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

decapitated. There was no one left alive with the authority to make big plasm calls.”
    Aiah’s mouth goes dry as she remembers the splashes of red-brown on her bedroom walls. “Do you know how our side managed it?” she asks.
    Delruss has clearly been giving this issue a lot of thought. “Very good intelligence, for one thing. It looked as if we knew where almost every last one of the enemy leaders were, and were able to target them. And there were probably holes in the security screen here that our side had discovered, so mages could slip an attack through. . . .” Delruss frowns, shakes his head. “But what sort of attack was used, miss, I can’t say. There are a large number of possibilities. But it was done very well, however it was done.”
    Aiah remembers a moment of choking terror in a deep underground tunnel, the appearance of a thing that seemed made of purest black and silver, the chill waves of ice that flooded her nerves. . . .
    Ice man. Hanged man. The damned . . . an evil thing, whatever label you chose to give it. Its personal name was Taikoen, for that was its name when it was a man— a hero, Taikoen the Great, the leader who saved Atavir from the Slaver Mages. Now debased, beyond humanity, a creature that Constantine could summon out of the depths of the plasm well, a thing deadly to everything that lived. . . .
    The enemy leadership was completely decapitated. Perhaps literally. And Aiah has the feeling she knows how it was done. A large part of it, anyway.
    From the deep underwater plasma fortress, Delruss takes Aiah to the highest point of the Aerial Palace, where the huge bronze transmission horns are set in clusters like the outgrowths of a strange, intricate forest of gleaming metal. The horns are ornamented with ornate baroque swirls and scallops and, at each end, the sculptured figure of a hawk about to take flight. A cold wind buffets Aiah as she gazes out at the city— pontoons, buildings, roof gardens, long gray-green canals packed with ship and barge traffic— an endless procession stretching all the way to the distant volcanoes of the Metropolis of Barchab. Several of the aerial tramcars are visible in the distance, dancing on invisible wires. The volcanoes, Aiah realizes, are the only object in sight that, on account of altitude and danger of eruption, were not inhabited by the swarms of humanity that otherwise covered the globe.
    She looks in the other direction, toward the North Pole only three or four hundred radii away. She sees giant buildings looming up out of the sea, one group twenty or so radii away and another dimly visible in the distance behind a cluster of spires. The Shield glows on their gleaming windows and burnished metal. Jagged transmission horns top almost every building.
    “Lorkhin Island, and Little Lorkhin,” Delruss says. “Extinct volcanoes. They build tall here, when they can find bedrock.” He peers out into the distance. “The whole metropolis is ringed by tall buildings where the sea turns shallow. It’s called the Crown of Caraqui.”
    Here on the Palace roof, some of the transmission horns have been blown from their moorings, and others damaged. Engineers are rigging a big tripod of steel beams to hoist the damaged horns in place while repairs are made.
    “We tried to take these out at the start, miss,” Delruss says. “We used helicopters with special munitions, but we had only limited success. If these transmission horns had been able to broadcast power to where it was needed, we’d have had a much harder time.”
    “But there was no one to give the orders.”
    “Correct, miss.”
    The cold wind knifes through Aiah’s bones. Somewhere below a ship’s siren whoops three times, like an unanswered call for help. Aiah steps toward the edge, her feet crunching on glass from a rooftop arboretum blown open in the fighting, its rare trees and shrubs already withering in the cold.
    Above, between her and the Shield, plasm lines trace across the