Cities in Flight

The city’s retaliatory fire was largely invisible, since it emerged below the top of the perimeter. There was a Bethé fender out, which would keep the rim from being scaled until one of the projectors was knocked out, and plenty of heavy rifles were being kept hot. But the city had never been designed for warfare, and many of its most efficient destroyers had their noses buried in the mud, since their intended function was only to clear a landing area. Using an out-and-out Bethé blaster was impossible where there was an adjacent planetary mass—fortunately, since the bindlestiff had such a blaster and Amalfi’s city did not.

Amalfi sniffed the scarlet edges of the struggle appraisingly. The screen set up beside him did not show an intelligible battle pattern yet, but it seemed to be almost on the verge of making sense. Under Amalfi’s fingers on the platform railing were three buttons which he had had placed there four hundred years ago, duplicating a set on the balcony of City Hall. They had set in motion different actions at different times. But each time they had represented choices of actions which he would have to make when the pinch came. He had never found any reason to have a fourth button installed on either railing.

Rockets shrilled overhead. Bombs fell from them, crepitating bursts of noise and smoke and flying metal. Amalfi did not look up. The very mild spindizzy screen would fend off anything moving that rapidly. Only slow-moving objects, like men, could sidle through a polarized gravitic field. He looked out toward the horizon, touching the three buttons very delicately.

Suddenly the sunset snuffed itself out. Amalfi, who had never seen a tropical sunset before coming to He, felt a vague alarm, but as far as he could tell, the abrupt darkness was natural, though startling. The fighting went on, the flying discs of TDX explosions much more lurid now against the blackness.

After a while there was a dogfight far aloft, identifiable mostly by the exhaust traceries of rockets and missiles. Evidently Miramon’s air force was tangling with Fabr-Suithe’s. The jungle jammered derision and fury at Amalfi’s city without any letup.

Amalfi stood, watching the screen so intently as to cut the rest of the world almost completely out of his consciousness. Understanding the emerging pattern was hard work, for he had never tried to grasp a situation at such close quarters before, and the blue-coded trajectory of every shell, sketched across the screen in glowing segments of ellipses, tried to capture his exclusive attention, as if they were all planets.

About an hour past midnight, at the height of the heaviest air raid yet, he felt a touch at his elbow.

“Boss—”

Amalfi heard the word as though it had been uttered at the bottom of the Rift. The still-ascending fountain of space mines the bindlestiff was throwing up had just come into the margin of the screen—meaning that O’Brian, the proxy chief, had just located the ’stiff with one of his flying robot bystanders—and Amalfi was trying to extrapolate the shape of the top of the fountain. Somewhere up there in the aeropause, the fountain flattened into a shell of orbits encompassing the whole of He, and it was important to know how high up that shell began.

But the utter exhaustion of the voice touched something deeper. He said, “Yes, Mark.”

“It’s done. We lost almost everybody in the party. But we planted the women in a clearing right where a ‘stiff outpost could see them …. What a riot that caused.” A ghost of animation stirred in the voice for a moment. “You should have been there.”

“I’m almost there now. Just getting the picture from a proxy. Good work, Mark …. Better … get some rest.”

“Now? But boss—”

Something very heavy described a searing parabola across the screen, and then the whole city turned to a scramble of magnesium-white and ink. As the light of the star-shell faded, the screen showed a formless dim-yellow spreading and crawling, as if someone had spilled paint in the innards of the machine. Amalfi had been waiting for it.

“Gas alarm, Mark,” he heard himself saying. “Sure to be Hawke-site. Barium suits for everybody—that stuff’s pure death-by-torture.”

“Yes, right. Boss, have you been up here all this time? You’ll kill yourself running things this way. You need rest more than I do.”