He checked the manifest whose image his amulet shined into the back of his eyeballs, rippling through the scores of imaginary pages at once. He deduced a framework based on a statistical distribution and superimposed in his mind’s eye the warehouse space before him. Immediately he saw which crates did not fit the pattern: the tall, dark, sealed canisters grouped (by no coincidence) about the main load-bearing members.
Explosives. He did not need to open the crates to see; he could tell by the cables connecting them to junction boxes. The crates had Princess Rania’s personal seal on them. If Exarchel had a system to monitor unscheduled and unregistered depthtrain movements, he knew of this. But perhaps he did not.
Montrose grimaced. No need to fight the duel after all. Rania had prepared all this in advance. Even the orbital mechanics of the Hermetic now made sense: it would require a relatively short burn for that great vessel to reach a higher orbit.
He went back to the combination of landing deck and loading dock and into the spider car. The status light showed an upward-accelerating strand was ready to provide the energy to pull him aloft.
The strand was one of the many that formed the cable bundle of the tether. All he had to do was engage the clutch, to tighten the spider legs adhering to that strand while loosening the magnetic grip from the stationary strands.
He put his un-gauntleted hand toward the electric clutch and hesitated. Again, he had that feeling of being haunted by a thought just out of reach.
It bothered him that his augmented intelligence had seemed to make him less and not more aware of his subconscious mind. He wondered if expanding his mind were like blowing up a balloon: doubling the radius of the balloon would quadruple the surface area but would increase the volume hidden beneath the surface eightfold. Hence his subconscious would be darker, not clearer, than before: a cavern opening into a hollow world where strange lights could be seen in the distance, illuming only glimpses.
In any case, do not run from him. It will go badly for you, if you attempt it.
He snatched his hand back from the clutch. Something was wrong. What had he overlooked?
At that moment, his amulet uttered a chime of music, and the voice of Rania, sharp and clear, entered the car. “Husband, you have trapped yourself. Do not re-ascend!”
“Rainy, you awake?”
“No, I’m talking in my sleep. Why did you go down? Couldn’t you see it was a trap?”
“I can take him.”
“Stupid, stupid man!” That came out as a sob. “I had it all planned! Now you are caught! Get out of the car!”
He stepped back out of the spider car, and stood on the glass-enclosed observation deck. “What is it? Did Vardanov wake you up? I suppose no one can drive a car down the tether without everyone noticing…”
“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.