The Trade of Queens (40 page)

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

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

There were a lot of flashes.

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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