Flight of the Vajra (9 page)

I turned in my seat and got a look at the other
people in the gallery. Most of them seemed reasonably upscale: stylish dress,
open and receptive faces, good genetics. The sort of people who were walking
away in droves from the Old Way. Not like the crowds outside, most of whom hadn’t
even been able to get in despite it being “open to all”. Had that been
Angharad’s idea, even when she had to know full well there was no way to make
good on such a promise for everyone?

I sat back and tried to think about something
else. I ended up thinking about the research I’d done last night, about the
fact that this building and its surrounding acreage were now all one big fat
target for someone who wanted to make trouble.

Well then, I told myself, quit wondering about it
and
do
something. If your gut feelings are right, you won’t be spending
another day on this rock anyway.I tentatively switched on my CL, making sure to
use a frequency that they weren’t likely to be jamming. I probably should have
done it while I was still outside—odds are they’d be monitoring broadcasts in
here—but I did it at a low enough wattage and at a brief enough interval that I
doubted anyone would think it was more than transient atmospherics.

With the link up, I yanked some public
sensory-surface surveillance of the city from several previous events of this
magnitude. The presence of local defense forces and their movements throughout
the city were easy enough to ferret out, looking much like time-lapse ocean
currents on a weather map. I took averages of movements from five other events
like this one, then compared them to the actual movements taking place
throughout the city right now.

Oh, that ain’t right, I thought.

Not only were there fewer units near the hall or
in the surrounding blocks, quite a few of them that were spread out through the
city were apparently inching their way towards the south end of town—nowhere
near where we were.

Hypothesis #1: The local security forces have a
different protocol in effect for someone of the Kathaya’s stature. Not likely:
why put
less
protection around her, then?

So, hypothesis #2: something else is going on, and
it isn’t good news.

It only hit me later how over the course of the
last couple of days I’d gone from wondering about whether or not I was in
danger to wondering about whether
she
was in danger.

I sent out a quick broadcast to the
Vajra
to see if she was listening. Once I got back an OK from the ship, I told it:
Send
over Gunjita and Kanthaka.
The most direct way to work with most anything
made of protomics, after all, is just to plug into it via CL and think at it.

Even if you had been standing near the dock where
the
Vajra
was resting, you probably wouldn’t have seen the port open in
the top of the ship. It was just barely big enough to stick my head through,
and it spat out something the size of a tennis ball. This something—Gunjita, I’d
nicknamed it—was translucent, mostly spherical, and featured almost entirely transparent,
dragonfly-like wings that allowed it to hover noiselessly. It spiraled up, then
shot out towards the Pavilion a good five klicks off. I’d probably have to park
it on the roof or on top of a light fixture or something. Gunjita had power
enough to stay in flight for a few hours at a stretch, but I didn’t want to
push it, and I didn’t want to draw undue attention to it, either. She wasn’t
likely to be the only drone of her kind poking around up there today. Through
her battery of sensory surfaces, relayed to me via my CL, I could see the
sprawl of the city splayed out—as if projected on the inside of a hemisphere
that domed me like an umbrella.

As Gunjita headed my way, the belly of the ship
distended and released an oblong glob of its own hull, about two meters long
and half a meter wide. Inside this pod, over the past hour or so, something had
been forming from various reservoirs of protomic substrate. At first a
featureless pudding with colors that resembled mercury swirled with melted
white chocolate, it had sucked in its sides, hollowed itself out a bit on top,
extruded flanges here, grew translucent there, the whole time chittering and
squeaking like a neurotic balloon animal. In time that former piece of the hull
had become a two-wheel, two-seat vehicle with driver-enclosure canopy. Its coloration
was the same gold-red-and-black as the ship itself.

Kanthaka, as I called her, gunned her engine (fabbed
much earlier and kept in storage until now) and sped off towards town. All this
I also witnessed through the bevy of sensory surfaces both the ship and
Kanthaka provided to me through CL. I’d elected to go with a ground vehicle, complete
with fake temporary ID tags, since anything airborne bigger than Gunjita would
draw more attention than I needed. I didn’t know how close Kanthaka would be
able to get, what with the streets being either barricades or mobs, but a good
escape—or an remote-control vehicular interception—was worth the cost of a traffic
citation.

I glanced over at Enid. She looked more bored than
anything else, like she was about to start kicking the seat in front of her if
there had been one.

By the time the auditorium lights were switched
off and the first round of pre-emptive applause rang through the room, I’d
relaxed a bit. No usher had come over and given me stern words about switching
off my CL, and I was getting back intermittent broadcasts back from Gunjita as
she came closer. Apart from the city streets still being wall-to-wall faithful,
there was nothing that drew my attention, let alone inspired panic—but nothing
that relaxed me either.

Angharad entered from stage right to another loud
wave of applause, accompanied by two of the women I’d seen in her retinue at
our first meeting. She bowed once, deeply, at the edge of the stage, then
settled on the cushion provided for her and bowed deeply once again. This time
the audience returned the bow—Enid and I included, I noticed. Old habits.

“Thank you all very much for coming,” she said, her
amplified voice still managing to somehow sound quiet and reserved. “I know
that you are all busy people, and it never fails to impress me that so many of
you set aside the time to come and listen, and speak to me. But I must
apologize in advance.

“You see, there are a great many more people
outside who wanted to participate. I learned only just now before coming on
stage that the Cytherian authorities were so dismayed by the crowding and the
potential security problems that they elected instead to pre-screen the
admissions. That is, they admitted people not based on the order in which they
were able to reserve seating, but on their potential status as a security
hazard according to criteria that I was myself not made privy to or allowed to
influence. The event was offered by me as open to all, with first-come seating,
barring certain VIPs. Since this meeting is clearly not being held in that
format, I’m afraid I can’t continue, and again for that I apologize
. . . ”

The nattering and snarling all around was already
pretty loud, but the guy behind me shouted “
What
?”, and that granted a
great many more people the liberty to speak up just as vociferously.

Angharad raised her hands. “Please. Please—” She
had the look of someone trying to take a dangerous toy away from a
too-enthusiastic child, but her voice was firm and clear.

Enid turned around in her seat, wide-eyed at the
sight of most everyone else shouting and half-rising from their seats. And she
was smiling, too—maybe for the same reason I was also smiling, because there
was indeed a sneaky thrill to be found in watching Angharad fight back like
this.

“What are you grousing about?” I called out to the
guy behind me who’d
What?
-ed at the top of his voice. “It’s not like
you
paid
to get in here, is it?”

“Therefore—” Angharad had raised her voice. Only
slightly, but it was enough to carve a sizeable notch out of the audience’s own
volume. “Therefore, I propose that everyone in an odd-numbered seat, except for
the VIPs in the first two rows, give up their seats so that someone waiting
outside can be brought in. I apologize again, but you are yourselves the
victims of an unfairness that I did not know was being perpetrated—”

The audience remained noisy. One of Angharad’s
aides and a black-haired man in the gray-and-brown uniform of a Cytherian
security officer knelt at one side and had a heated conversation. The officer was
stocky, with the slightly reddish skin, high cheekbones and spreading nose of an
old-line Cytherian, and he looked like he would only smile if someone yanked
back his cheeks with fishhooks.

Gunjita, are you there yet?
I asked.

Gunjita told me she was still about a kilometer
from the building. ETA: two minutes. She’d kept low to avoid being singled out,
hopping from roof to treeline to roof again. The crowds below had grown that
much noisier and invigorated by Angharad’s words, which were being broadcast
from every single poster sprayed around town. The troop movements throughout
the city were converging all the faster towards a building that my CL telemetry
told me was the capitol.

Enid had turned in her seat at least six times—boggling
at the stage, the crowd behind us, the stage again. She consulted her seat
number and whispered to me: “Am I getting booted out?” Well, loud enough that
only a good friend would charitably call it a whisper.

“No, no,” I said. “First two rows—VIPs. We’re both
staying. Relax, this is about to be more worth it than I dreamed.” I patted her
shoulder. “And quit twisting around in your seat. You’ll wear out the velour.”

She gave my shoulder a punch that I decided on
reflection was actually rather affectionate.

After two more heated-looking conversations
between everyone on stage, the Cytherian security officer stepped up. He was
willing, he told us, to compromise by having another meeting scheduled for
tomorrow, with all who were previously excluded given a chance to speak
. . . albeit with slightly more rigorous security in place. Half the
people behind me were already out of their seat and looked resigned to just
packing it in when Angharad nodded and said that was acceptable.

From outside and overhead, Gunjita told me the
crowds were going slightly bonkers with joy. I predicted nobody was going to
show up for work tomorrow.

No, not just joy. The central-southern sector of
town was boiling, guards closing ranks in the streets and shoving people off
into alleys and onto side avenues, always in one direction: away from the
capitol building. Here and there were the signature blips and streaks of
weapons being discharged.

It’s started, I thought. No: whatever it was, it
had started before we’d ever come in here and closed the doors.

Vajra
, I thought,
undock and take cover
in the bay.

I stood up. The half of the audience that was
already on its feet was filing out with some grumbling, but nothing volcanic.
The security officer had knelt down next to Angharad, but was not speaking: he
was looking off at the floor with the distant, intense expression of someone
being funneled more information through their CL than they could safely
process. (Even on worlds like this, CL for the police and authorities was no
longer seen as a hypocrisy; it was sometimes the only way to get the job done.
But even they only chose to live with it so much.)

It took only one hop and five long steps to put me
next to the security officer—and by extension, Angharad and her two female
aides, who were now also kneeling to one side. They looked like they were
bracing for bad news.

The security officer—his arm-badge read ASEKHAR—looked
up at me. “Please, return to your seat immediately.”

“The two of them are with me,” Angharad told him.
I didn’t need to turn my head to guess that Enid had given in to her curiosity
and was now also standing behind me. I did need to turn my head, though, to see
the baffled look on her face.

“If there’s something going on, you’d better fill
us in,” I said.

Asekhar’s voice was tiny, clamped-down. “There
appears to be some kind of . . . miscommunication with two of the
divisions of the Civil Guard. They’ve stopped responding to orders and a number
of non-government buildings are offline.”

“From where I come from,” I said, “we call that a ‘coup’.”
I turned to Angharad. “I think we’ve got about minutes for you to get to your
ship and get out of here.”

The walls and ceiling flashed bright red and a
whoop-whoop
alarm sounded throughout the building. Someone, probably our own erstwhile
security man, had triggered the fire alarm. Everyone still seated blinked,
slowly stood, and began to follow the rest of the audience outside. As long as
they’re shaking their heads in annoyance and not stomping all over each other
in panic, I thought.

“This should forestall anyone closing the building
from the outside.” Asekhar stood up, then faced Angharad and did something I
barely recognized at first: he pressed the edge of his upraised hand between
his brows. I hadn’t seen that hard-core an Old Way salute since before I’d
lapsed myself.

“Your Grace,” he said, “we should leave. Come.”

Angharad shook her head. “These people here are
your first responsibility. Go protect them.”

Asekhar considered this for all of one second before
saluting her again and bowing all the more deeply.

“Go around behind the stage,” he said, in the same
tightly-wound tones, “and down the stairs marked ‘Auxiliary Loading.’ There’s a
small underground exit there which leads out to a one-way street closed to foot
traffic. But I don’t imagine there will be any cars right now.”

He left us with one last salute, which I returned
only after it was too late.