The Bronze Skies by Catherine Asaro
“What VR session?” Lavinda asked. “We never started it.”
That couldn’t be right. “Yah. You did. I was in for at least twenty minutes.”
“It’s been less than two minutes since you sat down,” Casestar told me.
“That’s impossible.” I pulled open the exoskeleton and sat forward as it retracted from my body. “I’ve been talking to the pharaoh.”
“You couldn’t have talked to her,” Lavinda said. “We hadn’t connected you yet.”
“Colonel.” Casestar had his hand up to the comm in his ear. “We’re receiving a message from Pharaoh Dyhianna.”
Lavinda glanced at him. “Go ahead.”
“She wants to know if Major Bhaajan is all right.”
“I’m fine.” My headache had begun to subside.
Casestar listened, then said, “Major Bhaajan, the pharaoh thanks you for the session.”
“Uh, okay.” I wasn’t used to powerful people saying thank you. “Tell her the same.”
“This makes no sense,” Lavinda said.
“Hell if I know what happened,” I muttered.
Fate apparently didn’t feel I had enough people telling me I was crazy, because the doctor who had treated Duane earlier today chose this moment to arrive. She came up behind Lavinda and stood frowning at me. “Are you the patient this time?” she demanded, all business.
“No, I’m not,” I said.
“Yes, you are.” Lavinda stood up and spoke to the doctor. “Something happened before we started the sim. She sat for about two minutes, then groaned. Then she started to convulse.”
What the blazes? I rose to my feet. “I had a convulsion?”
“A bad one,” Lavinda said.
The doctor scanned me with a handheld sensor. “Your heart rate and blood pressure are elevated. I need you to sit down so I can examine you properly.”
“I’m fine.” I had never liked being poked by doctors, and right now I just wanted to leave.
She scowled at me. “What is it with all my patients today? Stop arguing about how fine you are and sit the hell down.”
I blinked at her. Apparently the legendary Majda restraint didn’t extend to their doctors. I sat the hell down and let her get started.
The lift to my penthouse whirred as it whisked me to my penthouse. The gold walls and soft light usually soothed me, but today I felt too agitated to stand still. I had to make myself rest, though; if I had another convulsion, I couldn’t do my job. Convincing the doctor to release me hadn’t been easy, but finally she let me go home. No one could figure out what happened. I’d been in that chair less than two flipping minutes. How? Pharaoh Dyhianna and I had talked a lot longer than two minutes.
Except—did we actually talk? The interaction had felt surreal, all that mist and trees. Even a strong telepath couldn’t hold a mental conversation with someone who had no Kyle ability. I might possess some latent talent, but not enough for what we had done, besides which, psions couldn’t manage that kind of link without training, neurological enhancement, and a direct link into a console. I rubbed my eyes. This much was certain: the pharaoh knew about the riders, which probably meant Majda would soon know as well.
No, wait. No record existed of my meeting with the pharaoh. The techs insisted the session never happened. Had she set it up that way? I’d learned at a young age to read people; survival in the aqueducts demanded that skill. I didn’t think she’d told anyone what we discussed. No one else even seemed convinced I met with her. Maybe she intended to let me keep the riders a secret. I could hope, anyway.
“Interesting,” I told my reflection in the mirrors that paneled the upper half of the lift walls.
The lift didn’t answer. It did stop rising, though, and the doors opened into my penthouse.
As I entered the spacious living room, my house EI spoke. “You have a message waiting.”
“Who is it?” I asked. The doors closed behind me.
“Doctor Karz. She wants you to page her as soon as you get home.”
I walked down the three steps into the sunken living room. “Who is Doctor Karz?”
“Apparently she treated you earlier today.”
“Oh. That one.” So her name was Karz. I didn’t want to deal with anyone right now. If I didn’t respond, though, she might send someone to check on me. “Send her a page.”
“Done. Do you want the rest of your messages?”
“I have more?” Most of my friends were in the Undercity, not Cries.
“A woman named Tanzia Harjan.”
Odd. Tanzia was a volunteer at the Rec Center who had helped us do the Kyle tests last year. “Play her message.”
A voice rose into the air, young, cheerful, way too full of energy. “My greetings, Major Bhaajan. I’m following up on our discussion about a tykado tournament at the Rec Center. I’d love to see what we can do.”
Oh. Yah. I’d forgotten. I should do something, since the whisper mill had probably spread Duane’s comments about a sports meet across the entire Undercity. The Dust Knights might even agree to a tournament that let them kick and punch at rich kids from Cries. I doubted I could get any Cries tykado academy to agree, but what the hell. It was worth a try.
“Send her a message,” I said. “Tell her I can come by Center tomorrow, two hours after second sleep.”
“Sent. I have Doctor Karz on comm. Shall I put her through?”
“Go ahead.” I might as well get this over with.
The voice of the Majda doctor rose into the air. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine.” Which was true, except for me wanting to collapse into bed.
“I’ve finished analyzing your test results.”
“I thought you already did that.” It was why she let me go home; they found no problems.
“We ran some extra checks,” she said, as brusque as always. “I’ve discovered an anomaly.”
Damn. I didn’t have time to be sick. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. We just didn’t expect to find psiamine in your neural work up.”
I squinted at no one in particular. “Could you repeat that?”
“Psiamine. We found it in your brain.”
“How? I don’t have the paras that produce it.”
“We don’t know that for certain.”
I went over to the couch and sunk down into its gloriously comfortable cushions. “Check my military records.”
“I did,” she said. “Your testers never checked for them.”
“What? Sure they did.”
“Why would they? The basic test for them is the existence of psiamine, not the reverse. That your tests didn’t show any psiamine could just mean you hadn’t learned to use your paras. They don’t look much different from other neural structures. You need extra tests to verify their existence.”
“Oh.” I didn’t want to hear this. “Are you saying I experienced some sort of Kyle link with the Ruby Pharaoh?”
“It would explain why you think you met with her.”
“It seems unlikely.”
“Yes, it does.” She let out an audible breath. “You only have traces of psiamine, barely enough to explain your heightened ability to judge the emotional states of other people.”
For flaming sake. “I don’t need extra chemicals in my brain to read people.”
“Well, no. But you have them. You might also have a slight precognitive ability.”
“That’s nuts.” I closed my eyes, put my head back, and stretched out my legs. “I can’t tell the future. What would that even have to do with brain waves?”
“It’s simple, really. Just quantum mechanics.”
“Yah, right.” My head was starting to hurt again.
“An uncertainty exists in the time and energy of a system,” she said. “We can’t know both exactly. For humans, that uncertainty is so tiny, we almost never notice it.”
“Amazing,” I said dryly. “I can look a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of an inst
She gave a wry laugh. “That pretty much sums it up.”
“It’s not precognition.”
“For most people, no. But a probability exists that every now and then, the uncertainty will be more pronounced for an instant or so. Have you ever experienced déjà vu, the sense you’ve done something before?”
“I guess so.”
“It may be because you did actually foresee that moment an instant before it occurred.”
I rubbed my temples. “That happens to a lot of people.”
“Yes, and for most it doesn’t amount to anything significant. But some Kyle operators, on rare occasions, may have a momentary flash of a more distant future.”
“I never do.” I wished I did; I’d go bet in Jak’s casino.
“Even if you did, it wouldn’t account for what happened with you and the pharaoh.” In a musing tone, Karz added, “Though no one really knows the full extent of what she can do.”
No kidding. “Am I in danger from this psiamine cruising around my brain?”
“No, it won’t harm you.”
“Good.”
“Yes. Good.” She sounded as if she had more to say.
I sat there, caught between wanting to end the conversation and asking what else was up.
Karz made the decision for me. “Captain Ebersole is awake.”
“How is he?”
“Much better.” She paused. “He told us how you two survived the cartel attack in the slum.”
So much was wrong with that statement, I hardly knew where to start. “It wasn’t a cartel attack. It was one person who didn’t like cops coming into the Undercity.” City. Not slum.
“The captain claims a member of the Vakaar cartel assassinated your attacker.”
I thought of Dark Singer. “She didn’t ‘assassinate’ anyone. She saved our lives.”
“She needs to come into the police station and give a report.”
Yah, right. Good luck with that. “If I see her, I’ll let her know.”
“Can you give us her contact information?”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or groan. “No.”
Karz didn’t push it. Instead, she said, “Seeing someone die that way, blasted apart, would shake up anyone. If you need to talk, I’m here.”
“I’m fine.”
“Yes, I know, you’re fine, Captain Ebersole is fine, the Majdas are always fine. You people could be dying, and you’d still be telling me you were fine after I signed your death certificate.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “That’d be quite a feat on our part.”
“Just don’t be too proud to ask for help, all right?”
I could see why the Majdas employed this doctor, besides her being good at her job. She didn’t take jack from anyone. “All right.”
“Good. Come in tomorrow for a check up.”
“I will.” Right now, I’d agree to almost anything to escape.
“See you then. Out.”
“Out,” I said.
Then I went to bed.
The Down-deep lay below the aqueducts. I walked its tunnels in a darkness that felt thick. Whatever purpose these buried ruins had once served, nothing remained now but an ancient labyrinth saturated with the passage of time, as if the millennia left ever-thickening deposits of darkness.
I had been born here. In my youth, I assumed no one lived below the aqueducts, but that made no sense, because someone had found me here, a squalling newborn crying for her mother in the darkness. They took me up, above-city, to the Cries orphanage. Why they hadn’t found me a home in the aqueducts, instead of stranding me in that forsaken place, I’d never know. They left me behind the building, at the door, with a message tucked into my swaddling: Parents dead. Bhaaj’s jan.
Jan. Daughter. That was my sole legacy, that a woman named Bhaaj gave me birth. I’d lived in that blighted orphanage for three years before I escaped with an older child. Dig. The cops had caught her stealing on the Concourse and put her in the orphanage when she wouldn’t talk to them. She ran away and took me with her, back to the Undercity. She became my family, along with Jak and Gourd, the four of us ranging in age from three to six. Supposedly we lived with Dig’s mother, a ruthless crime boss too busy with a drug empire to bother with us. We did what we wanted, and the Kajada cartel looked the other way when we raided their stores for food. I didn’t think Dig ever forgave her mother for leaving her in the orphanage instead of coming for her, a test to see if she was strong enough to get home on her own. Dig swore she’d never do the same to her own kids. However else anyone might condemn Dig Kajada for the many sins she committed as an adult, she loved her children in a way her mother would never have even understood, let alone shown her daughter.
I knew nothing about my blood family other than vague tales of how some unknown person found me wailing next to my mother’s body down here. No one knew anything else. For decades I shut away my thoughts about the deep. Last year that all changed. A father and daughter from the deep had ventured into the aqueducts, the first in decades to come from so far down. They’d heard whispers of the Dust Knights and wanted to join. They even went to the Rec Center for Kyle testing, daring to enter a world so bright, they needed shades for their eyes and salves to protect their skin, which over the ages had paled until it almost seemed translucent.
Self-imposed natural selection, the doctors had said, whatever that meant. Their eyes are adapted to the dark. To live in normal light, they will need surgery to fix their vision.
The deepers had no interest in being “fixed.” They ate their free meal, drank their free water, did the Kyle tests, and went home. In the process, they pulverized the statistics for Kyle abilities in humans, even more than the general Undercity population. Of the twelve Down-deepers who took the tests, all were psions, including three telepaths. Too few came for the testers to know if they represented the entire population in the deep, but those stats didn’t surprise me. Their ancestors had withdrawn to that isolated realm for a reason.
Why had I been born here? I obviously wasn’t from the Down-deep. I had dark eyes and black hair like everyone else in the Undercity, and skin as dark as the wealthiest aristocrat in Cries.
In the army, I’d searched for some trace of my parents. Even ISC, with its endless files, had no DNA records that matched mine enough for a relative. I descended from a people isolated for so long, our history wasn’t part of the known Skolian gene pool. Maybe if I hadn’t been so busy repressing my thoughts of the Down-Deep as a child, I might have come here and found some clues to my origins. In retrospect, what had that all been about, anyway, my denial that this place existed? It made no sense to my adult self. It was too late now, probably decades too late, to find those clues, but I couldn’t ignore the deep any longer.
I sat on a stump of rock. The chilly air smelled dry. Desiccated. The darkness felt suffocating with the weight of the millennia that had accumulated in this place, a metaphor that made utterly no sense if I thought too hard about it, but never mind. It felt that way.
After a while, Max thought, Why are we here?
I’m waiting, I answered.
For what?
Whatever comes.
This is boring.
I’m brooding. That’s not boring.
Why are you brooding in the dark?
Because there’s no light.
Funny. He didn’t sound amused. Turn on a lamp.
I didn’t answer. He knew no one would come if I turned on a lamp. I felt drained even after sleeping ten hours last night, besides which, I didn’t know what I was expecting, either. So I sat.
A scratch came to my left—and a brilliant light flared, blinding me.
“Ah!” I put up one hand, protecting my eyes, and whipped up my revolver with the other.
“Going to shoot me, Bhaaj?” a woman asked in a gravelly voice.
“Singer?” I lowered my gun. As my eyes adjusted, I realized she hadn’t turned on a flood lam
“Why you here?” I asked.
“You. Said you wanted to talk to me.”
“How’d you find me?”
“Got ways.”
No doubt. Who knew what network she’d developed in her profession. Former profession. I hoped. We sat while she smoked her stick. With Singer, I had learned never to push. We would talk about why I wanted to see her when she felt like it, and not before.
“That shit will ruin your throat,” I eventually said.
“Throat is fine.”
“Good.” Given her raspy voice, I doubted it, but I wasn’t going to argue with an assassin.
“Why you sitting in the dark?” she asked.
“Waiting.”
“For what?”
She was as bad as Max. “For the world to implode,” I grumbled.
“Sounds noisy.” The tip of her stick glowed red.
“Don’t want noise.” I wished I didn’t feel so tired. “Need to hear whispers.”
“Whispers about the dark?”
“Yah. Down-deep.”
“I hear a lot of whispers,” she commented. “Most don’t mean squat. Just people pissing.”
“Singer, suppose you had to hide from everyone. Come here?”
“Maybe. Why?”
“Need to find someone.”
“Who?”
“Like you, but the reverse.”
“Not making sense, Bhaaj.”
“You used to assassinate. Now you defend.” That distinction separated a killer from a soldier.
“You got a patriot who turned into an assassin?”
“Yah.” Essentially.
Her stick glowed as she took another drag. “Why you care?”
“Majda hired me to find her.”
“Majda? Why?”
“She’s a Jagernaut.”
“That supposed to be a joke?”
Sure, I was a real comedian today. “Not a joke.”
“Huh. Interesting.”
From Singer, that was the equivalent of an impassioned outburst. “Fatal, too,” I said.
“Why’d you come here?”