Without warning

But they would be defeated. Jed Culver had stolen enough votes in his time to know when the situation was hopeless. The Putsch were going to get their amendments up. They were going to turn the United States Government into something like a third-world junta. He shook his head at his own incompetence in not foreseeing this and aborting it at conception. But, looking back, he could understand. He’d been so focused on his own, much humbler agenda that he simply hadn’t been prepared for the depth of feeling, the visceral fear that had infected everything here in a way it hadn’t back in Hawaii. That was understandable. You couldn’t see the Wave in Hawaii; you didn’t live every minute with the prospect of it moving and just eating you alive. He should have factored that in.

‘There is a tide in the affairs of men,’ he muttered to himself, ‘which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune – but omitted, and all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.’

‘What’s that, Jed?’

Culver turned around to the doorway and was surprised to find a thin man standing there, silhouetted by the light of a small hand-held phone. Two larger companions, instantly recognisable as bodyguards, loomed a discreet distance behind him.

‘Just mangling the bard, Bill,’ the lawyer replied. ‘It always helps me when creeping murmur and the pouring dark fill the wide vessel of the universe.’

Bill shrugged. ‘Me, I like to read or play bridge. Golf’s pretty good too. But not at this time of night.’

‘No,’ agreed Culver, who hadn’t been expecting anyone like this. The others he’d met tonight had all been anonymous people. Quiet men and women. ‘So… er…’

The figure chuckled in the gloom. ‘I really threw you for a doozey, didn’t I? Coming here, I mean.’

‘Yes, you did,’ Culver admitted. ‘I was expecting someone… lower down the food chain.’

‘Someone expendable?’

‘If you like.’

The man walked into the room while his bodyguards remained in the corridor. ‘This is important, Jed,’ he said. ‘I have a lot invested in this venture. We all do. If it fails, we’re sunk. If it plays out, who knows, maybe people will remember us hundreds of years from now. Assuming there’s anybody left, of course.’

The lawyer shrugged. ‘People would remember you anyway, Bill.’

‘Not for something as cool as this, though, Jed. This is the sort of thing that ends up in oil paintings. Like Paul Revere’s ride. It’s that important.’

Culver couldn’t argue with that.

‘You did bring your phone, right?’ asked Bill.

Jed pulled it out of his suit pocket and handed it over. The man’s face was underlit by the glow of the screen as he keyed in a series of codes.

‘Okay,’ he said, as the smart phone beeped. ‘The network is active.’

‘And secure?’

‘And secure.’

Culver thanked him as he took the phone back. He opened the message window and pressed a few buttons.

And with that, a single hard-encrypted message beamed out across the city to hundreds of identical devices.

‘It’s done,’ he said. ‘It’s happening.’

* * * *

Most of the delegates at the convention had succumbed to the lack of air-conditioning and removed their jackets; ties were loosened and, in some cases, dispensed with altogether. The atmosphere in the auditorium was sour, hot and rank, although partly that had to do with the split on the floor that was threatening to tear the whole process apart. James Kipper pressed his lips together in an effort to maintain his calm as some asshole from Spokane attempted to tell him how to do his job.

‘This isn’t how we would run things, let me tell you, Kipper. We’d have had this show wrapped up days ago, and there wouldn’t have been any of this school-camp bullshit with lights out and no air, either. How the hell do you expect people to make decisions under these conditions? It is impossible.’

Kipper’s jaw moved like he was chewing gum, which he wasn’t. It was simply an old habit. He folded his arms and resisted the urge to tell this… Malcolm Vusevic, according to his name-tag – that he was full of shit because Spokane, lying behind the Wave, wouldn’t be organising anything ever again.

He kept his mouth shut, because, in his experience, people who’d hailed from the dead zone tended to be a little sensitive about it, which was only reasonable. What wasn’t reasonable was the delegates demanding that they get special treatment over and above what the rest of the city could expect.

‘Not gonna happen, sir,’ said Kip, resolutely shaking his head. ‘Redmond, Finn Hill and North Creek are all on their allotted power-ups at the moment. If you want to turn up the air-con here, it means diverting grid power from those folks. I’m not going to do it. Not on your say-so.’

‘Well, on whose then?’ Vusevic demanded to know. ‘Would an order from General Blackstone do it for you?’

‘Nope.’ Kipper shook his head equably. ‘I work for the city, not the military. At least not yet.’