Fantastic Metropolis

As the fingertip of his kidskin glove rubbed his nose, Epidermal Mite #011847-B scrambled to the sheltering pit of a sebaceous gland. The mite crouched there until the hand went away. Then it crept back to skin level and crouched there, blinking in the sunlight. It adjusted its iris settings and resumed its transmission.

The IIE was bored to tears with the mute perambulations of the gloomy physicist. It switched its 283rd vesicle to a different sensor.

 

Roughly half a kilometer west of the Riga-to-Petrograd railway track, Mikhail Bakunin sat on an empty crate and focused his binoculars on the ballast mound under the tracks. He was a burly man with long black hair, wearing a leather greatcoat and a woolen cap. He was sitting in a camouflaged foxhole, among other foxholes that were occupied by the men of his anarchist cadre. The mountain wind moaned through the crate. Bakunin whistled through his teeth.

The satchel charges were still in place. If the contacts didn’t freeze, and if the attack went as planned, the tsar’s train would never reach Petrograd. And if Bakunin’s key agent was successful with her task, then the tsar would be a dead man within the hour. If, if, if. Bakunin pulled a handkerchief from a coat pocket and blew his nose.

As the saboteur blew his nose, the tiny red eyes of Spy Flea #44382-G were staring at the back of his neck. Somewhere behind those eyes, the 665th vesicle of the IIE watched every move Bakunin made.

 

The cardiac surgery in Alexius was finally underway. The boy lay in his sickbed under a white quilt, as usual. The tsarina sat in the observer’s booth. Nicholas had declined to attend.

Dr. Ostrokov sat in the telemetry chair, sweating like a pig. Two interns sat at banks of consoles and watched the boy’s vital signs wriggle across oscilloscope screens.

Inside Alexius, Pod and Ostrokov had become indistinguishable. He was living in an undersea cavern within the chest of a giant.

The three Gaffers had lowered the polyprotonol valve into position above the faulty valve of flesh. The three Cutters had completed their oval incision through the transverse septum. They had severed the final muscle fibrils and cauterized the last arteriole with their laser lamps. Now the Cutters were stationed in nooks they’d carved for themselves in the valve tissue, holding the valve in place, ready to release it.

When they let go, the diastolic blood surge would flush the leaky valve into the ventricle, with the Cutters inside it. The Gaffers would lower the artificial valve and glue it into place. Down in the ventricle, the Cutters would anchor the excised valve and slice it into bits for the lymphocytes to gobble. Then Pod would declare the operation a success.

Pod waited and listened. The systole thundered on. The plasma turbulence boiling up from the incision shook the Gaffers on their stovepipe legs. The turbulence tugged at the white saucer in the Gaffers’ pincers. The valve cusps sprang open.

Pod tight-beamed the Cutters: “Do it!”

The rushing of the blood tide was a keening banshee to his sonar. He pressed himself tight against Anchorlegs’s back. The Cutters retracted their arms. The flesh valve dropped away and left a gaping hole in the septum. The Gaffers swayed on their tripods in the whirling blood maelstrom. Pod spoke to the Gaffers: “Lower away.”

The Gaffers lowered the white oval toward the rim of the chasm. As the gap narrowed, the plasma suction got meaner and more erratic.

“Keep it level. Hold back, Number Three. Resume now, Three. Steady on. Almost there. Three, you’re off-center. Widen your tripod. That’s better.”

An awful black blob of congealed blood, microns across, careened from the vena cava. A clinging mass of jelly buried Gaffer Three. A direct hit.

A clot, thought Pod. This is all we need.

“Don’t move!” Pod called out to G-3. “Hold onto the valve! Maintain your footing. Nobody move. I’m coming. I’ll dig you out.”

Pod climbed down the side of Anchorlegs and scurried awkwardly toward G-3 across the wall of the auricle, on his six match-stick legs. Too late. The clot was bigger than G-3, and the drag of its surface area was too much for Three’s suction feet. Three lurched forward, crashed against the valve, and was swept down the hole.