“Shit.” Rich picked up the handset and dialed a four-digit number. “Ops? This is a call for SERENE AMBLER. Yeah, that’s SERENE AMBLER. They’re expecting you to connect me immediately . . . good. Colonel? Rich here.”
The voice at the other end of the line sounded alert. “What’s the news?”
“Our FADM inventory is fucked, and it’s worse than we feared. We’re out by another five, in addition to the one we found in Boston. That one was on forward deployment when it went walkies, but the ones we’re missing here were supposed to be in secure storage. Turns out they’ve been tampered with in the meantime—someone has gotten inside the storage cells. I slipped out while they were declaring an official Pinnacle Empty Quiver so I could warn you; the missing items are all from the covert resource allocated to SECDEF and VPOTUS back in 2001, so somebody needs to brief WOLFMAN and WARBUCKS urgently to head it off at the pass before the shitstorm hits the National Command Authority and confuses the president.”
“I see.” The colonel fell uncharacteristically silent for a few seconds. “And what does the scene look like to you, right now?”
Rich paused, glancing at the guard, who was pointedly not listening—too pointedly, he thought. “The area’s secured against normal threats, so your guess is as good as mine as to how they got in.” Which was to say, not a guess at all—they both knew perfectly well how these particular bad guys might sneak into a secure area. “The building’s surrounded by a—the usual kind of security you’d expect—but it’s AGL. The guards seem alert enough to”—yes, the guard was very pointedly not listening—“intruders. I’m not making any guesses how they managed to make the substitution, but the H-912 cases were full of ballast. Which suggests whoever took them knows exactly what they’re doing with the contents.”
Another pause. “Can you confirm six missing, and no more?”
That was an easy one to answer: “No, sir. I can confirm six empty quivers and six full ones, but I cannot rule out the possibility that there are more missing.” He licked his dry lips. “I would be astonished if the site authority doesn’t order a full lockdown immediately and commence an audit within the next hour or two, in anticipation of NCA’s likely orders. Meanwhile, it looks like we’ll be stuck here for a few hours, if not days. What do you want us to do?”
Silence. “Leave it to the NNSA,” the colonel finally said. “I’ll escalate it for WARBUCKS’s attention immediately. Meanwhile, I want you back in Boston as soon as you can disengage. There’s a problem with COLDPLAY. . . .”
Heir Apparent
I
am not hearing this, Miriam Beckstein told herself. The temptation to giggle, to laugh it all off as a bizarre joke, was enormous. Pretend it isn’t happening; yeah, right. Story of my life. She tightened her grip on the valise holding her notebook PC and its precious CDROMs. Except that for the past six months, the mad stuff had made a habit of punching her in the guts whenever she least expected it. “Run that by me again,” she said.
“It’s quite simple,” said the hard-eyed young debutante with the machine pistol. “Your mother wants to use you to consolidate power.” She kept her eyes focused on Miriam as she twisted the magazine free of the gun, worked a slide to eject a cartridge, and swapped another magazine into place. “The duke agrees with her. And we”—the eloquent roll of her shoulder took in their companions, a cohort of young and alarmingly heavily armed Clan world-walkers—“intend to make sure you’re not just there for show.”
They look like students, thought Miriam. Students outfitted by North Face for a weekend hike; accessories by Fabrique Nationale and Heckler & Koch. Of course they were nothing of the kind. Young aristocrats of the Clan nobility—born in the curious quasi-mediaeval kingdom of Gruinmarkt, and able to travel to other worlds at will—they might look like ordinary American undergrads, but the mindset behind those fresh young faces was very different.
“Oh, really?” she managed. The idea of her mother—and the duke—plotting to put her on the throne of the Gruinmarkt was pretty preposterous, on the face of it—but then, so were so many of the other intrigues the Clan seemed to generate. Then another thought struck her: You said “we,” didn’t you? So Brill had an agenda of her own, over and above her loyalty to the duke—or Miriam, for that matter? Time to probe. . . .
“Was this”—she pointed at her belly, quiet anger in her voice—“part of their plan?”
“Milady” Brill—Lady Brilliana d’Ost, a mere twenty-something—furrowed her brow. “With all due respect, if you think that, you’re paranoid. Do you really think the duke—or your mother—know you so poorly as to think you a suitable mother for the heir to the throne? Much less, under such durance? Henryk and your—his backer—were fools for thinking they could manipulate you that way, and now they are dead fools. The rest of us are just trying to make the best of a bad deal. And if you want to talk politics, would you mind leaving it until later? I’ve got a splitting headache and it’s about to get worse.”
Miriam winced. World-walking took it out of a member of the Clan’s inner families, those with the ability: Doing it more than once in a day risked migrainelike symptoms and a blood pressure spike. There were other symptoms, too: pregnancy, she’d learned the hard way, made world-walking under your own power impossible. But they’d come here from New Britain, escaping after the abortive ambush at a provincial railway station in that world’s version of California, immediately after picking her up.
One of the young men pacing the perimeter of the clearing raised a hand, twirled it in a warning circle. “One hour to go.”
“Yah.” Brill glanced round again. The forest clearing was peaceful, unoccupied but for Miriam, Brill, and her three young bloods, but she never stopped scanning.
“Are we in any immediate danger?” Miriam asked, shifting her balance on the fallen tree trunk.
“Probably not right now.” Brill paused to continue her inspection. “The Kao’s patrols don’t usually sweep this far northeast. Better not linger, though. We’ll be ready to move in another hour.”
“The Kao?”
“The Favored of Heaven’s border troops. Most of the local tribes give them a wide berth. We should, too.” A warning look in her eyes gave Miriam a cold shiver; if Brill was scared of them, that was enough for her.
“What are you planning on doing once we cross over?”
“We’ve got a hotel suite in San Jose. I plan to get us over there, then make contact with the duke and ask for further instructions. I imagine he’ll want us back on the east coast stat—we’ve got a biz-jet standing by. Otherwise, we’ll do what Security tells us to do. Unless you have other plans?” Brill raised a carefully shaped eyebrow. Even though she’d started the day with a brisk firefight, then a forced crossing into wilderness, she’d taken pains with her makeup.
Miriam shrugged. “I thought I did.” Her hands were restless; trying to keep them still, she thrust them deep in the pockets of her overly heavy coat. “The political situation in New Britain is going to hell in a handbasket. Erasmus was on his way to meet a big wheel in the, uh, resistance.” In point of fact, the biggest wheel in the underground, returning from exile after a generation—to whom he had once been a personal assistant. “It’s too hot for comfort. I was only going along because I couldn’t think of anything else to do; when I fetched up in London all I had was the clothes on my back.”
“Well, at least you got away from the mess at the Summer Palace with your skin intact,” Brill observed. “And thank whatever gods you believe in for that.”
She fell silent for a few minutes. But finally Miriam’s curiosity got the better of her. “I can guess how you tracked me down,” she said. “But what about Huw? And the other two? Who are they? You said something about a job I’d suggested, but I don’t recall . . . and they don’t look like Uncle Angbard’s little helpers to me.”
“They’re not.” Brilliana’s eyes narrowed. “I just called in help and head office sent them along. Hey! Sir Huw? Have you a minute?”
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Huw nodded. “Bro, cover for me,” he told the tall, heavily built guy with the semiauto shotgun as he walked towards them. Huw was anything but husky: skinny and intense. “Has something come up?”
“Huw.” Brill smiled, oddly cheerful. “We’ve got a couple of hours to kill. Why don’t you tell her grace what you found?”
Her grace? But I’m not a duchess. Miriam blinked. Suddenly bits of the big picture were falling into place. Heir to the throne. “What you found, where?”
“We’re calling it world four right now, but I think a better name for it would be Transition A–B,” Huw said as he sat down at the far end of the fallen trunk. “It’s where you go if you use the Hidden Family’s knotwork as a focus in your world, uh, the United States.” He grinned, twitchily. “Nobody was able to cross over in New England because, well, it’s probably under an ice sheet—the weather there’s definitely a lot colder than in any of the other time lines we know about.”
Hang on, time lines—Miriam held up a hand. “What were you doing?”
“The duke tasked me with setting up a systematic exploration program,” Huw explained. “So I started by taking the second known knotwork design and seeing where it’d take you if you used it in world two, in the USA, which the Hidden Family had no access to. The initial tests in Massachusetts and New York failed, so I guessed there might be a really large obstacle in the way. There’s some kind of exclusion effect . . . but anyway, we found a new world.”
Miriam narrowly resisted the urge to grab him and start yelling questions. “Go on.”
“World four is cold, as in, about ten degrees celsius below datum for the other worlds we’ve found. That’s ice age cold. We didn’t have time to do much exploring, but what we found—there were people there, once, but we didn’t see any signs of current habitation. High tech, very high tech—perfect dentistry, gantries made out of titanium, and other stuff. We’re still trying to figure out the other stuff, but it’s a whole different ball game. The building we found looked like it had been struck from above by some kind of directed energy weapon—”
“Some kind of—”Miriam stopped. On the opposite side of the clearing, the young blond woman who’d come with Huw was kneeling, her weapon trained on something invisible through the trees.
Brill was already moving. “Get ready to go.”
“But it’s too early,” Miriam started.
“What’s Elena spotted?” Huw rose to his feet. The big guy at the far side of the clearing—the one Huw had called “bro”—was crouching behind the blonde, his shotgun raised: A moment later she turned and scrambled towards them, staying low.
“Riders,” she said quietly, addressing Brill. “At least three, maybe more. They’re trying to stay quiet. Milady, we await your instructions.”
“I think”—Brill’s eyes hardened—“we’d better cross over. Right now. Huw, can you carry her grace?”
“I think so.” Huw knelt down. “Miriam, if you could climb on my shoulders?”
Miriam swallowed. “Is this necessary? It’s too early—”
Brill cut her off. “It is necessary to move as fast as possible, unless you want another shoot-out. I generally try to limit them to no more than one before lunch on any given day. Huw, get her across. We’ll be along momentarily.”
Miriam stood up, wrapped her arms around Huw’s shoulders, and tried to haul her legs up. Huw rose into a half-crouch. She strained to clamp her knees around his waist. “Are you alright?” she asked anxiously.
“Just a second,” he gasped. “Alright. Three. Two.” Something flickered in the palm of his hand, just in the corner of her vision: a fiery knot that tried to turn her eyes and her stomach inside out. “One.”
The world around them flickered and Huw collapsed under her, dry-retching. Miriam fell sideways, landing heavily on one hip.
They were in scrubland, and alone. Someone’s untended back lot, by the look of it: a few stunted trees straggling across a nearby hillside like hairs across a balding man’s pate, a fence meandering drunkenly to one side. A windowless barn that had clearly seen better days slumped nearby.
Miriam rose to her feet and dusted herself off. Her traveling clothes, unremarkable in New Britain, would look distinctly odd to American eyes: a dark woolen coat of unusual cut over the mutant offspring of a shalwar kameez. Along with her temporarily blond, permed hair it was a disguise that had outlived its usefulness. “Where are you parked?” she asked Huw as his retching subsided.
“Front of. Barn.” He staggered to a crouch. “Need. Painkillers. . . .”
Something moved in the corner of her sight. Miriam’s head whipped round as she thrust a hand in her coat pocket, reaching for the small pistol Erasmus had given her before she recognized Elena. A few seconds later Huw’s brother Hulius popped into view, followed almost immediately by Brilliana. “Come on, people!” Brill sounded more annoyed than nauseous. “Cover! Check!”
“Check,” Huw echoed hollowly. “I think we’re still alone.”
“Check!” trilled Elena. “Did they see you, Yul? Ooh, you don’t look so good!”
“Guuuh . . . Check. I don’t think so. Going. Be sick.”
Brill clapped her hands. “Let’s get going, people.” She was almost tapping her feet with impatience. “We’ve got a safe house to go to. You can throw up all you like once we report in, but first we’ve got a job to do.” She nodded at Miriam. “After you, milady.”
In a soot-stained industrial city nestling in the Appalachians, beneath a sky stained amber by the fires of half a million coal-burning stoves, there was a noble house defended by the illusion of poverty.
The Lee family and their clients did not like to draw attention to themselves. The long habit of secrecy was deeply ingrained in their insular souls; they’d lived alone among enemies for almost ten generations, abandoned by the eastern Clan that had once—so they had thought until recently, so some still thought—cast them out and betrayed them. Here in the industrial heartland of Irongate there was little love for rich foreigners, much less wealthy Chinese merchants, at the best of times. And the times were anything but good: With the empire locked in a bewildering and expensive overseas war (to say nothing of multiple consecutive crop failures and a bare treasury, deflation, and high unemployment) the city was as inflammable as a powder keg.
Consequently, the Lees did not flaunt their wealth and power openly. Nor did their home resemble a palatial mansion. Rather, it resembled a tenement block fronted by the dusty window displays of failing shops (for only the pawnbroker’s business remained good). Between two such shops there stood a blank-faced door, a row of bellpulls discreetly off to one side. It might have been a stairwell leading to the cramped flats of shopkeepers and factory foremen. But the reality was very different.
“Be seated, nephew,” said the old man with the long, wispy beard. “And tell me what brings you here?”
James Lee bowed his head, concealing his unease for a few more moments. As was right, he went to his knees and then sat cross-legged before the low platform on which his great uncle, the eldest of days—and his companions, the eldest’s younger sibling, Great-Uncle Huan, and his first wife—perched.
“The Clan has gone too far,” he began, then paused.
“Tea for my favorite nephew,” the eldest commented, and one of the servants who had been standing behind James bowed and slipped out through a side door. “You may continue.”
James took a deep breath. “They resumed their scheme to capture the royal house. My understanding is that the chosen bride, the long-lost daughter of the western alliance, was not an enthusiastic participant: The architect of the marriage, her grandmother, allied with the conservative faction at court to coerce her.”
He paused for a moment as the servant, returning, placed a tray bearing a steaming cup before him. “I considered the merits of direct action, but concluded the cost would outweigh any benefit. It would be interpreted as base treachery, and I did not feel able to take su
ch measures without your approval.”
“Just so.” His great-uncle nodded. “What happened next?”
James chose his next words very carefully, aware of the tension in the room: There was no whispering in corners, and none of the usual cross-play between the ancients that was normal when the eldest held court. “The baroness and her coconspirators made a fundamental error of judgment when they arranged the betrothal of the heir Miriam to the youngest son of the King. They failed to see how this would be received by his elder brother. Prince Egon is not of the blood and therefore they ignored him; Creon, though damaged, was thought by them to be an occulted carrier”—one who carried the recessive gene for the world-walking ability, but was not able himself to world-walk—“and so they planned to breed from him a king who would be one of their own. Egon took as dim a view of this marriage as you would expect, and the result was bound to be messy. Although I did not realize how drastically he would react at the time.”
He reached out and picked up the cup of tea, then took a sip before continuing.
“I intervened at the betrothal by presenting the eastern heir—Helge, as they call her, Miriam, in her own tongue—with a locket containing our house sigil. She had made it clear that she felt no filial piety, and wished to escape. I therefore concluded that there was no reason to kill her if it was her heart’s desire to do what we wanted: I merely gave her the means. I confess that I did not anticipate Egon’s attempt to massacre everybody at the ceremony—but by now either she’s dead or in exile, so our goal is achieved without her blood on our hands.”
“About the massacre.” Great-Uncle Huan leaned forward. “You were present, were you not?”
James nodded.
“How did you escape?”
Another sip of tea: “The situation was confused. When Egon’s men detonated a petard beneath the palace and then attacked, the royal life guards fought back. While this was going on, those of the Clan’s leaders who were present made themselves scarce. They left their dead behind. I hid under a table until I could get out, using my spare sigil.” With one hand, James reached into the sleeve of his robe. Now or never. He pulled out a small gilded locket on a fine chain. “Before I left, I removed this from the body of a dead baron. It’s the authentic sigil of the eastern Clan. I have tested it myself.” He laid it on the dais before the eldest. “I brought it here directly.”
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