When Amaranthe lifted her head to massage a crick in her neck, she found Tikaya gazing at her. It was one of the few times the professor hadn’t been riveted by the control room’s myriad options.
“Are we ready?” Amaranthe asked.
“I believe I’ve discovered how to engage the self-immolation method.”
“And?” Amaranthe didn’t know if she cared for that word choice, but perhaps it would be best, leaving nothing behind to be studied by unscrupulous sorts.
“Two problems. It must be activated from here.” Tikaya pointed at the floor of the control room. “And I haven’t been able to determine how damaging it will be to the surrounding area.”
“How much more damaging could it be than squashing an entire army fort?” Maldynado asked. He and Basilard had grown bored of standing an assiduous watch, given the lack of trouble encroaching through the locked doors, and a travel-sized Tiles game sprawled across the floor between them.
“I don’t know,” Tikaya said. “If there’s intense heat or shrapnel or, goodness, I can only imagine how they might accomplish this feat-I gather it was usually done in outer space, not while landed on a planet-it may be destructive for miles around.”
“Miles… as in the city?” Amaranthe asked.
“Possibly. At the least, those gaping civilians and would-be relic raiders wandering about the outside of the craft would be in danger. For us…”
“I can’t imagine they’d require someone to die with the craft,” Amaranthe said. “See if there’s some sort of delay. There are lifeboats, or there should be. Unless all of them were fired when we crashed. Maybe you can check on that too. As for the rest…” She closed the journal and sat down. “I don’t want to risk the city. Can we lift off and then immolate?”
“Let me check on those things.” Tikaya returned to the images.
Amaranthe had been thinking of the professor as being in charge, as someone who saw her as nothing more than a bodyguard along to shoot things. That she’d asked for Amaranthe’s opinion, and even seemed to be following her… yes, they’d been orders, surprised Amaranthe. Maybe Tikaya figured it wasn’t her city and they weren’t her people, so it’d be appropriate to ask for a native’s advice. Or maybe she wanted to pass the blame to Amaranthe.
“Just what I need,” she muttered. “More deaths on my shoulders.”
Nobody was around to hear her. Mahliki, the closest person, was still manipulating the viewing image, trying to find those tunnel-boring machines or evidence of a fresh underground passage. She frowned deeply and murmured something of her own.
“What is it?” Amaranthe shook out her hand again, in case she needed to put her pen to use once more.
“I… don’t know. Come look.”
Amaranthe gazed up at the image. Their “bird” was providing a view from near the Emperor’s Preserve again, but it was focused toward the horizon instead of downward. The eastern mountains, their white craggy peaks thrusting skyward, were… burning? She wasn’t sure. Smoke smothered one of the peaks directly east of the city. It seemed to be drifting up from the front slope of the mountain.
She lifted a hand, intending to ask Mahliki to take them closer, but a brilliant explosion burst from the hillside, yellow and orange flames leaping into the air so high they would have been visible from the city by the naked eye. It might have been audible too, even across the miles and miles of intervening farmlands. Before, there’d been a smoky haze above the area, but now huge black plumes rose, darkening the sky.
“Whose demented ancestor caused that?” Maldynado asked. “And why?”
“What’s out there?” Tikaya asked.
“A pass,” Maldynado said. “There’s a road up into the mountains. We were there last spring. It…” He trailed off, chewing thoughtfully on the side of his mouth.
“More than a pass,” Amaranthe said, guessing her thoughts matched his. “There’s a hidden dam and a lake up there that supplies all the clean, fresh water to the city. Although… can you get closer with that thing?” She waved toward their floating map. “That explosion came from lower on the mountainside, I think.”
“There are a lot of old mines up there,” Maldynado said.
“Which would be pointless to blow up,” Amaranthe said. “The city’s water supply though… If they blew up the dam, they’d flood Stumps, and nobody wins there, but…” She snapped her fingers. “I bet it’s the aqueduct. There are reservoirs in the city, but with a million people, we’ll start to run out of water within three or four days.”
“I don’t understand,” Mahliki said. “There’s a lake right there.”
“A lake we pump our sewage into,” Amaranthe said. “It gets pretty diluted I think-people swim out there after all-but I’ve heard that if you drink much of it, you and you family can expect to enjoy some lovely bouts of cholera.”
“You don’t have any filtration systems in place?” Tikaya asked.
“Filtration?”
“I’ve read of sand filtration systems being used by some civilizations, and my people have experimented with chemicals that kill pathogens.” Tikaya lifted a shoulder.
“We never needed to develop anything like that,” Amaranthe said. “I’m not even sure we have the technology to do so. If it’s not metallurgy or engineering…” She shrugged-those were what the empire was known for.
“But your city’s vulnerable if it only has one water source,” Mahliki said.
“That’s why the aqueduct is underground,” Amaranthe said. “So it’s not easy for enemies to reach. And the existing maps aren’t even accurate. They’re deliberately misleading about where the water comes from and where the underground lines run. I can’t imagine who would know to strike out there.” She pointed at the billowing smoke. “My team only knows about all this because of the incident last year. Researching the snarl of lies and altered blueprints confused the spit out of us.”
Basilard waved a hand to get everyone’s attention, then made a single sign, the finger sweep across his throat. Sicarius?
Amaranthe’s stomach sank into her boots. If he belonged to that Nurian practitioner, and that practitioner was working for Flintcrest… “Why?” she asked. “What would one of the candidates gain from harming the city? They should want to inherit a glorious capital city, not writhing chaos.”
“There’s another explosion.” Mahliki nodded, not toward the mountains this time, but toward the southwest corner of the city, near the lake and the railway. “Multiple explosions.”
It didn’t take long for Amaranthe to figure out what the smoking cylindrical husks left behind represented. “The granaries.”
“Someone’s striking at your city’s food supply too?” Mahliki asked.
“There’s not much stored within the city itself,” Amaranthe said, “not when compared to the number of people here who need to eat. Most food comes in via the rail system from the surrounding countryside and other satrapies as well, but the granaries are symbolic. This is going to cause panic.”
“This may be our opportunity to destroy this craft without many people noticing.” Tikaya walked over and drew a finger through the map, returning its focus to the Behemoth.
The crowd that had been staring at the craft, trying to figure it out, had dissipated. Some people were gaping toward the eastern mountains, but more were leaving the field, racing back to their homes to check on their families. And to check their food and water stores, or at least that’s what they’d be doing when they figured out what had happened.
“I’ll take us off the ground and set the destruction mechanism,” Tikaya said. “If it blows up in the air, high above the lake, it might put on a good show, but it shouldn’t damage anything down here. Though I suppose there could be sizable chunks of shrapnel. I’ll move us out over the farmlands farther, where the population is less dense. I think I can give us ten minutes, maybe more, to run to the nearest of those lifeboats, where we can escape and make our way back to the factory.”