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Authors: Catherine Asaro
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crumbling aqueduct toward the Maze, my laser stylus hanging around my neck, providing a glow to light the way. Memories came at me from all sides, like flashes of pain. When I was nine, I had stood on this path while a small child with a dirty face held out her hand, tears on her face because she was cold and had nothing to eat. I’d lifted her into my arms and held her while she cried. She had no name, so I called her Sparks, for the look in her eyes when she saw me. She became part of my circle, which included my dust gang, several adults who helped us, and two single-parent families. She and I lived together while I ran with the gangers, helping to fill our coffers with food, blankets, clothes, toys, and anything useful I could steal from topside.
She fell sick when I was ten. We called it the carnelian rash, an illness that prowled the aqueducts like a specter, turning the skin of its victims red and scaly. No hospital in Cries would take a dust rat. I was the one who nursed her, who used wet clothes to cool her rash, who dribbled filtered water between her swollen lips, who traded raw steak to the drug punkers for the hack that eased her pain—and I was the one who held her in my arms as she died. She went in peace, in her sleep, but I never forgot. Too many memories. Too much hurt.
After I retired from the army, I came back to Raylicon with some nebulous idea that I could find a place to live in the city of my childhood. I wanted to see Cries from the perspective of someone who lived in the above-city. It hadn’t worked and in the end, I had left, I thought forever. After all, they say you can never go home again, whoever “they” is. And yet here I was, once more in the undercity.
Today I followed the midwalk of a shallow waterway only about a meter across. Up ahead, its wall had fallen, blocking my way, a mound of rubble nearly as tall as me. It hadn’t been here seven years ago. I clambered over the debris and squeezed through the hole it left in the wall, entering an even narrower canal. It didn’t surprise me that this entire area seemed deserted; with such a low population in the undercity and such extensive aqueducts, you could walk for a long time without seeing anyone.
Of course that didn’t mean no one was here. These canals were networked with crannies, and crevices, and anyone could be watching from a hiding place. Although my holstered pulse gun was visible, I doubted that was why no one bothered me. For all that I lived and worked in the above-city now, I fooled no one here with my veneer of civilization. They knew their own. However, they hadn’t accepted me, either. They were waiting to see what I would do.
I carried the jammer in my backpack, shrouding myself. No doubt Chief Takkar was trying to track me through the biomech web in my body. That was illegal of course, except for the topmost military brass. Like the General of the Pharaoh’s Army, eh? Although the signals my web produced were encrypted and invisible to most sensors, Takkar would know how to track them. I knew even better how to hide them. The image-dust on my skin also shielded me against the bee-bots in the Majda security arsenal. Blasted bees. They searched out the DNA of a specific person and reported in when they found a match. Several had buzzed around me earlier today, but when I activated my shroud, they became confused and wandered away. Although the “bees” were almost too small to see, I had sensors in my gauntlets that could detect their signatures, devices I’d bought on the black market, one of my savvier investments.
Takkar would be thoroughly pissed when she couldn’t find me. Tough. The people I needed to talk with didn’t react kindly to intruders who came with Majda listening. The cyber-riders salvaged or filched tech-mech from Cries and its garbage dens, and what they did with that “junk” surpassed the best tech-mech Cries had to offer. The undercity would know if I had Majda in my pocket.
I
She fell sick when I was ten. We called it the carnelian rash, an illness that prowled the aqueducts like a specter, turning the skin of its victims red and scaly. No hospital in Cries would take a dust rat. I was the one who nursed her, who used wet clothes to cool her rash, who dribbled filtered water between her swollen lips, who traded raw steak to the drug punkers for the hack that eased her pain—and I was the one who held her in my arms as she died. She went in peace, in her sleep, but I never forgot. Too many memories. Too much hurt.
After I retired from the army, I came back to Raylicon with some nebulous idea that I could find a place to live in the city of my childhood. I wanted to see Cries from the perspective of someone who lived in the above-city. It hadn’t worked and in the end, I had left, I thought forever. After all, they say you can never go home again, whoever “they” is. And yet here I was, once more in the undercity.
Today I followed the midwalk of a shallow waterway only about a meter across. Up ahead, its wall had fallen, blocking my way, a mound of rubble nearly as tall as me. It hadn’t been here seven years ago. I clambered over the debris and squeezed through the hole it left in the wall, entering an even narrower canal. It didn’t surprise me that this entire area seemed deserted; with such a low population in the undercity and such extensive aqueducts, you could walk for a long time without seeing anyone.
Of course that didn’t mean no one was here. These canals were networked with crannies, and crevices, and anyone could be watching from a hiding place. Although my holstered pulse gun was visible, I doubted that was why no one bothered me. For all that I lived and worked in the above-city now, I fooled no one here with my veneer of civilization. They knew their own. However, they hadn’t accepted me, either. They were waiting to see what I would do.
I carried the jammer in my backpack, shrouding myself. No doubt Chief Takkar was trying to track me through the biomech web in my body. That was illegal of course, except for the topmost military brass. Like the General of the Pharaoh’s Army, eh? Although the signals my web produced were encrypted and invisible to most sensors, Takkar would know how to track them. I knew even better how to hide them. The image-dust on my skin also shielded me against the bee-bots in the Majda security arsenal. Blasted bees. They searched out the DNA of a specific person and reported in when they found a match. Several had buzzed around me earlier today, but when I activated my shroud, they became confused and wandered away. Although the “bees” were almost too small to see, I had sensors in my gauntlets that could detect their signatures, devices I’d bought on the black market, one of my savvier investments.
Takkar would be thoroughly pissed when she couldn’t find me. Tough. The people I needed to talk with didn’t react kindly to intruders who came with Majda listening. The cyber-riders salvaged or filched tech-mech from Cries and its garbage dens, and what they did with that “junk” surpassed the best tech-mech Cries had to offer. The undercity would know if I had Majda in my pocket.
I
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