93 - Hara's Secret

Hara sat in the back of the throne room and looked out over the space. Three quarters of the zardukar were working hard to maintain Lainz all up and down the canyon. The young men in the group didn’t stand out, especially behind the veils, even with the men’s sarband. The bees hummed and settled on various of the zardukar. The wax models of the city and of the canyon grow terraces glowed with the changes they sealed into place. 

The main city of Lainz alone shone on the map. The whole rest of the continent seemed dark compared to the bright spot of the city. As the zardukar came online to hide the major concentration of human beings on the continent Lainz was slowly… slowly lost in the wash of light of ‘natural’ light sources up and down the whole length of the canyon. The Milari were included and the sparks of glowing deception spread all the way into Nadumon and down to Trovi. 

The mist curtains actually blew water into and across the zardukar, as the rain-winds heralded the arrival of the second rainy season in the year. This time... after the death of the old Radiance and the taking up of a new Queen, there was no fancy posturing of Hive Lords and their supporters and no precious daughters being trotted out to dance with prospective suitors. The whole social season had been disrupted with the massive changes. 

The lin was in every household and the poorer quarters were sending their children down to gather fibres in the canyon to sell. People kept sheet after sheet and a whole new industry had sprung up to bind sheets into bundles and boxes, carefully labelled. Everyone, if they had water and fibre, had access to a permanent record of what they wrote and they could send it across the Empire and now into Milar. 

As many copies as people wanted to pass around to their families, to their friends, even on the street. The main news sheet were being sold for either work or coin to those who had no home for a lin to settle. The Milari pages were the most popular exotic news... and Trovi, now not just a name, but a presence in people's lives every day. People put everything into the lin. 

The data keepers in the Hive were swamped with people sending and storing information, stories, pictures, drawings, recipes, ideas, machine plans, work engagements, games and how to play them. How to clean things, how to filter things, how to tend someone lost in the code. The Dark Monks found that they suddenly had a way to teach people how to retrieve relatives lost in their own heads, manuals for code work. 

The mist-curtains that played moving pictures were enormously popular, but there was no way for everyone to keep the plays yet and people were clamouring for the 'everyday' motion keeper. Learning was spreading as if the old Radiance had opened the school and poured it like fire-starter into a bonfire. 

Hara quietly gathered up her veils around her, taking more time at it than a Lainz woman, so she didn't draw any attention to herself by knocking something over with a trailing hem. Her slippers were almost silent against the stone as she walked down inside the column of the city, down into the raw rock itself. 

Shashi and Kurazon and the women --the other zardukar, female or male -- were all working as hard as they could, just to keep the city going, and to keep Prime's spy-eyes in the sky from even considering that the glitter they saw on the planet below was anything but natural. The boys were all off... and safe... she'd made certain sure of that, first thing after the concussions. They weren't playing war anymore. Prime had done really well by them, by raining destruction from the sky on the Nadumon. 

If she knew her father... and step father, truly... then Prime'd near as shoved them all into the same bed and he'd have to just choke on the consequences of married cultures. There was the Terence code on the moon but she found that just too tempting to flee there and chat and waste time, and just be with something that wasn't even a human boy, but a machine ghost of one, though she did wonder if he was as charming in the flesh as his simulacra was. 

She was far below the usual paths for the city, far below the spiralling paths and rooms and evacuation halls for the populous, should an attack from the sky ever come. Far below the vast reservoirs where the filtered water was kept for emergency. 

Her bees buzzed around her head and she smiled as they landed on her sarband and told her about what they'd built, what they'd made, what they'd helped people design. She had clouds of all of the building bees around her and they buzzed louder and louder as they realized she was heading down to her place. 

It was a hollow space, with bee-built corbels holding up the tons of city above. There were slits to let light in all around and at this point the butte was connected hard to the cliff, a bit over half way down to the canyon floor. There was enough rock, now edged with bee metal, to hold this space,this studio, for her. She hadn't shown anyone else human what she was doing here.

There was only a human sized door, since she had not yet come up with anything that needed a larger access door. She keyed the door and that triggered the bioluminescent lights in the walls and ceiling, illuminating her project. 

The boys had said, 'find a way to fly'. But her talks with Terence/machine had convinced her that it wasn't enough to merely get word out to the greater community off planet, that Milar (and Lainz and the others, she reminded herself) existed and owned the part of the planet they were on. Prime had showed he was perfectly capable of trying to erase people on the ground. He probably had a dozen lies ready if someone should ever come from away, and ask him about it. They were sitting targets, even if mostly hidden. 

No, the flying thing they built had to have multiple roles... and one of them was a sword and shield for people. A thing that flew, as if warbirds could fly, and could stop Prime's rocks from hitting the ground... or even breaking up in the atmosphere because Terry's machine had illustrated for her how awful that could be as well.

In the centre of her secret hall, was her best bee-built design for a flying machine that might be the Shield for Milar and Lainz. She'd think of flying swords later. 

This was a mechanical bush dragon that could swat small rocks and snowballs out of their courses, break them up, deflect them. If she could find a way to power it, it should be able to get into the air... might keep the city safe, while they argued with Prime in the greater courts.