State Tectonics

by Malka Older

  She is keeping an eye out for other modes of attack on the roof—grappling hooks, or crows or tsubames carrying assault teams—but fighter jets would be faster and more devastating. The AlThani military might have some limited anti-air capacity to defend against them, but InfoSec certainly doesn’t.

  Mishima gets a ping to her handheld: a line-of sight message from the InfoSec Jens has stationed near the roof access. Suspected take-off from same site. Eight bogies.

  Mishima cranks the crow into the air, heading straight up a couple of dozen meters. Crows don’t get a lot of altitude; there’s not going to be any way for her to engage directly with fighter jets. The best she can hope for is to deflect the bombs or whatever they’re planning on raining down. She makes herself not think about anything, not feel the cold bringing goosebumps out on her skin despite the perfect climate control, but it’s not easy during the wait. She misses her old crow.

  There! Faint discolorations in the sky still, up and to the northeast. Mishima stares until her eyes water despite the protective coating on the viewer. Faster than seems possible, the blur separates into shapes that grow and sharpen. Mishima gets as high as she can, taking a quick glance downward in case this is a distraction for a ground assault. When she can hear the roar, she pulls back slightly from the roof, tilts the crow upward as far as the air pressurizers allow. She has no idea if it’s possible to divert a bomb as it’s falling. Don’t most of these things have directional controls? But there’s nothing else to do. She relaxes her hands, ready to control the crow with instinct instead of brain, and focuses everything on the air above her as the jets shatter the sky.

  One breath. Two breaths. Would she see a bomb by now? The jets scatter dark blots in their wake, but as Mishima watches, they bloom and slow: paratroopers.

  Mishima lets out the third breath with a whoosh, forces herself to breathe slowly until her hands stop shaking. This enemy wants control, not destruction. And now she has time to figure out what she’s going to do.

  * * *

  “This is taking too long,” Maryam says. Hassan is still working doggedly, stringing together node after node, but it’s slow going.

  “Remind me to hardwire in emergency paths after this is over,” he grunts.

  Taskeen says nothing, and hasn’t for a while; Maryam suspects she is working on connecting to her local contacts instead of AlThani. Which, who knows, might work even better.

  “I’m going for help,” Maryam says. Taskeen doesn’t look up, but Hassan does.

  “What are you going to do? Run all the way to the AlThani hall?” Their seat of government is on the other side of the city—no one thought it was a good idea to have two such powerful institutions close together—nearly ten kilometers away.

  “No, I’m going to see if we can contact YourArmy.”

  Hassan, who knows about her relationship with Núria, looks at her through narrowed eyes. “Don’t do something stupid.”

  Maryam doesn’t care. She wants to be with Núria now. The last time she felt this way and ignored it, she ended up feeling like a jerk. She stands up.

  Taskeen finally looks at her. “I’ve left messages for some people. I told them to wear white armbands. They’ll help you if they can.”

  Maryam tries a smile. “No neutral press, huh?”

  “No such thing,” Taskeen answers.

  * * *

  While waiting for the paratroopers, Mishima checks the crow’s weaponry. Nothing but a flamethrower on the nose. She wishes she had thought to grab a grenade launcher from the armory. She has time to think about how hard she wants to work to avoid killing people—aside from anything else, she would like to know exactly what the fuck is going through their heads when they decide to attack Information—and then they drift into range.

  Mishima lets the crow sink slowly with them, staying slightly above the bulk of the chutes so the paratroopers can’t see her. The tricky thing is going to be taking them all out while they’re high enough to be injured but low enough not to be killed by the fall, but her fear is gone now, leaving anger alone beating through her body, so she doesn’t spend a lot of time worrying about it. Mishima’s impatient for a real fight. At five meters above the roof, she starts torching parachutes.

  * * *

  Maryam hurries down to the ground floor. She should probably go to the security office and get some intel on what’s going on, but she’s afraid they’ll talk her out of leaving. She goes through the lobby, past the ground floor restroom and the small logistics office, and back through the janitorial offices to the service door where food is brought in for the canteen. Feeling silly and scared, Maryam lies down on her belly and pushes at the door. It’s heavy and hard to push open in that position, and she has to get up on her knees and elbows to edge it open. She pauses and waits. The hot air is steaming in from outside and her arm aches holding the door open. She can feel the sweat gathering on her forehead.

  Maryam crawls forward and pushes the door open more, leans her head up to the doorjamb and peers out. The Information hub is set away from its neighbors, with an access road that circles half the building to a small auxiliary parking lot by the door and a driveway up to the loading dock next to it. Maryam’s eyeing a small stand of climate-modified bamboo a few meters from the door when she is startled by a growling roar that gets louder and louder until it rips the sky and crowds everything but fear out of her brain: They’re coming for us! She squeezes out through the door and wriggles her way behind the bamboo, cowering there until the noise has faded.

  The building hasn’t exploded, and she can think again.

  Carefully, Maryam pulls herself into a crouch and looks around. It’s a dozen meters or so across bare ground to the next building, an anonymous glass-and-concrete parallelogram that houses a content factory, a logistics company, and a firm specializing in custom workspaces. Maryam sprints across the ground to the side of the building and works her way around it. When she leans around the corner, she sees a hundred or so people in business wear standing in front of the building, chatting. She stands up and walks into the crowd, listening.

  “They’re probably just doing drills.”

  “Or an airshow? Have you seen anything about that?”

  “They could have waited until closer to lunchtime.”

  “Hey, have you voted yet?”

  “No, and I can’t seem to get on Information. I sure hope this isn’t a repeat of last election.”

  Maryam winces. She’s worked her way to the middle of the group and feels like she can breathe again. She blinks to call public transportation, but of course nothing comes up. Well, she walked here from the hotel this morning; she can walk back as long as no one stops her.

  * * *

  A few of the paratroopers miss the roof, but the rest scatter over it, crashing through trellises and destroying the bulk of the solar cells. Mishima lands on the roof of the access stairwell and leaps down from the crow in front of the door. She’s just in time. Several figures wrapped in reflective flight suits are struggling upright and scrambling from the pile of comrades who cushioned their falls. Mishima raises her flamethrower and moves forward to roast the first one, but they are quicker than she expects after their fall and leap aside to avoid most of the blast. Those suits look fire-retardant, but what got to them must have hurt.

  “Reinforcements!” Mishima yells into the access doorway, hoping the runner is there. She steps back toward the door and arcs flame across the faces of two more of the glimmering blue-white figures as they converge on her, drawing their own weapons. She hears screaming and then is knocked backward when something hits her in the shoulder.

  Mishima hits the ground awkwardly but manages to roll back up to her feet and get herself into the lee of the access doorway. Her shoulder is throbbing. She’s pretty sure she’s bleeding but doesn’t dare look down at it. The two she just torched are rolling on the ground screaming, but she hears something ricochet off the doorjamb in front of her and finally understands: t
hey are armed with plastic guns.

  “Chikushou,” Mishima swears. She fumbles for her stiletto and peels a healing pad off the hilt. She hears a ping but she’s too busy with the pad to read the message; hopefully it’s confirmation of reinforcements on the way.

  Mishima can’t see the hole in her shoulder well, so she has to position the pad by touch, patting around the halo of soreness and then gasping when she touches raw flesh. When she has it aligned as well as she can manage, she presses her palm against it, biting her lip against the pain. She inhales as deeply as she can, exhales, and forces more air into her lungs the second time, working past the pain. Then Mishima holds her flamethrower above her head and ducks around the doorway, spouting flame.

  The first few bullets are aimed at the shoulder-level flamethrower and give Mishima time to find her assailant lying flat on their stomach behind one of their companions’ bodies. Mishima levels a steady plume at them and runs in under its cover. She sees the gun melted against her assailant’s hand before she plunges her hunting knife into their back. She lets the momentum carry her into a crouch and stays low to strip guns from all the bodies within reach and then scurry back to the door. Mishima slides inside to find two InfoSecs pounding up the stairs.

  “Most of them are immobile, but I can’t guarantee how many are still alive, and they have plastic guns,” she pants, hoping her relief isn’t audible.

  “Did you get the message?” asks one of the InfoSecs as the other launches a grenade through the access door.

  Mishima shakes her head, heart sinking.

  “Six more jets on the way,” he says, and then both InfoSecs charge out the door in the wake of the explosion. Mishima climbs back up toward the crow, leaving them to handle the situation on the roof. She can already hear the roar of the jets.

  CHAPTER 29

  Maryam is limping down Khalifa Street as quickly as she can in her sandals when the second set of jets passes overhead. She hovers in place until she is sure that they didn’t blow up the Hub this time either, then jogs on. It is not until she passes Al-Jamiaa Street that Information comes back up. She almost collapses with relief, stops in the middle of the sidewalk to blink up everything at once. She doesn’t see anything about the Hub attack at first, until a new window pops up in her vision, bold headline streaming across it: Heritage attacks Information Hub on Election Day! She opens it up. The data is scant, and she suspects it wouldn’t pass publication muster for Information, but it’s there.

  Maryam keeps reading as she walks, and almost bumps into Núria.

  “What are you doing here?” Núria asks, throwing her arms around her.

  “I—” Maryam looks around. She’s still a couple of kilometers from the hotel. “I was coming to you. What are you doing here?”

  “I saw about the attack, and I came to find you.” Núria holds up the lighter-sized mini-flamethrower she carries with her, smiling. “Flamethrowers blazing, remember? You’re all right?”

  “Fine,” Maryam says. “Where did you find out about the attack?”

  “Something called…” Núria blinks it open. “Proto-data. Is that a new compiler?”

  “I don’t think so,” Maryam says. She checks the metadata on the site she was reading: Omnivision. “No, it’s not a compiler. It’s something new.”

  * * *

  Mishima pulls the crow up in the air and circles once to make sure the two InfoSecs on the roof didn’t run into any trouble. When she sees their thumbs up, she rises higher, preparing for another round of parachute hunting. How long can they keep this up? The jets zoom overhead, dropping their payloads of troops, but the roar of the engines doesn’t fade away. Mishima peels her eyes off the chutes and scans the horizons. Two more jets are approaching, but from the west. They roar over the paratroopers and follow the others. Mishima cranes her neck, but there’s no way she can see the insignia on the tail. Still, they have to be AlThani planes, right? With that in mind and the two InfoSecs below her waiting with confiscated plastic guns, she decides to let the paratroopers get close before she incinerates their chutes.

  It doesn’t take long to neutralize the second set of paratroopers. Two of them get shots off, and one of the InfoSecs will have a bad bruise on the chest tomorrow, but the armor prevented any serious injury. Mishima and the two InfoSecs are still checking the prisoners for hidden weapons when a runner comes up to confirm: the AlThani fighter jets have pursued the attackers to the coastline of the Heritage centenal across the Gulf, and are now patrolling the border. AlThani ground security forces are in the process of securing the building.

  Mishima leaves the InfoSecs and clatters down the stairs, loose-jointed with relief. No one is left in the Jaber room, which feels slightly eerie, but she finds Ken and Sayaka in the lobby, coming out of the bunker adjoining the crisis management center. She picks up Sayaka and hugs her until the girl squirms. Then she puts her arms around Ken and lets him hold her for a long time.

  * * *

  Ken wants to sleep in the crow that night, and Mishima wholeheartedly agrees. After she gets him and Sayaka settled there with plans to order some tsubame-delivered kebabs, she searches out Nejime to let her know.

  Not entirely surprisingly, Nejime is back in her office. “Another night in the crow?” she repeats distractedly when Mishima asks her. “Not a problem. Is your daughter all right?”

  “She doesn’t seem to have registered anything after the initial shock of the lights going out.”

  “Good job with that,” Nejime says, but she sighs. “One might say the same about the rest of the population. There’s been no outrage, barely any condemnation of Heritage.”

  “Did you expect them to hail us as heroes?” asks Mishima. “They’re too busy exploring all their new data options.” She changes the subject. “By the way, how did you end up getting word to AlThani?”

  Unexpectedly, Nejime laughs. “We didn’t! No one told you?” Mishima shakes her head. “It was your protégé, Amran. She learned about their planning in Nairobi and alerted the Nairobi hub. They alerted AlThani and sent a couple of crows up here themselves. Amran came with them; she’s being debriefed by the lawyers downstairs.”

  “I’ll go see her,” Mishima says.

  “Yes, you should. She’ll make a good operative … or she would have, I suppose.”

  Reluctantly, Mishima slows her retreat. “You don’t think you’ll be continuing the program?”

  “I don’t know if we’ll be continuing at all. We were so close.” Nejime has turned her gaze to the window; Mishima suspects it’s to hide her emotion. “Four elections, two peaceful transfers of power—that is significant in the annals of new forms of government. If we could have just gotten the Secretariat up and running, if we had just thought of it in time for the last elections…”

  “You really think the Secretariat could have prevented this?” Maybe it is sour grapes, but Mishima can’t think of the Secretariat as anything but another sad layer of self-important bureaucracy.

  “You always undervalued these things,” Nejime says without ire. “Processes, pomp, consensus, taking that extra step for democratic inclusion. And especially legitimacy. Look: we started with nothing.” She turns her soft elderly hands palms up. “You start by making something out of that nothing, creating. But it’s still almost nothing! You have to roll it, build on it, feed it, recruit others. At some point you gain traction, and it gets easier, but you still have to push, and push, and push. Finally, you get some momentum, it has taken on a life of its own, but you still have to guide and push some more. And then you hope, someday, it will go on without you. But it is all imaginary and invisible. As you well know, government only works because people believe in it.”

  “Maybe what comes next will be better.” Mishima can’t help being cold: she is just so sick of this shit.

  “Maybe it will,” Nejime says, in a tone that does nothing to admit the premise. “But you have just knocked all that legitimacy we built up down to zero.”

&nbs
p; “I didn’t do it,” Mishima says. “And I wouldn’t have chosen it. But holding on too long can strangle legitimacy just as easily.” Nejime doesn’t answer. “Speaking of which, what will happen to Heritage?”

  “I would like to decommission them, the way we did SecureNation,” Nejime says, her usual fierceness returning. “But I’m not sure we have enough legitimacy capital to manage it. For the moment, Agambire is under arrest, but do you know he’s blaming it on his wife? He says she masterminded it all from exile. Meanwhile, she was interviewed by one of these new data peddlers”—Mishima wonders how long it will take for that term to seem unforgivably derogatory—“and she claims it was all William Pressman managing it from prison.”

  “Maybe now that it’s not running the world, Information can do more work on accountability,” Mishima suggests, and turns to leave.

  “Oh, Mishima?”

  Mishima pauses, almost at the door.

  “Keep the crow.”

  Mishima turns back, startled. “What?”

  “I think you’ve earned it.”

  * * *

  When Mishima finds Amran, she’s been in debriefing for three hours. They might not be done with her, but she is clearly done with them. Mishima pulls rank to get her out of the room and takes her to get some food.

  “I’m not sure I’m up for this spy stuff,” Amran says for the third time. Her plate is still mostly full, and she’s pushing the rice around.

  “You don’t have to be. But you were amazing,” Mishima says.

  “I was terrified! I messed up the escape!” She hides her face in her hands.