less prepossessing than he chose to seem in vid. He was tall and well built but somewhat soft: a man who had no need for action other than the virtual sort, and no inclination to alter his body to look as if he did.

  That was a mask, like everything else about him. “Isn’t this a conflict of interest?” she asked. “If I’m mediating for both sides, where is your worthy opponent?”

  “Waiting,” Rinaldi said. “She requested we meet on neutral ground.”

  “Which this port allegedly is,” Khalida said.

  He smiled. “Allegedly, Captain?”

  She had no reason in this world to trust him, but no choice but to let herself be taken where her orders commanded her to go. It was small consolation that Aviram had the same orders—and even less autonomy. If and when this fell apart, he would go down with her.

  “I will go,” she said, “after I have eaten, rested, and reviewed the situation. An hour, Meser Rinaldi. Colonel: I suppose you have a kitchen here?”

  Aviram nodded stiffly. Rinaldi was amused. She was dancing in chains, and they all knew it.

  It made a point. She was hungry, to her surprise, and she did want as well as need to examine her orders more closely. Aviram’s revelation might not be all that was hidden in the knotwork of official phrasing.

  ~~~

  As far as she could tell while she worked her way methodically through a small vat of pasta alla vongole and a bottle of rather pleasant red wine, her orders were no more or less complicated than they had seemed at first scan. Meet, separately and together, with representatives of the warring parties. Talk Ostia down off the ledge. Get the keys to the worldwrecker and relay them to Tech. Use the resources of MI on-world and the Leda off it.

  And there it was. In collaboration with the Interplanetary Institute for Psychic Research.

  Psycorps.

  Officially, Psycorps and the city-state of Castellanos were separate entities. The fact that Castellanos was founded,
inhabited, and governed by Psycorps, and only by Psycorps, was never, officially, acknowledged.

  Khalida spoke aloud to the apparently empty office. “You’re not even pretending that there’s any hope of objectivity here.”

  “We all do what we must,” Rinaldi said. His voice came from everywhere and nowhere, but her uplink found him in the hallway just outside the door, leaning against the wall. Loitering; or eavesdropping.

  “And if I decide that we have to lock you up and find for Ostia by default?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. His amusement made her skin shiver.

  “I begin to understand,” she said, “why Ostia would rather see this world dead than in your hands.”

  “Understanding is the beginning of wisdom,” he said.

  If she hated him, he won the skirmish. She made herself cold and quiet and still. He was nothing to her. An obstacle, that was all. She would find a way over or around him. Or not.

  Nothing mattered. This war was nothing. This man, this psi-nine—nothing. Nothing at all.

  Was that a gasp from the hallway?

  She must be imagining it. “I’m ready,” she said.

  ~~~

  If the envoy from Ostia had not insisted on meeting Khalida alone in a shielded room, Khalida would have done it for her. These negotiations could not be the normal and ordinary meeting of opponents across a table or a webspace. Khalida would speak with each party in that room, where psi was blocked and blanked. Then, if and when she was ready, she would bring them together. She might not even do that at all.

  For now there was the representative of the people whose relatives and children she had murdered. Mem Aurelia was a woman of size and presence, composed and still. She sat on a cushion with her feet tucked beneath her skirts. Her hands were folded in her lap; her eyelids were lowered.

  She might have seemed asleep, but even within the shields, Khalida could feel the force of her regard. “There’s no escaping our enemies,” she said. “No matter where we go. No matter what we do.”

  “You seem to have found ways,” Khalida said.

  “Desperation,” said Mem Aurelia.

  “You asked for me. Why?”

  “Because you understand,” Mem Aurelia said.

  “You don’t think I can talk you out of this.”

  “No one can.”

  “Tell me why,” Khalida said.

  “Not in words,” said Mem Aurelia. “Watch.”

  Khalida had an instant’s warning: the flash of the download alert; the ripple in the web that warned of data incoming before it crashed over her.

  It was meant to overwhelm her. She sorted it almost by instinct, with reflexes that had not, after all, lost their edge. Every city, every town, every farm and ranch and station, had its own file. Collated, searched, and sorted, they transcribed a pattern.

  She had seen parts of it on the first tour, before she destroyed Ostia. She had not known how large it was, or how pervasive. It had seemed to be a matter for an individual and rebellious city-state—not for the whole half of a planet.

  More than half. One thread in the pattern was distinct. Children of talent and intelligence taken from their families—for schooling, those who took them said; to better their prospects and those of their towns and villages. But they never came back. Nor were they heard from, apart from a handful of bland messages: Dear Father and Mother, I am well, I am learning, I am a credit to my teachers.

  That set of files linked to another from which the Classified seals had been visibly removed. There were not nearly as many of those, and they were incomplete in ways that spoke of files truncated or corrupted. But the pattern persisted.

  On the surface it was not so different from what Psycorps did to every child on every world: tested, analyzed, took away those with the talent to be brought into the Corps. But these were younger, not yet come to puberty. They had been genemapped at or before birth, again as children were, and those maps had been flagged.

  Not every flag led to a child’s being taken. Only particular cases. Intelligence of a particular type, at a particular level.

  And again, Psycorps bred for psi. That was common and accepted knowledge. But only, as far as anyone knew, within the Corps.

  “Not just for psi,” Mem Aurelia’s voice said through the cascade of data. “For its opposite. For minds not only blind but locked. Unreadable; inaccessible. Not just non-psi. Psi-null.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Khalida said.

  “This is Psycorps. When has sense ever had anything to do with them?”

  Khalida felt the drawing of kinship, the bond of common understanding. That was dangerous. She must be objective. That was why she was here.

  “Blind minds,” she said. “Impenetrable walls. Perfect spies. Perfectly loyal, one would presume.”

  “One would,” said Mem Aurelia.

  Khalida went perfectly still. Mem Aurelia’s eyes widened slightly.

  Khalida was not going to say it.

  There was more than one war. Not only psi against non, but psi against psi—using the nulls as weapons. But for whom, and against whom?

  It was too complicated for Khalida’s damaged mind. She focused on what was here and obvious and in front of her. Clear violations of the Compact of Worlds. Use and abuse of human populations without their consent.

  Those populations had chosen to counter that abuse with a much more blatant violation of Compact. In return for the loss of their children, they threatened to destroy a world.

  “Tell me what else there is,” she said. “What justifies your ultimatum.”

  “Our children—”

  “No,” said Khalida. “As terrible as it is, it’s not enough. United Planets has laws against such things. You have the right to invoke those laws. Why haven’t you? Why do you see no other choice than planetary suicide?”

  “You are an innocent,” said Mem Aurelia. “Don’t you know who owns United Planets?”

  “Psycorps isn’t that powerful,” Khalida said. “Not yet.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “I think it would like to be,” Khalida said.

  Mem Aurelia’s composure was visibly strained. “We are what they would make of us all—every human on every world. Serfs and slaves, to feed and breed. They will rule. We will serve. That is what the Corps is for. Has always been.”

  There was a perilous logic in it. Khalida had had such thoughts herself. Still…

  “What good will it do to destroy one world? There are hundreds of others, and the Corps has its claws in all of them. You won’t be martyrs. You’ll be criminals, deplored and despised.”

  “People will know,” Mem Aurelia said. “Some will think. The Corps can’t stop every mind from drawing conclusions. If even a few realize what has been done, and undertake to stop it, maybe—”

  “I can assure you,” said Khalida, “that mass suicide—or massacre—solves nothing.”

  “Not if we take the cream of the Corps with us,” Mem Aurelia said.

  “Now who’s the innocent? You’ve given them ample warning. They’ve gone elsewhere, or made plans to go before the world breaks. You’ll be dead, and they’ll be safe. All of it will come to nothing.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Mem Aurelia.

  Her voice was so soft that Khalida barely heard it. It echoed much louder on the connection between them, a pinprick of data that unlocked into a pattern of terrible beauty.

  As nulls and normals were linked through their implants, so were psis—not only by their powers of mind but by certain enhancements. Connections that everyone took for granted. Technology so common, so simple and so ordinary, that not even a psi stopped to ask who made it, or what that person or persons might have built into it.

  “They will find it,” Khalida said, “if they haven’t already. Even as we sit here—they know. If they didn’t before, they do now.”

  “I don’t think so,” Mem Aurelia said again. “What they’ve done to our chil
dren: as soon as we knew, we developed our own countermeasures. Try to speak of this, or even think it outside of this link. I do mean that, Captain. Do try.”

  Khalida did not need to. She had her own defenses, and they had analyzed the nature of the link and reached the appropriate conclusions.

  “What good does it do to tell me of it, then?” she asked. “If I can’t report in full to my superiors, all I have is a grossly unequal provocation and response, and a finding against you.”

  “You’ll find a way,” said Mem Aurelia. “That’s your gift, as you should know. To think around corners. To see a path where none seems to exist.”

  “And you reach that conclusion how? From the ashes of Ostia Magna?”

  If that was a blow to Mem Aurelia’s serenity, she did not show it. “Not all perception is measurable as psi. Nor is every non-psi strictly normal in the Corps’ definition. That too you should know, Captain Nasir.”

  Khalida was past knowing what she knew. She hoped she excused herself with appropriate politeness. In her mind she was already far away, curled in a corner, trying hard to think of nothing at all.

  29

  The marines took Aunt Khalida away, surrounding her with a wall of black uniforms and broad upright backs. She wasn’t a small woman, but they dwarfed her.

  Aisha and Rama were not taken prisoner, exactly, but while Aisha was distracted with her aunt, they acquired their own large and imposing escort. Instead of marines they had Psycorps—and that made Aisha’s skin crawl and the sun inside her shoot out a flare that she hoped blinded any of them who tried to spy on her mind.

  They were herded onto a transport, quite a comfortable one if she had been in any mood to notice. Rama was perfectly calm, inside as well as out. He still refused to see any danger in these psionic amateurs, no matter how hard Aisha tried to convince him to be careful. He watched the city go by outside the transport’s screens, taking it all in with wide clear eyes.

  She knew where Psycorps headquarters was. It was the first thing she’d looked for on the worldweb after she left the Leda. They were not going toward it.