The Trade of Queens

Northwoods

Morning, July sixteenth.

In a locked store room on the eighth—top—floor of a department store off Pennsylvania Avenue, a timer counted down towards zero.

Another timer matched its progress—in a janitor’s store on the top floor of a museum building near the Mall, behind a door jammed by cyanoacrylate glue in the lock and hinges.

And unfathomably far away, on a scaffold by the swampy banks of a slow-moving river, two men labored over a third timer, readying it for delivery to a target in the looking-glass world of the United States of America.

Nobody understood yet, but the worlds were about to change.

* * *

Four hundred miles from D.C., in a quiet residential street in Boston, the first bomb of the day detonated.

It wasn’t a very large bomb—just a repurposed concussion grenade—but it was right under the driver’s seat of the parked Saturn it was attached to. There was a bright flash; every window shattered as the car heaved on its suspension. Mike Fleming, standing in his doorway with keyfob remote raised, had no time to blink; the pressure wave shoved him backward and he stumbled, falling against the doorframe. In the ringing moment of silence after the blast, car alarms went off up and down the street and panicking dogs added their voices to the chorus. The hot yellow light of burning plastic and seat cushions filtered through the empty windows of the car, warmth beating on Mike’s face as he struggled to work out why he was sitting down with his legs askew, why the back of his head hurt—

They want me dead, he realized, coldly. Then: Dr. James screwed up. It was an easy mistake to make. The technician who’d planted the bomb had meant to wire it to the ignition circuit, but they’d got the central locking instead. The fine art of car bombing had gotten positively esoteric in the past few years, with the proliferation of in-car electronics, remote-control engine starters, and other bells and whistles; and US government agents were more used to defusing the things than planting them. Then: But that means they’re complicit for sure. The thought was shocking. It’s Operation Northwoods, only this time they’re doing it for real.

Mike reached up gingerly and felt the back of his head. There was going to be a nasty lump in a few hours, but his fingers came away dry. No bleeding. Taking stock, limb by limb, he took deep breaths, pushing down the wave of impending panic. I’m alive, he told himself. Shaken but intact. He’d been lucky; if he hadn’t changed the batteries in his keyfob remote three months ago he might have been closer to the car, or even reduced to using the door key, with fatal results. As he stood up, something crunched underfoot. Fragments from the rear window, pea-sized pellets of safety glass. Bending down stiffly, he picked up his go-bag. His leg twinged hard inside its cast. What now? Clear the killing zone, the instructors had insisted, years before. But they’d been talking about a different kind of ambush—a car bomb was a passive trap. Probably they were relying on it. Probably … Mike pulled his pistol from the bag and duck-walked towards the street, edging around the burning car as he scanned for threats. In the distance, a siren began to scream.

Less than twenty seconds had elapsed.

* * *

“Duty Chief? This is the major. I have some orders for you. The day code is: Echo, Golf, Zulu, Xray, five, nine, Bravo. Did you get that?”

“Yes, my lord. One moment … yes, that is correct. What do you have for me?”

“Flash priority message to all Internal Security posts. Message begins: Traitors to the Clan have activated Plan Blue without authorization. Any security officers in possession of special weapons are to secure and disarm them immediately. Anyone not in possession but with knowledge of the disposition of special weapons must report to me immediately. Use of lethal force to secure and disarm special weapons in the possession of unauthorized parties is approved.” Riordan swallowed and shifted his grip on the cell phone. “Anyone who is unaware of Plan Blue or the nature of the special weapons—you should execute Plan Black immediately. I repeat, Plan Black, immediate effect. Order ends. Please copy.”

The stunned silence at the other end of the connection lasted almost a second. “My lord. Plan Blue? Plan Black?”

“Copy, damn your eyes!”

“Sir.” The duty officer pulled himself together: “I copy…” He repeated Riordan’s orders. “I’ll put that out immediately, by your leave?”

“Do it. Riordan out.”

He closed the phone with a snap and glanced sidelong at Lady Olga. She was staring across her seat back at Miriam, who was talking intently into her own phone, her face a study in strain. He opened his mouth, but she raised a finger. Half a minute passed as their driver, Alasdair, carried them ever closer to the turnpike; then Miriam held the phone away from her face and shook her head. “Trash,” she said, holding it out to Brill, who popped the battery before sliding it into a waste bag. “We are so fucked,” she said tonelessly.

“Plan Black?” Olga raised an eyebrow.

“What did Mr. Fleming say?” asked Riordan, ignoring her to focus on Miriam.

“It’s—” Miriam shook her head, punch-drunk. “Crazy talk. He says Dr. James works for the vice president! And he’s been in collusion with someone in the Clan for years! It’s insane! He said something about tapes, and about them wanting an excuse, a Pearl Harbor.”

“Can Fleming do anything for us?” Riordan stared at Miriam as she shook her head again. “Why not?”

“He says he’s disposable. He’s going to try and find someone to talk to, but there’s no point going through the chain of command. We’re trying to negotiate with people who want us dead—tell me it’s not true?”

“Figures,” Olga said tartly. Everyone stared at her—even Sir Alasdair, by way of the rearview mirror.

“What do you mean, my lady?” Riordan’s return to exaggerated courtesy was a sign of stress, screamingly clear to Miriam even in her punch-drunk state.

“We’ve been looking for a second mole, ever since Matthias went over the wall, nearly a year ago. But we haven’t been looking very hard, if you follow. And I heard rumors about there being a former politician, now retired, chief executive of a major logistics corporation, who was cooperating with us to provide doppelgangered locations and distribution hubs, back in the good years, in the late eighties and early nineties. The West Coast operation—back when WARBUCKS was out of politics. Before his comeback as VP. The crown fits, does it not?”

“But why—” This from Brilliana, unable to contain her curiosity.

“We don’t work with politicians,” Riordan said tiredly. “It’s too hard to tell good from bad—the ones who stay bought from the ones who don’t. There’s too much potential for blowback, as the CIA can attest. But WARBUCKS was out of politics, wasn’t he?”

Miriam nodded, brooding. “He was in the wilderness until…” Her eyes widened. “Oof. So, he got a second start in politics, and the duke would have pulled the plug. Am I right? But then Matthias went over the wall, and his report would have ended up where WARBUCKS—or one of his people—could read it, and he’d have to take out Matthias and then try to—oh no—”

“He’d have to try to kill us all,” Olga finished the sentence, nodding, “or not even BOY WONDER could keep him from impeachment, yes? Our mole, for whom we have not been looking with sufficient vigor, isn’t a low-level functionary; he’s the vice president of the United States. And now he fears exposure.”

Riordan reached over to tap Sir Alasdair on the shoulder. “Do you know where your Plan Black site is?” he asked.

“Yes, my lord.” Alasdair nodded, checking his side mirror as he floored the accelerator to merge with the traffic on the interstate. “I’m taking us there.”

“What’s Plan Black?” Miriam tried to make eye contact with Olga.

Riordan cleared his throat. “My lady, we need to get you to a place of safety. But it’s not just you; in light of the current situation we all need to get clear. Plan Black is a defensive measure, put in place by his grace after the mess last year. It’s a pull-out—everyone in this world is to proceed to a safe site, collect essential equipment, and cross over.”

“But that’s—” Miriam paused. “What about the conservative faction? Earl Hjorth, the duchess, whoever took the bombs and activated Plan Blue, will they—”

“No.” Riordan bared his teeth. “And I’m counting on it. Because if they disobey a directive from the acting head of Clan Security in the middle of an emergency, that’s all I need to shoot them.”

“It’s the civil war, my lady, all over again.” Olga whistled tunelessly. “They’ve been begging for it—and now they’re going to get it.”

* * *

In another world, in a mansion overlooking a lawn that swept downhill to the banks of a small river, an elderly man sat at a writing desk in a room off to one side of the great hall. It was a small room, walled in bare stone and floored with planks, which the tapestries and rugs failed to conceal; the large window casements, built for light but featuring heavy oak shutters with peepholes and iron bolts, suggested the architect had been more concerned with security than comfort. Despite the summer heat he held his robes of office tight about his shoulders, shivering as he stared at the ledger before him with tired eyes. It was a balance sheet of sorts, but the items tallied in its columns were not quantities of coin but the living and the dead. And from time to time, with the slow, considered strokes of his pen, Baron Julius Arnesen moved names from one column to the other.

Arnesen was a survivor of seventy-some years, most of which he had experienced in a state of barely suppressed existential terror. Even now, in a house his security chief assured him was securely doppelgangered from both the known alternate worlds (in the United States by a convenient interstate off-ramp, and in New Britain by a recently acquired derelict warehouse), and at the tail end of yet another civil war (this one between the Clan and the rival noble houses, rather than between Clan families) and at the tail end of his years, he could not bring himself to sit with his back to door or window. Besides, an instinct for trouble that had served him well over the decades whispered warnings in his ears: Not all was right in the Gruinmarkt, or within the uneasy coalition of Clan radicals and conservatives who had agreed to back the baroness Helge Thorold-Hjorth and her claim to bear the heir to the throne. It’s all going to come apart again, sooner or later, he told himself gloomily, as he examined the next name in the ledger. There are too many of them.…

The civil war in the Gruinmarkt, torched off by the conservative Baron Henryk’s scheme to marry the troublesome Helge—who had grown up in the United States, calling herself Miriam—to the king’s second son, had left an enormous mess in its wake. Crown Prince Egon, paranoid by disposition, had sensed in the betrothal the first stirring of a plot to assassinate him; he’d moved against the Clan with vicious speed and ruthless determination, and in the three months they’d run wild his followers had destroyed the work of decades.

Egon was dead now, blown to bits along with most of his army when they tried to take a Clan castle, and Helge—pregnant as a result of the gynecological skullduggery of one of the Clan’s own doctors—was acknowledged as the dead Prince Creon’s widow. But a goodly chunk of the backwoods nobility wouldn’t believe a word of it, even if she presented them with a baby who was the very spitting image of Creon in six months’ time. To them, Helge was simply an impostor, willing puppet for the Clan’s avarice and ambition. They were keeping their mouths shut right now, out of fear, but that wouldn’t last forever; and weeding out the goats from the sheep was proving to be a well nigh impossible task. As magister of the royal assizes, Julius had considerable freedom to arraign and try hedge-lords whom he might suspect of treasonous intent; but he also had to walk a fine line between rooting out threats and conducting a witch hunt that might itself provoke another uprising.

Here in the countryside eight miles outside the capital Niejwein, in a house seized from the estate of the lord of Ostrood—conveniently missing with his sons since the destruction of the royal army at the Hjalmar Palace—Julius had established a crown court to supervise the necessary unpleasantness. To arraign and execute nobles in the capital would be inflammatory; better by far to conduct the grim job beyond the city walls, not so far out of sight as to invite accusations of secrecy, but distant enough to deter casual rubbernecking. With selected witnesses to testify to the fairness of the proceedings, and a cordon secured by imported American security devices as well as armed guards, he could proceed at his leisure without fear of the leading cause of death among judges in the Gruinmarkt—assassination by an angry relative.

Take the current case in hand, for example. Sir Euaunt ven Pridmann was a hedge-knight, titular liege lord to a village of some ninety souls, a house with a roof that leaked, three daughters with dowries to pay, one son, and a debt run up by his wastrel grandfather that exceeded the village’s annual surplus by a factor of fifteen. Only a writ of relief from usury signed by the previous king’s brother had spared him the indignity of being turfed out of his own home.

For such a man to show up in the army of the late pretender to the throne might be nothing more than simple desperation, for Egon had promised his followers a half share in the Clan lands that they took for him—not that ven Pridmann had done much looting and pillaging. With gout and poor eyesight he’d spent three-quarters of the war in his sickbed, and another fourth groaning with dysentery. That was why he hadn’t been present at the destruction of the Hjalmar Palace by the god-cursed “special weapon” Clan Security had apparently detonated there, and his subsequent surrender and protestations of loyalty to the true heir were just another footnote to the whole sordid affair. But. But. Julius squinted at the ledger: How could you be sure? Might ven Pridmann be what the otherworld Americans called a werewolf, one who stayed behind to fight on in secret, after the war? Or might he have lied about his culpability, claiming innocence of very real crimes?

Julius sighed and laid his pen down beside the ledger. You couldn’t be sure; and speculation about intangibles like loyalty in the absence of prior evidence was a good way to develop a raging case of paranoia. You could end up hanging thousands, as a preventative measure or in the hope of instilling a healthy fear in the survivors—but in the end, would it work? Would fear make them keep their heads down, or provoke a further uprising? He’s got gout, Julius reasoned. And he’s too poor to buy a gun or pay a lance of infantry. Low risk. And reasoning thus, he crossed ven Pridmann off the death list.

There was a knock.

“Yes? Yes?” Julius said querulously, looking up.

An apologetic face peeped round the door. “Sorry to bother you, my lord, but you have a visitor? Philip ven Holtz-Hjalmar from the Office of the Post, with dispatches from the Crown.”

“Tell him to leave them—” Julius paused. That’s funny, I wonder what it is? The post office in question was the Clan’s courier service, manned by members of the six families and their close relatives who held in common the talent of walking between worlds. Normally he could expect at most one courier delivery a day, and today’s had arrived some hours ago. “Show him in.”

“At once, my lord.”

The manservant withdrew. After a moment’s muted conversation, the door opened again.

“My lord Arnesen.” Julius didn’t recognize the courier. He was a young fellow, wearing a dark business suit, conservatively cut, standard uniform for the couriers who had to travel in public in American cities. The briefcase he held was expensive and flashy: brushed aluminum with a combination lock and other less obvious security measures. “May we speak in private?”

“Of course.” Julius waved at his servant: “Be off, and keep everyone away from the door.”

“Thank you, my lord.” The courier didn’t smile.

“Well? What is it?” Julius strained to sit up, pushing back against the weight of his years.

“Special message, for your eyes only, from her grace the dowager Thorold Hjorth.” He put the briefcase down on the side table.

This should be good, Julius thought. The duchess Hildegarde, Helge’s grandam, one of the mainstays of the conservative faction, hadn’t had the time of day for him since the disaster at the Summer Palace three months ago. If she’s decided to kiss and make up now it must mean—

He was still trying to articulate the thought when the messenger shot him in the face, twice. The gun was fitted with a suppressor, and Baron Arnesen was seated; there was barely any noise, and the second bullet was in any case unnecessary.

“She sent her best wishes,” said the courier, sliding his pistol back into the padded sleeve and picking up his briefcase in his left hand. “Her very best wishes.”

Then he rolled his left sleeve up, focused his eyes on the temporary tattoo on the back of his wrist, and vanished into the locked and derelict warehouse that Julius Arnesen had been so reassured to hear of from his chief of security.

* * *

Meanwhile in another world, a doctor of medicine prepared himself for his next house call—one that would destroy families, rewrite wills, and quite possibly generate blood feuds. They deserve it, he thought, with a bitter sense of anticipation. Traitors and bastards, the lot of ’em.

For Dr. Griben ven Hjalmar, the past six months had brought about a disastrous and unplanned fall from grace and privilege. A younger child of the same generation as the duchess Patricia, or Angbard ven Lofstrom, born without any great title or fortune to his outer-family-derived name, Griben had been quick-witted and ambitious enough to seize for himself the opportunity to study needful skills in the land of the Anglischprache, a decade before it became the common pattern of the youth of the six families. In those days, the intelligent and scholarly were viewed with circumspection, if not outright suspicion: Few paths were open, other than the military—a career with direct and useful benefits to the Clan’s scions.

Griben aimed higher, choosing medicine. In the drafty palaces of the Gruinmarkt, the allure of Western medicine held a mesmeric attraction to the elders and the high ladies. With open sewers in the streets, and middens behind many houses, infection and disease were everyday killers: Childbed morbidity and infant mortality robbed the Clan of much of its vigor. Griben had worked hard to convince Angbard’s dour predecessor of his loyalty, and in return had been given some slight experience of life in America—even a chance to practice medicine and train after graduation, so long as he packed his bag and scurried home at the beck and call of his betters.

Antibiotics and vaccines raised many a soul from death’s bed, but the real returns were quite obviously to be found in obstetric medicine. He realized this even in premed; the Clan’s strength lay in its numbers, and enhancing that would find favor with its lords. As for the gratitude of its noblewomen at being spared a difficult or even fatal labor … the favors so endowed were subtler and took longer to redound, but no less significant for all that. One day, Griben reasoned, it was likely that the head destined to wear the crown would be there solely by his intervention—and the parents of that prince would know it. So for two decades he’d worked at his practice, patiently healing the sick, attending to confinements, delivering the babies (and on occasion discreetly seeing to the family-planning needs of their mothers), while keeping abreast of the latest developments in his field.

As his reputation burgeoned, so did his personal wealth and influence. He bought an estate in Oest Hjalmar and a private practice in Plymouth, growing plump and comfortable. Duke Lofstrom sought his advice on certain technical matters of state, which he dealt with discreetly and efficiently. There was talk of an earldom in his future, even a petty barony; he began considering the social advantages of taking to wife one of the ladies-in-waiting who graced the court of Her Majesty the queen-widow.

Then everything inexplicably and rapidly turned to shit.

Dr. ven Hjalmar shrugged, working his left shoulder in circles to adjust the hang of the oddly styled jacket he wore, then glanced at the fly-specked mirror on the dresser. His lip curled. To fall this far … He glanced sidelong at the battered carpetbag that sat on the hotel room bed. Well, what goes down can come right up again, he reminded himself.

It was all the Beckstein women’s fault, mother and daughter both. He’d first heard it from the mouth of the haughty dowager duchess herself: “The woman’s an impostor of course,” Hildegarde voh Thorold-Hjorth had snapped at him. “Do you really think it likely that an heiress has been living secretly in exile, in the, the barbarian world, for all these years? Just to surface now, when everything is finally settling down again? This is a plot, you mark my words!”

Well, the Beckstein woman wasn’t an impostor—the dowager might not know a DNA paternity test from a rain of frogs, but he was under no such illusions—but the emergence after so long of her black-sheep mother certainly suggested that the dowager was right about it being some sort of conspiracy. And the bewildering ease with which Miriam had destroyed all the obstacles set in her path and then taken on the Clan Council like some kind of radical reformist firebrand was certainly suggestive. Someone was clearly behind the woman. And her exposure of the lost cousins, and this strange world which they had made their own, was a thunderbolt out of the blue. “She’s a loose cannon,” Baron Henryk ven Nordstrom had muttered angrily over a glass of port. “We shall have to take her out of play, Robard, or she’s going to throw the board on the floor and jump on the pieces.”

“Do you want me to neutralize her permanently?” ven Hjalmar had asked, cocking his head slightly to one side. “It seems unsubtle.…”

Henryk snorted in reply. “She’s a woman, we can tie her down. If necessary, you can damage her a little.” He didn’t mention the other business, with the boy in the palace all those years ago; it would be gauche. “Marry her off and give her some children to keep her busy. Or, if she won’t back off, a childbed accident. Hmm, come to think of it, I know a possible husband.”

Well, that hadn’t worked out for the best, either. Griben snorted again, angry and disquieted. He’d seen what the Pervert’s army had left of the pretty little country house he’d bought, kicked the blood and ashes of Oest Hjalmar from his heels for a final time after he’d made the surviving peasants build a cairn from the ruins. He’d done his bit for Henryk, insuring the rebellious cow got knocked up on schedule for the handfasting after she stuck her nose in one too many corners where it didn’t belong; how was he to know the Pervert would respond by committing regicide, fratricide, patricide, homicide, and generally going apeshit?

But after that, things went even more askew. Somehow Angbard’s minions had conspired to put her on the fucking throne, the throne!—of all places—with a Praetorian guard of hardline progressivist thugs. And she knew. She’d dug and dug until she’d turned up the breeding program, figured out what it was for—almost as if she’d been pointed at it by someone. Figured out that Angbard had asked him to set up the liaison with the clinic, no doubt. Figured out that what was going on was a power struggle between the old bitches who arranged the marriage braids and the macho phalangist order of the Clan Security organization. Figured out that he was the fixer, the enabler, the Clan’s own medic and expert in reproductive technology who had given Angbard the idea, back when he was a young and foolish intern who didn’t know any better.…

His idea. The power of it still filled his age-tempered heart with bitter awe: The power to raise an army of world-walkers, to breed them and train them to obedience could have made him the most powerful man in the six—now unhappily seven—families. If he’d waited longer, realized that he stood on the threshold of his own success, he’d never have sought Angbard’s patronage, much less learned to his dismay how thoroughly that put him under the thin white duke’s thumb.

Stolen. Well he had, by god—by the Anglischprache’s dead god on a stick, or by Lightning Child, or whichever thrice-damned god really mattered (and who could tell)—he had stolen it back again. The bitch-queen Helge might have it in for him, and her thugs wouldn’t hesitate with the hot knives if they ever discovered his role in Hildegarde’s little gambit—but that was irrelevant now. He had the list. And he had a copy of the lost, hidden family’s knotwork emblem, a passport for travel to New Britain. And lastly, he had a piece of paper with a name and address on it.

James Lee had done his job well, during his exile among the Clan.

Finally satisfied with his appearance, Dr. ven Hjalmar walked to the door and opened it an inch. “I’m ready to go,” he said quietly.

Of the two stout, silent types standing guard, one remained impassive. The other ducked his head, obsequious—or perhaps merely polite in this society; Griben was no judge of strange mores—and shuffled hastily towards the end of the corridor.

The doctor retreated back to his room to wait. These were dangerous times, to be sure, and he had nearly fallen foul of muggers on his way here as it was; the distinction between prison guard and bodyguard might be drawn arbitrarily fine. In any case, the Lees had done him the courtesy of placing him in a ground-floor room with a window overlooking a walled garden; unless Clan Security was asleep at the switch and the Lees had been allowed to set up doppelganger installations, he was free to leave should he so choose. Of course, that might simply be yet another of their tests.…

There was a knock; then the door opened. “Good afternoon, Doctor.”

Ven Hjalmar nodded affably. “And the same to you, sir.” The elders were clearly taking him seriously, to have sent James Lee to conduct him to this meeting. James was one of the principal heirs. One-quarter ethnic Han by descent, he wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows in the other Anglische world: but the politics of race and ethnicity were very different here, and the Lee family’s long sojourn on the west coast of the Clan’s world among the peasants of the Middle Empire had rendered them conspicuous in the whitebread northeast of New Britain. “Chinese gangsters” was perhaps the nicest term the natives had for them, and despite their considerable wealth they perforce kept a low profile—much like Griben himself. “I trust it is a good afternoon?”

“I’ve had worse.” Lee held the door open. “The elders are waiting to hear your proposal in person, and there’s always the potential for—misunderstandings, in such circumstances. But we are all men of goodwill, yes?”

“Yes.” Ven Hjalmar smiled tightly. “And we all hold valid insurance policies. After you, no, I must insist.…”

* * *

The Lee family had fallen out of contact with the rest of the Clan most of two centuries ago—through betrayal, they had thought, although the case for cock-up over conspiracy was persuasive—and in that time they had come to do things very differently. However, some aspects of the operation were boringly familiar: an obsession with the rituals of hierarchy, pecking order, and tiresome minutiae of rank. As with the Clan, they relied on arranged marriages to keep the recessive genetic component of the world-walking trait strong. Like the Clan, they had fractured into a loose formation of families, first and second cousins intermarrying, with a halo of carriers clinging to their coattails. (Again, like the Clan, they practiced a carefully controlled level of exogamy, lest inbreeding for the world-walking trait reinforce other, less desirable ones.) Unlike the Clan, Mendelian genetics had made a late arrival—and actual modern reproductive genetics as practiced in the clinics of America was an unknown black art. Or so ven Hjalmar believed; in fact, he was betting his life on it.

* * *

“Speak to me of this breeding program,” said the old man on the mattress.

Ven Hjalmar stared at his beard. It straggled from the point of his chin, wispy but not too wispy, leaving his cheeks bare. Is that spirit gum? he wondered. The cheeks: There was something unnatural about their smoothness, as if powdered, perhaps to conceal the pattern of stubble. It would make sense perhaps, in an emergency, to be able to shed the formal robes, queue, and beard, to dissolve in the crowd.… “It was established by the Clan’s security division a generation ago,” he said slowly. “Normally the, the braid of marriages is managed by the elder womenfolk, matchmakers. But with a civil war only just dying down, the Clan’s numbers were diminished drastically.” It was surprisingly easy to slip into the habit of speaking of them as a third party, as them not us. Another creeping sign of exile.

“In America, to which they have access, medical science is very much more advanced than in the Gruinmarkt—or in New Britain. Childless couples can make discreet use of medical services to arrange for a child to be born, with one or other parent’s genes”—he used the alien word deliberately, throwing it into conversation without explanation—“to the wife, or to a host mother for adoption. The duke came to an arrangement with such a clinic, to discreetly insure that a number of such babies were born with the ability to pass on the world-walking gene to their own offspring. Records were kept. The plan was to approach the female offspring, as adults, and offer to pay them to be host mothers—paid handsomely, to bear a child for adoption. A child who would, thanks to the clinic, be a true world-walker, and be fostered by the Clan.”

The old lady to the right of the bearded elder tugged her robe fastidiously. Despite the cultivated air of impassivity, the stench of her disapproval nearly made the doctor cough. “They are unmarried, these host mothers?” she asked querulously.

Ven Hjalmar nodded. “They do things very differently in the United States,” he added.

“Ah.” She nodded; oddly, her disapproval seemed to have subsided. Must be some local custom.… He took note of it, nervously.

“As you can imagine, the Clan’s, ah, matchmakers”—he’d nearly said old women but caught himself at the last moment—“did not know of this scheme. It undermined their authority, threatening their rank and privilege. Furthermore, if it went to completion it would hugely undermine the noble families, for these new world-walkers would be brought into the Clan by the duke’s security apparatus, with no hereditary ties to bind them to the braids. The scheme found favor with the radical reformers who wished to integrate the Clan more tightly into America, but to those of us who had some loyalty to the old ways”—or who preferred to be bigger fish in a smaller pond—“it was most suspicious.”

The old man—Elder Huan, James Lee had whispered in his ear as they approached the chamber—nodded. “Indeed.” He fixed ven Hjalmar with a direct and unwavering gaze that was entirely at odds with the image he had maintained throughout the audience up to this point, and asked, “What do you want of us, Doctor?”

Ven Hjalmar did a double take. “Uh, well, as a doctor, the duke commanded my attendance. I obeyed, with reservations; however, I consider myself to be released from his service by the occasion of his death. The family loyalists and the radicals are currently tearing each other apart. I come to you in the hope that you might better exercise the wisdom needed to guide and integrate a generation of new world-walkers.” He smiled tightly. “I do not have the list of host mothers on my person, and indeed it would be no use to you without a physician licensed to practice in the United States—which I happen to be. There will be expenses, and it will take some time to set up, but I believe my identity over there is still secure. And I have in any case taken steps—”

Elder Huan glanced sideways at the sour-faced old woman. “Aunt Mei?”

Aunt Mei sniffed. “Get to the point, boy. We don’t have all day!” Elder Huan produced a pocket watch from one sleeve of his robe and glanced at it. “You are trying to sell us something. Name your price.”

Sweat broke out on Griben’s hands. Not so Chinese, he realized. Either that, or the directness was a snub, unconscionable rudeness to someone of professional rank. “I can give you world-walking babies,” he finally admitted. “I will have to spend some time and considerable money in the United States, and it will take at least eighteen months to start—this can’t be hurried, not just the pregnancies but the appearance of legitimate medical practice—but once the operation is up and running, I can deliver up to fifty new world-walkers in the first two years, more later.” Lots more with harvested eggs and sperm and an IVF clinic; times had moved on since the first proposal to use AID and host mothers. “The money … I believe on the order of two million US dollars should cover start-up costs, and another hundred thousand per baby. That would be eight thousand pounds and eight hundred pounds. You’ll need to build a small shipping operation along similar lines to the Clan’s to raise the money—but you have the advantage of being utterly unknown to and unsuspected by the federal agencies. If you stay out of their exact line of business you should thrive.”

Aunt Mei’s eyes narrowed. “And your price?” she asked.

It was now or never. “I want somewhere to live,” he admitted. “My patron is dead, the Clan is in turmoil, and I doubt their ability to survive what is coming. I know the Americans—I’ve worked among them for years—the Gruinmarkt will not be safe. If the loyalist faction wins, they will try to continue as before, a big mistake. If the progressives win … they’ll want to live here.” He smiled, as ingratiatingly as he could. “We are distant cousins. Can we put past misunderstandings behind us and work together? Consider me a test case.”

“You ask of us accession to our family,” declared Aunt Mei. “Money and status besides, but principally refuge from your enemies.” She turned and nudged Elder Huan. “Is that all?” She sounded mildly scandalized.

Elder Huan stared at ven Hjalmar. “Is that all, indeed?” he echoed ironically. “You would betray your own family…?”

“They betrayed me!” Ven Hjalmar was beyond containment. “I was placed in an intolerable position! Obey the duke and earn the undying hatred of a woman who was to be married to the heir to the throne, or disobey the duke and—well!” He swallowed. “I gather there is a curse: May you come to the attention of important people. At first it looked like a simple problem to solve. The girl was an idiot, naive, and worse, was poking her nose into places it did not belong. But then the civil war started, the duke was incapacitated, and she … well. My household was destroyed in the war: My parents are dead, I have no brothers or sisters. What is a man at the end of his affairs to do?”

There it was, on the table. Spun as neatly as he could manage, admittedly, no hint that his own actions had been motivated by aught but the purest obedience to his elders and betters; but soon there would be no one alive to gainsay his account. (The duke was reliably dead, and as for the dowager Hildegarde, she had followed the most insane imaginable strategy of tension with the Americans, obviously lacking even the remotest idea of the magnitude of their inevitable response—she would follow him soon, and certainly long before she’d move to New Britain, of that he was certain.) Robard sweated some more, waiting for the elder Huan to give some indication of his thoughts. Then, after a moment, the elder inclined his head, and looked at Aunt Mei. “As you will.”

Aunt Mei looked at ven Hjalmar. “We shall consider your proposal,” she said slowly. “Such matters are best decided on after full discussion: You may enjoy our hospitality while we search for consensus. But I shall tell you this minute that if we agree with it, there will be another price you must pay.”

“Another…?” Ven Hjalmar was at a loss.

“Yes.” She smiled, a crinkling around the eyes that hinted at amusement. “If you are to stay with us, you will have to find a wife.” She clapped her hands. “Nephew.” James Lee bowed. “Take the doctor back to his room.”

* * *

Erasmus Burgeson strode through the portico of the People’s Palace as if he owned it, his brown leather duster swinging around him. His usual entourage followed him—a pair of guards in the black peacoats and helmets of Freedom Riders, a stenographer and a pair of messenger boys to race his orders to the nearest telautograph, three secretaries and assistants. It was impossible to fart without his entourage recording the event and issuing a press release to reassure the masses that the commissioner of state propaganda had eaten a healthy breakfast and his bowels were in perfect working order. Such is the price of being on the winning side, he reminded himself whenever it got a bit much; the alternative—a short walk off the end of a long rope—was far less attractive.

Just one month had wrought great changes. The pompous neoclassical building was crawling with Freedom Riders and guards from the newly formed Security Committee, checking passeportes and getting underfoot: but with some justification, for there had been three assassination attempts on members of the Radical government by Patriot renegades in the past week alone—one of them successful to the extent of having cost Commissioner of Industry Sutter half the fingers on one hand and the use of his left eye, not to mention a secretary and a bodyguard. Erasmus had made much of this shocking martyrdom, but it was hardly the most onerous fate the Patriot mob had in mind for any commissioner who fell into their hands, as the full gibbets in rebel-held Rio de Janeiro could attest.

But the guards didn’t impede Burgeson’s progress through the entrance and up the stairs to the Avenue of Ministries; they stood aside and saluted with alacrity, their faces expressionless. It was only at the door to the receiving room that he encountered a delay: Commissioner of Security Reynolds’s men, of course. “Citizen Burgeson! You are expected, but your colleagues must identify themselves. Your papers, please!”

Erasmus waited impatiently while the guards confirmed that his aides were indeed on the privileged list, then nodded amiably to the underofficer on door duty. “If you please?” he asked. The man practically jumped to open the door, avoiding eye contact: Erasmus was of the same rank as the head of his entire organization. Erasmus nodded and, not waiting for his entourage, walked through into the outer office. It was, as usual, crammed with junior people’s commissioners and bureaucrats awaiting instruction, cooling their heels in the antechamber to the doctor’s surgery. Not pausing for idle chatter, Burgeson walked towards the inner door.

A stout fellow who overtopped him by a good six inches stepped sideways into his path, blocking the doorway. “You can’t—” he began.

Erasmus stopped and looked up at him. “Don’t you recognize me?” It was genuinely curious, to be stopped by anyone—even a bruiser in the uniform of the Security Committee.

The bodyguard stared down at Erasmus. Then, after a second, he began to wilt. “No sir,” he admitted. “Is you expected by ’is citizenship this mornin’?”

“Yes.” Burgeson smiled, showing no teeth. “Why don’t you announce me?”

The ability to intimidate secret policemen didn’t come easily or lightly to Erasmus; he still found it a thing of wonder as he watched the big bodyguard turn and push the door ajar to announce his arrival. He’d spent years in the camps, then more years on the run as a Leveler underground organizer in Boston, periodically arrested and beaten by men of this selfsame type, the attack dogs of power. It was no surprise after all these years to see these people rising in the armed wing of the revolutionary democratic cadres, and leaders like Reynolds gaining a certain reputation—especially in view of the unfolding crisis that had first provoked an abdication and then enabled the party to hold its coup—but it was a disappointment. Meet the new boss, just like the old boss: Erasmus remembered the Beckstein woman’s cynical bon mot. Then he dismissed it from his mind as the thug threw the door wide open before him and stood aside.

“Hail, citizen.” Sir Adam Burroughs smiled wearily at him as the door closed at his back. “Have you been keeping well?”

“Well enough.” Erasmus lowered his creaking limbs into one of the ornate chairs that faced Sir Adam’s huge, gilt-tooled leather-topped barge of a desk. And indeed, it was true: With the tuberculosis that had threatened to kill him cured by Miriam’s magic medicine, he felt like a new man, albeit a somewhat breathless one upon whose heels middle age was treading. “Drowning in paperwork, of course, but aren’t we all? My staff are just about keeping on top of the routine stuff, but if anything out of the ordinary comes up they need their reins held.” Barely a square inch of Sir Adam’s desk was occupied, but that was one of the privileges of office: There was another, discreet servants’ door in the opposite wall, and behind it a pool of stenographers, typer operators, and clerks to meet his needs. “What can I do for you, citizen?”

“It’s the French business.” Sir Adam sounded morose. “I’ve asked Citizens Wolfe and Daly to join us in a few minutes.” Wolfe was the commissioner for foreign affairs, and Daly was the commissioner for the navy: both cabinet posts, like Burgeson’s own, and all three of them—not to mention Sir Adam—were clinging on to the bare backs of their respective commissariats for dear life. Nobody in the provisional government knew much about what they were supposed to be doing, with the questionable exception of the Security Committee, who were going about doing unto others as they had been done by with gusto and zeal. Luckily the revolutionary cadres were mostly used to living on their wits, and Sir Adam was setting a good example by ruthlessly culling officials from his secretariat who showed more proficiency in filling their wallets than their brains. “We can’t put them off for any longer.”

“What are your thoughts on the scope of the problem?” Erasmus asked carefully.

“What problem?” Sir Adam raised one gray eyebrow. “It’s an imperialist war of attrition and there’s nothing to be gained from continuing it. Especially as His Former Majesty emptied the coffers and mismanaged the economy to the point that we can’t afford to continue it. The question is not whether we sue for peace, it’s how—ah, John, Mark! So glad you could join us!”

So am I, Erasmus thought as the two other commissioners exchanged greetings and took their seats. Being seen to proceed by consensus on matters of state was vital—at this point, to take after the king’s authoritarian style would be the quickest way imaginable to demoralize the rank and file. “Are we quorate?” he asked.

“I believe so.” Wolfe, a short, balding fellow with a neat beard, twitched slightly, a nervous tic he’d come out of the mining camps with—Erasmus had had dealings with him before, in Boston and parts south. “Is this about the embassy?” he asked Sir Adam.

“Yes.” Sir Adam reached into a desk drawer and withdrew a slim envelope. “He insisted on delivering his preliminary list of demands to me, personally, ‘as acting head of state’ as he put it.” He made a moué of distaste. Wolfe grunted irritably as Sir Adam slid the envelope across the desk towards him. “I don’t want to preempt your considered opinion, but I don’t consider his demands to be acceptable.”

Erasmus raised an eyebrow: Daly, the naval commissioner, looked startled, but Wolfe took the trespass on his turf in good form, and merely began reading. After a moment he shook his head. “No, no … you’re absolutely right. Impossible.” He put the paper down. “Why are you even considering it?”

Sir Adam smiled with all the warmth of a glacier: “Because we need peace abroad. You know and I know that we cannot accept these terms, but neither can we afford to continue this war.”

“May I?” Erasmus reached for the letter as Sir Adam nodded.

“But the price they’re demanding—” Erasmus scanned quickly. After the usual salutations and diplomatic greetings, the letter was brusque and to the point. “It’s outrageous,” Wolfe continued. “The money is one thing, but the loss of territory is wholly unacceptable, and the limitation on naval strength is—”

“Choke them,” Erasmus commented.

“Excuse me?” Wolfe stared at him.

“There is stuff here we can’t deal with, it’s true. War reparations … but we know we can’t pay, and they must know we can’t pay. So buy them off with promissory notes which we do not intend to honor. That’s the first thing. Then there’s the matter of the territorial demands. So they want Cuba. Give them Cuba.” He grinned humorlessly at Wolfe’s expression. “Hasn’t the small matter of how to put down the Patriot resistance there exercised us unduly? It all depends how we give them Cuba. Suppose we accede to the French demands. The news stories at home will run, the French have taken Cuba. And to the Cubans, our broadcasts will say, sorry, but the Patriots stabbed us in the back. And there is nothing to stop us funneling guns and money to the Patriots who take up arms against the French, is there? Let it bleed them, I say. They want Nippon? Let them explain that to the shogun. It’s not as if he recognizes our sovereignty in any case.”

“What naval concessions are they demanding?” asked Daly. “We need the navy, the army isn’t politically correct—”

“They want six of our ships of the line, and limits on new construction of such,” Erasmus noted. “So take six of the oldest prison hulks and hand them over. Turn the hulls in the shipyards over to a new task—not that we can afford to proceed with construction this year, in any case—those purpose-built flat-topped tenders the air-minded officers have been talking about.” Miriam had lent Erasmus a number of history books from her strange world; he’d found the account of her nation’s war in the Pacific with the Chrysanthemum Throne most interesting.

“These are good suggestions,” Sir Adam noted, “but we cannot accede to this—this laundry list! If we pay the danegeld, the Dane will … well. You know full well why they want Cuba. And there are these reports of disturbing new weapons. John, did you discover anything?”

Daly looked lugubrious. “There’s an entire city in Colorado that I’d never heard of two weeks ago,” he said, an expression of uneasy disbelief on his face. “It’s full of natural philosophers and artificers, and they’re taking quantities of electricity you wouldn’t believe. Something about a super-petard, made from chronosium, I gather. Splitting the atom, alchemical transformation of chronosium into something they call osirisium in atomic crucibles. And they confirm the French intelligence.” He glanced at Erasmus: “I mean no ill, but is everyone here approved for this news?”

Sir Adam nodded. “I wouldn’t ask you to report on it if I thought otherwise. The war is liable to move into a new and uncertain stage if we continue it. The French have these petards, they may be able to drop them from aerodynes or fire them from the guns of battleships: a single shell that can destroy a fleet or level a city. It beggars the imagination but we cannot ignore it, even if they have but one or two. We need them likewise, and we need time to test and assemble an arsenal. Speaking of which…?”

“I pressed them for a date, but they said the earliest they could test their first charge would be three months from now. If it works, and if ordered so, they can scale up production, making perhaps one a month by the end of the year. Apparently this stuff is not like other explosives, it takes months or years to synthesize—but in eighteen months, production will double, and eighteen months after that they can increase output fourfold.”

“So we can have four of these, what do you call them, corpuscular petards?—corpses, an ominous name for an ominous weapon—by the end of this year. Sixteen by the end of next year, thirty-four by the end of the year after, and hundreds the year after that. Is that a fair summary?” Daly nodded. “Then our medium-term goal is clear: We need to get the bloody French off our backs for at least three and a half years, strengthen our homeland air defenses against their aerodynes, and work out some way of deterring the imperialists. In which case”—Sir Adam gestured irritably at the diplomatic communiqué—“we need to give them enough to shut them up for a while, but not so easily that they smell a rat or are tempted to press for more.” He looked pointedly at Erasmus. “Finesse and propaganda are the order of the day.”

“Yes. This will require care and delicacy.” Erasmus continued reading. “And the most intricate maintenance of their misconceptions. When do you intend to commence direct talks with the enemy ambassador?”

“Tomorrow.” Sir Adam’s tone was decisive. “The sooner we bury the hatchet the faster we can set about rebuilding that which is broken and reasserting the control that we have lost. And only when we are secure on three continents can we look to the task of liberating the other four.”

* * *

An editor’s life is frequently predictable, but seldom boring.

At eleven that morning, Steve Schroeder was settling down in his cubicle with his third mug of coffee, to work over a feature he’d commissioned for the next day’s issue.

In his early forties, Steve wasn’t a big wheel on the Herald; but he’d been a tech journalist since the early eighties, and he had a weekly section to fill, features to buy from freelance stringers, and in-depth editorial pieces to write. He rated an office, or a cubicle, or at least space to think without interruption when he wasn’t attending editorial committee meetings and discussing clients to target with Joan in advertising sales, or any of the hundred and one things other than editing that went with wearing the hat. Reading the articles he’d asked for and editing them sometimes seemed like a luxury; so he frowned instinctively at the stranger standing in the entrance to his cubicle. “Yes?”

The stranger wore a visitor’s badge, and there was something odd about him. Not the casual Friday clothes; it took Steve a moment to spot the cast on his leg. “You’re Steve Schroeder?”

“Who wants to know?”

The stranger shrugged. “You don’t know me.” He produced a police ID card. Steve sat up, squinting at the badge. Drug Enforcement Agency? Mike Fleming?

“Not my department; Crime’s upstairs on—”

“No, I think I need to talk to you. You commissioned a bunch of articles by Miriam Beckstein a couple of years ago, didn’t you?”

Huh? “What’s this about?” Steve asked cautiously.

“Haven’t heard from her for a while, have you?”

Alarm bells were going off in his head. “Has she been arrested? I don’t know anything; we had a strictly business relationship—”

“She hasn’t been arrested.” Fleming’s gaze flickered sidelong; if Steve hadn’t been staring at him he might not have noticed. “She mentioned you, actually, a couple of years ago. Listen, I don’t know anyone here, and I’ve got very limited time, so I thought I’d try you and see if you could direct me to the right people.” He swallowed. “She pointed me at a story, kind of, before she disappeared. I need to see it breaks, and breaks publicly, or I’m going to disappear too. I’m sorry if that sounds overdramatic—”

“No, that’s all right.” Jesus, why me? Why now? Steve glanced at his workstation for long enough to save the file he was reading. Do I need this shit? Building security mostly kept the nuts out with admirable efficiency; and paranoids invariably headed for Crime and Current Affairs. If this guy was a nut … “Mind if I look at that?” Fleming handed him the badge. Steve blinked, peering at it. Certainly looks real enough.… He handed it back. “Why me?”

“Because—” Fleming was looking around. “Mind if I sit down?”

Steve took a deep breath and gestured at the visitor’s chair by his desk. “Go ahead. In your own time.”

“Last year Miriam Beckstein lost her job. You know about that?”

Steve nodded, guardedly. “You want to tell me about it?”

“It wasn’t the regular post-9/11 slowdown; she was fired because she stumbled across a highly sophisticated money-laundering operation. Drug money, and lots of it.”

Steve nodded again. Trying to remember: What had Miriam said? She’d been working for the Industry Weatherman back then, hadn’t she? Something wild about them canning her for uncovering—Jesus, he thought. “Mind if I record this?” he asked.

“Sure. Be my guest.” Fleming laughed as Steve activated his recorder. It was a hoarse bark, too much stress bottled up behind it. “Listen, this isn’t just about drugs, and I know it’s going to sound nuts, so let me start with some supporting evidence. An hour ago, my car was blown up. The news desk will probably have a report on it, incident in Braintree—” He proceeded to give an address. “I’m being targeted because I’m considered unreliable by the organization I’ve been working for on secondment. You can check on that bombing. If you wait until this afternoon, I’m afraid—shit. There’s going to be a terrorist strike this afternoon in D.C., and it’s bigger than 9/11. That’s why I’m here. There’s a faction in the government who have decided to run an updated version of Operation Northwoods, and they’ve maneuvered a narcoterrorist group into taking the fall for it. I’m—I was—attached to a special cross-agency task force working on the narcoterrorist ring in question. They’re the folks Miriam stumbled across—and it turns out that they’re big, bigger than the Medellín Cartel, and they’ve got contacts all the way to the top.”

“Operation—what was that operation you mentioned?” Steve stared at his visitor. Jesus. Why do I always get the cranks?

“Operation Northwoods. Back in 1962, during the Cold War, the Chiefs of Staff came up with a false flag project to justify an invasion of Cuba. The idea was that the CIA would fake up terrorist attacks on American cities, and plant evidence pointing at Castro. They were going to include hijackings, bombings, the lot—the most extreme scenarios included small nukes, or attacks on the capitol; it was all ‘Remember the Maine’ stuff. Northwoods wasn’t activated, but during the early seventies the Nixon administration put in place the equipment for the same, on a bigger scale—there was a serious proposal to nuke Boston in order to justify a preemptive attack on China. This stuff keeps coming up again, and I’d like to remind you that our current vice president and the secretary for defense got their first policy chops under Nixon and Ford.”

“But they can’t—” Steve stopped. “They’ve just invaded Iraq! Why would they want to do this now? If they were going to—”

“Iraq was the president’s hobbyhorse. And no, I’m not saying that 9/11 was stage-managed to drag us into that war; that would be paranoid. But there’s a whole new enemy on hand, and a black cross-agency program to deal with them called Family Trade, and some of us aren’t too happy about the way things are being run. Let me fill you in on what’s been going on.…”