Mobius

by Garon Whited

  I didn’t even hear anyone trying to get into the vault. It’s possible they didn’t hear anything, didn’t even notice my arrival, but I tend to think they simply didn’t get anyone with the key down there in time.

  I closed the gate and went to hand off the money.

  Note to self: Gold is heavy. When hauling it about at night, at least pretend to strain. Velina was on duty and seemed more than a little startled when I brought the chest down to the ground floor. The ground floor of the tower is sort of the central command, now, I guess. There are always a couple of female warriors on duty and another at a table—not a desk, exactly, but the next best thing. This is in addition to the two guards stationed outside the main door.

  I should really look into how the keep is secured, but it’s more Leisel’s job than mine. I already provided a tower, masonry outbuildings, a defensive wall for a perimeter, and a paved courtyard. I think I should be allowed to delegate.

  You know you won’t let it go, Boss.

  Shut your flame-hole, you.

  “Can we use part of the dungeon as a treasury?” Velina asked, and tried to lift one end of it. She grunted and it didn’t move.

  “Of course. We’ll want someone on top of it until I can get some enchantments installed.”

  She grunted again, this time an affirmative, and opened the chest. They started carrying down individual bags. No doubt the chest would follow, simply as a container, once it was empty.

  The door to the upward stairs opened and Renata came through, waddling slightly. She was definitively pregnant and, strangely enough, I’d say she was no less beautiful. I’m no expert, but I’m guessing she was eight months. Part of my guess was based on the secondary glow shining through her midsection. The kid looked nearly done to me. It also looked completely normal. If there was a disembodied light occupying the little person, it was now an embodied light, which raised a whole slew of questions I couldn’t answer.

  “Renata! Good to see you. It’s been a while. How are things?”

  “We have papers from the Republic about your weapons. We do not know how to answer them.”

  “That’s odd. Let’s go look.”

  I escorted her up the stairs again. By now, they were easily wide enough to walk side-by-side. I took it as a measure of her condition when she accepted my arm. She sometimes seems to have a chip on her shoulder, whether from long habit—the extra-pretty warrior being mistaken for a courtesan—or from her annoyance at being guarded instead of doing the guarding.

  We went up to the shift-booth and I paused for a moment to check the time. Daylight on the far side told me to wait.

  “Tell you what, Renata. Go ahead. I’ll change clothes, since they don’t wear armor there.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If I get sidetracked, come get me after sunset.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  She went through, I switched out of my armor, and I flicked the micro-gate on and off a couple of times to advance the daylight over there. After a few flicks, the sun went down in the Republic and Renata came back to get me.

  Sitting in the living room—the nicely-furnished living room, I noticed—I reviewed the documents. The Republic of Texas was kindly informing me of the import restrictions on weapons. Crossbows weren’t forbidden, but any shipment of a hundred or more “devices designed for the purpose of launching a harmful projectile” required a lot of paperwork. Permits. Fees. Background checks. Import statements, supply contracts, and, in most cases, a business license to prove I could sell them retail.

  I think they just don’t want anyone supplying a private army.

  Until such time as I filled out and filed the proper paperwork, my shipment from my Mexican—I’m going to think of it as “Mexico.” They referred to it as “Nueva España,” but it occupied the area I think of as Mexico—from my Mexican manufacturer would be held at the customs impound yard in Laredo. It also mentioned, in passing, something about “subject to storage fees and import tax,” but didn’t list any schedules for it. I was reminded of a restaurant rule: If they don’t publish the prices, you can’t afford the eat there.

  There were also some old letters from Chuck, along with the contract for manufacture. The latest letter asked me how I would like to handle the import problem the manufacturer had. Getting the shipment across the border wasn’t part of the contract, but they tried to deliver. Now they had the money and my property was impounded. “Not our problem,” apparently.

  No doubt I could sue somebody, but it wouldn’t get me what I wanted.

  I called Chuck, thanked him for his time and effort, and assured him I’d take care of it. As I hung up, I wondered how I would take care of it. I had the distinct feeling I was getting shafted by both the company who made the things and by the blind, uncaring bureaucracy of a government. I had a hard time believing anyone was in any way concerned about a bunch of archaic weapons being used to stage a coup or a rebellion. Worse, I had a hard time believing they would give them back to me. I can’t pass a background check. I don’t have the documentation to get through a traffic stop! The only reason I could buy a house in the first place was I paid up front and avoided the credit check for a mortgage!

  I’m a fan of neither organized religion nor big government. Am I an iconoclast, revolutionary, or anarchist?

  Regardless, I wasn’t going to sit idly by and let them waste my time and effort. I went to a lot of trouble for those weapons. Since nobody was currently trying to kick down the gate into the valley, I might have time to go get them. The Temple schmucks were headed back to Sarashda to report. The Temple assassin was guarded in the basement and under interrogation. House Sarcana was financially unstable. I might not need the crossbows. Everything might turn around and settle down.

  Who am I kidding?

  I went back and got Bronze. It’s a two-hour drive to Laredo and I didn’t want to do it alone.

  Laredo was a nice place, although rather dusty. I suspect the climate in this world is slightly different from my original Earth. Laredo is a financial center for the Republic with some major banking houses—some of the laws in the Republic are bank-friendly—but its major economic punch comes from being a trading center. The Republic has good highways, so there’s a lot of traffic through it from Mexico to the Confederacy. Since port duties are low, it’s often cheaper to drive a truckload of product directly than to send it by ship across the Gulf, transfer it to a truck, and then deliver it.

  If I hadn’t run afoul of the “projectile weapons” clause, I’d have had no problems.

  The port of entry was a sprawling area on both sides of the highway. Big trucks, little trucks, buses, cars, all of it went through the standard passport and search checks. Most of the cars they simply waved on through after stamping the passport. Dogs sniffed around everywhere, of course, and on many vehicles agents opened trunks, slid wheeled mirrors underneath, all the usual things.

  Cargo carriers, though, detoured off the highway for a manifest check, passport stamp, and a trip through an oversized gadget reminiscent of a metal detector. It was actually a combination of radar scanner and radiation detector, sized for a big rig. I wondered what they expected to find. Or, rather, what they hoped they wouldn’t find. If they were checking for radioactive isotopes, were they more concerned with terrorist contamination or terrorist nukes? The first one I can probably deal with.

  I spent a while simply walking around the unrestricted areas, looking through the fence, that sort of thing. I spent longer looking through a mirror at the warehouses and secure storage areas. I had a hard time finding the crossbows since I didn’t have any idea what sort of crates they were in. I resorted to a location spell. My cargo was still in the original trailer, one of many lined up in rows and surrounded by a wall topped with razor wire. None of them were going anywhere. They were trailers only. The facility had some miniature versions of trucks for moving the trailers when necessary. They didn’t allow a full rig to enter.

  Several ideas
came and went, including stealing a big rig and busting into the holding area. If Bronze wore a tractor-trailer suit, we could hook up to the trailer I wanted pretty quickly. A running battle with the police would then follow, but I figured with her driving and me defending we were about fifty-fifty on making it to the house outside Corpus Christi.

  Firebrand was all for it, as I knew it would be. Bronze wasn’t against it, which is kind of my touchstone for detecting bad ideas. I, on the other hand, am a coward by trade.

  I could show up with a lot of money. If I talked to someone fairly high up the food chain—and left a briefcase full of cash in his office—my paperwork might get lost and my truck released. If I talked to several lesser links, rustling handshakes might make the truck disappear in the correct direction, but someone would eventually notice and come looking—not that I needed much of a head start. Either of those would work, but I’d need to bring Firebrand along to check the people, not for honesty, but for the capacity to stay bought—at the very least, reliably leased. It would also take days.

  My problem was the sheer weight of cargo. I ordered five thousand of the things. That could be as much as twenty tons, not counting packaging. Getting to the goods wasn’t a problem. I could sneak in there, night or day, no sweat. Getting out with the goods was the problem. No, getting away with the goods was the problem. Getting out of the facility was something we could manage, I felt sure. Going a hundred and fifty miles with everyone in Texas trying to stop us would be trouble.

  I could set up a gate somewhat outside the facility, though. The power demand would be prohibitive, but with some extra crystals and a dedicated gate in La Mancha, we might barrel down the road, trigger the gate, and make it through intact. If only the wall of their holding area was high enough, I would draw a temporary gate on it. As it was, I’d have to set one up somewhere outside the holding area.

  But let’s refine this a little further. To save power, we could set up a point-to-point gate on this Earth. It would stay open longer. We could roar out of the holding area, charge down the road and through the gate, emerging from a dedicated gate on the side of my shift-barn. Then we could take our time about parking inside the shift-barn for the second leg of the trip through to Tauta. The barn takes far less power than a gate.

  Then again, all I really wanted was the stuff inside the trailer…

  I’m going to need a bigger truck.

  I had to tweak the time-stream a bit with a quick hop back to the keep, but it was only a minute or two in the keep and most of a day in the Republic. It was long enough for a tractor-trailer rig to show up at the house and park in the barn. In theory, it was going to sit there while I loaded it, which was technically correct. It took a little doing, since I wanted some fairly specific dimensions on the trailer, but the trucking company was willing to help—for a price. The driver arrived late in the afternoon, pulled it into the barn, and we put him up in the guest room.

  While he had a nice dinner, entertained by two pretty ladies, I worked in the barn with a smallish gate to cover costs. I grabbed a couple of sacks of money from somewhere local—I aimed for one of the banks in Laredo—and packed the cash in a suitcase. I was about to have no use for it, but the truck driver would.

  I could have simply killed him and stolen the truck, but that level of ruthlessness is still outside my comfort zone.

  I got my grease pencils and worked over the trailer. There’s one end of a one-shot shift-booth spell.

  I showered for the sunset and hopped into Bronze’s pickup truck. I really ought to get her some spare bumpers, or get some orichalcum jumper cables. For her, changing clothes almost always involves tearing them a little. I started my usual highway hurry spells, gathering some of the local power for them but relying mostly on the batteries. She took off for Laredo while I did this and she flipped through the radio dial for me. There wasn’t much to be heard in the empty places. We should have gotten her a truck with satellite radio. She obligingly replayed some songs she remembered. “El Paso.” “The Streets of Laredo.” “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” “Back in the Saddle Again.” “Cool Water.”

  My horse can sing. Either that, or she’s also an iPod. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

  The impound yard was designed to contain freight. The objective of the security was to prevent someone from making off with cargo. This is not the same thing as keeping everyone out. The entrance and exit from the impound yard had those concrete barriers, forcing anything entering or exiting to go through a slow, careful turn rather than run straight in. There were also gratings with spring-loaded, one-way tire spikes. On a more people-oriented scale, they had walls, fences, surveillance cameras, and lights, but only a few guards. Guards are required, but they also have to be paid. Aside from maintenance, fences are forever. I had speed, one hell of a high jump, and a Somebody Else’s Problem spell. I also don’t show up on cameras and the guards were, for the most part, watching monitors indoors, in the air conditioning, not out on patrol.

  Finding my cargo again required another application of my locator spell. I remembered the right general area, but everything looks different at night, especially for me. I found my trailer, twisted the padlock off, and jumped inside.

  Then it was just a matter of a grease pencil and time.

  Once I had the shift-booth spell prepared, I got out and fired it immediately. As the interior space swapped with the other trailer’s interior space there was a sharp crack, like a rifle shot, while the trailer shook and groaned. The splintering, cracking noise was unexpected. The upper structure of the trailer sagged slightly and the whole thing leaned, twisting a bit.

  I peered inside through a gap between the doors. The interior was a mess. I think I failed to accurately define the space and accidentally stripped out some of the trailer’s interior. Hopefully, I didn’t damage the other trailer too badly.

  I got out of there before someone came to investigate. Thank goodness for government budget cuts.

  Bronze parked in back of the barn, near the front of the big truck. The space-frame add-on to the barn was open, not walled in, so maneuvering was straightforward and easy. I checked over the trailer. It wasn’t a happy trailer. The size and design weren’t entirely identical to the first one, so there were some inevitable consequences. The space and all its contents transferred, of course, but there was some uncertainty about the edges. Bits of the slightly-smaller trailer came away and merged with the slightly-larger one. It appears mismatched spaces can have a zone of indeterminacy along the exterior planes. This wouldn’t happen with a full-on shift-booth, but I cut corners—no joke intended—to cast a quick and dirty one-shot cargo-transfer spell.

  I didn’t want to drive the trailer anywhere, but it was reasonably intact. The crates inside—those I saw—were in perfect condition. Close enough.

  I changed into armor and sent Renata and Illaria out to the barn before I woke up the truck driver. I handed him the suitcase with the cash and had him open it.

  “The truck is insured, right?’

  “Uh? Yes.”

  “Good. Report it stolen in the morning.”

  “But—”

  “Do you see the large pile of money?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pretend you didn’t. The cops will ask questions. Report it stolen, take the insurance, and keep the stack of cash, too.”

  He accepted the cash with a displeased expression. I didn’t expect that. When someone hands you folding money in a pile large enough to require a container, you look happy. Maybe it took him a couple of minutes to process, as might be expected. Someone woke him up in the middle of the night. It can take a little while to get up to speed, especially when the unexpected happens.

  There’s a Spanish Inquisition joke in there, somewhere, but I can’t seem to bring it out. Oh, well.

  Out in the barn, I checked the time. The sun was already up in La Mancha. Crap. We could shift immediately and I would have a really bad day, or we could wait four hours for
the local sunrise.

  Sometimes this time-slippage thing is awesome—awesomely useful, or awesomely inconvenient.

  Well, there were still a couple of things to do. At least I could send Renata and Illaria back through the shift-closet. The truck driver stuck his head out of the bedroom to see what was going on.

  “Relax. I’m finishing up and about to leave. Go count your money.”

  He nodded and went back into the guest room.

  I went back out to the barn and waited there. I debated the wisdom of flicking the barn’s micro-gate a couple of times, just to see if I could pop ahead, but I didn’t like the odds. I only needed a couple of hours. I didn’t want to be gone for days, weeks, or years just to save myself a couple hours of boredom.

  So I was bored. At least the seats were comfortable. Comfortable, but only for about an hour. Then the police showed up.

  “What part of ‘In the morning’ did he not understand?” I grumped, jumping down from the cab.

  Maybe he’s confused on when morning starts? It’s after midnight, Firebrand pointed out.

  “Yeah, but I think of it as more a sunrise thing.”

  You would.

  “Stop making sense when I’m grouchy. I’m in no mood for logic.” I closed the barn doors to keep out the flashing lights and discourage entry. No doubt there would be a pair of officers entering the barn in a moment, but I wanted more time. They gave me time by talking to the truck driver. From what I heard, he was deeply upset. I guess he was attached to his truck beyond its monetary value. He didn’t mention the cash, though. Good for him. Maybe he was sounding aggrieved for the officers’ benefit. I didn’t get to see his spirit to check.

  We could kill them all and keep waiting, Firebrand suggested.

  “We could, but I’m not comfortable with killing people for no good reason.”

  You’d be avoiding a sudden sunset-start. Isn’t that a good reason?

  “Technically, yes, but no. I’m not going to murder a couple of cops for doing their job. All this is going to do is inconvenience me. They don’t get killed for that.”