Free Undercity by Catherine Asaro Page A

crowd, making him even more effective in his job.
    The Majda sisters were all here, tall, formidable, and pissed off. Corejida Majda paced like a caged desert-lion on my left, back and forth in front of her sister, Colonel Lavinda Majda. The colonel stood by the door, looking stunned. It didn’t surprise me. She had just discovered the dead body of one of her best people. Vaj Majda stood across the table with Takkar, a silent figure who watched us all, her appraising gaze like ice. I had no doubt she missed nothing.
    Max, I thought. Record everything that happens here and store it in file “Interrogation.”
    Recording , he thought.
    The wall to my right doubled as a holoscreen. At the moment, it was playing the recording made by a Majda bee-bot that had followed Lavinda around today. The playback showed the flycar that had taken the colonel, her aide, her bodyguard, and Captain Krestone away from the palace.
    The playback showed Lavinda’s flycar as it settled on the roof of an office tower in Cries. Krestone was piloting and Ebersole sat in the front passenger’s seat. The colonel and her aide were in the back of the car, working with screens they had rolled out into thin films on their laps. Holos danced in the air above the screens showing graphs, images, and glyphs.
    Lavinda was professional with her male aide. It fit my research; the Majdas were scrupulous in their relationships. They treated everyone with the same distant professionalism. If they ever strayed in their personal lives, they had left no trace of their indiscretions. In their circles, heredity determined everything. During the Ruby Empire, the penalty for adultery among the nobility had been execution, and to this day that law remained in force. I had never heard of a noble House executing anyone for fooling around, and I seriously doubted they were all paragons of virtue, but they kept it discreet. As far as I could tell, however, the Majdas actually followed the law. They were annoyingly well behaved, another reason blackmail would never work with them.
    In the recording, the colonel disembarked with her aide and Ebersole, and the three of them walked across the landing pad. A bland bodyguard I vaguely recognized from the palace staff met them at the lift shaft, which jutted up from the roof like a spire of modern art. The bee-bot flew with them. The airlift inside was little more than a disk in a chute, but it lowered them so smoothly, it didn’t ruffle a lock of anyone’s hair. It stopped at upper level of the building, and the four of them walked into a huge place, a confusing expanse of gleaming silver and white Luminex. Then my mind reoriented and I made sense out of the scene. The room spanned the entire floor of the tower. Partial walls of white Luminex stood here and there, but it was mostly open. Abstract sculptures of blue and silver chrome stood in a few areas. It was artistic in a weird sort of way.
    The colonel went to a glass-enclosed office with her aide and the bland bodyguard. She left a box of data spheres on the desk and checked the console there. Major Ebersole stood by the door and kept watch on the huge room, which was empty except for the three of them. He grinned suddenly and swatted directly at us, as if to strike our faces. Of course he didn’t. However, our view did swerve, showing the other offices as if the camera had swung around. Then it came back to Ebersole and the colonel. Hah! Ebersole had done the supposedly impossible, which was see a bee-bot spying on him, and by swatting it, he made it check the rest of the room. Smart fellow. So far all four of them were quite alive, and with Ebersole there, they seemed likely to stay that way. So when had Lavinda’s aide died?
    At the moment, the aide was standing at Lavinda’s side in the office, checking his mesh glove whenever she asked him a question. The bodyguard stood behind him, looking bored. After about fifteen minutes, the three of them rejoined Ebersole and