The Merchants’ War

Bombardiers

It was a good morning for flying, thought Rudi, as he checked the weather station on the north tower wall. No, make that a great morning. After all, he’d never flown over his homeland before. It would be a personal first, not to mention one in the eye for the stick-in-the-muds. Visibility was clear, with a breeze from the southwest and low pressure, rising slowly. He bent over the anemometer, jotting down readings in the logbook by the dawn light. “Hans? I’ll be needing the contents of both crates. Get them moved into the outer courtyard. I’ll need two pairs of hands to help with the trike—make sure they’re not clumsy. I’ll be down in ten minutes.”

“Aye, sir.” His footman, Hans, gave him an odd look, but hurried down off the battlements all the same. He clearly thought his master was somewhat cracked. Well, he’ll change his mind before the day is out, Rudi told himself. Along with everyone else. Just as long as nothing goes wrong. He was acutely aware that he hadn’t kept his flying hours up since the emergency began, and there were no luxuries (or necessities) like air traffic control or meteorology services over here.

In fact, he didn’t even have as much fuel as he’d have liked: he’d managed to squirrel away nearly twenty gallons of gas before some killjoy or other—he harbored dark suspicions about Erik—had ratted out his scheme to Riordan, who’d had no option but to shout a lot and notify the duke. Who in turn had threatened to have him flogged, and lectured him coldly for almost half an hour about the idiocy of not complying with long-standing orders…

Rudi had bitten his tongue while the duke threatened to burn the trike, but in the end the old man had relented just a little. “You will maintain it in working order, and continue to practice your skills in America, but you will not fly that thing over our lands without my explicit orders, delivered in person.” Eorl Riordan wasn’t the duke, but on the other hand, he was in the chain of command: and that was enough for Rudi. Flying today.

It took him closer to half an hour to make his way down to the courtyard, by way of his room—his flying jacket and helmet were buried deeper than he’d remembered, and he took his time assembling a small survival kit. Then he had to divert via the guardhouse to check out a two-way radio and a spare battery. “Where do you think you’re going, cuz?” asked Vincenze, looking up from the girlie magazine he was reading: “A fancy dress party?”

Rudi grinned at him. “Got a date with an angel,” he said. “See you later.”

“Heh. I’ll believe it when I see it—” But he was talking to Rudi’s back.

Down in the courtyard next to the stables, he found that Hans had enlisted a couple of guards to move the crates, but hadn’t thought to bring the long tubular sack or the trike itself. “Come on, do I have to do everything myself?” he demanded.

“I didn’t know what you wanted, sir,” Hans said apologetically. “You said it was delicate…”

“Huh. Okay. Come here. Take this end of the bag. I’ll take the other. It’s heavy. Now! The courtyard!”

Half an hour later, performing in front of an audience of mostly useless gawpers (occasionally he’d need one of them to hold a spar in position while he tightened a guy wire), Rudi had the wing unpacked and tensioned. At eight meters long and weighing fifty kilos the Sabre 16 had been murder to world-walk across—it was too long to fit in the Post Office room—but it was about the smallest high performance trike wing he’d been able to find. At least he’d been able to unbolt the engine from the trike body. “Go get the trike,” he told Hans and the guards. “Push it gently, it’ll roll easily enough once you get it off the straw.”

Another half hour passed by in what felt like seconds. By then he’d gotten the wing mounted on top of the trike’s mast and bolted together. The odd machine—a tricycle with a pair of bucket seats and a petrol engine with a propeller mounted on the back—was beginning to resemble a real, flyable ultralight. He was double-checking his work, making sure there was no sign of wear on any of the cables and that everything was secure, when someone cleared his throat behind him. He glanced round: it was Eorl Riordan, along with a couple of sergeants he didn’t recognize. “How’s it going?” asked Riordan, his tone deceptively casual.

“It’s going all right, for now.” Rudi glanced up at the sky. Partial cloud cover, at least five thousand feet up—no problem for the time being. “Thing is, I’m about to trust my neck to this machine. There’s no backup and no air traffic control and no help if something goes wrong. So I want to make sure everything is perfect before I take her up.”

“Good.” Riordan paused. “You’ve got a radio.”

“Yeah. And binoculars.” He gestured to the small pile sitting beside the fuel drum. “If you need it, I can take a camera. But right now, this is going to be pretty crude, visual flying only in good weather, staying below two thousand feet, and if I see anything I’ll probably only be able to pinpoint it to within a mile or so. I max out at about fifty-five miles per hour, so that’s not going to take me far from here, and I’ve got enough fuel for a couple of three-hour-long flights, but I’d prefer not to go up twice in one day. It’s pretty physical.”

“Three hours and a hundred and fifty miles ought to be enough.” Riordan nodded to himself. “What I wanted to say—I’d like you to do a circuit of the immediate area. If there’s any sign of troops on the ground within thirty miles, I’d like to know about it. We’re expecting a move from the southeast, and I know it’s well forested down there so I don’t expect miracles, but if you do see anything, it’s probably important. Also, I’d like you to take a look at Wergatfurt. We got an odd call half an hour ago, there’s something going on down there. Can you do that?”

“Probably, yes.” Rudi patted his pocket. “I’m using relief maps from the other side for navigation, it’s close enough to mostly work, and the Wergat’s pretty hard to miss. The only thing I will say is, if the weather starts closing in I need to get down on the ground fast. The Hjalmar palace is about an hour, hour and ten minutes away from here, as the trike flies—it’ll cut into my ability to do a sweep around to the north. Are you sure you want that?”

Riordan rubbed the side of his nose thoughtfully. “I think…if you don’t see signs of soldiers southeast of here within thirty miles, then I definitely want to know what’s going on down along the Wergat. If you see those soldiers, call me up and we’ll discuss it.” He nodded to himself. Then he pointed at Rudi’s survival kit. “Why the gun? Can you shoot from a moving aircraft?”

“It’s not for when the trike’s flying: but if anything goes wrong while I’m forty miles out, over open forest…”

Riordan nodded. “Good luck.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ll try not to need it.”

In the end, what saved them was Huw’s nose hair.

It was, Huw sometimes reflected, one of those fine ironies of life that despite being unable to grow a proper beard, he suffered inordinately from the fine hairs that clogged his nostrils. Nostril hair was neither sexy nor obviously problematic to people who didn’t have to put up with it: it was just…icky. That was the word Elena had used when she caught him in the bathroom with an open jar of Vaseline and one finger up a nostril. Yet it played seven shades of hell with his sense of smell, and had driven his teenage self into an orgy of nose-picking that resulted in a series of nosebleeds before he’d figured out what to do about it. And now…

In the flashlight-lit wreckage of a building inside a shattered dome, standing before a wall with a tightly sealed doorway in it, his kid brother raised a fire ax and swung it down hard towards the left side of the door.

As the ax struck the door, Huw, who was standing a good two meters behind and to the left of him, sneezed. The sneeze had been building up for some time, aggravated by the cold, damp air in this new world and the low priority Huw had attached to his manicure in the face of the mission of exploration. Nevertheless, the eruption took Huw by surprise, forcing him to screw his eyes shut and hunch his shoulders, turning his face towards the floor. The noise startled Yul, who began to turn to his right, towards Huw. The movement took him out of the direct line of the door. And it also surprised Elena, who was standing off to the right near the entrance to the building with her vicious little machine pistol at the ready. She ducked, and this took her out of the direct line of sight on the portal.

Which was why they survived.

As the ax blade bit into the edge of the door, there was a brilliant flash of violet-tinted light. Huw registered it as as flicker of red behind his closed eyelids and might have ignored it—but the rising noise that followed it was impossible to write off.

“Ouch! What’s that—” Yul began.

Huw, opening his eyes and straightening up, grabbed his brother’s arm, and yanked. “Run!”

The hissing sound from the edge of the door grew louder; the center of the door bowed inward slightly, as if under the pressure of a giant fist from their side. Yul barely spared it a glance before he dropped the axe and took to his heels. Huw was a stride behind him. Two seconds brought them to the twilit entrance to the room. “Hit the ground!” yelled Huw, catching one glimpse of Elena’s uncomprehending face as he threw himself forward and rolled sideways, away from the open doorway.

Behind them, the creaking door—far thinner than Huw had realized—creaked once more, and gave way. All hell broke loose.

The hissing and whistling gave way to a deep roaring, and the breeze in Huw’s face began to strengthen. Huw glanced over his shoulder once, straining to look over the length of his body towards the inner chamber. A strange mist curdled out of the air, obscuring whatever process was at work there. The wind was still strengthening. “Take cover!” he called out. “There’s hard vacuum on the other side of that—thing—watch out for flying debris!” It’ll blow itself out soon, he told himself. Won’t it? A sudden frisson of fear raised the hair on the back of his neck: That skeleton was old, the door can’t have held in a vacuum that long. So something’s pumping the air on the other side out, something that’s still working…

But that didn’t make sense. Come on, Huw, think! The wind wasn’t slackening. Dust and leaves blew past, vanishing towards the gulping maw behind the doorway. Huw pushed himself up on hands and knees and began to crawl sideways, away from the damaged front of the building. He waved to Yul and Elena, beckoning them after. The seconds stretched out endlessly. The wind was refusing to die. “Meet me behind the building!” He yelled, jabbing his hands to indicate the direction. Yul raised a thumb and began to crawl away, tracking round the building.

Once Huw was away from the frontage, he risked standing up. Out of the direct line of the door, the wind was a barely noticeable breeze. “Huh.” He slapped the knees of his fatigues, then hurried round to meet Yul and Elena. It’s still running, he realized. Can’t be a pump; it’d take a jet engine to shift that much mass flow. He glanced around. A nasty idea was inching its way into his mind: Utterly preposterous, but…

“Well, bro, what do you reckon?”

Yul was characteristically unfazed by his near-miss. Elena, however, was anything but pleased: “What were you playing at? Hitting that thing with an ax, we could all have been killed!”

“It looked like a door to me,” Yul shrugged.

“Did you see the flash—”

“Flash?” Huw glanced at her. “There was a flash?”

“Yes, a bright flash of light as the big oaf here hit it!” Elena swatted Yul on the arm. “You could have been killed!” She chided him. Then she glared at Huw. “What were you playing at?”

“I’m not sure yet.” Huw licked his left index finger and held it up to feel the breeze. “Yes, it’s still going. Hmm.”

“What is it?”

“I’m not sure,” Huw said slowly, “but I’ll tell you what I think. It was behind the door, sealed in until Yul broke something. It’s got hard vacuum on the other side. like a, a hole in space. Not a black hole, there’s no gravitational weirdness, but like—imagine a wormhole leading into yet another world? Like the thing we do when we world-walk, only static rather than dynamic? And the universe it leads to is one where there’s no planet Earth. You’d come out in interplanetary space.”

“But why—”

Huw rolled his eyes. “Why would anyone want such a thing? How would I know? Maybe they used to keep a space station there, as some kind of giant pantry? You put one of those doors in your closet, build airtight rooms on the other side of it, and you’ll never have to worry about where to keep your clothes again—it gives a whole new meaning to wardrobe space. But you keep an airtight door in front of the—call it a portal—just in case.”

He gestured around the dome. “Something bad happened here, a long time ago. Centuries, probably. The guy with the perfect teeth was trying to hide in the closet, but didn’t make it. Over time, something went wrong on the other side—the space station or whatever you call it drifted off site—leaving the portal pointing into interplanetary space. And then we came along and fucked with the protective door.”

Elena’s eyes widened. “But won’t it suck all the air out?”

Huw shrugged. “Not our problem. Anyway, it’ll take thousands of years, at a minimum. There’s plenty of time for us to come back and drop a concrete hatch over it.” He brightened: “Or an airlock! Get some pressure suits and we can go take a look at it! A portal like that, if we can figure out how it works—” he stopped, almost incoherent with the sudden shock of enlightenment. “Holy Sky Father, Lightning Child, and Crone,” he whispered.

“What is it, bro?” Yul looked concerned. “Are you feeling alright?”

“I’ve got to get back to base and report to the duke right now.” Huw took a deep breath. “This changes everything.”

After two days aboard the Northern Continental, Miriam was forced to reevaluate her opinion of railroad travel—even in luxury class. Back when she was newly married she and Ben had taken a week to go on a road trip, driving down into North Carolina and then turning west and north. They’d spent endless hours crawling across Illinois, the landscape barely changing, marking the distance they’d covered by the way they had to tune the radio to another station every couple of hours, the only marker of time the shifting patterns of the clouds overhead.

This was, in a way, worse: and in another way, much better. Travel via the Northern Continental was like being sentenced to an enforced vacation in a skinny luxury hotel room on wheels. Unfortunately, New British hotels didn’t sport many of the necessities a motel back home would provide, such as air-conditioning and TV, much less luxuries like a health suite and privacy. Everything was kept running by a small army of liveried stewards, bustling in and out—and Miriam hated it. “I feel like I can’t relax,” she complained to Burgeson at one point: “I’ve got no space to myself!” And no space to plug her notebook computer in, for that matter.

He shrugged. “Hot and cold running service is half of what first-class travel is all about,” he pointed out. “If the rich didn’t surround themselves with armies of impoverished unfortunates, how would they know they were well off?”

“Yes, but that’s not the point…” Back in Baron Henryk’s medieval birdcage she’d at least been able to shunt the servants out of her rooms. Over here, such behavior would draw entirely the wrong kind of attention. She waved a hand in wide circles, spinning an imaginary hamster wheel. “I feel like I’m acting in a play with no script, on a stage in front of an audience I can’t see. And if I step out of character—the character they want me to play—the reviewers will start snarking behind my back.”

“Welcome to my world.” He smiled lopsidedly. “It doesn’t get any better after a decade, let me assure you.”

“Yes, but—” Miriam stopped dead, a sarcastic response on the tip of her tongue, as the door at the carriage end opened and a bellboy came in, pushing a cart laden with clean towels for the airliner-toilet-sized bathroom. “You see what I mean?” she asked plaintively when he’d gone.

The train inched across the interior at a laborious sixty miles per hour, occasionally slowing as it rattled across cast-iron bridges, hauling its way up the long slope of the mountains. Three or four times a day it wheezed to a temporary halt while oil and water hoses dropped their loads into the locomotive’s bunkers, and passengers stretched their legs on the promenade platform. Once or twice a day it paused in a major station for half an hour. Often Miriam recognized the names, but as provincial capitals or historic towns, not as the grand cities they had become in this strange new world. But sometimes they were just new to her.

On the first full day of the voyage (it was hard to think of anything so protracted as a train journey) she left the train for long enough to buy a stack of newspapers and a couple of travel books from the stand at the end of the platform at Fort Kinnaird. The news was next to impenetrable without enlisting Erasmus as an interpreter, and some of the stuff she came across in the travel books made her skin crawl. Slavery was, it seemed, illegal throughout the empire largely because hereditary indentured servitude was so much more convenient; one particular account of the suppression of an uprising in South America by the Royal Nipponese Ronin Brigade left her staring out of the window in a bleak, reflective trance for almost an hour. She was not surprised by the brutality of the transplanted Japanese soldiers, raised in the samurai tradition and farmed out as mercenaries to the imperial dynasty by their daimyo; but the complacent attitude to their practices exhibited by the travel writer, a middle-aged Anglican parson’s wife from Hanoveria, shocked her rigid. Crucifying serfs every twenty feet along the railway line from Manaus to São Paulo was simply a necessary reestablishment of the natural order, the correction of an intolerable upset by the ferocious but civilized and kindly police troops of the Brazilian Directorate. (All of whose souls were in any case bound for hell: the serfs because they were misguided papists and the samurai because they were animists and Buddhists, the author felt obliged to note.)

And then there was the other book, and the description of the French occupation of Mesopotamia, which made the New British Empire look like a bastion of liberal enlightenment…

What am I doing here? she asked herself. I can’t live in this world! And is there any point even trying to make it a better place? I could be over in New York getting myself into the Witness Protection Program…

On the second day, she gave in to the inevitable. “What’s this book you keep trying to get me to read?” she asked, after breakfast.

Erasmus gave her a long look. “Are you sure?” he asked. “If you’re concerned about your privacy—”

“Give.” She held out a hand. “You want me to read it, right?”

He looked at her for a while, then nodded and passed her a book that had been sitting on the writing desk in full view, all along. “I think you’ll find it stimulating.”

“Let’s see.” She turned to the flyleaf. “Animal husbandry?” She closed it and glared at him. “You’re having me on!”

“Why don’t you turn to page forty-six?” he asked mildly.

“Huh?” She swallowed acid: breakfast seemed to have disagreed with her. “But that’s—” she opened it at the right page “—oh, I see.” She shook her head. “What do I do if someone steals it?”

“Don’t use a bookmark.” He was serious. “And if someone does steal it, pray to the devil that they’re a fellow traveler.”

“Oh.” She stared at the real title page, her brow furrowed: The Ethical Foundations of Equality, by Sir Adam Burroughs. “It’s a philosophy textbook?”

“A bit more than that.” Burgeson’s cheek twitched. “More like four to ten years’ hard labor for possession.”

“Really…” She licked her lips. It was a hot day, the track was uneven, and between her clammy skin and her delicate stomach she was feeling mildly ill. “Can you give me a synopsis?”

“No.” He grinned at her. “But I should like it very much if you would give me one.”

“Whoa.” She felt her ears flush. “And I thought you were being a perfect gentleman!”

He looked at her anxiously. “Did I say something offensive?”

“No,” she said, as her guts twisted, “I’m just in a funny mood.” Her hand went to her mouth. “And if you’ll excuse me now, I’m feeling sick—”

Days turned into hours, and the minor nuisances of keeping a round-the-clock watch on a suburban house sank into the background. So when the call she’d been half-dreading finally came through, Judith Herz was sitting in the back of her team’s control van, catching up on her nonclassified e-mail on a company-issue BlackBerry and trying not to think about lunch.

“Ma’am?” Agent Metcalf leaned over the back of the seat in front, offering her a handset tethered to the van’s secure voice terminal: “It’s for you.”

She managed to muster a smile as she put down the BlackBerry and accepted the other phone: “Who is it?”

Metcalf didn’t say anything, but his expression told her what she needed to know. “Okay. Give me some privacy.” Metcalf ducked back into the front. A moment later, the door opened and he climbed out. She waited for it to close before she answered. “Herz here.”

“Smith speaking. Authenticate.” They exchanged passwords, then: “I’ve got an errand for you, Judith. Can you leave the watch team with Sam and Ian for a couple of hours?”

“A couple of—” She bit back her first response. “This had better be worth it, Eric. You’re aware my watch team’s shorthanded right now?”

“I think it’s worth it,” he said, and although the fuzz the secure channel imposed on the already-poor phone line made it hard to be sure, she got the impression that he meant it. “How far from the nearest MBTA station are you?”

Herz blinked, surprised. “About a twenty-minute walk, I figure,” she said. “I could get one of the guys to drop me off, if you’re willing to cut the front cover team to one man for a few minutes. Why, what’s come up?”

“We’ve got a lead on your last job, and I thought you’d want to be in on the close-out. I’m out of town right now and I need a pair of eyes and ears I can trust on the ground. What do you say?”

“The last—” That was the search for the elusive nuke source GREENSLEEVES had claimed he’d planted. She swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. “You found it?”

“It’s not definite yet but it looks like it’s at least a level two.” They’d defined a ladder of threat levels at the beginning of the search, putting them into a proper framework suitable for reporting on performance indicators and success metrics. A level five was a rogue smoke detector or some other radiation source that tripped the NIRT crews’ detectors—all the way up to a level one, a terrorist nuke in situ. The nightmare in the lockup in Cambridge was still unclassified—Judith had pegged it for a level one, and still didn’t quite believe in it—but a level two was serious; gamma radiation at the right wavelength to suggest weapons-grade material, location confirmed.

“Okay. Where do you want me to go?”

“Blue Line, Government Center. It’s the station itself. Go there and head for the Scollay Square exit. Rich will meet you there. He and Rand are organizing the site search. The cover story we’re going with is that it’s an exercise, training our guys for how to deal with a terrorist dirty bomb—so you can anticipate some press presence. You’ll be wearing your old organization hat and you can tell them the truth, you’re an agent liaising with the anti-terror guys.”

Herz felt like wincing. Wheels within wheels—how better to disguise a bunch of guys in orange isolation suits trampling around a metro station in search of a terrorist nuke than by announcing to the public that a bunch of guys in isolation suits would be tramping around the station in search of a pretend-nuke? “What if they don’t find Matt’s gadget?” She asked.

“That’s okay, they’ve got a mock-up in the van. You’ll just have to run in with it and tell any reporters who get in your way that we forgot to install it earlier.”

A dummy nuke, in case we don’t find a real one? Herz shook her head. “When does it kick off?”

“Rich is shooting for fourteen hundred hours.”

“Okay, I’m on my way.” She hung up the phone and cracked the window. Metcalf was smoking a cigarette. “Hey, Ian.”

He turned, looking surprised. “Yes, ma’am?”

“We’ve got a call. Time to roll.”

Metcalf carefully stubbed the cigarette out on the underside of his shoe then climbed back into the driver’s seat. “What’s come up?”

“I need a lift to Alewife. Got a T to catch.”

He shook his head. “You’re being pulled off the site?”

“It’s urgent.” She put an edge in her voice.

“I’m on it.” He slid the van into gear and pulled away. “How long are you going to be?”

“A couple of hours.” She picked up her briefcase and zipped it shut to stop her hands trembling with nervous anticipation. “I’ll make my own way back.”

The train ride to Downtown Crossing went fast, as did her connection to Government Center. Early afternoon meant that there was plenty of space in the subway trains, but the offices in the center of town would be packed. Herz tried not to think about it. She’d had months to come to terms with the idea that there might be a ticking bomb in the heart of her city—or not, that it might simply be a vicious hoax perpetrated by a desperate criminal—and now was not the time to have second thoughts about it. Still. “Our man has a thing about trip wires and claymore mines,” Mike Fleming had told her. Right. Booby traps. She resolved to keep it in mind. Not that it wasn’t in the orchestral score everyone was fiddling along to, but if it slipped some other player’s mind at the wrong moment…

On her way out of the station Herz had time to reflect on the location. The JFK Federal Building loomed on one side, a hulking great lump of concrete: around the corner in the opposite direction was the tourist district, Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market and a bunch of other attractions. The whole area was densely populated—not quite as bad as downtown Manhattan, but getting there. A small backpack nuke would cause far more devastation and more loss of life than a ten-megaton H-bomb out in the suburbs. But the search teams had already combed this district—it was one of the first places they’d looked. So what’s come up now?

Rich was waiting just inside the station exit, tapping his toes impatiently. “Glad you could make it,” he said, leading her out onto the plaza. “We’re ready to go.”

Judith froze for a moment. There was an entire flying circus drawn up on the concrete: police cars with lights flashing, two huge trucks with an inflatable tent between them, Lucius Rand and his team wandering around in bright orange suits, hoods thrown back, chatting to each other, the police. There was even a mobile burger van—someone’s idea of lunch, it seemed. “What’s this?” She asked quietly.

“This is Operation Defend Our Rails,” Rich announced portentiously. “In which we simulate a terrorist attack on a T station with weapons of mass destruction, and how we’d respond to it. Except,” his voice dropped a dozen decibels, “it’s not a simulation. But don’t tell them.” He nodded in the direction of a couple of bored-looking reporters with a TV camera who were filming the orange-suited team.

“What do the cops know?”

“They know nothing.” Rich suddenly looked serious.

“Okay.” Judith steered him towards what looked to be the control vehicle. “Tell me why we’re here, then.”

“Team Green rescanned the area with the new gamma spectroscope they just got hold of from Lockheed. The idea was to calibrate it against our old readings, but what they found—they thought it was an instrument error at first. Turns out that MBTA’s civil engineers recently removed the false walls at the ends of the Blue Line platforms so they could run longer trains. That’s when we began getting the emission spectra. More sensitive detectors, less concrete and junk in the way—that’s how it works. There’s an older platform behind the false walls, and it looks like there’s something down there.”

Down? “How far down?” she asked.

“Below the surface? Not far. This lot is all built up on reclaimed land—if that’s what you’re thinking.”

She nodded. “Suppose it’s not deep at all, in fairyland. Suppose it’s on the surface. They could just waltz in and plant a bomb. Nobody would notice?”

“It’s not that simple,” said Dr. Rand, taking her by surprise. “Let’s get you a hard hat and jacket and head down to the site.”

“You’ve already opened it up?” she demanded.

“Not yet, we were waiting for you.” He grinned unnervingly. “Step this way.”

All railway stations—like all public buildings—have two faces. One face, the one Herz was familiar with, was the one that welcomed commuters every day: down the stairs into the MBTA station, through the ticket hall and the steps or ramps down to the platforms where the Blue Line trains and Green Line streetcars thundered and squealed. The other face was the one familiar to the MBTA workers who kept the system running. Narrow corridors and cramped offices up top, anonymous doors leading into dusty, ill-lit engineering spaces down below, and then the trackside access, past warning signs and notices informing the public that they endangered both their lives and their wallets if they ventured past them. “Follow me, sir, ma’am,” said the MBTA transit cop Rand was using as an escort. “It’s this way.”

From one end of a deserted Blue Line platform—its entrance sealed off by police tape, the passengers diverted to a different part of the station—he led them down a short ramp onto the trackside. Herz glanced up. The roof of the tunnel was concrete, but it was also flat, a giveaway sign of cut and cover construction: there couldn’t be much soil up there. Then she focused on following the officer as he led them alongside the tracks and then through an archway to the side.

“Wow.” Judith glanced around in the gloom. “This is it?” Someone had strung a bunch of outdoor inspection lamps along the sixty-foot stretch of platform that started at shoulder height beside her. It was almost ankle-deep in dirt, the walls filthy.

“No, it’s down here,” said Lucius, pointing.

She followed his finger down, and realized with a start that the platform wasn’t solid—it was built up on piles. The darkness below seemed almost palpable. She bent down, pulling her own flashlight out. “Where am I supposed to be looking?” she asked. “And has anyone been under here yet?”

“One moment,” said Rand. “Officer, would you mind going back up for the rest of my team? Tell Mary Wang that I want her to bring the spectroscope with her.”

Herz half-expected the cop to object to leaving two civilians down here on their own, but evidently someone had got to him: he mumbled an acknowledgment and set off immediately, leaving them alone.

“No, nobody’s been under there yet,” said Rand. “That’s why you’re here. You mentioned that the person behind this incident had some disturbing habits involving trip wires, didn’t you? We’re going to take this very slowly.”

“Good,” said Herz, suppressing an involuntary shudder.

The next half hour passed slowly, as half a dozen members of Rand’s team made their way down to the platform with boxes of equipment in hand. Wang arrived first, wheeling a metal flight case trailing a length of electrical cable behind. She was petite, so short that the case nearly reached her shoulders. “Let’s see where it is,” she said encouragingly, then proceeded to shepherd the case along the platform at a snail’s pace, pausing every meter or so to take readings, which she marked on the platform using a spray can.

“Where do you make it?” Rand asked her.

“I think it’s under there.” She pointed to a spot about two thirds of the way down the platform, near the rear wall. “I just want to double-check the emission strength and recalibrate against the reference sample.”

Rand glanced at Herz and pulled a face. “Granite,” he said. “Plays hell with our instruments because it’s naturally radioactive.”

“But Boston isn’t built on—”

“No, but where did the gravel in the aggregate under the platform come from? Or the dye on those tiles?” His gesture took in the soot-smudged rear wall. “Or the stones in the track ballast?”

“But granite—”

“It’s not the only problem we’ve got,” Rand continued, in tones of relish that suggested he was missing the classroom: “Would you believe, bananas? Lots of potassium in bananas. You put a bunch of bananas next to a gamma source and a scattering spectrometer on the other side and they can fool you into thinking you’re staring at a shipping container full of yellowcake. So we’ve got to go carefully.” Wang and a couple of assistants were hauling her balky boxful of sensors over the platform again, peering at the instrument panel on top with the aid of a head-mounted flashlight.

“It’s here!” she called, pointing straight down. “Whatever it is,” she added conversationally, “but it sure looks like a pit to me. Lots of HEU in there. Could have come right out of one of our own storage facilities, it’s so sharp.”

“Nice work.” Rand eased himself down at the side of the platform and lowered himself to the track bed. He looked up at Herz. “Want to come and see for yourself? Hey, Jack, get yourself over here!”

Judith jumped down to the track bed beside him. Her hands felt clammy. Is this it? she asked herself. The sense of momentous events, of living through history, ran damp fingertips up and down her spine. “Watch out,” she warned.

“No problem, ma’am.” Rand’s associate, Jack, had an indefinite air about him that made her think, Marine Corps: but not the dumb stereotype kind. “Let’s start by looking for lights.”

Another half hour crept by as Jack—and another three specialists, experts in bomb disposal and booby traps—checked from a distance to ensure there were no surprises. “There are no wires, sir,” Jack finally reported to Dr. Rand. “No IR beams either, far as I can tell. Just a large trunk over against the wall, right where Mary said.”

The hair on Judith’s neck rose. It’s real, she admitted to herself. “Okay, let’s take a closer look,” said Rand. And without further ado, he dropped down onto hands and knees and shuffled under the platform. Herz blinked for a moment, then followed his example. At least I won’t have to worry about the dry-cleaning bill if Jack’s wrong, part of her mind whispered.

Jack had set up a couple of lanterns around the trunk. Close up, down between the pillars supporting the platform, it didn’t look like much. But Rand seemed entranced. “That’s our puppy all right!” He sounded as enthusiastic as a plane spotter who’d managed to photograph the latest black silhouette out at Groom Lake.

“What exactly is it?” Herz asked warily.

“Looks like an FADM to me. An enhanced storage version of the old SSADM, based on the W54 pit. Don’t know what it’s doing here, but someone is going to catch it in the neck over this. See that combination lock there?” He pointed. “It’s closed. And, wait…” He fell silent for a few seconds. “Got it. Did you see that red flash? That’s the arming indicator. It blinks once a minute while the device is live. This one’s live. There’s a trembler mechanism and a tamper alarm inside the casing. Try to move it or crack it open and the detonation master controller will dump the core safety ballast and go to detonate immediately.” He fell silent again.

“Does ‘detonate immediately’ mean what I think it means?” asked Herz. It’s been here for months, it’s not going to go off right away, she told herself, trying to keep a lid on her fear.

“Yes, it probably does.” Dr. Rand sounded distracted. “Hmm, this is an interesting one. I need to think about it for a while.”

You need to—Herz wrenched herself back on track. “What happens now?” she asked.

“Let’s go up top,” suggested Rand.

“Okay.” They scrambled backwards until they reached the track bed, and could stand up. “Well?” she asked.

“I got its serial number,” Rand said happily. “Now we can cross-check against the inventory and see where it came from. If it’s on the books, and if we can trust the books, then we can just requisition the PAL combination and open it up, at which point there’s a big red OFF switch, sort of.” A shadow crossed his face: “Of course, if it’s a ghost device, like the big lump of instant sunshine you stumbled across in Cambridge, we might be in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble? Tell me everything. I’ve got to tell the colonel.”

“Well…” Rand glanced from side to side, ensuring nobody else was within earshot. “If it’s just a pony nuke that’s been stolen from our own inventory, then we can switch it off, no problem. Then we get medieval on whoever let it go walkabout. But you remember the big one? That wasn’t in our inventory, although it came off the same production line. If this is the same, well, I hope it isn’t, because that would mean hostiles have penetrated our current warhead production line, and that’s not supposed to be possible. And we won’t have the permissive action lock keys to deactivate it. So the best we can hope for is a controlled explosion.”

“A controlled—” Herz couldn’t help herself: her voice rose to an outraged squeal—“explosion?”

“Please, calm down! It’s not as bad as it sounds. We know the geometry of the device, where the components sit in the casing. These small nukes are actually very delicate—if the explosive lens array around the pit goes off even a microsecond or two out of sequence, it won’t implode properly. No implosion, no nuclear reaction. So what happens is, we position an array of high-speed shaped charges around it and blow holes in the implosion assembly. Worst case, we get a fizzle—it squirts out white-hot molten uranium shrapnel from each end, and a burst of neutrons. But no supercriticality, no mushroom cloud in downtown Boston. We’ve got time to plan how to deal with it, so before we do that we pour about a hundred tons of barium-enriched concrete around it and hollow out a blast pit under the gadget to contain the fragments.” He grinned. “But these gadgets don’t grow on trees. I’m betting that your mysterious extradimensional freaks stole it from our inventory. In which case, all I need to do is make a phone call to the right people, and they give me a number, and—” he snapped his fingers “—it’s a wrap.”

“But you forgot one thing,” Judith said slowly.

“Oh, yes?” Rand looked interested.

“Before you do anything, I want you to dust for fingerprints around the lock,” she said, barely believing her own words. “And you’d better hope we find prints from source GREENSLEEVES. Because if not…”

“I don’t under—”

She raised a hand. “If these people have stolen one nuke, who’s to say they haven’t stolen others?” She looked him in the eye and saw the fear beginning to take hold. “We might have found Matt’s blackmail weapon. But this isn’t over until we know that there aren’t any others missing.”

Rudi hung above the forest with the wind in his teeth, a shit-eating grin plastered across his face (what little of it wasn’t numb with cold) and the engine of the ultralight sawing along behind his left ear like the world’s largest hornet. The airframe buzzed and shuddered, wires humming, but the vibration was acceptable and everything was holding together about as well as he’d hoped for. Unlike a larger or more sophisticated airplane, the trike was simple and light enough for one world-walker to shift in a week of spare time: and now Rudi was reaping his reward for all the headaches, upsets, reprimands, and other cold-sweat moments he’d put into it. “On top of the world!” He yelled at the treetops a thousand feet below him. “Yes!”

The sky was as empty as a dead man’s skull; the sun burned down, casting sharp shadows over his right shoulder. Hanging below the triangular wing, with nothing below his feet but a thin fiberglass shell, Rudi could almost imagine that he was flying in his own body, not dangling from a contraption of aluminum and nylon powered by a jumped-up lawn mower engine. Of course, letting his imagination get away from him was not a survival-enhancing move up here, a thousand feet above the forests that skirted the foothills of the Appalachians in this world—but he could indulge his senses for a few seconds between instrument checks and map readings, saving the precious memories for later.

“Is that the Wergat or the Ostwer?” he asked himself, seeing the glint of open water off to the northwest. He checked his compass, then glanced at the folded map. One advantage of using an ultralight: with an airspeed of fifty-five, tops, you didn’t wander off the page too fast. A few minutes later he got it pinned down. “It’s the Ostwer all right,” he told himself, penciling a loose ellipse on the map—his best estimate of his position, accurate to within a couple of miles. “Hmm.” He pushed gently on the control bar, keeping one eye on the air speed indicator as he began to climb.

The hills and rivers of the western reaches of the Gruinmarkt spread out below Rudi like a map. Over the next half hour he crawled towards the winding tributary river—it felt like a crawl, even though he was traveling twice as fast as any race-bred steed could gallop—periodically scanning the landscape with his binoculars. Roads hereabout were little more than dirt tracks, seldom visible from above the trees, but a large body of men left signs of their own.

That’s odd. He was nearly two thousand feet up, and a couple of miles short of the Ostwer—glancing over his left shoulder at a thin haze of high cloud that looked to be moving in—when a bright flash on the ground caught his eye. He stared for a moment, then picked up his binoculars.

Out towards the bend in the river—after the merger that produced the Wergat, where the trees thinned out and the buildings and walls and fields of Wergatfurt sprouted—something flashed. And there was smoke over the town, a thin smudge of dirty brown that darkened the sky, like a latrine dug too close to a river. “Hmm.” Rudi leaned sideways, banking gently to bring the trike round onto a course towards the smoke, still climbing (there was no sense in overflying trouble at low altitude on one engine), and took a closer look with his binoculars.

He was still several miles out, but he was close enough to recognize trouble when he saw it. The city gates were open, and one guardhouse was on fire—the source of the smoke.

“Rudi here, Pappa One, do you read?”

The reply took a few seconds to crackle in his earpiece: “Pappa One, we read.”

“Overflying Wergatfurt, got smoke on the ground, repeat, smoke. Guardhouse is on fire. Over.”

“Pappa One to Rudi, please repeat, over.”

“Stand by…”

Minutes passed, as Rudi checked his position against the river, and buzzed ever closer to the town and the palace three miles beyond it. The smoke was still rising as Rudi closed on the town, now at three thousand feet, safely out of range of arrows. He looked down, peering through binoculars, at a scene of chaos.

“Rudi here, Pappa One. Confirm trouble in Wergatfurt, cavalry force, battalion level or stronger. Cannon emplaced in town square, northeast guard tower on fire, tents outside city walls. Now heading towards Hjalmar Palace, over.”

“Pappa One, Rudi, please confirm number of troops, over.”

Rudi looked down. A flash caught his eye, then another one.

“Rudi here, am under fire from Wergatfurt, departing in haste, over.” His hands were clammy. Even though none of the musketry could possibly reach him, it was unnerving to be so exposed. He pulled back on the bar to nose gently down, gathering speed: the sooner he checked out the palace and got the hell away from this area, the happier he’d be.

Tracking up the shining length of the river, Rudi headed towards the concentric walls of the castle overlooking the Wergat. The Hjalmar Palace was an enormous complex, sprawling across a hillside, surrounded on three sides by water. It stood in plain sight, proud of the trees that clothed the land around it. Rudi raised his glasses and stared at the walls. From a mile out, it looked perfectly normal. Certainly the cannon stationed in Wergatsfurt hadn’t bitten any chunks out of those walls yet.

“Pappa One, Rudi, update please, over.”

“Rudi here. Approaching Hjalmar Palace at two five hundred feet. Looks quiet. Over.”

“Pappa One, Rudi, be advised palace has missed two watch rotations, over. Be alert for—”

Rudi missed the rest. Down below, sparks were flashing from the gatehouse. Startled, he let go of the binoculars and threw himself to the left, side-slipping away from the tower. A faint crackling sound reached his ears, audible over the buzz of the engine. “Rudi, Pappa One, am under fire from the palace, over.” He leaned back to the right, feeling a bullet pluck at the fabric of his wing. This shouldn’t be happening, he told himself, disbelieving: the altimeter was still showing two thousand feet. How are they reaching me? A horrible suspicion took hold. “Pappa One, Rudi, they’ve got—shit!”

For a moment he glanced down at the shattered casing of the radio, blinking stupidly. Then he leaned forward, trying to squeeze every shuddering mile per hour that was available out of the airframe, fuming and swearing at himself for not bringing a spare transceiver.

His unwelcome news—that whoever had taken the Hjalmar Palace had also taken its heavy machine guns, and knew how to use them—would now be delayed until he returned to Castle Hjorth.

It took them two hours to stagger back up the track to the waypoints blazed on the trees, and another half hour to reach the marked transit point. Walking in near-darkness with early flakes of snow whirling around them wasn’t Huw’s idea of a happy fun vacation: but his sense of urgency pushed him on, even though he was halfway to exhaustion. We’ve got to tell someone about this, he kept reminding himself. Important didn’t begin to describe the significance of the door into nowhere. We might not be the only people who can world-walk—or even the most effective at it.

Eventually he staggered into the clearing where they’d pitched the tent—now a dark hump against a darker backdrop of trees, lonely and small in the nighttime forest. “You ready?” he asked Yul.

“I think you should go first, bro,” his brother rumbled. “You’re the one who understands that stuff.”

“Yes but—” He made a snap decision: “—Follow me at once, both of you. We can recover the camp later if we need to. I may need witnesses to back me up.”

“I’d kill for a bath!” Elena ended on a squeak. “Let’s go!”

“Count of three,” said Huw. He bared his wrist to the chilly air and squinted. “One, two—”

He lurched as the accustomed headache kicked in, then gasped as the humid evening air of home hit him in the face like a wet flannel. The noise of insects was almost deafening after the melancholy silence of the forest. To his left, Elena blinked into view and winced theatrically. “I’m going to the bathroom,” she announced, unslinging her P90. “I may be some time.”

“Whatever.” Huw waited a few seconds before he turned to his brother, who was grinning like an idiot. “Is she always like this?”

“What? Oh, you should see her in polite society, bro.” He stared after her longingly.

Huw punched him on the arm. “Come on inside, I’ve got to report this immediately.”

He headed for the front room, shedding his pack and boots and finally his jacket and outer waterproof trousers as he went. The mobile phone was where he’d left it, plugged in and fully charged. He picked it up and unlocked it, then dialed by hand a number he’d committed to memory. It took almost thirty seconds to connect, but rang only once before it was answered. “This is Huw. The word today is ‘interstitial.’ Yes, I’m well, thank you, and yourself, sir. I want to speak to the duke immediately, if you can arrange it.”

Hulius watched him from the doorway, a faintly amused expression on his face. From upstairs, the sound of running water was barely audible.

Huw frowned. “Please hold,” Carlos had said. He was the duke’s man; he would have been told that Huw was working on a project for him, surely?

“Trouble?” asked Yul.

“Too early to say.” Huw sat down on the bedroll, cradling the phone. “I’m on hold—oh. Yes, sir, I am. We’re all there. I have an urgent report—what? Yes. Um. Um. Can you repeat that, please? Yes. Okay, I guess. Transfer me.”

He clamped his free hand over the mouthpiece and grimaced horribly at Yul. “Shit. We’ve been nobbled.”

“What—” Yul began, but Huw’s face turned to an attentive mask before he could continue.

“Yes? My lady? Yes, I remember. What’s going on? It’s about—oh, yes, indeed. You want—you want us to meet you where?—When?—Tomorrow? But that’s more than a thousand miles! We could fly—oh. Are you sure?” He rolled his eyes. “Yes, my lady. Um. We’ll have to get moving right away. Okay. You have my number? We’ll be there.”

He hung up then put the phone down deceptively gently, as if he’d rather have thrown it out the window.

“What was that about?”

Huw looked up at his brother. “We’d better roust Elena out of her bath. Shit.” He shook his head.

“Bro?”

“That was my lady d’Ost—one of his grace’s agents. I got through to the duke’s office but he’s busy right now. Carlos passed on orders to submit a written report: meanwhile we’re to get moving at once. We’ve got to drive all the way to the west coast and back on some fucking stupid errand. We’re to take our guns, and we’ve got to be in Las Vegas by noon tomorrow, so we’re going to be moving out right now. There’s a private plane waiting for us near Richmond but we’ve got to get there first and it’s going to take eight hours to get where we’re going once we’re airborne. Some kind of shit has hit the fan and they’ve got my name down as one of the trustees to deal with it!” He trailed off plaintively. “What’s going on?”

Hulius grunted. “Two and a half thousand miles, bro. They must really want you there badly.”

“Yeah. That’s what I’m afraid of. Hmm, Lady d’Ost. I wonder what she does for the duke?”

Otto stared at the buzzing gnat in the distance, and swore.

“Gregor, my compliments to Sir Geraunt and I request the pleasure of his company in the grand hall as a matter of urgency.”

The hand-man dashed off without saluting, catching the edge in his voice. The faint hum of the dot in the sky, receding like a bad dream of witchcraft, put Otto in mind of an angry yellowjacket. He could barely hear it over the ringing in his ears; the morning smelled of brimstone and gunsmoke. Too early, he thought. He’d barely taken the inner keep an hour ago: he’d counted on having at least a day to arrange things to his advantage. “Heidlor,” he called.

“Sir?” Heidlor had been saying something to one of the gunners, who was now hastily swabbing out the barrel of his weapon.

“Get the fishermen into the grand hall and have them set their nets up between ankle and knee level, leaving areas free as I discussed. Once they’ve done the hall they’re to do the barracks room, the duke’s chambers, the kitchen, and the residences, in that order. The carpenters are to start on the runways in the grand hall as soon as the fishermen are finished, and to move on in the same order. This is of the utmost urgency, we can expect visitors at any time. Should any of the craftsmen perform poorly, make an example of them—nail their tools to their hands or something.”

“Yes, sir.” Heidlor paused. “Anything else?”

Otto swallowed his first impulse to snap at the man for hanging around: he had a point. “Find Anders and Zornhau. Their lances are to go on duty as soon as they are able. Station the men with the fishers and carpenters, one guard for each craftsman, with drawn steel. In the grand hall, place one man every ten feet, and a pistoleer in each corner. For the cleared spaces, position two guards atop a chair or table or something. Warn them to expect witches to manifest out of thin air at any moment. Rotate every hour.” He paused for a moment. “That’s all.”

“Sir!” This time Heidlor didn’t dally.

Otto turned on his heel and marched back towards the steps leading down from the battlements. He didn’t need to look to know that his bodyguard—Frantz and four hand-picked pistoleers, equally good with witch gun or wheel lock, and armed with cavalry swords besides—were falling into line behind him. The way the witches fought, by stealth and treachery, his own life was as much under threat as that of any of his soldiers, if not more so.

The corkscrewing steps (spiraling widdershins, to give the advantage to a swordsman defending the upper floor) ended on the upper gallery of the great hall. Otto looked down on the fishermen and their guards, as they hastily strung their close-woven net across the floor at ankle height. Spikes, hammered heedlessly into the wooden paneling, provided support for the mesh of ropes. The carpenters were busy assembling crude runways on trestles above the netting, so that the guards could move between rooms without touching the floor. At the far end, near the western door that opened onto the grand staircase, there was a carefully planned open area: a killing ground for the witches who would be unable to enter from any other direction.

Sir Geraunt, the royal courier, was standing directly below him, looking around in obvious puzzlement. “Sir Geraunt!” Otto boomed over the balcony: “Will you join me up here directly?”

A pale face turned up towards him in surprise. “Sir, I would be delighted to do so, but this cat’s cradle your artisans are weaving is in my way. If you would permit me to cut the knot—”

“No sir, you may not. But if you proceed through the door to your left, you will find the stairway accessible—for now.”

A minute later Sir Geraunt emerged onto the balcony, shaking his head. A couple of weavers also emerged, lugging a roll of netting between them, but Otto sent them a wave of dismissal. “We are in less danger from the witches the higher we go, but the balcony must be netted in due course,” he explained, for the younger man was still staring at the work in the room below with an expression of profound bafflement.

“My lord, I fail to understand what you are doing here. Is it some ritual?”

“In a way,” Otto said easily. He walked to the edge of the balcony, and pointed down. “What do you see there?”

“A mess—” Sir Geraunt visibly forced himself to focus. “Nets strung across the floor, and walkways for your men. The witches appear from the land of shadows, do they not? Is this some kind of snare?”

“Yes.” Otto nodded. It wouldn’t do to let the witches retake the castle too easily—his majesty’s little plan wasn’t the kind of trick you could play twice. “Observe the open area, and the position of the guards—who are free to move where they will. I am informed by an unimpeachable source that the witches cannot arrive inside another object: that is, they may be able to appear within the building, but if the exact spot they desire to occupy is filled by a piece of furniture or a tree or another body, they are blocked. The netting is close enough to prevent them arriving anywhere on the covered floor. Thus, if they wish to pay us a visit, they must do so on the ground I leave to them. Where, you will note, my soldiers are awaiting them.”

Sir Geraunt’s eyes widened. “Truly, his majesty chose wisely in placing his faith in you!”

“Perhaps. We’ll see when the foe arrive. That was why I called for you, as a matter of fact: the witches have unforeseen resources. A most peculiar carriage just overflew us, carrying a man who is now, without a doubt, hastening to their headquarters with word of our presence. I had counted on having an entire day to prepare the defenses here, and the surprise outside. To make matters worse, my guards fired on the intruder—and missed. His majesty is still a day away. I therefore expect the witches to attack within a matter of hours.”

The knight’s reaction was predictable: “I stand before you. What can I do on your behalf?”

Otto managed to produce a thin smile. “I expect to kill a fair number of witches, but they have better guns than my men, and probably other surprises beside. So I am moving things forward. A reinforced company will stay here to take the first attack. The survivors will fall back through the tunnel to the river. Hopefully the resistance will force them to concentrate in the castle, but our witch-guns on the curtain walls, pointing inwards, will bottle them up for long enough to execute his majesty’s plan…”

It was shaping up to be a good day, thought Eric, as he twisting his left wrist with increasing effort to get the gyroball up to speed. A good day in a good week. Judith’s report from the scene under Scollay Square was the second bit of really good news after Mike Fleming’s remarkable reappearance. Heads we win: Lucius punches in the PAL code and switches off the bomb. Tails we don’t lose: we get to deal with a fizzle, but we keep Boston. There were cover stories available to deal with a fizzle, to sweep it under the rug—it would be messy, but a whole different matter from losing the core of a city. “I’m waiting on a definite match when they finish fuming for prints,” Judith had told him from the scene, “but we got some good UV-fluorescence images of patent prints in the dirt around the lock, and it sure looks like GREENSLEEVES’s prints.” Eric gave the ball another flick of the wrist. Which means we can take the kid gloves off now, he thought, with a warm glow of satisfaction. Just as soon as we’ve confirmed no other stock is missing. And he went back to staring at his desk.

Back when telephone switchboards were simple looms of wires and plug boards, different networks needed different wires. You could judge how important an official was by how many phone handsets he had on his desk. Life had been a lot simpler in those days. Today, Eric had just the one handset—and it plugged into his computer instead of a hole in the wall. He glanced at the clock in his taskbar to confirm the call was late, just as the computer rang.

“Smith here.” He leaned back.

“Eric? Mandy in two-zero-two.”

“Hi Mandy, Jim here. Y’all had a good day so far?”

“I’ll take roll call.” Eric grinned humorously. The list of names on the conference call was marching down the side of his screen. “Looks like we’re missing Alain and Sonya. I’d give them another five minutes, but I’ve got places to be and meetings to go to, so if we can get started?”

The field ops conference call was under way. Like any policing or intelligence-gathering operation, the hunt for the extradimensional narcoterrorists called for coordination and intelligence sharing: and with agents scattered across four time zones it couldn’t be carried out by calling everyone into a briefing room. But unlike a policing job, some aspects of the task were extraordinarily sensitive and could not be discussed, and unlike a normal intelligence operation, things were too fluid and unstable to leave to the usual bureaucratic channels of written reports and weekly bulletins. So the daily ops call had become a fixture within FTO, or at least within that part of FTO that was focused on hunting the bad guys within the Continental United States. Each field office delegated a staff intelligence officer who could be trusted to filter the information stream for useful material and refrain from mentioning in public those projects that not everyone was cleared for. Or so the post-hoc justification went. In practice, they gave Eric a chance to keep a finger on the pulse of his department at ground level without spending all his time bouncing around the airline map.

In practice, normally all it was usually good for was an hour’s intensive wrist exercise with the gyroball and a frustrating ten minutes writing up a summary for Dr. James. But today, Eric could smell something different in the air.

“…Following up the mobile phone thing via Wal-Mart, we’ve made some progress over here.”

Eric snapped to full alert, glancing at the screen. It was Mandy, from the team in Stony Brook. “How many phones?” He cut in.

“I was just getting to that.” She sounded offended. “The suspects bought two hundred and forty-six over the past six months, all the same model, batches of ten at a time, right up until yesterday. Wal-Mart has been very cooperative, and we’ve been going over their videotapes—they think it’s some kind of fraud ring—and it looks like a Clan operation for sure. It’s the same two men each week: if they follow the usual pattern—” the Clan had a rigid approach to buying supplies, always paying cash for small quantities at regular intervals “—we could lift them next week. We’ve also got a list of phone IMEIs and SIM numbers they bought and we’re about to go to Cingular to see if—”

“Don’t do that,” Eric interrupted again. He glanced around frantically, looking for a pen and a Post-it: he hadn’t expected this much information, so soon. “We have other resources to call on who are better at dealing with this angle.” To be precise, Bob and Alice at No Such Agency, who—given a mobile phone’s identifying fingerprints—could tell you everything about them. This was the trouble with ex-FBI staff: they did great investigative work, but they didn’t know what external strings they could pull with Defense. “E-mail me the list immediately,” he ordered. “I’ll take it from there.”

“Certainly, I’ll send them right after—”

“No, I meant now.” The gyroball, unnoticed, wound down. “If any of those phones are switched on, we can get more than a trace.” He took a deep breath. “I’m going offline now, waiting on that e-mail, Mandy.” He hit the hangup button and shook his head, then speed-dialed a different number.

The phone picked up immediately. “James here.”

“It’s me. I assume you’re in the loop over Lucius’s little project? Well, Stony Brook has just hit the mother-lode, too. Mobiles, numbers. I’m forwarding everything to EARDROP. If any of them turn out to be live I intend to put some assets on the ground and tag them—then it’s time to turn up the heat. If Herz confirms that the gadget under Government Center was planted by GREENSLEEVES, and Dr. Rand’s friends confirm that no other weapons of the same class are missing, I propose to activate COLDPLAY.”

“Excellent,” said James. “Get started, then get back to me. It’s time to hurt these bastards.”

Three coaches full of medieval weekend warriors drove in convoy through the Massachusetts countryside, heading towards Concord.

The coaches were on lease from a small private hire firm, and someone had inexpertly covered their sides with decals reading HISTORY FAIRE TOURING COMPANY. The passengers, mostly male but with some women among them, wore surcoats over chain mail, and the luggage racks overhead were all but rattling with swords and scabbards: the air conditioners wheezed as they fought a losing battle with the summer heat. They looked like nothing so much as the away team for the Knights of the Round Table, on their way to a joust.

The atmosphere in the coach was tense, and some of the passengers were dealing with it by focusing on irrelevancies. “Why do we have to wear all this crap?” complained Martyn, running his thumb round the neckline of his surcoat. “It’s about as authentic as a jet fighter at the battle of Gettysburg.”

“You’ll grin and bear it,” grunted Helmut. “It’s cover, is what it is. You can swap it for camo when we link up with the wardrobe department. And it’ll do in a hurry, if it comes to it…”

“Consider yourself lucky,” Irma muttered darkly. “Ever tried to fight in a bodice?”

Martyn blew a raspberry. “Are we there yet?”

Helmut checked the display on his GPS unit. “Fifteen miles. Hurry up and wait.” Someone down the aisle groaned theatrically. Helmut turned, his expression savage: “Shut the fuck up, Sven! When I want your opinion I’ll ask for it.”

The medieval knight at the wheel drove on, his shoulders slightly hunched, his face red and sweating. The lance members wore full plate over their machine-woven chain vests and Camelbak hydration systems—it was much lighter than it looked, but it was hellishly hot in the sunlight streaming through the coach windows. Heat prostration, Helmut reminded himself, was the reason heavy armor had gone out of fashion in this world—that, and its declining utility against massed gunfire. “Hydration time, guys, everyone check your buddies. Top off now. Victor, make with the water cart.”

A police cruiser pulled out to overtake the coach and Helmut tensed, in spite of himself. Thirty assorted knights and maids on their way to a joust and a medieval faire shouldn’t set the traffic cop’s alarm bells ringing the way that thirty soldiers in American-style body armor would, but there was a limit to how much inspection their cover could handle. If the police officer pulled them over to search the baggage compartment he’d be signing his own death warrant: Helmut and his platoon of Clan Security soldiers were sitting on top of enough firepower to reenact a much more modern conflict.

“Keep going.” The police car swept past and Helmut sent Martyn a fishy stare. “Mine’s a Diet Pepsi,” Martyn said, oblivious. Helmut shook his head and settled back to wait.

Some time later, the driver braked and swung the coach into a wide turn. “Coming up on the destination,” he remarked loudly.

Helmut sat up and leaned forward. “The others?”

“Braun is right behind me. Can’t see Stefan but I’d be surprised if—”

Helmut’s phone rang. Gritting his teeth, Helmut answered it. “Yes?”

“We see you. Just to say, the park’s clear and we’re keeping the bystanders out of things.”

“Bystanders?”

The voice at the other end of the connection was laconic: “You throw a Renaissance Faire, you get spectators. Ysolde’s telling them it’s a closed rehearsal and they should come back tomorrow.”

Helmut buried his fingertips in his beard and scratched his chin. “Good call. What about the—” he checked his little black book “—ticket seats?”

“They’re going up. A couple of problems with the GPS but we should be ready for the curtain-raiser in about an hour.”

Helmut glanced at his book again to confirm that curtain-raiser was today’s code word for assault team insertion. One of the constraints they’d been working under ever since the big DEA bust six months ago was the assumption that at any time their cellular phones (carefully sanitized, stolen, or anonymously purchased for cash) might be monitored or tracked by hostile agencies. Clan Security—in addition to fighting a civil war in the Gruinmarkt—had been forced to rediscover a whole bunch of 1940s-era communication security procedures.

“Call me if there’s a change in status before we arrive,” Helmut ordered, then ended the call. “Showtime,” he added, for the benefit of the audience seated behind him.

“It’s not over until the fat lady sings,” Martyn snarked in Irma’s direction: she glared at him, then drew her dagger and began to ostentatiously clean her already-spotless nails.

The coach turned through a wide gateway flanked by signs advertising the faire, bumped across loose gravel and ruts in the ground, then came to a halt in a packed-earth car park at one end of a small open field. A couple of big top circus tents dominated it, and a group of men with a truck and a stack of scaffolding were busy erecting a raised seating area. To an untrained eye it might easily be mistaken for a public open-air event, close by Concord: that was the whole idea. Real SCA members or habitual RenFaire goers weren’t that common, and those that might notice this event would probably write it off as some kind of commercial rip-off, aimed at the paying public. Meanwhile, the general reaction of that public to a bunch of people in inaccurate historical costume was more likely to be one of amusement than fear. Which was exactly what Riordan had proposed and Angbard had accepted.

In fact, the strip mall on the far side of the open space was owned by a shell company that answered to a Clan council director—because it was doppelgangered, located on the identical spot occupied by a Clan property in the other world. And the supposed historical faire was one of several ClanSec contingency plans designed to cover the rapid deployment of military units up to battalion size into the Gruinmarkt.

“Let’s move those kit bags out,” Helmut barked over his shoulder as the driver scrambled to open the baggage doors on the side of the coach. “I’ll have the guts of any man who opens his kit before he gets it inside the assembly tent.” His troopers scrambled to drag their heavy sports bags towards the nearer big top: he’d checked that they’d been properly packed, and while any hypothetical witnesses would see plenty of swords and “historical shit” as Erik called it, they wouldn’t get even a hint of the SAWs and M16s that were the real point of this masquerade—much less the M47 Dragon that Stefan’s fire support platoon were bringing to the party.

The setup in the tent would have surprised anyone expecting a show. Half a dozen men and women—officers in Clan security, comptrollers of the postal service, and a willowy blonde in a business suit who Helmut was certain was one of the duke’s harem of assassin-princesses—were gathered around a table covered with detailed floor plans: three more, armed with theodolites, laser range finders, and an elaborate GPS unit were carefully planting markers around the bare earth floor. At the far side, a work crew was unloading aluminum scaffolding and planks from the back of a truck, while another gang was frantically bolting them together at locations indicated by the survey team. Helmut left his soldiers scrambling to pull camouflage surcoats and helmets on over their armor, and headed straight for the group at the table, halting two meters short of it.

The duke glanced up from the map. As usual, he was impeccably tailored, dressed for the boardroom: a sixty-something executive, perhaps, or a mid-level politician. But there was a feral anger burning in his eyes that was normally kept carefully banked: Helmut suppressed a shudder. “Third platoon is dismounting and will be ready to go in the next ten minutes,” he said as calmly as he could.

The duke stared at him for a moment. “Good enough,” he rasped, then glanced sideways at his neighbor, whom Helmut recognized—with a surprised double-take—as Earl Oliver Hjorth, an unregenerate supporter of the backwoods conservative cabal and the last man he’d have expected to see in the duke’s confidences. “I told you so.”

The earl nodded, looking thoughtful.

“Is there any word from Earl Riordan?” The duke turned his attention towards a plump fellow at the far side of the table.

“Last contact was fifty-two minutes ago, sir,” he said, without even bothering to check the laptop in front of him. “Coming up in eight. I can expedite that if you want…”

“Not necessary.” The duke shook his head, then looked back at Helmut. “Tell me what you know.”

Helmut shrugged. Despite the full suit of armor, the gesture was virtually silent—there was neoprene in all the right places, another of the little improvements ClanSec had made to their equipment over the years. World-walkers were valuable enough to be worth the cost of custom-fitted armor, and they hadn’t been idle in applying new ideas and materials to the classic patterns. “Stands to reason, he’s hit the Hjalmar Palace, or you wouldn’t have called us out. Is there any word from Wergatsfurt or Ostgat?”

The duke inclined his head. “Wergatsfurt is taken. Ostgat hasn’t heard a whisper, as of—” He snapped his fingers.

“Thirty-seven minutes ago,” said the ice blonde. She sounded almost bored.

“So we were strung out with a feint at Castle Hjorth and the Rurval estates, but instead he’s concentrated eighty miles away and hit the Hjalmar Palace,” summarized Helmut. He glanced around at the scaffolding that was going up. “It’s fallen?”

“Within minutes,” Angbard confirmed. He was visibly fuming, but keeping a tight rein on his anger.

“Treachery?”

“That’s my concern,” said the duke, with such icy restraint that Helmut backed off immediately. The blonde, however, showed no sign of surprise: she studied Helmut with such bland disinterest that he had to suppress a shudder.

So we’ve got a leak, he realized with a sinking feeling. It didn’t stop with Matthias, did it? “Should I assume that the intruders know about doppelganger defenses?” He glanced round. “Should I assume they have world-walkers of their own?”

“Not the latter, Gray Witch be thanked.” Angbard hesitated. “But it would be unwise to assume that they don’t know how to defend against us, so every minute delayed increases the hazard.” He reached a decision. “We can’t afford to leave it in their hands, any more than we can afford to demolish it completely. Our options are therefore to go in immediately with everything we’ve got to hand, or to wait until we have more forces available and the enemy has had more time to prepare for us. My inclination is towards the immediate attack, but as you will be leading it, I will heed your advice.”

Helmut grimaced. “Give me enough rope, eh? As it happens, I agree with you. Especially if they have an informant, we need to get in there as fast as possible. Do we know if they are aware of the treason room?”

“No, we don’t.” Angbard’s expression was thunderous. “If you wish to use it, you will have to scout it out.”

“Aye, well, there are worse prospects.” Helmut turned on his heel and raised his voice. “Martyn! Ryk! To me. I’ve got a job for you!” Turning back to the duke, he added: “If the treason room is clear, we’ll go in that way, with diversions in the north guard room and the grand hall. Otherwise, my thinking is to assault directly through the grand hall, in force. The higher we go in—” he glanced up at the scaffolding, then over to the hydraulic lift that two guards were bringing in through the front of the tent “—the better I’ll like it.”

Motion sickness was a new and unpleasant experience to Miriam, but she figured it was a side effect of spending days on end aboard a swaying express train. Certainly it was the most plausible explanation for her delicate stomach. She couldn’t wait to get solid ground under her feet again. She’d plowed through about half the book by Burroughs, but it was heavy going; where some of the other Leveler tracts she’d read had been emotionally driven punch-in-the-gut diatribes against the hereditary dictators, Burroughs took a far drier, theoretical approach. He’d taken up an ideological stance with roots Miriam half-recognized—full of respectful references to Voltaire, for example, and an early post-settlement legislator called Franklin, who had turned to the vexatious question of the rights of man in his later years—and had teased out a consistent strand of political thought that held the dictatorship of the hereditary aristocracy to be the true enemy of the people. Certainly she could see why Burroughs might have been exiled, and his books banned, by the Hanoverian government. But the idea that he might be relevant to the underground still struck her as peculiar. Do I really want to get involved in this? she asked herself. It was all very well tagging along with Erasmus until she could get her hands on her laptop again and zip back to the United States, but the idea of getting involved in politics made her itch. Especially the kind of politics they had here.

“He’s a theoretician, isn’t he?” she asked Erasmus, as their carriage slid through the wooded hills. “What’s Lady Bishop’s interest?”

He stared out of the window silently, until she thought he wasn’t going to reply. Then he cleared his throat. “Sir Adam has credibility. Old King George sought his counsel. Before Black Monday, he was a Member of Parliament, the first elected representative to openly declare for the radicals. And to be fair, the book—it’s his diagnosis of the ailment afflicting the body politic, not his prescription. He’s the chair of the central committee, Miriam. We need him in the capital—”

There was a sudden jerk, and Miriam was pushed forward in her seat. The train began to slow. “What’s going on?”

“Odd.” He frowned. “We’re still in open country.” The train continued to slow, brakes squealing below them. The window put the lie to Erasmus’s comment almost immediately, as a low row of wooden shacks slid past. Brakes still squealing, the long train drifted to a halt. Erasmus glanced at her, worried. “This can’t be good.”

“Maybe it’s just engine trouble? Or the track ahead?” That’s right, clutch at straws, she told herself. Her hand went to her throat, where she had taken to wearing James Lee’s locket on a ribbon: at a pinch she could lift Erasmus and land them both in the same world as the Gruinmarkt, but…“I can get us out of here, but I know nothing about where we’d end up.”

“We’ve got papers.” Now he sounded as if he was grasping at straws, and knew it.

“Don’t anticipate trouble.” She swallowed.

“Get your bag. If they want a bribe—”

“Who?”

“How should I know?” He pointed at the window: “Whoever’s stopped the train.”

The door at the end of the compartment opened abruptly, and a steward stepped inside. He puffed out his brass-buttoned chest like a randy pigeon: “Sorry to announce, but there’s been a delay. We should be moving soon, but—” A bell sounded, ringing like a telephone outside the compartment. “’Scuse me.” He ducked back out.

“What kind of delay?” Miriam asked.

“I don’t know.” Erasmus stood up. “Got everything in your bag?” He raised an eyebrow.

Miriam, thinking of the small pistol, swallowed, then nodded. “Yeah.” It was stuffy in the un–air-conditioned carriage, but she stood up and headed over to the coat rail by the door, to pick up her jacket and the bulging handbag she’d transferred the notebook computer into. “Thinking of getting off early?”

“If we have to.” He frowned. “If this is—”

Footsteps. Miriam paused, her coat over her left arm. “Yes?” she asked coolly as the door opened.

It was a middle-aged man, wearing the uniform of a railroad ticket inspector. He looked upset. “Sir? Ma’am? I’m sorry to disturb you, but would you mind stepping this way? I’m sure we can sort this out and be on our way soon.”

Erasmus glanced sideways at her. Miriam dry-swallowed, wishing her throat wasn’t dry. Bluff it out, or…? “Certainly,” he said smoothly: “Perhaps you can tell us what it’s about?”

“In the station, sir,” said the inspector, opening the door of the carriage. The steps were already lowered, meeting the packed earth of a rural platform with a weathered clapboard hut—more like a signal box than a station house—hunched beside it. Only the orange groves to either side suggested a reason for there to be a station here. The inspector hurried anxiously over towards the building, not looking back until he neared the door. Miriam caught Burgeson’s eye: he nodded, slowly. The Polis would just have come aboard and arrested us, wouldn’t they? she told herself. Probably…

As her companion approached the door, Miriam curled her fingers around the butt of her pistol. The inspector held the door open for them, his expression anxious. “The electrograph from your cousin requested a private meeting,” he said apologetically. “This was the best I could arrange—”

“My cousin?” Miriam asked, her voice rising as the door opened: “I don’t have a cousin—”

A whoosh of escaping steam dragged her attention up the line. Slowly and majestically, the huge locomotive was straining into motion, the train of passenger cars squealing and bumping behind it. Miriam spun round, far too late to make a run back for it. “Shit,” she muttered under her breath. A steam car was bumping along the rutted track that passed for a service road to the station. “Double shit.” Erasmus was frozen in the doorway, one hand seeming to rest lightly on the inspector’s shoulder. Another car came into view along the road, trailing the first one’s rooster-tail of dust.

“Please don’t!” The inspector was nearly hysterical.

“Who set this up?” Erasmus asked, his tone deceptively calm.

“I don’t know! I was only following orders!” Miriam ducked round the side of the station house again, glancing in through the windows. She saw an empty waiting room furnished only with a counter, beyond the transom of which was an evidently empty ticket office. It’s not the station, she realized, near-hysteria bubbling under.

“Into the waiting room,” she snapped, bringing the revolver out of her pocket. “Move!”

The inspector stared at her dumbly, as if she’d grown a second head, but Erasmus nodded: “Do as she says,” he told the man. The inspector shuffled into the waiting room. Erasmus followed, his movements almost bored, but his right hand never left the man’s shoulder.

“How long ’til they get here?” Miriam demanded.

“I don’t know!” He was nearly in tears. “They just said to make you wait!”

“They,” said Erasmus. “Who would they be?”

“Please don’t kill me!”

The door to the ticket office was ajar. Miriam kicked it open and went through it with her pistol out in front. The office was indeed empty. On the ticket clerk’s desk a message flimsy was waiting. Miriam peered at it in the gloom. DEAR CUZ SIT TIGHT STOP UNCLE A SENDS REGARDS STOP WILL MEET YOU SOONEST SIGNED BRILL.

Well, that settles it. Miriam lowered her gun to point at the floor and headed back to the waiting room.

“—The Polis!” moaned the inspector. “I’ve got three wee ones to feed! Please don’t—”

Shit, meet fan. Even so, it struck her as too big a coincidence to swallow. Maybe the Polis are tapping the wires? That would do it. Brilliana had figured out where she was, which train she was on, and signaled her to wait, not realizing someone else might rise to the bait.

Burgeson’s expression was grim. “Miriam, the door, please.”

“Let’s not do anything too hasty,” she said. “There’s an easy way out of this.”

“Oh please—”

“Shut up, you. What do you have in mind?”

Miriam waved at the ticket office. “He’s not lying about my cousin: she’s on her way. Trouble is, if we bug out before she gets here she’s going to walk into them. So I think we ought to sit tight.” She closed the door anyway, and glanced round, looking for something to bar it with. “I can get us both out of here in an emergency,” she said, a moment of doubt cutting in when she recalled the extreme nausea of her most recent attempts to world-walk.

The first car—more like a steam-powered minivan, Miriam noted—rounded the back of the station and disappeared from sight. Almost two minutes had passed since they reached the station. Miriam slid aside from the windows, while Burgeson did likewise. Boots thudded on the ground outside: the only sounds within the building were the pounding of blood in her ears and the quiet sobbing of the ticket inspector.

“Mr. Burgeson!” The voice behind the bullhorn sounded almost jovial: “And the mysterious Mrs. Fletcher! Or should I say, Beckstein?” He made it sound like an accusation. “Welcome to California! My colleague Inspector Smith has told me all about you both and I thought, why, we really ought to have a little chat. And I thought, why not have it somewhere quiet-like, and intimate, instead of in town where there are lots of flapping ears to take note of what we say?”

Across the room, Burgeson was mouthing something at her. His face was in shadow, making it hard to interpret. The inspector knelt in the middle of the floor, in a square of sunlight, sobbing softly as he rocked from side to side wringing his hands. The appearance of the Polis had quite unmanned him.

“Like this: parlez vous Francoise, Madame Beckstein?”

Miriam felt faint. They think I’m a French spy? Either the heat or the tension or some other strain was plucking her nerves like guitar strings. Somehow Erasmus had fetched up almost as far away as it was possible to get, twelve feet away across open ground overlooked by a window. To get him out of here one or the other of them would need to cross that expanse of empty floor, in front of—

The ticket inspector snapped, flickering from broken passivity to panic in a fraction of a second. He lurched to his feet and ran at the window, screaming, “Don’t hurt me!”

Erasmus brought his right hand up, and Miriam saw the pistol in it. He hesitated for a long moment as the inspector fumbled with the window, throwing it wide and leaning out. “Let me—” he shouted: then a spatter of shots cracked through the glass, and any sense of what he had been trying to say.

The bullhorn blared, unattended, as the inspector’s body slumped through the half-open window and Miriam, seeing her chance, ducked and darted across the room, avoiding the lit spaces on the floor, to fetch up beside Burgeson.

“I think they want you alive,” he said, a death’s-head grin spreading across his gaunt cheekbones. “Can you get yourself out of here?”

“I can get us both out—” She fumbled with the top button of her blouse, hunting for the locket chain.

“After how you were last time?”

Miriam was still looking for a cutting reply when the bullhorn started up again. “If you come out with your hands up we won’t use you for target practice! That’s official, boys, don’t shoot them if they’ve got their hands up! We want to ask you some questions, and then it’s off to the Great Lakes with you if you cooperate. That’s also a promise. What it’s to be is up to you. Full cooperation and your lives! Hurry, folks, this is a bargain, never to be repeated. Because you’re on my manor, and Gentleman Jim Reese prides himself on his hospitality, I’ll give you a minute to think about it before we shoot you. Use it carefully.”

“Were you serious about waiting around for your friends?” Burgeson asked ironically. “Is a minute long enough?”

“But—” Miriam took a deep breath. “Brace yourself.” She put her arms around Erasmus, hugging him closely. His breath on her cheek smelled faintly stale. “Hang on.” She dug her heels into the floor and lifted, staring over his shoulder into the enigmatic depths of the open locket she had wrapped around her left wrist. The knot writhed like chain lightning, sucking her vision into its contortions—then it spat her out. She gasped involuntarily, her head pulsing with a terrible, sudden tension. She focused again, and her stomach clenched. Then she was dizzy, unsure where she was. I’m standing up, she realized. That’s funny. Her feet weren’t taking her weight. There was something propping her up. A shoulder. Erasmus’s shoulder. “Hey, it didn’t—”

She let go of him and slumped, doubling over at his feet as her stomach clenched painfully. “I know,” he said sadly, above her. “You’re having difficulty, aren’t you?”

The bullhorn: “Thirty seconds! Make ’em count!”

“Do you think you can escape on your own?” Burgeson asked.

“Don’t—know.” The nausea and the migraine were blocking out her vision, making thought impossible. “N-not.”

“Then I see no alternative to—” Erasmus laid one hand on the doorknob “—this.”

Miriam tried to roll over as he yanked, hard, raising the pistol in his right hand and ducking low. He squeezed off a shot just as Gentleman Jim, or one of his brute squad, opened fire: clearly the Polis did things differently here. Then there was a staccato burst of fire and Erasmus flopped over, like a discarded hand puppet.

Miriam screamed. A ghastly sense of déjà vu tugged at her: Erasmus, what have you done? She rose to her knees and began to raise her gun, black despairing fury tugging her forward.

There was another burp of fire, ominously rapid and regular, like a modern automatic weapon. That’s funny, she thought vacantly, tensing in anticipation. She managed to unkink her left hand, but even a brief glance at the locket told her that it was hopeless. The design swum in her vision like a poisonous toadstool, impossible to stomach.

Erasmus rolled over and squeezed off two more shots methodically. Miriam shook her head incredulously: You can’t do that, you’re dead! Someone screamed hoarsely, continuously, out behind the station. Shouts and curses battered at her ears. The hammering of the machine gun started up again. Someone else screamed, and the sound was cut short. What’s going on? she wondered, almost dazed.

The shots petered out with a final rattle from the machine gun. The silence rang in her ears like a tapped crystal wineglass. Her head ached and her stomach was a hot fist clenched below her ribs. “Erasmus,” she called hoarsely.

“Miriam. My lady, are you hurt?”

The familiar, crystal-clear voice shattered the bell of glass that surrounded her. “Brill!” she cried.

“My lady, are you alone in there?”

Urgency. Miriam tried to take stock. “I think so,” she managed. “I’m with Erasmus.”

“She’s not hurt, but she’s sick,” Burgeson called out. He shuffled backwards, into the shadowy interior of the waiting room, still clutching his pistol in his hand. He focused on Miriam. “It’s your girl, Brill, isn’t it?” he hissed.

“Yes,” she choked out, almost overwhelmed with emotion. He’s not dead! More than half a year had passed since that terrible moment in Fort Lofstrom, waiting beside Roland’s loose-limbed body, hoping against hope. And Brill—

“Then I suggest we move out of here at once!” Brilliana called. “I’m going to stand up. Hold your fire.”

“I’m holding,” Erasmus called hoarsely.

“Good. I’m coming in now.”

Another wild goose chase, Judith told herself gloomily. No sooner had she gotten back to the serious job of shadowing Mike Fleming like he was the president or something, no sooner had she managed to breathe a series of extended gasps of relief at the news—that Source GREENSLEEVES fingerprints had been all over the casing and it was missing from inventory and Dr. Rand had punched in the PAL code and switched it off without any drama, and all the other weapons in its class were present and accounted for—than the colonel came down with his tail on fire and a drop everything order of the day: absolutely typical. “Leave a skeleton team on site and get everyone else up here now,” he said, all trace of his usually friendly exterior gone. Crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes that hadn’t been there the week before. Something’s eating him, she’d realized, and left it to Rich Hall to ask what the rush job was and get his head bitten off.

Which was why, four hours later, she was sitting in the back seat of an unmarked police car behind officers O’Grady and Pike, keeping an eye on a strip mall and a field with a big top in it and a sign saying HISTORY FAIRE outside.

“What is it we’re supposed to be looking for, ma’am?” Pike asked, mildly enough.

“I’ll tell you when I see it.” The waiting was getting to her. She glanced once more at the laptop with the cellular modem and the GPS receiver sitting next to her. Seven red dots pocked the map of Concord like a disease. Updated in real time by the colonel’s spooky friends Bob and Alice, no less, the laptop could locate a phone to within a given GSM cell…but that took in the mall, the field, and a couple of streets on either side. “There are tricks we can play with differential signal strength analysis to pin down exactly where a phone is,” Smith had told her, “but it takes time. So go and sit there and keep your eyes peeled while we try to locate it.”

The mall was about as busy—or as quiet—as you’d expect on any weekday around noon. Cars came, cars went. A couple of trucks rumbled past, close enough to the parked police car to rock it gently on its suspension. O’Grady had parallel-parked in front of a hardware store just beside the highway, ready to move.

“We could be here a while,” she said quietly. “Just as long as it isn’t a wild goose chase.”

“I didn’t think you people went on wild goose chases,” said Pike. Then she caught his eye in the rearview mirror. He reddened.

“We try not to,” she said dryly, keeping her face still. Her FBI credentials were still valid, and if anyone checked them out they’d get something approximating the truth: on long-term assignment to Homeland Security, do not mess with this woman. “We’re expecting company.”

“Like that?” O’Grady gestured through the window. Herz tracked his finger, and stifled a curse. On the screen beside her, an eighth red dot had lit up in her cell.

“It’s possible.” She squinted at the coach. Men were coming out of the big top to open the gate, admitting it.

The laptop beeped. A ninth red dot on the map—and another coach of HISTORY FAIRE folks was slowing down to turn into the field.

“Just what do they do at a history faire anyway?” asked Pike. “Hey, will you look at that armor!”

“Count them, please,” Judith muttered, pulling out her own phone. She speed-dialed a number. “Larry? I’ve got two coachloads that showed up around the same time as two more positives. Can you give me a background search on—” she squinted through her compact binoculars, reading off the number plates “—and forward it to Eric? He’s going to want to know how many to bring to the party.”

“What’s that they’re carrying?” Pike grunted.

Judith blinked, then focused on a group of men in armor, lugging heavy kit bags in through the door of the marquee. “This doesn’t add up—” she began. Then one of the armored figures lifted the awning higher, to help his mates: and she got a glimpse at what was going on inside.

“Officers, we’re not dressed for this party and I think we should get out of here right now.”

“But they—” began Pike.

“Listen to the agent.” O’Grady grimaced and started the engine. “Okay, where do you want me to go, ma’am?”

“Let’s just get out of the line of sight. Keep moving, within a couple of blocks. I’m going to phone for backup.”

“Is it a terror cell? Here?”

She met his worried eyes in the mirror. “Not as such,” she said grimly, “but it’s nothing your department can handle. Once you drop me off you’re going to be throwing up a cordon around the area: my people will take it from here.” She hit a different speed-dial button. “Colonel? Herz. You were right about what’s going on here. I’m pulling out now, and you’re good to go in thirty…”

Rudi squinted into the sunlight and swore as he tried to gauge the wind speed. The walls of Castle Hjorth loomed before him like granite thunderclouds—except they’re far too close to the ground, aren’t they? He shook his head, fatigue adding its leaden burden to his neck muscles, and glanced at the air speed indicator once more. Thirty-two miles per hour, just above stall speed, too high… the nasty buzzing, flapping noise from the left wing was quieter, though, the ripstop nylon holding. He leaned into the control bar, banking to lose height. Small figures scurried around the courtyard below him as he spotted the crude wind sock he’d improvised over by the pump house. Okay, let’s get this over with.

The ultralight bounced hard on the cobblestones, rattling him painfully from spine to teeth, and he killed the engine. For a frightening few seconds he wondered if he’d misjudged the rollout, taking it too near the carriages drawn up outside the stables—but the crude brakes bit home in time, stopping him with several meters to spare. “Phew,” he croaked. His lips weren’t working properly and his shoulders felt as stiff as planks: he cleared his throat and spat experimentally, aiming for a pile of droppings.

Rudi had originally intended to go and find Riordan and make his report as soon as he landed, but as he took his hands off the control bar he felt a wave of fatigue settle over his shoulders like a leaden blanket. Flying the ultralight was a very physical experience—no autopilots here!—and he’d been up for just over three hours, holding the thing on course in the sky with his upper arms. His hands ached, his face felt as if it was frozen solid, and his shoulders were stiff—though not as stiff as they’d have been without his exercise routine. He unstrapped himself slowly, like an eighty-year-old getting out of a car, took off his helmet, and was just starting on his post-flight checklist when he heard a shout from behind. “Rudi!”

He looked round. It was, of course, Eorl Riordan, in company with a couple of guards. He didn’t look happy. “Sir.” He stood up as straight as he could.

“Why didn’t you report in?” demanded the eorl.

Rudi pointed mutely at the remains of the radio taped to the side of the trike. “I came as fast as I could. Let me make this safe, and I’ll report.”

“Talk while you work,” said Riordan, a trifle less aggressively. “What happened?”

Rudi unplugged the magneto—no point risking some poor fool chopping their arm off by playing with the prop—and began to check the engine for signs of damage. “They shot at me from the battlements and the gate-house,” he said, kneeling down to inspect the mounting brackets. “Took out the radio, put some holes in the wing. I was two thousand feet up—they’ve got their hands on modern weapons from somewhere.” He shook his head. Shit. “If anyone’s going in—”

“Too late.”

Rudi looked up. Riordan’s face was white. “Joachim, signal to the duke: defenders at the Hjalmar Palace have guns. No, wait.” Riordan stared at Rudi. “Could you identify them?”

“I’m not sure.” Rudi stood up laboriously. “Wait up.” He walked round the wing—tipped forward so that the central spar lay on the ground—and found the holes he was looking for. “Shit. Looks like something relatively large. They were automatic, sir, machine guns most likely. Didn’t we get rid of the last of the M60s a long time ago?”

Riordan leaned over him to inspect the bullet holes. “Yes.” He turned to the messenger: “Joachim, signal the duke, defenders at the Hjalmar Palace have at least one—”

“Two, sir.”

“Two heavy machine guns. Go now!”

Joachim trotted away at the double, heading for the keep. A couple more guards were approaching, accompanying one of Riordan’s officers. For his part, the eorl was inspecting the damage to the ultralight. “You did well,” he said quietly. “Next time, though, don’t get so close.”

Rudi swallowed. He counted four holes in the port wing, and the wrecked radio. He walked round the aircraft and began to go over the trike’s body. There was a hole in the fiberglass shroud, only inches away from where his left leg had been. “That’s good advice, sir. If I’d known what they had I’d have given them a wider berth.” It was hard to focus on anything other than the damage to his aircraft. “What’s happening?”

“Helmut and his men went in half an hour ago.” Riordan took a deep breath. “When will you be ready to fly again?”

Whoa! Rudi straightened up again and stretched, experimentally. Something in his neck popped. “I need to check my bird thoroughly, and I need to patch the holes, but that’ll take a day to do properly. If it’s an emergency and if there’s no other damage I can fly again within the hour, but—” he glanced at the sky “—there’re only about three more flying hours in the day, sir. And I’ve only got enough fuel here for one more flight, anyway. It’s not hard to get on the other side, but I wasn’t exactly building a large stockpile. To be honest, it would help if we had another pilot and airframe available.” He shrugged.

Riordan leaned close. “If we survive the next week, I think that’ll be high on his grace’s plans for us,” he admitted. “But right now, the problem we face is knowing what’s going on. You didn’t see any sign of the pretender’s army, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t out there. Get your work done, get some food, then stand by to go out again before evening—even if it’s only for an hour, we need to know whether there’s an army marching down our throat here or whether the Hjalmar Palace is the focus of his attack.”

Brill was one of the last people Miriam had expected to meet in California—and she seemed to have brought a bunch of others with her. “You’re unhurt?” Brill asked again, anxiously.

The trio of Clan agents she’d turned up with—two men and a woman, sweating and outlandish in North Face outdoor gear—as if they’d just parachuted in from a camping expedition somewhere in the Rockies, in winter—had taken up positions outside the station. One of them Miriam half-recognized: Isn’t he the MIT postgrad? Perhaps, but it was hard for her to keep track of all the convoluted relationships in the Clan, and right now—covering the approach track with a light machine gun from behind a bullet-riddled steam car—he didn’t exactly look scholarly. Brilliana was at least dressed appropriately for New British customs.

“I’m unhurt, Brill.” Miriam tried to hold her voice steady, tried not to notice Erasmus staring, his head swiveling like a bird, as he took in the scattered bodies and the odd-looking machine pistols Brill and the other woman carried. The Polis inspector and his men had tried to put up a fight, but revolvers and rifles against attackers with automatic weapons appearing out of thin air behind them “—Just got a bit of a headache.” She sat down heavily on the waiting room bench.

“Wonderful! I feared you might attempt to world-walk.” Brill looked concerned. “I must say, I was not expecting you to get this far. You led us a merry chase! But your letter reached me in time, and a very good thing too. His grace has been most concerned for your well-being. We shall have to get you out of here at once—”

Miriam noticed Brill’s sidelong glance at Burgeson. “I owe him,” she warned.

Erasmus chuckled dryly. “Leave me alive and I’ll consider the debt settled in my favor.”

“I think we can do better than that!” Brill drew breath. “I remember you.” She glanced at Miriam. “How much does he know?”

“How much do you think?” Miriam stared back at her. This was a side to Brill that she didn’t know well, and didn’t like: a coldly calculating woman who came from a place where life was very cheap indeed. “They were lying in wait for us because they intercepted your telegram. The least we can do is get him to his destination. Leave him in this, and…” She shrugged.

Brill nodded. “I’ll get him out of here safely. Now, will you come home willingly?” she asked.

The silence stretched out. “What will I find if I do?” Miriam finally replied.

“You need not worry about Baron Henryk anymore.” Brill frowned. “He’s dead; but were he not, the way he dealt with you would certainly earn him the disfavor of the council. He overplayed his hand monstrously with the aid of Dr. ven Hjalmar. The duke is minded to sweep certain, ah, events into the midden should you willingly agree to a plan he has in mind for you.” Her distant expression cracked: “Have you been sick lately? Been unable to world-walk? Is your period late?”

Miriam blinked. “Yes, I—” she raised a hand to her mouth in dawning horror. “Fuck.”

Brill knelt down beside her. “You have borne a child before, did you not?”

“But I haven’t slept with—” Miriam stopped. “That fucking quack. What did he do to me?”

“Miriam.” She looked down. Brill was holding her hands. “Ven Hjalmar’s dead. Henryk is dead. Creon is dead. But we’ve got living witnesses who will swear blind that you were married to the crown prince at that ceremony, and this was the real reason why Prince Egon rebelled. Ven Hjalmar, with the queen mother’s connivance…it’s unconscionable! But we’re at war, Miriam. We’re at war with half the nobility of the Gruinmarkt, and you’re carrying the heir to the throne. You’re not a pawn on Angbard’s chessboard anymore, Miriam, you’re his queen. Whatever you want, whatever it takes, he’ll give you—”

Miriam shook her head. “There’s only one thing I truly want,” she said tiredly, “and he can’t give it to me.” The claustrophobic sense of losing control that she’d fled from weeks ago was back, crushingly heavy. She lowered one hand to her belly, self-consciously: Why didn’t I think of this earlier? she wondered. All those examinations…Shit. Then another thought struck her, and she chuckled.

“What ails you?” Brilliana asked anxiously.

“Oh, nothing.” Miriam tried to regain control. “It’s just that being figurehead queen mother or whatever scheme Angbard’s penciled in for me isn’t exactly a job with a secure future ahead of it. Even if you get this rebellion under control.”

“My lady?”

“I was planning on bargaining,” Miriam tried to explain. “But I don’t need to, so I guess you want to know this anyway: it’s too late. I ran into an old acquaintance on my way out of the burning palace. His people had been watching it when the shit hit the fan. It’s the U.S. government. They’ve got agents into the Gruinmarkt, and it’s only a matter of time before—”

“Oh, that,” Brill snorted dismissively and stood up. “That’s under control for now; your mother’s running the negotiations.”

Miriam held a hand before her eyes. Make it stop, she thought faintly. Too much!

“In any event, we have worse things to worry about now,” she added. “Sir Huw was sent to do a little job for the duke that I think you suggested—he’ll brief you about what he found on the flight home. The CIA or the DEA and their friends are the least of our worries now.” Brill laid a hand on her shoulder. Quietly, she added: “We need you, Miriam. Helge. Or whoever you want to be. It’s not going to be the same this time round. The old guard have taken a beating: and some of us understand what you’re trying to do, and we’re with you all the way. Come home with me, Miriam, and we’ll take good care of you. We need you to lead us…”

The treason room was a simple innovation that Angbard’s last-but-two predecessor had installed in each of the major Clan holdings: a secret back door against the day when (may it never arrive) Clan Security found itself locked out of the front. Like almost all Clan holdings of any significance, the Hjalmar Palace was doppelgangered—that is, the Clan owned, and in most cases had built on, the land in the other world that any world-walker would need to cross over from in order to penetrate its security.

For an empty field, the location where they’d set up the HISTORY FAIRE had a remarkably sophisticated security system, and the apparently decrepit barns at the far end of the field, collocated with the palatial eastern wing, were anything but easy to break into.

The treason room in the Hjalmar Palace had once been part of a guard room on the second floor of the north wing. That is, it had been part of the guard room until Clan Security had moved everybody out one summer, installed certain innovative features, then built a false wall to conceal it. The cover story was that they’d been installing plumbing for the nobs upstairs. In fact, the treason room, its precise location surveyed to within inches, was an empty space hidden behind a false wall, located twenty feet above the ground. The precise coordinates of the treason rooms were divided between the head of Clan Security, and the office of the secretary of the Clan’s commerce committee, and their very existence was a dark secret from most people.

Now, Helmut watched tensely as two of his men ascended towards the middle of the tent on a hydraulic lift.

“Ready!” That was Martyn. Big and beefy, he waved at Helmut.

“Me too,” called Jorg. He pulled the oxygen mask over his head and made a show of adjusting the flow from his tank, then gave a thumbs-up while Martyn was still fiddling with his chin straps.

“Move out when you’re both ready,” Helmut called.

Martyn turned, lumbering, and switched on the tactical light clamped under the barrel of the MP5 he wore in a chest sling. Then he knelt down. Jorg climbed onto his back. The platform creaked and its motor revved slightly as he stood up, raising his left wrist to eye level before him. Silently and without any fuss, they disappeared from sight: a perfect circus trick.

Helmut nodded to the platform’s operator. “Take it down three inches.” The platform whirred quietly as it lowered. It wouldn’t do for the returning world-walker to be blocked by the lift. He checked his watch. Thirty seconds. The drill was simple. Jorg would drop off Martyn’s back, Martyn would swing round, and if there was any company he’d take them out while Jorg came right back over. If not, they’d inspect the room, plant the charges in the pre-drilled holes, set the timer to blow in half an hour, and then Jorg would carry Martyn back. After which, the next group through wouldn’t need the masks—they wouldn’t be entering a room that had been filled with carbon dioxide and sealed off behind a gas-tight membrane for fifty years.

Elapsed time, two minutes. Helmut shook his head, dizzy with tension. If they’ve found the treason room and booby-trapped it…He’d known Jorg as a kid. This wasn’t something he wanted to have to explain to his mother.

“It’s going to work,” a voice at his shoulder said quietly.

Helmut managed not to jump. “I hope so, sir.”

“It had better, because this is the real treason room, not the decoy.” Angbard cast him a brief feral grin. “Unless my adversary is a mind reader…”

The thud of boots landing on metal dragged Helmut’s head round. “Yo!” Jorg waved from the platform, which swayed alarmingly. He pulled his oxygen mask up: “It’s clean!” Behind him, Martyn staggered slightly, fumbling with the lift controls. The platform began to descend, and Helmut drew in a breath of relief.

“Stand down,” he told the guards who still stood with M16s aimed at the platform.

“Aw, can’t I shoot him?” asked Irma. “Just a little?”

“You’re going in next,” Helmut said, deadpan. Now he was tense for an entirely different reason: anticipation, not fear. On the other side of the tent, Poul’s couriers were already wheeling the siege tower forward. The aluminum scaffold on wheels didn’t look very traditional, but with its broad staircase and the electric winch for hauling up supply packs it served the same purpose—a quick way into an enemy-held fortress. He looked up at Martyn. “Time check!”

“Catch.”

Martyn tossed underarm and Helmut grabbed the grip-coated stopwatch out of the air. He stared at the countdown. “Listen up! Eighteen minutes and thirty seconds on my mark…Mark! First lance, Erik, lead off at plus ten seconds. I want an eyeball report no later than T plus thirty. Second lance, Frankl, you’re in after the eyeball clears the deck. Third lance, you idle layabouts, we’re going in thirty seconds after that. Line up, line up! Take your tickets for the fairground ride!” He headed off around the tent, checking that everyone knew their assigned role and nothing was out of place.

Minutes passed. The siege tower was finally set up on the carefully surveyed spot below the treason room. The couriers were still hammering stabilizer stakes into the ground around it as Erik led his lance up the ramp to the jump platform. The medical team was moving into position, maneuvering stretchers into position next to the winch: an ambulance sat next to one of the side doors to the tent, ready to go. Helmut checked the stopwatch.

“Sir Lieutenant.” He glanced round, as Angbard nodded at him. The old man had a disturbing way of moving silently and unobtrusively. He straightened as the duke continued: “I don’t intend to jog your elbow. You have complete discretion here. However, if there is an opportunity to take the commanding officer of the attacking force, or one of his lieutenants, alive, without additional risk to yourself or your men, then I would be most interested in asking him certain questions.”

“Really?” He felt himself grinning in spite of himself. It wasn’t an expression of amusement. “I can imagine, your grace.” He glanced at the scaffolding. In a few minutes, it was quite possible that some or most of his platoon would be dead or injured. And right that moment, the idea of dragging the man who’d inflicted this shocking insult upon the Clan’s honor up before his liege was a great temptation to Helmut. “I shall do everything in my power to oblige you, my lord. I can’t promise it—not without knowing what is happening within the castle—but I’d like to make the bastards pay for everything they’ve done to us.”

“Good.” Angbard took a step back, and then, to Helmut’s surprise, raised his fist in salute: “Lead your men to victory, knight-lieutenant! Gods speed your sword!”

Helmut returned the salute, then checked the time. Minus one minute. He raised a hand and waved at Erik, pointing to the stopwatch. “One minute!”

On the other side of the wall between the worlds, the timer would be counting down towards zero. Martyn and Jorg had packed the pre-drilled holes with blocks of C4 strung together on detcord, plugged in the timer, and synchronized it with the stopwatch in Helmut’s hand. In a few seconds time, the thin false wall would be blasted into splinters of stone, throwing a deadly rain of shrapnel across the guardroom. It was intended to kill anyone inside, clearing a path for the assault lance waiting on the siege tower above. Any second—

Helmut raised his hand. “Time!”

Twelve pairs of boots shuffled forward above his head. The rattle of M16s and M249s being cocked, like a junk-yard spirit clearing his throat: Erik’s lance flipping out the knotwork panels beside their sights, squinting along their barrels and shuffling forward.

“Plus five!” called Helmut. “Six! Seven! Eight! Nine! Ten!”

The platform juddered on its base as the soldiers flickered out of sight. Helmut took a deep breath and turned towards the map table where the duke was conferring with his officers. Raised voices, alarm. Helmut glanced at the sergeant standing with his men beside the ramp. “Frankl, you know the plan. When the eyeball reports, go if it’s clear. I’m—” the duke’s raised voice made up his mind “—checking something.”

“Is this confirmed?” Angbard demanded: the signals officer hunched defensively before him. “Is it?”

“Sir, all I have is Eorl-Major Riordan’s confirmed report on Lieutenant Menger’s overflight. If you want I can put you through to Castle Hjorth, but he’s already redeploying—”

“Never mind.” Angbard cut him dead as he turned to face Helmut. “They’ve got M60s,” he said conversationally, although his cheeks showed two spots of color. “Your men need to know.”

“M60s?” Helmut blanked for a moment. “Shit! The gatehouse!”

“More than that,” the duke added. “It sounds like they captured a stockpile from one of the strategic villages. Eorl Riordan is redeploying his company. They should be arriving here within the next three hours.”

“Right, right.” Helmut nodded. “Well, that puts a different picture on things.” He glanced at Angbard, anticipating the duke’s dismissal. “If you’ll excuse me, sir, my men need me?”

He turned and trotted back towards the siege tower. Overhead, on the platform, the first lance’s messenger was shouting excitedly, something about the room being clear. “Listen up!” he called. “Change of plan. We’re going in now. Housecleaning only, new plan is to secure the upper floors, strictly indoors. Anyone who goes outdoors gets their ass shot off: the bad guys have got their hands on a couple of M60s, and until we pinpoint them we’re not going to be able to break out. Lance three, follow me in. Lance two, follow after.”

He strode up the ramp as fast as he could, bringing his M16 down from his shoulder. The messenger was almost jumping from foot to foot. “It’s clear, sir! It went really well. Erik said to tell you he’s moving out into the upper gallery and will secure the roof line. Is that right?”

“It was.” Five minutes ago, before we knew they had machine guns on the bastions. Helmut shook his head, an angry sense of injustice eating at his guts. Erik was probably already dead. “Okay, let’s go to work.” He glanced over his shoulder, at Irma and Martyn and the others in the lance he, personally, led: they were watching him, trusting him to lead them into the unknown. “For the glory of the Clan! Follow me…”