Anderssen squared her shoulders and forced herself to not bite her lip. "They – the Honorable Chartered Company – sent me to Jagan to look upon the kalpataru, to take the readings I have in my comp now, and to bring them back. No more."
"Hoooo! Well, you've twisted my tail, sure enough." Malakar's jaws gaped. She hissed angrily. "Everything you wished, I've done, haven't I? What a good servant this old one proves! The Master of the Garden would be stricken dumb to see me bow and scrape!"
"Here." Gretchen held out the comp. "Everything is in here. If you take this, then I will return home with empty hands. The secrets of the kalpataru will be safe. No one will ever return to disturb the Garden. Go on, take it."
Malakar stared suspiciously at the comp and hesitated, just for an instant.
A howling, shrieking noise pierced the triangle-leaved trees and the stone screen. Malakar jerked back her claw and both she and Gretchen stared towards the terrace with alarm.
"What was that?" Gretchen blurted. "That sounded like…no, that's impossible…"
"I have never heard such a noise before," the old Jehanan said, striding down into the passage out onto the overlook. Anderssen hurried after her and they both stepped out into the ruddy sunshine of Bharat. Takshila lay before them, the sprawl of the apartment buildings and factories and refineries half-hidden under a dirty yellow haze. There was a distant, rippling boom.
Gretchen tugged the goggles down over her eyes and scanned the horizon. After only a second she pointed, stabbing her finger. "There – in the sky to the southeast! A silver flash!"
"Hrrrr!" Malakar shaded her eyes. "I see – a yi of enormous size, racing faster than the wind! Trailing smoke and fire!"
"Not a yi," Anderssen said, alarmed and puzzled by turns. "That looks like an old-style jet fighter – but they've not been used by the Empire for hundreds of years…"
The distant dot swept low over the sky, flashing through the rising fume of hundreds of smokestacks, then darted skyward. Below, there was a bright flash among the buildings. A sharper roar trembled across the city to reach their ears. A black smudge billowed up, lit from below by the red-orange glow of flames.
"What are they attacking?" Gretchen zoomed the magnification of her goggles, but the haze in the air obscured everything. "The train station?"
"No…" Malakar pointed off due south. "The iron road is there… That fireis where the asuchau merchant houses stand."
Gretchen pushed back her goggles, heart thudding with fear. "I have to get back to my friends right now. If Imperial citizens are being attacked, they are in danger."
Without waiting for a response, she turned and bolted down the passageway, goggles jammed down to her nose, the filter keyed into ultraviolet. There was a startled hooting from behind her, and then the slapping of leathery feet on stone. Anderssen didn't wait, plunging down the ramp at the end of the perforated hall, survey comp clutched to her breast.
Near the Boulevard of Stepping Cranes District of The Wheel, Parus
The hue of sunlight falling through the back of the truck changed, even as the driver swerved into a narrow lane between two buildings of painted brick and plaster. Itzpalicue looked out, puzzled by the shifting light, and then two things happened at once: her earbug roared painfully with static, making her flinch, and the dappled shadows beneath the trees lining the lane shifted wildly.
Another attack? My hand-comp!
Queasy with fear, the old woman wrenched out her earbug with a gasp of pain. The Arachosian stared at her, puzzled himself, and watched in concern as she snatched out her comp, saw the machine was showing wild, fragmentary garbage on its screen, and then hooted with surprise as she vaulted the tailgate and bolted across the flagstone-paved courtyard the truck had just entered. Radiation attack, she realized, her medband squealing an unmistakable alert.
The sky over Parus rippled with queer, diamond-hard light. The sun gained three smaller companions, each brilliant pinprick glaring down through gathering cloud. The Arachosian warrior jumped down from the truck – now coughing to a halt – and stared up, one long, tan claw shading deep-set eyes. The tiny suns burning the sky were already fading, leaving scattered spots in his vision. He blinked, tear ducts flushing his seared retinas. The black spots did not disappear.
Itzpalicue hurried down a flight of stairs into the empty basement of the safe-house, pressed one hand against a hidden security sensor and then threw back her scarf as a second door opened in the floor, allowing her to descend a flight of newly built wooden stairs.
She cursed, seeing the lights had dimmed to dull red emergency filaments powered by an on-site power-cell. A handful of humans stared up at her, eyes wide in the near-darkness. The banks of comm displays, comps and monitoring apparatus were silent and dead.
"What are you doing?" Itzpalicue snapped, eyes going cold. "Bring up emergency power! Switch to the landline network!"
"But…" One of the Mirror technicians, eyes dark in the poor light, lank black hair shining with grease, started to stand up. "What happened? All the networks have gone down again – the Tepoztecatl relay is off-line, we can't…"
"Sit down and get to work," the old woman said in a hard voice. "Or you will be replaced."
The man sat, flushed, sweating now with fear.
"Operating power can be provided by the power-cell array in the other chamber," she barked, stabbing a thin finger at an engineer. "Start them up!" She stared around at the rest of the frightened people, lips twisted into a sneer. "There is work to be done, children. Get about it! You know what to do if the primary networks fail. I want status reports within ten minutes!"
Everyone started awake and – prodded by her sharp voice – returned to their stations. The whine of power-cells firing up echoed in from the other room and the lights flickered back on.
Itzpalicue waited by the stairs, gimlet eyes fierce on every sweating face. Under her baleful gaze, everyone settled down with remarkable efficiency. The comps were reset and came back up, filling the room with a hard, jewel-like glare.
Itzpalicue let herself take the tiniest breath of relief. We still have some comp.
"Over-the-air networks are still down," the lead technician reported a few moments later. "We've lost the line-of-sight relay on the roof and our aerials aren't picking up any comm traffic at all, just undifferentiated static."
"No military traffic?" Itzpalicue raised an eyebrow. "The 416th should have been able to ride out an EMP burst. Any broadband from orbit?"
The technician shook his head, lips pursed. He was staring questioningly at the old woman.
"What?" Itzpalicue's expression hardened to granite and she wondered if Yacatolli had been more careless than she'd planned. He'd better have had his command tracks in hardened mode, or the Field Officers' School will be making a test question out of his utter failure on the plain of battle.
"EMP shock, mi'lady? Is…is that what knocked out our comm network?"
Itzpalicue grunted. "And the spyeyes back aloft as well, I'm sure. We'll be blind until Lachlan can launch fresh ones." If he has any left – two blows now aimed at our aerial surveillance capacity – very thorough, very thorough indeed.