Baen Books Free Stories 2017

by Baen Books

  “Are you requesting directions to a metropolitan recruiting facility?”

  I scowled. Was it making fun of me? Then again, it was above-city. They all jibbered.

  “Need map,” I clarified.

  A map appeared, floating in the air. Parts of it were gone, the sections above the dark blotches in the screen. I could still read it, though. A red line showed the way to a place marked by a red pyramid just like the symbols on the army mesh site. I memorized the map the way I’d memorized all the routes and levels in the aqueducts. It was easy.

  “Would you like to print the map?” the screen asked.

  “Nahya.” I tapped its edge the way I’d seen Gourd do when he finished working. The screen went dark and rolled back into a small rod. Huh. Weird. I got up and resumed pacing the cave.

  Eventually Dig and Gourd returned. Dig looked less angry at the world. She worried about all of us, serious in her duties as our leader, but spending time with Gourd calmed her down.

  “Want to practice?” Dig asked me.

  I shook my head. “Need walk.”

  “Go where?” Gourd asked.

  I thought of Jak. How would he like it if I disappeared? I should make him sweat. “Enlist.”

  Gourd smiled. “What?”

  I didn’t actually know what I wanted, just that I felt angry, not only at Jak, but at the world. Maybe it wasn’t even anger. I felt pushed inside, and I couldn’t say why.

  “Got to walk,” I said.

  Dig nodded. “Go.”

  So I left, headed some place, I didn’t know where.

  #

  I bypassed the Foyer. Instead, I followed hidden passages, tunnels so narrow I had to turn sideways in places to squeeze through. Eventually they took me into the walls of the lower Concourse. When I reached a narrow break in the tunnel, I slipped through it into the open.

  A smoky haze surrounded me. I wrinkled my nose and squinted in the bright light. Only the dregs of the above-city merchants sold their goods here, so close to the aqueducts. Walking forward, I reached the back of a market stall, old and faded, built from canvas stretched on a framework. The aroma of meat sticks drenched in pizo sauce saturated the air. My mouth watered. I inched forward, into a narrow alley between two stalls. Crouching down, I hid behind the lower part of the stall and peered over the waist-high railing. Yah, there was a vendor, a hefty man roasting meat over a brazier. He had a row of meat sticks set up on his front counter. It didn’t look like he had sold any. Almost no one came down this far on the Concourse.

  I crept along, hidden behind the lower portion of the stall. When I reached the front, I snaked my hand up and pinched a meat stick. Then I backed off, as silent as I’d come, until I was away from the stall. Standing up, I took a bite of my prize. Ah, bliss. Pizo sauce filled my mouth and the meat crunched like a dream. While I feasted, I walked a path hidden behind the stalls. I didn’t much like stealing; I preferred to earn my way through a good bargain. But it beat starving, especially if it left food for the kids we protected.

  When I finished my pizo treat, I dropped the stick in a trash cruncher and set off, loping along behind the stalls. As I went farther up the Concourse, the haze cleared and my hidden path widened. The stalls were less faded here, and bright blue ribbons hung from poles at their sides. I could hear tourists on the main street chatting with the vendors. These merchants sold pots, tapestries, glassware, and handmade crafts supposedly from the Undercity. I would have laughed it if hadn’t been so annoying. These fakes couldn’t come close to matching the beauty of what someone like Top Deck created. Too bad no one from the Undercity could get a license to set up shop here.

  I kept jogging.

  The path became a cobbled street running behind the shops on my right. On my left, the wall of the Concourse rose up until it met the ceiling hundreds of meters above my head. The entire boulevard was underground, but it sloped upward, gradually climbing until at its end it was only a few meters below the desert. Supposedly. I rarely came this far up the Concourse, and I’d never been to its end. I heard people thronging the boulevard, all their talking and laughter, also bells and music. This far up, fancy boutiques and cafés lined the boulevard. My pulse jumped. I pretended it was from the strain of running uphill, but that was bullshit. I could run twice this fast up a slope twice as steep for twice as long and barely feel winded. I’d ventured to a new realm, a place where I would be shunned and turned away if the police caught me.

  I kept jogging.

  The cobblestone path turned into a street. The Concourse widened enough that on my left, instead of a wall, I was passing another row of shops tucked away from the road. A trio of people came out of a pottery shop, glanced up as I jogged toward them—and did a double-take. They backed up, watching avidly as I passed. I was so tense, I registered only their looks of terrified fascination. A real Undercity thug! Yah, right. The only danger was to me, if they called for help and the cops came looking for the dust ganger who’d invaded their fancy street.

  Making a left at the next intersection, I ran down an alley until I reached the back of this second street of shops and the Concourse wall. I moved fast, putting as much distance between myself and the pottery people as possible.

  I kept jogging.

  The buildings on my right began to glow. Lights danced around their eaves, red and blue, shimmering. Signs described what the shop sold: bolts of cloth, walking shoes, jewelry, crystals. Holos of creatures with wings ran up and down the side of one building, singing. It was all so pretty, it hurt to see. I felt as if I were breaking, but I wasn’t sure why. So much light. And these were only the lesser shops, not the bigger, ritzier establishments on the main Concourse.

  I kept jogging.

  A woman and a man came down an alley on my right. Holos of water flowed down the walls of the buildings on either side of them, and a rushing noise filled the air. It sounded painfully beautiful, as if I should recognize the sound that went with falling water, though I’d never heard it before. The two people were chatting, but when they saw me approaching, they froze, staring. Then they spun around and ran in the other direction.

  “For flaming sake,” I muttered. I wasn’t going to mug them. I just wanted out of here before all these pretty people called the authorities.

  I was approaching a gate made from gold bars. Beyond it, an open area stretched out. I slowed to a stop at the gate. It reached from the ground to the ceiling, which was only about twenty meters high here. To have come all this way, venturing farther than I’d ever tried before, only to have this barrier stop me—no. I couldn’t stand the thought of having to retrace my steps back to the aqueducts, but any other route would take me out among the tourists, a risk I couldn’t take. Although I’d avoided being caught so far, my luck wouldn’t last if I ventured onto the main Concourse. Frustrated, I grabbed the bars—

  The gate swung open.

  Oh. It wasn’t locked. I’d assumed Cries built the gate to stop people like me. Now that I thought about it, that made no sense. We rarely came up this far. This silly gate just served as some arbitrary divider separating the boulevard from the open area beyond.

  I walked past the open gate and closed it behind me. The large area I’d entered reminded me of the Foyer, but bigger, bright and shiny, not a rock in sight, just smooth walls made from blue material. Racks with scooters parked in them stood to my left. Images moved on the walls and showed people laughing, eating, or going to shops. Soft voices told me I wanted to buy “tickets” to “shows” or “clubs.” Pretty machines gleamed with so many colors I couldn’t see them all at once: red, blue, green, gold and more. One of them showed bottles, some with water, others with brown or blue or orange liquid. I stood there, dumbfounded, trying to make sense of the scene.

  Voices filtered into my awareness, people talking in happy voices. Across the foyer, a wide set of stairs climbed upward. A group was coming down them, three girls and three boys. They looked like adults, like me and Jak and Dig and Gourd, bu
t they didn’t seem old enough for their height. No scars, I realized. They were bright and clean and happy, wearing clothes too complicated for me to ken, with too many colors, blue and gold, white for flaming sake, clothes so clean, they seemed to glow. I stared at them, knowing I should hide, but too astounded to move.

  As the group reached the bottom of the steps, one boy glanced around and caught sight of me. Even from so far away, I saw his eyes widen. He gasped and the entire group looked. They all froze like I’d turned them into stone or something.

  The boy spoke. I had the impression he thought he was using a voice too quiet for me to hear, but after so many years of listening for every footstep and trickle of dust in the aqueducts, always alert for danger, I easily made out his words.

  “Over there!” he hissed. “A gangster.”

  “Gods almighty!” a girl whispered. “She looks ready to kill someone.”

  “She’s so dirty,” another boy said.

  What? I was not dirty. I cleaned in a grotto each day. Of course I had dust on my clothes; you couldn’t exist in the aqueducts without stirring up the stuff.

  “I wonder if she can speak,” one of the girls said.

  “They’re too stupid to speak,” a boy answered. “I’ve heard they aren’t really human.”

  “Don’t make any sudden moves,” another girl cautioned. “She could go crazy. Just back away, slow and easy.”

  They stepped away so carefully, it was funny, or it would have been if they hadn’t been pissing me off.

  The third boy spoke more gently. “She’s gorgeous under all that dust.”

  The last girl snorted. “Don’t go near her, hon. They have no sense of decency.”

  Oh, drill that. I was tired of people acting like I was a monster. Maybe I should give them a scare. I pulled myself up, clenched my fists for good effect, and strode toward them.

  “Ah!” The kids yelled and broke into a run, sprinting across the foyer. They ran under a large arch to my right, which I realized led out in to the main Concourse. I almost laughed, until I saw other people walking out there. Some glanced back when they heard the panicked kids.

  Damn! I’d let down my guard. I had to get out of here before the cops came. This far up the Concourse, they’d probably take me to jail in Cries instead of chasing me back to the aqueducts. I ran to the steps, looking for the spaces that would let me through the staircase. Not a single break showed, no entrance to any hidden passages. The steps were ledges, wider than any I’d ever seen, straight and unbroken. I didn’t have time to figure it out, so I ran up them. They felt as solid as they looked, and nothing broke or shifted under me.

  I reached a wide landing at the top and paused to heave in a breath. The ceiling here was only about twice my height. A large archway stood before me, filled with the oddest sight. Colored light. It rippled in pale colors, blue, silver, purple, white. I’d never seen a gate like this. Did it open or what? No time to ponder. If I was gone by the time the police arrived, they might think the yelling kids had made up the whole thing. I hoped. Taking a breath, I reached out to push open the gate.

  My hand went through the shimmer.

  “Ah!” I jerked back my arm. It returned in one piece, with no bad effects that I could see.

  Go ahead, I told myself. Ahead. Not back.

  I walked into the shimmer.

  The glistening curtain felt like a thin film dragging along my bare arms. Then I was through—

  Light hit me like a physical blow. So bright! I couldn’t absorb the view. Red, red, red everywhere, and blue above me. I couldn’t see it all together, not because anything blocked my view. I just couldn’t process it all. The world had gone insane.

  Gradually I became aware of air. Someone was blowing against my face. Except I was alone. My hair blew back from my face, yet no one stood here making that happen. Hell, no one I knew could blow enough air to throw around my heavy curls this way.

  I focused on the ground under my feet. It resembled the ground in the aqueducts, red with blue flecks, except this was all sand instead of dust. I lifted my gaze—

  No. It couldn’t be. The ground went on forever. Forever. No walls rose up to define the space. Nothing, at least not until a long, long distance, so far away that it couldn’t be real. I tried to remember the word I’d learned when Gourd showed me images of the desert. Horizon. I was seeing the horizon. Beyond it, a blue wall rose up and up until it curved into a ceiling far over my head. I reached up, trying to touch it. My fingers didn’t even come close. Air blew against my arm. Wind! I felt wind, not a person blowing air. The blue above me—it was a sky. Gods almighty, it was true. The sky went on forever, so high you could never reach far enough to touch its endless blue.

  Something was building in me, something powerful and strange. The desert, the sky, the wind, they stirred a hunger I couldn’t define, one that burned as bright as this impossible light.

  I turned slowly. The archway stood behind me with its curtain of colors. It rose out of the ground as if it were a hill, like the mounds made by rock falls in the aqueducts. I kept turning, gazing at the desert. The horizon became mountains that reached into the sky. When I raised my head to look almost straight up, a disk of light seared my vision, too brilliant to look at. I lowered my gaze, still turning—

  And I stopped.

  To my right, a few meters away, the sky came to the ground. It lay there, blue and smooth, covering the desert, stretching out and out. Not forever, though. In the distance, beyond the blue, the towers of a city rose into the brilliant day, shining and impossible, reflecting the sky. No words I knew could do justice to that sight.

  The City of Cries.

  I’d never believed the holos. They were creations of artists who had nothing better to do than make up fantasy places that could never exist. Except the city did exist. It stood there with light pouring all around it towers, and it was real.

  I stepped toward the blue that separated me from Cries. The red ground under my feet stayed firm. Good so far. I took another step. Still good. So I drew in a deep breath and strode forward. As I drew closer to the blue ground, the smooth surface resolved into what looked like stone. It wasn’t flush with the sand; four steps led up to it, bizarre ledges that stretched out on either side of where I stood.

  I walked up the small staircase and stepped onto the blue surface. It felt solid.

  “Eh,” I said. “Got sky under my feet.” It didn’t fit with anything I’d read about the sky, but then, I hadn’t read much.

  So I walked across the sky, headed for Cries. The sky turned out to be blue rock. Or not rock, exactly, but some material that felt solid. My boots thudded on it. Kneeling down, I brushed my fingers across the surface. It felt smoother than anything in the aqueducts. I tilted my head back to see the sky above me. Same color. Standing up, I tried to touch it, but I still couldn’t reach high enough.

  A thought came to me. Maybe the blue rock under my feet wasn’t part of the sky. I tried to remember what I’d read about Cries. It had a “plaza” on the outskirts of the city. Could this be it?

  “Pretty,” I said.

  I set off jogging toward the city.

  #

  The map I’d memorized placed the army center on this edge of Cries. In that sense, I had only a short distance to go.

  In every other sense, it was the longest walk I’d ever taken.

  I didn’t understand the City of Cries. Its buildings rose straight up with smooth sides, built from red stone with blue specks, or white stone, or glossy metals, or glass that reflected the sky. The city had a spare, sleek beauty. I became so overwhelmed with the fantastic sights, I no longer cared that I was walking in the open, on a boulevard at the edge of the city. If the cops came to get me, well, they came. My mind had no room left for fear. I didn’t belong here, and sooner or later someone would tell me to get out, but until that happened, I kept walking.

  This far from the city center, a lot of space separated the buildings. From a dista
nce, these structures had looked small compared to the rest of the city, but up close their true height became obvious. I set my hands against the wall of one and looked up. It reached to a height more than three times my own.

  A hum sounded above me. I tilted my head back, bracing my hand on the wall so I wouldn’t get dizzy and fall over. A silver wedge flew in the sky. I watched it, squinting against the brightness of the day. The silver thing didn’t look anything like the flying reptiles I knew, little winged ruziks that whizzed through the aqueducts. This wedge glittered. I watched until it disappeared behind the towers. Then I pushed away from the wall and continued my walk.

  The boulevard took me past courtyards and parks—parks—with green plants, lush and full. So much green. Rotating wheels close to the ground sprayed water over them. I didn’t understand how water could come out of little spinning machines.

  Not many people were out. They watched when I passed them, but no one bothered me. Unlike on the Concourse, where everything was closer together and more intense, out here no one seemed to care who walked in the wide spaces under the endless sky. It was the middle of the eighty-hour day, so most people were probably asleep. I never thought about it in the aqueducts; we slept when we were tired. We did keep track of the day’s cycle, though, using Gourd’s tech. Mostly we slept once in the night, once at midday, and maybe a third time if we needed the rest.

  I wasn’t tired. I felt so wound up, my mind spun with energy. I couldn’t have stopped even if a wall burst up from the ground and blocked my way. I’d have climbed over it, gone around, anything. I felt like I would burst with this huge emotion inside me, but I didn’t know what it meant or how to describe the feeling.

  My sense of time got lost in all the open space, and I couldn’t have said how long it took to reach the army center. I knew when I found it, though. It looked the same as the image on the map, a low building with many windows. A green and gold holo glowed on its wall: The Pharaoh’s Army Career Center. A red pyramid shimmered next to it, probably for the Ruby Pharaoh.