“Startling is itself an advertisement, you know. Grabs attention.”
Ryan nodded. There was something to that—he’d been impressed, seeing the man shooting fire from his hand. A true sign of Rapture science at work. And according to Sullivan, Fontaine was raking in huge profits— overtaking Ryan’s own. Ryan Industries truly needed to find a way into plasmids…
Kinkaide was gawping at Diane again. Ryan found himself wondering if he could indeed fob Diane off on Anton. Of course, he could always simply tell her to go away. But somehow she’d wormed her way into his emotional life so that he knew just dismissing her would be painful, which was partly why he wanted to get rid of her. He didn’t want the distraction of a serious relationship. She’d been hinting of marriage lately. Detestable thought. Never again. But he would prefer Diane left him on her own, without having to be… propelled.
He felt her touch his arm, turned to see her smiling back at him with just a mild reproach. “Darling, my glass has been empty for ever so long.”
Ryan sighed inwardly. The former cigarette girl, at least publicly, was always putting on that stilted chic diction she’d picked up from the movies. Thought she was Myrna Loy.
“Yes, my dear, we do need another bottle of champagne.” He didn’t want to suggest any more wine for Sullivan. “Brenda!”
The woman who was ostensibly the owner of Kashmir—Ryan’s partner, really—came hurrying over, trotting around the heroic statue of powerful men lifting the world, beaming at Ryan. Brenda’s high forehead gleamed in the light from the window; her tight, low-cut silvery gown—rather much, Ryan thought, for a woman past thirty—forcing her to take small Geisha-like steps across the carpet. “Andrew!” she gasped, in an absurdly girlish voice. “What
“A bottle of our best champagne, if you please.”
“And,” Sullivan said, “bring a, uh…” He noticed Ryan watching him and sighed: “… a glass of water.”
“I’ll see to it personally,” Brenda fluted. “Personally
“Yes,” Ryan said. “That’ll be splendid; thank you, Brenda…”
He glanced around at the others. The smiles they’d put on for Brenda faded as she walked away—except, as always, Fisher, who seemed in his element in Rapture, still smiling confidently.
But his reports from Sullivan, and other security sources, suggested that there was discontent at all levels of society—especially in Artemis Suites and “Pauper’s Drop,” both of which were growing dangerously crowded. He’d underestimated how many people were needed for basic maintenance work and hadn’t built enough housing for them. Rapture would soon exceed eighteen thousand souls. Not all of them came equipped with investment funds. He had hoped many of the maintenance and construction workers would earn their way out of their slummy squalor. Find a way to branch out, take a second job, invest—the way
But Sofia Lamb—he had a plan for her. He’d get her to debate him in public. When Rapture’s better element heard her Marxist sophistry flagrantly blared on the radio, no one would object if she simply… disappeared.
“I was thinking,” Diane said, “that we might have some public performances, me and Sander and a few of them others—” She remembered her new grammar. Cleared her throat. “And a
Ryan found himself yearning for the simpler, less affected company of Jasmine Jolene. Perhaps he could slip away to see her tonight…
“Mr. Ryan?” Karlosky’s thick accent broke in on his thoughts. Smelling of tobacco and too much men’s cologne, Karlosky was standing at his elbow.
Ryan turned briskly to him, hoping this was an excuse to slip away early. “Yes?”
“There is problem in Hephaestus. Sabotage, they say!”
“Sabotage!” Strange that he should be almost pleased to hear of this. But it was just the excuse he needed. He stood. “Do not discommode yourselves,” he told the others. “I’d better go look into this.”
“I’ll come too,” Kinkaide said.
“Not your area of engineering, Anton. I’ll see to it. Ah—perhaps you can escort Diane home for me, after?”
“Oh yes, yes, delighted, surely, I… yes…”
Ryan hurried away with Karlosky, guessing that Bill McDonagh was already dealing with the emergency…
Bill McDonagh was up to his waist in icy water, wondering how he was going to deal with this emergency. He had sloshed across the valve-control room and found the right wheels to turn, but his numb fingers were losing strength. He only had two out of four shut down. He managed the third and fumbled at the fourth. He should have closed the hatch to the valve room. But if he did, he risked drowning in here. He’d switched on the bailing pumps and hoped the machine could keep up with the inflow till he could get this broken pipe plugged.
Roland Wallace was also wading in through the water, wearing rubber waders up to his armpits and gloves. Wallace pressed close at Bill’s side, reached into the cold water, and helped turn the last two valves. The valve wheels turned gratingly, and it seemed to take forever—but at last the flow was blocked.
The water stopped rushing into the room, and they found their way to the pumps, activated them, waiting for the room to drain—both with chattering teeth.
“You see the tool marks where they tore the pipes out?” Wallace asked, pointing. His voice was raised to be heard over the grinding and sucking sounds of the pumps.
Bill nodded, rubbing the feeling back into his hands. The broken coolant pipe was jutting out, the metal ragged at the ends, the harsh angle and the marks on the wall suggesting strong force. “You got no argument from me, mate. Sabotage!”
The floodwater had almost pumped out when Bill saw the package taped to the ceiling vent.
“What the hell is that, Roland!”
“What—oh! I don’t know! But it’s got some kind of clock on it…”
“
Wallace threw the bolt, opened the metal door—and they stepped through not a split second before a
“Fuck!” Bill sputtered. He peered through the smoky air, back through the open door, and saw a blackened mark on the vent where the bomb had gone off but no other appreciable damage. Instead, the room was littered with what looked like large pieces of confetti, which were starting to stick to the wet floor and walls.
Coughing from the acrid smoke, he stepped in, scooped up some of the confetti, and hurried back out.
There were words on the strips of paper. Printed in large black letters on one was
And on another was
They were all like that, one phrase or the other. “Be warned, Rapture oppressors,” he said, looking over the slips of paper.
“A bomb with nothing but paper in it?” Wallace said, puzzled, scratching his head.
Bill remembered hearing as a kid about the old anarchist bombers active from the late nineteenth century. Mad bombers they’d called them. But confetti wasn’t their style. “Just a way to get our attention,” he suggested. “A little sabotage, yeah? A bit of a bomb, but not enough to make people go all out to find the bombers. Like it says —a
