City on Fire

wave!”

The crew looks at her in surprise, then obeys. She puts on the official red hard hat that marks her as a member of the ministry’s Plasm Bureau. The emergency lights flash on, tracking yellow and red across the narrow concrete walls of Coel’s Channel. The helmsman leans on the air horn, and the blast startles the flock of pelicans into sudden flight. He throws the throttles all the way forward, and the boat’s stern digs into the murky canal water and leaps forward on a sudden boil of white foam…

Wind blows Aiah’s hair back as she sees the bridge sway into view. Police in black shiny helmets look down at the small convoy of motorboats driving a flock of frantic birds before it. Aiah senses their eyes on her and feels a defiant blast of fire in her heart, burning as fierce as if it were plasm. A grin drags her lips back from her teeth, and she raises a hand to wave at her fellow civil servants on the bridge above.

There is a moment of hesitation. Then black gloves lift and wave in answer. Some of the gloves carry weapons, but the barrels are pointing at the Shield.

The bridge passes, a black shadow like the wings of death, and then the boats are past. The police have not been instructed to impede emergency vehicles.

The helmsman gives Aiah a hollow graveyard laugh, and there is a hot glow of reckless terror in his eyewhites as he turns to Aiah. “Go west again?” he says.

Aiah shakes her head. “Stay in the main channels. Faster that way.” The helmsman laughs again, defying his own fear.

“Aye aye, miss,” he says.

The carnage on the radio ceases as switches are finally thrown in Kerehorn’s headquarters. Someone puts on music, something with a lot of violins.

Aiah’s teams pass half a dozen police roadblocks on the way to Fresh Water Bay, but the police never do anything but wave.

TEN

They are deep in the bowels of a concrete barge long as a Jaspeeri city block, in a place walled off by bulkheads and watertight steel doors. Somewhere a pump is thudding, there’s a constant loud humming noise from the generators in the next compartment, and the electric cable that services the light fixtures is tacked to the ceiling with metal staples. The oversized lightbulbs, with little nipples on the tips, are in metal cages.

—Carcel’s team is not quite in place. Took a wrong turn.

Ethemark’s disembodied mental voice, ringing in Aiah’s head, is different from his real voice, pitched a little higher, and with little resonance.

—Tell the others to stand by, Aiah sends.

And then, to Davath and Prestley, “Not just yet.”

When Aiah’s little convoy got to Fresh Water Bay, she called the Aerial Palace on a portable handset she plugged into a communications junction. Constantine, who had not felt he could spare any mages to escort them during their trip, had then assigned each of Aiah’s four teams a telepresent minder.

Accompanied by their invisible guardians, the teams split up and surrounded their target plasm station. They were going to try cutting all its plasm supply at once, at each of the four plasm mains leading to the structure.

—The station will be attacked once you cut it off from the net, Ethemark says. Constantine is sending two companies of Garshabis. Once the station’s plasm reserves are drained, the soldiers can move in.

—Are the soldiers on their way now?

—Yes. They should be there in fifteen minutes or so, depending on how well they deal with roadblocks on the way. Thus far the police have always scattered when challenged by our soldiers.

—What else is happening?

—The Marines have come over to us. They shot their traitorous officers and are moving on the aerodrome under the command of Captain Arviro.

The satisfaction in Ethemark’s voice is apparent even in this tenuous telepathic communication.

—Radeen’s lost then, Aiah judges. The balance has swung against him.

—So Constantine believes. The Second Brigade at Government Harbor has made no moves other than to direct a few mortar rounds our way, and the Aerial Brigade has not budged from the aerodrome—wait a moment, please.

There is a pause.

—Carcel says he is in place, Ethemark finally reports.—Let’s begin then.

Plasm is like water, flowing through every available conduit until it reaches a kind of equivalence. But some structures are capable of containing more plasm than others: plasm accumulators, capacitors, and batteries are constructed so as to fill with plasm, and draw in even more from the surrounding grid. The mains carrying plasm from the structures where it is generated to the plasm stations are composed of woven bundles of cable made of an alloy designed to carry a perfect flood of plasm along its length.

There are four main cables going into the plasm station in Fresh Water Bay, one for each cardinal direction; and they must all be cut at once, for otherwise the plasm would reroute itself, like water pouring through a system of pipes, into the uncut cable. Probably the single cable would not be capable of carrying as much plasm as the four, but it is a supposition that Aiah would not care to test.

Aiah looks at Davath and Prestley. “Let’s get started.”

The cable is thick at this juncture, thick as three Davaths coiled together. The junction, where other cables from other structures merge with this one, features an electric-powered rotor that can take any of the cables off the line, including—because all cables must at times receive maintenance—the main cable that brings all the plasm in the district to the plasm station.

Prestley has stripped the cover from the electric junction box and disabled the communications line that allows the plasm station to control it. “Ready,” he says.

Aiah nods at him. “Go.”

A loud rattle hammers at Aiah’s ears as the rotator shifts to the neutral position. The plasm station is now cut off.—Mission accomplished, Aiah sends to Ethemark.—Good. Get out of there fast.—Fast. Right.

The truth is, they must stay around a while.

Davath strikes a light on an oxy-acetylene torch as Prestley uses both hands to draw by its handles the heavy black plastic-encased fuse from the junction box—“I’ll throw this in the canal later,” he says—and then takes a hammer to the manual controls. Bits of plastic and wire fly around the room as he batters the box into ruin. Aiah’s heart hammers—in Fresh Water Bay Station they’ve got to know what’s happened—but Davath calmly bends to apply his torch to the plasm junction, welding it into the neutral position.

If there are combat mages in the plasm station, Aiah thinks, we could be dead any second.

Sweat drips from her brow. The room, with its steel-and-concrete walls surrounding the welding torch, suddenly seems close and hot.

—Our mages have launched their attack, Ethemark says. The soldiers are accelerating and should be at the station soon.

Plasm stations are notoriously designed with insurrection or war in mind. They are heavily armored, and covered with a bronze collection web designed to absorb plasm attacks, disperse them over the web, and then draw the plasm into the station’s own stores. The chief way to attack such a station is to throw heavy things at it —usually armor-piercing shells, but in a pinch big rocks will do—until the defenses are breached and telepresent mages can enter on a raging wave of plasm to sweep away opposition.

Aiah counts the drops of sweat that fall from her chin onto the scarred steel floor. Thirty-one, thirty-two … At last Davath finishes his work. He stands, pulls his goggles down around his thick neck. “Done. Let’s go.”

They leave the tiny compartment on a run. “One last thing,” Prestley says. “Turn on your torches.” He goes to the generator room next door and throws a switch—the cage-enclosed lights die with a whimper.

Aiah leads the other two upward at a run, taking the grid-ded metal steps two at a time. Slamming and locking a steel door behind them, they emerge into a corridor filled with anxious civilians. Poor people live here, in