The Trade of Queens

8/18

It is a little-known fact that, contrary to public mythology, the president of the United States of America lacks the authority to order a strategic nuclear attack. Ever since the dog days of the Nixon administration, when the drunken president periodically phoned his diminishing circle of friends at 3:00 A.M. to rail incoherently about the urgent need to nuke North Vietnam, the executive branch has made every effort to insure that any such decision can only be made stone-cold sober and after a lengthy period of soul-searching contemplation. An elaborate protocol exists: A series of cabinet meetings, consultations with the Joint Chiefs, discussions with the Senate Armed Services Committee, and quite possibly divine intervention, a UN Security Council Resolution, and the sacrifice of a black goat in the Oval Office at midnight are required before such a grave step can be placed on the table for discussion.

However …

Retaliation in the aftermath of an attack is much easier.

If WARBUCKS put the plan in motion, diverted superblack off-budget funds to the Family Trade Organization, jogged BOY WONDER’s elbow to sign the presidential orders setting in motion the research program to build machines around slivers of vivisected neural tissue extracted from the brains of captured Clan world-walkers, then perhaps the blame might be laid at his door. But it was his successor in the undisclosed location, former mentor and then vice president by appointment, who organized the details of the strike and bullied the Joint Chiefs into drafting new orders for USSTRATCOM tasking them with a mission enabled by the new ARMBAND technology. And it was the Office of the White House Counsel who drafted legal opinions approving the use of nuclear weapons in strict retaliation against an extradimensional threat, confirming that domestic law did not apply to parallel instances of North American geography, and that the two still-missing SADM demolition devices were necessary and sufficient justification: that such an operation constituted a due and proportionate response in accordance with international law, and that the Geneva conventions did not apply beyond the ends of the Earth.

Complicity spread like a brown, stinking cloud through the traumatized rump of a Congress and Senate who were themselves the survivors of a lethal attack on the Capitol. WARBUCKS had insured that the opposition would vote the way they were told; the PAPUA bill was as efficient an enabling act as had been seen anywhere in the world since 1933. A few dissenters—pacifists and peaceniks mostly—spoke out against the far-reaching surveillance and monitoring regime, but the press and the public were in no mood to put up with their rubbish about the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments; with the nation clearly under attack, who cared if a few whining hippie rejects talked themselves into a holiday in Club Fed? Better that than risk them giving aid and comfort to enemy infiltrators with stolen nukes. Rolling out the new identity-card system would take a couple of years, and until it was in place there’d always be the risk that the person walking past you in the street was a soldier of the invisible enemy. An eager Congress voted an ever-increasing laundry list of surveillance and control orders through with unanimous consent, each representative terrified of being seen to be weak on security.

And when the president went before the House Armed Services Committee in secret session to present certain legal opinions and request their imprimatur upon his war plans—the full House having already voted to declare war on whoever had attacked the capital city—nobody dared argue that they were excessive.

* * *

Midmorning in Gloucestershire, England. It was a bright day at Fairford, and behind the high barbed-wire–topped fence the air base was a seething hive of activity. Officially a British RAF base, Fairford had for decades now provided a secure forward operating base for USAF aircraft staging out to the Arabian Gulf. Newly upgraded to provide a jumping-off point for operations in Iraq, boasting recently upgraded fuel bunkers and a runway so long that it was designated as a Space Shuttle transatlantic abort landing strip, for three weeks Fairford had been playing host to the B52s of the Fifth Bomb Wing, USAF.

The Clan couldn’t reach them in England, ran the official thinking. Not without international travel on forged documents.

Now they were queueing up on the taxiways: The aircraft of the Fifth Bomb Wing had been ordered to fly home. But first they were going to make a little detour.

For the past week, C17s had been flying in nightly from Stateside, carrying anonymous-looking low-loaders, which were driven to the bomb storage cells and unloaded under the guns of twitchy guards. And for the past two days technicians had been double- and triple-checking the weapons, nervously working through the ringbound manuals. Yesterday there’d been a hiatus; but in the evening the ordnance crews had turned out again, and this time they were moving the bombs out to the dispersal bays, under guard. Finally, around midnight, a last C17 arrived, carrying a group of specialists and a trailer that, over the following hours, made the rounds of the readying air wing.

Nobody outside the base saw a thing. The British authorities could take a hint; the small and dispirited huddle of protesters, camped by the front gate to denounce the carpet-bombers of Baghdad, had been rounded up in a midnight raid, hauled off to police cells under the Terrorism Act, to be held for weeks without counsel or charge. The village nearby was cowed by a military police presence that hadn’t been seen since the height of the Troubles: Newspaper editors received discreet visits from senior police officers that left them tight-lipped and shaken. Fairford, to all intents and purposes, had vanished from the map.

At 11:00 A.M. Zulu time, the first of thirty-six B52H Stratofortresses ran its engines up to full throttle and began its takeoff roll. It was a hot day, and the huge jet’s wing tanks were gravid with jet fuel; it climbed slowly away, shaking the ground with a bellowing thunder like the onrushing end of the world.

* * *

The Atlantic Ocean was wide, and the jet streams blowing west-to-east over Ireland slowed the bombers as they climbed towards their cruising altitude of forty-eight thousand feet, high above the air corridors used by the regular midmorning stream of airliners heading west from the major European and Asian hubs. The operations planners had seen no reason to warn or divert those airliners; when CARTHAGE was complete they would, if anything, be safer.

Over the next seven hours the BUFFs shadowed the daily commuter herd, tracking along the great circle route that took them just south of Greenland’s icy hinterlands before turning south towards Newfoundland and then on towards Maine. As they neared the coast, the bombers diverged briefly from the civil aviation corridor, skirting around Canadian airspace and then flying parallel to the regular traffic, but farther east, staying over deep water for as long as possible. It was more than just the diplomatic nicety of keeping aircraft engaged on this mission out of foreign airspace: If anything should go catastrophically wrong, better that the cargo should ditch in the Atlantic waters than scatter over land.

As they passed the southernmost end of Nova Scotia, the bombers finally turned west. The final encrypted transmission came in: Meteorological conditions over the target were perfect. Downstairs from the pilot and copilot, the defensive-systems operators were busy at last, running the activation checklist on their ARMBAND units—gray boxes, bolted hastily to the equipment racks lining the dark cave of the bomber’s lower deck—and the differential GPS receivers to which they were connected by raw, hand-soldered wiring looms. Meanwhile, their offensive systems operators were running checklists of their own; checklists that required the pilot and copilot’s cooperation, reading out numbers from sealed envelopes held in a safe on the flight deck.

* * *

A hundred miles due east of Portland, the bomber crews completed their checklists. It was nearing three o’clock in the afternoon on the eastern seaboard as they lined up. At a range of fifty miles, the largest city in Maine was spread out before them, glittering beneath the cloudless summer sky. An observer on the ground who knew what they were looking at—one with very sharp eyes, or a pair of binoculars—would have seen a loosely spaced queue of aircraft, cruising in echelon far higher than normal airliners. But there were no such observers. Nor did the civilian air traffic control have anything to say in the presence of the FBI agents who had dropped in on them an hour ago.

Overhead without any fuss, the bombers were going out.

* * *

Another day, another world.

In the marcher kingdoms of the North American eastern seaboard, life went on. A frontal system moving in from the north was bringing cooler, denser air southeast from Lake Ontario, and a scattering of high cloud cover warned of rainfall by evening. The daily U2 reconnaissance overflight had reported a strong offshore breeze blowing, carrying dust and smoke out to sea; it was expected to continue for at least twenty-four hours.

The wheat harvest was all but over, and rye, too; the peasants were still laboring with sickle and adze in their strip fields, and the granaries were filling, but an end to toil was in sight. Their lords and masters busied themselves with the summer hunt, wild boar and deer fat and heavy; the season of late-summer parties was in swing, as eligible daughters were paraded around before their fathers’ friends’ sons, and barons and dukes sought surcease from the stink of the cities by touring their estates and the houses of their vassals.

There was quiet unrest too. Among the hedge-lords, whispered rumor spoke of the upstart tinker families becoming absent neighbors. Houses were mysteriously empty, houses that had weathered the campaign by the late pretender and survived the subsequent wave of murders that had engulfed the Clan. Some spoke of strangeness; families with children sent away, the parents’ bright-eyed cheer covering some grim foreboding. Rumors of tinker Clansmen in their cups maundering about the end of the world, grumbling about absent cousins trying to run before the storm surge while they, the heroic drunk, chose to stand firm against the boiling wave crests—

And the queen, Prince Creon’s widowed pregnant wife, had not been seen in public for nearly two months.

The queen’s absence was not in and of itself remarkable—she was pregnant, and a retreat from court engagements was not unexpected—but the totality of it attracted notice. She hadn’t been seen by anyone except, it appeared, her mother. The dowager duchess (herself mysteriously absent for a period of decades) was in residence in Niejwein in one of the Clan’s less badly damaged great houses, busying herself with the restoration of the Summer Palace (or rather, with commencing its reconstruction from the ground up, for its charred beams and shattered stones would not be fit for habitation anytime soon). And she had seen her daughter the queen-widow, and loudly testified to that effect—to her bouts of morning sickness and desire for seclusion. But. The queen hadn’t been seen in public for weeks now, and people were asking questions. Where was she?

Now, high above the thin mares’ tails, a curious thing can be seen in the heavens.

A row of strange straight clouds are rushing across the vault of the sky, quite unlike anything anyone remembers seeing in times gone by. True, for the past month or so the witch-clouds have been glimpsed from time to time, racing crisscross from east to west—but only one at a time.

Today, two rows of knife-straight clouds are ploughing southwest, as if an invisible god has drawn two eighteen-toothed combs across the horizon, one comb flying two thousand feet above the other. They cover the dome of the sky from side to side, for they are not close together; a knowledgeable observer would count twelve miles between teeth.

Flying just ahead of each tine is a B52H Stratofortress of Fifth Bomb Wing, Eighth Air Force, Air Combat Command. Thirty-five out of thirty-six aircraft carry in each bomb bay a rotary dispenser containing six B83 free-fall hydrogen bombs. The remaining bomber is gravid with a single device, a monstrous B53-Y1, a bloated cylinder that weighs over four tons and fills the BUFF’s central bomb bay completely. This aircraft flies near the eastern edge of the upper group. It is intended to deliver the president’s signature message to the enemy capital: shock and awe.

* * *

The track from Kirschford down to the Linden Valley was clear of tinker-lord traffic this afternoon. The flow of refugees had slackened to a trickle, for those who wanted to evacuate had for the most part already left. Helena voh Wu and her infants and sister-in-law had come this way a week before; while Gyorg was still occupied with the corvée, shuttling supplies between anonymous storage lockups in Boston and wine cellars in the Gruinmarkt, his dependents had achieved the tenuous sanctuary of a refugee camp in New Britain.

So none of them paused to look up, slack-jawed, as the first wave of bombers commenced their laydown.

A B83 hydrogen bomb isn’t very large; it weighs about a ton, and looks exactly like most other air-dropped bombs. The weapons the Fifth Bomb Wing were delivering were equipped with parachutes which retarded their descent from altitude, so that it would take each bomb more than three minutes to descend to its detonation altitude of twenty thousand feet. Flying parallel courses spaced twelve miles apart, wingtip-to-wingtip, the aircraft began to drop their payload at one-minute intervals, seeding a furrow of hells twelve miles apart. The distance between bombs was important; any closer, and the heat flash might ignite the Kevlar ribbon chutes of the other weapons.

Three minutes and twenty seconds. The trails arrowed south across the sky of the Gruinmarkt, a faint rumble of distant thunder disturbing the afternoon quiet; and then the sky lit up as the first row of eighteen hydrogen bombs, spanning the kingdom from sea to inland frontier, detonated at an altitude of just under four miles.

The flash of a single one-megaton hydrogen bomb, followed by a fireball which dims over a period of nearly a minute, is visible in good weather at a range of hundreds of miles—light from the flash is scattered by particles in the upper atmosphere, reflected around the curve of the earth. To an observer in Niejwein, the capital city located nearly two hundred miles south of the first row, the northern horizon would have begun to flicker and brighten as if a gigantic match had been held to the edge of the map. There was no sound; would be no sound for many minutes, for even though the shock waves from the detonations overtook the bombers, it would take a long time for the attenuated noise to reach the capital.

To an observer located closer to the bombing line, it would have been the end of the world.

The heat flash from a B83 detonating at twenty thousand feet is sufficient, in good weather, to ignite cardboard or cotton sheeting, heat damp pine needles to smoldering tinder, and char wood and flesh six miles from ground zero. The leading row of eighteen bombers were spaced close enough that over open ground no spot could remain unseared; only in the lee slope of a steep valley or the depths of a cellar or cave was there any hope of survival.

Peasants working in the fields might have glanced up as the sky flashed white above them; it would have been the last thing they saw through rapidly clouding eyes. Their skin reddened and crisped as the grain stubble and trees around them began to smoke; screaming and stumbling for cover, they blundered towards their houses or the tree line, limned in the flaring red burn of a billion leaves igniting simultaneously. There were some survivors of the initial flash: women spinning thread or weaving cloth, millers tending their wheels, even a lucky few sitting behind dry-stone walls or swimming in cool water pools. But as they looked up in confusion they saw the same thing in every direction around them: trees, plants, buildings, even cattle and people smoking and flaming.

And then the hammerblast of wind arrived from above, slamming into hedges and walls alike and splintering all before them.

The aircrew saw nothing of this. They flew on instruments, insulated blackout screens drawn across the cockpit windows to prevent reflected light from blinding their pilots. Perhaps they glanced at one another as shock waves buffeted the tail surfaces of the bombers, bumping and dropping them before the pilots regained full control authority; but if they did so, it was with no sympathy for the unseen carnage below. A president had been killed, more thousands murdered by emissaries from this world; their word for the task they were engaged in was payback.

Seventy seconds later, the second row of H-bombs reached their preset altitude and began to detonate, flashbulbs popping erratically on a wire two hundred and fifty miles wide. And seventy seconds after that, the process continued, weeping tears of incandescence across the burning coastline.

There were a lot of flashes.

* * *

It took the aircraft nearly twelve minutes to reach Niejwein, two-thirds of the way through their carpet-bombing run. And here, there were witnesses. Niejwein, with a population of nearly sixty thousand souls, was the biggest city within four hundred miles; proud palaces and high-roofed temples rose above a sprawling urban metropolis, home to dozens of trades and no fewer than four markets. And the people of Niejwein had due notice. The flickering brightness on the horizon had been growing for almost a quarter hour; and lately there had been a rumbling in the ground, an uneasy shuddering as if Lightning Child himself was shifting, uneasy in his bed of clay. A strange hot wind had set the bells of the temple of Sky Father clanging, bringing the priests stumbling from their sanctuary to squint at the northern lights in disbelief and shock.

And in the Thorold Palace, some of the residents realized what was happening.

At midafternoon, the dowager duchess Patricia was holding court, sitting in formal session in the east wing of the palace to hear petitions on behalf of her daughter. A merchant, Freeman Riss of Somewhere-Bridge, was bringing a complaint about the lord of his nearest market town, who, either in a fit of pique or for some reason Freeman Riss was reticent about disclosing, had banned said merchant from selling his wares in the weekly market.

At another time, this complaint might well have interested Dame Patricia—also known for the majority of her life as Iris Beckstein—as much for its value as leverage against the earl in question as for its merit as a case. But it was a hot afternoon, and sitting in the stiff robes of state beneath a row of stained-glass windows which dammed the air and cast flickering multicolored shadows across the bench before her, she was prone to distraction.

Riss was reciting, in a scratchy voice as if from memory, “And I deponeth thus, that on the third feastday of Sister Corn, the laird did send his armsmen to stand before my drover and his oxen and say—”

Patricia raised a shaky hand. “Stop,” she said. Freeman Riss paused, his mouth open. “Surcease, we pray you.” She squinted up at the windows. They were flickering. “We declare a recess. Your indulgence is requested, for we are feeling unwell.” She closed her eyes briefly. I hope it isn’t another attack, she worried; the MS hadn’t affected her vision so far, but her legs had been largely numb all week, and the prickling in her hands was worsening. “Sergeant-at-arms—”

There was a banging and clattering from outside the room. The courtiers and plaintiffs began to talk, just as the door burst open. It was Helmut ven Rindt, lord-lieutenant and commander of the second troop of the Clan’s security force, accompanied by six soldiers. Their camouflage surcoats sat uneasy above machine-woven titanium mail. “Your grace? I regret the need to interrupt you, but you are urgently required elsewhere.”

“Really?” Iris stared at Helmut. Not you, too? The clenching in her gut was bad.

“Yes, your grace. If I may approach”—she nodded; Helmut stepped towards her raised seat, then continued to speak, quietly, in English—“we lost radio nine minutes ago. There’s nothing but static, and there are very bright lights on the northern horizon. Counting them and checking the decay curves, it’s megaton-range and getting closer. With your permission, we’re going to evacuate right now.”

“Yes, you go on.” She nodded approvingly, then did a slow double take as one of Helmut’s troops marched forward. “Hey—”

The soldier bent to lift her from her throne in a fireman’s carry.

Instant uproar among the assembled courtiers, nobles, and tradesmasters assembled in the room. “Stop him!” cried one unfortunate, a young earl from somewhere out to the northwest. “He laid hands on her grace!”

That did it. As the soldier lifted Patricia, she saw a flurry of bodies moving towards the throne, past the open floor of the chamber, which by custom was not entered without the chair’s consent. “Hey!” she repeated.

Helmut grimaced: “Earl-Major Riordan’s orders, your grace, you and any other family we set eyes on. We are to leave none alive behind, and you’ll not make a family-killer of me.” Louder: “To the evac cellar, lads! Double time!”

The young earl, perhaps alarmed at the unfamiliar sound of Anglischprache, moved a hand to his hip. “For queen and country!” he shouted, and drew, lunging towards Helmut. Four more nobles were scarcely a step behind, all of them armed.

For palace guard duty, in the wake of the recent civil disorder, Earl-Major Riordan had begun to reequip his men with FN P90s. A stubby, oddly melted-looking device little larger than a flintlock pistol, the P90 was an ultracompact submachine gun, designed for special forces and armored vehicle crews. Helmut’s men were so equipped, and as the misguided young blood ran at them they opened fire. Unlike a traditional submachine gun, the P90 fired low-caliber armor-piercing rounds at a prodigious rate, from a large magazine. In the stone-walled hall, the detonations merged into a continuous concussive rasp. They fired for three seconds: sufficient to spray nearly two hundred rounds into the crowd from less than thirty feet.

As the sudden silence rang in Patricia’s numb and aching ears her abductor shuffled forward, carefully managing his footing as he slid across blood-slick flagstones. The wounded and dying were moaning and screaming distantly in her ears, behind the thick cotton-wool wadding that seemed to fill her head. The light began to flicker beyond the windows again, this time brightening the daylight perceptibly. Helmut led the way to the door, raising his own weapon as his guards discarded their empty magazines and reloaded; then he ducked through into the next reception room. Patricia looked down from the shoulder of her bearer, into the staring eyes of a dead master of stonemasons. He sprawled beside a lady-in-waiting, or the wife of a baron’s younger son. My people, she thought distantly. Mother dearest wanted me to look after them.

They stumbled out of the cloister around the palace into the sunlit afternoon of a summer’s day, onto the tidily manicured lawn within the walled grounds. Something was wrong with the shadows, she noticed, watching Helmut’s feet: There were too many suns in the sky. “Don’t look up,” he shouted, loudly enough that she couldn’t help but hear him and raise her eyes briefly. Too many suns.

The northern wall of the palace grounds was silhouetted with the deepest black, long shadows etched across the grass towards her, flickering and brightening and dimming. A moment of icy terror twisted at her guts as she saw that Helmut and his guard were hurrying towards one of the smaller outbuildings ahead. Its doorway gaped open on darkness. “What’s that?” she asked.

“Gatehouse. There’s a cellar, doppelgangered.”

She saw other figures crawling antlike across the too-bright lawn. Nukes, she realized. They must be using all the nukes. For a moment she felt every second of her sixty-two years. “Put me down,” she called.

“No.” The response came from Helmut. Her bearer was panting hard, all but jogging. Her weight on his back was shoving him down: He had no more breath to reply than any other servant might.

They were nearly at the building. Helmut hung back, gestured at her rescuer. “Now,” he snarled. “Drop her and go.”

The man let Patricia slide to the ground, twisting to lay her down, then without pause rose and dashed forward to the entrance. Helmut knelt beside her. “Do you want to die?” he asked, politely enough.

Behind him the sky cracked open again. Getting closer. She licked dry lips. “No,” she admitted. “But I deserve to.”

“Lots of people do. It has nothing to do with their fate.” He slid an arm beneath her and, grunting, levered her up off the ground and into his arms. “Arms round my neck.” He stumbled forward, into the darkness, following his men—who hadn’t bothered to wait.

“I failed them,” she confessed as Helmut’s boots thudded on the steps down into the cellar. “We drew this down on them.”

“They’re not our people. They never were.” He grunted again, reaching the bottom. “We’re not part of them, any more than we were part of the Anglischprache who’re coming to kill us. And if you reached your age without learning that, you’re a fool.”

“But we had a duty—” She stopped, a stab of grim amusement penetrating the oppressive miasma of guilt. It was the same old argument, liberal versus conservative by any other name. “Let’s finish this later.”

“Now she talks sense.” There was an overhead electric light at the bottom, dangling from the top of the vaulted arch of the ceiling. The stonework grumbled faintly, dislodging a shower of plaster and whitewash dust; shadows rippled as the bulb shivered on the end of its cord. Someone had nailed a poster-sized sheet of laminated paper against the wall, bearing an intricate knotwork design that made her eyes hurt. Helmut stepped forward onto the empty circle chalked on the floor. The guards had already crossed over. “I’ll carry your grace,” he told her. Then he turned to face the family sigil and focus.

“I’m not your grace anymore,” Iris tried to say; but neither of them were there anymore when she finished the sentence.

* * *

Sixty miles north of Niejwein, the first wave of B52s finished unloading their rotary dispensers. Their crews breathed a sigh of relief as they threw the levers to close their bomb-bay doors, and the DSOs began the checklist to reactivate their ARMBAND devices for the second and final time. Meanwhile, the second wave of bombers smoothly took their place in the bomb line.

One of them, the plane with the single device in its front bay, flew straight towards the enemy city. With the target confirmed in visual range, her DSO keyed a radio transmitter—a crude, high-powered low-bandwidth signal that would punch through the static hash across the line of sight to the other aircraft in the force. To either side, the formation split, the neighboring aircraft following prearranged courses to give it a wide berth. Twelve miles was an acceptable safety margin for a one-megaton weapon, but not for the device this aircraft carried.

(“I’m going to send them a message,” the president had said. “Who?” his chief of staff replied, an ironic tilt to his eyebrow. “The Russians.” The president smirked. “Who did you think I meant?”)

The single huge bomb crammed into the special bomber’s bay was a B53; at nine megatons, the largest H-bomb ever fielded by the US military: a stubby cylinder the size of a pickup truck. The bomber rose sharply as the B53 fell away from the bomb bay. A sequence of parachutes burst from its tail, finally expanding into three huge canopies as its carrier aircraft closed its bay doors and the flight crew ran the engines up to full thrust, determined to clear the area as fast as possible.

To either side of the heavyweight, the megaton bursts continued—a raster burn of blowtorch flames chewing away at the edge of the world. Behind the racing bomber force the sky was a wall of darkness pitted with blazing rage, domed clouds expanding and rising and flaring and dimming with monotonous precision every few seconds. The ground behind the nuclear frontal system was blackened and charred, thousands of square miles of forest and field caught in a single vast firestorm as the separate waves of incineration fanning out from each bomb intersected and reinforced each other. The winds rushing into the zone were already strengthening towards hurricane force; the bombers struggled against an unexpected sixty-knot jet stream building from the south.

Beneath its parachutes, the bulbous B53 slowly descended towards the city. The strobing flare of distant apocalypses flashed ruby highlights across its burnished shell as it twisted in the wind, drifting towards the roof of a well-to-do carpenter’s house on the Sheepmarket Street to the south of the city. The carpenter and his wife and apprentices were standing outside, staring at the horizon in gape-jawed dismay. “If it be a thunderstorm it’s an unseasonal huge one,” he told his wife. “Better fetch in your washing—” He whirled at the crashing and crunching from the roof. “Who did that!” Instant rage caught him as he saw the deflating dome of a white parachute descend across the yard. “If that be your idea of a prank, Pitr—”

Niejwein, population just under sixty thousand, two and a half miles by one and a quarter, Niejwein, capital of the Gruinmarkt—all gone.

Wiped away as if a bullet had slammed through a map pasted across a target.

Niejwein: home to just under sixty thousand artisans and tradesmen and their families, and almost two hundred aristocrats and their servants and hangers-on, and previously home to as many as ninety members of the Clan—of whom only eleven remained at this point—all brought to a laser-bright end by a flash of light from the heart of a star.

The boiling, turbulent fireball resulting from a surface laydown expanded in a fraction of a second until it was over a mile in diameter. At its periphery, the temperature was over a hundred thousand degrees: Stone boiled, the bodies of man and animal flashed into vapor. A short distance beyond it—out to five miles—the heat was enough to melt iron structures. Castles and palaces only a mile or two beyond the fireball, be their walls made of stone and never so thick as a man’s body, slumped and then shattered on the shock wave like a house of cards before a hand grenade.

There would be no survivors in Niejwein. Indeed, there could have been no survivors in the open within fifteen miles, had not the other bombers of the strike force continued to plow their fields with the fires of hell.

It was not the intention of the planners who designed Operation CARTHAGE to leave any survivors, even in subsurface cellars.

The firestorm raged steadily down the coast, marching at the pace of a speeding jet bomber. Behind it, the clouds boiled up into the stratosphere, taking with them tens of millions of tons of radioactive ash and dust. Already the sun was paling behind the funeral pyre.

In the aftermath, the people of the Gruinmarkt might well be the luckiest of all. It was their fate to be gone in a flash or burned in a fire: a brief agony, compared with the chill and starvation that were to follow all around their world.

* * *

Huw was in the shed near the far end of the vegetable garden, tightening the straps on his pressure suit, when Brilliana found him.

“What in Sky Father’s name do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.

She was, Huw realized abstractedly, even more pretty when she was angry: the brilliant beauty of a lightning-edged thundercloud. Not even the weird local fashions she wore in this place could change that. He straightened up. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

Yul chipped in: “He’s getting ready to—”

Brill turned on him. “Shut up and get out,” she said flatly, her voice dangerously overcontrolled.

“But he needs me to—”

“Out!” She waved her fist at him.

“Give us some space, bro,” Huw added. “Don’t worry, she won’t shoot me without a trial.”

“You think so?” She waited, fists on hips, until Yulius vacated the shed and the door scraped shut behind him. “You’re not going to do this, Huw. I forbid it.”

“Someone has to do it,” he pointed out. “I’ve got the equipment and, more importantly, the experience to go into an uncharted world.”

“It’s not an uncharted world, it’s our world. And you’re not going. You don’t need to go. That’s an order.”

“You’re not supposed to give me orders—”

“Then it’s an order from Helge—”

“—Isn’t she busy visiting her special friend in New London right now?” Huw raised an eyebrow.

Brill glared at him. “It will be one, as soon as I tell her. Don’t think I won’t!”

“But if the Americans—”

“Listen to me!” She stepped in front of him, standing on her toes until he couldn’t help but see eye-to-eye with her. “We got a report.”

“Oh?” Huw backed down. Heroic reconnaissance into the unknown was one thing, but wasting resources was something else. “Who from? What’s happened?”

“Patricia’s guards came across. They wired us a report and Brionne’s only just decrypted it. They were in the palace when the sky lit up, the entire horizon north of Niejwein. Helmut reported at least thirty thermonuclear detonations lighting up over the horizon, probably many more of them, getting progressively closer over the quarter hour before he issued the order to evacuate. They were carpet-bombing with H-bombs. Now do you understand why you’re not crossing over?”

Huw looked puzzled. “How do you know they were H-bombs?”

“Hello?” Brill’s nostrils flared as she squinted at him. “They lit up the sky from over the horizon in clear daylight and they took a minute to fade! What else do you think they might be?”

“Oh.” After a moment, Huw unbuckled the fastener on his left glove. “Shit. More than thirty of them? Coming towards Niejwein?”

Brill nodded mutely.

“Oh.” He sat down heavily on the stool he’d been using while Yul helped him into the explorer’s pressure suit. “Oh shit.” He paused. “We’ll have to go back eventually.”

“Yes. But not in the middle of a firestorm.” Her shoulders slumped. “It was only a couple of hours ago.”

“There’s a firestorm?”

“What do you think?”

“We’re stranded here.”

“Full marks, my pretty one.”

Huw looked up at her. “My parents were going to evacuate; I should find out if they made it in time. What about your—”

She avoided his eyes. “What do you think?”

“I’m sorry—”

“Don’t be.” She made a cutting gesture, but her eyes seemed to glisten in the afternoon light filtered through the hazy window glass. “I burned my bridges with my father years ago. And my mother would never think to stand up to him. He told her to stop writing to me. I’ve been dead to them for years.”

“But if they’re—”

“Shut up and think about your brother, Huw. At least you’ve got Yul. How do you think he feels?”

“He—” Huw worked at the chin strap of his helmet. “Shit. Where’s Elena? Is she—”

“Turn your head. This way.” She knelt and worked the strap loose, then unclipped it. Huw lifted the helmet off. “Better.” She straightened up. A moment later Huw rose to his feet. He stood uncertainly before her. “I last saw Elena half an hour ago.”

“Sky Father be praised.”

“That’s one way of putting it.” She watched him uncertainly. “Do you understand what’s happening to us?”

Huw took a breath. “No,” he admitted. “You’re sure they were hydrogen bombs—”

“Denial and half a shilling will get you a cup of coffee, Huw.”

“Then we’re all orphans. Even those of us whose parents came along.”

“Yes.” Brill choked back an ugly laugh. “Those of us who haven’t been orphaned all along.”

“But you haven’t been—” He stopped. “Uh. I was going to ask you to, uh, but this is the wrong time.”

“Huw.” She was, she realized, standing exactly the wrong distance away from him: not close enough, not far enough. “I didn’t hear that. If you were going to say what I think you meant to say. Yes, it’s the wrong time for that.”

He swallowed, then looked at her. A moment later she was in his arms, hugging him fiercely.

“If we’re orphans there’s nobody to force us together or hold us apart,” he whispered in her ear. “No braids, no arranged marriages, no pressure. We can do what we want.”

“Maybe,” she said, resting her chin on his shoulder. “But don’t underestimate the power of ghosts. And external threats.”

“There are no ghosts strong enough to scare me away from you.”

His sincerity scared her at the same time as it enthralled her. She twisted away from his embrace. “I need some time to myself,” she said. “Time to mourn. Time to grow.”

He nodded. A shadow crossed his face. “Yes.”

“We don’t know what we’re getting into,” she warned.

“True.” He nodded, then looked away and began to work at the fasteners on his pressure suit.

She paused, one hand on the doorknob. “You didn’t ask me your question,” she said, wondering if it was the right thing to do.

“I didn’t?” He looked up, confused, then closed his mouth. “Oh. But it’s the wrong time. Your parents—”

“They’re dead. Ask me anyway.” She forced a smile. “Assuming we’re not talking at cross-purposes.”

“Oh! All right.” He took a deep breath. “My lady. Will you marry me?” Not the normal turn of phrase, which was more along the lines of May I take your daughter’s hand in marriage?

“I thought you’d never ask,” she said lightly.

“But I thought you—” He shook his head. “Forgive me, I’m slow.”

“I’m an orphan, over the age of majority,” she reminded him. “No estates, no guardians, no braids, no dowry. You know I don’t come with so much as a clipped groat or a peasant’s plot?”

His smile was luminous. “Do I look like I care?”

She walked back towards him; they met halfway across the floor of the hut. “No. But I wasn’t certain.”

“For you, my lady”—they leaned together—“I’d willingly go over the wall.” To defect from the Clan, to voluntarily accept outlawry and exile: It was not a trivial offer.

“You don’t need to,” she murmured. She kissed him, hard, on the mouth: not for the first time, but for the first time on these new terms, with no thought of concealment. “Nobody now alive in this world will gainsay us.” Her knees felt weak at the thought. “Not my father, nor your mother.” Even if his mother had lived to enter this exile, she was unlikely to reject any Clan maid her son brought before her, however impoverished; they were, indeed, all orphans, all destitute. “No need to fear a blood feud anymore. All the Clan’s chains are rusted half away.”

“I wonder how long it’ll take the others to realize? And what will they all do when they work it out…?”