City on Fire (Metropolitan 2) by Walter Jon Williams Read Free Book Online

force. Once you have that, once you have proved your worth, they will have a much harder time dislodging you.”
    Aiah’s head swims. “I understand.”
    “Do you need anything right now? Anything at all?”
    “I need to see as much of the apparatus as possible. Control stations, broadcast antennae, receivers, connections, capacitors.”
    “I will arrange to give you a tour.”
    “Of course.”
    He kisses her— a moment’s softness brushing her lips— and then Constantine is already in motion, his body moving toward the door, mind focused on another item of his agenda. He reaches the door and turns.
    “I will send you an engineer, Miss Aiah. Within the hour.” He reaches for the door, then hesitates and breaks into a smile. “Apologies for my haste,” he says. “By all means finish your luncheon, and order as many desserts as you like.”
    “Thank you,” Aiah says, his taste still tingling on her lips, and then he is gone.
    She returns to her meal, and wonders how dangerous it is that, after all this, she is still so very hungry.
     
    TRAM SCANDAL REVEALED!
    KEREMATHS RAKED IN MILLIONS!
    CONTRACTOR HELD FOR QUESTIONING
     
    Constantine sends a Captain Delruss, who is plainly annoyed at having been drawn away from his other duty. Delruss is stocky and gray-haired, a native of the Timocracy of Garshab, where the military profession is an honored and highly profitable tradition among its fierce mountaineers. He is a military engineer with a specialty in plasm control systems— and probably a mage of sorts— and though he has had only a few days to acquaint himself with the systems of the Aerial Palace, he has learned them well indeed. If Delruss performs his new assignment grudgingly he performs it efficiently enough, and becomes visibly happier when he finds out that Aiah knows her business.
    The tour starts in the heart of the Palace, deep underwater in the largest of the giant barges that support the extravagant structure overhead. This is clearly the center of Caraqui’s power: the concrete pontoon is armored with slabs of steel, segmented into watertight compartments, laced with a defensive bronze web intended to absorb plasm attack.
    There is one compartment after another filled with giant plasm accumulators and capacitors— each four times Aiah’s height, layers of gleaming black ceramic and polished brass and copper that tower into the darkness overhead. Above them are the huge contact arms poised to drop and connect the accumulators to Caraqui’s plasm network, the all-embracing web that can draw all the power of the city into this one place.
    The control room is as vast as everything else, one bank after another of controls, levers, switches, glowing dials. In one corner is an icon to Tangid, the two-faced god of power, with a few candles burning in front of it, and in another corner is another icon to a figure Aiah doesn’t recognize, with no candles at all. Looming overhead, video monitors show unblinking views of the outside of the building, of the entrance areas, of Government Harbor several radii away, and of other points deemed important to Caraqui’s security.
    Mages, some civilian and some not, sit before consoles, eyes closed, bodies swaying as power pours through them. Captain Delruss’s comrades, the uniformed personnel operating the system, seem dwarfed by the enormity of it all.
    “During the fighting all this could have given us a lot of trouble,” Delruss says, “but afterward we discovered there were very few calls for plasm made during the coup.”
    “ Why was that?” Aiah asks, gazing up at glowing monitor screens. She can’t imagine anyone forgetting to use the colossal power of this place.
    “There was sabotage of the communications system and of the plasm delivery network,” Delruss says. “But nothing that couldn’t have been overcome by competent people in the control room. What really won the coup for our side was that the enemy leadership was completely