CHAPTER II CHAPTER II
VETERANS ADMINISTRATION
I sat sprawled in a chair in the sunken living room of my penthouse, my legs stretched across the floor and light pouring in the window-wall. Outside, far below the tower, the panoramic view of the Vanished Sea Desert spread to the horizon. Inside, the white carpet shimmered with a glossy finish that was actually a holoscreen. Currently, a holographic replica of the Quida mansion filled the room. The images came from Max’s recordings and the police analysis Talon had finally sent me. The scene looked the same as I remembered from last night.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Still no ransom demand?”
“Not a word.” Max spoke using the comm in my wrist gauntlets. I preferred talking when we were alone. Of course, that was only after I’d deactivated any nosy Majda tech trying to watch the penthouse. It was the price I paid for accepting this gorgeous place; it belonged to the Majdas, so it included their security monitors. Fortunately, I was better at outwitting their spy tech than it was at spying on me.
“Maybe Mara Quida went offworld,” I said.
“Not according to any flight record I’ve found,” Max said. “The police, Majda security, and Scorpio Corporation also did checks, not just of who bought tickets or boarded ships, but also a visual analysis of every passenger on any flight.”
“With her resources, she could have paid for anonymity.”
“For what purpose? She had every reason to stay.”
It certainly looked that way. Last night should have been a coup for Mara Quida. I got up and walked over to the holo of the crumpled scroll. “The negotiations were finished, right? Quida had already finalized the Metropoli deal.”
“That’s right. The contracts have been signed and processed.”
I passed my hand through the holographic scroll. “Her disappearance could make Metropoli doubt Scorpio Corporation, maybe even spur them to question the contract.”
“According to every report I’ve received or intercepted, the deal is proceeding as planned.”
Intercepted. That sounded like Max-speak for cracking other people’s secured systems. “Anything from the beetle bot I sent after whoever tried to shoot me last night?”
“Nothing yet. Wherever it went, it’s either out of my range or shrouding its systems.”
I noticed he left out the other possibility, that the shooter had caught or destroyed my bot. I scowled. I liked that little beetle. “Let me know when you make contact.” I paced through the holos as if they were ghosts. “Do you think Lukas Quida killed her? He inherits everything, all her assets, connections, real estate, even her place on the Scorpio board of directors.”
“He is the obvious choice,” Max said. “Maybe too obvious. Several hundred people saw him at the gala before, during, and after her disappearance.”
“Yah, well, he could have hired someone to whack her.”
“True. But why be so obvious about it?”
“Maybe that’s the point. Make it look absurd to suspect him.”
“No body has been found,” Max reminded me. “We don’t know she is dead.”
“I hope not.” Her husband had seemed genuinely agonized last night. He didn’t strike me as a good suspect, but I did have some questions. “Set up a meeting with Lukas Quida later today.”
“What about your appointment at the Veterans Administration?”
I stopped pacing. “What appointment?”
“With Adept Sanva.”
“Oh, that.” I shifted my weight. “Reschedule it.”
“You’ve already rescheduled twice.”
I went to the wall console and smacked my palm against a panel. The holos in my living room disappeared like an Undercity thief evading the cops. It left me surrounded by the elegance of a penthouse I never would have chosen myself, as much as I liked it. I’d always felt like a visitor here, never truly at home.
“Bhaaj?” Max asked.
“What?”
“You should go to your appointment with Adept Sanva.”
“Why?”
“Because if you don’t, you’ll be angry at yourself.”
What, now my EI was analyzing me? “You’re a biomech brain, Max. Not a psychologist.”
“I have entire libraries dedicated to psychology. I also have many years as your EI. I know you.”
Great. My EI was pulling the I know you card. Even worse, he was probably right. His brain evolved as we interacted, and after more than ten years together, it did sometimes seem like he knew me better than I knew myself.
“All right,” I grumbled. “I’ll go see Sanva. But get the meeting with Lukas, too. I want to talk to him as soon as possible.”
The Veterans Administration stood in the Commodore’s Plaza in Cries. All the buildings here served the army, fronting on an open area paved in white and blue stones. A fountain in the center showed the ancient goddess of war with her wings spread and her head tilted back as she blew into a battle horn. Water spumed out of the horn into the air and cascaded down her body in glistening drops.
It never ceased to amaze me what people in Cries took for granted. We lived on a dying world where the seas had dried up ages ago. Raylicon had no surface water; you had to dig deep to find it even here in the north, the most livable area of the planet. Deadly chemicals poisoned the water, making purification plants the most lucrative business on the world. In the Undercity, we had several grottos, even an underground lake, but none of those contained drinkable water. To survive, we scrapped together filtration machines and siphoned energy from Cries to run them. Yet this city boasted so much wealth, her people could waste water in a fountain that sprayed huge amounts of the life-saving liquid into the air. Cries probably even filtered it. No one wanted to get sued if someone drank from the fountain and ended up in the hospital or died.
I crossed the plaza to the VA building. In Cries, the army topped the city hierarchy, separate but equal to the corporate big dealers. The VA reflected that status, a tall building with displays on its outer walls showing confident soldiers in spotless fatigues, their heads lifted with pride. Too bad we’d never actually looked like that. Most of my time in combat, I’d been dusty, covered in mud, soaked to the bone, or drenched in sweat. Nanites in the cloth tried to clean our fatigues, which maybe helped boost morale, but it didn’t stop you from dying, both literally and emotionally, bit by bit, until you built so many defenses, you became numb.
Inside the VA, I found a lobby with consoles at chest height. Benches lined the walls and four people sat on them, two women and two men, all looking bored. They were like the soldiers I’d enlisted with. Like me. None of us had been considered officer material. Many of the higher-ups hadn’t believed I’d survive basic training. A dust rat? Ludicrous. My response had been Just watch me. I refused to give up, and eventually I’d made the supposedly impossible leap to the officer ranks. The army used my skills well, putting me on task forces to solve problems in weapons and strategy. I retired after twenty years and became a PI, intrigued by the idea of solving problems for a living. But I never forgot where I came from, below the city.
I stood at a console and pressed my finger against the screen.
“Name and rank?” the console asked.
“Major Bhaajan, retired. I have an appointment with Adept Sanva.”
“ID verified.” A holo flashed, the Majda insignia, a hawk soaring through the sky. It vanished as fast as it came. Huh. It looked like the console had flagged me as a Majda employee.
“An escort will be out to take you to your appointment,” the screen said.
I glanced toward the bored vets waiting their turn. “Other people are ahead of me.”
The screen didn’t answer, probably since I hadn’t asked a question, or maybe it just found my comment irrelevant. I scowled, then stalked over to the bench and sat down with the others.
A man in fatigues walked under the archway across the room and headed in my direction. He looked like the people in the images on the walls, perfect and professional. He stopped in front of me. “Welcome, Major Bhaajan.” Lifting his hand, he invited me to follow him. “This way please.”
I motioned toward the other people, who were watching with varying degrees of irritation and resignation. “They were here first.”
The man blinked, looking confused. “You are next.”
I didn’t want to give him a hard time. He was just doing his job, following orders and the city hierarchy. Apparently my Majda connection or my retired officer status put me on top of this little pecking order. Screw that. I’d spent a substantial portion of my life being treated as if I were less than nothing, and I wasn’t about to inflict that on other people.
“You can take them ahead of me,” I said. “I’ll wait my turn.”
He stood awkwardly, as if hoping I’d change my mind. When I stayed put, he left the room. One of the other vets nodded to me, the barest motion. Then we all went back to our boredom.
The console’s voice spoke in the air. “Sergeant Mazo, proceed to room fourteen for your appointment with Doctor Raven.”
A man stood and left the room through the archway. The rest of us continued to wait.
Eventually, after the other three people were called, the console announced my name, to meet Adept Sanva in room three. I headed for the archway, reminding myself I didn’t feel nervous about talking to a neurological adept. I normally had no problem with healers, including doctors who specialized in neuroscience and psychology. But she applied her training to empaths. Psions. Kyle operators. Whatever you called them, it meant the same thing. I had absolutely no desire to use my abilities as an empath. The last thing I wanted to experience was other people’s moods. Hell, I had enough trouble understanding my own emotions. I’d always suppressed my empathic ability.
It made survival easier.
Adept Sanva turned out to be an older woman with gray hair and an unlined face that suggested her body carried nanomeds to delay her aging. The large desk where she sat had glossy holoscreens for its surface. The room was airy, with flowering plants in pots and windows that let in sunlight.
Sanva looked up as I entered. “Welcome, Major.” She motioned to a smart-chair. “Make yourself comfortable.”
I sat down, about as comfortable as a sand-hawk caught in a prickle-pot.
She considered me. “I understand you would like to redo your Kyle tests.”
“Not exactly.” I didn’t want to answer. She was supposed to be an empath. She should know what I felt, right? Except it didn’t work that way. Everyone had natural barriers in their mind, and mine were stronger than most.
“Not exactly?” she prodded.
“The army tested me when I enlisted.” I pushed my hand through my hair, tousling the black mane around my shoulders. “They said I have zero Kyle ability.”
Sanva tapped her desk and hieroglyphics flowed across it in a glowing river of data. “Actually, it doesn’t say zero ability.” She looked up at me. “It says ‘none detected.’”
So yah, apparently “none detected” didn’t mean “no ability.” I’d never realized that until last year. “The Majdas believe my tests were wrong. They think I might be an empath. I want to find out if that’s true.” I didn’t really, but I’d hidden from this for too long. If I was even a marginal empath, it could be useful in my business, not to mention in life in general. Besides, it was ridiculous that I could be so good at solving other people’s mysteries and so bad at facing my own.
“Yes, they put a flag to that effect in your file.” She sat back in her chair. “Have you noticed anything to make you think they are correct?”
“Well, no.” That wasn’t a lie, not exactly.
Sanva waited. After a moment, I added, “I may have suppressed any ability because, uh—”
“Yes?”
“Because of my birth.” I felt stupid saying the words.
She regarded me curiously. “You can’t remember your birth.”
“Not literally.” I shifted my weight on her “smart” chair, which seemed pretty dumb. No matter how much it readjusted to make me more comfortable, nothing worked. “An EI helped me reconstruct the events and their implications.”
“And?”
“My mother died.” I spoke curtly. “It was in a cave. She bled to death. Apparently she was an empath. She tried to reach my mind, to comfort me while I cried. We made a link. When she died, I felt it. That left mental scars.” There. It was said. I waited.
Sanva stared at me. “You were born in a cave?”
That was all she got out of my miserable little story? Everyone in the Undercity lived in caves. Those homes could be works of art, but, yah, they were caves. The surprise wasn’t that my mother gave birth in one, but that it had been rough and cold, and she had been alone, with no help. I had no idea why, since no records existed of my father or other relatives.
“Yah,” I said coldly. “I was born in the Undercity.” She knew that. It was in my files.
“I didn’t realize the conditions.” She spoke in a gentle voice. “I could see how such an experience might damage your ability to make empathic connections.”
I took a moment to breathe. It wasn’t her fault that talking about this made me jittery. “I don’t know that I want to fix it. I’ve been fine. But it seems I should find out how it affected me.”
She touched her desk, bringing up a new display. “According to this, a recent medical exam picked up traces of the neural transmitter psiamine in your brain. Only psions produce psiamine, and only when they are using the Kyle structures in their cortex.”
“Does that mean I was, uh—feeling moods?”
“Possibly.” She spoke in a friendly manner. “Did you notice anything?”
“I’m not sure.” Her calm nature made her easier to deal with than I’d expected. “I mean, I’m good at reading people. You have to be, to survive in the Undercity. But it’s more reading body language, facial expressions, that sort of thing.”
“Have you ever heard someone else’s thoughts?”
“Just my EI. But that’s all tech.” Dryly I added, “That’s annoying enough.”
I am most certainly not annoying, Max thought.
Sanva read the data floating above her desk. “You have a biomech web in your body.” She looked up at me. “And a spinal node?”
“Not in my spine.” I raised my gauntleted wrist. “In here. When I click the gauntlet into my wrist sockets, it connects to my brain.”
She didn’t look surprised. “An ability to use that tech indicates your brain is well suited to the process. Not everyone can link with a neural EI. You may be drawing on the Kyle structures in your brain without realizing it.”
I hesitated. “There is one other thing.”
“Yes?”
“It’s just that—very rarely, I get flashes of, well, I don’t know what you’d call it.” I stopped, feeling stupid.
“Flashes of what?”
She was certainly patient, I’d give her that. “The glimpse of a possible future. It only lasts a few seconds.”
“Precognition?”
“I don’t know.” Gods, I sounded like an idiot.
“It’s rare.” She seemed intrigued, as if I were a puzzle. “More so than empathy. It’s due to the quantum uncertainty in time and energy. The better you know the energy of an event, the more uncertain the time.”
“Those are tiny uncertainties.” I’d had to take quantum engineering during college. “Way too small to notice on any human scale.” As small as Planck’s constant, which meant even our best instruments couldn’t measure the uncertainty in time.
“Yes, generally, that’s true,” she said. “But apparently for some people, the Kyle bodies in their brain interact in such a way to increase the temporal uncertainty.”
I grimaced. “Can you translate that?”
“Your brain increases the uncertainty enough for you to glimpse the future.” She spoke as if this were a perfectly natural event. “It’s one reason people experience déjà vu.”
It didn’t sound real, but then, up until a few years ago, I wouldn’t have expected to have this conversation at all. “Do you think it’s worth pursuing any of this?”
“That depends. Do you want to?”
Good question. I wanted to say no. I’d come here for help, though, and she couldn’t give it if I closed up like a water clam in the desert. I spoke awkwardly. “My people don’t talk about our emotions. But I can’t hide forever.” After a pause, I said, “So yes, I want to pursue it.”
“All right. We’ll see what we can do.” Sanva tapped another panel on her desk. “I’m sending you a file with some exercises. Try them. Let’s meet again in a few days.”
“Exercises?” How the blazes could you exercise being an empath?
“Just relax your mind for a start.”
“I’ll try.” I might as well. People were always telling me I needed to relax. I stood up. “Thanks.”
She stood as well. “Good luck, Major.”
I nodded. Then I escaped her office.
I walked out of the VA into a perfectly sunny day. We never had clouds unless we created them ourselves using weather machines. As someone who’d spent the first sixteen years of her life underground, I never stopped marveling at the open sky, the city towers reflecting its blue expanse—
A silver glint flashed in my side vision. I dove to the side, but not fast enough to avoid being hit. Pain flared in my chest as I smashed into the blue-tiled plaza.
Mist blurred my vision. Impossible mist. I groaned and rolled onto my back. The clear sky stretched above me. Someone was shouting. I tried lifting my arm—felt like lead—it dropped onto my chest. My palm squelched on wetness there.
Bhaaj, don’t move, Max thought. You’ve been hit by a knife. It tore an artery near your heart. I have contacted the hospital and summoned emergency med-bots.
Hurts . . . I couldn’t form coherent thoughts.
A man’s face came into view above me. He looked familiar.
“Major, we have help coming,” he said. “Stay here.”
Like I was going somewhere? I recognized him now; he was the well-meaning fellow who had offered to take me in to see Adept Sanva.
I closed my eyes and passed out . . .
“Stay put!” Doctor Raven looked ready to tie me to the hospital bed. “Major, if you don’t lie down, you’ll reopen your wound.”
I glowered at her from where I sat on the edge of the bed with my legs hanging nearly to the floor. “I’m fine,” I repeated.
“You aren’t even close to fine. You nearly died.”
“You fixed me up. Now I have business to attend.” Like finding the asshole who kept trying to kill me, and had nearly succeeded this time.
Raven crossed her arms. “You’re not going anywhere. And you have to talk to the police. Security from Scorpio Corporation wants to see you, too.” In a more subdued voice, she added, “Also Colonel Lavinda Majda.”
Well, good. “So go get them.”
She didn’t budge. “You woke up thirty minutes ago. You aren’t ready to see anyone.”
“You refusing Majda?” I was so annoyed with my enforced bed rest, I was even willing to invoke their name, which I normally avoided like indigestion.
She didn’t look the least intimidated. “Using the Majdas to get around me won’t work. If you’d like, I can contact their doctor.”
Well, damn. I knew the Majdas’ personal physician. She didn’t take shit from anyone, including me. “Fine,” I growled. “When can I see all these people?”
Raven lowered her arms. “I’d like you to rest for another few hours. I injected specialized nanomeds into your body. Give them time to repair your artery. I’ll check on you later this afternoon. If you’re healing well, you can talk to your visitors.”
A few hours. I supposed I could live with that. I felt more worn out than I wanted to admit. With a grunt, I lay on my back and stared at the sky-blue ceiling.
Rustles came from across the room as she did whatever doctors do when they check their machines to make sure you aren’t dying or misbehaving. Eventually her footsteps receded as she left the room, until only the distant hums and clicks of the hospital kept me company. I turned on my side and gazed at the landscapes glowing on the walls, images of the Vanished Sea. Eons ago, long before humans came to Raylicon, an ocean had filled that great basin. Another image showed the ruins of the alien starships that had brought our ancestors to Raylicon six thousand years ago. No one could visit those ships except the military and a few scientists cleared to study them. They’d sat in the harsh desert sun for millennia, all that remained of whoever stranded humans on this world.
I closed my eyes and drowsed, thinking about the ruins. My ancestors had built an interstellar civilization using the libraries on those ships, but their Ruby Empire had fallen thousands of years ago. In this modern age, an elected Assembly ruled the Imperialate; the Ruby Pharaoh’s position was only titular. She led the House of Skolia, just like the Majda Matriarch led the House of Majda, but she no longer ruled.
Except . . .
We called ourselves the Skolian Imperialate, not the Federated Worlds of Whatever. If it ever came to a challenge between the Assembly and the Ruby Dynasty, the military might well throw their formidable power behind the dynasty. The Pharaoh’s Army was its oldest branch, with six thousand years of fealty to the empire. And yah, many people still considered Skolia an empire, not a democracy. So sue us. The Majda Matriarch also served as General of the Pharaoh’s army, one of the four joint commanders of Imperial Space Command. That alone placed her among the Imperialate’s most forceful leaders . . .
Sometime later I became aware of someone watching me. I opened my eyes to find Jak sitting on a stool by the bed, his dark clothes and hair a sharp contrast to the sky-blue room.
“Eh,” I said.
“Eh, Bhaaj.” He was verbose today, using two words for his greeting.
“How’d you get in here?”
He shrugged. “Easy. Cyber-rider shroud.”
Ah, good. A well-constructed shroud could help hide him from monitors, including optical, ultraviolet, infrared, radar, microwave, and neutrino sensors. I used one when I went to the Undercity, to keep the Majdas or anyone else from spying on me. Shrouds that hid you that well tended to be military grade and not available to civilians. That never daunted our cyber-riders. They’d provide Jak with top-notch protection using smuggled parts and black-market tech.
“You got knifed.” Jak leaned forward. “Stupid. Almost dead stupid.”
I sat up, more startled that he called me stupid than annoyed. “Not stupid.”
“Walking in plain view.”
“City has defenses.”
“City has crap.”
Normally I’d have challenged him on that. Cries had military-grade defenses even for the civilian population. Not that I would call it a military state, because, you know, you didn’t say that, not where anyone could overhear. Besides, its wealthy population wanted protection even if it meant giving up some of their privacy. Yet despite all that, in the last day someone had twice nearly managed to kill me.
“Yah, stupid,” I decided. My attacker was smart. Too smart. No one could trick the defenses in Cries that well. They had to be part of the same security infrastructure they were outwitting, which placed them high in the city hierarchy.
“You need to be more careful.” Jak switched into the Cries dialect, which he always did when he wanted to stress a point with me. “Someone big is after you.”
“Someone in Scorpio security or the city police.”
“Or Majda.” His dark gaze simmered.
“Maybe.” I didn’t see why Majda would want me dead. Nor did murder seem like their style. They had more subtle ways to achieve their goals. I’d never met any other group so adept at doing whatever the hell they wanted without breaking laws, at least not in ways you could trace. “Scorpio seems more likely.”
“Police don’t like you, either.”
“Yah. But they wouldn’t throw knives. They’d shoot.”
He shook his head. “It’s easier to hide a knife from the city monitors.”
Doctor Raven’s voice came from across the room. “How the hell did you get in here?”
Jak looked past me and spoke in his deepest voice, a tone meant to sound pleasant, but that came across as menacing more than anything else. “My greetings, Doctor.”
I turned to see Raven walking toward us. She frowned at Jak. “You have to leave. The major is recuperating.”
Jak almost smiled. He didn’t, because he didn’t know her, but apparently he found the concept of me obediently lying here to recuperate funny enough that he stopped being irked at the doctor. “She’s too ornery to stay put.”
I scowled at him. “You heard her. Leave.”
He did smile then. “Go with care, Bhaaj.” With that, he vanished. Not literally; I could make out a slight ripple in the air in the shape of his body. He’d activated the holographic portion of his shroud, which used screens and tiny light sources in his clothes, and holo-dust on his skin, to project images of his surroundings. It showed realistic views of the room behind his body instead of him, so he seemed to disappear. The shroud had limitations, especially close up, but the farther away the viewer, the better the camouflage.
“What?” Doctor Raven blinked at the place where Jak had vanished.
“He does that sometimes,” I said.
She spoke wryly. “Major, you are not the world’s easiest patient.”
I could have told her that.
“I don’t know who threw the knife,” I repeated.
Detective Talon from Scorpio Security was recording my statement with her wrist-cam. She stood near my hospital bed where I sat with my legs dangling. Lavinda Majda had accompanied her. Although it made sense for Majda to check on me, given how much they paid for my services, I hadn’t expected Lavinda. She showed respect by coming here when she could have sent an underling. The colonel stood back in the room, tall and silent by the entrance arch. Gold mosaics bordered the doorway, another indication this was no ordinary hospital, but a high-end clinic.
“Then you didn’t see anyone?” Talon asked me.
“I didn’t have a chance,” I said. “I barely managed to dodge in time.”
“How did you know to dodge?” Talon frowned. “According to our footage of the incident, you had no warning.”
I’d wondered that myself. “I saw a flash.”
“No flash shows in our recordings.” From Talon’s suspicious tone, you’d have thought I was the criminal rather than the victim. “And yet somehow you threw yourself down in the exact moment your attacker threw the knife.”
I leaned forward. “I should be asking how someone got that close to me with a weapon.”
Talon’s expression turned bland. “That portion of the city is monitored by army security, not Scorpio Corporation.”
Lavinda came forward. “Our security didn’t pick up anyone with a knife.”
“Why not?” I asked—and immediately regretted my tone. My recuperating brain was worse off than I realized, because I’d just disrespected someone I admired. “Colonel, I apologize for my discourtesy. I didn’t mean to sound rude.”
Lavinda didn’t look offended. “You ask a good question. The knife should have set off warnings. Yet whoever threw it didn’t register on our monitors. We’re checking on it.”
“Has anyone else in the Quida investigation been attacked?” I asked.
“Only you,” Lavinda said. “We’ll get this figured out, Major.”
I nodded to her, and she inclined her head.
“We could get you a Scorpio bodyguard.” Talon spoke as if that idea smelled bad.
“Or a military escort,” Lavinda said.
“No, that’s all right. I’ll take precautions.” I was probably better at being a bodyguard than most anyone they could provide, besides which, it would hamper my investigation to have someone following me around. If I showed up in the Undercity with a bodyguard, no one would talk to me.
“Maybe you should leave the investigation to those of us trained for this,” Talon said.
Well, screw you too. I’d looked at her record. She didn’t even come close to my experience. I couldn’t tell if she didn’t like me nosing around her jurisdiction or she just plain disliked me. Lavinda was harder to read, but she should know I never backed down. It was one reason the Majdas hired me. I could be as tenacious as a byte-bull infecting a mesh system.
I said only, “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
Whoever tried to kill me had made this personal, and no way would I let that go.