The Trade of Queens

The Final Countdown

The track from Kirschford down to the Linden Valley—which also defined the border of the duchy of Niejwein and Baron Cromalloch’s ridings—was unusually crowded with carriages and riders this day. A local farmer out tending his herd might have watched with some surprise; the majority of the traffic was clearly upper-class, whole families of minor nobility and their close servants taking to the road in a swarm, as if some great festival had been decreed in the nearby market town of Glantzwurt. But there was no such god’s day coming, nor rumor of a royal court tour through the provinces. The aristocracy were more usually to be found on their home estates, staying away from the fetid kennels of the capital at this time of year.

But there were no curious farmers, of course. The soldiers who had ridden ahead with the morning sunrise had made it grimly clear that this procession was not to be witnessed; and in the wake of the savagery of spring and early summer’s rampage, those tenants who had survived unscathed were more than cooperative. So the hedgerows were mostly empty of curious eyes as the convoy creaked and squealed and neighed along the Linden Valley—curious eyes which might, if they were owned by unusually well-traveled commoners, recognize the emblems of the witch-families.

The Clan was on the move, and nothing would be the same again.

A covered wagon or a noble’s carriage is an uncomfortable way to travel at the best of times, alternately chill and drafty or chokingly, stiflingly hot (depending on the season), rocking on crude leaf springs or crashing from rut to stone on no springs at all, the seats a wooden bench (perhaps with a thin cushion to save the noble posterior from the insults of the road). The horsemen might have had a better time of it, but for the dust clouds flung up by the hooves of close to a hundred animals, and the flies. To exchange a stifling shuttered box for biting insects and mud that slowly clung to sweating man and horse alike was perhaps no choice at all. But one thing they agreed: It was essential to move together, and the path of least resistance was, to say the least, unsafe.

“Why can’t we go to ’merca, Ma?”

Helena voh Wu gritted her teeth as one carriage wheel bounced across a stone in the road. Tess, her second-youngest, was four years old and bright by disposition, but the exodus was taking its toll after two days, and the question came out as a whine. “We can’t go there, dear. I told you, it’s not safe.”

“But it’s where Da goes when he travels?”

“That’s different.” Helena rested a hand lightly on the crib. Markus was asleep—had, in fact, cried himself to sleep after a wailing tantrum. He didn’t travel well. “We can’t go there.”

“But why can’t we—”

The other occupant of the carriage raised her eyes from the book she had been absorbed in. “For Sky Lady’s love, leave your ma be, Tess. See you not, she was trying to sleep?”

Helena smiled gratefully at her. Kara, her sister-in-law, was traveling with them of necessity, for her husband Sir Leon was already busied with the residual duty of the postal corvée; his young wife, her pregnancy not yet showing, was just another parcel to be transferred between houses in this desperately busy time. Not that Sir Leon believed the most outlandish warnings of the radical faction, but there was little harm in sending Kara for a vacation with her eldest brother’s family.

Now Kara shook her head and raised an eyebrow at Helena. The latter nodded, and Kara lifted Tess onto her lap, grunting slightly with the effort. “Once upon a time we could all travel freely to America, at least those of us the Postal Service would permit, and it was a wondrous place, full of magic and treasure. But that’s not where we’re going, Tess. There are bad men in America, and evil wizards; they are hunting our menfolk who travel there, and they want to hunt us all down and throw us in their deepest dungeons.”

The child’s eyes were growing wider with every sentence. Helena was about to suggest that Kara lighten up on the story, but she continued, gently bouncing Tess upon her knee: “But don’t worry, we have a plan. We’re going on a journey somewhere else, to a new world like America but different, one where the k—where the rulers don’t hate and fear us. We’re going to cross over there and we’ll be safe. You’ll have a new dress, and practice your Anglischprache, and it’ll be a great adventure! And the bad men won’t be able to find us.”

Tess looked doubtful. “Will the bad men get Da?”

Helena’s heart missed a beat. “Of course not!” she said hotly. Gyorg ven Wu would be deep underground, shuffling between doppelgangered bunkers with a full wheelbarrow as often as the blood-pressure monitor said was safe: a beast of burden, toiling to carry the vital necessities of life between a basement somewhere in Massachusetts and a dungeon or wine cellar beneath a castle or mansion in the Gruinmarkt. Ammunition, tools, medicine, gold, anything that Clan Security deemed necessary. The flow of luxuries had stopped cold, the personal allowance abolished in the wake of the wave of assassinations that had accompanied the horridness in the Anglischprache capital.

“Your da is safe,” Kara reassured the child. “He’ll come to see us soon enough. I expect he’ll bring you chocolate.”

Helena cast her a reproving look—chocolate was an expensive import to gift on a child—but Kara caught her eye and shook her head slightly. The effect of the work chocolate in Tess was remarkable. “Want chocolate!” she exclaimed. “All the chocolate!”

Kara smiled over Tess’s head, then grimaced as one of the front wheels thumped over the edge of a rut and the carriage crashed down a few inches. Markus twitched, clenched a tiny fist close to his mouth uneasily as Helena leaned over him. “I wish we had a smoother road to travel,” she said quietly. “Or that we could walk from nearer home.”

“The queen’s men have arranged a safely defended house,” Kara observed. “They wouldn’t force us to travel this way without good reason. She wouldn’t let them.”

“She?”

“Her Majesty.” An odd look stole across her face, one part nostalgia to two parts regret. “I was one of her maids. She was very wise.”

So you never tire of reminding us, Helena thought, but held her tongue; with another ennervating day’s drive ahead, there was nothing to gain from picking a fight. Then Tess chirped up again: “Tell me about the queen?”

“Surely.” Kara ruffled her hair. “Queen Helge was the child of Duke Alfredo and his wife. One day when she was younger than your brother Markus, when her parents were traveling to their country estates, they were set upon by assassins sent by—”

Helena half-closed her eyes and leaned against the wall of the carriage, looking out through the open window at the tree line beyond the cleared roadside strip. I wonder if this is what it was like for Helge’s mother, she wondered. She escaped just ahead of her attackers, didn’t she? I wonder if we’ll be so lucky.…

* * *

Arranging a meeting was much easier the second time round. Miriam handed Sir Alasdair a hastily scribbled note for the telautograph office to dispatch: NEED TO TALK URGENTLY TOMORROW AGREED LOCATION STOP. One of Alasdair’s men, and then the nearest post office, did the rest.

Not that imperiously demanding a conversation with the commissioner for propaganda was a trivial matter; receiving it in New London only two hours after it was transmitted, Erasmus swore under his breath and, before departing for his evening engagement—dinner with Victor McDougall, deputy commissioner for press approval—booked a compartment on the morning mail train to Boston, along with two adjacent compartments for his bodyguards and a communications clerk. By sheer good luck Miriam had picked the right day: He could see her and, provided he caught the following morning’s train for the return journey, be back in the capital in time for the Thursday Central Committee meeting. “This had better be worth it,” he muttered to himself as he clambered into the passenger compartment of his ministerial car for the journey to McDougall’s home. However, it didn’t occur to him to ignore Miriam’s summons. In all the time he’d known her, she’d never struck him as being one to act impetuously; if she said something was urgent, it almost certainly was.

Attending the meeting was also easier, second time round. The morning after James Lee’s visit, Miriam rose early and dressed for a public excursion. She took care to look as nondescript as possible; to be mistaken for a woman of particular wealth could be as dangerous here as to look impoverished, and the sartorial class indicators were much more sharply defined than back in the United States. “I’m ready to go whenever you’ve got cover for me,” she told Sir Alasdair, as she entered the front parlor. “Two guards, one car, and a walkie-talkie.”

“Emil and Klaus are waiting.” Sir Alasdair didn’t smile. “They’ll park two streets away and remain on call.” He gestured at the side table: “Lady d’Ost prepared a handbag for you before she went out.”

“There’s no—” Miriam paused. “You think I’ll need this?” She lifted the bag, feeling the drag of its contents—a two-way radio and the dense metallic weight of a pistol.

“I hope you won’t.” He didn’t smile. “Better safe than unsafe.”

The steamer drove slowly through the streets and neighborhoods of a dense, urban Boston quite unlike the city Miriam had known; different architecture, different street names, different shops and businesses. There were a few more vehicles on the roads today, and fewer groups of men loitering on street corners; they passed two patrols of green-clad Freedom Rider militiamen, red armbands and shoulder-slung shotguns matching their arrogant stride. Policing and public order were beginning to return to the city, albeit in a very different shape. Posters had gone up on some of the high brick walls: the stern-jawed face of a balding, white-haired man. CITIZEN BURROUGHS SAYS: WE WORK FOR FREEDOM! Miriam hunched her shoulders against an imperceptible chill, pushing back against the bench seat. Erasmus had spoken glowingly of Citizen Burroughs. She found herself wishing fervently for him to be right, despite her better judgment.

Miriam covered the last hundred yards, from the deceptive safety of the car to the door of Burgeson’s tenement building, feeling naked despite the contents of her bag and the presence of her backup team. It was odd: She couldn’t see any bodyguards or observers, but just knowing Erasmus wouldn’t be able to travel alone left her feeling watched. This time, however, she had a key. After turning it in the lock, she hastily closed the door behind her and climbed the stairwell Burgeson’s apartment shared with half a dozen other dwellings.

His front door was locked. Miriam examined it carefully—it had become a habit, a kind of neurotic tic she’d picked up in the year-plus since she’d discovered her distinctly paranoid heritage—then opened it. The flat was much as it had been on her last visit; dustier, if anything, sheets covering most of the furniture. Erasmus wasn’t here yet. For no reason she cared to examine too closely, Miriam walked from room to room, carefully opening doors and looking within. The bedroom: dominated by a sheeted bed, walled with bookcases, a fireplace still unraked with spring’s white ash caked and crumbling behind the grate. A former closet, a crude bolt added inside the door to afford a moment’s privacy to those who might use the flushing toilet. The kitchen was big and empty, a tin bath sitting in one corner next to the cold coal-fired cooking range. There wasn’t much here to hang a personality on, aside from the books: Burgeson kept his most valued possessions inside his head. The flat was a large one by local standards—family-sized, suitable for a prosperous shopkeeper and his wife and offspring. He must have rattled around in it like a solitary pea in a pod. Odd, she thought. But then, he was married. Before the last clampdown. The lack of personal touches … How badly did it damage him? She shivered, then went back to the living room, which with its battered piano and beaten-up furniture gave at least a semblance of domestic clutter.

It was distinctly unsettling to her to realize how much she didn’t know. Before, when she’d been an unwilling visitor in the Gruinmarkt and an adventurer exploring this strange other-Boston in New Britain, she’d not looked too deep beneath surface appearances. But now—now she was probably going to end her days living in this nation on the other side of time—and the thought of how little she knew about the people around her troubled her.

Who are you dealing with and how do you know whether you can trust them? It seemed to be the defining paradox of her life for the past year or so. They said that blood was thicker than water, but in her experience her relatives were most likely to define themselves as enemies; meanwhile, some who were clearly supposed to be her enemies weren’t. Mike Fleming should have shanghaied her to an interrogation cell; instead, he’d warned her off. Erasmus—she’d originally trusted him as far as she could throw him; now here she was, waiting for him anxiously in an empty apartment. And she’d wanted to trust Roland, but he’d been badly, possibly irreparably, broken. She sniffed, wrinkling her nose, eyes itching—whether from a momentary twist of sorrow or a whiff of dust rising from the sofa, she couldn’t say.

The street door banged, the sound reverberating distantly up the stairwell. Miriam stood, moving her hand to the top of her handbag, just in case. She heard footsteps, the front door opening, familiar sounds—Burgeson breathed heavily, moved just so—and she stood up, just in time to meet him in the living-room doorway.

“You came,” she said, slightly awkwardly.

“You called.” He looked at her, head tilted sidelong. “I could hardly ignore you and maintain that cover story?”

“Yes, well—” She caught her lower lip between her teeth: What will the neighbors say? “The commissioner is visiting his mistress again”?—“I couldn’t exactly come and fetch you, could I? Hey, get your breath back. Do you have time to stay?”

“I can spare a few hours.” He walked past her and dragged a dust sheet off the battered sofa. “I really need to sell up. I’m needed in the capital almost all the time; can’t stay here, can’t run the shop from two hundred miles away.” He sounded almost amused. “Can I interest you in a sherry?”

“You can.” The thought of Erasmus moving out, moving away, disturbed her unaccountably. As he rummaged around the sideboard, she sat down again. “A sherry would be nice. But I didn’t rattle your cage just for a drink.”

“I didn’t imagine you would.” He found a bottle, splashed generous measures into two mismatched wineglasses, and brought one over to her. He seemed to be in high spirits, or at least energized. “Your health?” He sat down beside her and she raised her glass to bump against his. “Now, what motivated you to bring me to town?”

They were sitting knee-to-knee. It was distracting. “I had a visitor yesterday,” she said carefully. “One of the, the other family. The Lees. He had some disturbing news that I thought you needed to know about.”

“Could you have wired it?” He smiled to take the sting out of the question.

“I don’t think so. Um. Do you know a Commissioner Reynolds? In Internal Security?” Nothing in his facial expression changed, but the set of his shoulders told her all she needed to know. “James Lee came to me because, uh, he’s very concerned that his uncle, the Lee family’s elder, is cutting a deal with Reynolds.”

Now Burgeson’s expression changed: He was visibly struggling for calm. He placed a hand on her knee. “Please, do carry on.”

Miriam tried to gather her thoughts, scattered by the unexpected contact. “The Lees have had a defector, a renegade from our people. One with a price on his head, Dr. ven Hjalmar. Ven Hjalmar has stolen a list of—look, this is going to take a long time to explain, just take it from me, it’s bad. If the Lees can get the breeding program database out of him, they can potentially give Reynolds a couple of thousand young world-walkers within the next twenty years. There are only about a hundred of them right now. I don’t like the sound of Reynolds, he’s the successor to the old Polis, isn’t he?”

“Yes.” Burgeson took a deep breath. “It’s a very good thing you didn’t wire me. Damn.” He took another breath, visibly rattled. “How much do the Lees know? About your people?”

“Too much for comfort.” Despite the summer humidity, Miriam shivered. “More to the point, ven Hjalmar is a murderous bastard who picked the losing side in an internal fight. I told you about what happened to, to me before I escaped—”

“He’s the doctor you mentioned. Yes?” She felt him go tense.

“Yes.”

“Well, that tells me all I need to know just now. You say he’s met Stephen Reynolds?”

“That’s what James Lee says. Listen, I’m not a reliable source; I don’t usually bear grudges but if I run into the doctor again … and then there’s the question of whether James was telling the—”

“Did he have any obvious reason to lie to you?” Burgeson looked her in the eye. “Or to betray confidences?”

Miriam took a sip from her glass. Now Erasmus knew, she felt unaccountably free. “I met him while I was being held prisoner. He was a hostage against his parents’ behavior after the truce—yes, that’s how the noble families in the Gruinmarkt do business. He helped me get away. I think he’s hoping I can save his people from what he sees as a big mistake.”

“Yes, well.” He took his hand away: She felt a momentary flash of disappointment. “I’m sorry. He was right to be afraid. Reynolds is not someone I would want to put any great faith in. Do you know what the Lee elders have in mind?”

“Spying. People who can vanish from one place and reappear in another.” Miriam shrugged. “They don’t have access to the United States, at least not yet, not without the doctor—they don’t have the technology transfer capability I can give you, and they don’t have the numbers yet. But they do have a track record as invisible assassins.” She shivered and put the glass down on the floor. “How afraid should I be?”

“Very.” He took her hand as she straightened up, leaning close; his expression was foreboding. “He’s having me followed, you know.”

“What, he—”

“Listen.” He leaned closer, pitching his voice low: “I’ve met men like Reynolds before. As long as he thinks I’m in town to see my mistress he’ll be happy—he thinks he’s got a hand on my neck. But you’re right, he’s dangerous, he’s an empire-builder. He’s got a power base in Justice and Prisons and he’s purging his own department and, hmm, the books you lent me—made me think of Felix Dzerzhinsky or Heinrich, um, Hitler? Himmler. Expert bureaucrats who build machineries of terror inside a revolutionary movement. But he doesn’t have absolute power yet. He may not even have realized how much power he has at his fingertips. Sir Adam doesn’t realize, either—but I’m in a position to tell him. Reynolds isn’t invulnerable but he is dangerous, and you have just given me a huge problem, because he is already watching me.”

“You think he’s going to use me as a lever against you?”

“It’s gone too far for that, I’m afraid. If he knows about your relatives and knows about our arrangement, he will see me as a direct threat. He’ll have to move fast, within the next hours or days. Your household is almost certainly under surveillance as an anomaly, possibly suspected of being a group of monarchists. Damn.” He looked at her. “I really should inform Sir Adam immediately—if Stephen has acquired a secret cell of world-walking assassins, he needs to know. I wouldn’t put a coup attempt beyond him. Normally we should stay here for two or three hours at least, as if we were having a liaison. If I leave too soon, that would cause alarm. But if he’s moving against your people right now—”

“Wait.” Miriam took his arm. “You’re forgetting we have radios.…”

* * *

The morning had dawned bright with a thin cloudy overcast, humid and warm with a threat of summer evening storms to follow. Brilliana, her morning check on the security points complete, placed the go-bag she’d prepared for Helge on the table in the front guard room; then she went in search of Huw.

She found him in one of the garden sheds behind a row of tomato vines, wiring up a row of instruments on a rough-topped table from which the plant pots had only just been removed. He didn’t notice her at first, and she stood in the doorway for a minute, watching his hands, content. “Good morning,” she said eventually.

He looked up then, smiling luminously. “My lady. What can I do for you?”

She looked at the row of electronics. “It’s a nice day for a walk into town. Will your equipment suffer if you leave it for a few hours?”

Obviously conflicted, Huw glanced at his makeshift workbench, then back at her. “I suppose—” He shook his head. Then he smiled again. “Yeah, I can leave it for a while.” He rummaged in one of the equipment boxes by the foot of the table, then pulled a plastic sheet out and began to unfold it. “If you wouldn’t mind taking that corner?”

They covered the electronics—Brilliana was fairly certain she recognized a regulated power supply and a radio transceiver—and weighted the sheet down with potsherds in case of rain and a leaky roof. Then Huw wiped his hands on a swatch of toweling. “This isn’t a casual stroll, is it?” he asked quietly.

“No, but it needs to look like one.” She eyed him up, evidently disapproving of his choice of jeans and a college sweatshirt. “You’ll need to get changed first. Background story: You’re a coachman, I’m a lady’s maid, and we’re on a morning off work. He’s courting her and she’s agreed to see the sights with him. I’ll meet you by the trades’ door in twenty minutes.”

“Are you expecting trouble?” He looked at her sharply.

“I’m not expecting it, but I don’t want to be taken by surprise.” She grinned at him. “Go!”

(An observer keeping an eye on the Beckstein household that morning would have seen little to report. A pair of servants—he in a suit, worn but in good repair, and she in a black dress, clutch bag tightly gripped under her left elbow—departed in the direction of the streetcar stop. A door-to-door seller visited the rear entrance, was rebuffed. Two hours later, a black steamer—two men in the open-topped front, the passenger compartment hooded and dark—rumbled out of the garage and turned towards the main road. With these exceptions, the household carried on much as it had the day before.)

“Where are we going?” Huw asked Brilliana as they waited at the streetcar stop.

“Downtown.” She narrowed her eyes, gazing along the tracks. “Boston is safer than Springfield, but still … I want to take a look at the docks. And then the railway stations, north and south both. It’s best to have a man at my side: less risk of unwelcome misunderstandings.”

“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “What else?”

She unwound slightly; a moment later she slid her fingers through his waiting hand. “I thought if there is enough time after that, we could visit the fair on the common.”

“That’s more like it.”

“It’ll look good to the watchers.” She squeezed his thumb, then leaned sideways, against his shoulder. “Assuming there are any. If there aren’t—by then we should know.”

“Indeed.” He paused. “I’m carrying, in case you were wondering.”

“Good.” With her free hand she shifted the strap of her bag higher on her shoulder. “Your knot…?”

“On my wrist-ribbon.”

“That too.” She relaxed slightly. “Oh look, a streetcar.”

They rode together in silence on the open upper deck, she sitting primly upright, he discreetly attentive to her occasional remarks. There were few other passengers on the upper level this morning, and none who might be agents or Freedom Riders; the tracks were in poor repair and the car swayed like a drunk, shrieking and grating round corners. They changed streetcars near Haymarket Square, again taking the upper deck as the tram rattled its way towards the back bay.

“What are we looking for?” asked Huw.

“Doppelganger prisons.” Brill looked away for a moment, checking the stairs at the rear of the car. “They use prison ships here. If you were a bad guy and were about to arrest a bunch of world-walkers, what would you—”

Rounding the corner of a block of bonded warehouses, the streetcar briefly came in sight of the open water, and then the piers and cranes of the docks. A row of smaller ships lay tied up inside the harbor, their funnels clear of smoke or steam: In the water beyond, larger vessels lay at anchor. The economic crash, and latterly the state of emergency and the new government, had wreaked havoc with trade, and behind fences great pyramids and piles of break-bulk goods had grown, waiting for the flow of shipping to resume. Today there was some activity—a gang of stevedores was busy with one of the nearer ships, loading cartloads of sacks out of one of the warehouses—but still far less than on a normal day.

“What’s that?” asked Brill, pointing at a ship moored out in the open water, past the mole.

“I’m not sure”—Huw followed her direction—“a warship?” It was large, painted in the gray blue favored by the navy, but it lacked the turrets and rangefinders of a ship of the line; more to the point, it looked poorly maintained, streaks of red staining its flanks below the anchor chains that dipped into the water. Large, boxy superstructures had been added fore and aft. “That’s an odd one.”

“Can you read its name?”

“Give me a moment.” Huw glanced around quickly, then pulled out a compact monocular. “HMS Burke. Yup, it’s the navy.” He shoved the scope away quickly as the streetcar rounded a street corner and began to slow.

“Delta Charlie, please copy.” Brill had her radio out. “I need a ship class identifying. HMS Burke, Bravo Uniform Romeo—” She finished, waited briefly for a reply, then slid the device away, switching it to silent as the streetcar stopped, swaying slightly as passengers boarded and alighted.

“Was that entirely safe?”

“No, but it’s a calculated risk. We’re right next to the harbor and if anyone’s RDFing for spies they’ll probably raid the ships’ radio rooms first; they don’t have pocket-sized transmitters around here. I set Sven up with a copy of the shipping register. He says it’s a prison ship. Currently operated by the Directorate of Reeducation. That would be prisons.” She frowned.

“You don’t know that it’s here for us.” Huw glanced at the staircase again as the streetcar began to move.

“Would you like to bet on it?”

“No. I think we ought to head back.” Huw reached out and took her hand, squeezed it gently.

She squeezed back, then pulled it away. “I think we ought to make sure nobody’s following us first.”

“You think they might try to pick us up…?”

“Probably not—this sort of action is best conducted at night—but you can never be sure. I think we should be on guard. Let’s head back and tell Helge. It’s her call—whether we have to withdraw or not, whether Burgeson can come up with a security cordon for us—but I don’t like the smell of that ship.”

* * *

Brilliana and Huw had been away from Miriam’s house for almost an hour. Miriam herself had left half an hour afterwards. An observer—like the door-to-door salesman who had importuned the scullery maid to buy his brushes, or the ticket inspector stepping repeatedly on and off the streetcars running up and down the main road and curiously not checking any tickets—would have confirmed the presence of residents, and a lack of activity on their part. Which would be an anomaly, worthy of investigation in its own right: A household of that size would require the regular purchase of provisions, meat and milk and other perishables, for the city’s electrical supply was prone to brownouts in the summer heat, rendering household food chillers unreliable.

An observer other than the ticket inspector and the salesman might have been puzzled when, shortly before noon, they disappeared into the grounds of a large abandoned house, its windows boarded and its gates barred, three blocks up the street and a block over—but there were no other observers, for Sir Alasdair’s men were patrolling the overgrown acre of Miriam’s house and garden and keeping an external watch only on the approaches to the front and rear. “If you go outside you run an increased risk of attracting attention,” Miriam had pointed out, days earlier. “Your job is to keep intruders out long enough for us to escape into the doppelganger compound, right?” (Which was fenced in with barbed wire and patrolled by two of Alasdair’s men at all times, even though it was little more than a clearing in the back woods near the thin white duke’s country retreat.)

Sir Alasdair’s men were especially not patrolling the city around them. And so they were unaware of the assembly of a battalion of Internal Security troops, of the requisition of a barracks and an adjacent bonded warehouse in Saltonstall, or the arrival on railroad flatcars of a squadron of machine-gun carriers and their blackcoat crew. Lady d’Ost’s brief radio call-in from the docks was received by Sven, but although he went in search of Sir Alasdair to give him the news, its significance was not appreciated: Shipping in the marcher kingdoms of the Clan’s world was primitive and risky, and the significance of prison ships was not something Sir Alasdair had given much thought to.

So when four machine-gun-equipped armored steamers pulled up outside each side of the grounds, along with eight trucks—from which poured over a hundred black-clad IS militia equipped with clubs, riot shields, and shotguns—this came as something of a surprise.

Similar surprise was being felt by the maintenance crew at the farm near Framingham, as the Internal Security troops rushed the farmyard and threw tear-gas grenades through the kitchen windows; and in a block of dilapidated-looking shops fronting an immigrant rookery in Irongate—perhaps more there than elsewhere, for Uncle Huan had until this morning had every reason to believe that Citizen Reynolds was his protector—and at various other sites. But the commissioner for internal security had his own idea of what constituted protection, and he’d briefed his troops accordingly. “It is essential that all the prisoners be handcuffed and hooded during transport,” he’d explained in the briefing room the previous evening. “Disorientation and surprise are essential components of this operation—they’re tricky characters, and if you don’t do this, some of them will escape. You will take them to the designated drop-off sites and hand them over to the Reeducation Department staff for transport to the prison ship. I mentioned escape attempts. The element of surprise is essential; in order to prevent the targets from raising the alarm, if any of them try to escape you should shoot them.”

Reynolds himself left the briefing satisfied that his enthusiastic and professional team of Polis troops would conduct themselves appropriately. Then he retired to the office of the chief of polis, to share a lunch of cold cuts delivered from the commissary (along with a passable bottle of Chablis—which had somehow bypassed the blockade to end in the polis commissioner’s private cellar) and discuss what to do next with the doctor.

* * *

Huw’s first inkling that something was wrong came when the streetcar he Brilliana were returning on turned the corner at the far end of the high street and came to a jolting stop. He braced against the handrail and looked round. “Hey,” he began.

“Get down,” Brill hissed. Huw ducked below the level of the railing, into the space she’d just departed. She crouched in the aisle, her bag gaping open, her right hand holding a pistol inside it. “Not a stop.”

“Right.” Taking a deep breath, Huw reached inside his coat and pulled out his own weapon. “What did you see?”

“Barricades and—”

He missed the rest of the sentence. It was swallowed up in the familiar hammering roar of a SAW, then the harsh, slow thumping of some kind of heavy machine gun. “Shit. Let’s bail.” He raised his voice, but he could barely hear himself; the guns were firing a couple of blocks away, and he flattened himself against the wooden treads of the streetcar floor. Brill looked at him, white-faced, spread-eagled farther back along the aisle. Then she laid her pistol on the floor and reached into her handbag, pulling out the walkie-talkie. Fumbling slightly, she switched channels. “Charlie Delta, Charlie Delta, flash all units, attack in progress on Zulu Foxtrot, repeat, attack in progress on Zulu Foxtrot. Over.”

The radio crackled, then a voice answered, slow and shocky: “Emil here, please repeat? Over.”

“Shit.” Brill keyed the transmit button: “Emil, get Helge out of there right now! Zulu Foxtrot is under attack. Over and out.” She looked at Huw: “Come on, we’d better—”

Huw was looking past her shoulder, and so he saw the head of the IS militiaman climbing the steps at the rear of the carriage before Brilliana registered that anything was wrong. Huw raised his pistol and sighted. The steps curled round, and the blackcoat wasn’t prepared for trouble; as he turned towards Huw his mouth opened and he began to raise one hand towards the long gun slung across his shoulder.

Huw pulled the trigger twice in quick succession. “Go!” he shouted at Brill. “Now!”

“But we’re—” She flipped open the locket she wore on a ribbon around her left wrist, for all the world like a makeup compact.

More machine-gun fire in the near distance. Shouting, distant through tinnitus-fuzzed ears still ringing from the pistol shots. Huw shoved his sleeve up his arm and tried to focus on the dial of the handless watch, swimming eye-warpingly close under the glass. The streetcar rocked; booted feet hammered on the stair treads. Brilliana rose to a crouch on her knees and one wrist, then disappeared. Something round and black bounced onto the floor where she’d been lying, mocking Huw. He concentrated on the spinning, fiery knot in his eyes until it felt as if his head was about to explode; then the floor beneath him disappeared and he found himself falling hard, towards the grassy ground below.

Behind him, the grenade rolled a few inches, then stabilized for a second before exploding.

* * *

The man behind the desk was tall, silver-haired, every inch the distinguished patriarch and former fighter pilot who’d risen to lead a nation. But it was the wrong desk; and appearances were deceptive. Right now, the second unelected president of the United States was scanning a briefing folder, bifocals drooping down his nose until he flicked at them irritably. After a moment he glanced up. “Tell me, Andrew.” He skewed Dr. James with a stare that was legendary for intimidating generals. “This gizmo. How reliable is it?”

Dr. James’s cheek twitched. “We haven’t made enough to say for sure, sir. But of the sixteen ARMBAND units we’ve used so far, only one has failed—and that was in the first manufactured group. We’ve got batch production down and we can swear to ninety-five-percent effectiveness for eighteen hours after manufacture. Reliability drops steeply after that time—the long-term storable variant under development should be good for six months and self-test, but we won’t be able to swear to that until we’ve tested it. Call it a year out.”

“Huh.” The president frowned, then closed the folder and placed it carefully in the middle of the desk. “CARTHAGE is going to take sixty-two of them. What do you say to that?”

Is that it? Dr. James lifted his chin. “We can do it, sir. The units are already available—the main bottleneck is training the air force personnel on the mobile biomass generators, and that’s in hand. Also the release to active duty and protocol for deployment, but we’re basically repurposing the existing nuclear handling protocols for that; we can relax them later if you issue an executive order.”

“I don’t want one of our planes failing to transition and executing CARTHAGE over domestic airspace, son. That would be unacceptable collateral damage.”

Dr. James glanced sidelong at his neighbor: another of the ubiquitous blue-suited generals who’d been dragged on board the planning side of this operation. “Sir? With respect I think that’s a question for General Morgenstern.”

The president nodded. “Well, General. How are you going to insure your boys don’t fuck up if the doctor’s mad science project fails to perform as advertised?”

The general was the perfect model of a modern military man: lean, intent, gleaming eyes. “Mark-one eyeball, sir: that, and radio. The pilot flying will visually ascertain that there are no landmarks in sight, and the DSO will confirm transition by checking for AM talk-radio broadcasts. We’ve done our reconnaissance: There are no interstates or railroads in the target zone, and their urban pattern is distinctively different.”

“That assumes daylight, doesn’t it?” The president had a question for every answer.

“No sir; our cities are illuminated, theirs aren’t, it’s that simple. The operation crews will be tasked with activating the ARMBAND units within visual range of known waypoints and will confirm that they’re not in our world anymore before they button up.”

“Heavy cloud cover?”

“Radio, sir. There’s no talk radio in fairyland. No GPS signal either. No sir, they aren’t going to have any problem confirming they’re in the correct DZ.”

The president nodded sagely. “Make sure they check their receivers before they transition. We don’t want any systems failures.”

“Yes sir. Is there anything else you want me to add?” Normally, Dr. James thought, handing the man a leading question like that might border on insolence, but right now he was in an avuncular, expansive mood; the bright and shiny gadgets were coming out of the cold warrior’s toy box, and playing up to the illusion of direct presidential control over the minutiae of a strike mission was only going to go down well. A very political general, he told himself. Watch him.

“I think there is.” The president looked thoughtful. “Doctor. Can you have a handful more ARMBAND units ready two days after the operation? We’ll want them fitting to a passenger aircraft suitable for giving some, uh, witnesses, a ringside seat. It’s for the review stand at the execution—diplomatic witnesses to show the Chinese and the Russians what happens if you fuck with the United States. It’ll need to be an airframe that’s ready for the boneyard, it’ll need a filtered air system, good cabin visibility, and nothing too sensitive for commie eyes. Except ARMBAND, but you’ll be keeping the guests out of the cockpit. General, if you could get your staff to suggest a suitable aircraft and minute my office on their pick, I’ll see you get an additional order via the joint command.” He smiled alarmingly. “Wish I was going along with it myself.”