II
Shrine of the Desolate
I walked with Colonel Lavinda Majda beneath a canopy of trees, the blue gravel path crunching under our boots. She wore her uniform today, dark green tunic and trousers, with gold braid on her cuffs and shoulders. She cut an impressive figure, tall and fit, with dark hair and dark eyes.
“The Jagernaut is Daltana Calaj,” Lavinda said. “She’s a war hero, highly decorated.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“It is as the witness told you. Calaj killed Tavan Ganz.”
I stopped and waited.
Lavinda halted next to me. “What is it?”
“The witness,” I said. “She’s the Ruby Pharaoh.” Tell me I’m wrong.
Lavinda exhaled. “Yes, it is Pharaoh Dyhianna.”
Gods. No wonder they wanted this kept under wraps. Only one day had passed since they said I needed a higher security clearance, but they had already prepared the way. The moment I accepted the job, they had reactivated my clearance.
“I still don’t get it,” I said. “Why would a Jagernaut kill the aide of a high-ranking Assembly Councilor in front of the pharaoh? Was it an assassination attempt that went wrong?”
“As far as we know, Secondary Calaj didn’t even realize the pharaoh witnessed the crime.”
I couldn’t imagine our dynastic ruler, titular or not, skulking around in places where people got themselves murdered. “Why was the pharaoh there?”
“I’m not sure exactly. She will give you the details.”
“Was the aide who died connected to Calaj?” I paused as we walked under a canopy of trees. “Was he a lover or friend?”
Lavinda shook her head. “No, they had no connection.”
“Did the pharaoh have a connection to him?”
“No, none.” She raked her hand through her hair. “I’m sorry I can’t be of more help. The members of the Ruby Dynasty are—I don’t know how to put it. Vulnerable. Especially the pharaoh. The only one of them that I don’t worry will break is Imperator Skolia.”
Imperator Skolia. The pharaoh’s nephew. People called him a military dictator. He wasn’t, but his title sure as blazes wasn’t titular. He commanded ISC, the combined military forces of the Skolian Imperialate. Rumor claimed he had killed his grandfather, the previous Imperator, to take his position. I had seen him once, a huge man with metallic skin who never smiled. Vulnerable he wasn’t.
The woman I had met on the bridge, however, had looked eminently breakable. “You worry that what you say will in some way injure the pharaoh?”
“Yes and no.” The colonel pushed aside a hanging vine of gold flowers. “It’s true, she looks delicate. But under that fragile exterior, she’s like a cord of steel. And she knows the interstellar meshes like no one else. People call her the Shadow Pharaoh. She’s been infiltrating the meshes for decades, even before she was pharaoh.”
“Why do you say ‘infiltrating’?” It seemed an odd description, given that the pharaoh’s job was to serve as the Assembly Key, the liaison between the meshes and the elected Assembly.
“Infiltrate may be the wrong word. She controls the interstellar meshes in ways no one understands. And the meshes control civilization.” She continued to walk in silence, and I kept pace, my thoughts churning.
Without the networks that tied humanity together, civilization couldn’t exist. They affected every facet of our lives, from world-spanning webs to nano-sized networks in our bodies. The meshes even extended into a different universe, Kyle space, what some people called psiberspace, as a Hilbert space spanned by the quantum wave functions that described a person’s brain. In other words, your thoughts determined your location in Kyle space. People having a conversation were “next” to each other there even if light-years separated them in our universe. You couldn’t physically visit the Kyle but you could transform your thoughts there if you were a trained operator with proper neural enhancement. The Kyle mesh made almost instantaneous communication across light-years possible, and that held together interstellar civilization.
We had just one “little” problem; although trained telepaths called telops could use the Kyle mesh, they could neither create nor maintain it. The power drawn by that immense network would burn out their brains. Only members of the Ruby Dynasty, the strongest known psions, survived its power. The Ruby Pharaoh created and recreated the mesh continually, and she maintained it with her nephew, the Imperator.
Lavinda and I came out on a terrace that overlooked the mountains. Lower terraces stepped down from our feet like gigantic steps lush with trees sculpted to resemble birds that had never existed on Raylicon. At the bottom, far below, a forest spread out, and beyond the trees, the barren peaks of the mountains jutted into the sky, black rock streaked with red. It was an eerie landscape, the beauty and rich life of the palace a bitter contrast to the dying world.
“Is the pharaoh still at the palace?” I asked.
“Yes, she’s here. She’s working. We will set up a meeting for you when she’s ready.” Lavinda considered me. “Just be prepared.”
I blinked. “For what?”
“Pharaoh Dyhianna sometimes has trouble expressing herself. She’s almost ninety, and in all those decades her mind has evolved, augmented by neural implants that let her use Kyle space.” Dryly she added, “Who the hell knows what she means half the time. The imperator seems to understand her, but he’s the only one.”
Ninety? The woman I had met looked in her thirties. She must have some golden meds in her body to delay aging. I couldn’t begin to imagine what nearly a century of using the otherworldly Kyle would do to a person.
General Majda and four guards escorted me to the room—if a word as mundane as “room” could describe the jeweled chamber we entered. Gilded mosaics covered its surfaces. The dark tiles where the walls met the floor evoked a silhouette of the jagged mountain range outside. Above that horizon, the mosaics glowed red, pink, and gold like the Raylican sunset. Higher up, the tiles turned blue, darkening until they met the ceiling. Stars glittered near the top like diamonds. Hell, they probably were diamonds, real ones dug up from the ground rather than the perfect synthetics created in labs. The domed ceiling curved high overhead, tiled with moonstones. A chandelier of diamonds hung from its topmost point.
Pharaoh Dyhianna sat at a console table across the room. Night had fallen. The sky showed beyond the arched window next to her console, and silvery starlight bathed her, streaming through the glass. Ghostly holos floated above her console in swirls of color. She had leaned back in her chair with her eyes closed. She wore no gauntlets, only simple bands around her wrists that I had missed at first glance. They could pass for pearly bracelets, except I knew they allowed a prong from her console to click into her wrist sockets so she could link to the Kyle mesh.
We stopped just inside the door. I glanced at General Majda, and she shook her head slightly. I suspected she hadn’t expected to find the pharaoh still working. We stayed put, silent and with respect. No one told me not to look, though. I couldn’t stop staring. It wasn’t that she was doing anything. I’d have thought she’d fallen asleep if I hadn’t known she was visiting another universe with her mind. I mean seriously, what did that mean? I couldn’t fathom how her mind existed in that Elsewhere place.
The pharaoh suddenly opened her eyes and looked at me. I had always considered the phrase “riveted in place” bizarre, since people weren’t hammered into the floor like machinery, besides which, who used rivets anymore. But in this moment, it made perfect sense. I couldn’t move.
“General Majda, thank you,” Dyhianna said. “I will let you know when we are done.”
Vaj Majda inclined her head and withdrew from the room, leaving me with the four guards. I had thought everyone had to bow to the Ruby Pharaoh, but apparently not the Majda Matriarch, who was a queen in her own right. That realization pulled me out of my daze. I bowed from the waist, which I would have done when I’d first met her if anyone had bothered to mention that this person was the freaking empress of not one, but two universes.
Dyhianna smiled. “Major, come sit with me.”
As I crossed the room, I shored up my mental barriers. She indicated a chair across the table and I sat down facing her. Swirling holos separated us, so that I saw her through the translucent images. At least this time I’d had a chance to look up the proper form of address.
“My honor at your presence, Your Majesty,” I said. “You grace me with your notice.”
I expected her to incline her head the way they all seemed to do or some other regal gesture that no one but the aristocracy could make convincing. Instead, she just said, “Thank you.” She touched a panel and the holos disappeared. Diffuse light came from the chandelier above, adding to the starlight.
“Where would you like to start?” she asked.
Straight and to the point. I liked that. “I need to know everything about what you saw.”
“Are you recording?”
“Yes.” I showed her my gauntlet. “I have an EI.” I thought, Max, are you getting all this?
I’m recording everything, he answered.
The pharaoh rubbed her eyes, looking very human and tired, not at all what I expected for an interstellar potentate. She set her hand back on the table. “Aide Ganz was in his office in Selei City. Secondary Calaj walked into the room and shot him.”
I still wasn’t sure why they wanted me in on this. “That makes the crime the jurisdiction of the J-Forces internal affairs office in Selei City on the world Parthonia.”
“Yes. They are working on the case.” She paused. “Many people are working on it.”
“Then why me?”
She considered me. “Calaj came here. We believe she is hiding on Raylicon, possibly in the ancient aqueducts under the city.”
Ho! If a murderer had invaded the Undercity, my territory, this became personal. “How do you know she went there?”
“I’m not sure.” She exhaled. “We’ve tracked her to Raylicon. As far as her going under the city, that’s just a—well, I suppose you could call it my intuition.”
“All right.” I didn’t know what to make of that, at least not yet. “Do you know why she shot Tavan Ganz?”
She pushed back her hair, a tousled black mane that fell over her shoulders and arms. It looked like she hadn’t bothered to cut it in decades. “It wasn’t her.”
“Secondary Calaj didn’t shoot him?”
“No.”
“But you just said she did.”
“She pressed the firing stud.”
“Isn’t that shooting him?”
The pharaoh shook her head. “The other did.”
I tried another tack. “Do you mean someone else was in the room with Calaj and Ganz, and that person forced Secondary Calaj to fire?”
“No.” Her gaze took on a distant quality. “The other one.”
“The other what?”
“In the Secondary.”
“You mean an alternate personality?”
“I suppose it might feel that way. But no.”
I had the oddest sense, as if she were only partly here. “Your Majesty, you need to concentrate yourself back into this room.”
She focused on me. “What?”
“You’re drifting.” I had no idea if I were allowed to address her this way, but it was the only way I knew how to speak, so I forged ahead. “You’re not all here.”
“Where do you think I am?” She didn’t sound offended, only curious.
“In Kyle space.”
She tilted her head. “I can’t be in Kyle space while I’m talking to you.”
“Perhaps not literally.” I had no clue how it worked. “You’re doing something, swapping back and forth with your mind. I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me, and I think it’s because you’re partly in a place where you see things that are clearer to you than to me.”
“Ah, well.” She rubbed her eyes. “I was thinking of Tavan Ganz. Gods, what must he have thought in that moment she fired? His life held so much promise, all extinguished in one instant.”
I had thought similar when I read his file. “I’m sorry.”
Dyhianna regarded me steadily. “Secondary Calaj is a Jagernaut, which means she has a node in her spine. That node has an EI. The EI killed Tavan Ganz.”
“Do you mean the EI took over her mind?” That was supposed to be impossible.
“No.” After a moment, she added, “It was her.”
“She and her EI became one personality?”
“Not literally. But yes. In a sense.”
“What sense?”
“It’s hard to explain.” She glanced at the tech-embedded gauntlets on my wrists. “When you communicate with your EI using thoughts, you feel as if you are talking to it in your mind, yes?”
“Well, yes, I do.”
“You aren’t, actually. The EI sends signals to the biomech threads in your body, which carry the signals to bio-electrodes in your brain. They fire your neurons in patterns you interpret as thought.”
That made it sound so impersonal, not at all like Max. “Tech-induced telepathy.”
“Essentially.” She grimaced. “Calaj’s EI is corrupting the neural firings of her brain.”
“Turning her into a murderer.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t think that could happen.” Before I had a biomech web implanted in my body, I researched them in excruciating detail. They were safe. The biomech webs carried by Jagernauts had even more security than my system. The J-Force had an entire division dedicated to ensuring the symbiosis between the EI and its human host worked.
I shook my head. “Calaj’s system would have deactivated at any hint of trouble.”
“Apparently it didn’t.”
Maybe, but that seemed unlikely. Regardless, whatever happened between Calaj and her EI, it was internal to the Jagernaut, not the pharaoh. “How can you know it altered her thoughts?”
“I was there.”
I squinted at the pharaoh. “In her mind?”
“No. Yes.” She sounded frustrated. “In the web.”
“You mean the Kyle mesh?”
“Yes.”
“And that put you in her mind?” I felt stupid asking the question, it sounded so odd.
“It didn’t. I am—” She blew out a gust of air. “I don’t know how to describe it, Major, except that I was linked to her mind when she killed Tavan Ganz.”
“But how?” I needed to learn more about telops, the telepathic operators who manipulated the Kyle mesh. “Were the two of you connected through Kyle space?”
“In theory, that isn’t possible. She wasn’t linked to the Kyle when she killed Ganz.”
“In theory?”
The pharaoh rubbed her neck, working at the muscles. “Sometimes I get more than I should.”
Get more? “I don’t understand what you mean.”
She watched me with her sunrise eyes. “Sometimes I get more from the Kyle than I should be able to pick up. I can’t link to someone who isn’t also jacked into the Kyle mesh. But I was linked to her mind during the murder.”
It sounded like a nightmare. “Can you describe how it happened?”
“I was working in the Kyle.” She took a breath. “I felt the violence in her mind. Somehow it pulled me to her. Or she drew me in. I don’t know how. I’m not sure she realized we connected. We were in a neural link when she killed Aide Ganz.”
Despite her outward calm, I could tell she was upset. The experience had hit her at a deep level. All Jagernauts were psions—empaths and telepaths. Those traits served them in battle, helping them predict what their enemies intended and strengthening the neural links they made with the EI brains on their star fighters. It gave them an edge no other fighters could claim, but that great strength was also their greatest weakness. They had the highest suicide rate of any members of the armed forces, despite all the techniques they learned to protect them from the cognitive dissonance of turning empaths into weapons. If the pharaoh had actually experienced what she described, then as an empath in the mind of an empath, she would have felt everything the killer felt, not only what drove the Jagernaut to commit murder, but also what the victim felt—his shock, his fear, his death.
No wonder Pharaoh Dyhianna was so shaken.
I spoke as gently as I knew how. “I’m sorry.” For her and especially for Ganz, a vibrant young man who had done nothing but prevent Calaj from entering the office of the Finance Councilor of the Imperialate. He might very well have saved the Councilor’s life.
“Calaj is going to kill again.” Dyhianna regarded me steadily. “Find her, Major. Before it’s too late.”
Izu Yaxlan. City of ruins.
I walked through the shadows of late afternoon. Weathered structures surrounded me, widely spaced, aged and cracked. These ruins had stood in the desert for thousands of years, built by the first humans stranded on this world. Some people called these ruins the true City of Cries, a silent tribute to our ancestors, who had wept for their lost home. In modern times, the City of Cries had become the name for the modern metropolis of glittering towers and boulevards many kilometers west of these ruins. Someday the powers of Skolia would change the name of that gilded city to one more palatable for tourism. For those of us born here, those of us whose lineage went back six thousand years on this world, Izu Yaxlan would always be the true City of Cries.
Almost no one came to Izu Yaxlan. Tourists were banned. Although no formal laws prevented citizens of Raylicon from coming here, our unwritten laws discouraged people from visiting the sacred ruins. I came alone, aware I was trespassing on traditions that went farther back in our history than any of us remembered. I walked with care and respect.
I couldn’t imagine my ancestors living here. They had built Izu Yaxlan as a tribute to their lost homes, but Earth soon became a myth, faded with time. We had known only that an unnamed race of beings had left humans on Raylicon and vanished. Whatever their reasons, they stranded my ancestors here with nothing more than the empty shells of their abandoned starships.
Those first humans barely survived. Their one hope; the starships left by their abductors contained the library of a starfaring race. Desperation drove them to learn those records. Many of the records were corrupted, but my ancestors managed to unravel the details of eerie sciences unlike any we used today. Although it took centuries, they eventually figured out star travel. They built new ships and went in search of their lost home. They never found Earth, but they built the Ruby Empire, an interstellar civilization that spread its colonies across the stars. The Ruby Pharaohs rose to power then. Those warrior queens differed so much from Dyhianna Selei, it was hard to believe she descended from them. Had the millennia weakened the dynastic line? At first glance, it looked that way, but I didn’t understand the pharaoh. She was the endpoint of six thousand years of genetic tinkering and drift, and I had no idea how to interpret the results.
And then Earth found us, their lost children.
Our DNA proved our relationship, but nothing on Earth from six thousand years ago even vaguely resembled a civilization implied by these ruins. They were too advanced. We might never learn our origins; the Virus Wars during Earth’s late twenty-first century wiped out a substantial portion of her population, including whatever clues remained about my people. This much we knew: when Earth was just entering its Bronze Age, my ancestors raised an interstellar empire. Built on poorly understood technology and plagued by volatile politics, the Ruby Empire survived only a few centuries before it collapsed, plunging my people into a barbarism that lasted four thousand years.
Barely a day had passed since I talked to the pharaoh, but on Raylicon that meant eighty hours, enough time for me to interview the other members in Calaj’s Jagernaut squad. It didn’t help. They didn’t understand her actions, either. I needed a different approach.
The ruins of Izu Yaxlan lay at the base of a cliff that rose straight up from the desert, the first in a series of mountains stepping into the sky. I walked through the city on a broad path in the direction of those peaks. Sand covered the broken flagstones beneath my feet, red grains that glinted with blue minerals. I passed crumbling stone houses, plazas with dry fountains, and a ball court. Doorways gaped, each frame carved like a beast’s mouth open in a roar, its horns curving up in an arch. An octagonal pillar stood like a sentinel by the path. Wind blew through the ruins, keening as if it held the ghosts of all those lost souls who had raised this city while grieving for their lost home.
“Shrine of the desolate,” I murmured, recalling an Undercity song from my youth. Hidden paths, forever gone, forever lost, vanished like the seas, vanished like the cries of the lost children. Music filled the Undercity, mournful and elusive, but we sang only for ourselves, when no one from the above world could overhear our laments.
Eventually I reached the tower I sought, a spire encrusted by red sand and glinting blue specks, its paint long ago eroded off its walls. Inside, it consisted of one room about thirty paces across. The flagstone floor was broken in places, but still intact. Cracks jagged through the walls, which tapered to a point several stories above the ground. Parts of the roof had collapsed, letting the sepia rays of the setting sun slant across the interior walls.
I waited.
A rustle came behind me. I turned to see a man who stood more than two meters tall. Despite his broad shoulders, his great height made him seem long and narrow. His ascetic face commanded attention, with his large, hooked nose, dark eyes and skin, and high cheekbones. He wore a black robe as protection against the blowing sand, but here in the tower, he left it untied, showing his clothes, black trousers and a green shirt embroidered around the collar with gold thread. His hair hung in a queue down his back.
He regarded me with an ageless gaze. “We rarely have visitors in Izu Yaxlan.” His voice rumbled like muted thunder. He used Iotic, a language almost no one spoke except royalty, nobility, and scholars. I knew it for two reasons: in the army, they expected officers to speak the language of the dynasty we served, and as a PI, I needed to know the language of my most elite clients.
“I come with honor for the city,” I said. “I apologize for my trespass.”
He nodded. “You are Raylican.”
“Undercity,” I said. “Then Pharaoh’s Army. Major.”
He had no reaction, at least not that I could read. Most people found my story absurd. I had been born in the Undercity. They called us dust rats. No one even expected me to enlist, let alone become an officer. I wouldn’t have believed it, either, if I hadn’t been the one who clawed my way up the hierarchy. People said I didn’t have what it took, that I wasn’t likely to achieve anything, let alone the almost impossible jump from the enlisted to officer ranks. They laughed at the idea of a dust rat as a military commander. Well, screw them. I had succeeded.
This man, however, had no such reaction. He said only, “You are here for the army?”
“I’m retired now,” I said. “ISC hired me as a private investigator.”
“Investigating what?”
“A murder.”
“Why did you come to Izu Yaxlan?”
“To talk to the Uzan.”
His voice cooled. “Why?” No one demanded an audience with the Uzan.
“The killer is a Jagernaut,” I said. “We think she’s hiding on Raylicon.”
“We don’t hide murderers.” His gaze never wavered. “We don’t murder.”
We don’t murder. A simple statement with a world of complications. He belonged to an ancient tribe of warriors called the Abaj Tacalique, led by the Uzan. You didn’t enter this sacred city without their permission, much less involve them in a criminal investigation. They descended from the original bodyguards of the Ruby queens and swore their lives to protecting the dynasty and Izu Yaxlan. In this modern age, they were Jagernauts, all of them, some living here, others scattered among the stars.
He considered me in silence. I waited.
Finally he said, “Come.” He turned and strode out of the tower, through its crumbling archway.
At least he hadn’t kicked me out of the city. I joined him outside in the darkening shadows of evening. We set off through Izu Yaxlan, and I had to lengthen my stride to keep up with him. Wind scented with the fragrance of desert-stalk plants rustled our hair and swirled sand along our path. A small beast squawked in the sky above us, a flying ruxin, its body smaller than the palm of my hand, its wing span long and wide. Little dragon.
We entered a building through the gaping jaws of a gargoyle with stone fangs framing its arch. Most of the structure lay open to the sky and rubble covered the floor. The Abaj walked to the one area still covered by the roof. A staircase there spiraled into the ground. As we descended the ancient stairs, the stone walls pressed in with barely enough room for us go single file. Their surfaces felt cracked under my hand. My boot hit a chunk of stone and it clattered down the stairs. No matter. I had grown up in worse. The Undercity mostly consisted of aqueducts, some huge, others as small as underground pipes. Claustrophobia never bothered me. Darkness? I didn’t care. The broken pieces of life had no power to inspire my fear.
Eventually the light disappeared, and I made my way with my hand on the wall, using one foot to check each step before I put down my weight. Max, I thought. Activate infrared.
Done, he answered.
The world took on an eerie, blurred glow. IR filters in my eyes let me see at wavelengths longer than visible light, those that produced heat. Colder areas looked dark and heat showed in brighter hues. The walls were dark blue, but the Abaj in front of me blazed white-gold.
We continued until we reached a chamber at the bottom of the stairs. The Abaj touched the wall there in a fast pattern. A line of light appeared, gradually widening. He was opening a door.
Deactivate infrared, I thought.
The blaze of light from the Abaj vanished, but the light beyond remained, a cool blue glow. I followed him through the doorway—and froze. A cavernous command center spread out before us. Consoles filled the place, holos rotating in the air above them, and catwalks ran along the walls at different levels. Abaj walked among the equipment like giants in their milieu. Most weren’t wearing the robes that protected them from the desert above. They all dressed like my guide, in dark trousers and shirts bright in greens, blue, and gold. Some stood posted around the walls like standing stones, watching, analyzing, protecting. The air had an astringent smell as if they had scoured this center clean, down to the last speck of sand.
Your heartbeat just spiked, Max said.
I breathed in deeply, calming my surge of adrenalin. Did anyone else even know so many Abaj worked here, in such an incredible center? Probably the Majdas, but certainly none of my people, and we knew what went on below the desert better than anyone in Cries.
None of the Abaj spoke. I doubted they even needed words. They were all Jagernauts. That put them among the one in a million humans with telepathic as well as empathic ability. The biomech in their bodies enhanced their abilities, creating neural meshes that linked them together.
I strengthened my mental barriers, grateful for the training I received in the army to protect my thoughts. It was one of the first skills they thought us, in this universe where even your thoughts were no longer necessarily private.
We crossed the room, passing Abaj warriors seated at consoles, encased in exoskeletons with visors over their eyes. Telops. They linked into the Kyle mesh. This must be how they monitored the orbital defenses for Raylicon, the best-defended planet in the Imperialate. Some who weren’t working turned their dark gazes our way; others ignored us. They showed no other reaction.
Abaj were the exception to the matriarchal roots of Imperial Skolia. In these modern times, we had achieved an egalitarian society where women and men had equal rights, at least as long as you weren’t a Majda prince, but the remnants of our history hadn’t disappeared. The Abaj had been an anomaly. Male warriors. A mutation in their gene pool proved lethal to female fetuses. They hadn’t become extinct, though. They didn’t just look alike, they were identical, all of them clones.
The Kyle genes that produced psions also carried harmful mutations, which was why empaths and telepaths had become so rare even though all of the original settlers had been psions. The small gene pool of our ancestors nearly killed them. Desperation forced them to learn genetic engineering, using the libraries in the abandoned starships. Kyle genes were recessive, so if you inherited lethal genes from only one parent, you survived. One of the worst mutations, the CK complex, was linked to the X chromosome. Men carried one X and one Y, so it didn’t affect them. If fact, CK suppressed other damaging mutations, which meant if you carried it unpaired, you were more likely to survive. As a result, after six thousand years, most male psions carried CK. Women had two X chromosomes; if a female fetus inherited CK on both, she died. It led to a crushing fatality rate among female psions.
That rarity elevated female empaths and telepaths in our culture, like the Majdas. However, it became a curse for the strongest psions, the Ruby Dynasty. The Imperialate needed them; without Ruby psions, the Kyle web didn’t work. So the Assembly sought any means to control them. I didn’t envy the pharaoh, who had to survive the desperate politics of an empire where she served as a titular sovereign. I was beginning to understand why the Majdas felt so protective toward her. She didn’t have their military strength, so they provided it in their unswerving loyalty to the House of Skolia and the Pharaoh’s Army.
Cloning psions proved difficult, though we didn’t yet know why. The stronger the psion, the greater the fatality rate. The ancient scientists had succeeded with only about thirty Abaj. All of the Abaj since then descended as clones of those thirty men. A chill went up my back as I realized I was seeing essentially the same warriors who had walked this planet thousands of years in our past. We lost so much in the Dark Ages after the fall of the Ruby Empire, but the Abaj survived in their secret cloisters, using cloning methods passed from generation to generation. They continued long after the knowledge of why those methods worked had vanished into a darkness that lasted four millennia.
We reached a dais on the far side of the room. An Abaj sat at a large console up there, his deep-set gaze never wavering as he watched us. Streaks of grey showed at his temples. If he was communicating with my escort, I couldn’t tell. My biomech could link to theirs only if they granted access, which none of them had done. I was surprised they even allowed me to enter this inner sanctum.
The man on the dais had an even more imposing presence than the others, a sense of contained energy, like a weapon poised for release. His wrist gauntlets glowed with lights, embedded with so much tech-mech, they probably drew energy from the microfusion reactor that powered his body. This was the Uzan, the leader of the Abaj.
He indicated a smart-chair across the console from him. When I sat down, the chair shifted, adapting to my weight, trying to ease my tension. It didn’t help. I sat on its edge.
“I am told you work for the Ruby Pharaoh,” the Uzan said.
I certainly hadn’t told him. “What makes you think that?”
His voice rumbled with such resonance, I half expected the ground to shake. “The pharaoh requested your assistance. We serve the pharaoh. Ask your questions.”
“How do you know she requested my assistance?”
“We are Abaj,” he said, as if that explained everything.
I tried a different tack. “What have you heard about the murder?”
“Nothing.”
“Your oath to the Ruby Dynasty includes a vow of secrecy, yes?” I motioned toward the rest of the center. “For all of you. So our discussion here is confidential.”
“Yes, that is true.” His gaze never wavered. “Unless Pharaoh Dyhianna commands otherwise.”
“I understand.” I told him what I knew. When I finished, I said, “The pharaoh says she doesn’t know why Secondary Calaj killed Ganz.”
“And you question the veracity of what she told you.”
Damn. I thought I’d hidden my doubts. I spoke carefully. “It seems—unusual.”
His gaze never wavered. “It is unlikely she imagined what she described. Whether or not you would experience the events in the same manner, I can’t say. But you must begin from the assumption that she speaks a truth.”
Interesting. “You say ‘a truth.’ You believe more than one exists?”
“I don’t know.” He leaned forward, his elbows resting on the console, his green and gold shirt a contrast to his dark coloring. “If you think we are harboring the killer, you are wrong.”
“I had wondered,” I admitted. “I’d have come here regardless, though. As Jagernauts, you more than anyone else can give me insight into her motives.”
“Why? Jagernauts can’t commit murder.”
“Supposedly.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“We don’t know for certain what happened,” I amended.
“You think it didn’t happen?”
“No, it happened. Calaj shot Tavan Ganz. I’m wondering if she believed he was an enemy of ISC.” That was no good, either; the J-Force couldn’t have its top officers executing people. It was better than the alternative, though, that Calaj had gone insane and was murdering the citizens she had sworn to protect.
“If it were that simple,” the Uzan said, “Secondary Calaj would have reported him to her CO. Her involvement would have stopped there unless they asked her to act as their agent.”
“She didn’t report him to anyone. As far as we can tell, they had no connection.”
He shook his head. “It is impossible for me to envision a scenario where a Jagernaut would commit such a murder. I use my spinal node continually. I’ve had it for fifty years. I cannot imagine any way in which it could let me commit murder. It would freeze me in place if I tried.”
“What if it corrupted your thoughts, so you didn’t consider the act murder?”
He motioned at the command center. “If it corrupted mine, it would have to corrupt every Abaj on Raylicon without any of us realizing it. We are all in contact. Hundreds of us.”
“Most Jagernauts aren’t Abaj, though,” I said. “They work in squads of only four people.”
“Have you talked to Calaj’s squad?”
“Yes.” It had given me a grand total of zero insights. “None of them noticed anything unusual.”
He rubbed his chin. “A squad monitors itself, as do their ships and the weapons platforms they work with. Have you checked those records?”
“Yes, several times.” I’d spent the night going through every file the military provided for Calaj and her squad. All that endless, tedious work had turned up zilch. “It’s all in order.”
He sat back in his chair. “Then how do you think I can help you?”
“So far every method we’ve used to find Calaj has failed.” I tilted my head toward the center below. “You monitor an entire planet. And as Jagernauts, you’re better able to predict her actions.”
“Ever since you contacted us, we have searched for Secondary Calaj. We haven’t found her.”
I blinked, startled. I’d seen no sign of communication between him and anyone else here. Then again, the gauntlets on his wrist continually flickered with lights. “Maybe she’s left Raylicon.”
“On what? Both we and ISC are monitoring all planetary traffic. She hasn’t left.”
I scowled. “ISC can’t even locate the signature of her biomech web.”
“It’s possible to mask biomech signals.” He considered me. “As I’ve no doubt you know.”
Perceptive. I was good at hiding the signals from the biomech within my own body. In my line of work, it was a necessity. I tried to read his expression, with no success. “What would you do if you were Calaj?”
“If I just wanted to hide,” he said, “I would go to a remote location, bringing whatever sensor shrouds and supplies I could carry, go underground, and stay on the move.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of that answer. “What else would you want to do besides hide?”
“You say the pharaoh believes Calaj will kill again.”
“Yes.”
“Then she has to go to a place with people to kill.”
“The City of Cries.”
He regarded me steadily. “We can monitor the city in great detail. She isn’t there.”
I knew of only one other possibility, one harder to monitor, not only because of its location and poverty, but also because of the cyber-wizards who hid their illegal activity. “The Undercity.”
“It is a possibility.”
Well, shit. I hated that thought just as much now as I had the other times it had occurred to me this past day. We already had enough trouble with our own killers in the Undercity; we didn’t need to import more of them from offworld.
“It should be impossible for one of you to murder,” I said. “Yet it happened. I need to understand how the symbiosis works between a Jagernaut and their spinal node.”
He studied me, his deep-set eyes revealing nothing.
Then he said, “I can offer you more than insight.”