Bannor was tempted to reject the proposal outright, but hell, no harm in hearing it. “Who and why?”
“I’m recommending Rodriguez and Capdepon, sir.”
Bannor shook his head. “Vincent Rodriguez is far more than a grease monkey. He’s the only Lost Soldier qualified on all the modern machinery. He’s needed here. And while Joe Capdepon is a fine soldier, we already have enough trigger-pullers.”
Missy frowned. “Yes, sir. But then you’ve still got a problem: all your trigger-pullers are chiefs, not Indians. Sir.”
Bannor ignored the unfortunate archaic axiom. “I know that look, Ms. Katano. You’ve got an alternate solution.”
“Yes, sir. We could send the two Lost Soldiers whose cold cells failed. It not only helps you, it helps them. And the rest of the unit.”
Bannor folded his arms. “Convince me.”
“Well, sir, you yourself said that if Murray Liebman can’t be stuck back in a freezer, we’d better stick him in a combat zone.”
“Yes, well…”
“Sir, he’s outstanding in the field, but the longer he sits around, the more likely he is to become a major discipline problem. Again. Not good for morale. Or opsec.”
Peter Wu nodded. “Specialist Liebman was under my command on Turkh’saar. I can vouch for him. As long as he has something to do, he’ll be fine.”
Katano smiled her appreciation while keeping her eyes on Bannor. “The other Lost Soldier is Craig Girten, sir. He’s been requesting any assignment that would take him off-site. For two years, now.”
Rulaine nodded. “I am aware.” Bannor was also aware why. Girten, of all the Lost Soldiers, had become a “black rabbit’s foot”: the guy who had, again and again, been the sole survivor in his unit, from the Ardennes all the way to Turkh’saar. The only persons who hadn’t bought into the inevitable graveyard superstitions were Riordan and his original crew. Or as Bannor and the others in that group preferred, “the Crewe.”
“Okay,” Rulaine murmured. “tell the two of them to grab their gear. Anyone else with IRIS or intel affiliations? Karam? Tygg?” As he mentioned Tygg’s name, his wife, Melissa Sleeman, leaned back, her jaw suddenly taut.
Duncan shook his head. “Neither of them were actually IRIS. They’re not of interest to our pursuers.”
Bannor unfolded his arms. “Well, then, I guess we’d better start packing.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
JULY 2124
LELTLOSU-SHAI (VIRTUA), BD+75 403A
As Caine Riordan opened the French doors to the balcony, a light breeze spun the last tendril of smoke rising from the extinguished oil lamp on his night table. The large house, a genuine Victorian, was quiet. His ronin bodyguards were too stealthy to be heard.
Another step carried him into the cool quiet of his bedroom’s balcony. Out beyond Willard Bay, the moon was rising over Long Island Sound.
Caine leaned his weight upon the oak railing and winced. Although healed, his left hand was still sensitive around the scarred knuckle where his fourth finger had once been. Last year’s escape from Rangoon had been entirely too close. Of the two steam gunboats flying British colors, the one that they hadn’t disabled with gunfire ran them down and attempted a boarding. After Riordan emptied his second revolver, there hadn’t been time to do anything but fight back with katana and sai. Frankly, they were lucky to have made it out of that long, narrow bay alive.
Well, virtually alive. After more than three local years, it remained a challenge to keep that distinction in mind. But his time in Virtua was finally coming to an end, one way or another. The basic strategic moves he had plotted while escaping from London—which had sent him on an incognito circumnavigation of the globe—had ultimately brought him to this place, this confrontation with Kutkh. Or, more accurately, with her local persona: Lord David Weiner, Earl of Greater Connecticut.
However, the details of Riordan’s plan had sharpened as his knowledge of this strange alternate Earth of 1872 broadened.
The first clear deviation from Earth’s historical timeline was that the spate of mid-eighteenth-century pluralist revolutions had not taken place. Instead, Europe had transitioned straight into a more energetic and ruthless Imperialist phase. The majority of its wars were colonial clashes fought by the familiar empires of Earth’s equivalent epoch. But here, their reach was so absolute that every patch of land, every tiny atoll and islet, now belonged to one of these leviathans, either directly or through their innumerable satrapies and client states.
However, as Riordan had asked more questions and read more histories, it became evident that although these empires had never been weakened by popular revolts, they nonetheless retained only a fraction of their autonomy. Here, their dominance had been undermined with finesse and subtlety by a very different set of change agents: businesses. But how and why had early industrial magnates become the power behind the age’s various imperial thrones?
The answer turned out to be coal. Or more specifically, its arresting scarcity. Anthracite, the lifeblood of Earth’s early heavy industry, was rare. More energy-dense fossil fuels were entirely unknown.
Tracking backward, Riordan discovered that, in consequence, the Industrial Revolution had not arrived as a wave, but a slowly rising tide. The markedly greater costs of manufacturing were exacerbated by constant increases in the price of coal as known seams were exhausted more swiftly.
Prospectors roved across the globe to find more deposits. England’s discovery of the North American fields gave it an economic boost almost as great as the Spanish discovery of silver centuries before. Indeed, the American colonies became so prized for their coal reserves that, by 1770, they had attracted droves of new and well-subsidized settlers and workers. Before long, the businesses that consumed New World anthracite decided to build their factories on site, rather than shipping the fuel across the Atlantic. The industrialization of America had begun half a century early.
Those empires that could followed England’s lead. A redoubled frenzy of prospecting sparked colonial wars, even as coal’s increasing value and scarcity slowly but surely transferred the power and prerogatives of empires to the industries that controlled the mines and colliers. Those few nations that chose to cling to traditional sources of energy were swiftly relegated to second-tier status or the dustbin of history. And although the polities that embraced this new reality survived, they did so under the increasingly overt direction of the globe’s real power: the Capital and Coal Council.
The 3C, or simply “Coal,” rapidly consolidated into a consortium which demonstrated marked propensities for both ruthlessness and avarice. However great the historical injustices of Earth’s nineteenth century had been, they were dwarfed by the 3C’s unrelenting and nightmare of brutality.
Caine’s reverie became a reflection upon characterizing Coal’s reign of terror as a “nightmare.” After all, here everything was just a bad dream. And yet, this world had remained utterly and flawlessly believable in every regard. His struggle to remember, minute to minute, that this was a virtual space had not become easier, but harder. It was now populated by simulacra whom he had known for years, whose joys and tragedies moved him, who laughed and wept and hoped and despaired. Worse yet, he still had to remind himself that sensations—such as tonight’s skin-cooling sea breeze—were just a blizzard of electric impulses, tricking his brain, his nerves.
Which, he had begun to fear, might not just be the endgame for Dornaani civilization. It could be in humanity’s future as well. Conceivably, those seeds were latent in electricity itself. Given how it ultimately expanded each individual’s sphere of contact and control, its utility was inseparable from the allure of its power. We summon heat and light without having to create it ourselves. We communicate across continents and oceans. We operate machines that labor in our stead. We keep opponents at a safe distance with remote sensors and drones. Is that how the long, subtle slide into speciate senescence began, that the more a species distanced itself from direct a
ction, the more unfamiliar the natural environment became?
Riordan drew in a lungful of night air that wasn’t really there. If humans completely insulated themselves from all physical effort and risk, that could erode the mental resilience required to contend with emotional and psychological challenges. And if that, in turn, led them to minimize contact with those whose different ideas were the most frequent source of such challenges, what would become of social bonds? Of courage, of love, of hope?
Riordan shivered, wondered if his actual body was covered by the same thin sweat of dread that chilled his virtual one. So will we, too, come to rely upon virtuality to rediscover this smell of dark pines, this cool buffeting of a crisp night wind, and the siren call of spray-capped swells rolling on a moonlit sea?
Riordan quit the balcony, shut the French doors, wondered if any tangible benefit would result from his sojourn in Virtua. He’d spent over a year readying his body for the coming confrontation, even while chafing at the certainty that his new muscle mass would not follow him back into the real world.
But what of the rest? Would the engagement at Rangoon, and a dozen others, better prepare him for actual close combat? Would the training and the skills he had acquired in Virtua translate into actual competencies? Maybe so; maybe not. Only time and real-world experience would tell.
Riordan shuttered the windows, drew back the covers of his bed. He slipped under them slowly, arranged them to lie loosely upon his body. All that remained was for him to signal the machinery of Virtua that this sleep cycle was to last for two local days. Caine lay back slowly. He blinked five times.
He paused. Three blinks.
Another pause. One blink. And…
Blackness.
Chapter Fifty-Four
JULY 2124
LELTLOSU-SHAI (VIRTUA), BD+75 403A
“Cei!”
Riordan leaned sideways to look into the next baggage car, felt the crisp November wind lash into his face, much colder than the breeze off the bay three nights ago. Standing in the rear doorway of the car ahead of his, Pip Robinson gave a thumbs-up. “Target’s departure is confirmed.”
“Wire test?”
“Circuit is good.”
“Operational security?”
“Semaphore from over the river signals that our observers remain uncompromised. No sign of enemy security forces. Routine defense contingent is traveling with the target. It’s just Weiner’s standard Boston to New Haven run.”
It was indeed typical in all particulars. Lord David Lawrence Weiner’s special train, which shuttled him back and forth between his offices in Boston and New York several times a month, was right on time. At approximately 1:10 PM, it would finish crossing the dual-track rail bridge that stretched across the Connecticut River. A coded telegraph from observers in Lyme confirmed that the train was in its normal configuration.
This meant that a small security car—essentially a four-wheeled fort—was positioned ahead of the armored locomotive, which was in turn followed by two reinforced corridor cars with steel-shuttered windows: duty stations and billets for the protection forces, as well as Weiner. Then the observation car, which in most trains would have been either first or last in line. But that made it excessively vulnerable to derailings and attacks, so this observation car was a custom design. Slightly convex mural-sized windows provided the central viewing gallery with a panoramic view of the passing scene. The tail of the train included two more reinforced corridor cars and, finally, a battery car: an iron-sided box with one cannon trained behind and one to either side.
It was said that Weiner’s train was the safest conveyance on the planet. Evidently, his many foes believed that assessment. It had never been attacked.
Riordan responded to Pip Robinson’s sitrep with a thumbs-up and, “Execute.”
A moment later, the floor beneath Caine jerked into motion. Their own train’s relic locomotive staggered forward against the weight of the five muddy baggage cars that had been unceremoniously shunted into this unused siding two days ago. The cars groaned slowly toward the eastbound track.
Eight hundred yards to the west, three of Riordan’s operatives, wearing railroad coveralls, would already be raising signals indicating a line closure ahead. It would be unusual if anyone challenged them inasmuch as they were positioned between stations. Just in case, one of them was an easygoing, glib American who could deflect any but the most insistent of inquiries. Which was fortunate, since his two pals didn’t even speak English. The strike team had been chosen for boldness and resolve, not multilinguality.
As the shabby train began to pick up speed, Riordan turned to face the thirty men behind him, clustered around several blocks of ice. Each of the frost-sided cubes was belted with numerous cloth bandoliers. “Load tubes,” he ordered. “Then check your gear.”
The group split. Half of the men retrieved small, partitioned boxes from the drafty cargo apron near the open rear door. The other half checked the fittings and straps that held their swords, percussion-cap revolvers, and ammunition. There were even a few custom-built wheelguns, which in this world meant percussion cap shotguns fitted with revolver actions.
Caine’s own readiness review was markedly different. He began by checking his armor: a full suit of two-hundred-year-old Italian field plate. Cuirass, greaves, cuisses, vantbrasses, the rest: he made sure every exquisitely crafted piece moved smoothly. Although designed for optimal distribution of weight, Riordan had trained in the thirty-four-pound suit for months, just to be sure of moving swiftly for a few crucial minutes today.
He scanned the men’s equipment, spotted a holstered pistol without a lanyard affixed to its grip, nodded at it. The owner, a Prussian by the name of Heidl, murmured a quick apology and fumbled with awkward hands after the leather lead that should have attached it to his belt. “Heidl,” Caine muttered, “die neuen Handschuhe. Nicht so schwer.”
Heidl blinked, then smiled as he slipped off the heavy, lined gloves he’d been wearing and replaced them with light leather ones that made handling the lanyard much easier.
Riordan pulled on his own shooting gloves, smoothing them so that they fit snugly beneath the back-hand armor of his demi-gauntlet.
The men carrying the partitioned boxes from the car’s cargo apron deposited them near the ice. As they began checking their own gear, those who had just finished doing so slipped the bandoliers off the frost-covered blocks. From each pouch, they carefully removed a heavy-walled vial half filled with frozen, and therefore inert, nitroglycerin. Storing it against the ice had kept it well under the requisite fourteen degrees centigrade.
The delicate part of the work began. Several men drew small, clockwork firing mechanisms from the boxes’ partitions, confirmed each one was fitted with a primer cap, and passed it on. The next man inserted it into a waiting vial and armed the device by turning its top-mounted key until the striker was cocked and tabs had extended to lock it in place against the inner walls of the tube. Which, if broken, would release the tabs and striker simultaneously.
Once the last tube had been sealed and reinserted into one of the bandoliers’ many well-cushioned loops, Riordan flipped back the cover on the inside of his left vantbrass. He read the pocket watch fastened there. “Seven minutes. Weapons check.”
His men made sure that their swords cleared their scabbards smoothly, that the spare cylinders for their revolvers came readily out of the other pouches on their bandoliers. In Riordan’s case, there were no extra cylinders. He wouldn’t have time to reload. Instead, a brace of three pistols rode low on his left hip. He drew them one by one, ensuring that there were no snags.
As he reholstered and secured the last, he glanced up. The men’s eyes were upon him. Expectant, fearful, eager, and, above all, deadly earnest. They had all lost something—livelihood, family, dreams, pride—to the 3C. Ever since the Great Coal War, its plutocrats had dictated economic policy, reshuffled wealth according to their own interests, and seemed well on the way to establishing the
corporate equivalent of serfdom.
And always at the forefront of those who espoused and enforced such policies was Lord David Lawrence Weiner, Earl of Connecticut, coal and steel magnate of the Greater British Empire, and the most powerful man in America.
Lord Weiner was also invulnerable, or so Caine had often been told during his escape from London’s waterfront. That opinion was loudly reprised by the dissenters who stashed him and Pip in one of Amsterdam’s shadier dockside taverns. There, in a secret basement that smelled of old tobacco and stale gin, he had been assured that none of the world’s disparate resistance movements had any hope of attacking or assassinating Weiner. Better to stick to humbler targets.
“Such as London Bridge?” Riordan had wondered aloud.
“That was madness,” a smuggler from Santander had opined over his gin. “I mean no disrespect to Commander Robinson, but the plot was too bold, too uncertain. And too costly.” The Spaniard’s eyes shifted sideways toward Pip. “How many did we lose? The two who set the charges, three of the agitators who ensured that the riot would distract the Blackhands, and then dozens more who knew no better than to attack the Irregulars? All to destroy one bridge in a city with half a dozen others?”
“Not just any bridge,” Pip said thickly. “London Bridge. A symbol. And so, a message.”
Antanas Voldermaras, a fatherly, gray-bearded Lithuanian, shook his head sadly. “A message that we haven’t the means to send again.”
Riordan shrugged. “Actually, I think you can repeat the message. And louder. But there are other actions you have to take first.”
Bram Prins, a Jewish banker from Mittelberg, leaned his index finger alongside his temple. “Such as?”
Riordan smiled. “What do you need most?”
Pip sighed, tossed back his beer. “Everything. But mostly, money and weapons.”
Caine looked around the table. “What about security?”
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