Huw took a deep breath. “We found more,” he said, holding up three fingers. “And two viable knots. Then all hell broke loose and we only just got here.” He grinned, much too brightly.
“Three worlds?” Miriam raised an eyebrow.
“Yes!” Elena bounced up and down on the linen press she’d taken for a seat. She, too, was wearing native dress from the Clan’s home world; she and Huw would have faded right into the background at any Renaissance Faire, if not for the machine pistol poking from her shoulder bag. “Three! It was very exciting! One of them was so warm Yul nearly fainted before he could get his oxygen mask off! The others—”
Huw cleared his throat, pointedly. “If I may? That one was subtropical, humid. Lots of cycads and ferns, very damp. We didn’t see any people, or any animal life for that matter—but insects. Big dragonflies, that big.” He held his hands a foot apart. “I was pretty light-headed by the time we left. I want to measure the atmospheric gas mix—think it’s way on the high side of normal, oxygen-wise. Like the carboniferous era never ended, or came back, or something. And then there was another cold pine-forest world. Again, no life, no radio transmissions, no sign of people.” He shook his head.
“The third?” Miriam pushed herself up against the pillows, fascinated.
“We nearly died,” Elena said very quietly.
“You nearly—” Miriam stopped. “Huw, I thought you were taking precautions? Pressure suits, oxygen, guns?”
“We were. That one’s inhabited—but not by anything alive.” He clammed up. “Miriam. Uh. Helge. My lady. What’s going on? Why are we here?”
Miriam blinked. “Inhabited? By what?”
“Robots, maybe. Or very fast minerals. Something surprised Yul so he shot it, and it ate his shotgun. After that, we didn’t stick around. Why are we here? The major said you were in charge of, of something important—”
“I need to get out of bed.” Miriam winced. “This wasn’t part of the plan. Huw, we’re here to make contact with the government. Official contact, and that means I need to be in there doing it.”
“Official contact?” His eyes widened.
“Yes.” She took a deep breath. “We’re finished in the United States. The Clan, I mean. Those mindless thugs in the postal arm, Baron Hjorth, my grandmother—they’ve completely wrecked any hope of us ever going back, much less normalizing relations. The US will follow us, to the ends of the universe. Ends of every universe, perhaps. Certainly they had agents in the Gruinmarkt … Riordan’s not stupid, he saw this coming. That’s what we’re doing here. We’re to open negotiations with the Empire of New Britain and sue for asylum. They’ve got problems too, stuff we can help with—the French, that is, the Bourbon monarchy in St. Petersburg. We’ve got access to science and technology that’s half a century ahead of anything they’ve got in the laboratory here, much less widely deployed. That gives us a bargaining tool, much better than a suitcase full of heroin.” She chuckled softly. It made her ribs hurt. “You know all the Roswell, Area 51, alien jokes? Crashed flying saucers, secret government labs full of alien technology? We’re going to be their aliens. Except there’s a slight problem.”
“A problem.” Huw’s expression was a sight. “I can see several potential problems with that idea. What kind of problem do you find worrying enough to single out?”
“We’re not the only people who’ve had a coup d’état.” Miriam sat up, bracing her arms against the headboard of the bed. “The king’s under arrest, the country is in a state of crisis, and the contacts I’d made are high up in the new government. Which may sound like a great opportunity to you, but I’m not sure I like what they’re doing with it. And before we can talk to them we need to square things with the cousins.”
“The cousins—”
“Yes. Or they’ll assume we’re breaking the truce. Tell me, Huw—have you ever met James Lee?”
* * *
The huge, wooden radio in the parlor of the safe house near Framingham was tuned permanently to Voice of England, hissing and warbling the stentorian voice of Freedom Party–approved news as and when the atmospheric conditions permitted. The morning of the day after his arrival, Huw opened it up and marveled at the bulky tubes and rat’s nest of wires within. It was a basic amplitude-modulated set, the main tuning capacitor fixed firmly in position by a loop of wire sealed with a royal crest in solder: comically easy to subvert, if the amateur engineer had been partial to five years in a labor camp. Huw shook his head, then added a crate of pocket-sized Sony world-band receivers to his next supply run shopping list, along with a gross of nicad batteries and some solar-powered chargers.
“How do you use it?” asked Brilliana, looking at it dubiously.
“You plug it back in”—Huw demonstrated, clipping the battery wire to the bulky lead-acid cell that filled much of the radio’s plinth—“and turn it on like so.” Hissing static filled the room.
She frowned. “It sounds horrible. How do you tune it?”
“You don’t. I mean, we can adjust it slightly, within a permitted frequency range.” Huw straightened up. “But the state owns the airwaves.” Someone was talking in portentious tones through the wrong end of a trombone. “Welcome to the pre-transistor era, when radio engineers needed muscles.”
“What use is a radio you can’t—”
Miriam stopped in the doorway. “Wait!” She held up a hand, frowning. She was looking better this morning, Huw decided: There was color in her cheeks and she’d bothered to get dressed in native drag, something like an Indian shalwar suit, only with frightening amounts of embroidery. “Can you turn that up?”
“I guess.” Huw tweaked the fine-tuning pot, then cranked up the volume.
“I know that voice!” Miriam stared at the radio, her eyes wide. “It’s Erasmus!”
“Really?” Brill nodded, then cocked her head. “I suppose it might be.”
“—Our enemies. Only through unceasing vigilance can we insure our safety in the face of the brutal attacks of the aristocratic gang and their lickspittle toadies. But be of good heart: They are a minority, and they swim against the current of history. The slave owners and gangmasters and mercantilists cannot bully us if we stand firm against them. The party is the backbone of the people, and we shall bear the full weight of the struggle against totalitarian monarchism on your behalf—”
“Yes, I think you’re right,” Brilliana said thoughtfully. “He’s wordy enough.…”
“Jesus.” Miriam swayed slightly. “It’s too early for this. Is there any coffee?”
“In the kitchen, I think.” Brill raised an eyebrow at Huw. “Enough with the radio,” she said. Huw could take a hint: He switched it off, and waited for the glowing tubes to fade to gray before he followed them towards the waiting pot.
Miriam was sitting on one of the two chairs, her hands clutching an earthenware mug of black coffee. The kettle still steamed atop the coal-fired cast-iron cooking range. “He’s on the radio,” she said, as if she didn’t quite believe it. “Voice of England. That’s the official news channel, isn’t it? He must have made it to California and come back. This will make everything so much simpler.” Her hands were shaking slightly. “But it also means we need to talk to the cousins now, not later.”
“It’s too dangerous.” Brill looked mulish. “Travel, I mean! There are roving gangs, and we don’t have a car, or—”
“They don’t use cars here,” Miriam pointed out. “At least not the way they do in our—my—America. There are trains. We’re about three miles outside city limits and there’s a railway station. You can catch a train to, to—where are the Lees? Do we have an address for them in Boston? If the service is running right now, and if they aren’t demanding travel papers. But there’s a small-scale civil war going on. They don’t—neither side—have the resources to lock down travel, except across contested borders. We’re on the east coast city belt here, the paper says it’s all Freedom Party territory—”
“You’ve got newsp
apers?” Huw demanded, incredulity getting the better of him.
“Yes, why wouldn’t we?” Miriam was nonplussed. “They don’t have domestic television, Huw, no internet either. How do you expect they get their news?”
“But, but—there’s a civil war going on!”
“Yes, but that’s not stopping the local papers. We get visitors, Huw. We’ve had knife-grinders and pan-sellers and we get a book merchant who carries the weekly paper. As far as our neighbors know, we’re a bunch of squatters who moved in here when the farmer and his family ran away—they’re royalists, he was a snitch, apparently. They don’t mind having us around: Alasdair and Erik saw off a gang of hobos—probably deserters—the day before yesterday. So we, we try to keep informed. And we’re trying to fit in.” She frowned. “Got to get you some local clothes.”
“I’ll sort him out.” Brill rose and poked at the firebox in the range cautiously. Huw winced. Between the summer warmth and an active fire the kitchen was unpleasantly warm, although Miriam still looked as if she was cold. “There’s a lot of work involved in establishing a safe house,” she said, looking at Huw speculatively. “I’ve got a list. If you want to stick around, make yourself useful—”
“No,” said Miriam. Brill looked at her. “I need to see Erasmus. In person.” She tapped a finger on the table. “We need to send a message to James Lee, fix up a conference.” Another tap. “And we need to get as many of our people as possible over here right now. And set up identities for them.” A third finger-tap. “Which feeds back to Erasmus. If he’ll help us out, all our immediate troubles here go away.”
“And if he doesn’t?” Asked Brill.
“Then we’re so screwed it isn’t funny.” Miriam took a sip of coffee. “So we’re not going to worry about that right now. I’m not well enough to travel today, but I’m getting better. Huw? I want you and Yul—you’re the expeditionary research team, aren’t you?—to go into Framingham today. Yeah, I know, so find him some clothes, Brill. I’ll give you a couple of letters to post, Huw, and a shopping list. Starting with a steamer. We’ve got gold, yes? More of the shiny stuff than we know what to do with. So we’re going to spend some of it. Get a steamer—a truck, not a passenger car—and buy food and clothing, anything that’s not nailed down, anything you can find from thrift stores. Some furniture, too, chairs and beds if you can get them, we’re short on stuff here, but that’s a secondary consideration.” She was staring past him, Huw realized, staring into some interior space, transcribing a vision. “Along the way you’re going to post those letters, one to James Lee, one to Erasmus.”
She cleared her throat. “Now here’s the hard bit. If you’re stopped by Freedom Riders, drop my name—Miriam Beckstein—and say I’m working for Erasmus Burgeson and Lady Margaret Bishop. Remember that name: Margaret Bishop. It’ll get their attention. If it doesn’t get their attention, don’t resist if they take you into custody, but make sure you emphasize that you’re working for me and I’m working for their bosses—Lady Bishop and Erasmus know about me, and about the Clan, at least in outline. Then get the hell away. You know how to do it, you’ve got your temp tats, yes?”
Huw cleared his throat. “Do you want that to happen?” Or is this just micromanagement due to nerves?
“No.” Miriam shook her head. “We want to make contact at the highest level, which means ideally we go straight to Erasmus. But if things go wrong, we don’t want to start out with a firefight. Do you see where I’m going here?”
“Six different directions at once, it seems.” Huw rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I think I get it. These people are going to be our patrons, so don’t start the relationship by shooting the servants, right?”
“That’s about it.” Miriam paused. “If you run into real trouble, don’t hang around—just world-walk. We can afford to try again later; we can’t afford to lose you.”
* * *
“Conflicting mission objectives: check.” Click. Yul shoved another cartridge into the magazine he was filling. “Flashing wads of money around in the middle of a revolution while guilty of looking foreign.” Click. “Micromanaging boss trying to run things on impulse.” Clack. He squeezed down on the last cartridge with a quiet grunt, then laid the magazine aside. “Have I missed anything, bro?”
“Yes.” It was either the coffee or pre-op nerves: Huw was annoyed to find his hands were shaking slightly as he checked the battery level on the small Pentax digital camera. “We’ve got a six-month deadline to make BOLTHOLE work.” (BOLTHOLE was the name Brill had pinned on the current project; a handy identifier, and one that anticipated Miriam’s tendency to hatch additional projects.) “Then all the hounds of Hel come belling after our heels. And that’s before the Americans—”
“I don’t see what you and Her Maj are so worked up about, bro. They can’t touch us.” Yulius stood, shrugging his coat into shape.
“We disagree.” Huw slid the camera into an inner pocket of his own jacket. “You haven’t spent enough time over there to know how they think, how they work.” He stood up as Yul stowed his spare magazines in a deep pocket. “Come on, let’s go.” He slung a small leather satchel across his chest, allowed it to settle into place, then gave the strap a jerk: Nothing rattled.
It was a warm day outside, but the cloud cover threatened rain for the afternoon. Huw and Yul headed out into the run-down farmyard—now coming into a modicum of order as Helge’s armsmen cleared up after the absent owners—then down the dirt track to the highway. The road into town was metaled but only wide enough for one vehicle, bordered by deep ditches with passing places every quarter mile. “They make good roads,” Yul remarked as they walked along the side. “Not as good as the Americans, but better than us. Why is that?”
“Long story.” Huw shook his head. “We’re stuck in a development trap, back home.”
“A what trap?”
A rabbit bolted for safety ahead of them as the road curved; birds peeped and clattered in the trees to either side like misconfigured machinery. “Development. In the Americans’ world there are lots of other countries. Some of them are dirt-poor, full of peasants. Sort of like home, believe it or not. The rich folks can import automobiles and mobile phones but the poor are just like they’ve always been. The Americans were that way, two hundred years ago—somewhere along the way they did something right. You’ve seen how they live today. Turns out—they’ve tried it a lot, in their world—if you just throw money at a poor country and pay for things like roads and schools, it doesn’t automatically get better. The economists have a bunch of theories about why, and how, and what you need to do to make an entire nation lift itself up by its own bootstraps … but most of them are wrong. Not surprising, really; mostly economists say what the rich people who pay them want to hear. If they knew for sure, if there was one true answer, there’d be no underdeveloped nations. We’d have developed, in the Gruinmarkt, too, if there was a well-defined recipe. It’s probably some combination of money, and institutions like the rule of law and suppression of corruption, and education, and a work ethic, and fair markets, and ways of making people feel like they can better themselves—social inclusion. But nobody knows for sure.”
A high stone wall appeared alongside the road, boundary marker to a country estate. “People have to be able to produce a bit more than they consume, for one thing. And for another, they have to know that if they do produce it—well, what does a lord do if his peasants are growing more food than they need?”
Yul shrugged. “What do you expect me to say, bro? They’re his tenants!”
“Well, yeah, but.” They passed a spiked iron gate, head-high and closed, behind which a big house squatted with sullenly shuttered windows. The wall resumed. “Here’s the thing. Our families became rich, and bought titles of nobility, and married into the aristocracy. And after a generation or two they were noble houses. But we’re still stuck in a sea of peasants who don’t make anything worth shit, who don’t generate surpluses because they know some guy in a suit
of armor can take it away from them whenever he likes. We’ve got towns and artisans and apothecaries and some traders and merchants and they’re … you’ve seen the Americans. They’re not smarter than us. They don’t work harder than the peasants on your father’s land. They’re not—most of them—rich because they inherited it. But two hundred years ago things over there took a strange turn, and now they’re overwhelmingly wealthy. These people are … they’re better off than us: not as good as the Americans, but doing well, getting better. So what are they doing right?”
Huw stopped. The wall had come to an end, and ahead of them the road ran straight between a burned-out strip of row houses and a cleared field; but a group of four men had stepped into the highway in front of them, blocking the way ahead. They had the thin faces and hungry eyes of those who had been too long between hot meals.
“Yer bag. Give it ’ere,” said the thinnest, sharpest man. He held out a hand, palm-up. Huw saw that it was missing two fingers. The men to either side of the speaker, hard-faced, held crudely carved shillelaghs close by their sides.
“I don’t think so,” replied Huw. He smiled. “Would you like to reconsider?” From behind his left shoulder he heard a rip of Velcro as Yul freed up his holster.
“They’s the strangers wot moved on ole Hansen’s farm,” the skinny man—barely more than a teenager—at the left of the row hissed sharply.
The speaker’s eyes flickered sideways, but he showed no sign of attention. “Git ’em, lads,” he drawled, and the highwaymen raised their clubs.
Yul drew and fired in a smooth motion. His Glock cracked four times while Huw was persuading his own weapon to point the right way. The two club-men dropped like sacks of potatoes. The skinny lad’s jaw dropped; he turned and bolted into the field.
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