Four
kilometers south of the Urban Palace, a man is standing in the open
door of a garage, looking to the north through a pair of binoculars.
He's watching a blob of brown-red that is just barely visible on the
horizon – but is growing fast. Right on time.
-
- - - - - - -
Almost
there, almost there... Mara and Fir are standing in front of a
door, genuine hydroponic-grown wood, rich and brown and absurdly
incongruous with the concrete walls and tang of disinfectant of the
servants' halls. On the other side is the part of the Palace the
nobles see. The map is burned into her memory: they step outside,
turn to the left, take a dozen steps, and they'll be in front of the
locked door into the part of the Palace where they keep those who
aren't allowed to leave. And they're a good fifty seconds ahead of
schedule. Mara presses the opening bar.
Before
her is a vast arching hallway, ten meters high and almost as wide,
red marble walls gleaming in the sunlight streaming in through
skylights covering the roof. The floor is covered with thick, rich
carpet, wool or a synthetic indistinguishable from it, her boots
sinking centimeters into the soft surface. Paintings dot the walls,
clearly hand-made. Artificial scents waft through the air,
tantalizing the senses. The luxury is hits her almost like a
physical blow, and she stumbles slightly as she steps through the
door. She forces her eyes to look straight ahead, to ignore what's
around her, as she steps one, two, three, and ahead of her is the
door, the door she has been working towards for the last six years.
“Spirit,”
Fir murmurs. But he does his job. Mara stands behind him as Fir
goes to work on the door, blocking the view from the rest of the
hall. There's no one there – they've seen only two or three
servants in their course through the Palace, gray-suited maids and
manservants, thankfully ignoring them as they hurried on their own
tasks. The place is almost deserted... And thank the Spirit
for that.
A
click, and the door's open, revealing a large sitting room centered
around a hand-crafted wooden table and ample armchairs upholstered in
a shiny, dark material Mara doesn't recognize, and four doors leading
off from the room – and a manservant with the epaulets of a senior
butler man-handling heavy glass urns onto a cart. The man looks up,
sweating. “Ah! Good timing, you two. Get over here and help
me with this.” He frowns, straightens, walks over to the door,
Mara momentarily frozen. “Wait, who are you?”
The
man's just a meter in front of Fir. Fir glances back, and Mara
nods. It's over before the man has time to scream.
-
- - - - - - -
Here
we go... The study hasn't been opened in years, and there's a
thick layer of dust over everything. But even eleven years after
her death, Iskander can still feel the personality of MuniPrix Gerta
Ludei suffusing the room. No skylights here, no glass trinkets, no
paintings of dead ancestors. A solitary electric light hanging from
the center of the ceiling casts the room in a soft amber glow,
leaving much of it in almost womb-like shadow. A battle-scarred
antique wooden desk sits in the center of the room facing the door;
the walls are lined with shelves stuffed with memory sticks and a few
actual books, and Iskander has to fight down the urge to browse
through them. He's here for one thing and one thing only: the steel
safe built into the wall behind the desk.
The
safe uses an old-style mechanical lock. Iskander has neither the
time nor the skill to figure out the combination. But he has
something better. First the punch, a three-centimeter-long cylinder
custom-made by a Hiver craftsman specializing in tools of a
questionably legal nature, small enough to fit in the hollow under
his armpit, where no guard would dare to search. He sets it on the
steel case just above the lock and presses the button on the end.
There's a few seconds of grinding as the tool grips the case, and
then a thump of explosives as the charge shoot the diamond tip
of the punch through the steel.
Next
step, the acid. He's just set the punch on the ground when he hears
the voice behind him. “Iskander?”
He
turns. MuniPrix Sara Ludei is standing in the doorway. “I saw
the door open. Goodness, I haven't been in here since... Since
before poor Greta died.” She frowns. “What are you doing?”
Iskander
smiles. He has come much too far, risked far too much to let some
foolish woman stand in his way now. “Let me show you.”
What
follows is messy, but short.
-
- - - - - - -
Four
kilometers away, at Elysium Power Station #3, an innocuous line of
code in a power transformer notes that it has finally reached the
time it's been waiting for. Thirty seconds later, a series of
safety controls shut down, and a surge of current four times the
allowed voltage passes through the main power line leading to the
Urban Palace.
The
fuses in the Palace do their job, bursting open with a soft crack in
the power distribution room. Running on batteries now, the Palace
computer first tries to shift power supply to the backup line – but
that runs through the same fusebox, which has just melted to slag.
No matter. Within a tenth of a second, the backup reactor's
computer has woken up, and begun its warmup cycle. Pumps begin to
churn, passing pressurized helium through the core of the fission
reactor, and the primary control rods pull out. The turbine begins
to turn – and that's when the thermite ignites.
Thirty
seconds later, the primary battery backups are exhausted, and the
Urban Palace's lights go out.
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