City on Fire (Metropolitan 2) (28 page)

“It is not your fault that Gentri was clever,” Constantine says. “I suspected something, and Sorya could not find an answer, and I asked you to help ... I had not the right to expect you to find a thing when the experts could not.”

“
But this ...”
I am to blame
, she wants to say, but her tongue trips on the words.

Constantine booms out the door at the end of the tunnel, and the vast space that is Plasm Control swims into giddy perspective. People sit intent before banks of glowing dials and brass levers. The icon to Two-Faced Tangid glowers down at them with red electric eyes. Poised like a dancer with one foot turned out, Sorya stands leaning against a console, intent in conversation with Captain Delruss, the stocky engineer who had given Aiah her first tour of the palace. Constantine and Aiah approach.

“These reinforcements landing at the aerodrome,” Constantine begins. “Our friends in the Timocracy did not warn us that these people were mobilizing?”

Sorya looks disturbed. “I have heard nothing.”

Delruss— born and raised in the Timocracy of Garshab— speaks in a soft voice. “We are very good at operational security. Possibly the destination was kept secret until the units were actually in flight. So unless someone very high up was sympathetic to the current government here, or had a friend here he wished to warn, it isn’t surprising you were caught off guard.”

“Who is paying for them?” Sorya wonders. “I do not think that Radeen or Gentri have that kind of money, and the soldiers of the Timocracy do not move without ready coin.” Her eyes narrow. “I suspect our neighbors. Lanbola does not love us, nor does Charna. Barchab wants the Keremaths back, but their government is so disorganized I doubt they could keep something like this secret.”

“We shall find out in time,” Constantine says. “But until then we need to deal with the soldiers themselves. Sorya, I think we need to make their landing considerably less pleasant.”

Pleasure glitters in Sorya’s green eyes. “May I have free use of the available mages?”

“So long as security here is not imperiled, yes. At the very least, try to crater the runways.”

Sorya gives an elaborate, ironic bow. “Your servant, sir.”

As Sorya glides away, Constantine turns to Delruss. “How much plasm can we call on? Can we afford to go on the offensive?”

“We’ve ordered all the plasm stations in the city to cease non-emergency use and to prepare to send us any stored plasm beyond that required for station defense, but three have not responded. We have thrown emergency switches to take them off the well, but these did not answer properly and have probably been sabotaged. Four other plasm stations reported that police tried to talk their way past security, but were turned away by the military police guards without violence.”

“So the other stations probably made the mistake of letting the police inside?”

“Very possibly.” Delruss looks apologetic. “There was no alert, of course. No reason to suspect them.”

Constantine’s eyes light with calculation. “Three stations,” he muses. “And of course the Second Brigade’s own headquarters plasm. That isn’t enough to breach our defenses, but it can raise a lot of mischief and will probably be supplemented with plasm purchased abroad. If our enemies can afford foreign troops, they can certainly afford foreign plasm. But—” He smiles. “They tried to take seven plasm stations and got only three. They attempted to bring all the army with them and got only a single brigade of infantry and the Aerial Brigade, which seems to be somewhat less than enthusiastic. At least one of the triumvirs is still at large, and their attempt to murder me was foiled by Sorya.” He puts a large, warm hand on Aiah’s shoulder. “And they have not had Miss Aiah to provide a well of plasm vast beyond reckoning, as we did in our own strike. And that is where they are at a disadvantage.” At his words, Aiah feels a welling of pleasure that wars with the despair in her heart.

“Minister,” she says. “My department has mages in the building. Not trained for military work, but—”

“How many?” Constantine’s response is immediate.

“A dozen or so. I should be getting a report very soon.”

He nods briskly. “We will see if we can put them to use.”

He leans closer to Aiah and speaks in a low rumble. “In the meantime, I need you to organize some ministry employees— form teams— and get out into the city. Find the plasm connections to those three stations, and cut them. Destroy them, so that they cannot be repaired with any ease.”

Aiah’s heart gives a lurch. “I—” She hesitates. She will need maps, she thinks, equipment for manipulating plasm connections. Boats. How many teams? And Constantine wanted the plasm connections destroyed—how? Demolitions? No— not unless Constantine can give her people who know how to use them.

Acetylene torches, she thinks. Close the switches and weld them shut.

Constantine’s eyes, cold and commanding, glitter down at her. “Yes, Minister,” she says. He nods. “Very good. You may draw what you need from our ministry supplies here in the Palace. Take food from the cafeterias—you may be gone for some time.”

Aiah’s head whirls. “Yes.”

He looks at her gravely, and to her immense surprise sketches the Sign of Karlo over her forehead with his thumb.

“At once, Miss Aiah," he says, his voice surprisingly gentle, and turns away.

CHELOKI RECOGNIZES CARAQUI REBELS

DENOUNCES “CONSTANTINE’S ILLEGITIMIST METHODS”

Marine engines rumble in the darkness beneath the city. The combined reek of floating garbage and floating humanity is clenched in the back of Aiah’s throat like a fist.

The boat’s spotlights carve a misty tunnel in the darkness. Rusting hulls, strange scaffoldwork, misshapen bodies, and dully glittering eyes loom on either side. The boat is passing through one of the uncharted half-worlds, a far more primitive place than Aground, a randomly assembled collection of human and nautical rubbish. Edged by the spotlights, perceived only in fragments, the rusting barges and silent, unresponsive people have a nightmarish jigsaw quality, eerie fragments assembled at random in some huge, unguessable formation.

It had taken several hours for Aiah to assemble her teams— to find them in the shelters, to persuade them to volunteer, to locate the necessary equipment, and to plan the operation on ministry maps laid out over the tables in the Operations Room. And all the while the situation outside was changing, the balance of power shifting as more elements entered the volatile situation. . . .

Sorya’s team of mages failed to significantly damage the mercenary units landing at the aerodrome— they were well guarded by their own mages— but she succeeded in cratering the runways to prevent further reinforcements. The incoming mercenaries were forced to divert their flights to neighboring Lanbola, where it is presumed they will be interned. Hilthi was plucked from his hideout by Geymard’s troops and delivered to Caraqui’s broadcast center, where radio and video began to air his appeals to the population. And to everyone’s surprise the third member of the triumvirate, Parq, phoned in from his office in the Grand Temple. He had survived a brawl between his guards and police sent to arrest him, and several people had been killed. He had thought the plot aimed against himself alone— perhaps initiated by a band of religious dissidents— and had only belatedly discovered the extent of the countercoup.

He was declaring for the government, he said, and was mobilizing his Dalavan Guard and would soon be making a broadcast on his own Temple-owned communications channels.

Constantine seemed pleasantly surprised by this. In view of Parq’s history of treachery, he clearly had anticipated a great deal of bargaining before the triumvir chose one side or another; but apparently the assassination attempt had frightened him— “He cannot be encouraged by the thought that our opponents find him dispensable,” as Constantine remarked— and Parq was now firmly in the government camp, even if his Dalavan Guard was a lightly armed joke.

Following this news came another strike by the Aerial Brigade— much more timid this time: the helicopters darted from the aerodrome, fired their rockets at extreme range in the general direction of the Palace, then raced back to safety. The rockets rained down everywhere but the Palace, setting fires in the surrounding district, and Geymard’s military mages and antiaircraft weapons managed to bring two of the helicopters down in spite of their caution.

Aiah had packed her teams into their four official ministry powerboats and waited for the all-clear. It was all, she suspected, her fault. Now she had a chance to repair some of the damage, and the only way to be certain of success was to do the job personally. A mage’s place, she realized, is probably in the Palace, but unless she was in the field with her teams, she could not make sure the job would be done right.

But it was an ominous sight, as the day eased into its third shift, that greeted Aiah as her motorboat slid from the government marina— low gray clouds obscuring the Shield, a cold wind shouldering its way between the buildings, columns of black smoke rising from the city on fire. The sky was empty of plasm adverts— all plasm had been diverted to other purposes— and there were no people to be seen other than soldiers huddling behind barricades. There was a strange silence in the air— none of the usual noises, the hiss of motor traffic or the roar of boats. Even the sound of helicopters, so prominent earlier in the day, was gone. There was a sense of wariness, of hidden eyes looking down at Aiah’s boats from darkened windows. It is as if her little flotilla is the only thing moving in the whole city, the only thing alive, the only target...

As if the metropolis was waiting to discover who would be its master.

Motoring out of sight in the half-submerged world beneath the city’s structures is like cruising down a huge flooded sewer, the hulking barnacle-encrusted concrete pontoons looming huge on either side, overhead a distant, shadowy roof or the narrow slit of Shieldlight permitted by overhanging buildings. Here the turnings are largely unmapped, and navigation is largely by instinct and by compass. Uncharted half-worlds filled with equally uncharted humanity block the channels and impede progress.

Now something large and black runs along a half-world gangway on Aiah’s left, then disappears into a darker piece of shadow. Aiah’s heart leaps, and her eyes strain into the gloom. Nothing moves. Whatever— whoever— it was remains hidden.

Ahead, a bright patch of Shieldlight transects the channel. Aiah gnaws her lip, looks hopelessly at the map pinned to the table in front of her, then takes one of the boat’s spotlights and trains it on the side of the pontoon near the splash of light. Every pontoon is required to have identification numbers painted on each end, and there are also supposed to be hanging metal signs giving the names of the various nautical lanes and channels; but the usual Caraqui slackness has been applied to the regulations, the signs have been scavenged for their metal, and what inspector would ever visit the underworlds anyway?

Aiah motions with her hand and the boat slows while she scans the pontoon, and then the pontoon opposite. Narrowing her eyes, she can faintly make out the flaked, weathered paint, centuries old, only visible because there is no real weathering down here. Each numeral is twice her height, and the pattern is only visible at all because it’s so huge. 4536N: a coordinate. She returns to her map, squints down at it, looks at the boat’s compass, then back at the map.

“Left,” she says, hoping she’s worked the compass correctly— this close to the Pole, the deviation is enormous— and that the new course will take them all west, to their target at Fresh Water Bay.

The turn takes the flotilla into a narrow alleyway overshadowed by tenements of brown brick. The place actually has a name: Coel’s Channel. The sky is a long, narrow slit directly overhead, dark cloud skimming low overhead. Far above, laundry strung on lines floats gray in Shieldlight. Arrangements of guy wires and planks, sometimes at dizzying heights, connect the buildings over the little canal. A female hermit, long gray hair shrouding her face, hangs like the laundry from a wire in what looks like an old flour sack.

One of the boat’s crew has been listening to the radio, earphones pressed to his head, turning knobs as he stares fixedly at yellow glowing dials. He looks up with a start. “Listen to this,” he says, and turns another knob, and an official-sounding voice comes from the buzzing metal grid of the speaker.

“—al Government of Caraqui,” it says, “was formed in order to unite those patriotic citizens determined to free our metropolis from the pernicious foreign ideas of the ex-Metropolitan Constantine and his gang of outland mercenaries.”

“
Who
is
this?” growls Davath— large, twisted, a stoneface with features like pitted concrete. The answer to his question is obvious enough. The enemy has finally declared himself publicly.

“I will now surrender the microphone to our president, Kerehorn.”

“
Kere
horn
?” asks Prestley. “Which Keremath’s that?”

“Kerethan’s son,” Aedavath says.

“No, Kerethan’s son was Keredeen, and they both got killed.”

“
Kerethan’s
other
son.” Stubbornly.

“No, he’s dead, too.”

“
Hush.”

Kerehorn’s voice is reedy and uncertain. “Greetings, fellow citizens. The day of liberation is nigh.”

“
Nigh?”
someone offers. “Who
wrote
this?”

The speech is a vitriolic personal attack on Constantine, along with his “gang of foreigners and oppressors.” Other major figures in the government, Drumbeth and Parq and Hilthi, are not even mentioned. But Kerehorn is not much of a speaker, and the whole speech falls flat, interrupted every so often by the rustle of paper as he tries to find his place in his prepared text.

Aiah looks at the others as they all listen: their faces show skepticism, amused contempt, grim humor. They’ve lived under the rule of the Keremaths, and she hasn’t: they know better than she how to take this. Apparently their respect for Kerehorn, or any of his family, is limited.