She carries her sensorium in an anima, a plasm body that she hasn’t bothered to will into the shape of an actual human body: it’s a diffuse cloud of plasm she has configured to remain sensitive to its environment. Carefully she drops the anima beneath street level, where the huge grounded pontoons loom on either side and the dark brackish sea slops over the mudflats below. There is little light here, but plasm can be configured to see in the dark. Aiah moves between the pontoon walls until she comes to a mark, scored lightly into the crumbling concrete, that she has left earlier.
At this point she reconfigures her anima, confining it to a narrow pipette of plasm that should be difficult to detect, and then rises through the midst of the tenement, through iron beams and brick arches and worn plastic flooring, through uninspiring sights of people cooking or doing laundry or watching video, past children playing or sleeping or fighting with each other, until she reaches the hallway outside the Silver Hand plasm house she has been observing for the last week.
The hallway’s flaking paint is scarred with decades’ worth of graffiti. The crumbling plastic flooring, a cheap imitation of an old Geoform design, has worn clear through in spots, and has been overlaid with ribbed plastic mats—probably not for the convenience or safety of the tenants, but for the benefit of the Silver Hand, who moved truckloads of plasm batteries through this hallway.
Aiah ghosts along at floor height, looking for the mage she’s relieving. She wills her sensorium to become sensitive to plasm, and finds a little flare from a not-quite-concealed sourceline in the hallway, near the baseboard. She ghosts up to the flare, wills a little extrusion of her own plasm to touch the sourceline.
—This is Aiah, she pulses. Anything doing?
She senses a flare of surprise from the other ghost. He is one of Aiah’s new hires, a newly graduated mage from Liri-Domei, a little inexperienced but learning quickly.
—The deliveries went out before midbreak, he broadcasts. The Ferret’s inside filling batteries. The Slug is there with him.
—The Mole?
—Been and gone.
The code names date from an earlier phase of the observation, when Aiah and her unit were ignorant of the names of the Handmen they were observing. But the codes were more descriptive than the Handmen’s actual names, and remain in force.
—I’ll relieve you, then, Aiah sends.
—Nothing much happening. Good luck.
The other mage fades. Aiah slides through the wall and extrudes a minute part of her plasm-body to the other side.
The Silver Hand is very confident here. A plasm house should be sheathed in bronze or at least bronze mesh, like Lamarath’s office in Aground, to prevent anyone like Aiah from peering inside. But the Silver Hand isn’t worried about the forces of the law, or apparently anyone else. They operate openly. Thousands of people must know about this place.
The Silver Hand will learn caution in time. But Aiah intends to gather as much information as possible while they are still careless, and then strike. If she had more time, and more people, she could fashion a single powerful attack that would prove lethal to all of them; but as it is, with the knowledge she possesses and the weapons she has been given, she will do her best to make the blow a heavy one.
Aiah opens her plasm-senses, sees the two Silver Hand men inside their place of business. Each is of a type. Gangsters, Aiah suspects, are the same everywhere. The young are exuberant and dress in exaggerations of fashionable styles—the Ferret wears yards of lace and a plush velvet jacket, purple with brass studs in decorative patterns. His hair is permed and dressed in shining ringlets. He wears a heavy Stoka watch on one wrist, and suede boots with heels.
Older Handmen carry themselves with a different style.
The Slug’s suit is more conservative, his face masklike, his ruthlessness complete. In the younger ones you can still see traces of humanity; in the older ones, never, nothing but the inhuman glimmer in their calculating eyes. Back in Jaspeer they all had military ranks: captains, colonels, generals. Here they have a family structure and call themselves cousins, brothers, and uncles. All the same.
The Ferret wrestles heavy plasm batteries to and from his illegal tap. It’s a struggle for him because he’s a slender man, and sweat drips from his forehead to splash on the scarred soft rubber flooring installed to muffle the thuds of the heavy work.
The other, the Slug, is obese and in authority. He is in charge of the cash, which is kept in a drawer of his desk. He has his feet propped atop the desk while he watches the younger man work, and gestures largely with both hands as he talks on a telephone headset.
The Ferret wrestles the last battery into place, puts the tap on it, and stops to light a cigaret. The Slug, talking to a girlfriend, drones on without cease.
Plasm stolen by the Silver Hand is usually not consumed by the gangsters themselves. They sell it, at inflated prices, to customers who have no choice but to pay their extortionate fees. But a certain percentage of the plasm is used within their own operation: to locate cargoes worth hijacking, to intimidate and murder, to provide life-extension treatments for their leaders. If necessary, to kill each other, though there hasn’t been a war among the Silver Hand in twenty years, and being a Handman is as safe as—probably safer than—banking.
Aiah watches the pair for two hours. Junior Handmen or independent affiliates—“brothers” or “nephews” in Hand-man jargon—turn up every so often to drop off empty plasm batteries and bags of cash and pick up newly charged batteries. Sometimes they stay around and gossip for a while before leaving. It’s all routine.
Aiah approves of the Silver Hand’s having a routine day. They’re much more likely to relax their security and give their operations away.
Except when there are visitors, the Slug stays on the phone the whole time, alternating business and romantic interests. Aiah keeps careful tabs on when each call is made, and the subject matter of the conversation, and plans to requisition a copy of the phone records in order to discover to whom the Slug’s been talking. Eventually the Slug takes his headphones off and goes off to a midbreak rendezvous with one of his girlfriends. Now that the phone is free, the Ferret fastidiously cleans the earphones and the mouthpiece with his handkerchief, then makes a few calls of his own.
Until there’s a visitor. He’s a stranger, an older man with gray hair and the unnaturally healthy flesh of someone on life extension. He is thin and dapper, a mixture of characteristics—youthful stride, hatchet face, a grizzled mustache. He hammers angrily on the door, and is annoyed when he finds the Slug is gone.
“He didn’t know you were coming,” the Ferret apologizes.
“I told that stupid whore of his,” the thin man says, showing yellow teeth.
“Which one?” the Ferret asks, but the stranger is una-mused.
“I need access to the tap, third shift. My boys are hijacking a barge down at the Navy Yard.”
The Ferret is interested. “I used to pick stuff from the Yard sometimes, when I was nephew with Daddy Cathobert’s crew. But we’d have to take care of Commodore Grophadh first.”
The stranger scowls. “Grophadh’s gone—got his ass retired after the coup. But his lad Armaki’s still there, and I make sure he’s taken care of.”
(Aiah, back in her office, carefully detaches a fragment of her consciousness from her anima and scrawls notes to herself across a pad of paper. Grophadh. Armaki. People who got paid off when the Navy Yard got looted. And a theft in the Navy Yard early tomorrow—she would have to put experienced observers in place.)