Metropolitan (42 page)

Aldemar’s mental voice, invading Aiah’s senses, is surprisingly calm.

— Wizard One, remain in reserve near Red Bolt. Wizard Two, try to cut off its sourceline.

The attacking serpent suddenly rears up like a cobra about to strike.

Bits of Aiah’s own plasm beam break off, like military aircraft peeling out of formation, each trailing its golden sourceline behind it. One heads for the intruder — Aldemar, Aiah thinks — another darting low as if to snip the serpent off near its tail. If the attacker’s sourceline can be interfered with closer to its point of origin, then the attack itself will evaporate.

The hovering cobra strikes, spitting a hundred flashing plasm missiles at its target, self-contained bolts of fire. Flame streaks the sky. Missiles splash against a shield that Aldemar stretches across the sky at the last instant. And then both the missiles and the cobra are gone, and Red Bolt flies serenely along its course high above the clouds.

Aldemar’s grim voice floats into Aiah’s consciousness.

— He’ll be back. He’s just gone to get his friends.

A notion occurs to Aiah.

— Can we put Red Bolt on another course? I can bend the beam to keep it on track, and eventually reorient the transmission horn.

Aldemar’s answer is decisive.

— Yes. Let’s do it.

In her normal voice she orders the commo techs to relay orders to the pilot, and Red Bolt dips a wing, throttles up, and rolls away from its original path, diving slightly to increase speed.

For the moment the sky is peaceful again. Aiah finds it easy enough to keep the beam on target: she follows Red Bolt’s path, the plasm looping behind her in the sky, and then straightens the kinks in the beam when she has the opportunity.

She glances up at the video through slitted eyes. Half the Metropolitan Guard headquarters is a flaming holocaust, but there’s still resistance, shellfire crunching against the crumbling concrete walls. Resistance seems to have completely collapsed at the Aerial Palace, and rebel troops are moving up stairwells without opposition.

But the Martyrs’ Canal seems to be living up to its name. Mondray’s mercenaries managed to find or seize a bridge, and they’re pushing as many troops over it as possible. The rebels don’t have enough troops to stop them — calls for reinforcements are continuous — and the only rebel superiority seems to be in numbers of mages. The mercenaries have very little magical protection.

If you can’t send troops, send plasm,
Aiah thinks urgently. But she’s not in command.

“
Red Bolt’s under attack!”

Aiah’s perceptions snap to the sky. And the war goes on.

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 checks 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.”