House of Reeds

flagstone-paved courtyard the truck had just entered. Radiation attack, she realized, her medband squealing an unmistakable alert.

The sky over Parus rippled with queer, diamond-hard light. The sun gained three smaller companions, each brilliant pinprick glaring down through gathering cloud. The Arachosian warrior jumped down from the truck – now coughing to a halt – and stared up, one long, tan claw shading deep-set eyes. The tiny suns burning the sky were already fading, leaving scattered spots in his vision. He blinked, tear ducts flushing his seared retinas. The black spots did not disappear.

Itzpalicue hurried down a flight of stairs into the empty basement of the safe-house, pressed one hand against a hidden security sensor and then threw back her scarf as a second door opened in the floor, allowing her to descend a flight of newly built wooden stairs.

She cursed, seeing the lights had dimmed to dull red emergency filaments powered by an on-site power-cell. A handful of humans stared up at her, eyes wide in the near-darkness. The banks of comm displays, comps and monitoring apparatus were silent and dead.

'What are you doing?' Itzpalicue snapped, eyes going cold. 'Bring up emergency power! Switch to the landline network!'

'But…' One of the Mirror technicians, eyes dark in the poor light, lank black hair shining with grease, started to stand up. 'What happened? All the networks have gone down again – the Tepoztecatl relay is off-line, we can't…'

'Sit down and get to work,' the old woman said in a hard voice. 'Or you will be replaced.'

The man sat, flushed, sweating now with fear.

'Operating power can be provided by the power-cell array in the other chamber,' she barked, stabbing a thin finger at an engineer. 'Start them up!' She stared around at the rest of the frightened people, lips twisted into a sneer. 'There is work to be done, children. Get about it! You know what to do if the primary networks fail. I want status reports within ten minutes!'

Everyone started awake and – prodded by her sharp voice – returned to their stations. The whine of power- cells firing up echoed in from the other room and the lights flickered back on.

Itzpalicue waited by the stairs, gimlet eyes fierce on every sweating face. Under her baleful gaze, everyone settled down with remarkable efficiency. The comps were reset and came back up, filling the room with a hard, jewel-like glare.

Itzpalicue let herself take the tiniest breath of relief. We still have some comp.

'Over-the-air networks are still down,' the lead technician reported a few moments later. 'We've lost the line- of-sight relay on the roof and our aerials aren't picking up any comm traffic at all, just undifferentiated static.'

'No military traffic?' Itzpalicue raised an eyebrow. 'The 416th should have been able to ride out an EMP burst. Any broadband from orbit?'

The technician shook his head, lips pursed. He was staring questioningly at the old woman.

'What?' Itzpalicue's expression hardened to granite and she wondered if Yacatolli had been more careless than she'd planned. He'd better have had his command tracks in hardened mode, or the Field Officers' School will be making a test question out of his utter failure on the plain of battle.

'EMP shock, mi'lady? Is…is that what knocked out our comm network?'

Itzpalicue grunted. 'And the spyeyes back aloft as well, I'm sure. We'll be blind until Lachlan can launch fresh ones.' If he has any left – two blows now aimed at our aerial surveillance capacity – very thorough, very thorough indeed.

'An atomic on the ground, mi'lady?' The technician was looking a little green. 'At the spaceport?'

'Exoatmospheric,' Itzpalicue said, softening her voice a little, realizing the operators in the sub-surface room had no way to tell there had been a series of nuclear explosions at the edge of the Jaganite atmosphere. 'Multiple detonations in orbit. If the Flower Priest network has gone off-line and there aren't any recog codes being transmitted from orbit, assume the Tepoztecatl has been destroyed.' She frowned, thumb to her lower lip. 'What about the Fleet cruiser?'

'We're trying to get linked back to main operations now… We'll knowabout other stations and relays in…' The technician swallowed nervously. '…an hour? Then we'll be able to broadcast to orbit – but we don't have that capability here.'

The old NГЎhuatl woman's lips twitched into a sour grimace. Deployment planning, operations manual, revision six thousand and three…deploy backup orbital uplink with tertiary communications center. Deploy ground-based surveillance mechanisms.

'Get me verification on all ships we knew were in orbit. Get me a radar scan or visual – something! As soon as possible. If something has entered orbit and destroyed both of our support ships…we will need to revise our planning.' Go underground and scatter, she thought grimly. With Yacatolli's regiment dispersed and under attack, and no orbital support, we may lose the Legation and our entire presence here. Even one Danish privateer would be enough to tip the balance…

She placed the thought firmly aside. Until more data was available, she'd assume things were as they stood and no more. Which, she allowed sourly, is bad enough.

'Landline status?' Some of the technicians were talking into their voice-phones. Most of the comp displays were live again, though none of them were showing v-feeds.

The technician scratched his head, glancing over his shoulder. 'Station two,' he pointed, 'has gotten ahold of one of the techs at main operations. She's transcribing their status. We're trying to raise the other city operations teams, but so far we've only managed to get through to the one at Sobipurй. They've had to move to their backup site – the landing field has been overrun and the Imperial citizens there slaughtered.'

'Hmm…what about Fleet staff at the base?' Itzpalicue leaned over the display showing the transcript from Lachlan's conversation. 'Were they killed or captured as well?'

The technician shrugged. 'No news. We're operating nearly blind, mi'lady.'

'Yes,' Itzpalicue pursed her lips. 'What about datacomm over the landlines?'

'Ten minutes,' he said, swallowing again. 'I think. There is a problem with -'

She fixed him with a stony glare. 'Fix it. Now, where is my station?'

The room had returned to a proper feeling of busy efficiency by the time Itzpalicue had settled herself in a distant corner, half-hidden behind a stack of heat exchangers and storage crystal lattices. The tension and fear was ebbing from the voices around her, though everyone was on edge. The old woman was pleased. Losing all prospect of support and even, possibly, their way home had not reduced any of her staff to uselessness from panic or fear.

They have spirit, she thought, as I have always maintained.

A mingled sensation of bitterness and pride filled her. A traditional Mirror field team would have leaned heavily on older, more experienced staff. Ones with 'proven skills' and spotless efficiency records, drawn from well- connected members of the great clans or the military families. None of the young men and women in the room had been recruited from within the Four Hundred. Nearly all, in fact, were from colony worlds or mining stations or the slums of AnГЎhuac. Patronless, making their way only by skill, tenacity and a blithe disregard for the danger around them. A more experienced team, she allowed privately, would not heed my orders so effortlessly. They would argue and quibble and question. And dwell too much on the prospect of failing to return home in a critical time.

The comp displays before her came to life at a touch, showing audio transcripts from the operators in the room. She inserted a fresh earbug and twisted the comm-thread around to her lips. The chatter in her ear was confusing for a moment, but she let her eyes relax, let the room fall away and plucked a maguey thorn from her sleeve.

Blood welled from her breast and the sharp stab of pain focused her mind.

An array of glyphs appeared on her main display, including one associated with Lachlan. Pleased, Itzpalicue tapped the glyph and a moment later Lachlan's voice was threading its way through the stream of conversations washing over her.

'Did you suffer any losses in the shockwave?'

No, mi'lady. No human casualties at least. She could hear him smiling grimly. The gods of war favored us a little – we hadn't relaunched our surviving spyeye assets when the EMP shock blanketed this face of the planet – so we didn't lose any more. Still, we've lost three-quarters of our