Shadows of Falling Night

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Istanbul

The Zeppelin Company had long ago diversified into everything up to and including kitchenware, but since the turn of the century it had also taken to making airships again, mostly for the tourist trade. Ellen had even seen one during a holiday in San Francisco, taking a stately tour up the Napa Valley. They were midgets compared to the giants that had once bombed London and circumnavigated the globe right after World War One, but still nearly three hundred feet long; there were pivoting engines in pods, and the controls were all digital and fly-by-wire. Ellen knew that in fact it was gossamer-fragile and light, but instinct said it was a massive hulk hovering impossibly overhead.

It loomed like some great prehistoric night-creature over the roof, not like an aircraft at all. The buzzing throb of the engines died down to a low growl just sufficient to hold it in place, and a rope-ladder dropped from the gondola along with a grapnel cable. Someone tied that off. Adrian went up first and Ellen right behind him, glad that she’d always been athletic-she was a runner and tennis-player of considerable merit, and she’d learned more recondite skills since. Adrian moved like a leopard in the night, nearly running upward, and paused to give her a hand through the hatchway.

The seats had been removed inside the gondola, except for the pilot’s; it was surprisingly small, after the huge bulk of the lifting body, no bigger inside than a minor commuter jet. Fourteen people crowded it, and she put an arm around the solid slimness of Adrian’s waist as they both gripped handholds on the walls. It was always a bit of a shock when something reminded her that he was actually below average height. The air had an electric crackle, and that distinct fruity scent of Break Free gun oil, and very faint powder residues that apparently never entirely came out of clothing.

It’s my imagination that I can smell the blood. I’m glad the Brotherhood approves of showers and soap and deodorant, she thought. They can be sort of self-punishing at times.

The cable slipped free. There was a curious rising-elevator sensation, and a rumble and splash as water ballast cut loose. The pilot chuckled.

“Never thought I’d get a chance to actually do this,” he said.

In a thick Australian accent, what she thought of as a roip way of talking; he was a man in his thirties with a thick shock of yellow hair beneath the headset.

“Always thought the higher-ups were bonkers for putting me through fuckin’ Hindenburg school, and here I am floating over to a bunch of clowns with fuckin’ shooters and whizz bangs.”

Adrian leaned forward. “Can you do a silent approach?”

“Come upwind and drift down?” A shrug. “I can try it. Tricky, though. All things considered I’d rather be back in Borroloola snogging the salties.”

The big aircraft spiraled upward, and lines crawled over the screen’s GPS unit. That looked patched in and clamped in an improvised mount; someone had liberated a military-grade model for this.

“Here we go,” the pilot said, and cut the engines.

Silence fell, broken only by the whine and click of small electronic components. Lights and streets and buildings drifted by beneath, shockingly close; the hills north of the Golden Horn were coming up, and they were scarcely higher than the modest height of the tallest towers.

I wonder how they’re handling the police and air traffic control, Ellen thought, the words drifting through the tension in her mind. I wonder how many laws we’re breaking?

The thought was remote. That whole world, laws, regulations, the mechanisms of civil society, seemed so distant now. And more than remote-she was thoroughly enclosed now in the cystlike prison of the Council-Brotherhood War-but the real world seemed so unreal once you knew how the world really worked. A false front, a reassuring story told to children, a Potemkin village, a world pulled over the world’s eyes. It was a profoundly unsettling thought, when you let yourself dwell on it, so most of the time she didn’t.

Of course, so is the fact that you’re floating in a balloon towards people who want to shoot you, she thought. Then: Wait a minute…

“This thing won’t burn, will it?” she asked.

The pilot grinned without turning around, though there was little he could do while the zeppelin was free-floating at the same speed as the air that bore it up, with nothing for the control services to bite on. She could see his reflection in the glass of the gondola’s windows ahead of him, ghostly and pale.

“No, don’t worry about us doing a Hindenberg. It’s helium in there”-he jerked a thumb upward-“not flammable. Skin’s not doped with rocket fuel, either.”

She blinked. “Rocket fuel?”

“Just a bit of an exaggeration. It was iron oxide and aluminum and cellulose acetate on the outside of the old Zeps, though. Burns a treat. This lady’s all composites and synthetics, strong and fireproof. Mind you, it’s all too thin to stop a bullet. Like riding in an empty beer can that way.”

Adrian chuckled at that, as did most of the group. One-the tall thin black woman with the Yoruba teardrop scars below her eyes-glanced at Ellen and shrugged as if to say what can you do?

The pilot glanced at the screen, where high definition pictures flowed from the radar-laser scanners. A spot steadied on the roof of the building that was their target. “Coming up. I’ll have to restart the engines to hold us over the roof, there’s a bit of a breeze.”

Adrian shook his head, an abstracted look in his yellow-flecked eyes. “No. I will go down on a line and secure it. You can winch the craft in after the assault group rappels down. Is everyone clear on that? Objections?”

Everyone looked at him then; even Ellen, though she knew he wasn’t as reckless as he sounded sometimes. Because…

“You’d have to be dead lucky,” the pilot said. Then: “Oh. You are dead lucky, right, sport?”

Adrian nodded. “Perhaps lucky enough. Then again, perhaps not, hein?”

That brought a chuckle; this time the scarred woman, whose name had been something like Abayomi, joined in. Ellen gave his arm a single brief squeeze as he knelt by the door and opened it, reaching around and down for the wire cable with its lock-loop on one end, casual about the hundreds of feet of open space below him. The light of the city poured in, but the breeze surprised by being gentle, if cold.

Because we’re floating with the air, she realized. At the same speed as the wind so we don’t feel it.

Below, a dark street crawled by, with pools of light where the streetlamps cast puddles that glittered where the beams struck standing water and damp pavement. The rain was still falling, turning the glitter of windows and cars beyond watery and shifting. With the hatch open she could hear the murmur and rumble of traffic, and the shushing white-noise sound of the rain itself on miles of rooftops and pavements and the tin-roof drumbeat on the zeppelin itself.

Adrian looked at her and nodded once as he snapped a hook to link the line to his body.

“Give me the word,” he said crisply.

“Right,” the pilot said tightly, his eyes moving between the GPS screen and the inward-slanting window ahead of his position. “Coming up…we’re going to cross right over it.”

“Just about…now!”

Adrian leapt into the darkness, trusting in qualities of mind and muscle and bone to stop at just the right moment where the moving line draped over the roof. Ellen’s heart seemed to lurch in her chest, even before the weight coming on the line made the vast gossamer fabric of the airship bob and dip. Then there was a solid yank, a groan of protesting trusses, and the football-field bulk of the zeppelin swiveled in the air as the line turned its nose into the wind.

“We’re solid,” the pilot barked, and reached up for the emergency gas valve, yanking on it to balance the weight that would be leaving the airship. “As long as the bloody thing doesn’t tear loose. Go, go, go!”

The Brotherhood troopers swung out; each hooked on, locked an arm and a leg around the cable that swooped out in a long curve into the night and slid away. Ellen had never actually done a rappel like this in reality, though some of the rock climbing had come close. In the dreamspace of Adrian’s mind, yes, often, and in conditions far worse…and it would work just like real training, if she didn’t think about it and paralyze herself.

Hubbie’s waiting for me, she thought, and let her body act as it thought it had done a hundred times before.

A jerk as her weight came on one elbow, the hand on that arm locked under the other armpit, her ankles crossed on the cable below with the soles of her boots clamped on it to slow the descent and keep the cable from burning through the leather jacket. There was gear specifically for this, but they didn’t have it and you didn’t need it for a short drop…if you were strong and willing to take risks.

Rushing night, a flash of exhilaration, then dark shapes looming. She released about six feet up, landed and rolled on the asphalt surface of the rooftop, grunting slightly as she slammed into a ventilation duct. Luckily that was the corner-it hurt, but it didn’t boom much. The black shape of the dirigible above them bobbed upwards, hauling the cable more nearly straight. There was a hiss of released gas, but the pilot didn’t bring the airship down too far. They’d need to get back on board. She rolled back to her feet, felt an inner tickle that was Adrian checking on her-he’d installed a Wreaking to let her know when he did that, and another that could shut him out if she chose. Right now she hadn’t the slightest desire to do that.

Someone pointed to the camera pickup over the central island that held the stairwell; the building was about three stories high, too little for an elevator.

Adrian made a gesture with thumb and forefinger, as if shooting it out: I’ve taken care of it.

The black woman knelt by the door. It had an access keypad and a biometric scanner, quite state-of-the-art, but Ellen had noticed that Istanbul had a full share of the mod-cons, which had rather surprised her. Turkey was apparently quite a modern country, at least this part of it. The Brotherhood operative reached out one slim-fingered hand and closed her eyes. There was a click and the door opened slightly as the deadbolts withdrew. Adrian paused, frowning.

There…are…human…traces…below…carefully…shielded, he thought at them all, the word/symbols freighted with meaning beyond their content-a cold wariness, alert and hard and quite merciless. But…no…trace…of…Ledbetter…Guha…or…Farmer. They…have…been…here…but…I…can not…be…certain…if…they…are…now.

Everyone looked slightly surprised, as far as she could tell in the dark among a group so stone-faced. Of course, Adrian’s sensitivity was far greater.

You…said…Ledbetter’s…shielding…was…very…good, someone pointed out.

Ellen unconsciously rubbed at her forehead. She didn’t like telepathy, even the somewhat distanced relay version Adrian could provide despite her lack of the genes that would let her do it herself. She liked the real thing even less-she’d experienced that in his mind, while he was soul-carrying her. It was too much like talking to someone by whispering in each other’s ears during an embrace, naked. Nice with Adrian sometimes. With people in general, no. Especially Shadowspawn people, who tended to get so obviously hungry around her.

Most of the time Adrian…well, his motto was if you have a message, text it. Adrienne felt the same way, oddly enough. Telepathy had low bandwidth, especially at a distance. But there were occasions when it was useful.

The building was three stories, but it had only one logical place to put something the size of the bomb. That was in the loading dock on the ground floor. One of the Brotherhood operatives secured the rooftop door with a wedge jammed in next to the hinge, and they went down the stairs in a very quiet rush; someone was always looking up the stairwell and someone down, and the second-story door was dealt with equally quietly.

I don’t think I’ll ever really love the Brotherhood, Ellen thought. But I do respect them.

“Halt!” someone shouted as they came out into the echoing spaces of the ground floor.

There was nothing but darkness, shadows and concrete pillars. She dove for cover behind one of them, ignoring the pain of landing elbows down on a hard surface. It took a moment before Ellen realized that she was hearing through her base-link with Adrian as well as through her ears. Their connection grew stronger under stress, and what she was getting now included his knowledge of Turkish.

“Halt or we will open fire! This is the gendarmerie and you will receive no further warning!”

Oh, shit, she had time to think, before the roaring, stuttering, strobing flicker of an automatic weapon cast its jerky shadows. The deadly keening ping of ricochets sounded, all the more nerve-racking because the danger was so random. Seconds later there was a single, louder, bang and an inhuman shriek of agony. A round had misfired or ruptured and a chain of explosions had shattered the weapon and probably most of the man wielding it.

That was why Shadowspawn didn’t use automatics when they fought each other, and the Brotherhood didn’t carry them either. One of the adepts with her had lashed out with a preset Wreaking on reflex.

Grenades flew. More of the automatic weapons opened up, in panic: the police ambush hadn’t been set with attack from above in mind. Generally terrorists didn’t drop out of the sky on Zeppelins.…

A megaphone began to bellow something from outside. It cut off in a feedback squeal and then the big soft whump of gasoline going off in a rare fuel-air explosion. Ruddy light shone through a window, and screams sounded from the street. The volume of fire grew.

“No! Don’t kill them!” Adrian shouted.

Her heart lurched as he stood erect and spread his arms wide; the lisping whine of Mhabrogast as he shouted made her want to clap her hands over her ears-even though she had a revolver in the right.

Lines of tracer swung towards him…and then stopped. The world twisted and men leapt to their feet. They were dressed in black helmets and body armor, their faces anonymous under their night vision masks. They all tore off their goggles and threw them away, as if they’d stopped working-or were showing them something different, different and intolerable.

One kept tearing at his face as if something was clinging there; only the leather gloves he wore prevented him from ripping it away. Another simply stood rocking back and forth, tears flowing from his eyes. Two more just ran, their screams echoing over the slap of their boot soles on the concrete.

“Secure them!” Adrian snapped. “They must have been decoyed here somehow. They’re bystanders, not players!”

He moved forward, shouted another phrase in the lingua demonica, his voice utterly different-deep and harsh, but somehow also like the chittering of a rat the size of a wolf. Another police commando erupted out of a utility room, tearing off his earphones and batting at smoking spots on his uniform; the smell of scorching polyester was added to the medley of stinks. Behind him communications equipment shorted out in a spectacular barrage of yellow and red sparks and a crackle of burning plastic.

The Brotherhood commandos sprinted forward. They seemed to know exactly where the Turkish police were hiding, those who weren’t stumbling blind or rolling on the floor as they fought with private demons. Mostly they just touched them, and the Turks lost interest or slumped unconscious. The less Power-endowed used hypodermics.

There was a bustle of action. “Clear!” one of the operatives said at last. “They’re barricading the street outside, though. And the airship will have to leave. No amount of Wreaking can hide something that size for long.”

Adrian nodded. “The bomb?”

“There’s been no one here but the gendarmes for hours at least.”

Adrian was snarling-literally-when she came up to his side, holstering her pistol, and then gasping with relief when he needed not hold the Wreakings in operation any longer. The snarl wasn’t simply anger; she could feel the frustration and self-reproach. And even in the darkness he looked a little pale. Wreaking on that scale without time for preparation would be draining even for an adept of Adrian’s capacities. They needed a little privacy. Even when it didn’t involve sex, she felt feeding was far too intimate to let anyone else watch if it could be helped.

“Remember what you said about Harvey,” she said.

Some of the tension went out of him. There was even the faintest trace of amusement in his voice when he spoke:

“It is much easier to appreciate his dashing redneck savoir-faire when you’re not on the receiving end.”

“Sir,” one of the Brotherhood operatives said. “This was under the windscreen wiper of one of the trucks. Old model, but a substantial semi-tractor. I get an impression that it came from the east-there’s a residue that smells like that curse the Council put on the area.

The note read, Sorry I couldn’t show you and Ellen around Istanbul, but I’ve got Georgia on my mind.

“Let me see this truck,” Adrian said.

While he examined it, Ellen kept her back to him and her eyes busy. Despite the temptation; his face might have been a disreputable angel’s when he concentrated that way, but it wouldn’t do him any good to have her mooning over him and it might to have her watching his back. There was a long silence, broken only by the muffled sobbing of one of the Turkish SWAT team.

“They are expecting backup soon,” one of the operatives said, after a few words with the crying policeman. “Even if you got their communications before they called an alarm.”

Adrian sighed again. “And it would tickle Harvey’s fancy no end to have us waste more time and more of the Power. This is the vehicle, there is no doubt about that.”

One of the others placed her palms against it, and concentrated. “I feel absolutely nothing, she said dubiously. “No linkages, no trace of flexion in the world-lines beyond what you’d expect for one anonymous vehicle. It is…Just there.”

Ellen couldn’t resist the snicker that she mostly smothered. “Now you know what it’s like being a normal,” she said.

“That is the effect of the new…Technique,” Adrian said; even here among Brotherhood loyalists he didn’t say machine. “Even now that it has been removed. That portion of its existence has been, mmmm, cut out of its history as far as the Power is concerned.”

He turned. “Deal with the gendarmes; get them out, implant short-term amnesia, and plant some suggestion of psychotropic gasses. After the Bangkok Strike, that will be credible enough. We should torch this truck, otherwise someone from the Council might notice. We cannot have them getting a hint of the Boase Effect.”

One of the team nodded. “Sir, we have to evacuate as soon as we’ve done that. There are far too many of the enemy around, and they have the Turkish government under close control.”

He nodded. “I and my companions will carry on the search. Back to the roof, the lot of you.” Only Ellen heard him add: “For whatever good it will do.”

“What about us?” she said, as the Brotherhood operatives withdrew; one of them was limping and swearing, though that was the limit of their injuries.

“Eric and the others are down by the docks. That was an excellent thought of his. Come, we can do some work along the way.”

He walked over to the wounded Turks. One…

Ellen swallowed and let her eyes slide out of focus. “Is he dead?”

“Not quite, but beyond hope.” Adrian went down on a knee and touched the man’s forehead; the body went limp. “Help me with this one.”

Fortunately the ambush team had all had the usual first-aid supplies with them. They did what they could and then Adrian levered the semi-conscious man upright. Ellen took an arm over her shoulder, her nostrils wrinkling with the smells of blood, scorched flesh and gear, and body wastes. They walked the man out. The street outside was the tail-end of chaos as policemen chivvied the last of the local civilians away; a medium-sized truck with official markings was still burning despite fire-extinguishers. An ambulance pulled away as she watched, and machine-pistols turned towards them.

Adrian pulled out ID from a pocket, held it up and snapped orders in Turkish. Ellen was close enough to see the look of relief on the nearest faces; paramedics ran forward with a gurney, and a squad rushed past the two Americans.

“What did you tell them? And how did you explain me?” she asked, as they walked past briskly; a police noncom went ahead of them, waving others aside.

He continued ahead as the pair turned left, down towards the Golden Horn to the south.

Adrian shrugged. “I told them I was a Milli İstihbarat Teşkilatı officer.”

“What’s that?”

“The Turkish equivalent of the CIA and the FBI, combined. It’s a useful cover.” He smiled bleakly. “Harvey taught me that one. It’s appropriate, no? Let’s see if the others have managed to blunder as badly as we and the Brotherhood.”

Peter Boase held up the tablet, the screen glowing with high definition pictures of Harvey Ledbetter and his two presumed accomplices.

“Have you seen these people?” he asked, one of the half-dozen phrases of Turkish they had learned. Then: “I don’t speak Turkish. Yes or no, please?”

Eric didn’t speak Turkish either; he was good with languages, but no Shadowspawn to pick them up in a few days. He did, however, have a knack for telling whether people were lying or not. He was also usefully intimidating, scowling with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat, the scabs and bruises on his face adding a little gravitas. All that helped, but trying to do detective work in a place where you didn’t speak the language and didn’t even have some interpreter sweating by your side was still a nightmare.

“No,” the Turk growled, and started to push past Peter into what might be the entrance of a rooming house, or some really cheap apartments. “I have not seen them.”

“Yes, you did, my friend,” Eric said. “Didn’t your mama ever tell you that lying was a sin?”

As he spoke he put his left arm on the door frame, barring the local’s way. With the same motion he brought his right hand up and fanned out a crisp spray of bills with a gesture like a stage magician’s.

He hadn’t done that before because money was like a gun. Which meant it wasn’t a magic wand that always made people do what you wanted. In this case, if you offered the money before you knew whether the person actually had the information needed, you muddied the waters beyond repair. If nothing was what they had, chances were they would make a determined effort to sell you disguised nothing.

The man had been sporting a scowl to match the New Mexican’s; that faded as he looked down at the bills. He didn’t smile-the sensible man wouldn’t, when a foreigner waved that sort of cash under his face. Danger and gold went together a lot more certainly than love and marriage ever had, and this looked to be the sort of neighborhood where people were acutely aware of the fact.

He did look as if he were thinking things over, though, unconsciously chewing for a second on his substantial mustache. Then he gave a jerk of his head, motioning them through into the foyer. That was a fairly fancy name for a dark dingy little expanse with a staircase leading upward, and a slight whiff of either human or cat urine under a reek of cheap disinfectant. It made a good place to do business, though. Under all the differences of detail-the building was basically stone, and might be a thousand years old-it made him sort of nostalgic for some of the things he’d done as a homicide roach. Even little Santa Fe had plenty of places like this, and Albuquerque still more.

“Bingo,” he said softly, as the man took the tablet.

The Turk grunted, and surprised him by expertly manipulating the touchscreen to enlarge the faces. Then he surprised Eric again by speaking in comprehensible if thickly accented English, the type that got meaning across without necessarily being able to master the tense structure:

“Yes, I see him, and him, and her, the dark woman. She is wearing scarf on head and long coat, but she look from like a hawk and everyone else dog, bad woman I think. Think she have gun. Man with yellow hair too; bad man, cruel man. Old man meet them on dock, truck with-”

The man’s English failed him, but not his command of information technology. The fingers of his right hand danced on the screen; Peter sighed, and Eric swore fluently in Ladino Spanish. Even more surprisingly, the Turk chuckled appreciatively at one of the riper phrases. The screen he showed was of a big flatbed with an integral crane…Perfectly suited for lifting a heavy load, and with modern controls one operator could use it; there were video pickups on the business end.

“Old man hires six to make fast on gulet,” he said. Then with a slight frown: “He speaks very good Turkish. Not like Turk, but good for foreigner.”

“A gulet is a type of local sailing craft,” Peter said. “It would have a diesel, too. Small enough for three people to operate, if they knew what they were doing and didn’t mind taking risks.”

“Joy to the fucking world,” Eric snarled sotto voce. Then, to the other man:

“When?”

The Turk plucked the money out of his hand, then rubbed his thumb over his fingers in a meaningful gesture. Eric produced more, but before the man could reach for it he leaned close and whispered with their noses almost touching:

“When?”

He wasn’t trying to scare the guy; from his own instant appraisal he judged that that would take a lot more than getting in his face. He did want to make sure that he wasn’t dismissed as some foreign pansy who could be dicked around with impunity.

“Just now,” the man said with a smile, and added street directions.

Eric tossed the money over his shoulder as they turned and dashed out of the building. It was a petty gesture, but satisfying. One glance at the man had told him that he wouldn’t grovel for the money metaphorically, but at least he’d have to do it literally.

Adrian stopped. Eric was standing and glaring out to sea as if he was looking through the sights of a missile launcher across the crowded docks of Karaköy.

Peter slumped expressionless against a bollard, staring at a gulet already small in the distance towards the east, its hull and masts white against the blue of the Asian shore. Adrian stood and panted with his hands on his hips, long practice forcing him to take slow deep breaths and keep his shoulders back to let his lungs expand. Ellen was not far behind, carefully guarding his path; the Brotherhood operatives were gone, having been lent grudgingly for a single operation. The quayside was crowded with a simulacrum of maritime life, little in the way of freight or fish, but plenty of big ferries and some cruise ships as well as pleasure craft of all shapes and sizes.

Adrian turned to a young dockworker who was coiling rope.

“So, brother,” he said in perfect idiomatic Turkish. “Did a gulet just cast off from here?”

“Yes, the Çobanoğlu. Bodrum built, mostly teak, thirty meters. Strange though, no real crew, just three foreigners and a container in the hold that they hired some men to help stow. That is a waste. This is the prime cruising season down along the coast, and that is too much ship for two men and a woman.”

He shrugged, evidently not overly disturbed at the perils of some foreigners, or their obvious lack of good sense. “If I were still living in Hamburg, I would want to go for a cruise this time of year as well. Winter there is not as cold as Erzurum, but you can go for months without seeing the sun. No wonder Germans are all mad.”

“That is very helpful, brother.” Adrian shook hands with him, and slipped across a discreet wad of bills as he did. “Now, if you could help me find a gulet of my own…No, no crew is necessary…Also, no formalities, I am in a hurry…May God witness what I say, that would be a help to me, and I would be thankful. Grateful, to anyone who helped me.”

“By God, it is good to find a man who knows what he wants without filling in forms,” the local said, covertly glancing down to see the denominations in his palm and trying to hide his surprise. “My father’s brother’s paternal cousin-”

Turkish used separate, specific words for kin terms like that, much more precise than English.

“-has a good one. But it has just been refitted for the season.…A substantial deposit will be necessary with no, ummm, formalities, you understand.”

Which meant no papers, permits or licenses.

“And something will be necessary for the officials, to explain the need for haste and help them be reasonable.”

The Turk shrugged one shoulder and made an expressive gesture with thumb and fingers, the for bribes as plain as speech and much more discreet. Adrian nodded. He might not be able to bribe the local bureaucrats himself without a time-consuming dance or using the Power; he didn’t know which ones were susceptible, and like any transaction corruption required some degree of trust.

“Your uncle would not lose if he chartered it to me,” he said.

Which, as they both knew, meant sold under the table. Nobody in their right mind was going to assume they’d get their valuable property back under the circumstances. Adrian reminded himself not to try and bury the problem under money. Too much would excite suspicion. Just enough to be very tempting…The men would assume something illegal was going on, which would explain the cash and the haste.

He mentioned a figure with a percentage bonus for haste. The man nodded, turned and walked quickly away with a pleased and eager step. Adrian began to laugh, staring out to where the waters of the Golden Horn reflected the lights of towers and bridges. The cold brackish water had the stale harbor smell, unattractive in itself but hinting at voyages and adventures. A probe with the Power revealed absolutely nothing, which was significant in itself.

I must be very careful here, Adrian thought. I will do nothing but waste energy if I seek the impact of the bomb itself on the world lines, even my own. Perhaps if I focus entirely on certain other things-

“What exactly is so funny?” Eric growled, unconsciously rubbing a belly still bruised by the shot in the sewers of Vienna.

Adrian slapped him on the shoulder. “That all my life, or at least all my life since he took me from my parents, Harvey has been advising that it is a very good idea to be careful about deciding what you want before you set out to get it.”

“¿Qué?” Eric said in frustration.

“One of the things I wanted to do after I married Ellen was take her on a sea voyage. We have no time for a real honeymoon, you understand. It was more the nature of convalescence combined with the commando school. Come, we need a gulet of our own for this pleasure cruise in the footsteps of Jason seeking the plutonium fleece.”

“I’d prefer a missile boat with some heat seekers and a couple of autocannon,” the New Mexican said flatly.

Adrian shook his head regretfully. “Not with my sister in the mix. An aircraft would be extremely unwise, even more so.” A full-throated laugh. “It is ironic. She actually loves modern technology, and I am glad to use it. But together…contending together…We dare not rely upon it.”

“Except for Harvey and his fucking bomb, and that thing shielding it.”

Adrian sobered and nodded. “Yes. Except for that.”

“And I just accomplished zip,” Eric snarled; Adrian could feel the self-reproach radiating off him.

“On the contrary. We now know for sure that Guha and Farmer are helping him. Bad news, but good intelligence.”