Revolution Business (2 page)

"Sir." The senior guard made it sound like a cough. "Opening a device on inactive inventory is a security-"

"Sergeant, I am very much afraid that this is not, in fact, a device on inactive inventory. It's something else. In which case, the regulation you're about to quote at me doesn't apply, does it?"

"Right." The guard looked unhappy. "Will you put that in writing, sir? Because if not, I'll have to…"

Ellis took a deep breath. "Yes, I'll put it in writing." He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Now, are we going to keep these people waiting?"

Rich felt an elbow in his ribs. "Have to
what?"
whispered Chavez.

"Shoot somebody," Rich grunted. "Probably us."

"Captain Hu…"

"I'm on it."

The audience in the storage room fell silent as Captain Hu set to work, unfastening catches and then going to work with a torque wrench under Alvarez's watch. He took barely five minutes, but to Rich it felt closer to five hours. Finally, the lid of the carrier came free.

"Well?" asked Ellis.

Hu held the carrier open as Alvarez reached down and pulled. "We've got an empty quiver," he said laconically, and held up his catch: an object which, from the way he held it, had to be unusually heavy. "Unless we've taken to storing lead bricks in nuclear weapon carriers…"

The transportation of mobile phones-let alone camera phones-into the secure areas of Pantex was more than slightly discouraged. Rich stayed with the crowd scene for the next two hours, as the inspectors ripped through the other eleven storage cells in the facility with increasing desperation. Then, with the final tally-six H-912s filled with the sleeping FADM lightweight nukes, six H-912s empty but for lead bricks and a slip of red paper taped inside the inspection window-he slipped outside.

Chavez followed him. "The colonel will want to know," she said as the door closed behind them.

"Yeah," he agreed. He nodded to the guard on duty outside, then presented his badge. "We have to make a call. Where can I find a phone?"

The cop looked at him with barely concealed suspicion. "You don't get to go anywhere until I confirm you're free to leave the area, sir."

Chavez snorted. "You have no legal authority over us, soldier." She held up her warrant card. "C'mon, Rich, we're-"

The guard tensed. "You're not leaving!" he repeated, louder.

Rich spread his hands. "Whoa! We don't need an argument and we don't need to leave the area, we just need to make a phone call. Is there a voice terminal we can use nearby? Preferably secure?"

"You want an outside line?" The guard looked aghast.

"No, just one that can put me through to Operations Control. Operations Control? Come on, there must be one-"

"Internal phone's over there." The cop pointed at a box on the wall. "Just don't try to leave the area until you've been cleared, sir, ma'am. I don't know what's going on in there, but nobody's to leave. And I don't care what your badges say, I've got my orders and I'm sticking to 'em. Don't put me in a position where I've gotta do something we'll all regret."

"I don't intend to." Rich tried to look as unthreatening as possible. "I just need to talk to someone in Operations Control. We're not going to be any trouble."

He could feel Chavez's eyes drilling a hole in his back. He glanced round. "You want to make this one?"

"No, you go first." Chavez grinned humorlessly. "I'll just watch your back."

"Shit." Rich picked up the handset and dialed a four-digit number. "Ops? This is a call for SERENE AMBLER. Yeah, that's SERENE AMBLER. They're expecting you to connect me immediately… good. Colonel? Rich here."

The voice at the other end of the line sounded alert. "What's the news?"

"Our FADM inventory is fucked, and it's worse than we feared. We're out by another five, in addition to the one we found in Boston. That one was on forward deployment when it went walkies, but the ones we're missing here were supposed to be in secure storage. Turns out they've been tampered with in the meantime-someone has gotten inside the storage cells. I slipped out while they were declaring an official Pinnacle Empty Quiver so I could warn you; the missing items are all from the covert resource allocated to SECDEF and VPOTUS back in 2001, so somebody needs to brief WOLFMAN and WARBUCKS urgently to head it off at the pass before the shitstorm hits the National Command Authority and confuses the president."

"I see." The colonel fell uncharacteristically silent for a few seconds. "And what does the scene look like to you, right now?"

Rich paused, glancing at the guard, who was pointedly not listening-too pointedly, he thought. "The area's secured against normal threats, so your guess is as good as mine as to how they got in." Which was to say, not a guess at all-they both knew perfectly well how these particular bad guys might sneak into a secure area. "The building's surrounded by a-the usual kind of security you'd expect-but it's AGL. The guards seem alert enough to"-yes, the guard was
very pointedly
not listening-"intruders. I'm not making any guesses how they managed to make the substitution, but the H-912 cases were full of ballast. Which suggests whoever took them knows exactly what they're doing with the contents."

Another pause. "Can you confirm six missing, and no more?"

That was an easy one to answer: "No, sir. I can confirm six empty quivers and six full ones, but I cannot rule out the possibility that there are more missing." He licked his dry lips. "I would be astonished if the site authority doesn't order a full lockdown immediately and commence an audit within the next hour or two, in anticipation of NCA's likely orders. Meanwhile, it looks like we'll be stuck here for a few hours, if not days. What do you want us to do?"

Silence. "Leave it to the NNSA," the colonel finally said. "I'll escalate it for WARBUCKS's attention immediately. Meanwhile, I want you back in Boston as soon as you can disengage. There's a problem with COLDPLAY…"

I
am not hearing this,
Miriam Beckstein told herself. The temptation to giggle, to laugh it all off as a bizarre joke, was enormous.
Pretend it isn't happening; yeah, right. Story of my life.
She tightened her grip on the valise holding her notebook PC and its precious CD-ROMs. Except that for the past six months, the mad stuff had made a habit of punching her in the guts whenever she least expected it. "Run that by me again," she said.

"It's quite simple," said the hard-eyed young debutante with the machine pistol. "Your mother wants to use you to consolidate power." She kept her eyes focused on Miriam as she twisted the magazine free of the gun, worked a slide to eject a cartridge, and swapped another magazine into place. "The duke agrees with her. And
we"-the
eloquent roll of her shoulder took in their companions, a cohort of young and alarmingly heavily armed Clan world-walkers-"intend to make sure you're not just there for show."

They look like students,
thought Miriam. Students outfitted by North Face for a weekend hike; accessories by Fabrique Nationale and Heckler amp; Koch. Of course they were nothing of the kind. Young aristocrats of the Clan nobility-born in the curious quasi-mediaeval kingdom of Gruinmarkt, and able to travel to other worlds at will-they might look like ordinary American undergrads, but the mind-set behind those fresh young faces was very different.

"Oh, really?" she managed. The idea of her mother-and the duke-plotting to put her on the throne of the Gruinmarkt was pretty preposterous, on the face of it-but then, so were so many of the other intrigues the Clan seemed to generate. Then another thought struck her:
You said "we," didn't you?
So Brill had an agenda of her own, over and above her loyalty to the duke-or Miriam, for that matter? Time to probe…

"Was this"-she pointed at her belly, quiet anger in her voice-"part of their plan?"

"Milady" Brill-Lady Brilliana d'Ost, a mere twentysomething-furrowed her brow. "With all due respect, if you think
that,
you're paranoid. Do you really think the duke-or your mother-know you so poorly as to think you a suitable mother for the heir to the throne? Much less, under such durance? Henryk and your-his backer-were fools for thinking they could manipulate you that way, and now they are dead fools. The rest of us are just trying to make the best of a bad deal. And if you want to talk politics, would you mind leaving it until later? I've got a splitting headache and it's about to get worse."

Miriam winced. World-walking took it out of a member of the Clan's inner families, those with the ability: Doing it more than once in a day risked migrainelike symptoms and a blood pressure spike. There were other symptoms, too: pregnancy, she'd learned the hard way, made world-walking under your own power impossible. But they'd come here from New Britain, escaping after the abortive ambush at a provincial railway station in that world's version of California, immediately after picking her up.

One of the young men pacing the perimeter of the clearing raised a hand, twirled it in a warning circle. "One hour to go."

"Yah." Brill glanced round again. The forest clearing was peaceful, unoccupied but for Miriam, Brill, and her three young bloods, but she never stopped scanning.

"Are we in any immediate danger?" Miriam asked, shifting her balance on the fallen tree trunk.

"Probably not right now." Brill paused to continue her inspection. "The Kao's patrols don't usually sweep this far northeast. Better not linger, though. We'll be ready to move in another hour."

"The Kao?"

"The Favored of Heaven's border troops. Most of the local tribes give them a wide berth. We should, too." A warning look in her eyes gave Miriam a cold shiver; if Brill was scared of them, that was enough for her.

"What are you planning on doing once we cross over?"

"We've got a hotel suite in San Jose. I plan to get us over there, then make contact with the duke and ask for further instructions. I imagine he'll want us back on the east coast stat-we've got a biz-jet standing by. Otherwise, we'll do what Security tells us to do. Unless you have other plans?" Brill raised a carefully shaped eyebrow. Even though she'd started the day with a brisk firefight, then a forced crossing into wilderness, she'd taken pains with her makeup.

Miriam shrugged. "I thought I did." Her hands were restless; trying to keep them still, she thrust them deep in the pockets of her overly heavy coat. "The political situation in New Britain is going to hell in a handbasket. Erasmus was on his way to meet a big wheel in the, uh, resistance." In point of fact, the
biggest
wheel in the underground, returning from exile after a generation-to whom he had once been a personal assistant. "It's too hot for comfort. I was only going along because I couldn't think of anything else to do; when I fetched up in London all I had was the clothes on my back."

"Well, at least you got away from the mess at the Summer Palace with your skin intact," Brill observed. "And thank whatever gods you believe in for that."

She fell silent for a few minutes. But finally Miriam's curiosity got the better of her. "I can guess how you tracked me down," she said. "But what about Huw? And the other two? Who are they? You said something about a job I'd suggested, but I don't recall… and they don't look like Uncle Angbard's little helpers to me."

"They're not." Brilliana's eyes narrowed. "I just called in help and head office sent them along. Hey! Sir Huw? Have you a minute?"

Huw nodded. "Bro, cover for me," he told the tall, heavily built guy with the semiauto shotgun as he walked towards them. Huw was anything but husky: skinny and intense. "Has something come up?"

"Huw." Brill smiled, oddly cheerful. "We've got a couple of hours to kill. Why don't you tell her grace what you found?"

Her grace? But I'm not a duchess.
Miriam blinked. Suddenly bits of the big picture were falling into place.
Heir to the throne.
"What you found, where?"

"We're calling it world four right now, but I think a better name for it would be Transition A-B," Huw said as he sat down at the far end of the fallen trunk. "It's where you go if you use the Hidden Family's knotwork as a focus in your world, uh, the United States." He grinned, twitchily. "Nobody was able to cross over in New England because, well, it's probably under an ice sheet-the weather there's definitely a lot colder than in any of the other time lines we know about."

Hang on, time lines-Miriam
held up a hand. "What were you doing?"

"The duke tasked me with setting up a systematic exploration program," Huw explained. "So I started by taking the second known knotwork design and seeing where it'd take you if you used it in world two, in the USA, which the Hidden Family had no access to. The initial tests in Massachusetts and New York failed, so I guessed there might be a really large obstacle in the way. There's some kind of exclusion effect… but anyway, we found a new world."

Miriam narrowly resisted the urge to grab him and start yelling questions. "Go on."

"World four is cold, as in, about ten degrees celsius below datum for the other worlds we've found. That's ice age cold. We didn't have time to do much exploring, but what we found-there were people there, once, but we didn't see any signs of current habitation. High tech,
very
high tech-perfect dentistry, gantries made out of titanium, and other stuff. We're still trying to figure out the other stuff, but it's a whole different ball game. The building we found looked like it had been struck from above by some kind of directed energy weapon-"

"Some kind of-"Miriam stopped. On the opposite side of the clearing, the young blond woman who'd come with Huw was kneeling, her weapon trained on something invisible through the trees.

Brill was already moving. "Get ready to go."

"But it's too early," Miriam started.