Any large force would have to come up the switchback road on the other side of the acropolis, a route that had its own problems, not the least being that it would be under fire every step of the way.
These calculations spun through her mind as she walked across the High City, emerging by the Gate of the Exalted, marked by the two pillars where the switchback road entered the plateau, a place guarded by another pair of antiproton guns in turrets. Looking to the other side, she recognized the large barrel-vaulted edifice of the Ngeni Palace, with the terrace behind and the banyan that overshadowed PJ’s cottage.
From PJ’s, she thought, she might be able to view the defenses, see when the guard changed and when meals arrived.
Besides, she was freezing.
PJ brightened when she arrived on his doorstep, and he offered her tea and soup.
“I wish I could contribute more,” he said as he watched her eat. “I’m not giving you much information these days. My clubs are almost empty—more servants than members. Everyone who could leave has gone.”
“You’re still very well placed here,” Sula said. “Any information you provide is valuable.” Her attempts to boost PJ’s morale had become so standardized that she could practically recite the lines in her sleep. “I’m counting on you,” she added, “to stay in the High City and keep your ear to the ground.”
“I’m a good shot,” PJ said hopefully. “I could move into the Lower Town and become an assassin.”
Sula mopped the last of her soup with her bread. The soup was flavored with lemon and saffron both, an unusual but in this case successful combination.
“You’re useful here,” she said.
“For what?” PJ said darkly. “You can buy soup in a restaurant.”
“You have binoculars, I assume.”
“Yes. Naturally.”
“I want you to keep an eye on those antiproton guns at the Gate of the Exalted. Check regularly. Find out when the crews are changed, when they’re fed. When the doors in the turrets are open or closed.”
PJ’s look was intense. “You’re thinking of attacking them?”
“I’m thinking I’d like to have a pair of antiproton guns, yes. Or at least the ammunition.”
Her action team had been trained on the weapons, and the stay-behind force under Fleetcom Eshruq had some in inventory, but Sula hadn’t known where, and presumably they’d been captured by the Naxids.
Perhaps the four guns on the High City were the ones that the secret government had once owned. It was only right to take them back.
“Oh, PJ, another thing,” Sula said. “You don’t happen to know any expert mountaineers, do you?”
PJ’s first report was astoundingly detailed. It seemed to Sula that he must have been checking the batteries every half hour, and stayed up all night to make observations. He’d caught the shift changes, mealtimes, the number of guards, the number of officers, and the type of transport that moved them to and from their barracks.
Sula had begun visiting the High City regularly to observe the two turrets overlooking the funicular, but her data only confirmed PJ’s, and in the end she saved herself the commute and assumed the two gun batteries were on the same schedule.
When the cold wind finally spent its last strength howling around the eaves of the High City, she found the answer to the question of when the turret doors were opened—in good weather. The turrets were small and cramped, and the crews much preferred being out of doors, at least when an autumn wind wasn’t blustering around the gray granite battlements of the acropolis.
“So we set the attack on a nice day,” Sula said at a planning meeting. “All we need is to glance at the long- range forecast.”
“We can probably manage that, princess,” said Patel with an easy smile. “It’s climbing that damned rock I’m worried about.”
They were holding the meeting in Patel’s hotel suite, sitting around an elegant chrome-rimmed table that seemed strangely at home with the fussy laquered cabinets, the collected bric-a-brac, and the bright bouquets of fragrant flowers. The room, with its oddities and perfumes, appeared to be a perfectly suitable environment for a man who had offered to fight for love.
“I wish we could rehearse the climb somehow,” Julien said. “We’ve not only got to get ourselves up that cliff, but our gear.” He gave a tight, uncomfortable grin. “And I don’t much like heights.”
It was clear that no frontal assault on the acropolis could possibly succeed. The positions that controlled the two gateways to the High City—the funicular and the switchback road—could only be taken from behind, and that meant first sneaking a force onto the acropolis.
Getting an army up the cliff was a task that would have been impossible in peacetime, when the long granite bulk of the High City was illuminated by brilliant floodlights that would have pinned any climber to the cliff. After the destruction of the ring, the electricity shortage had turned the floodlights off. Even most of the streetlights on the High City were dark, so the area was full of shadows.
The Ngeni Palace was very large, enough to hide two entire action groups until it was time for them to move out.
“We can have them practice on a real cliff,” Macnamara suggested. “Take them out to the country and send them up an escarpment.”
Julien looked at him in something like shock. He was a city boy, and the very idea of countryside was alien to him.
“Can’t we do it in town somewhere?” he said. “Climb a building or something?”
Sula smiled “That might attract attention.” She looked up at Macnamara. “You’ll work out the training schedule for the trips to the country and the climbs. I want everyone to ascend at least twice.”
Julien was dismayed. “Won’t there be snakes and things?” he asked.
Casimir grinned at him. “Yes. Big nasty poison ones too.”
Macnamara sniffed and made a note on his datapad. He had never learned to like the cliquemen, and he wasn’t able to hide it. The Bogo Boys responded with a good-natured condescension that suggested they were hated by a lot more interesting people than Macnamara.
Sula took a sip of her sparkling water and looked at her agenda. “My worry is security,” she said. “This is a big operation. Any leaks and most of us die.”
“Keep the inner circle small,” Casimir said. “Only a few of us should know the actual objective.”
Spence tapped cigarette ash into one of Patel’s elegant ashtrays—hanging around cliquemen, along with a delivery job that delivered tobacco in large quantities, had taught her to smoke.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” she said. “What we should do is hide one big operation underanother big operation. We tell them to prepare for one thing, and then—on the day—they all get new orders.”
Sula looked at her in surprise. “What’s bigger than taking the High City?”
“Attacking Wi-hun,” Spence suggested, naming the airfield the Naxids used as a base for their shuttlecraft. “That might draw security forces out into the countryside.”
“No,” Casimir said. “We tell everyone we’re taking the prisons and liberating all the hostages.”
Sula looked at him in admiration. “Very nice,” she said. “Storming the prisons will require a lot of the same skills as storming the High City, so we can explain any training exercises. And we’ll put a watch on the prisons, have people take notes about the number of guards, shift changes, and so on, so that if the Naxids find out about it, the data will seem to support the cover story.”
“The security forces will be drawn out of the High City,” Spence said. “There aren’t any prisons in the city center.”
“I’d like to completely isolate the High City if we can,” Sula said. “The High City has all the political and military leadership in their palaces. The mid-level leadership stays in requisitioned hotels on the acropolis, particularly the Great Destiny, and most of the rankers sleep in those hotels in the Lower Town, at the foot of the funicular. If we can keep the officers from their troops, they’re going to have to overcome their own leadership deficit before they can do anything else.”
“Princess,” Patel said, “can’t we kill those officers, somehow, while they’re asleep?”
“I wanted to take out the Great Destiny Hotel early on, with a truck bomb,” Sula said, “but Hong wanted to concentrate on the Axtattle Parkway attack first.” Which had been the end of Hong and the secret army, all but
