Metropolitan

by Walter Jon Williams

  07:55. Red Bolt had managed to move over three hundred radii before the enemy found it again. It’s hard to say whether Aiah’s maneuver made any difference at all, and Aiah wonders if that is typical of war, if a commander never really knew whether the care she was taking was ever worthwhile. And now battle is joined, the air covered with writhing plasm serpents and arrows of fire. Red Bolt corkscrews through the sky, trying to dodge the swift oncoming attacks. The defenders are agile, but the government mages keep coming, raking in from different directions, and though Red Bolt is a smaller and more maneuverable target than the airship Paperhanger, it’s also more fragile, with far less redundancy. And when it dies it dies swiftly, an irruption of fire, wings folding toward its flaming body in one last sad gesture as it streaks like an arrow in a long arc toward the gray metropolis below.

  Aiah never even saw what hit it.

  They died right in front of me, she thinks, and it’s all my fault.

  “Out of the well!” Aldemar yells.

  Aiah pulls her awareness out of the plasm. Her eyes open to scenes of carnage — the Metropolitan Guard complex afire, a jittering camera regarding a distant bridge over a wide stretch of water all orange with burning, doubtless the Martyrs’ Canal. Aiah’s eyes go wide with awe and terror.

  “Lady! On the board!”

  Aiah jumps at Aldemar’s command, strips the copper bracelets from her wrists and races to the master switches as she wipes tracks of sweat from her face. Plasm is still pouring out of the reserve transmission horn, aimed uselessly at the all-absorbing Shield.

  “Shut it off! Now! They can track us!”

  Aiah throws switches. With a clack, overhead copper contacts retract to the neutral position. Her eyes stay glued to the video, the jittering images of holocaust. The rebels have lost a large percentage of their plasm, and she’s expecting horror to erupt on video any second now.

  “Who needs the goods?” Aldemar tips her chair back, looks over her shoulder, at the commo crew. “And how do we get it to them?”

  “Ride the beams in ourselves!” Wizard Two is happy to state the obvious. There’s a twitchy glow of battle behind his thick spectacles. A crooked grin reveals a gleam of steel braces.

  Trucker presses big hands over his earphones. “Big Man and Panther are demanding all we’ve got. He wants to finish off the Guard.”

  “But look!” Aiah can’t stop herself from pointing at the screen. “The real fight’s at the Martyrs’ Canal!”

  Her words are punctuated by an explosion, a mushroom of flame and smoke rising near the canal.

  Red nods. “They’ve been calling for more plasm all along.”

  Aldemar looks up at the screens, bites her lip. “Who’s the mage in charge of that fight? Where is he?”

  “He’s an army mage,” Red reports. “He’s at the Qinchath Plasm Station, and I think the only plasm he’s got is the stuff generated locally.”

  “Big Man wants the goods now,” Trucker reminds.

  “Qinchath needs plasm,” Aiah says. “Are the coordinates on the charts? Can we ride a beam there?”

  Aldemar flips hopelessly through the paper printout. “Crap! Is it on the list or not?”

  “I can use the video!” Wizard Two bounces up and down on his chair. “I can just jump there with the goods! If I can find our Qinchath man, I’ll hand the stuff to him, and if not, I’ll just kick some ass myself.”

  Aldemar cocks an eyebrow at him. “You can do that?”

  “I’ve got the training — yeah! I can do it!”

  “Excuse me!” Trucker shouts. “But Big Man is chewing me a new asshole right now! What do I tell him?”

  Aldemar turns to Aiah. “Give Horn One to Wizard Two. Half our product.” She looks resigned. “I’ll get the rest to Big Man myself. Give me Horn Two.” Sweat patters on Aiah’s console as she spins knobs, throws switches. Aldemar continues with her orders. “Wizard Three — run a security watch around the factory. We might have half a battalion of creepers out there for all we know.”

  A charming thought.

  Copper contacts clack into their cradles. “Wizard Two!” Aiah calls. “Powering Horn One on my mark! Two! One! Mark! Alde — Wizard One — powering Horn Two on my mark! Two. One. Mark!”

  Aiah stares at Wizard Two. The purpose of the live video feed is to enable precisely what the boy is attempting: a mental jump from one location to another, dragging the anima’s plasm tail along with it. The mage visualizes the place he wants to go, then tries both to leap his transphysical presence to the spot and to carry his plasm supply with him.

  Wizard Two stares intently at the video of the Martyrs’ Canal. His staring blue eyes are enlarged by his thick spectacles. His body gives a jerk, hands clenching into fists.

  And then, above his head, the video image jitters, as if something’s just jostled the camera. “Yes!” the boy shouts.

  Aiah licks sweat from her upper lip, her eyes darting from the boy to the video feeds and back. Other than the brief nudge to the camera, nothing visible occurs for a while. And then the boy’s body curves in a perfect arc as water fountains from the river right in the center of the bridge, gushing upward as if from a broken main. The center span rocks, then lifts as if a giant invisible hand were beneath it. The span strains, rocks and finally is flung bodily to one side, girders snapping like twigs. Personnel and armored vehicles spill into the water. The camera jerks again as if in surprise or terror.

  Explosions march along the approach span of the bridge, Mondray’s vehicles cooking in their own fuel or ammunition. This is followed by a series of flashes in midair — Aiah concludes it’s invisible mages battling each other. And then, slowly forming over the bridge approach, is a figure, tenuous at first, then gaining in solidity and size, outlines rippling with fire.

  The Flaming Man.

  Fear chills Aiah’s spine. She stares at the video display, helpless with terror and awe. The flamer, taller than any of the surrounding buildings, stalks into the city. Flashes fill the air near him, but they don’t seem to slow him down. Buildings explode into flame at his approach. Prisms of light flash in midair from flying glass. Debris spirals skyward in a whirlwind of rising heat.

  My fault, Aiah thinks. The accusation catches in her throat and stops her breath.

  Aiah rips her eyes from the video and looks at Wizard Two. He’s slumped in his chair, head cocked to one side, one arm dangling almost to the floor. Aiah runs to the chair and her heart leaps into her throat as she stares aghast at the ruined, shriveled face, already an old man’s, lolling atop a body shrinking slowly into its clothes. Behind misty lenses the blackened eyes are sizzling in their sockets, evaporating, and from the slack mouth comes another hiss, a wisp of vapor — the tongue and palate are being consumed.

  My fault.

  Noradrenaline fury seizes Aiah. She snatches the wires connecting the boy’s t-grips to the console and yanks, pulling them from their sockets. “Help!” she yells. “Is anyone here a medic?” And then her knees give way and she sags against a wall of sandbags. Sand drifts gently to the floor at her feet. On the video feed she still sees the Burning Man, holocausts leaping into being at his touch. A cold hand twists Aiah’s nerves as she realizes the flamer’s self-contained now, and will live as long as there’s plasm to feed him. She throws down the wires and runs back to the command console. Her boots skid on concrete as she pulls herself to a stop, and she slaps at the switch cutting off plasm to Horn One.

  “Medic!” she yells.

  The Burning Man’s image fades, crumpling into itself the way Wizard Two shrank into his clothes, and relief sings through Aiah’s mind, a relief that fades into horror as she realizes that, while the flamer is gone, his funeral pyre is not. A firestorm still rages in Caraqui, flames swirling skyward, and no one is in a position to put it out.

  Two of the security men, so maddeningly unhurried that Aiah wants to shriek at them, stride to where Wizard Two lies on his chair, look at him for a moment — one offhandedly c
hecks the pulse of the trailing hand — and then they look at each other and shrug. “Toasted cheese,” one says.

  “I’m getting a message from the Qinchath mage,” Red says. “He says our side’s running like hell, but it doesn’t matter, because the enemy’s annihilated.” He grins up from his console and savors the word. “Annihilated!”

  “Annihilated, shit!” Aiah cries, gesturing at the flaming chaos onscreen. “Look at the video!”

  My fault.

  “Where the hell is my plasm?” Aldemar yells. “What’s going on?”

  Aiah looks at her dials and simply stares. The capacitors and accumulators are empty, drained, and so is much of the old factory structure underneath. The buried structure at Terminal will generate more over time, but for the moment even its awesome resources are strained.

  Aiah turns dials. “Wizard One, I’m giving you all there is. We’re depleted!”

  “Oh, crap.”

  “The Aerial Palace is secure,” Trucker reports almost anticlimactically. “They haven’t found anything on the top floors but bodies.”

  “Silver is trying to transmit a surrender demand to the Metropolitan Guard.” Another announcement. “No reply yet.”

  Silver is the code name for Colonel Drumbeth, the leader and instigator of the coup. This is the first Aiah’s heard of him since the whole action began.

  She looks up at the screens again, the buildings burning.

  My fault.

  *

  08:22

  The security men are quietly gathering up papers and equipment for the burn safe. Vehicles are being readied for a fast exit.

  Fire fills the video screens. The Metropolitan Guard hasn’t replied to any of the repeated surrender demands, leaving the rebels with no option but to continue their attack. Resistance has almost ceased — some scattered gunfire is still directed at attackers — but for the most part the Guard receive their pounding in silence, without reply. All the Guard’s plasm connections have been broken. Their mages have ceased action and may well be dead, cooked alive in their bunkers. No one can tell.

  The waters of the Martyrs’ Canal reflect a wall of flame, a fireball eating its way outward. Panicked residents choke the quays and the bridges, most of which have been broken or blocked in an attempt to keep the mercenaries from crossing. The Qinchath mage, or someone, is lifting the waters of the canal to pour on the burning buildings, but the fires are beyond his control.

  “I can see police cars,” Wizard Three reports. Aiah is too mentally exhausted to react to the announcement. “Cars coming down Eleven-ninety-first Street, but the weekend crowds are slowing them down. I don’t detect anyone observing us through plasm.”

  “Shut down the transmission horns,” Aldemar says. “Leave my station live, but everyone else get out.”

  Aiah throws the switches for the last time.

  “Gloves in the burn safe,” a security man reminds.

  Aiah peels off her gloves and throws them into the burn safe, then moves toward the cars. Aldemar stands up at her station and calls out.

  “I’m going to cover your withdrawal, and then I’ve got to give this place a quick-and-dirty cleaning. Get out as quick as you can.”

  “This way, miss!” a guard says, opening the sliding rear door to a small van. His tone shows impatience. Aiah jumps into the back along with Red and Trucker. In the instant before the door slams she glances up at the screens and sees only orange fire.

  The van is in motion before the factory door has completely slid open. Aiah balances herself against a violent turn as the van swings into traffic, its horn bleating to clear pedestrians out of the way.

  The driver looks at Aiah through mirrored shieldglasses. “Where do you need to go, miss?” he says. “We haven’t been left instructions.”

  “Take me to Rocketman trackline station,” she says.

  “I don’t know where that is. I need directions.”

  Aiah makes her way forward and slides into the passenger seat. In the rearview mirror she can see two other vehicles in convoy behind. Startled pedestrians are jumping out of the way of the vehicles.

  “How are you people getting out?” she asks.

  “InterMetropolitan Highway,” the driver says. “We’ll be out of Jaspeer in less than ninety minutes, traffic willing.”

  Aiah stares at a flash in the rearview mirror, a bloom of orange and black.

  Her heart gives a cry of anguish.

  “The factory!” she says. “It’s on fire!”

  The driver gives her another expressionless look. “When mages clean,” he says, “they clean.”

  *

  09:00.

  New Central Line to Mudki Station. Mudki is huge, and Aiah makes a point of wandering through a lot of it, making it difficult for any plasm hound to trace exactly where she intends to go. She buys fresh bread and rolls from a vendor, then takes the Red Line home.

  10:44.

  Aiah walks through the door of Loeno Towers. She had hoped to enter unseen but the doorman — not the one she’d taken to the chromo — smiles and opens the door for her. She offers him a roll and tells him she’d gone out for breakfast supplies.

  In her apartment she depolarizes the windows to full light, makes breakfast and watches the video news. A new military government in Caraqui, she hears, much fighting and loss of life. A burning aeroplane crashed in a crowded residential area of Makdar, creating an explosion and fire that killed over 160 people. A punctured airship had draped itself over several buildings in a district of Liri-Domei, but no one has been injured. An old factory building on fire on 1190th Street, the neighborhood threatened, no deaths reported.

  Scarcely tasting it, Aiah eats slice after slice of the bread. She’s never been hungrier in her life.

  She wonders if Aldemar made it out of the factory. She doesn’t see how.

  13:02.

  The hourly news broadcast shows Caraqui’s new government, little Drumbeth in a fresh uniform, Parq in full clerical regalia, red and gold, wearing the Mask of Awe that demonstrates he’s acting in his official capacity as head of the Dalavites. Apparently he joined the winning side in time. A third figure in the triumvirate is a spare, disdainful civilian she’s never heard of, a journalist described as a “leading dissident”.

  All the cameras are on Constantine, though, looming behind the three in his long snakeskin coat. Sorya stands next to him, a self-satisfied smile on her face.

  And standing on the other side of Constantine is Aldemar, her face neatly made up, eyes gazing complacently at the cameras from under her level bangs. Aiah stares and wonders how she escaped from the factory that she herself had set on fire, let alone got to a Caraqui still in the midst of a revolution.

  Teleportation, she thinks. The rarest and most dangerous of mage skills.

  Aldemar, it would seem, is a much better mage than even her chromos made out.

  Almost all the journalists’ questions are addressed to Constantine. “This is not my moment,” he finally says, “but Caraqui’s, a metropolis that has been rescued from generations of government by bandits. Please address your questions to Colonel Drumbeth.”

  This, Aiah comforts herself, is her responsibility as well.

  *

  15:20.

  A feather touch in Aiah’s mind, a stimulation of the senses — the scent of soft leather, musk, a deep voice that speaks gently to the inner ear.

  — Precious Lady, can you hear me?

  Aiah touches her throat and sits down suddenly on her unmade bed.

  — Yes. Yes, I can hear.

  —I wish to thank you. Aldemar says that you did very well today. You were right to divert plasm to the Martyrs’ Canal, I was too close to the fighting to realize that.

  There is a lump in Aiah’s throat.

  — That boy. He died.

  — You were not responsible for that. He overestimated his own abilities.

  — So many others must have died.

  Constantine’s ton
e is matter-of-fact.

  — Yes, certainly. But compared to what happened in Cheloki, I think we got off lightly.

  Aiah cannot entirely find ease in this thought. Constantine continues.

  — You were brave and most resourceful, he sends. I wish to give you a reward if this can be done safely. There will be money in a bank account in Gunalaht, and I will send you the numbers and a chop when it’s safe.

  — Those people who lost their homes, Aiah sighs. Take care of them first.

  — Yes. Yes. I am, finally, in a position to do that.

  A phantom hand seems to stroke Aiah’s hair. Constantine’s scent rises in her nostrils.

  — Farewell, brave Lady, he sends. I will not forget your brightness.

  Constantine fades from Aiah’s mind as tears spill across her cheeks.

  Some dreams have come true today, she knows, but not her own.

  *

  18:22.

  The police are at Aiah’s door.

  CHAPTER 20

  LIFE EXTENSION

  MORE AFFORDABLE THAN YOU MIGHT THINK

  Police have a knock louder than anyone else in the world, and there’s no mistaking it. Aiah stares at the door while fear grips her throat. Then she walks to the door and tries to calm herself.

  There are at least three different kinds of police outside: the two in suits and subdued lace are plainclothes Authority creepers, big men who threaten to fill the doorway. Behind them are a pair of district police in their brown uniforms, and a blue-uniformed Loeno security woman who seems bewildered by the whole thing.

  Aiah suspects there may also be a mage floating invisibly overhead on a plasm sourceline, there to guard the cops in case Aiah dares to smite them with magework.

  “May we come in?” the first creeper says, brandishing his ID. He has fatty eyelids that fall like curtains over his pebble eyes.

  “No,” Aiah says.

  Something else she learned at her granny’s knee. Once you let the cops in, you can’t get rid of them.

  “We can go to a pross judge and get a warrant,” the creeper offers.