“There are snipers on the buildings.”
“How many have you taken over?”
It turned out that she had only one under her control.
His amulet showed a building, one of the taller ones in Quito. The image was from the point of view of a spy; one of Rania’s tiny dragonfly-winged hair ornaments. The tiny bug eyes showed a young man in a bulky camouflage jacket sitting huddled against the gray stones, his jacket fabric tuned to gray. He was seated next to a squat cylindrical machine on three legs that Montrose recognized as a gun emplacement.
He spoke, and the dragonfly mikes could pike out the sound of his voice, but not decipher the words. They were in the compressed, high-speed jargon only the Psychoi used.
Menelaus grimaced. “Brotherhood of Man, huhn? You don’t seem so brotherly, brother.”
The answering voice was Del Azarchel’s. Again, only the voice contour, not the words, came through.
The dragonfly had rebuilt itself, formed tools, and wormed its way into the inner electronics of the weapon, whose long-range lens was open. Through the blur and shimmer of atmospheric distortion, the general shape of the spider car could be seen: a grainy image. There was a smudgy silhouette of one head framed in the spider car’s window. His head.
The first payload was a surface-to-air missile loaded with grapeshot, surrounding a pressurized high-energy plasma bottle. All it had to do was puncture the window, and knock out the leg induction fields with an electromagnetic pulse.
The second payload was high-yield chemical explosive: a blockbuster. It was large enough to burn the spider car, but probably not enough to sever the super-refractory super-strong carbon polymer material of the cable itself. Interesting. It was meant to destroy the car and anyone in it, but leave the cable, and the hotel sitting at the upper terminus of the cable, intact.
Montrose knew Del Azarchel well enough to guess his thought. If the man you challenge to a duel turns yellow and starts to run away, you shoot him down from behind. And he did not want to hurt Rania, who was still in the hotel in the upper stratosphere.
Montrose looked again at the other files he had examined earlier, Pellucid’s track of depthtrain movements. There was insufficient mass. This one sniper could not account for all the train activity in recent days. There had to be others, no doubt under the same orders, to shoot at any ascending car.
Sneaking back up the cable was not feasible while the snipers were there. Since the whole cable was pulled out of vertical at the moving spot where the car legs were, any idiot could see where the car was, even without sending out bees to take a look. And the damn car was transparent.
“Doll, give me control of your little insect spy there, and I can get you out of this trap.”
“Can you extricate yourself?”
“Uh … That would be a good solution, but it is less likely.”
“Can you extricate Ximen?”
“Pestulation! Are you sweet on him, after all?”
“My husband, is all human feeling absent from that underutilized lump you call your brain? He is my father, or one of them. Even if I hated him so much that I wanted to see him murdered, I would not hate you so much to wish you to be a murderer.”
“I’ll spare him if I can. I reckon that would be best of all, but the least likely. Do you have men in the tower base? Vardanov, or anyone else? Tell them to clear out—”
There was a snap of noise from the amulet. Montrose tapped the surface, called up the system diagnostic. The signal to the hotel was cut off. Had she cut the line in anger? He did not think so. Jammed? Most likely.
“I love you,” he said into the dead line.
Jammed by someone who had overheard the conversation? Also likely. If so, Montrose’s control of the enemy sniper weapon would last only until an order could be given to the shooter. That was the whole point of having a human operator in wartime, rather than relying on drones and remotes.
At the moment, the signal from the hair ornament was still strong and clear. How had the tiny flying machine gotten there? Had she tossed it out an airlock, and it made re-entry by itself? Had she scattered a group of them over the nearby rooftops, hours or days before the wedding? Either option seemed odd.
He tapped his fingers over the amulet again, entering dozens of command lines. With the last line, he set the amulet to react to his voice. He screwed the heavy gauntlet back on, and spoke aloud. “Magic band on my hand: Turn off the lights.”
The car light snapped off. His voice could carry to the amulet even through the thick metal gauntlets. With ponderous steps, weighed down by more than his armor, awkward as a man in an old-fashioned diving suit, Montrose departed the car, and took an elevator down the spine of the superscraper to the ground level.
4. The Exchange
When the elevator doors opened, he saw a strange scene. Here was a shopping arcade, like something from a storybook set in the Twentieth Century, in the Fat Years. To either side were broad windows, with goods on display. The pearls and shoes, drinking vessels and fishing rods were surrounded by rainbow images of themselves, a chromatic aberration: because the windows were actually empty, and had been for years. Through the doors could be seen a desolation of floorspace: shops themselves were dark and bare.
What made the scene strange were machine gun nests. The floor tiles had been dug up in spots, to make foxholes, and the debris piled in a half-circle in front of the foxholes. The tripod-mounted weapons of some make Montrose did not recognize were still squatting in their places, ugly snouts peering through the debris of tiles toward the outer doors. Fat power cables ran from the tripod-mounted artillery across the floor to an open elevator shaft, and from there they snaked down out of sight, presumably to some buried dynamo, or perhaps the power system of the subterranean vactrains. Also snaking across the tiled floor of the empty mall were tangles of defensive wire, the kind that could be set to shock, or entangle, or explode. The wire was motionless at the moment, but little grenades like iron grapes dangled from the twisted wire at irregular intervals.
But there were no soldiers. Rania’s men must have been here, and quite recently, and fled precipitously enough to leave their gear behind, whatever they could not carry.
In his heavy armor, Montrose clanked through the empty halls, and came to the broad glass front doors, like the doors of a palace, that loomed above him, four times the height of a man. There was a switch, but clicking it did nothing: the circuit was dead. Peering through the thick glass panes, he saw the dark and empty streets outside. No one was standing too close, and he did not feel like searching for a manual door, so he removed the safety from one of his eight side-bullets, the Six O’clock position, and fired it into the door-hinge.
The hinge mechanism must have had a self-oiling canister, because a most satisfactory gust of fire and oily smoke leaped up with a roar, with torn metal screaming in reply, and the massive doors toppled majestically, smashing into half a dozen raft-sized flakes and a cloud composed of a thousand diamond shards. (That crash surprised him. He assumed the future people would make glass out of something safe and shatter-proof, like plastic. He wasn’t complaining, though.)
He stepped through the cloud of black smoke and tinkling shards, down the broad marble stairs. All the eyes of the soldiers were on him.
The buildings here were long-empty, unlit, the windows covered with coppery sheets, like pennies on the eyes of dead. There was no traffic: the road had been recently torn up, as if by directed energy, to form a crude trench. Slabs of armor plate with gunslits like narrowed Cyclops-eyes peered over the trench edge like headstones, as if shields taller than a man but small enough to be transported via traincar had merely been fitted together, edge to edge, to form impromptu pillboxes and stronghouses. Modern warfare was modular.