Palace (59 page)

At precisely the fours, in the dead of night after Datechange, Elen took a floor cleaning bot down to the generator level, where he would sabotage one of the bot’s photonic circuits. Ten minutes later, Kata made a point of speaking to the shift boss and another worker, so that they’d remember him being in the lobby after Elen had gone down. Twenty minutes after that, Kata stashed his work cart in a men’s room stall, then took his lunch box and found a lift booth down. While he rode, he switched his coveralls to the red side and lifted the toolkit from the lunch box. Now came the first small danger. He’d equipped his lunch box with a magnet just inside the lid. With a leap, he stuck it on the ceiling of the booth. With luck, no-one would ever notice it there, even if the booth had riders while he was gone. Kata walked out of the booth and pretended to look puzzled as he glanced around. A security guard strolled over.

‘You come about that dead bot?’

‘Sure have. Where is it?’

‘Go down this hall, turn right, and follow the arrow that says Generator Room.’

‘Thanks.’

Elen and the bot were waiting out in the hall in front of the pale grey doors to the force-field generator. Kata made a show of kneeling down and examining the machine, though Elen had already repaired the sabotage. Elen leaned against the wall in a pose like that of any worker glad of a few minutes’ idleness.

‘The guard’s gone,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve been timing out his round. You’ve got about twelve minutes.’

Kata strode across the hall and laid his hand on the entrance panel beside the grey doors. Another miracle - Riva had indeed coded his prints in, and the door slid open. He walked in, looking, listening, smelling the air, too, for the ugly stink of human, then realized that he was alone in an antechamber, equipped with a pair of chairs and a counter. On the wall four Mapscreens flickered in endless readouts of red numbers. Probably the real safety control point lay elsewhere.

He glanced up and looked over the ceiling; sure enough, he saw the two black lenses of dead security cameras. Riva could buy him five minutes, she’d said, before someone noticed the cameras were down.

Across the room, another door, which again slid open at his touch, and more Mapscreens, more dead cameras - and the generator, sitting on an obsidian base against the far wall, an oddly ordinary-looking piece of equipment for something so powerful. He crossed over fast, and already he’d seen what he needed to: a separation of about two inches between the pale grey housing and the wall, where shielded cables climbed like trellised vines to a power route box at the ceiling.

The generator itself stood about four feet high and six long, big enough to throw the bottom of that gulf twixt it and the wall into deep shadow. When Kata laid a hand on it, he felt only the barest trace of vibration. The Colonizers had built solid tech, all right. He knelt, flipped open the toolkit, and slid out his device, a metal oblong no more than an inch wide and six long, four high, but inside, neady folded like pastry around a battery, lay ten ounces of the plastique from the swamps.

Provided it had remained chemically stable, it would stay safe until the right electric pulse rippled through its molecular structure.

Provided. Kata set the device on the floor, then brought out the tiny fuse and stuck its metal prong into a hole in the case. With one claw he flipped open the fuse cover and pulled out the antenna. Or tried to. The antenna, a fine curl of wire, stuck in place. If he pulled too hard, and if the plastique had turned vicious ... - He flicked the cover again and again, finally got a claw tip under the wire and pulled. It reeled out with a fine hiss and nothing more. Kata let out his breath in a puff and slid the device, antenna and all, back behind the generator with the telescoping rod he’d brought in the kit. He got up, replacing the rod, shutting the kit as he did so, and trotted out of the generator room, hurried through the antechamber and stepped out while the cameras were still dead. Out in the hall Elen stood on guard.

‘Got it,’ Kata whispered. ‘How are we for time?’

‘Here he comes now.’

‘Okay.’ Kata raised his voice to normal. ‘That bot should keep running for a while, but it needs a new core chip. We won’t be able to patch it together for much longer.’

‘Sure,’ Elen said. ‘I’ll tell my boss.’

On his way out, Kata waved at the guard, who waved back, a semi-salute. In the lift booth his lunch box hung where he’d put it. He leapt up and retrieved it, stashed the kit, then changed his coveralls around. He saw no-one until he was wheeling his work cart out of the men’s room, and no-one on the crew ever mentioned looking for him and finding him gone. For the last few hours of his shift, Kata found himself treading lightly whenever he was walking approximately over the generator room, even though he had to laugh at himself for doing so. If the device was going to blow early, a few footsteps would matter not at all. By the time he and Elen checked out, just at dawn, there had been no explosion, nor had anyone else discovered the bomb. As they were walking to the wiretrain station, Elen allowed as how he was relieved.

‘If it didn’t blow in the first couple of hours,’ Kata said, ‘the plastique must still be stable. Unless of course it’s completely deteriorated and gone inert.’

‘What if it has?’

‘We’ll find some other little amusement, that’s all.’ Kata shrugged the problem away. ‘Well, it’s just chiming the eights now. In about six hours, we’ll know.’

* * *

Cardinal Roha always began his work day so early that by the tens he needed a rest. As he usually did, that morning he invited Dav into the inner office to share breakfast while they watched the morning news. The feature story covered the UJU rally slated for the afternoon in a remarkably balanced presentation.

‘Interesting coverage,’ Roha said. ‘I’m surprised to find it so impartial.’

‘So am I, Your Eminence. It’s a loaded subject.’

‘I wonder if maybe we - if the order - should take an interest in this group. Perhaps we should find someone trustworthy and have them join it.’

Dav nearly choked on his drink. He put the cup down fast while his face turned an alarming shade of red.

‘Are you all right?’ Roha said. ‘Should I call a medic?’

Dav shook his head and coughed enormously into a napkin. At last he sat back in his chair and took a deep breath. His colour began to ebb toward normal.

‘My apologies, Your Eminence,’ he murmured. ‘Don’t know what came over me.’

‘I think I do.’ Roha had to smile. ‘You thought I was already involved with UJU, didn’t you?’

‘Well, er, ah ...’

‘I’ve never hidden my views on these subjects from you. You-don’t need to be embarrassed, Brother Dav! But no, I’ve avoided having anything to do with these people so far. For all I knew they were going to advocate murdering Leps in the street. We can’t risk having the Church associated with anything coarse, after all, and I’m afraid that at my rank, anything I do will represent the Church in most people’s eyes.’

‘Of course. I’m sorry, I just-’

‘A perfectly understandable mistake.’ Roha held up one hand. ‘Don’t mention it again. But I can’t help wondering if these people will be useful, somehow.’

‘We could send someone to observe the rally.’

‘A good suggestion.’ Roha considered. ‘But I don’t know, I think we’d best wait. I’d like to know a little more about them, you see, before we even go that far.’

‘Their advertisements said they’d be handing out free literature. I can send a lay brother to get some pamphlets.’

‘Now that’s an excellent idea. Do that. And we’ll want to see if we can find out if this steering committee has someone else behind them. They certainly seem to have money at their disposal.’

‘That’s for sure. You don’t rent the amphitheatre for spare coinage.’

‘Precisely.’

On and off throughout the morning, while he worked on the homily he would deliver at Vida’s contract ceremony, the cardinal would remember Dav’s assumption, which was of course perfectly correct. He took it as a sign that he’d grown too careless in expressing his views on matters racial. With Sister Romero on planet, he needed to tone down his public image. Since he knew Dav well, he could be sure that his stolid factor had believed his little denials, but still, perhaps it would be wise to voice doubts about the public group, while he kept a firm hand on the secret council behind it. Later, after the rally, he would consult with UJU-Prime and discuss what needed to be done.

* * *

Jevon had put too much work into the UJU rally to simply stay away. Although she couldn’t allow herself to be seen in the amphitheatre, she did arrange to leave the office in Government House around the elevens and run errands that would take her near Algol Park. Seemingly by chance, she wandered across the lawn to investigate the row of booths down by the river. By then the rally had started. Every now and then she could hear a faint cheer or burst of laughter from the Floating Amphitheatre, which dominated the park like a huge purple planet, dwarfing the horizon of its moon. In the pale light the coiled power cables glittered around its support column.

The literature display stood nearly deserted. Under their red and white awnings, various UJU members waited, forlorn and yawning, behind counters spread with piles of shiny pamphlets. Six young Leps, university students from their shabby clothes, stood to one side carrying signs that read, ‘A peaceful end to racism is all we ask.’ A few humans, maybe thirty at the most, wandered from booth to booth, picking up pamphlets and laying them down again or stopping to argue. She heard one well-dressed man telling an UJU staffer, ‘you’re crazy, you people’ in no uncertain tone of voice.

Jevon stopped at a booth staffed by a woman with bright blue hair and red fingernails long enough to be Lep claws. She brightened at the sight of a possible audience.

‘Things seem slow for you folks,’ Jevon said.

‘Oh, everyone’s in the rally now.’ The woman gestured at the Floating Amphitheatre. ‘We had a nice crowd this morning, dearie, really we did.’

‘Really?’ Jevon picked up a pamphlet and pretended to read it. ‘What about the rally? Have a lot of people gone in?’

‘They’re free, dearie, just help yourself. And oh yes, the rally’s very well-attended. Why, I heard that the gate’s at least five thousand.’

Since the amphitheatre sat seventy thousand, Jevon winced. She could imagine the crowd, all huddled forlornly around the speakers’ podium. She laid down the pamphlet and picked up a schedule for the rally, then checked the time. Wilso should just be starting his speech.

‘These ideas are very important, dearie. Sure you won’t just take a copy home? It’s free.’

Jevon started to answer, but the earth heaved and boomed. At first she thought she was fainting; she found herself on her knees. Again the earth rose and fell under her. She heard screams and saw the booths settling, as if they were giant dowagers sinking onto chairs in a rustle of enormous skirts.

‘Earthquake!’ someone yelled.

She scrambled to her feet and saw the Lep protesters, signs flung away, rushing to help the humans trapped in the booths. She could hear the blue-haired woman swearing in terror but too loudly for her to be hurt.

‘I’m right here,’Jevon called. ‘I’ll help you! I - oh God. Oh God no.’

The Floating Amphitheatre was tilting on its column. The enormous steel support was bending and twisting as it bent, for all the world as if it were a rolled-up piece of washing being wrung out by invisible hands. Slowly, horribly slowly at first, while everyone outside stood frozen and staring, the amphitheatre began to tilt, following the bend of its column downhill toward the river, slowly and then faster, tilting more steeply, a bowl full of screaming as it tipped. With a boom so loud it deafened Jevon, the support column snapped. The purple bowl fell and hit the riverbank. She felt as if someone scooped her up in a giant hand only to slam her down into darkness.

* * *

Rico was sitting at his desk and organizing the saccule files from the ancient data dump when he felt the building tremble. Earthquakes were common enough in Palace that he ignored the tremor and went on working. A few minutes later he heard the first sirens, shrieking at some distance away. From overhead came the pounding of airhoppers, rising up from the centre of Government House and speeding off. Rico got up and rushed to the window, opened it wide and hung halfway out to look. The ‘hoppers, red emergency vehicles and black police choppers both, were heading in a huge flock toward the park in the middle of Centre Sect. He could see a plume of what looked like smoke unfurling high into the sky, but as he watched, the plume began to settle back toward the ground. ‘Dust? What in hell?’

Rico pulled himself back into the room and turned to the vidscreen.

‘On. Search: news and local.’

The screen powered up and filled with windows. Ashen-faced presenters held mike feeds to their ears with shaking hands; intakes mouthed soundlessly. Video: the plume of dust rising; the flock of airhoppers; strange heaps of red and white canvas lying on lawns with humans and Leps, some moving, some ominously still, strewn upon or near them; a crater in green lawns, black and gaping; a twisted rod of snapped steel. And a thing, a purple structure, a sphere of some sort - Rico could not make sense of it at first - lay half on the ground, half in a stream, a child’s purple ball dropped carelessly, perhaps.

‘Oh my God. That’s the amphitheatre.’

Hi came running into the room and joined him, staring at the screen. In a blare of sound the presenters got their transmit feed through at last. Sirens, people screaming, ten different intakes all talking at once, police bullhorns - they all went mute to leave a single voice.

‘.. . horrible horrible tragedy,’ an intake was saying. ‘Here at the Floating Amphitheatre, I’m Jo Caro. This is worse than you can imagine back in the studio. The river is damming up. We need volunteers to get these injured people out of here. It’s rising fast.’

‘Jo, what happened?’ the presenter was doing her best to speak calmly. ‘Can you tell us what happened to the amphitheatre?’