Revolution Business (7 page)

"Come in," she called, hastily buttoning up.

The door opened and Brilliana looked in. "Milady?"

"I'm nearly done here." Miriam glanced around. "Where did I put my shoes?" Handmade leather ankle-boots from New Britain wouldn't look too out of place, and shoes were the one thing Brill hadn't been able to buy for her. "Eh." They were hiding under the dressing table.

"I think we need to talk," Brilliana observed.

"Yes." Miriam bent over and began working on her left foot. "What exactly has been going on since the, the banquet?" Her brain began to catch up with her earlier thoughts: "My mother-is she alright? What about the duke? My grandmother-"

"It's a mess," Brill said wryly. She perched on the stool by the table. "We're not sure exactly how long Egon had been planning it for, but he used Henryk's scheme"-the plan to forcibly marry Miriam into the Gruinmarkt's royal dynasty-"as leverage to get a bunch of the backwood peers behind him. He's declared the entire Clan outlaw and placed a price on our heads, and is promising half our estates to those nobles who back him. It's turned into a messy civil war and Angbard's had his hands tied trying to defend individual holdings instead of going after the pretender's army. While all that was going on, we've had some disturbing-well, a couple of couriers have gone missing over the past six months. Missing with no explanation, no hint of trouble. Not only did the bastard Matthias rat us out to the Drug Enforcement Agency, now there's some sort of secret government cross-agency committee trying to hunt us down. Everyone on this side has had to activate their emergency cover plans. And the really bad news is that this agency managed to sneak a couple of agents into the Gruinmarkt, which means it's serious."

"Yes, I know." Miriam sat up and took a deep breath. "I told you about meeting Mike, didn't I?" She'd once had a thing going with Mike Fleming. Odd, it seemed an awfully long time ago. "He got me out of the palace alive." She shrugged. "He was unexpectedly honest." Another deep breath. "Told me that if I wanted to join the federal witness protection program…"

The words hung in the air for a few seconds. Finally, Brilliana nodded. "We know. And it will count for much when it comes to the Council's attention, I think," she said slowly. A longer pause. "Olga and your mother have been talking to him. Trying to negotiate a, a temporary cease-fire. But things are really bad. They believe we've stolen a nuclear weapon, and they want it back."

"Jesus." Miriam shook her head. "Why would they think
that?"
She looked at Brill, aghast. "Hang on. They
believe
the Clan has stolen a
nuke?
Why? Why would they believe that? Has Angbard- He'd have to be mad! Tell me he hasn't?"

Brill looked uncomfortable.
"Angbard
hasn't stolen a nuke. But they leave them in undoppelgangered bunkers; is that not a temptation?"

"Tell me." Miriam shoved her hair back from her face. "Has someone in the Clan actually gone and stolen a nuclear weapon? How? I mean, I thought they were too big to carry-"

"Not one," Brill said, then bit her lip. "Six, we think. Maybe more. They're backpack devices, part of the inactive inventory-the CIA asked for them, originally."

Aghast, Miriam stared at her. "Is that why they're all over us?"

Brill nodded.

"Then who-"

"Oliver, Earl Hjorth, is the key-holder designated by the Clan committee."

"Jesus, why
him?"
The thought of what might happen if the feds discovered the Clan had haunted Miriam ever since she'd learned about her own ancestry; what they might do if they thought the extradimensional narcoterrorists had nuclear weapons didn't bear thinking about. And Baron Oliver was about the worst person she could think of to be holding them-an unregenerate backwoodsman and dyed-in-the-wool conservative faction member. "And they can get their own people into the Gruinmarkt, can't they."

"There's more bad news," Brill added after a moment.

"Why don't you come downstairs? Then Huw can deliver it himself."

Elena sprawled across the sofa in the living room, pulling an oiled cleaning cloth through the breech of her P90. "Find another channel, minion," she drawled without looking up. "I can't
stand Friends."

"As you wish, my princess." Yul, hulking and fair-haired as any Viking warrior, carefully squeezed the remote. Advertisements and sitcoms strobed across the eviscerated guts of the machine pistol on the coffee table until he arrived at MTV. "Ah, that is better." Marilyn Manson strutted and howled through the last tour on earth; Elena pulled a face. "Manly music for martial-" an oily rag landed on his head.

"Children."

Elena glanced round, pulled a face.
"He
started it!"

"Sure." Huw stood in the doorway, trying not to smile. "Did you get the Internet working?"

"Something's wrong with it," Yul said apologetically.

"Ah, well." Huw shrugged and walked over to the armchair, where a laptop trailed bits of many-colored spaghetti towards the wall. "I'll sort it out. Got to report in." Expecting Yul or Elena to do anything technical had been a forlorn hope. Am
I the only competent person around here?
he wondered. Dumb question: While he'd been studying in schools and colleges in the United States under a false identity, Yul had been bringing joy to their backwoods father's heart, riding and hunting and being a traditional son on their country estate in the western marches of the Gruinmarkt; and Elena had been under the stifling constraints of a noble daughter, although she'd kicked up enough of a fuss that her parents had allowed her to escape into Clan Security, leaving them with one less dowry to worry about. Which left Huw as the guy who knew one end of an Internet router and a secure voice-over IP connection from another, and Yul and Elena as the armed muscle to watch over him when they weren't engaging in risky post-adolescent high-jinks-risky because the older generation weren't many years past fighting blood feuds over that sort of thing.

It took him a few minutes, some scrabbling with cables, and a reboot to get everything working properly, but Huw was setting up the encrypted link to the ClanSec e-mail hub and looking forward to checking in when he heard footsteps.

"Yes?" He glanced round. It was Miriam. She looked-not tired, exactly, but careworn. And something else.

"Brill tells me we need to talk," she said, then glanced across the room at the sofa.

"She said-"Huw's larynx froze for a few seconds as he stared at her. The first time he'd met her, gowned and bejeweled at a royal reception, she'd been turned out in the very mode of Gruinmarkt nobility; then earlier, when Lady Brilliana had so rudely yanked him (and Yul, and Elena) away from his survey, she'd been wearing an outlandish getup. Now she looked-at
ease,
he
decided. This is her. She isn't acting a part. How
interesting. "Ah. Well, she did, did she?"

"She said." Miriam leaned on the back of his chair. "You've been exploring. Whatever that means." She sounded bored, but there was a glint in her eye.

"Uh, yeah." Huw leaned forward and shut the laptop's lid. "Why don't we go fix something to drink?" He glanced sidelong at Yul and Elena, who were sitting on the sofa, bickering amiably over the gun, their heads leaning together. "Somewhere quieter." The TV howled mournfully, recycling the sound track of a guitar in torment.

The kitchen was bland, basic, and undersupplied-they'd traveled light and hadn't had time to buy much more than a bunch of frozen pizzas-but there was coffee, and a carton of half-and-half, and a coffee maker. Huw busied himself filling it while Miriam searched the cupboards for mugs. "How did you go about it?" she asked, finally.

Huw took a deep breath. "Systematically. We haven't started de-convoluting the knotwork"-the two worlds to which the Clan's members could walk were distinguished by the use of a different knot that the world-walker had to concentrate on-"but I'm pretty sure we'll start finding others once we do. The fourth world we found-it's accessed from this one, if you use the Lee's knot. We couldn't get through to it in New England, but it worked down south; I think it may be in the middle of an ice age."

"Did you find anyone? People, I mean?"

"Yes." Huw paused as the coffee maker coughed and grumbled to itself. "Their bones. A big dome, made out of something like, like a very odd kind of concrete. Residual radioactivity. A skull with perfect dentistry, bits of damaged metalwork, fire escapes or gantries or something, that I'll swear are made out of titanium. It's clearly been there decades or centuries. And then there's the door."

"Door?"

"Yul hit it with an axe. Nearly killed us-there was hard vacuum on the other side."

"Whoops." Miriam pulled out a stool and sat down at the breakfast bar. "Too fast.
Vacuum?
You think you found a
door
onto another world?"

"We didn't stick around to make sure," Huw said drily. "But it didn't stop sucking after a couple of minutes. Last time we saw the dome, it was surrounded by fog."

"Oh my." Her shoulders were shaking. "God."

Huw watched her, not unsympathetically. He'd had more than a day to get used to the idea: If Lady Brilliana was right-and his own judgement was right-and Miriam was fit to lead them…

"That changes a lot of things," she said, looking straight at him. "If it
is
a door to another world… how do you think it works?"

Huw shrugged again. "We are cursed by our total ignorance of our family talent's origins," he pointed out. "But what we seem to have is a trait that can be externally controlled-that's what the knot's for-and I figure if it turns out that other knots take us to other worlds, then it's no huge leap to conclude that it was engineered for a purpose. I don't think anyone's looked inside us-I figure the mechanism, if there is one, has got to be something intracellular-but the fact that it's controllable, that we don't world-walk at random when we look at a maze or a fractal generator on a PC, screams design. This door? There's more stuff in that dome, lots more, and it looks like wreckage left behind by a civilization more advanced than this one." He pointed at the coffee maker. "Think what a peasant back home would make of that? You know, and I know, what it is and how it works, because we went to school and college in this country." He pulled the jug out and poured two mugs of coffee. "Electricity. But to a peasant…"

"Magic." The word hung in the air as Miriam poured milk into both mugs.

"So." He chose his words carefully. "What do you think it means?"

"Oh boy." Miriam stared at her coffee mug, then blew on it and took a first sip. "Where do you want me to start? If nothing else, it makes all the Clan's defensive structures obsolete overnight. One extra universe is useful, two is embarrassing, three extra universes implies… more. Which means, assuming there are more, that doppelgangered houses stop being effectively defended." Doppelgangering-the practice of building defenses in the other worlds, physically colocated with the space occupied by the
defended
structure, in order to stop hostile world-walkers gaining access-was a key element in all the Clan families' buildings. But you could build an earth berm or a safe house in one parallel universe-how could you hope to do it if there were millions? "And then… well. I tried telling the Council their business model was broken, but I didn't realize
how
broken it was."

"Really?" Huw leaned forward.

"Really." She put her mug down. "The-hell, I'm doing it again. Distancing. We got rich in the Gruinmarkt by exploiting superior technology-being able to move messages around fast, make markets, that kind of thing. And we got rich in
this
world"-she glanced at the window, which opened out onto an unkempt yard-"by smuggling. But what they were
really
doing was exploiting a development imbalance. Making money through a monopoly on superior technology-okay, call it a family talent, and it may be something you can selectively breed for, but if you're right and it's a technology, then
it's not a monopoly anymore."

"Uh." Huw took a mouthful of coffee. "What's your reasoning?"

"Well. You're the one who just told me you thought our ability was artificial? And we've established that someone else-let's take your door into a vacuum realm as a given-has a way of moving stuff between time lines-yes, I'm going to take the idea that we're in a bunch of parallel universes that branch off each other as a given. New Britain really rubs your nose in it-and I think if they can just
open a door
then we have to admit that what the Clan can do? The postal corvée? Is a joke."

Miriam closed her eyes for a moment. "The Council are
so
not going to want to hear this. And it's not the worst of it."

"There's more?" Huw stared at her, fascinated.
Have you figured out the other thing?…

"Okay, let's speculate wildly. There are other people out there who can travel between parallel worlds. They're better at it than us, and they know what they're doing. That's really bad, right there, but not necessarily fatal. However… we've been pointedly ignoring, all along, the fact that what we do isn't magical. It's not unique. It's like, after 1945, the government pretended for a few years that making nuclear weapons was some kind of big secret. Then the Russians got the bomb, and the Brits, and the Chinese, and before you can blink we're worrying about the North Koreans, or the Iranians. What the Clan Council needs to worry about is the US government-who they've spent the past few decades systematically getting mad at them-and who now know we exist. What do
you
think?"

"But we don't know how the world-walking mechanism works. It's got to take them time-"

Miriam took another mouthful of coffee. "They've had
seven or eight months,
Huw. That's how long it's been since Matthias went over the wall. And there's"-she paused, as if considering her words-"stuff that's happened, stuff that will turn hunting us down into a screaming crash priority, higher than al Qaida, higher than the Iraq occupation. They've got to be throwing money at…" She trailed off.