House of Reeds

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.

"An atomic on the ground, mi'lady?" The technician was looking a little green. "At the spaceport?"

"Exoatmospheric," Itzpalicue said, softening her voice a little, realizing the operators in the sub-surface room had no way to tell there had been a series of nuclear explosions at the edge of the Jaganite atmosphere. "Multiple detonations in orbit. If the Flower Priest network has gone off-line and there aren't any recog codes being transmitted from orbit, assume the Tepoztecatl has been destroyed." She frowned, thumb to her lower lip. "What about the Fleet cruiser?"

"We're trying to get linked back to main operations now… We'll knowabout other stations and relays in…" The technician swallowed nervously. "…an hour? Then we'll be able to broadcast to orbit – but we don't have that capability here."

The old NГЎhuatl woman's lips twitched into a sour grimace. Deployment planning, operations manual, revision six thousand and three…deploy backup orbital uplink with tertiary communications center. Deploy ground-based surveillance mechanisms.

"Get me verification on all ships we knew were in orbit. Get me a radar scan or visual – something! As soon as possible. If something has entered orbit and destroyed both of our support ships…we will need to revise our planning." Go underground and scatter, she thought grimly. With Yacatolli's regiment dispersed and under attack, and no orbital support, we may lose the Legation and our entire presence here. Even one Danish privateer would be enough to tip the balance…

She placed the thought firmly aside. Until more data was available, she'd assume things were as they stood and no more. Which, she allowed sourly, is bad enough.

"Landline status?" Some of the technicians were talking into their voice-phones. Most of the comp displays were live again, though none of them were showing v-feeds.

The technician scratched his head, glancing over his shoulder. "Station two," he pointed, "has gotten ahold of one of the techs at main operations. She's transcribing their status. We're trying to raise the other city operations teams, but so far we've only managed to get through to the one at Sobipurй. They've had to move to their backup site – the landing field has been overrun and the Imperial citizens there slaughtered."

"Hmm…what about Fleet staff at the base?" Itzpalicue leaned over the display showing the transcript from Lachlan's conversation. "Were they killed or captured as well?"

The technician shrugged. "No news. We're operating nearly blind, mi'lady."

"Yes," Itzpalicue pursed her lips. "What about datacomm over the landlines?"

"Ten minutes," he said, swallowing again. "I think. There is a problem with -"

She fixed him with a stony glare. "Fix it. Now, where is my station?"

The room had returned to a proper feeling of busy efficiency by the time Itzpalicue had settled herself in a distant corner, half-hidden behind a stack of heat exchangers and storage crystal lattices. The tension and fear was ebbing from the voices around her, though everyone was on edge. The old woman was pleased. Losing all prospect of support and even, possibly, their way home had not reduced any of her staff to uselessness from panic or fear.

They have spirit, she thought, as I have always maintained.

A mingled sensation of bitterness and pride filled her. A traditional Mirror field team would have leaned heavily on older, more experienced staff. Ones with 'proven skills' and spotless efficiency records, drawn from well-connected members of the great clans or the military families. None of the young men and women in the room had been recruited from within the Four Hundred. Nearly all, in fact, were from colony worlds or mining stations or the slums of AnГЎhuac. Patronless, making their way only by skill, tenacity and a blithe disregard for the danger around them. A more experienced team, she allowed privately, would not heed my orders so effortlessly. They would argue and quibble and question. And dwell too much on the prospect of failing to return home in a critical time.

The comp displays before her came to life at a touch, showing audio transcripts from the operators in the room. She inserted a fresh earbug and twisted the comm-thread around to her lips. The chatter in her ear was confusing for a moment, but she let her eyes relax, let the room fall away and plucked a maguey thorn from her sleeve.

Blood welled from her breast and the sharp stab of pain focused her mind.

An array of glyphs appeared on her main display, including one associated with Lachlan. Pleased, Itzpalicue tapped the glyph and a moment later Lachlan's voice was threading its way through the stream of conversations washing over her.

"Did you suffer any losses in the shockwave?"

No, mi'lady. No human casualties at least. She could hear him smiling grimly. The gods of war favored us a little – we hadn't relaunched our surviving spyeye assets when the EMP shock blanketed this face of the planet – so we didn't lose any more. Still, we've lost three-quarters of our coverage. We've sorted out twelve primary detonations and one secondary. The first set were anti-matter cascades, the last a fusion explosion. A ship's reactor core by the emissions signature.

"Which ship?" Itzpalicue reached into her mantle and squeezed an oliohuiqui tablet from a sewn-in pocket. The round pill felt grainy and sharp under her fingertips. "The Tepoztecatl?"

We think not, he replied. The orbit position was wrong – best guess says it was the merchanter Beowulf, which had recently arrived with a cargo of recycled aluminum blocks and miscellaneous 'spare parts'.

"More guns for the local trade. Well, they'll not be missed. The native princelings seem to have accumulated enough fuel for a hot little war as it stands." The old woman placed the tablet under her tongue, feeling a familiar bitter taste well in her mouth. "And the detonations themselves?"

Orbital mines. The Йirishman's voice was flat. The Imperial Development Board's satellite network down to the meter. Civilian power plants replaced with military grade anti-matter packs and converted into cheap bomb-pumped x-ray laser platforms. The Tepoztecatl didn't mount the armor to shrug off even a single hit…

"A long-prepared trap." Itzpalicue blinked as everything around her became very sharply defined. "Do you concur?"

I don't know how long someone spent setting this up… Lachlan clicked his teeth together in thought. But someone here has been preparing for battle. We're not picking up any signs of another ship in the system, so I think the mines were used as a cheap way to cripple or destroy any assets we had in orbit. A one-off cast of the patolli beans, if you will. Costing nothing if the gambit failed, but carrying the potential for inflicting heavy casualties…

"This entire world is a snare for us, for the Regiment, for the xochiyaotinime." The old woman's voice was perfectly confident, and in the thought-accelerating clarity of the morning-glory extract dissolving into her bloodstream, all known data aligned and portentous signs emerged from the chaos of noise and data around her. "Someone knew we chose this world for the Flowery War – someone acquainted with our policies and customs."

Can you be sure? Lachlan's voice quickened in disbelief. Everything they've done could have been put in place on a very short timetable. Six months, perhaps a year. How long ago was Jagan chosen?

Itzpalicue consulted the serried ranks of her memory, plucking out one dusty tome loitering in the back of her mind. Pages unfolded before her, yielding brilliant visions of red and black, the smell of dried flowers and the echo of chanting voices. "The Flower Priests are not hasty," she said. "They have been planning their exercise here for almost four years."

Plenty of time to prepare, the Йirishman mused, if this enemy cabal has an ear inside the Temple of Mayahuel, or among her servants abroad on this world.

"Not a cabal," the old woman said sharply, "pawns and decoys aplenty, yes – minions dancing on unseen strings – but only one hand on the thread of destiny. Only one true enemy."

Lachlan did not respond, and Itzpalicue knew he was frowning, staring at an empty v-pane, wondering how to disagree. A flood of eager confidence rushed in her veins, straining her voice, making her words tumble like a swift stream. "We have our own ears here, Lachlan-tzin! Our own eyes. To hold such a trap secret for so long requires the tightest of conspiracies. Supremely trustworthy confederates. All of this has been arranged by a single mind. One enemy! As I have feared and suspected. But he shows his hand at last. Now I begin the see the outline of a face!"

Lachlan held his peace; Itzpalicue could hear him breathing and the muted chatter of the technicians in the distant room. She fought down the urge to giggle or shout aloud. She knew she was right. She was certain the bitter god guided her thoughts unerringly and they were clear, clear as a placid stream under willows.

Most of our data network is back up, the Йirishman said in a neutral tone. I will route you a copy of everything coming into main operations.

"Good." Itzpalicue felt her voice shine with bright colors. "My hunters are afield – their scanners still work – as soon as he reveals himself, we will strike."

You know your quarry is in Parus? Lachlan tried to hide the skepticism in his voice, but failed.

"No." The admission was painful. She had tried to acquire the services of more mercenaries from the highland tribes, but spending the time to win their trust and establish her power fully in their minds had taken too long. "But the Legation is here, and the darmanarga conspiracy will gauge failure or success by its capture. I believe…he will keep close watch upon them, for even if this is only a spine-prick to bleed us, such a victory would be hard to resist."

Very well. The Йirishman's tone held a disbelieving sigh. We are launching the reserve spyeyes now. We should have about twenty percent coverage within the hour.

The old woman smiled, bony hands flat upon her knees, eyes half-lidded, waiting and listening to the flood of sound surging around her. Her perception expanded, filling the world, penetrating even the most minute crevice, winging across the rooftops, hearing the distant voices of men in battle and pain.

The smell of blood and incense was sharp in her nostrils. Again, she felt young and strong, as if the years had dropped away, a heavy, jeweled mantle discarded upon the floor.