City on Fire m-2

by Walter Jon Williams

Another plasm house confirmed.

  Another tip from the half-worlds proven accurate.

  Aiah throws the switch and feels the transphysical world fade, sees the smaller of the two operations rooms come back into focus. The room is a shambles, gear piled everywhere and cables taped to the floor, with only a few plasm stations operational. Even though it’s early first shift, every station is being used by mages on surveillance. Aiah’s own shift ended at 24:00, but she stayed for another hour in order to make notes on a conversation the Handmen were having concerning a hijacking they’d pulled off in Barchab. The Barchabi police would probably be interested to know the names of the Barchabi accomplices.

  It takes half an hour for Aiah to write her notes into a form suitable for transcription, next shift, by one of the department’s clerical aides; and then she tucks the file under her arm and makes her way out of the room.

  The secure room is down a short hall. She’ll put the file there till work shift, then head to her apartment to take a shower and get some sleep. If, that is, the blazing plasm she’s been feeding into her nerves over the last hours will permit her even to close her eyes…

  Aiah nods to the guard and says hello to the clerk, a little goggle-eyed embryo woman, who’s on duty and bent over her desk, keeping the index up to date. Aiah gives her the file number so that she can log it in. Then she steps to the door of the secure room itself, puts her hand on the cool bronze bar, and prepares to punch the day’s code into the twelve-key pad. No, the next day’s code, because it’s after change of shift…

  She looks up and feels her heart turn over. Constantine is in the secure room, sitting at a metal desk, head bent as he copies something from a file. There is a cold light in his lowered eyes, and his upper lip is curled, as if in distaste for the task he has set himself.

  Constantine, normally so aware of his surroundings, hasn’t even glanced up at her approach.

  She steps silently back from the barred door and puts the file on the desk of the clerk. “I don’t want to disturb the minister,” she says. “Could you file this for me after he leaves?”

  The big eyes lift to hers. “Certainly.”

  Aiah walks away. / don’t want to know when it happens, she had told Constantine. / don’t want to know who, or when, or why it is being done.

  He is choosing Taikoen’s victims, Aiah knows. Going through the files to find the most deserving of the Handmen. She probably won’t know which.

  Until Taikoen is done with each, when Aiah will tell the clerk to retire his file.

  GOVERNMENT DECIDES TO SELL ARMS COMPANY

  QERWAN EMPLOYEES PROTEST DECISION

  Aiah, telepresent, watches the old man snore. He lives in a fashionable district, in an expensive apartment building that presents to its canal a long, sinuous, reflective ribbon of black glass. The ownership of the building seems obscure, and is being looked into. The man himself seems untroubled by the ambiguity. From the corner, an icon of the prophet Dalavos regards this domestic scene with approval. A little glittering jewel of drool hangs in the corner of his mouth as he sleeps, next to his third wife, beneath an expensive Sycar comforter.

  It is 02:00, early first shift, and the amnesty on plasm thieves expired two hours earlier, at 24:00. The opalescent Shield is bright overhead, undimmed by cloud, but most of the world is in bed, and few see the purposeful powerboats or the shrouded military convoys leaving the Palace district. The old man has polarized his windows, and his room is dark.

  The man in the bed is Great-Uncle Rathmen, the head of Caraqui’s Silver Hand, and he is 111 years old, a thin, precise man fond of handmade boots and sentimental tokaph music. Like Costantine, he has kept aging at bay with regular plasm-rejuvenation treatments. Except that his are illegal, performed with bootleg plasm; one of Aiah’s observers even saw one of the procedures being performed out of an illegal plasm tap in the man’s apartment. The tap appeared to have been in place for a long time, and may have been designed into the building when it was built.

  To live longer than a century is unusual in a Handman. It speaks less of his skill than of how comfortably the Silver Hand lives in Caraqui, that none of his underlings has seen any profit in removing him.

  He has taken precautions, however: there is a crosshatch-ing of bronze mesh in the glass windows, and other bronze grids in the wall paneling, beneath the floor tile, and hidden behind the ceiling. But he’s remodeled since he moved in, and some of the bronze mesh wasn’t properly reinstalled: one of Aiah’s surveillance teams found a way to sneak a sourceline in. And so Aiah, sensorium configured so as to see in the dark, plays plasm angel and hovers over Rathmen’s bed.

  Back in the Palace’s big ops room, she feels her assistant touch her arm. She lets her telepresent sensations fade, nods, and hears a voice in her ear. “The soldiers are in the building.” She nods her comprehension.

  Aiah returns her awareness to her anima, and the command center fades from her perceptions.

  In a few minutes there’s a crash as the door goes down—with martial law there’s no particular reason to knock—and Great-Uncle Rathmen comes awake with a start. To him it must mean the crash he’s waited for the last eighty years, the sound that marks his assassination and the end of his reign.

  “Police!” the soldiers shout. “Police!”

  But it’s what Great-Uncle’s assassins would say, whether they were police or not. Looking many decades less than a hundred years old, he throws back the Sycar comforter and vaults over his drowsy wife to the closet at the other side of the bed. There he slides open the door and fumbles for a panel built into the back of the wall.

  Tension jolts through Aiah at the sight. She hadn’t known the panel was there, nor what is on the other side of it. She’d expected him to jump for the plasm circuit set into the wall near his desk.

  Number three wife is awake. “What should I do?” she screams. “What should I do?”

  “Call Gemming!” Rathmen says, but all his wife does is shriek her question over and over.

  Call Gemming, Aiah writes automatically, scrawling blindly in loopy handwriting on a pad balanced on her chair arm. Something else for the files. But her nerves are screaming, and she has no confidence that the writing, at the end of the episode, will even be coherent.

  At least as agitated as Aiah, Great-Uncle Rathmen is having a hard time with his secret panel. His hands are shaking so hard that he can’t seem to work the mechanism. The soldiers are stomping down the hall, crying “Police!” The beams of their torches jitter into the room.

  Rathmen finally tears away the panel by main strength. He reaches inside, and Aiah sees, with her plasm-enhanced vision, the tube of a weapon propped in the interior.

  Aiah’s act is instinctual, like a parent swatting from her child’s hands the bottle of rat poison. She forms an ectoplas-mic hand faster than thought and slaps Great-Uncle Rathmen with it, knocking him away from the closet. There’s a strange unreality to it all—if she’d hit him with a real hand there would be feedback, her hand would sting and register the impact, but the hastily formed plasm hand isn’t configured to register sense impressions, and when Aiah sees Great-Uncle Rathmen flying across the room it seems as unreal as an image in a chromoplay.

  With more deliberation, Aiah plants the insubstantial hand on his chest and pins him to the ground like an insect until the soldiers, a half-second later, storm into the room—weaponed, in full battle armor, faceplates lowered to guard against explosion or plasm blast. They are followed by a cameraman with a huge spotlight, providing a feed to the ops center. At this intimidating sight the third wife screams and cowers.

  The officer flicks on the lights and everyone blinks. The woman on the bed even stops screaming. Aiah stifles a giggle—she’s the only one who sees how silly everyone looks. The captain marches up to Great-Uncle Rathmen, compares him with a chromograph he’s carrying in his file, and informs the Great-Uncle he’s under arrest.

  Aiah dissolves her ectomorphic hand and the officer
handcuffs his prisoner. The old Handman accepts this stolidly—reassured, apparently, that he won’t be assassinated, at least not yet.

  Aiah concentrates on expanding her anima, configuring it into a recognizable human shape. The last time she did this, back in Jaspeer, she failed to provide the anima any clothing and delighted the witnesses more than she’d intended, but in this case she mentally sculpts a more abstract image—female-shaped, yes, but without any detail, like a weathered statue, or a smooth metal abstract. She wills the image to fluoresce, and the soldiers blink again as the room is flooded with golden light. Aiah looks at her reflection in the mirrored closet doors—a glorious figure of shimmering gold—and spares a few seconds to admire her handiwork.

  Some of the soldiers shift nervously, take a firmer grip on their weapons. They can’t be sure whether this apparation is friendly or otherwise.

  “Can you hear me?” Aiah says, and some of the soldiers clap hands over ears. She tries to speak more softly, and raises a fluorescent hand to point into the closet.

  “There is a weapon in there. He was trying to get to it when I prevented him.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” the officer says.

  She allows her image to fade as the officer peers cautiously into the closet. He reaches in with a gloved hand and pulls out the weapon, a short metal barrel with a functional black plastic grip and a metal stock telescoped to its shortest configuration. There’s a wire that runs from the gun into the hidden closet compartment.

  “Shotgun,” the captain says. “Semiautomatic. Wired to a plasm circuit. I’m wearing insulated gloves, otherwise I’d be getting a dose of the goods right now.” He holds it up. “Felk, get a picture of this. And I’ll need an evidence bag.”

  The weapon is a nasty one, enabling Great-Uncle Rathmen to smite his enemies with shot and plasm at once. It’s at least a dozen ways illegal, and mere possession of such a thing is enough to guarantee Rathmen a stretch in prison.

  Triumph burns in Aiah’s mind. Her anima follows the soldiers as they seal the rooms, then march their prisoners to their waiting boats. Then Aiah thumbs off her t-grip, and the distant quay fades from her mind, is replaced by the busy ops center.

  ’With some help from Geymard’s mercenaries, the big ops room was finished by the deadline. Though some of the flooring isn’t yet in place, plasm and electric connections still snake over the floor, and the room smells strongly of paint, the place is at least functional. Banks of monitors glow down on the proceedings, and mages sway in their chairs, their eyes closed as they concentrate on telepresent sensations.

  She looks down at the form propped on her chair arm, checks the wall clock, and logs the time she finished her part of the operation.

  “Very nicely done, Miss Aiah.” Constantine’s voice rumbles in her ear. She gives a start, then turns to see him standing behind her chair.

  “Thank you, Minister,” she says. She stands, stretches. Plasm’s fierce glow fires her cramped muscles.

  Constantine’s eyes flicker along the rows of video monitors, pausing at each for a brief moment, then going on to the next. There is a pleased, ruthless little smile on his face.

  “Your operations are going well. A few of your teams have got lost in crowded tenements, but your telepresent mages seem to have put them all back on the right track.”

  “Colonel Geymard’s staff were a great help.”

  “They will need the practice. Most of their operations for the foreseeable future consist of arrests. I have persuaded the government to import two more battalions of military police.” He folds his arms, looks at her seriously. “How much thought have you given to what happens to your prisoners after their arrest?

  She looks at him. “Trial, conviction, imprisonment. But that isn’t my department’s problem, is it? We just gather evidence, make arrests, present the evidence to the prosecutors.”

  “Yes, but interrogations of these people would be invaluable, both to your department and to others. The information could lead to many further arrests.”

  “True.” She hadn’t considered interrogations, in part because her informers’ information has been so good, in part because she doubted the Handmen would talk, and more conclusively because she hadn’t the time or personnel.

  “We can conduct interrogations, of course,” she says. “We have their dossiers, we have a good idea what questions to ask.”

  “But you don’t have trained interrogation specialists. Other departments do.” “The police, you mean?”

  “Yes, after their fashion…” He nods patiently. “Amateurish, and reluctant to deal with Handmen at all. One could have Colonel Geymard’s people do it, but they don’t know which questions to ask, and they’re not familiar with local conditions in any case.” As he gazes down at her his expression hardens, grows commanding. “It was the Force of the Interior, of course, that I meant.”

  Distaste curls Aiah’s lip. “Sorya’s political police.”

  “Yes.” He cocks his head and considers, weighing his thoughts. “I wish them to no longer be political police—I plan that soon there will be no more political prisoners, not once the remaining Keremaths and collaborators are dealt with. I wish the F.I. to become merely national police, with a mandate to deal with espionage and crimes against the state. And as the Silver Hand is the greatest organized force that threatens us at present, I wish to direct some of Sorya’s specialists against them.”

  A protest bursts from Aiah’s lips. “There was torture in the Specials’ prisons,” she says. “Those people were—”

  A fierce light burns in Constantine’s eyes. “The torturers are gone,” he says firmly. “Or in prison themselves. Torture is a pointless and stupid exercise—there are more sanitary methods, and far more effective.”

  “Plasm scans.” Grimly.

  “Everyone in your department has already had one. You have had one yourself, when I first met you. Are they so inhumane?”

  Aiah struggles to form another protest. She couldn’t remember her own scan—Constantine had gone into her head on a ruthless probe of plasm in order to discover if she was a police informer, but if he had found anything else he had kept it to himself.

  “I want it understood,” Aiah says, “that civilized methods will be observed.”

  “Of course. There is no conceivable reason to behave otherwise.” Warmth kindles in his eyes as he looks at her. “This concern does you credit.”

  She looks away. “I still don’t like it.”

  “I will arrange the protocols with Sorya’s office, so they will have access to the prisoners and you will have copies of all the interrogations.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  Some of Aiah’s people raise a cheer: someone has made a particularly stylish arrest. Constantine looks up at the monitors. “Arrests in future may not be so peaceful, not once surprise is lost,” he says, and turns to Aiah again.

  The monitors’ reflection kindles a cold flickering in his eyes. “The government passed a new decree last shift, making it a capital crime to belong to a criminal organization.”

  Aiah’s heart gives a lurch. She looks at Constantine in surprise. “Which means what? Some of these people will be executed?”

  Constantine makes a dismissive, growling sound. “All of them, if I have anything to say about it. Great-Uncle Rathmen particularly—he was one of the first in my office with his bribes, only a few days after the coup. Smiled, brought me a new jacket of expensive goatskin lined with silk and, for all I know, a fortune in jewels in the pockets… offered me the locations of a couple of his plasm houses under the amnesty program, said it was an oversight. I turned down the jacket, but sent ministry crews to wire the plasm into the circuit—didn’t keep it for myself, as he probably expected.” He straightens, lips curling in distaste. “A plausible, bloody-handed bastard. It never occurred to him that I wouldn’t accept his payoffs. He had probably never met a civil servant who wasn’t on the take.”

  Aiah turns to the monitors,
sees the jumpy camera feed, half-dressed sleepy-eyed handcuffed men, pompadours hanging in their eyes, being marched onto trucks or into boats.

  All condemned, she thinks. She shivers at the thought that she is watching men who soon will die.

  “I wish there was another way,” she says.

  “Mercy is a privilege of the powerful,” Constantine says. “Our power is uncertain, and theirs is great, and we cannot afford to show them any lenience. If our situation were improved, if we were secure in our power, perhaps then a degree of forbearance would be possible.” He shakes his head. “Besides, the only way to defeat the Handmen is to enlist the population, and these executions are the only way to show the people that the Hand is vulnerable now.” A cold laugh rumbles from his throat. “And for what it’s worth, each of the Handmen will have his fair trial—all your evidence will be considered by the military courts in the next week, and then sentences carried out.”

  “They are all guilty,” Aiah says. “We know that.” And therefore will all die, because of her. After Sorya’s specialists rummage through their brains for useful information.

  He raises a hand to touch her shoulder. She wants comfort, wants to rest her cheek against his rough knuckles, but is too conscious of the presence of the people surrounding them.

  “Save sympathy for their victims,” he says, voice low in her ear.

  “I will.” She looks at the video images again, looks for familiar images—the Slug, the Ferret. The images are all those of strangers. Strangers soon to die.

  A cold wind seems to blow through her bones. She turns to Constantine again.

  “These Handmen,” she says, “they’re like your family, aren’t they? You were raised with people like this. And…” Her tongue stumbles on the words. “You destroyed them.”

  Constantine’s face is a mask. The reversed video images of condemned men float through his eyes.

  “My family deserved what happened to them,” he says, “and so, Miss Aiah, do these.”

  With that, he turns and prowls away.