Metropolitan (40 page)

This is not a
crime
, she thinks. This is politics . . . belief, ideals, necessity .. . different rules apply.

“If you think I will be of use,” Aiah says, “then of course I will help.”

Admiration glows warmly in Constantine’s eyes, “I salute you, brave lady,” he says, and draws her down again for a kiss. His arms go about her. Apprehension and passion war in Aiah’s nerves, and then she kisses him fiercely, determined to possess him entirely, his brilliance and humor and the touch of his body against hers, for as long as the moment lasts.

*

An hour or so later, bathed and dressed, fatigue toxins burned by plasm, Aiah leaves the bedroom at Constantine’s side. The ivory necklace is worn over her evening dress, and the silk nightgown is packed in her overnight bag. He is dressed for casual travel: gray cord pants, boots, his soft black leather jacket. There is a group waiting, a half-dozen of Constantine’s associates, and Sorya sitting in a plush chair wearing her military greatcoat and cap, her booted legs stretched out in front of her.

All waiting, Aiah thinks coldly, with the Fifth Level of Harmonious Balance going on just the other side of one thin hotel door.

Sorya stretches and gives a lazy yawn. “Recreation time over,” she says, and stands, the greatcoat hanging like a cloak off her shoulders. She walks up to Constantine, stands on tiptoe, kisses his cheek.

“The aerocar is ready to take us to Barchab. Geymard is waiting for us there.”

“Then we should go,” Constantine says.

“No luggage to pack? Very well.”

Sorya turns toward the door, pauses, looks at Aiah. A cold, clear warning sounds in Aiah’s mind. Sorya approaches, puts her arms delicately around Aiah, and kisses each cheek. “Thank you for everything,” she says. She reaches into a pocket of her coat, pulls out a jingling velvet bag and drops it into Aiah’s palm.

“Here’s for all your services,” she says with a smile, and turns away.

In the sudden, shocked silence Aiah stares at the weighty bag. Blood rises in her cheeks and murder wails in her heart. Her fingers close around the money, and she puts daggers in her voice.

“Let me know if you ever need my help again,” she says quietly, and sees Sorya’s spine stiffen as she walks out the door.

The others make haste to follow. Constantine looms over Aiah briefly, his hand squeezing her arm. “Sorya is what she is,” he says. “But I thank the gods you are who you are.”

Quickly Aiah traces the Sign of Karlo over his forehead. “Go,” she says, and kisses him.

Lingering by the door, Aiah watches his big form recede down the corridor, his people marching around him as if already formed in ranks for battle.

CHAPTER 19

It’s too dangerous to have all this cash around. She takes Sorya’s money, and the five thousand she’d stored in the fertilizer bag in her grow-room, and takes it to a money exchange. Except for a few hundred, she cashes every clink in for a checktube, and then hides the tube itself in one of Loeno Towers’ utility mains, one she can enter with her Authority passkey.

No more limousine rides; only an arrival time and a password to get her through the doors. Red Line to New Central Line, through Mudki Station, to Garakh Station near Terminal. Aiah knows she’ll feel exposed walking along the Shield-lit streets to the factory, but she doesn’t dare use a cab for fear some driver might remember her.

She climbs the stair out of the New Central Line Station and then shock rolls through her as she finds herself looking straight up at Constantine’s face.

Who is Constantine’s mystery lover?

The smoky glowing letters must be half a radius high.

Details on the
Wire
.

Aiah’s foot reaches for a step that isn’t there and she almost falls. “Careful!” A helpful citizen grabs her arm. “They need to replace this old concrete.” Overhead, Constantine’s image fades, replaced by a screaming headline about the lottery scandal and a picture of a politician hiding his face.

Adrenaline pounds at her heart with rubber mallets. Aiah peers into windows as she walks and finds the black-and-red
Wire
sticker in the flyspecked window of a corner diner. She walks into the diner, plugs coins into the machine, punches buttons for the headline she wants, and then waits two minutes, palms sweating, for the
Wire’s
central computer to scroll the story onto the screen.

Constantine, she reads, the controversial former Metropolitan of Cheloki and subject of renewed interest as the fictionalized hero of the chromoplay
Lords of the New City,
is said to have left his long-time companion, the socialite Sorya, at the chromo’s premiere in order to spend the next several hours in the Landmark Hotel in the company of an unknown woman. He is said to have spent several off-shifts in the Landmark recently, presumably with the same lady, whose identity has piqued the curiosity of millions. Sorya’s reaction to the revelations has not been revealed, and both she and Constantine are incommunicado.

Does she want a printed copy of the story? Aiah savagely jabs the
No
button. Reporters, she thinks, use plasm hounds if the story is big enough, but on the other hand Constantine said he’d have a mage sweep the hotel room clean of all traces.

Well, she thinks, there’ll be a better story about Constantine by tomorrow. Maybe everyone will forget about this one.

And then she thinks,
socialite
. And smiles, imagining Sorya’s reaction.

Aiah leaves the diner and makes her way through the Saturday dinnertime crowds. By coincidence the route takes her past the building that held Kremag and Associates. The faintest taste of pepper gas touches her nostrils and she glances up at the building’s ornamental wrought-iron crown. Pedestrians walk past without giving the building a glance. The arrests are yesterday’s news. Aiah heads on to the factory. She’s got more news to make.

*

The factory is quiet and dark and filled with the tension of waiting. Aiah has been here five hours and feels perfectly useless. Probably she should have brought a book or magazine to read. Possibly she shouldn’t have come at all. Even the pigeons seem to know it’s sleep shift and drowse on the roof beams.

The two young Jaspeeri mages are dipping the plasm well — teenagers, Aiah thinks, mere children — but they’re not part of the attack, they’re helping to guard the factory. Another mage is due to arrive later to help coordinate the actual assault.

There are a half-dozen security people, but they’re second-string — Aiah doesn’t know any of them, and they don’t move with the same unobtrusive, watchful confidence she’s experienced with Constantine’s personal guard. A group of communication specialists huddle around their equipment, monitoring radios and ground links. They’re dressed in civilian rig, but their posture is military, just like their spit-shined shoes. Aiah is the only woman present.

Aside from the two boys, Aiah hasn’t met any of these people before.

Everyone’s known by code-names, which imparts a silly sense of chromoplay melodrama to the whole proceeding. Aiah is Lady, which is at least logical. The boys are Wizards Two and Three — Wizard Two is the one with thick spectacles, and Wizard One is the mage who is yet to arrive - and the rest, manning the commo board or the radios, all have names like Red or Trucker or Slim.

“Insertion’s proceeding,” Red says to no one in particular. He’s listening to radio traffic, headphones clamped over his ears. The announcement is perfectly unnecessary, because a jerky video feed from Geymard’s helicopter shows the mercenaries flying toward Caraqui from their bases in the Timocracy of Garshab. Shieldlight splashes off rotors as the gray machines arrow through the sky, ordnance patient in streamlined pods. Bulletlike aerocars, packed with munitions, follow at a discreet distance. Geymard is still hundreds of radii away from his destination, and will refuel in midair before the final jump to his targets. In Caraqui, army units are already on the road. The First Brigade started late, with some officers having to be arrested or won over at the last minute, but the Second and Marine Brigades are on schedule, and the Marines made their move without a single officer over the rank of captain, having slipped out from under all its senior commanders while they were sleeping off a celebration honoring one of their number, a celebration carefully arranged by the coup leaders.

This last is the subject of much mirth when Red reports it. Aiah smiles and pictures herself, Telia, and the other junior executives turning buccaneer and commandeering the Plasm Control Authority while Mengene, Oeneme and the other seniors are off at a party in honor of the Intendant.

Adjusting the surgical gloves she’s been given to keep her fingerprints to herself, Aiah wanders toward the office. The maps and the lists of names have gone, but in their place are a checklist, a carefully compiled master schedule for the entire operation, complete with handwritten addenda in pencil. All names are in code, including all personnel, units and objectives, so it’s pretty opaque even to someone who knows what’s going on. Opaque or not, the schedule isn’t meant to be left behind, and for that reason it sits in a metal safe on which squats a slab of pure thermite: pull the pin and white-hot metal melts right through the safe and slags everything in it. All paper is to go in the safe on evacuation, along with the surgical gloves and t-grips, and everything will then be cooked to atoms.

Aiah looks at her watch — two minutes after four — then at the list.
04:05: Team Seven-A reaches Point Barometer en route to Point Windvane.

Team Seven, she knows, is the absconding Marine Brigade. Seven-A must be one of its units.

“Seven-A is at Barometer,” Red reports. Aiah looks at her watch again. Seven-A would seem to be ahead of schedule.

There’s a clumping of security men at the big street door, an exchange of passwords, and then the door opens and a red Gharik two-seater enters. The woman inside doffs her shieldglasses and steps outside, and a rush of surprised recognition goes through Aiah.

It’s Aldemar, an actress who plays a mage in a lot of second-rate chromos and is alleged to be a mage in reality. Aiah had never really believed it, or for that matter any of the other hype concerning this woman, whose absurd adventure plays were supposed to be inspired by her real life.
Attack of the Hanged Man
is her current release; Aiah’s seen the ads for it, and it sounds ghastly.
This is who we’ve been waiting for?
Aiah wonders.

Constantine, she thinks, has not lost his capacity to surprise.

Aiah waits in the office and is surprised by the other woman when she arrives. Aiah is used to seeing the actress forty feet tall in chromos, and in person she’s tiny, over a head shorter than Aiah, with dainty wrists and delicate ankles cased in clinging leather boots. Her dark hair is bobbed, with bangs across the forehead, and her refined features have the enigmatic caste that comes with years of plasm rejuvenation treatments. She seems surprised to find Aiah here.

Aiah holds out a hand. “Hello. You must be Wizard One.”

Aldemar smiles and takes the hand. “You are... ?”

“Lady.”

“Ah. Fine. Appropriate, I’m sure. And what’s happening so far?”

One of the communications techs leaps in to answer. “First Brigade had some problems sorting things out, but they’re on their way.”

“Air refueling’s commenced!” Red calls helpfully from his console — he seems miffed that his headset cord won’t stretch all the way to the celebrity.

Aldemar sits on the end of the old metal desk, is presented with the checklist, and goes over it carefully. Aiah watches her: even though she’s dressed in old cotton jeans and a worn quilted jacket, with no makeup or jewelry, there’s still an aura of glamor here. For years her skin and hair have been beautifully cared for, and she moves with the perfect, unhurried poise of an actress used to presenting all the most flattering angles. She responds to the techs’ clumsy attentions with grace and an expression of perfect attention so studied it might as well be real. Her identity as a celebrity is so ingrained by now that even though she’s made the attempt to suppress it, she was still recognized by everyone at the factory the second she stepped from her car.

Constantine, Aiah thinks,
uses
his celebrity, it’s a weapon, or a tool, he employs to get what he wants, a table at a restaurant or access to the powerful. Aldemar’s fame seems much more a part of her, and perhaps it’s all there is.

One of the techs scurries to make her a sandwich.

The mage senses Aiah’s appraisal, looks up at Aiah from under her bangs. “Did you need to tell me something?” she asks.

“
No. But they didn’t offer
me
a sandwich.”

The corner of Aldemar’s mouth twitches in amusement. “Perhaps one of these gentlemen will get you one.”

One of the gentlemen does.

04:12: Team Eight-C reaches Point Window on its way to Point Pillar.

Aiah remembers all the stories of the Barkazil War she heard when growing up, all the old soldiers drinking their beer on the sidewalk and reminiscing. She imagines trucks and armored cars in silent, disciplined columns, rumbling engine noise disturbing the sleep of Caraqui’s citizens. Marines in their gunboats speeding through the darkness beneath their city’s huge concrete pontoons.

Looks up to the video feed to see Shieldlight glinting off rotor blades and the blunt noses of rockets.

Thinks of dolphins darting in the darkness beneath Caraqui’s barges, weapons in their sleek hands.

And considers Taikoen, the hanged man, living in the pulse of plasm, ghost-hands reaching out to smother life.

She wonders who will die according to the neat dictates of the checklist and who will not, will die instead in the sudden, flaming knowledge that all schedules have gone awry, all agendas are voided, all programs canceled.