The Revolution Business

Wet Work

Downtown Boston, in summer: humid and warm and smelly with truck exhaust fumes, rumbling and roaring from the nearby turnpike. A well-dressed woman in late middle age driving an electric wheelchair along the sidewalk, chatting to a young woman walking beside her—a daughter, perhaps, or carer. The security guard glanced away from his screen, uninterested. He didn’t notice them stop and turn abruptly to enter the lobby of the office suite he was supposed to be monitoring. Not that it would have made any difference. They didn’t look like the sort of people he was supposed to keep out, and their faces didn’t feature on any watch list of undesirables. Not that he’d have been able to keep them out, even if they did.

The woman in the wheelchair hummed towards the receptionist’s station. “Iris Beckstein, to see Dr. Darling. He’s expecting me.” She smiled at the secretary: the self-assured smile of the financially secure.

“Sure, sign in here. . . .”

The receptionist’s lack of interest was convenient, Iris noted; possibly the doctor had encouraged it, although if so, his overreliance on other security precautions was risky. Iris signed, and nodded, and waited while her companion signed. False names, one and all, but the false name she was using would be a red flag to the people who would, in due course, check the visitor book.

“This way, dear,” Iris told her companion, then scooted towards the elevators. Mhara nodded and followed obediently, keeping her mouth shut. Despite having a good understanding of the tongue, she’d spent little enough time in America that her accent was still heavy. Most folks would mistake her for an Eastern European immigrant, but Iris didn’t feel like taking risks around this office—especially in view of the contents of her bag. As the doors slid shut, Iris reached for the fourth floor button. “On my word—but not a moment sooner,” she said in hochsprache, the underused words heavy in her mouth.

“Yes, milady.”

“You are about to be exposed to some of our most perilous secrets. If they confuse or dismay you, you may speak to me about them in private—but they must go no further.”

They ascended the rest of the way in silence. The lift was unusually slow, and Iris spent the time trying to relax. Adrenaline makes fools of us all, she reminded herself, then blinked irritably as the elevator doors opened. Ah, well.

The office suite was surprisingly quiet for this time of day, a few people moving between card-key-locked doors clutching mugs and papers. Iris rolled along the corridor, following memorized directions, until she found the correct door. She reached up with a card, swiped it, and pushed through as the lock clicked open.

“Hey, you can’t come in—”

“Cover,” she said in hochsprache. “Hello, Griben. Sit down, please.” The door clicked shut behind Mhara as she felt the weight of an empty leather shoulder bag land on one of her chair’s handles.

Griben ven Hjalmar, plump and goateed, in a brown three-piece suit, sat down slowly, keeping his hands clearly visible. His face was expressionless. The other man sitting in the swivel chair behind the desk was frozen in surprise. “And Dr. Darling. What a pleasant surprise.”

“Mrs. Beckstein? What’s the”—Darling swallowed convulsively—“what’s going on?”

Iris smiled crookedly. “Griben, what a coincidence. I was just thinking about looking you up. What brings you here? Thinking about cleaning up some loose ends?”

Dr. Darling—lean, middle-aged, the picture of a successful gynecologist—was looking between ven Hjalmar, Iris, and the muzzle of Mhara’s silenced Glock in slack-jawed surmise. “You—you—”

“I’d like to thank you both for the little number you played on my daughter. It wasn’t quite what I had in mind when I suggested the arrangement.”

Ven Hjalmar flushed beneath the force of her glare. “What did you expect us to do?” he demanded. “She was under house arrest! With an execution warrant on her head! You wanted the leverage—”

“Nevertheless.” Iris shifted uncomfortably in her wheelchair. “This is neither the time nor the place for this discussion.”

“Excuse me?” Three heads turned to stare at Dr. Darling. “What are you—”

“Griben, do you mind?” Iris asked casually, speaking hochsprache.

“If you absolutely must. I’d finished with him, anyway.”

“Did you get the disks from him?” she added.

“Of course.”

“What do you want?” demanded Darling.

In hochsprache: “Mhara, now.”

Outside the office, the two muffled shots would be mistaken for a door banging. Darling dropped forward across his desk, spilling blood and fatty tissue onto the keyboard of his PC.

Griben sighed. “Was that strictly necessary?”

“Yes,” Iris said shortly. She glanced round. Mhara was standing, frozen, her pistol angled slightly upwards and a confused look in her eyes. “Mhara? Child?”

The young woman shook her head. “I’m sorry.” She picked up the shoulder bag and carefully stowed her pistol inside, using hook-and-eye strips to secure it. “Never done that before.”

“You’ve attended executions, surely. . . .”

“Yes, milady. But it’s different when you do it yourself.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Iris reassured her. “Griben, he knew too damned much. Family Trade are on our tail and he’s not Outer Family or personal retainer. He had to go. You’ve got the disks. Mhara, the other device, please.”

“Other—oh.” Ven Hjalmar looked at the PC in distaste. “You don’t expect me to”—

“I surely do.” Iris held up a pair of latex gloves. “You’ll want these.”

None of them were particularly experienced at black-bag jobs; it took them nearly ten minutes to unscrew the casing of the PC and position the bulk eraser’s electromagnet above the hard disk drive. Finally, Iris hit the power switch. “Ah, good,” she said, as the disk error warning came up on the blood-specked screen. “Mhara, you see the filing cabinets yonder? You take the right one, Griben can take the middle, and I shall take the left. Start at the top and work down. You are looking for anything pertaining to Applied Genomics Corporation, the W-316 clinical trial, Angbard Lofstrom, Griben ven Hjalmar here, or adoption papers relating to children.”

“Adoption papers?” Mhara sounded confused.

“Legal documents,” Iris said blandly.

“Iris.” Griben looked worried. “This is going to take some time. What if someone—”

Iris snorted. “You have your locket, yes? I had the site prepared.”

“But we’re on the fourth floor!”

“So there’s a net. Try not to break your nose with your kneecaps. It’ll be harder for me if we have to take it, so let us start searching right away, no?” She levered herself out of her wheelchair and shuffled cautiously towards the wall of cabinets.

The office was overheated, and the smells of burned powder and spilled blood hung over them as they pored over the file drawers. After ten minutes Griben finally hit pay dirt. “He had a file on Applied Genomics,” he announced.

“Ah, excellent.” Iris gestured at her wheelchair. “In there.”

“Milady.” Mhara gestured politely at another drawer. “Is this important?”

Iris leaned over to look. “Well, how interesting.” She lifted the fat, spiral-bound document out of its hanger. “Names and addresses. It seems you’re not the only doctor who doesn’t trust computers to remember everything for you, Griben.”

“Dash it! We specifically told him not to do that!”

Iris sighed. “I ordered someone to black-bag his house this morning. His divorce came through nine months ago, so I think there is no need to trouble his ex-wife and children.” She frowned, pensive. “What have I forgotten?”

Griben nodded across the room. “I should check the bookcase. And the desk drawers. Just to be sure.”

“An excellent idea. Perhaps you’d like to see me out, afterwards?”

Ven Hjalmar raised an eyebrow. “Why—”

Iris nodded at Mhara. “She has other tasks.”

“Ah, jolly good.” He nodded. Mhara picked up the files and waited attentively as he scoured the bookcases and finally the desk drawers—working carefully around Dr. Darling’s body—then nodded again. “That’s all,” he announced. Darling’s desk was mostly for show; beyond the usual collection of stationery items, the pedestal unit was empty.

Iris shuffled back to her wheelchair. “Good. Mhara?”

“Milady.” She bobbed her head, holding the files two-handed.

“I want these files burned before we leave the building. Afterwards, make your way back to the house when you are ready.”

“Yes, milady.” Mhara smiled, a brief flash of expression crossing her face. Then she tilted her left wrist to expose the face of a wristwatch, and vanished.

“You’re sure about the net,” Griben said reflectively.

“She’s sure about it, and that’s what matters.” Iris lowered herself carefully into the wheelchair. “Mind you, she was there when I ordered its construction.”

A thoughtful pause, then: “I think I can see where your daughter gets it from.”

“Oh dear.” Iris whirred towards the door, then glanced over her shoulder with a fey expression. “Come on, Griben! We have a conspiracy to conceal and if you keep thinking about it we’ll be here until suppertime.”

They left the room with the conviction of a job well done, and no inkling of the significance of the encrypted memory stick attached to the key ring in the corpse’s coat pocket.

In a muddy field outside Concord, behind a sign declaring it to be a HISTORY FAIRE, the circus-sized tent was swarming with spooks.

Colonel Smith’s driver stopped outside the gate. A pair of police cars, their lights strobing, blocked the entrance; beyond the uniformed officers Smith could see parked buses and the tents of the forensic crews. Serious-looking officers in black windbreakers bearing the letters DEA paced around under the watchful eyes of guards in body armor and helmets. Casual rubberneckers might mistake them for a police SWAT team, but Smith was under no such illusion.

“Give me that badge.” Smith waited as the cop checked his name against a clipboard, carefully compared his face to the photograph, then nodded. “Go ahead, sir. HQ is the third tent on the left.”

“You heard him.” Smith leaned back and closed his eyes for a minute as his driver crept across the rutted ground. Too many vehicles had come this way too recently. A familiar drumming noise prompted him to open his eyes. Sure enough, a big helicopter was thuttering across the sky, descending towards the field. It’s not black; just very, very, dark gray. Smith suppressed a grin. What had happened at this site was no laughing matter. How the hell did they manage it? he asked himself as he opened the door and climbed out of the back of the car.

The mood in the headquarters tent was gray, too, as he discovered the moment he walked through the door. “Sir? How up to date are you?” Judith Herz, latterly of the FBI but currently answering to Smith, had been on-site when the shit hit the fan. Now she looked drained, hollows under her eyes from close to twenty-four hours supervising the site cleanup.

“I’ve been too busy fighting brushfires and keeping the press off your neck to track everything. Have you got time to give me a guided tour?”

Herz rubbed the side of her face then glanced at one of the men sitting in front of a rack of radios and laptop computers. “John, you want to take over for an hour? I need to bring the colonel up to speed.”

“Okay, I’ll do that.” John—heavily built, wearing one of the ubiquitous DEA windbreakers, nodded briefly before turning back to his screen.

“This way, Colonel.” Herz gestured back to the front awning of the tent. “Let me show you what we found.”

Forensics had already finished with the big top before Herz beckoned Smith past the incident tape and into the open space within. Smith glanced around curiously. Like any big top, its roof was held up by a pair of huge posts. But the resemblance stopped at that point; there were no seats, no trapezes or safety nets, and nothing in this particular ring could be described as a laughing matter.

“It’s a regular headquarters setup, we think,” Herz commented as she walked towards a row of tables at one side of the huge tent. “Look.” The tables showed every sign of having been abandoned in a hurry: folding chairs tipped over, equipment crates lying on their sides. One of the tables was covered completely by a large relief map, various implements strewn across it—notepads, pens, protractors, and folded pieces of card.

“Pay dirt,” breathed Smith. He paused momentarily. “Has it been checked out?”

“Everything’s been photographed in situ. I think they even dusted for fingerprints, just in case.”

“Gotcha.” Smith leaned over the map. It didn’t take much to recognize the foothills, and the river valley forking downstream. But there was something odd about the map. He frowned. “Concord should be here, shouldn’t it?”

Herz followed the direction of his finger. “I guess so.”

“Hmm. Look.” The moving finger trailed south. A much smaller clump of buildings perched beside the river, surrounded by a sharply incised wall. “This is printed. It’s even got grid coordinates. Betcha they bought the map data from someone over here, in our world, then added their own survey points. Saves time, assuming the geography’s the same, and I guess they would know about any major features like landslides.”

Herz shook her head. “You mean this is a map of, of fairyland.”

“It’s not fairyland,” Smith said sharply. “It’s real enough that they can make a map of it like this, and plan . . .”

He paused, then peered back at the map. Hunting upstream of the small town, at the fork in the river, he found what he was looking for. “Go get one of our maps. I want to confirm that this is where we are,” he said, moving one of the cardboard markers to sit atop the heptagonal feature he’d noticed. “They were here for a reason, and I want to know what they were doing that took nearly two hundred of the bastards.”

He straightened up and looked around. There were more tables dotted around, and a stack of empty kit bags, but the center of the tent was dominated by a two-story-high aluminum scaffold with ramps and ladders leading up to platforms on both upper floors. Surveyor’s posts and reflector disks fastened to the uprights, and a pair of theodolites at opposite sides of the tent, made it clear that whoever had built the scaffold had taken pains over its exact location. Smith frowned, thoughtful. Nearly two hundred of them and they vanished into thin air in less than three minutes. How did they avoid falling over each other? A precision operation, like paratroops jumping in quick succession from the back of a plane. And why did they do it out in public, risking detection? It had to be something to do with this location, and whatever it was collocated with in the other time line.

Herz was muttering into a walkie-talkie. “I need geographic input. Is Amanda—yes, I’ll hold, over.”

Smith walked partway round the scaffold. A faint memory began to surface, grade school on an Air Force base somewhere in Germany: knights in armor, huge creaking wooden contraptions grinding their way across a field of battle towards a walled castle. The whole mediaeval thing. It’s a siege tower. A siege tower without wheels, because you could build it in a parallel universe, butting right up against wherever you were going to go in. A siege tower without armor, and made of aluminum scaffolding components because they were cheap and easier to use than logs.

Voices pulled him back to the present. He glanced round, annoyed, then frowned. It was his political supervisor, Dr. James, with the cadaverous face and the connections to the current occupant of Number One Observatory Circle, plotting and scheming inside the beltway. A couple of flunkies—administrative assistants, pasty-skinned managerial types from Crypto city, even a discreet Secret Service bodyguard doing the men-in-black thing—followed him. “Ah, Eric! Excellent, Martin, you can stop trying to reach him now. What’s your analysis?”

Smith took a deep breath, held it for a moment. The smells of crushed grass and gun oil and desperate men filled his nostrils. “It’s a siege tower. They weren’t running away from us, they were breaking into something.” He gestured at the theodolites and the scaffolding. “That’s positioned with extreme care. I think it’s a siege tower—they had a target in their own world and this took them to a precise location. The map”—Herz was waving at him—“excuse me.” He walked over to the table. “Yes?”

“You were right,” she said. “We’re here.” Her finger stabbed at the heptagonal structure. “This thing is about five hundred feet across, look, concentric rings—does that remind you of anything?”

Smith nodded and turned to Dr. James. “If their map’s telling the truth, that structure is some kind of fortification. And we already know from CLEANSWEEP that some kind of internal struggle was going down fourteen to sixteen days ago. We could do a lot worse than send a couple of scouts across in the next valley over.” He cracked his knuckles, first the right hand then his left. “It’s a shame we don’t have anything that can touch them, because they’re probably still there, in strength.”

James grinned like a skull. “Well, I have an update for you. Let’s take a walk.”

BEGIN TELEPHONE TRANSCRIPT:

(A telephone buzzes for attention.)

“Hello?”

“Ah, is that the Lee residence?”

(Pause.) “Who is this?”

“I’d like to speak to James Lee, please. It is

dringen

—urgent.”

(Pause.) “Please wait.”

(Two minutes later.)

“Hello? Hello?”

“Who is this? Is—James? James, is that you?”

“Ah, yes—Who, um—”

“Poul, Poul ven Wu. You may remember me, from my cousin Raph’s wedding to Kara ven—”

“Ah, yes! I remember now! Yes, indeed. How good to hear from you. But surely this isn’t just a social call?”

“I wish it were. Unfortunately a somewhat delicate situation has arisen at short notice, and I hoped you might be able to advise me on how it might be resolved without undue difficulty.”

(Pause.) “Ah. I see, I think.” (Pause.) “Would this situation have anything to do with the events at the Thorold palace earlier this month?”

“Mm . . . in a manner of speaking, yes. It’s a delicate matter, as I said, and we’re anxious to resolve it without violating the terms of the settlement between our families, but it’s quite urgent and it appears to be becoming time-critical.”

“Hmm. Can you be more specific? I think I can safely say that we would also like to remain within the conditions of the truce, but I cannot commit to anything without my elders’ approval, and I am quite anxious to know what I shall be putting before them.”

(Pause.) “We would like to arrange for the safe passage of a substantial group of our people, from a location near Irongate—near Wergatsfurt—across a distance of some three miles, on foot, at night.”

“Passage. You mean, from Wergatsfurt, in Gruinmarkt, to somewhere about three miles away, also in Gruinmarkt, but through our world, I take it?”

“Precisely.” (Pause.) “In addition, the group is armed. Not civilian.”

(Long pause.) “You’re asking us to give safe passage to a small army.”

(Hastily.) “Only for about three hours, at night! And there are only two hundred and eighteen of them. Eleven walking wounded, six stretcher cases. We don’t want to attract attention—we want to keep it out of sight of the Polis, and everybody else. Can you—is it possible—to arrange this? I can supply details of the end-points of the sortie, and precise numbers—but what we would like, if it is possible, is not simply a dispensation within our agreement but active help. If you can organize covered trucks, and secure the destination, for example . . .”

“I can’t agree to that, Poul. I don’t have the authority to make agreements like that. I

can

tell you that my father can make a decision, but it would be better to petition him yourself—”

(Urgently) “It has to be done tonight!”

“I’m sure it does. And I can arrange for my father to see you within the hour—but the request must come directly from your lips to his ears.” (Pause.) “You understand that he will expect some reward for this inconvenience.”

“Of course.” (Pause.) “We expect to pay for any assistance, and I am authorized to negotiate with you—or your father. Only understand that it is a matter of some urgency, and while we are prepared to be generous, we would take a very poor view of any attempt to exploit the situation to our detriment.”

“Oh, that’s understood. Give me an hour to prepare things and you will be welcome at my father’s house. Do you need directions?”

END TRANSCRIPT

Erasmus Burgeson arrived in Fort Petrograd four days late, footsore and weary and out-of-pocket—but a free man, thanks to those extraordinary friends of Miriam Beckstein who had arrived just in time to stop the secret police from collaring the two of them.

After the shoot-out at the one-cow railroad station in the middle of nowhere, he’d taken up Miriam’s invitation to help himself to the political officer’s no-longer-needed steamer, and topped off both its tanks before cracking open the throttle and bumping across dirt tracks and paved military roads in the general direction of the southwest and the Bay Area. But the car had run out of steam ten miles before he reached Miwoc City, and he’d had second (and third) thoughts about the wisdom of paying a mechanic to come out and get her rolling again, in light of the car’s bloodstained provenance. (Not to mention the bullet hole in the left, passenger side, door.)

So he’d walked into Miwoc, dusty and sore-footed, and taken a room in a working men’s hostel, and spent the night lying awake listening to the fights and the begging and the runners clubbing indigents outside the thin wall of his dive—and set off for Fort Petrograd the next morning, whistling and doubtlessly mangling a ditty he’d picked up from Miriam, about a hotel in California.

It was a hundred miles to the big city, where the guns of Fort Petrograd loomed out across the headland of the bay, aiming south towards San Mateo. It shouldn’t have taken three days, but Erasmus decided to avoid the railways—one close shave with the law was more than enough—and not risk buying an automobile: A solitary man driving alone was as good as a green flag to a certain kind of highwayman, and it would swallow all his remaining funds besides. The buses and streetcars that connected the grids of these western townships were more than adequate, if one made allowances for delayed connections . . . and the increasing number of checkpoints where nervous thief takers and magistrate’s men stood guard with shotguns while the transport polis examined internal passports and work permits. These, at least, Erasmus was equipped to deceive, thanks to the package Edward had given him in New London.

Until, on the third day, the bus he was riding from Abadon reached Patwin (which Miriam would have pointed to on a map and called “Vallejo”), and ran into a general strike, and barricades, and grim-faced men beneath a blue flag slashed diagonally with a cross of St. Andrew beneath the glaring face of a wild turkey. “Ye can gae nae farthur,” said the leader of the band blocking the high street, “wi’out an aye calling ye strikebreaker.” He stood in front of the bus with arms crossed in front of him and the stolid self-confidence born of having two brothers-in-arms standing behind him with hunting rifles and an elderly and unreliable-looking carronade—probably looted from the town hall’s front steps—to back them up.

“I’m no’ arguing wi’t’artillery,” said the driver, turning to address his passengers. “End of t’road!”

An hour later, by means of various secret handshakes and circumlocutions, Erasmus was talking to the leader of the strike force, a lean, rat-faced man called Dunstable. “I was on my way to Fort Petrograd on Party business when I was forced off the train and only just escaped with my life. I need to get there immediately. Party business.”

“Let me see what I can do,” said Dunstable, then vanished into the back of the Town Aldermen’s office, doubtless to cable for directions. The two hard-faced men with pistols sat with Erasmus in silence; he made himself comfortable until Dunstable returned. “Aye, well, your story checks out.” Dunstable nodded at the two men. “Joe, go and get the mayor’s runabout. Frank, you stay with Mister Burgeson here. You and Joe will drive Mister Burgeson straight to Fort Petrograd, to the Crimea Barracks—you know how to find it? Good. Our people hold it. When you get there, do as Mister Burgeson says.”

Erasmus stood. “I’ll send them back as soon as possible,” he promised. “Good luck here.”

“Luck?” Dunstable snorted. “Luck’s got now’t to do with it: People are starving and the frogs are trying to retake New France!”

“They’re what?” Erasmus stared at him.

“Oh, the king’s got it nailed down quiet like, but we know the score. Furrin troops in Red Club, a dauphin looking to set foot in New Orleans next week.” Dunstable tapped the side of his nose. “Got to look fer our selves in times of unrest, ‘aven’t we?”

It took eight hours to drive the fifty miles from Patwin, overlooking the inner shore of the great bay, to Fort Petrograd and the downtown strip of barracks and museums and great houses that defined the core of western society, here on the edge of the Pacific. The roads were good, but the two ferries they required ran only infrequently at present, and they had to stop every five to ten miles to convince another roadblock, revolutionary caucus, civil defense brigade, emergency committee, republican guard, and ladies’ union that they were not, in fact, agents of the secret political police, the French dauphin (who had simultaneously invaded New France, or Louisiana as the French called it, and Alaska, and the Brazilian Directorate, not to mention New London), or even the Black Fist Freedom Guard (which last was worryingly close to the truth). Luckily the situation was so confused, the news so hazy, that Erasmus discovered that sounding vague and asking lots of questions quickly convinced most of them that he was what he said he was—an innocent business traveler trapped on the road with his driver and bodyguard. A couple of the local militias made halfhearted attempts to shake him down, but his invincible self-righteousness, combined with a pious appeal to the forces of order and justice once the emergency resolved itself, scared them off. The British were, it seemed, still half-convinced that it was all a bad dream, and the breakdown of government—it seemed the exchequer had run out of money two days ago, and the king had told parliament to resign, and parliament had refused, and the unpaid dragoons had refused to clear the benches—was not quite real.

It was, in short, exactly the sort of confused pre-revolutionary situation that Erasmus had spent most of his life not praying, but hoping for. And he was in very nearly exactly the wrong place, if not for having the good luck to run into Dunstable and his fellow travelers.

The broad boulevards and steel-framed stone buildings of metropolitan Fort Petrograd were awash with excited strikers from the munitions factories and—not entirely to Erasmus’s surprise—sailors from the vast naval base sprawling across the southwestern rim of the bay (which Miriam would have pointed to on a map and called “San Mateo”). Erasmus made a snap decision. “Forget the Crimea Barracks, take me to City Hall,” he told Joe.

City Hall, a neoclassical lump of concrete reinforced with steel—and, curiously, featuring no windows less than eighteen feet above ground level, and clear lines of fire in all directions—was the logical place to go. And so, when they were stopped two blocks from the place by a barricade manned by marines who had torn their insignia of rank from their uniforms, Erasmus climbed out of the car. “I’m here to see Adam,” he said openly. “Take me to him.”

It took a while, but half an hour later Erasmus slid to the front of a queue of supplicants. They were queuing to see the man in the mayor’s office, but the man behind the mayor’s desk was not the mayor, and he wasn’t doing ordinary civic business as usual. When Erasmus entered the room he was holding forth animatedly with a group of hard-looking types who he recognized instantly as party cadres. Sir Adam Burroughs had aged in the nearly twenty years since Erasmus had last seen him: His hair was thin and straggling, and his high forehead was deeply grooved with worry lines. But the magnetic charm and hyperactive temperament remained—

“Hello? Who’s this?” Burroughs looked at him for a few seconds. Then his eyes widened. “Joshua? Is that you?”

“It is indeed.” Erasmus bowed low—not a flourishing courtier’s bow, but a salute born of deep respect. “Lady Margaret sends her regards, and her hopes for your success in this venture.” He smiled. “Though it seems to me that you’ve made a good start already!”

“Joshua, man—” Burroughs stood up and flew from behind his desk, then gripped Erasmus by the shoulders. “It’s been too long!” He turned to face his half-dozen assistants. “This man is Joshua Cooke! During the eighty-six he was my secretary and correspondent, he ran the People’s Voice in New York. Since then he’s been a mainstay of the movement out east.” Eyes were staring, lips mumbling silently. “You’ve come to join us, I take it.”

“Oh yes.” Erasmus nodded. “But I go by the name of Erasmus Burgeson these days, and it’s gotten to be something of a habit. And to plug you into what’s been happening out east. I was delayed, I’m afraid, by the Polis—got away, but it was a near thing. And everywhere I went, rumor was chasing falsehood’s tail for truth’s bone. I take it loyalists are thin on the ground around here?”

“Vanished like rats from a sinking ship,” grumped one of Burroughs’s new assistants, a heavy-set fellow with a nautical beard. “We’ll root ’em out.”

“Organization first,” Burroughs said mildly. “Josh—Erasmus, is it?—you’ve arrived at exactly the right time. We’ve got to get the word out, now that the Hanoverian has emptied his treasury, get control—I want you to take a flying picket down to the Petrograd Times and get the presses rolling again. And the telautograph senders on the east bay mount. You’re going to be in charge of the propaganda ministry. Can you do that?”

Erasmus cracked his knuckles, grinning cadaverously. “It’ll be a good start.”

“An accident.” Miriam stared at Brill across the width of the safe house’s kitchen. She looks like someone told her the family dog’s got cancer. “What kind of accident?”

“The duke—” Brill swallowed.

Huw sidestepped towards the sink, making an adroit grab for a water glass.

“Yes?” Miriam said encouragingly, her heart sinking.

“He’s had a stroke, they say. World-walking.”

“But why would he—” Huw fell silent, seeing Miriam’s expression.

“The pretender’s army took the Hjalmar Palace by treachery. His grace was organizing a force to take it back when . . . something happened, something bad. Near Concord. Everyone had to cross over in a hurry. They retook the fortifications, but the duke—”

Brilliana swallowed.

“Well shit,” Huw said angrily.

Miriam raised a finger. “Is he still alive?” she asked. “Is he conscious? Because—”

“Wait.” Brill took the water glass from Huw’s fingers. “Anything. To put in this?”

“There’s a bottle of brandy in the luggage.” Huw headed for the door. “Don’t go away. Be right back.”

Miriam pulled a stool out and steered it behind Brilliana, who sat, gratefully.

“He’s in a bad way,” she said eventually, visibly gathering her wits. “Paralyzed on one side. They need to get him to a neurology ward but they’re trapped in the Hjalmar Palace—a big castle near Concord, in this world—by some Winter Crone-cursed police or paramilitary force that tried to raid them just as they were mounting the counterattack on the pretender’s forces.”

Huw reappeared with a dark green bottle. “Here.” He splashed amber fluid into Brill’s glass, then fetched down another and offered it to Miriam. “Yourself?”

“No thanks.” She glanced at him dubiously as he poured two fingers for himself. “What if you need to drive somewhere?”

“Firstly, I delegate to Yul, and secondly, there’s a difference between having a shot and getting drunk. Are you sure? . . .”

“Oh hell, go ahead.” Miriam snorted. Sometimes it was the little things about her relatives who’d grown up in the Gruinmarkt that tripped her up the hardest, like their extremely un-American attitude to alcohol. “Can they get him to a hospital?”

Brill lowered her glass. “It’s in train, I think. I mean, Olga’s there, she’s working something out with Earl Riordan. They couldn’t tell me more—need to know. But—it’s spooky. The feds swooped on ClanSec just as they concentrated to go across to relieve the Hjalmar Palace. It’s almost as if someone told them exactly when—”

“Matthias is dead,” Miriam interrupted.

“Matthias?” Huw looked fascinated. “Wasn’t he the duke’s personal secretary? I knew he disappeared, but—”

Miriam looked at Brill, who silently shook her head. “Later, Huw,” she promised. “Brill, we need to get back to, to—” She stopped, the words to wherever we need to be piling up like a car crash on her tongue.

Brill took a sip of brandy. “By the time we could get back to the east coast it’ll all be over,” she said huskily. “The important thing is what happens after that.”

I can’t believe how fast it’s all falling apart. Miriam shook her head. “Something about this doesn’t make sense,” she said slowly. “Things fell apart in Niejwein when Egon decided Henryk’s little power play was a personal threat to him, that’s clear. But this new stuff, the feds—it’s one coincidence too many.” She paused. “Could they be connected? Beyond the obvious, beyond Matthias defecting and spilling his guts?”

Brill gave her an odd look. “You might think that. I couldn’t possibly comment.”

“Oh for—” Miriam forced herself to stop. “Okay, let me tell you what I think is probably happening, Brill. You’re in Angbard’s chain of command, you deal with it.”

“You’d better wait outside, Huw,” Brill said sharply.

He shrugged and walked over to the door. “Call me when you’ve finished politicking,” he called, then closed it.

Miriam took a deep breath and tried to gather the unraveling threads of her concentration. Too much, too fast. “I think that we figured out Matthias had defected seven, eight months ago, when it first happened. And what followed was a factional race to get into the best position to come out on top when the US government figured out what was going on and brought the hammer down on the trade network. I stood up and told them their business model was flawed, and they didn’t do anything—but they weren’t all ignoring me. The conservative faction, led by Baron Henryk, decided to shut me up, but they had to be subtle about it. Angbard didn’t block him because he hoped they’d fail. Meanwhile, some other groups were looking into the possibilities dragged up by my stumbling over the hidden family and New Britain. That’d be where Huw comes in, yes? Angbard’s sitting at the center of a web, like a spider, holding everything together—trying to keep business running as usual, but trying to hedge everybody’s bets.”

She swallowed, then took a sip of brandy. “Trouble is, everybody’s doing different things. There have been sub rosa attempts to modernize the Clan going on for decades; I just didn’t recognize them. That’s what I got wrong—I took you all at face value, didn’t look below the surface. Everyone pays lip service to the status quo, but not everyone goes along with it. There’s the breeding program that was intended to rebuild the population base eroded by the civil war over the past fifty years, and crack the manpower monopoly effectively controlled by the marriage-brokering old grannies”—she watched Brilliana for signs of surprise, but didn’t see any—“and that debating society and talking shop Huw’s into. There’s even Clan Security, for heaven’s sake! Which is more like the, the Russian KGB, than something you’d expect in a post-feudal society like the Gruinmarkt. Am I right?”

She waited for Brill to say something, but the silence dragged out. After a few seconds, she cleared her throat and continued. “So, I upset a bunch of applecarts, and the fallout included Matthias going over the wall. I expect someone’s been trying to negotiate with the feds, buying time, patching things up. And I expect everyone’s been scrambling to secure a workable Plan B for their particular faction. I’m not going to ask what the hell ClanSec or the Council or whoever thought they were doing, messing around with stolen nukes, it’s immaterial; I just want to note that it was a really bad idea, because from the feds’ point of view it turned the Clan from a minor irritant into a serious menace. You can negotiate with a nuisance, but you shoot menaces—isn’t that right?” She put her glass down and looked at Brill. After a minute, she asked: “Well?”

Brilliana looked uncomfortable. “I can’t talk about . . . certain . . . matters without getting permission first. But broadly speaking”—she looked at Miriam appraisingly—“you are speculating along the right lines.” She coughed. “But please, refrain from airing your speculation in public? Lest other factions conclude that you know more than you do, and attempt to silence you.”

Miriam’s left eyelid twitched. “I’ve had enough of that, thank you. Since even my dear mother is prone to, to . . .” It was too painful to continue. She rested one hand on her lap. “And what that bastard ven Hjalmar tried to do. Did.” A long pause. “It’s only been about six weeks. I could get an abortion. If I’m pregnant.”

Brill looked at her oddly. “If you did that, you’d be throwing away your best leverage.” She took another sip of brandy. “Because it’s Creon’s get, and you’ve got a fistful of witnesses to the betrothal, even—by implication—the pretender. That’s the throne to the Gruinmarkt, Miriam.”

“And it’s my body.” Miriam looked at her half-empty glass and twitched, then she picked it up again and swallowed it in a single mouthful. “Not that that seems to mean much to you people.”

Brilliana reached out and grabbed her hand. “Helge!”

“What?” Miriam glared at her across the breakfast bar.

“This world is not fair or just. But I swore I would look after you—”

“—Who to?”

“To you, and to your uncle: but that is not important. I swore an oath to protect you. I must tell you that as long as you carry the heir to the throne of Niejwein, nobody in the six families will dare to lift a finger against you. And if, if we are still alive in eight months, things will be different. The pretender will be dead and Angbard will need a regent’s council and at a minimum you will be on it. He told me, if necessary”—her voice cracked—“tell her that if she does this thing, all debts are canceled.”

“And if I don’t?” Miriam made as if to pull her arm back, but paused. “You know there are no guarantees. I’m old for this. Miscarriages aren’t that unusual in older pregnancies. And there’s only a fifty-fifty chance it’s a boy, anyway. What if it doesn’t work?”

“Then at least you tried.” Brill moderated her voice. “You came back willingly: That weighs in your favor. The more you do for us, the harder it becomes for your enemies to belittle or ignore you. Thus has it ever been.”

“You make it sound as if the Clan runs on honor.”

“But it does!” Brill’s expression of surprise took her aback. “How else do you control an aristocracy?”

“I don’t think I’ll ever understand you guys.” Miriam watched while Brill refilled both their glasses. “Hey. Suppose I’m pregnant? You want to go easy with that.”

“What’s that got to do with it?” She looked perplexed.

“The Surgeon-General’s—no, fuck it.” Miriam picked up the glass. “Next time you send someone out for a pizza, try and get them to buy me a pregnancy test kit . . . hell, make that two of them, just in case.” She sipped at her brandy defiantly. “So anyway, I kicked over an anthill. And Henryk’s faction try to tie me down, to control the damage, and it backfires spectacularly and sets Egon off. Is that how I’m reading it? While at the same time, I set Matthias off, which set the feds on us. Right?”

“Wrong.” Brill raised her glass and stared at it pensively. “It was a powder keg, Helge. Even before you returned, it was balanced on a sword’s edge. You unleashed chaos, but without you—you strengthened Angbard’s hand immensely, did you not notice that? And you have unleashed Huw. Don’t underestimate him. He has connections. You can be at the center of things if you play the hand you have been dealt.”

“There won’t be any center to be at, if the feds figure out a way of getting over here in force,” Miriam said darkly.

“They won’t.”

“Huh. But anyway. Is it alright to bring him back in?”

“What? You’ve finished spilling our innermost secrets?”

“Innermost secrets, feh: It’s just uninformed speculation. No, I need to talk to Huw. We need to talk, that is.”

“Oh. Alright.” Brill stood up and walked to the door. “Huw!”

A moment’s silence, then feet pounded down the staircase. “Yes? What’s—oh.”

“Come in, sit down,” Miriam called over. “We’ve got to head back to Boston tomorrow, or as soon as possible.”

“But—” Brill stopped. “Why?”

“No politics, remember?” Miriam twitched. “If Angbard’s ill, we can’t risk being too far away. But what’s really important—Huw, I want you to tell me all about how you went about probing that new world. Because I think once everyone gets past running around and being worried about the pretender, we are really going to need to work out how to open up new worlds.”

“Eh?” Brilliana stared at her. “I don’t see why that’s a priority right now.”

Miriam sighed heavily and pushed her glass away. “It wouldn’t be, if we were just up against another bunch of upstart aristocrats, or if the US government were entirely reliant on captured couriers. Huw, why don’t you tell her about what we were discussing earlier?”

“The, uh, wild speculation?”

“Yes, that. I’m tired, I don’t want to repeat myself, and I think she needs to know.” She stood up and stretched. “I’m going to catch a nap. Call me if anything happens.”

Despite the summer heat, the sky was overcast and gray; it was threatening to rain as Dr. James led Colonel Smith around the side of the big top. Two minders followed at a discreet distance. “How certain are you that the bad guys are on the other side of that siege tower?”

Eric gave it scant seconds of consideration. “Very. They wouldn’t have come out here and stuck a couple of hundred assets in a field for us to see without an extremely urgent motivation. These people aren’t into cat and mouse games—they’ve been staying under cover very carefully until now. This has got all the signs of an emergency operation, and we disturbed them in the middle of it. That map alone, that’s dynamite. And it checks out: The scaffolding is right in the middle of what looks like a major fortification in their world.”

Dr. James halted—so fast that Eric nearly stumbled. “Good!” A curious half-smile played around his lips. “Then I’ve got a solution for you, son.”

“A—” Eric did a double take. “Excuse me?”

“It’s a political problem.” James began walking again, more slowly this time. “We want to send them a message. They think they can play with us. They stole six nukes from the inactive inventory. The message we want to send is, ‘if you play with us we will mess you up.’ If I wasn’t a man of faith I’d be using the f-word, Colonel. We want to send them a message and we want to underline don’t f– with us in blood.”

“In my experience,” Eric commented, feeling light-headed, “messages signed in blood ought to be delivered in a way that ensures the recipients don’t live long enough to read them. Anything else is asking for trouble.”

“Spoken like a flyboy at heart. You’re absolutely right. Nuke ’em ‘til they glow, then shoot ‘em in the dark.” Eric stared at him until he nodded. “That’s a direct quote from the vice president, son. Although he probably lifted it from someone else.”

“That puts an interesting light on things,” Eric agreed, slightly aghast. The Secret Service’s code name for VPOTUS, DADDY WARBUCKS, was also a comment on his neoconservative leanings, but such bloodthirsty words coming from the executive branch were somewhat surprising, even post-9/11.

“So he’s getting you a piece of paper on the White House blotter,” Dr. James continued blandly, “ordering you to take control of the gadget retrieved from Government Center and to, ah, return it to the person or persons who so carelessly left it under the Blue Line platform with extreme prejudice.”

But! Smith’s tongue froze. “But!” He tried again. It came out as almost a squeak. “We don’t have nuclear release authority, we’re not in the chain of command, you can’t do that—”

“Son.” James’s smile turned icy. “They stole six of them. The United States does not give in to nuclear blackmail. Never mind that it would be embarrassing to return it to inventory, on the record that it went walkies on our watch; they stole it so you are going to shove it up their, their behind, so hard they can taste it. It’s the perfect solution. It’s completely deniable: They stole it, it went off in their hands. And it sends the right message. Mess with us and we will hurt you. And besides—” He slid his spectacles down his nose and pulled out a cleaning cloth. “Daddy Warbucks is real keen to make sure the FADMs work as designed. And Major Alvarez knows how to use them. He is part of the chain, and he’s seconded to us. He knows what the score is. Why do you think we’ve been recruiting so widely . . . and selectively?”

“Okay,” Eric said thoughtfully. “I follow the logic.” He paused. “But how are we going to deliver it? We’ve only got two mules.” He left unspoken the corollary: Are you willing to let me strap an atomic device on a timer to a captured Clan courier who hates our guts? It would violate so many protocols that the stack of charges would be higher than the Washington Monument.

“Well now.” James stopped smiling. “You remember your little visit out west? They got Preparation Fifteen working. I’m having one of them flown out here right now—this will be its first deployment.”

“Wait.” Eric raised a hand. “Preparation Fifteen? I only saw number twelve. The, the disappearing tissue.” Tissue harvested from the brain of a captured Clan member—God only knew what had happened to them because Eric certainly didn’t want to. “Is Fifteen what I think it is?”

“Yes.” Dr. James looked smug. “Push the button, watch the black box vanish. Along with whatever it’s bolted to, as long as it’s in a conductive sack and is isolated from earth. It’s single-use, unfortunately; it has to be assembled by hand and lasts for about sixteen hours. But during that time—”

“Have you tried bolting one to an airframe?” Eric asked. “Sorry.”

“Good question. We’d need two—one for the return trip—and they’re not that reliable yet, but it’s on the road map. You can test fly the helicopter if you want.” James noticed Eric’s expression. “That was a joke, son, you’re not expendable.”

“I’m not licensed for choppers,” Smith muttered, under his breath. Just in case you get any crazy ideas. “So how are we going to deliver the, the physics package?”

“The usual way.” James started walking again; they were almost round the circumference of the big top, the awning just in view around the curve of its flank. “Written orders are coming down from the White House; it’s WARBUCK’s toy, but he’s gotten BOY WONDER to sign off on it, and we’re—well, certain of the Joint Chiefs have been briefed about the PINNACLE BROKEN ARROW and it’s been made clear to them that this is necessary. I gather they’ve even gotten Chief Justice Bork on board. You’ll use your man Rand and his crew to prepare the gadget, they’re already cleared. They’ll hand it and the timer controller to Major Alvarez and Captain Hu, who have orders to put a timer controller on it, set to detonate sixty seconds after activation. It’s tamperproof; any attempt to disarm it other than by using the code-wheel to enter the locking key will make it detonate, but they’ll have the key to hand just in case. You will bolt the Preparation Fifteen unit to the detonation sequencer and put the gadget on top of the, the siege tower. You and the major will start the sequencer, push the button on the transport unit to send it across. If the transport unit fails, you can enter the disarm code and try again later. If it succeeds . . . it’s their problem. May they burn in hell for making us do this,” he added quietly.