City on Fire (Metropolitan 2)

by Walter Jon Williams

  Aiah is looking for one of the latter. It isn’t hard to find, a sprawling, crumbling warren of brown-brick tenements so ancient that the only thing keeping them upright are the rusting iron braces and props added to the structure. Once there, Aiah has to be more circumspect, on the chance that the people she is looking for might also be on the lookout for her.

  She carries her sensorium in an anima, a plasm body that she hasn’t bothered to will into the shape of an actual human body: it’s a diffuse cloud of plasm she has configured to remain sensitive to its environment. Carefully she drops the anima beneath street level, where the huge grounded pontoons loom on either side and the dark brackish sea slops over the mudflats below. There is little light here, but plasm can be configured to see in the dark. Aiah moves between the pontoon walls until she comes to a mark, scored lightly into the crumbling concrete, that she has left earlier.

  At this point she reconfigures her anima, confining it to a narrow pipette of plasm that should be difficult to detect, and then rises through the midst of the tenement, through iron beams and brick arches and worn plastic flooring, through uninspiring sights of people cooking or doing laundry or watching video, past children playing or sleeping or fighting with each other, until she reaches the hallway outside the Silver Hand plasm house she has been observing for the last week.

  The hallway’s flaking paint is scarred with decades’ worth of graffiti. The crumbling plastic flooring, a cheap imitation of an old Geoform design, has worn clear through in spots, and has been overlaid with ribbed plastic mats— probably not for the convenience or safety of the tenants, but for the benefit of the Silver Hand, who moved truckloads of plasm batteries through this hallway.

  Aiah ghosts along at floor height, looking for the mage she’s relieving. She wills her sensorium to become sensitive to plasm, and finds a little flare from a not-quite-concealed sourceline in the hallway, near the baseboard. She ghosts up to the flare, wills a little extrusion of her own plasm to touch the sourceline.

  —This is Aiah, she pulses. Anything doing?

  She senses a flare of surprise from the other ghost. He is one of Aiah’s new hires, a newly graduated mage from Liri-Domei, a little inexperienced but learning quickly.

  —The deliveries went out before midbreak, he broadcasts. The Ferret’s inside filling batteries. The Slug is there with him.

  —The Mole?

  —Been and gone.

  The code names date from an earlier phase of the observation, when Aiah and her unit were ignorant of the names of the Handmen they were observing. But the codes were more descriptive than the Handmen’s actual names, and remain in force.

  —I’ll relieve you, then, Aiah sends.

  —Nothing much happening. Good luck.

  The other mage fades. Aiah slides through the wall and extrudes a minute part of her plasm-body to the other side.

  The Silver Hand is very confident here. A plasm house should be sheathed in bronze or at least bronze mesh, like Lamarath’s office in Aground, to prevent anyone like Aiah from peering inside. But the Silver Hand isn’t worried about the forces of the law, or apparently anyone else. They operate openly. Thousands of people must know about this place.

  The Silver Hand will learn caution in time. But Aiah intends to gather as much information as possible while they are still careless, and then strike. If she had more time, and more people, she could fashion a single powerful attack that would prove lethal to all of them; but as it is, with the knowledge she possesses and the weapons she has been given, she will do her best to make the blow a heavy one.

  Aiah opens her plasm-senses, sees the two Silver Hand men inside their place of business. Each is of a type. Gangsters, Aiah suspects, are the same everywhere. The young are exuberant and dress in exaggerations of fashionable styles— the Ferret wears yards of lace and a plush velvet jacket, purple with brass studs in decorative patterns. His hair is permed and dressed in shining ringlets. He wears a heavy Stoka watch on one wrist, and suede boots with heels.

  Older Handmen carry themselves with a different style. The Slug’s suit is more conservative, his face masklike, his ruthlessness complete. In the younger ones you can still see traces of humanity; in the older ones, never, nothing but the inhuman glimmer in their calculating eyes. Back in Jaspeer they all had military ranks: captains, colonels, generals. Here they have a family structure and call themselves cousins, brothers, and uncles. All the same.

  The Ferret wrestles heavy plasm batteries to and from his illegal tap. It’s a struggle for him because he’s a slender man, and sweat drips from his forehead to splash on the scarred soft rubber flooring installed to muffle the thuds of the heavy work.

  The other, the Slug, is obese and in authority. He is in charge of the cash, which is kept in a drawer of his desk. He has his feet propped atop the desk while he watches the younger man work, and gestures largely with both hands as he talks on a telephone headset.

  The Ferret wrestles the last battery into place, puts the tap on it, and stops to light a cigaret. The Slug, talking to a girlfriend, drones on without cease.

  Plasm stolen by the Silver Hand is usually not consumed by the gangsters themselves. They sell it, at inflated prices, to customers who have no choice but to pay their extortionate fees. But a certain percentage of the plasm is used within their own operation: to locate cargoes worth hijacking, to intimidate and murder, to provide life-extension treatments for their leaders. If necessary, to kill each other, though there hasn’t been a war among the Silver Hand in twenty years, and being a Handman is as safe as— probably safer than— banking.

  Aiah watches the pair for two hours. Junior Handmen or independent affiliates— “brothers” or “nephews” in Hand-man jargon— turn up every so often to drop off empty plasm batteries and bags of cash and pick up newly charged batteries. Sometimes they stay around and gossip for a while before leaving. It’s all routine.

  Aiah approves of the Silver Hand’s having a routine day. They’re much more likely to relax their security and give their operations away.

  Except when there are visitors, the Slug stays on the phone the whole time, alternating business and romantic interests. Aiah keeps careful tabs on when each call is made, and the subject matter of the conversation, and plans to requisition a copy of the phone records in order to discover to whom the Slug’s been talking. Eventually the Slug takes his headphones off and goes off to a midbreak rendezvous with one of his girlfriends. Now that the phone is free, the Ferret fastidiously cleans the earphones and the mouthpiece with his handkerchief, then makes a few calls of his own.

  Until there’s a visitor. He’s a stranger, an older man with gray hair and the unnaturally healthy flesh of someone on life extension. He is thin and dapper, a mixture of characteristics— youthful stride, hatchet face, a grizzled mustache. He hammers angrily on the door, and is annoyed when he finds the Slug is gone.

  “He didn’t know you were coming,” the Ferret apologizes.

  “I told that stupid whore of his,” the thin man says, showing yellow teeth.

  “Which one?” the Ferret asks, but the stranger is unamused.

  “I need access to the tap, third shift. My boys are hijacking a barge down at the Navy Yard.”

  The Ferret is interested. “I used to pick stuff from the Yard sometimes, when I was nephew with Daddy Cathobert’s crew. But we’d have to take care of Commodore Grophadh first.”

  The stranger scowls. “Grophadh’s gone— got his ass retired after the coup. But his lad Armaki’s still there, and I make sure he’s taken care of.”

  (Aiah, back in her office, carefully detaches a fragment of her consciousness from her anima and scrawls notes to herself across a pad of paper. Grophadh. Armaki. People who got paid off when the Navy Yard got looted. And a theft in the Navy Yard early tomorrow— she would have to put experienced observers in place.)

  The thin man marches off to rouse the Slug from his girlfriend’s bed. Aiah continues her surveillance for anot
her hour, then turns the business over to one of her mages and writes a formal report of what she’s overheard, which goes into a file in the secure room. There, she looks through books of known Handmen the department had got from the central police headquarters— armed with one of Constantine’s warrants, she and some assistants had just marched in and taken them, much to the cops’ chagrin— and in one of the books she finds the gray stranger. His name is Gurfith, and his rank within the Silver Hand is given as "under-uncle," which puts him fairly high in the hierarchy, working directly under one of the powerful uncles, the equivalent of a street colonel back in Jaspeer. For him to be involved personally in a hijacking means that whatever is being taken has a greater than average value.

  The plasm house where she’s made these observations is one of those given her by Sergeant Lamarath. Every single one of them has proved genuine. Lamarath is holding by his agreement.

  And now that word of her arrangement with Lamarath is leaking out into other half-worlds, more tips are coming in through Ethemark, arriving faster than the department’s limited resources can process them. She is beginning to realize that the half-worlds are some of the best intelligence sources she’ll ever have.

  She looks at the file, then closes it and returns it to the shelves. Aiah will probably have to let the hijacking take place. She doesn’t know anyone in the police structure or the Navy she can alert, not without a chance of it getting back to Under-uncle Gurfith.

  Unless, she thinks, some of Constantine’s mercenaries decide to hold some unscheduled maneuvers in the area of the Navy Yard.

  She’ll have to think about that.

  TWELVE YEARS OF MISMANAGEMENT

  WASTE DISPOSAL SCANDAL "CRIME OF A LIFETIME”

  Constantine’s level eyes gaze out over the tips of his tented fingers; he looks somberly out the oval windows of his Owl Wing office while Aiah sits before him and makes her report. “We’re trying to set up a proper operations center,” she says, “but because the technicians and engineers spend most of their time repairing damage, the job isn’t getting done, and so we’re doing our mage ops from our offices. It’s inefficient and any surveillance requiring more than one mage is difficult to coordinate.”

  Constantine continues to direct his gaze out the window— it is as if his mind were worrying over another problem entirely— but his answer shows he had been paying attention. “Will you have your ops room completed by the time you commence active operations?”

  “That is hard to say.”

  He turns to Aiah and places his hands on the surface of his desk. It is a beautiful piece of furniture, ebony, inlaid with gilt and mother-of-pearl.

  “Let me know when the deadline approaches, and if necessary I will assign more people to you. The repairs to the Palace are crucial to the physical safety of the government and its workers, and should take precedence.”

  There is a gentle knock at the door, followed by the appearance of Constantine’s secretary, a Cheloki named Drusus. “President Drumbeth wishes to see you, sir,” he says, and Drumbeth is in the room before Aiah and Constantine have more than half-risen from their chairs.

  The president of the triumvirate is a small man, but he is made taller by erect military posture and bushy gray hair. Though he resigned from his colonelcy after the coup, he wears his blue suit as if it were a uniform. The coup that overthrew the Keremaths was his creation, and he had been intelligent enough to make Constantine a part of it, and of the government he formed afterward.

  He shakes Constantine’s hand briskly. “I was passing by your office,” he says, “and thought I would take the opportunity to speak with you.”

  Drumbeth’s impassive copper face and slit eyes are impossible to read, and Aiah concludes that his unresponsive face must have served him well in his previous post as director of military intelligence.

  Constantine introduces Aiah. “Miss Aiah was giving a report on her progress in establishing her department,” he says.

  “I would be interested to hear it,” says Drumbeth. He takes a chair without being invited, and nods at Aiah. "Please continue, miss.”

  Aiah is near the end of her presentation, but for the triumvir’s benefit she begins again from the start. His narrow eyes watch her impassively as she speaks. Occasionally he interrupts to ask a pertinent question.

  “Very good, Miss Aiah,” he concludes. “You seem to have done well for someone"—his slit eyes flicker for a moment— “for someone so young.”

  Aiah is conscious of heat rising to her face. “Thank you, sir.”

  Drumbeth turns to Constantine, then seems to remember something. “Ah— it occurs to me to ask you,” he says, “about some prisoners you have ordered released from our jails.”

  Constantine gives him an expectant look. “Prisoners?”

  “A commissioner of the Special Police— Anacheth. One of his subordinates, Commander Coapli, and a general of the former regime’s army, Brandig. The worst kind of men the old regime had to offer, torturers and killers. After you interviewed them, you ordered them all released from the Metropolitan Prison.”

  A cold finger touches Aiah’s spine. These are Taikoen’s victims, the men Constantine was feeding to his creature.

  “Ah,” Constantine says. “I recall now. I released them after I received their medical reports. They were all in the last stages of a fatal illness, and it seemed needless cruelty to keep them confined. In fact, I believe Anacheth and Coapli have already died.”

  Drumbeth nods. “So I have been told. It was Coapli’s death, reported on the news, that made me wonder how he had come to be released from prison.”

  “I hoped,” Constantine says, “to be able to set a better example of humanity than our predecessors.”

  “That was good of you, I suppose.” Drumbeth’s tone implies indifference to the fate of Anacheth and his minions.

  “Also,” Constantine adds, “I did not want it said that we secretly murdered them while they were in custody.”

  Drumbeth nods agreement, but as he nods he continues to speak. “But nevertheless you are Minister of Resources, not Security, and you aren’t among those authorized to order the discharge of prisoners.”

  “I apologize if I exceeded my authority,” Constantine says. “Since my Cheloki had arrested these people in the first place, and in view of the great challenges facing Gentri and the safety ministry, I thought it was easier simply to order them released myself.”

  “That will no longer be necessary,” Drumbeth says. His voice is firm: Aiah sees an officer here, used to command. “Gentri now has a good sense of his department. If there are people whom you wish to have released on humanitarian grounds, call my attention to them, and after a review I will order their discharge.”

  “You are busy enough. I would not want to trouble you with these minor matters.”

  “Then don’t.” Drumbeth’s voice remains indifferent. “But if criminals are to be released, I wish it to be with my knowledge, or with Gentri’s.”

  Constantine nods gracefully. “As you wish, Triumvir.”

  Drumbeth tilts his head. “By the way— I wonder if you have seen the early news reports?”

  Constantine looks at him with grave curiosity. “I have not had the opportunity.”

  “There are stories in several media of a decision made at yesterday’s cabinet meeting concerning the fate of the Qer-wan Arms Company. The reports are unanimous in indicating the government’s decision to sell. In fact, my office has already been contacted by firms wishing to tender a bid.”

  Constantine nods. His usual dramatic tones and extravagant gestures are suppressed: he sits upright at the table, and speaks in a lowered tone. “Such eagerness would indicate that the sale of the company, complete with its current set of government contracts, should provide the government an excellent source of revenue.”

  “That may be true,” Drumbeth says. “But the fact remains that, contrary to the news reports, the government has not as yet decided the fate o
f the company, and may not decide to part with a resource so vital to its security.”

  “Guns and ammunition,” Constantine says, “are available in quantity, and for rather better prices, in many other places.”

  “So you said yesterday,” Drumbeth says. “It isn’t my intention to renew the debate, but instead to note my concern at reports of the inner workings of our cabinet now appearing in news reports.” A glint, steely in Shieldlight, appears in Drumbeth’s narrow eyes. “It would seem that someone is attempting to manipulate the situation through selected leaks to the media.”

  A ghost of a shrug rolls through Constantine’s shoulders. He continues to hold his gestures to a minimum, and Aiah wonders if he is afraid he might give himself away with one of them. “It is to be expected, I suppose,” he says. “If they are to have wider participation in government, as we seem to agree they should, the public must be educated in such matters.”

  “Educated,” Drumbeth says. “Not manipulated. Forcing the government’s hand this way will not be tolerated, and if I can discover the offender he may find that some of his most cherished projects—” His slitted eyes glance for a deliberate moment in Aiah’s direction. “His most cherished projects,” he continues, “will be vetoed, or given to someone else.”

  “I’ve been a neglectful host,” Constantine says. “May I offer you coffee? Tea? A glass of brandy perhaps?”

  “Some other time,” Drumbeth says, rising. “I have a full shift ahead of me.”

  “Damn the man!” Constantine cries after Drumbeth leaves. He hammers a heavy fist into his palm. “He is—" The words jam in his throat, and instead he waves the fist at the door. “This is unsupportable! Dressing me down in front of a subordinate!”

  Aiah shrinks from the storm of anger. “I wouldn’t call it dressing down . . .” she says.

  Constantine is not consoled. “How dare he check me!” he roars. “After everything I have done! After I set him in power!” He paces behind his desk, marching back and forth as fury sparks from his eyes. “An arms company!” he says. “Badly managed, fat with overpaid Keremath sycophants, their product inferior and overpriced...” He laughs. “And this shambles is so vital to the security of Caraqui? Our ex-colonel Drumbeth of all people should know how common arms companies are, how easy their product is to come by—”