Chapter 51: The Diabolical Board
There is a floor in the Yellemite district that does not have a button in the lift.
You reach it only when certain people decide you will, and command the lift to carry you there. The doors open on a long room with a long table, and a window running the whole eastern wall, and the Tower standing in that window with its upper floors lost in the cloud, close enough that it looks like a wall rather than a building.
There were five chairs around the table. They were the chairs of the top five agencies in Meteor City, the five that ran the rest, and nobody in the room needed a name plate.
"Say it again..."
The representative from Elevation spoke sternly and sharply, though he kept it measured.
"Slowly. Because I would like to hear myself understand it."
The Association’s leaked requisition sat in the middle of the table, one page, printed rather than screened, which told everyone at the table how seriously it was being taken. Paper does not sync anywhere. Paper burns.
The woman from Stratham had brought the numbers.
"A Class Two suppression array. Expedited twice by Vaunhold. Requisitioned against S-class privilege, countersigned by the Association President’s Aide."
She turned the page over with one finger.
"A private residence transport, escorted. Association logistics, Association route clearance, and a checkpoint hold order at the western gate for a window of forty minutes."
"For a patient?" the man asked, gently stroking his vermillion mustache.
"For a patient."
He laughed once, without any part of his face joining in.
"There’s no way the Association clears a checkpoint for a patient. The Association does not clear a checkpoint even for me, and I have four hundred and sixty licensed Heroes and a building with my name on the roof."
Nobody argued with that, because it was true, and because the men and women at that table had spent decades learning exactly what the Association would and would not do.
It would not move for money. It would not move for a guild. It had, twice in living memory, moved like this, and on both occasions it had been moving something it did not want the other four to see. One of those occasions was old enough that the men who had stood nearby for it were dead, and the other was recent enough that nobody at the table said the year out loud.
The rule everybody in the room had grown up with was simple. Below SS-rank, you are a resource. At SS-rank and above, you are a policy.
"So there is an SS in the city."
The man who spoke now was a large man with a small bald head set on a short neck and shoulders wide enough to make both look borrowed from somebody else.
He was from the Bulwark Agency, and he had come to the boardroom in field gear, as he always did, plates still scuffed grey at the forearms, and he had not sat down, as he always did not.
"An Unregistered SS, and they’re trying to hide him from us."
"Most likely because they haven’t confirmed if he is one." The lady who had brought the full information on the complaint added that, tilting her head until her emerald hair caught the sharp light of the room.
There was an old man from Southpaw Agency who said nothing at all and only stared at the Tower in the window, the way a farmer stares at weather.
And at the head of the table, in the chair that everyone had left the space around, sat a young woman in a grey suit with a folder she had not opened and a glass of water she had not touched.
She was not a Hero. She held no rank. She was somebody’s secretary, and the agency she was secretary to was Skyline, which had been first in Meteor City for twenty-five years, and every person in that room had arranged their morning around the possibility that she might speak.
For a moment nobody did, and a room with five people in it was almost no different from a graveyard.
Then the man with the vermillion mustache and hair spoke.
"What do we do then? Suck away here while the Association bags someone like that."
He leaned forward and smacked the table, and the ring of it went thunderous across the room, out to the glass and back again.
"We can fight over which Agency he stays in after we snatch him from the Association. The one thing we can all agree on is that leaving two SS-ranks to the Hero Association will tip the balance. And we certainly don’t want that."
The green-haired lady, Olandria, spoke with a refined tone.
"Regardless of where he lands, he will tip the balance anyway. Isn’t that a measly excuse, Master Fonestan?"
The man paused, turning to the lady with a ferocious grin that made his mustache look hostile.
Olandria, representing Stratham Agency, simply spoke on without paying him any attention at all.
"We cannot ask the Association anything, since that will tell them we know. We cannot follow the transport of the machine either, and I don’t expect the Association will take that lightly with us. We also don’t want the President’s wrath."
She laid a second sheet down and squared it to the edge of the table.
"But a transport is a promise anyway. If the road becomes genuinely dangerous, the Association must keep that promise in public, and whoever is inside that vehicle must decide whether to sit still and be protected or to get out and protect."
The large man grinned, revealing golden teeth.
"So we force the hand and hope he comes out? We know the Association won’t let him, lady. If they’re going through such extent to keep him, you think some dangerous road will matter?"
The lady adjusted her glasses and gave him a look over the top of them.
"Perhaps something the Association needs an SS-rank to solve, then?"
Master Fonestan’s gaze sharpened.
"A hazard of that scale may very well put all of Meteor City in jeopardy. I did not take you for such an enthusiastic wreck, Olandria."
"We don’t know each other enough for you to address me so casually."
"You are proposing that we arrange a hazard on a public road..."
Fonestan sounded delighted. He sounded appalled as well, and he made no visible effort to pick one.
"Something of such scale has to be at least Category Five, or let’s say Six. Do you know what the fine is? Do you know what the press is?"
"I am proposing nothing."
Olandria’s voice did not change.
"I am reporting a forecast."
She turned the last page around.
A Category Four was forming on the western artery, eleven kilometres past the checkpoint, in a stretch of woodland with no residences and no registered civilian traffic. Stratham’s forecasting was the best in the city, which was the entire reason Stratham was still at this table with a hero roster half the size of Elevation’s, and their window put it at thirty to fifty hours out.
The convoy was scheduled through that stretch inside the window.
Nobody had to arrange anything. The world had arranged it, and all that remained was the question of whether five agencies would be standing nearby when it happened, purely by coincidence, in the ordinary discharge of their public duty.
"How unfortunate," Fonestan said, delighted.
"Deeply," Olandria repeated dryly.
The old man from Southpaw finally spoke, without turning from the window.
"Do not send anyone that will die easily."
That was, in the end, the only warning anybody in the room gave, and it went into the minutes as a scheduling note, with no record of who it had been addressed to.
Then the young woman from Skyline closed her folder, which she had never opened, and stood up. The water was still full. The chair went back to where it had been before she sat in it.
"Skyline will attend."
That was all she said. It took four seconds. And when the lift doors shut behind her, the four most powerful people left in Meteor City sat in a room together and none of them said anything for a while.