by Malka Older
Mishima is so puzzled by this willful obliviousness that she almost misses it. The instant the low persistent buzz makes its way to her awareness, she knows, with a sting of compunction, that it’s been going on for some time: thirty seconds? A minute? She glances left and right, looking for a small automated device that could produce such a sound: a recorder? A weapon? Maybe the lights are vibrating. She looks up, but the fluoron loops hang unchanged over the hall. Then she shifts her eyes to the wall above her.
“Takeda,” she murmurs into her earpiece. On the stage, Fabré is still talking. “There’s a crow way too close to the wall. South side, up by the roof.” She has turned slightly to keep her eyes fixed on that point above her head.
The head of outdoor security responds immediately. “Hosono, get over there. Kumagai, back him up! I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Something Mishima doesn’t catch, maybe a muttered curse. “I’m stuck on the opposite side dealing with a minor spectator collision.” Under his breath but audible: “Could be a setup.”
She sees it then: a tiny flicker. The crow is cutting into the glass wall with a laser. “Oh-five, oh-five!” As she calls the evacuation code, she sees the quick swoop of a tsubame closing in on the crow.
This time, she hears Takeda swear. “Don’t you want to wait and see if Hosono can manage it?” he snaps. But the control station has already decided, after a moment of doubt (or maybe it was reaction time), to trust Mishima’s instincts. Evacuation sirens blare into the quiet hall, steamrolling Johnny Fabré’s speech. A gravelly rush of startled voices rises to a crescendo of alarm. This soon after the earthquake, everyone knows where the exits are, and despite the noise, the initial rush to the exits is orderly, although Mishima registers some dramatic indignation from the stage.
Her attention is pulled away almost immediately; another tsubame is arcing up toward the crow, but at the same time, there’s a dull pop, loud enough for people inside the room to look up and see the explosion. The walls tremble, and something tsubame-sized falls through the darkness on the other side of the glass.
At that point, the evacuation starts to unravel. Voices rise hysterically and the movement of the crowd turns jerky and dangerous. Mishima wishes for her crow, but it’s parked two blocks away. “Can we get a tsubame or two on the inside?” she asks her earpiece, and without waiting for an answer, activates her crowdcutter and pushes her way along the wall toward the glass ladder in the corner. On stage, the candidates have mostly stopped arguing and are either staring at the blast site or leaping off the platform only to get mired in the crowd. She spots Suzuki under the conference table and sees a knot of bodyguards that probably hides Fabré at its center, but she doesn’t have time to look more closely.
She reaches the access ladder, sheds the crowdcutter, and pulls herself toward the catwalk as fast as she can. This is why she wears only flats when she’s working; her shoes are light and flexible, with grips that cling to each rung. Her coif is holding up well so far; it probably doesn’t look as sleek as it did a few minutes ago, but her hair is out of her face and her vision is clear. The dress is another story, but it’s not tight enough to restrict her climbing. It will do for now.
Outside, Kumagai in the remaining tsubame has shifted to combat tactics, diving and swooping to strafe the miscreant crow with brief flashes from its high-intensity flamethrower. The crow lobs another grenade, but Kumagai dodges easily, and the projectile explodes at ground level, six stories or so below. The walls rattle again. As she gets higher, Mishima can make out more clearly the damage the crow’s laser has done. There’s a fissure in the wall, a clean line describing more than half of a circle. It’s not big enough for the crow to get through, and with a physical thump of fear, Mishima sees what they are doing: they must be cutting an entrance slot for a bomb.
She wastes a glance down at the politicians stuck in the middle of the room at the point farthest from every clogged exit. There’s no way the candidates are getting out in under three minutes, six or more to get out of the building; far too long to get out of blast range if they have something bigger than those grenades. Assassinating the front people for every Supermajority candidate government, crippling the nine largest governments simultaneously—Mishima stops thinking about consequences and focuses on her target. She’s on a small platform just under the lights in the corner of the hall; the blue flicker of the laser in the glass is less than twenty feet down the wall. She reaches up for a chandelier branch. “Cut the lights!” she yells into her earpiece.
This time, the reaction is instantaneous. The hall goes dark, triggering another collective wail from below. The crow outside is suddenly distinct and menacing beyond the glass: a small model, like Mishima’s, agile and unmarked. As Mishima watches, a blur of motion diagonals up and slams into it, knocking it upward: Takeda’s crow.
Another salvo of explosions. Mishima grabs the rail of the platform. At least the aftershocks have gotten her acclimated to shaking. What’s more worrying is that the laser-cut circle in the glass is almost complete. “Control! Do we have anything we can use to seal that or block it somehow?”
“We’re working on it!” The urgency is tinged with annoyance; obviously, they’ve also figured out what’s going on. It doesn’t sound like they’ve got a solution. Mishima hopes Takeda can manage this one, because she has no idea what she’s going to do to stop the crow from in here, armed as she is with five shuriken and a stiletto. Even so, she can’t just stand here and watch. Mishima grabs a cool tube of fluoron, smooth as an antler and the perfect circumference for a comfortable grip. She inhales, steps over the platform rail, and lets her legs swing forward, reaching ahead to seize another loop with her other hand.
When she looks up again, a few seconds later and halfway to the circle, Takeda’s crow, emblazoned with the green and white of Kobe, is hovering protectively between the attacker and the almost-complete incision in the glass panel. She watches as the enemy crow launches a grenade, but Takeda only has to bob slightly to dodge it. The tsubame weaves around the mystery crow. The flamethrower mounted on its nose hasn’t had much effect, but Kumagai is trying to hamper the crow’s movements as much as he can.
Mishima keeps swinging forward, more cautiously now. There is a pause in the explosions, and she wonders if the attackers are out of ammo. She hasn’t looked down at the dimness below her dangling feet, but the hall must be emptying out by now. She wonders when they will decide the attack is no longer worth it, that it’s time to cut their losses. Then she sees a sudden jet of motion and hears a bang: the attackers have adjusted their timing, and this grenade hits Takeda’s crow straight on. Mishima thinks she hears Takeda grunting as he tries to compensate, but she’s not sure because of the rushing in her ears as she pulls her legs back and swings her body forward with as much momentum as she can gather. The green-and-white crow is propelled backward by the explosion, lightly tapping the center of the circle before Takeda can pull away; a nanosecond later, Mishima’s feet hit the wall from the inside with a jolting smack that she feels all the way into her shoulders. Glass squeaks against glass. Swinging back, her arms tingling with fatigue, Mishima sees a couple of centimeters of laser-cut glass exposed where the circle has been pushed inward, but it’s holding for now. Through it, Mishima sees Takeda’s crow sink.
The throb in her palms and her forearms is starting to block out everything else when she feels something under her limp feet. Scrabbling for purchase, she looks down: a tsubame is hovering right below her, hatch open. The top, where her feet are balanced, is transparent, gently curved and about the size of a pool chair. Mishima has to remind herself not to close her eyes as she yells, “Stay there!” and lets go of the lights. The pilot has a steady hand, and she lands in a crouch, fingertips pressed to the tsubame top, without so much as a waver. From there it is only slightly scarier to swing herself in through the open hatch. As she does, she catches the flash of another tsubame swooping up from the darkness inside the hall.
“Thanks,” s
he says as the hatch closes behind her. Tsubame are designed to carry two people if necessary, but it’s a tight fit. “Is there a plan?” Mishima asks.
“Keep that glass in place and capture the perps if possible,” the pilot answers without taking his eyes off the circle in the wall. “Nice kick.”
Mishima believes in taking compliments, but she’s not sure she earned this one. “Thank Takeda for pulling back as fast as he did.”
Takeda’s crow takes another hit. Mishima can’t see the cockpit, and she hopes he’s okay in there. It’s a good sign that his crow is still battling to stay in the air, but it’s already drifted below the level of the circle and will soon be out of the fight entirely. As she watches, the enemy crow approaches, nosing up to the wall.
“It’s empty!” the pilot grunts in surprise. Mishima doesn’t follow at first. Peering over his shoulder, she looks through three layers of glass straight into the crow’s cockpit: there’s nobody there.
“It’s a remote!” she exclaims. As they watch, the hull door on the right side opens. The front of the crow presses forward against the newly cut circular panel. The two tsubame inside the hall bump up against the glass to push back, but they are no match for the thrust of a full-size crow. With a slow, painful screeching, the heavy disc of glass is forced inward until it wrenches free and disappears below them, the clatter of it hitting the floor obscured by the rush of air and noise. The crow has backed off and is turning to align its open hull door with the hole, but Kumagai on the outside is hampering it as much as it can, darting in and around and attacking its air pressurizers.
Mishima thumps her pilot on the shoulder. “Take us through!” she yells, and he nods, inching them forward until they are outside, between the crow and the building. The crow has turned enough so that Mishima can see the lone piece of cargo through the open hull door: a large plastic cube, dully reflective. “It’s a remote,” she says again to herself, and then to the pilot, “Open the hatch! Take me closer!”
He catches on immediately, and as the vertical door slides up and frigid outside air rushes in, he flies forward, positioning them above the crow’s open hull, so that all Mishima has to do is step down from one to the other.
She expects the crow to try to dump her out as soon as her feet touch its floor, but it continues rotating toward the building with occasional weaves to avoid the tsubames. Whoever’s controlling it must not have vid of the inside. Which is fortunate, because if they did, they probably would have detonated by now. She looks the cube over quickly. “Dark grey plastic, a few blinking lights—” She runs her hands over the outside, looking for a seal of some kind.
“Just get it out of there!” someone yells over the earpiece.
“There’s no visible timer; I’m guessing it’s set up to detonate on impact,” Mishima warns. They are all yelling now, and the crow jolts as one of the tsubame tries to knock it back from the building, Mishima’s hands involuntarily gripping the sides of the bomb.
“Slide it out; we’ll manage it with the air pressurizers,” her pilot says.
“It could be rigged to blow up as soon as it leaves the crow!”
“No choice! Get it out of there; you don’t have much time!”
The cube looks heavy and Mishima sets up to put her weight into shoving it, but it moves easily, sliding too quickly down the short gangplank ramp. She skids after to make sure it doesn’t shoot off the end into the building, and manages to deflect it to one side, where there is just enough space between the crow and the glass wall for the bomb to slide through. She catches a glimpse of the two tsubame whirling around it, but before she can see what happens, the crow is tilting sharply. Mishima, already off-balance, has no chance to grab hold of anything. She is tipped out through the opening like the bomb would have been.
“Lights!” she yells with what breath she has left. She pushes off from the gangplank as her feet skitter down it, a bad jump but with enough lift to catch one of those comforting, perfectly curved loops as the fluoron coils leap into visibility. She dangles there for a moment. The hall twenty feet below her is a mess of overturned chairs and abandoned belongings, empty except for the security personnel, most of whom are staring up at her. Mishima twists to look back over her shoulder, which is how she knows that the first explosion isn’t the bomb going off but the crow self-destructing.
* * *
The feed from the debate was cut when the sirens started, but Ken missed the turmoil completely. A few minutes into Johnny Fabré’s speech, a fight broke out among the karaoke singers. When one of them pulled an illegal plastic gun, Ken hit the floor and, in the same motion, muted his earpiece to give his full attention to his surroundings. He can listen to the recording later.
The centenal he’s in belongs to a local, Manila-only government, which has contracted police as well as military services out to SecureNation, and when the security personnel show up a minute or two after the first shot is fired, Ken keeps his cheek pressed to the beer-sticky floor. On the off chance that this gets picked up by any local news compilers, he wants his face to be visible in as few of the feeds as possible. The SecureNation guys get him up to take his statement, but they are polite and efficient, and even let the bar reopen, minus the karaoke. As much as that improves the atmosphere, he decides he’s done for the night. His hotel is right around the corner, and it’s not until he’s lying on the hard single bed that he flicks the debate coverage back on. He’s planning to flash back to the point where he stopped, which is why he doesn’t open any simultaneous feeds; he would rather not get the analysis before he hears the actual statements. He would like to know whether that scuffle in the bar made the news compilers; he has just decided to open a tiny projection for a local site when the debate audio comes on. “… sugar-coated oppression. Elections are sugar-coated oppression. Elections are sugar-coated oppression.”
Ken sits up fast, the anti-stain coating on the mattress crackling. Who the hell is that? As he’s trying to place the voice among the nine debate participants, his brain informs him that it is obviously distorted. Besides which, no sane person would repeat the same sentence over and over again in a debate. He spreads his projection out large and switches from local to top news, opening three more feeds at the same time.
The miniscule room is humid and warm as a sun-baked cement block, but as Ken sees the initial images of the debate hall, he feels the sweat congealing on his back. The monotonous refrain is cut off in the middle of the word “sugar.” There is dead air for a moment, and then a shaky but undeniably human voice: “We humbly apologize for the, ah, disruption.” A moment of hesitation and indrawn breath: the instinct is to spin or smooth, but the facts, such as are known, are already available for anyone to see. In the last two seconds, Ken has learned about the autocrow, the evacuation, and the explosions. “There has been an attack on the debate facility and a simultaneous appropriation of our broadcast.” Another pause, and Ken switches the audio off—he can read much faster. One free-swinging news compiler is reporting a claim of responsibility from Anarchy, the radical antielection group. Apparently, not everyone at Information is in shock, because someone has already annotated the story to say that no physical evidence has yet been analyzed to confirm or disprove the claim.
Watching and rewatching the tiny splice of video that someone grabbed before the lights went out, Ken calls Suzuki, but no answer. That’s to be expected, he tells himself: he must be in the middle of a cyclone now, probably getting checked by emergency services and fielding interview requests and trying to figure out what to do next, not to mention receiving a million other attempted calls at the same time. The casualty figures are low and nobody has mentioned any of the candidates being hurt, which would be big news. Suzuki’s fine, almost certainly. His eyes on the repeating clip of video, Ken suddenly leans forward and enlarges it. There’s a glittering dark figure climbing the back wall, and something about the way it moves … but what would Mishima be doing there? She does work for Information, so it
’s not impossible. The face is turned away, and the quality of the image is poor. Ken can’t be sure. He is about to try calling her when he remembers he already sent her a message that night, and decides to wait. Play it cool, he tells himself. Whether she was there or not, anyone working for Information is going to be pretty busy right now.
* * *
The debrief takes an hour and a half. Mishima has to detail minutely the moments leading up to her evacuation call and her actions on the crow. After her report, she stands in the back, watching the projector replays of the air fight and listening as the discussion about their massive security gaps heats up. The event manager is complaining about the short timeframe for rearranging the debate after the earthquake, and the regional operations chief is muttering about political pressure to use that venue and provide more seating. The deputy head of security is sidelined next to Mishima, his face locked in a worried frown. Hosono’s in the hospital with three fractured ribs and a snapped ulna after one of the tsubame’s airbags malfunctioned, and Takeda’s in intensive care for burns and shrapnel from the grenade bursting his windshield. The bomb was successfully dumped over the ocean and went off on impact with the surface. Considering the circumstances, damage was minimal, although Mishima wouldn’t have liked to be on one of the tsubames that took it out there: both the pilots have popped eardrums and probable concussions.