by Judith Tarr
“I wouldn’t do that,” someone said gently.
She wasn’t tall, but she held herself so straight that she seemed to tower over Rama. Without her robe of stars she wasn’t much to stare at: not young but not old, either, neither fat nor thin, with warm brown skin that Aisha would bet she had been born with, and a cloud of black hair.
She sat down across from Rama, not caring at all that her back was to the room. “I know you mean to provoke them,” she said, “and I’m sure you could take them, singly and together, but this is my house, and I prefer it clean and quiet. No blood on my walls, meser.”
“What, none at all? Not even a little?”
“Don’t test me,” she said.
She was as gentle as ever, but Rama blinked. “Your song,” he said. “That was a holy thing.”
“All the more reason not to commit blasphemy in my temple.”
He bent his head to her. She knew how to talk to him—Aisha was impressed. Nobody even had to tell her what he was. She just knew.
“We’ll give you a glass of whatever you like,” she said, “but then you’ll leave.”
“Even if I promise to behave myself?”
“Are you capable of it?”
“Maybe not,” he said, “but I can try.” He paused. “I need a place to rest in for a day, two—maybe three. You have rooms, yes? If I convince you that I won’t destroy them, or you, may I stay?”
“Rest? Or hide?” she inquired. “There are hotels by the dozen around the spaceport.”
“I could hide there if I were minded,” he said. “This is where I need to be.”
“Need?”
“Need,” he said.
“I should refuse,” she said. “If I discover you’ve put a witching on me, I’ll call the Corps. Do you understand that?”
“Perfectly,” he said.
“Then come,” she said.
~~~
Aisha should have known better than to expect anything in this place, but she’d seen too many vids; they’d marked her for life. She stood in a suite of rooms as big and bright and clean as any she’d ever stayed in, with a view of the spaceport and the shuttles taking off, that she only realized after a long few minutes was on a screen and not a wide, very clean window.
There were no windows, but screens everywhere. The place was like a fortress. It was shielded in as many ways as she could imagine, and probably a few she couldn’t.
The terrible singing was still there, but muted almost to silence. Rama stood a little straighter; his shoulders were a fraction less tight. “This will do,” he said.
“You haven’t asked the price,” the woman said.
“They tell me I’m wealthy,” he said. “You can have it all, if you insist. I’ll find more.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “I’ll ask for something that matters to you.”
“Not my companion,” he said.
Aisha was somewhat pleased at how quickly he said that.
“I don’t think that is yours to give,” the woman said. “You may rest. When the time comes for payment, you’ll know.”
“We could simply walk away,” he said.
“I think not,” she said. She turned to go, but paused. “My name is Marta. Speak it, and the system will provide whatever you ask for. Within reason, of course.”
“Of course,” said Rama. Aisha couldn’t tell if he was being ironic.
~~~
After Marta left, Rama said, “Katas in an hour. Meanwhile, rest if you will. Eat.”
“You sound like my grandmother,” Aisha said. “Always telling us to eat.”
“Food is life,” he said. And that was ironic.
Aisha didn’t trust him. The way he’d tried to provoke people down below, the quiet he was cultivating now—he was up to something.
She could play the game, too. “Marta,” she said, “I want a bath. With real water. And soap. And then I want dinner. Something good, with chicken. Can you do real chicken?”
“Gallus gallus redivivus thrives on Araceli,” the air replied in a sweetened version of the living Marta’s voice. “Have you a preference as to cuisine?”
“You choose,” Aisha said.
“Heard and recorded,” said the air.
“Thank you,” Aisha said, though it was only software.
31
“The port is full of pirates,” Rinaldi said.
Khalida had been expecting a delegation. It consisted, apparently, of Rinaldi, a pair of aides so bland as to be invisible, and a prickling in the nape of her neck that made her feel as if she was being watched by a multitude.
Rinaldi seemed unperturbed by room’s shields, though his aides held themselves tight and still. He sat where Mem Aurelia had sat, with no sign of sensing the presence that had been there before him. To Khalida’s eye he seemed small beside that memory of calm and composure, like a little yapping dog that wants to be a king of wolves.
That was interesting in itself. She sat on a cushion of her own, deliberately relaxed, and raised a brow. “You have new enemies, then? I’m to negotiate with pirates, too? Does MI know?”
“Military Intelligence is well apprised of the situation, I would hope,” Rinaldi said. “As for what they might choose to share with you…”
Khalida knew better than to let him provoke her. “Tell me what pirates have to do with the reason we are, ostensibly, here.”
“Oh,” said Rinaldi. “Such steel in that spine. Pirates, my dear Captain, have taken advantage of a peculiarity in planetary law, which allows them free access to the port city and limited access to the rest of Araceli—excepting our territories.”
Khalida was not going to give him either aid or ammunition. If he wanted anything said, he would have to say it himself.
“The port is now full of them,” he said, obligingly, “and there are reports of ‘touring parties’ throughout Ostia Magna and its neighbors. There’s a fair conclave of ships in orbit. All with letters of marque, or safe-conducts from one or more of the carefully neutral worlds. Geneva Nova, most notably.”
“Isn’t that a little obvious?” Khalida asked.
“One would think,” he said. “But considering the ultimatum under which we all labor, and the cargo capacity of the various ships, I do wonder…”
“Pirates,” Khalida pointed out, “or free traders, as they prefer to call themselves, don’t believe in charity. If your opponents are as poor as all evidence indicates, can they be planning anything close to what you imply?”
“Poor they may be,” he said, “but if all of them have gathered what resources they have and—even more to the point, perhaps—their talents—”
“Talents?”
“Technical skills,” he said. “Such as are rare and highly valued in the outer worlds.”
“Speculation,” she said.
“Informed speculation,” he said.
“Which is well and good,” said Khalida, “but I’m here, at your insistence, to resolve this conflict. I am not your speaker to pirates.”
“Even if your mission requires you to do so?”
Khalida took care to breathe slowly; to cling to calm. She had never taken kindly to being manipulated—and he was not even trying to hide it. “I take orders from Military Intelligence,” she said. “You are here to present your terms.”
“Well then,” said Rinaldi, “those are my terms. Clear the port of pirates. Prosecute those who can be prosecuted, and remove the rest. Then we’ll come to the table.”
He was smiling, damn him. Like the king in the old story, demanding impossible tasks for the hand of his daughter.
This would not be the only one, Khalida thought. Oh, no. He was just beginning.
~~~
Logically Khalida would go to Colonel Aviram, and then through channels to MI, and try to make sense of this game Rinaldi was playing. She was not here to run security sweeps through a spaceport.
Unless of course she was. Her orders dropped as soon as she left Rinaldi sitting in
the shielded room, sitting and smiling.
The last time she had to cope with this nightmare of a world, she had had Max and Sonja, Kinuko and John Begay. They were all inside her, capsules of memory, but none of them was speaking, or had spoken since she dropped the bomb on Ostia.
All she had now was herself.
Delegate, her orders said. Port Security was at her disposal. Aviram had the roster of MI personnel for both remote surveillance and boots on the ground. There was little enough for her to do but sign off on authorizations already prepared.
Khalida had never been good at signing off on orders. MI knew that.
~~~
She caught Aviram on his way out of HQ, in riot gear with his helmet under his arm. “No,” she said. “Mine.”
“Surely we can share,” he said.
“Unless it’s a ploy to get both of us out of HQ.”
He barely blinked. “There’s nothing here to attract a spy. Everything’s encrypted on the Worldsweb.”
Which she should know, his tone implied—gently, but nonetheless. “Everything but us,” she said, equally gently. Then she shrugged, shaking off the shudder under her skin. “Do what you will. We’ll sweep both ends against the middle, shall we?”
Even while she spoke she was scanning duty rosters on the web, calling up teams, some with names that swam up out of memory, others whom she did not know at all. Aviram saluted and went on his way. Khalida strode where the web directed her, in search of her own gear and the dozen MI operatives who would sweep the port under her command.
~~~
They were waiting in the ready room: twelve and one. The thirteenth met her stare with the faintest of half-smiles. Khalida counted the pips on the woman’s collar with a kind of acid pleasure. “A psi-five? We’re honored.”
“Major Li,” the agent named herself, “detailed to Military Intelligence.”
Very much by the book, that one. Without the stiff carriage and the stern expression, she would have been a remarkably pretty child. Though surely she was not as young as she looked.
“I am not,” she said. Crisply, but with a flicker of bone-dry humor. Not so stiff, then, either. And making a clear point of what she was and could do.
Khalida stiffened her own spine. Best she not see any of these agents as human. Allah knew, the Corps itself was not.
“You are here,” she asked of this agent, “for what purpose?”
Major Li replied with a ping on the web, a packet that unfolded itself into a set of short and remarkably concise orders.
Khalida has received the bulk of them already. Door-to-door sweeps. Executing warrants against the freer of the free traders—some of long standing, others suspiciously new. Clearing out the bars and brothels. Encouraging holders of letters of marque to hold them elsewhere. And, most directly to the point, searching for signs of psi-nulls—triangulating those signs with psis attached to other units, and agents at Corps HQ.
“Since,” Major Li said, “nulls are, as the term indicates, blank. Non-presences. Not there to the sight that I can bring to bear.”
“Rogue nulls?” Khalida wondered aloud, as pieces fell into place and patterns took shape. “Is any of you at all surprised?”
Major Li chose not to answer that. Instead she said, “Nulls are a sort of cloaking device. Whatever is being done around them, neither psi nor MI can detect. Therefore—”
“That must be terribly frustrating for you,” Khalida said.
“I enjoy a challenge,” said Major Li.
Khalida, at this stage in her life, did not. But here she was, playing policeman for Psycorps. It might be better than playing executioner for them—just.
~~~
Major Li refused to lead. She would follow. Khalida shrugged and took second, with the unit’s sergeant at point: a solid, foursquare, no-nonsense woman who managed without moving a muscle to convey her utter contempt for the Corps agent in the rear.
The rest of the unit did not even offer her that much. She could come or go, they said with turn of shoulder and angle of eye. It made no difference to them.
Khalida was a different matter. They knew who she was, and what. From some she had a sense of admiration. From others, almost fear. But none of them offered contempt.
That was something, she reflected as they advanced into the port. Word had gone out, of course. This being a spaceport, that meant more people in the streets rather than less, a succession of clogs and blockages that could have been completely accidental, but were ongoing and persistent.
Major Li looked for zones of nothingness. Khalida and her unit aimed toward the opposite: firmer obstruction, heavier crowds. Those were protecting something, as often as not.
Interesting how often Li and Khalida agreed as to where to go. It was slow going, and fruitless. Every knot they unraveled had nothing in its center. Every crowd evaporated once they had penetrated its outer circles.
Khalida held tight to patience. Door to door, her orders said. Door to door it was, no matter how many bodies tried to set themselves in the way.
She mapped their progress through the web. From HQ east toward the port proper, and then north, into the old city. Parts of that were as old as the human occupation of Araceli, built of native wood and stone and what looked like cannibalized shuttle parts.
They caught their first rat there: a small one, with a warrant out in three systems, and enough cheap liquor on board to float him through a fourth. Major Li had no interest in him; she barely deigned to wait for him to be wrapped and sealed and shipped off to Deportation.
“Trouble?” Khalida asked, leaving the unit to deal with the rat and taking station with Major Li in the street outside the tavern. It was suspiciously empty, and silent: not even the sound of a snore from the gutter.
Major Li frowned. Her lips were tight, her face pale, as if she nursed the mother of headaches. “No more than I expected,” she answered.
Her expression belied the words, but Khalida kept her mouth shut. The prickle in her nape told her there were eyes behind every door and window.
Between her unit and the rest, they had pirates running to the spaceport from every corner of the city. It had a slightly rancid smell about it: a script they all ran through, with everyone knowing her part, and no one minded to improvise.
The unit emerged from the tavern, minus the rat’s escort, which would deliver him to the nearest Port Security post and then rejoin the rest. Major Li had that look again, the hunter’s glare, aimed still deeper into the old city.
32
Major Li had stopped pretending to do anything but hunt a single quarry. Khalida kept her mouth shut and her troops in line, and let her lead them toward the real target.
Not a pirate. Those were running like a herd of antelope, bounding toward whatever shelter they could find. Major Li pursued a different prey.
Triangulating emptiness. Khalida felt it ahead of her. The world around it was ordinary, the sun sliding down the sky but still casting a painfully bright light on the nether parts of the port. The place toward which they were going was blank. Simply, starkly blank.
Trap.
“Too obvious,” Khalida said, though she knew what she was doing to herself by saying it. She found she no longer cared. “It’s not the empty you’re looking for. It’s the imperceptible.”
They were fanned out across a wider street than most, with Major Li on point and Khalida behind her. Doors were shut and windows blanked. Any vehicle that had not got out of there long since was pulled over and shut down.
Major Li turned in the empty street. “What—”
“Down!”
She dropped before the word was fully out. A bolt pierced the air where her head had been and blasted the facing from the building across the street.
Khalida’s troops were moving before she could get the words out, tracking the source of the shot and converging on the wall.
There was no one there. No heat signature. Nothing but the track of a bolt, and a sens
e of…direction. That was the best word Khalida could lay on it.
“That way,” she said.
Major Li said nothing. Her eyes had narrowed, maybe with anger, maybe with concentration. She set her lips together and followed where Khalida led.
The marines spread out as much as the street would let them, covering land and air and the walls between. The back of Khalida’s neck prickled, but she kept her head up and her riot shield over it.
She was moving fast, not quite running. The thing she aimed toward had started to move, too, sidling away from the direct line of the street. Side alleys, connected tunnels—in this part of the port, it could be anything.
Khalida stopped abruptly. “I’m going in alone. The rest of you, keep on with the sweep. Make it look good. Catch a rat or two if you can.”
She got no argument from the unit, though the sergeant’s lips had gone tight. Major Li’s dissent was equally physical: when Khalida handed off her shield and slipped through the massed and armored bodies toward the shadow of the wall, the Corps agent did the same.
Khalida had expected that. She set her own pace and let Li work to follow. Which, to be fair, she did well enough.
The trail of nothing led down an alley so narrow Khalida could touch both walls with outstretched hands. The sense of being funneled into ambush was strong enough to make her breath come short, but deeper instincts told her the walls and roof were clear. If anyone was lying looking to take another shot, the aim was outward, toward the unit.
This alley was no more than middling foul, which for this part of the city was worth noticing. It ended in a blank wall.
“May I?”
Khalida moved aside. Major Li slipped past her and laid both hands on the wall.
Her face twisted briefly; her fingers flexed. The wall shifted, divided, opened.
There was nothing supernatural about it. It was a door concealed behind the façade. It led to a corridor, dimly but adequately lit, and perfectly anonymous.
Major Li took the lead. Khalida loosened her sidearm in its holster and slipped the safety.
The passage had no exits: no doors on either side, and another blank wall at the end. To Khalida it felt like one of her less memorable nightmares, a cascade of blankness culminating in nothing.
