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 deviation 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.”
“Keretora?” 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.
“We pledge ourselves to the restoration of the ancient liberties and traditions of the Caraqui people,” Kerehorn says, and cynical laughter floats from one team member to the next.
“Why does he even bother to justify it?” someone says.
Cold certainty suddenly floods Aiah’s mind: Kerehorn is not the real leader. This unprepossessing a character could never have organized something as dangerous as the coun-tercoup. He is a figurehead, intended to provide a degree of legitimacy for the coup’s genuine leaders. But whose figurehead is he? Radeen’s?
Perhaps Radeen is using the Keremaths’ money to wedge himself into power. Perhaps they are both pawns of someone else. Or perhaps there is no real leader, only a group of people, each with different reasons for wanting to destroy the current government…
Coel’s Channel comes to an end up ahead, and the waters of a wide canal open out, its water bright green with algae and home to a flock of pelicans preening themselves in the unusual stillness. The boat’s helmsman throttles back. Aiah looks at the map again.
Ideally she wants to go straight on, but looking ahead she can see nothing but the gray slab wall of a pontoon on the far side of the canal. Obviously they will have to traverse the open canal for at least a while before turning west again.
The helmsman reverses the engines briefly to bring the boat to a complete stop, its prow barely jutting out beyond Coel’s Channel. Another crewman airily steps out onto the foredeck and peers left and right past the high concrete walls on either side. Aiah can tell from the sudden stiffening of his spine that he sees trouble. He returns to the cockpit, and Aiah’s mouth goes dry as she sees his grim expression.
“There’s a bridge to starboard, right in our path,” he says. “I can see a police roadblock on it, several cars, maybe a dozen cops.”
“Armed?” Aiah asks.
An unreadable expression passes across the crewman’s face. “Of course.”
An idiot question: Aiah doesn’t know
what she’s going to do, what she can do, and is just playing for time. She delays further by going onto the foredeck herself, moving far less surefootedly than the boat’s crewman; she peers gingerly around the corner, heart pounding, and sees the bridge a few stades away. Suspension wires curve in a graceful arc, and the iron uprights are covered with an untarnishable black ceramic impressed with the oval cameo profiles of long-dead Caraquis. Square in the middle of the span is the roadblock: cars drawn across the span with their lights flashing in silence, uniformed men standing with long weapons in their hands. Should they choose to fire down into boats passing beneath them, they could cause a massacre. But getting around them will require an endless amount of backtracking, with little assurance of not encountering another roadblock somewhere else along the way.
“Long live the Provisional Government!” The chorused words ring out from the radio. Aiah gnaws her lip and tries to figure out what to do.
Pelicans drift in the canal ahead, mocking her with eerie pebble eyes.
“We now take you live to Government Harbor,” the announcer says, “where officers and men of the Caraqui Army will swear allegiance to President Kerehorn and the new government.”
There is a pause, a howl of feedback—apparently people in Government Harbor are listening to the broadcast with their speakers turned up—and then a commanding voice, speaking a bit too far from the microphone.
“This is War Minister Radeen!” he says, and immediately afterward, as the techs sense his distance from the mike, his volume cranks up a bit. He has a tendency to shout every phrase and then stop, breaking every sentence up into little exclamations. “I have before me the officers! And the soldiers! Of the Army of Caraqui! Soldiers—!” The volume goes up again as the proclaiming starts. “I will now lead you! In the oath of allegiance to your new government!” He takes a breath. “/, a soldier of Caraqui…”
“I,” a great chorus roars, “a soldier of Caraqui…”
Aiah is struck by the idea of Radeen, far before the issue is decided, actually lining up the soldiers of the Second Brigade—or a large number of them, anyway—in Government Harbor square in order to swear an oath that, judging by the Second Brigade’s adherence to past oaths, isn’t worth a brass hundredth…
“Here in the sight of the gods and immortals…,” Radeen continues.
Government Harbor is a symbol—it’s the official seat of government, with the Popular Assembly and offices for most of the government departments—but it has no real military value. True civil and military power is concentrated in the vastness of the Aerial Palace. During the coup of Drumbeth and Constantine, Government Harbor had been seized, but the Marines then pushed on to aid in the storming of the Palace. Now Radeen seems content with the seizure of deserted office buildings and the mouthing of empty oaths.
Aiah has no military background, but in the past months she has seen real soldiers at work, and if she were in charge of the Second Brigade her soldiers would already be hammering at the doors of the Palace.
She snarls. These people do not deserve to win.
“/ swear allegiance to the Provisional Government, representing the people of Caraqui…”
And then over the radio comes a whistle and an explosion, and then another and another, and then shouts and screams. There is the crackling sound of rolling thunder, and Aiah remembers plasm heat on her face as she recognizes the sound of telepresent mages doing invisible combat. More cries and explosions buffet the microphone. She pictures neat parade formations dissolving in blood and chaos. Perhaps this is the ordinary soldiers’ first clue that they are not unopposed.
Government Harbor, she concludes, is entirely within the range of the mortars that Geymard had readied on the Palace roofs, and Radeen’s mages can’t keep out every round.
She looks back over the boat’s crew and sees their grins—twisted Davath throws back his head and laughs, cold amusement bubbling from his vast trunk—and then quite suddenly she knows what she will do.
“Turn on the flashers,” she says. “Lean on the horn. Everyone put on your hard hat, and stay in plain sight.” A strange, daring humor courses through her, and she gives a reckless smile. “When we see the police, everyone wave!”
The crew looks at her in surprise, then obeys. She puts on the official red hard hat that marks her as a member of the ministry’s Plasm Bureau. The emergency lights flash on, tracking yellow and red across the narrow concrete walls of Coel’s Channel. The helmsman leans on the air horn, and the blast startles the flock of pelicans into sudden flight. He throws the throttles all the way forward, and the boat’s stern digs into the murky canal water and leaps forward on a sudden boil of white foam…
Wind blows Aiah’s hair back as she sees the bridge sway into view. Police in black shiny helmets look down at the small convoy of motorboats driving a flock of frantic birds before it. Aiah senses their eyes on her and feels a defiant blast of fire in her heart, burning as fierce as if it were plasm. A grin drags her lips back from her teeth, and she raises a hand to wave at her fellow civil servants on the bridge above.
There is a moment of hesitation. Then black gloves lift and wave in answer. Some of the gloves carry weapons, but the barrels are pointing at the Shield.
The bridge passes, a black shadow like the wings of death, and then the boats are past. The police have not been instructed to impede emergency vehicles.
The helmsman gives Aiah a hollow graveyard laugh, and there is a hot glow of reckless terror in his eyewhites as he turns to Aiah. “Go west again?” he says.
Aiah shakes her head. “Stay in the main channels. Faster that way.” The helmsman laughs again, defying his own fear.
“Aye aye, miss,” he says.
The carnage on the radio ceases as switches are finally thrown in Kerehorn’s headquarters. Someone puts on music, something with a lot of violins.
Aiah’s teams pass half a dozen police roadblocks on the way to Fresh Water Bay, but the police never do anything but wave.
TEN
They are deep in the bowels of a concrete barge long as a Jaspeeri city block, in a place walled off by bulkheads and watertight steel doors. Somewhere a pump is thudding, there’s a constant loud humming noise from the generators in the next compartment, and the electric cable that services the light fixtures is tacked to the ceiling with metal staples. The oversized lightbulbs, with little nipples on the tips, are in metal cages.
—Carcel’s team is not quite in place. Took a wrong turn.
Ethemark’s disembodied mental voice, ringing in Aiah’s head, is different from his real voice, pitched a little higher, and with little resonance.
—Tell the others to stand by, Aiah sends.
And then, to Davath and Prestley, “Not just yet.”
When Aiah’s little convoy got to Fresh Water Bay, she called the Aerial Palace on a portable handset she plugged into a communications junction. Constantine, who had not felt he could spare any mages to escort them during their trip, had then assigned each of Aiah’s four teams a telepresent minder.
Accompanied by their invisible guardians, the teams split up and surrounded their target plasm station. They were going to try cutting all its plasm supply at once, at each of the four plasm mains leading to the structure.
—The station will be attacked once you cut it off from the net, Ethemark says. Constantine is sending two companies of Garshabis. Once the station’s plasm reserves are drained, the soldiers can move in.
—Are the soldiers on their way now?
—Yes. They should be there in fifteen minutes or so, depending on how well they deal with roadblocks on the way. Thus far the police have always scattered when challenged by our soldiers.
—What else is happening?
—The Marines have come over to us. They shot their traitorous officers and are moving on the aerodrome under the command of Captain Arviro.
The satisfaction in Ethemark’s voice is apparent even in this tenuous telepathic communication.
—Radeen’s lost then, Aiah judges. The balance has swung against him.
—So Constantine believes. The Second Brigade at Government Harbor has made no moves other than to direct a few mortar rounds our way, and the Aerial Brigade has not budged from the aerodrome—wait a moment, please.
There is a pause.
—Carcel says he is in place, Ethemark finally reports.—Let’s begin then.
Plasm is like water, flowing through every available conduit until it reaches a kind of equivalence. But some structures are capable of containing more plasm than others: plasm accumulators, capacitors, and batteries are constructed so as to fill with plasm, and draw in even more from the surrounding grid. The mains carrying plasm from the structures where it is generated to the plasm stations are composed of woven bundles of cable made of an alloy designed to carry a perfect flood of plasm along its length.
There are four main cables going into the plasm station in Fresh Water Bay, one for each cardinal direction; and they must all be cut at once, for otherwise the plasm would reroute itself, like water pouring through a system of pipes, into the uncut cable. Probably the single cable would not be capable of carrying as much plasm as the four, but it is a supposition that Aiah would not care to test.
Aiah looks at Davath and Prestley. “Let’s get started.”
The cable is thick at this juncture, thick as three Davaths coiled together. The junction, where other cables from other structures merge with this one, features an electric-powered rotor that can take any of the cables off the line, including—because all cables must at times receive maintenance—the main cable that brings all the plasm in the district to the plasm station.
Prestley has stripped the cover from the electric junction box and disabled the communications line that allows the plasm station to control it. “Ready,” he says.
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