The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2) (83 page)

‘But granite – ’

‘It’s not the only problem we’ve got,’ Rand continued, in tones that suggested he was missing the classroom: ‘Would you believe, bananas? Lots of potassium in
bananas. You put a bunch of bananas next to a gamma source and a scattering spectrometer on the other side and they can fool you into thinking you’re staring at a shipping container full of
yellowcake. So we’ve got to go carefully.’ Wang and a couple of assistants were hauling her bulky boxful of sensors over the platform again, peering at the instrument panel on top with
the aid of a head-mounted flashlight.

‘It’s here!’ she called, pointing straight down. ‘Whatever it is,’ she added conversationally, ‘but it sure looks like a pit to me. Lots of HEU in there.
Could have come right out of one of our own storage facilities, it’s so sharp.’

‘Nice work.’ Rand eased himself down at the side of the platform and lowered himself to the track bed. He looked up at Herz. ‘Want to come and see for yourself? Hey, Jack, get
yourself over here!’

Judith jumped down to the track bed beside him. Her hands felt clammy.
Is this it?
she asked herself. The sense of momentous events, of living through history, ran damp fingertips up
and down her spine. ‘Watch out,’ she warned.

‘No problem, ma’am.’ Rand’s associate, Jack, had an indefinite air about him that made her think, Marine Corps: but not the dumb stereotype kind. ‘Let’s start
by looking for lights.’

Another half hour crept by as Jack – and another three specialists, experts in bomb disposal and booby traps – checked from a distance to ensure there were no surprises. ‘There
are no wires, sir,’ Jack finally reported to Dr. Rand. ‘No IR beams either, far as I can tell. Just a large trunk over against the wall, right where Mary said.’

The hair on Judith’s neck rose.
It’s real,
she admitted to herself. ‘Okay, let’s take a closer look,’ said Rand. And without further ado, he dropped down
onto hands and knees and shuffled under the platform. Herz blinked for a moment, then followed his example.
At least I won’t have to worry about the dry-cleaning bill if Jack’s
wrong,
part of her mind whispered.

Jack had set up a couple of lanterns around the trunk. Close up, down between the pillars supporting the platform, it didn’t look like much. But Rand seemed entranced. ‘That’s
our puppy all right!’ He sounded as enthusiastic as a plane spotter who’d managed to photograph the latest black silhouette out at Groom Lake.

‘What exactly is it?’ Herz asked.

‘Looks like an FADM to me. An enhanced storage version of the old SSADM, based on the W54 pit. Don’t know what it’s doing here, but someone is going to catch it in the neck
over this. See that combination lock there?’ He pointed. ‘It’s closed. And, wait . . .’ He fell silent for a few seconds. ‘Got it. Did you see that red flash?
That’s the arming indicator. It blinks once a minute while the device is live. There’s a trembler mechanism and a tamper alarm inside the casing. Try to move it or crack it open and the
detonation master controller will dump the core safety ballast and go to detonate immediately.’ He fell silent again.

‘Does “detonate immediately” mean what I think it means?’ asked Herz.
It’s been here for months, it’s not going to go off right away,
she told
herself, trying to keep a lid on her fear.

‘Yes, it probably does.’ Dr. Rand sounded distracted. ‘Hmm, this is an interesting one. I need to think about it for a while.’

You need to
– Herz wrenched herself back on track. ‘What happens now?’ she asked.

‘Let’s go up top,’ suggested Rand.

‘Okay.’ They scrambled backwards until they reached the track bed, and could stand up. ‘Well?’ she asked.

‘I got its serial number,’ Rand said happily. ‘Now we can crosscheck against the inventory and see where it came from. If it’s on the books, and if we can trust the
books, then we can just requisition the PAL combination and open it up, at which point there’s a big red OFF switch, sort of.’ A shadow crossed his face: ‘Of course, if it’s
a ghost device, like the big lump of instant sunshine you stumbled across in Cambridge, we might be in trouble.’

‘What kind of trouble? Tell me everything. I’ve got to tell the colonel.’

‘Well . . .’ Rand glanced from side to side, ensuring nobody else was within earshot. ‘If it’s just a pony nuke that’s been stolen from our own inventory, then we
can switch it off, no problem.
Then
we get medieval on whoever let it go walkabout. But you remember the big one? That wasn’t in our inventory, although it came off the same
production line. If this is the same, well, I
hope
it isn’t, because that would mean hostiles have penetrated our current warhead production line, and that’s not supposed to be
possible. And we won’t have the permissive action lock keys to deactivate it. So the best we can hope for is a controlled explosion.’

‘A controlled –’ Herz couldn’t help herself: her voice rose to a squeak ‘ –
explosion
?’

‘Please, calm down! It’s not as bad as it sounds. We know the geometry of the device, where the components sit in the casing. These small nukes are actually very delicate – if
the explosive lens array around the pit goes off even a microsecond or two out of sequence, it won’t implode properly. No implosion, no nuclear reaction. So what happens is, we position an
array of high-speed shaped charges around it and blow holes in the implosion assembly. Worst case, we get a fizzle – it squirts out white-hot molten uranium shrapnel from each end, and a
burst of neutrons. But no supercriticality, no mushroom cloud in downtown Boston. We’ve got time to plan how to deal with it, so before we do
that
we pour about a hundred tons of
barium-enriched concrete around it and hollow out a blast pit under the gadget to contain the fragments.’ He grinned. ‘But these bombs don’t grow on trees. I’m betting that
your mysterious extradimensional freaks stole it from our inventory. In which case, all I need to do is make a phone call to the right people, and they give me a number, and –’ he
snapped his fingers ‘– it’s a wrap.’

‘But you forgot one thing,’ Judith said slowly.

‘Oh, yes?’ Rand looked interested.

‘Before you do anything, I want you to dust for fingerprints around the lock,’ she said, barely believing her own words. ‘And you’d better hope we find prints from source
GREENSLEEVES. Because if not . . .’

‘I don’t under – ’

She raised a hand. ‘If these people have stolen one nuke, who’s to say they haven’t stolen others?’ She looked him in the eye and saw the fear beginning to take hold.
‘We might have found Matt’s blackmail weapon. But this isn’t over until we know that there aren’t any others missing.’

*

Rudi hung above the forest with the wind in his teeth, a shit-eating grin plastered across his face (what little of it wasn’t numb with cold) and the engine of the
ultralight sawing along behind his left ear like the world’s largest hornet. The airframe buzzed and shuddered, wires humming, but the vibration was acceptable and everything was holding
together about as well as he’d hoped for. Unlike a larger or more sophisticated airplane, the trike was light enough for one world-walker to shift in a week of spare time, and simple enough
for one aviator to assemble and fly: and now Rudi was reaping his reward for all the headaches, upsets, reprimands, and other cold-sweat moments he’d put into it. ‘On top of the
world!’ he yelled at the tree-tops a thousand feet below him.
‘Yes!’

The sky was as empty as a dead man’s skull; the sun beat down, casting sharp shadows over his right shoulder. Hanging below the triangular wing, with nothing below his feet but a thin
fiberglass shell, Rudi could almost imagine that he was flying in his own body, not dangling from a contraption of aluminum and nylon powered by a jumped-up lawn mower engine. Of course, letting
his imagination get away from him was not a survival-enhancing move up here, a thousand feet above the forests that skirted the foothills of the Appalachians in this world – but he could
indulge his senses for a few seconds between instrument checks and map readings, saving the precious memories for later.

‘Is that the Wergat or the Ostwer?’ he asked himself, seeing the glint of open water off to the northwest. He checked his compass, then glanced at the folded map. One advantage of
using an ultralight: with an airspeed of fifty-five, tops, you didn’t wander off the page too fast. A few minutes later he got it pinned down. ‘It’s the Ostwer all right,’
he told himself, penciling a loose ellipse on the map – his best estimate of his position, accurate to within a couple of miles. ‘Hmm.’ He pushed gently on the control bar,
keeping one eye on the air speed indicator as he began to climb.

The hills and rivers of the western reaches of the Gruinmarkt spread out below Rudi like a map. Over the next half hour he crawled towards the winding tributary river – it felt like a
crawl, even though he was traveling twice as fast as any race-bred steed could gallop – periodically scanning the landscape with his binoculars. Roads hereabout were little more than dirt
tracks, seldom visible from above the trees, but a large body of men left signs of their own.

That’s odd.
He was nearly two thousand feet up, and a couple of miles short of the Ostwer – glancing over his left shoulder at a thin haze of high cloud that looked to be
moving in – when a bright flash on the ground caught his eye. He stared for a moment, then picked up his binoculars.

Out towards the bend in the river – after the merger that produced the Wergat, where the trees thinned out and the buildings and walls and fields of Wergatfurt sprouted – something
flashed. And there was smoke over the town, a thin smudge of dirty brown that darkened the sky, like a latrine dug too close to a river. ‘Hmm.’ Rudi leaned sideways, banking gently to
bring the trike round onto a course towards the smoke, still climbing (there was no sense in overflying trouble at low altitude on one engine), and took a closer look with his binoculars.

He was still several miles out, but he was close enough to recognize trouble when he saw it. The city gates were open, and one guardhouse was on fire – the source of the smoke.

‘Rudi here, Pappa One, do you read?’

The reply took a few seconds to crackle in his earpiece: ‘Pappa One, we read.’

‘Overflying Wergatfurt, got smoke on the ground, repeat, smoke. Guardhouse is on fire. Over.’

‘Pappa One to Rudi, please repeat, over.’

‘Stand by . . .’

Minutes passed, as Rudi checked his position against the river, and buzzed ever closer to the town and the palace three miles beyond it. The smoke was still rising as Rudi closed on the town,
now at three thousand feet, safely out of range of arrows. He looked down, peering through binoculars, at a scene of chaos.

‘Rudi here, Pappa One. Confirm trouble in Wergatfurt, cavalry force, battalion level or stronger. Cannon emplaced in town square, northeast guard tower on fire, tents outside city walls.
Now heading towards Hjalmar Palace, over.’

‘Pappa One, Rudi, please confirm number of troops, over.’

Rudi looked down. A flash caught his eye, then another one.

‘Rudi here, am under fire from Wergatfurt, departing in haste, over.’ His hands were clammy. Even though none of the musketry could possibly reach him, it was unnerving to be so
exposed. He pulled back on the bar to nose gently down, gathering speed: the sooner he checked out the palace and got the hell away from this area, the happier he’d be.

Tracking up the shining length of the river, Rudi headed towards the concentric walls of the castle overlooking the Wergat. The Hjalmar Palace was an enormous complex, sprawling across a
hillside, surrounded on three sides by water. It stood in plain sight, proud of the trees that clothed the land around it. Rudi raised his glasses and stared at the walls. From a mile out, it
looked perfectly normal. Certainly the cannon stationed in Wergatsfurt hadn’t bitten any chunks out of those walls yet.

‘Pappa One, Rudi, update please, over.’

‘Rudi here. Approaching Hjalmar Palace at two five hundred feet. Looks quiet. Over.’

‘Pappa One, Rudi, be advised palace has missed two watch rotations, over. Be alert for – ’

Rudi missed the rest. Down below, sparks were flashing from the gatehouse. Startled, he let go of the binoculars and threw himself to the left, side-slipping away from the tower. A faint
crackling sound reached his ears, audible over the buzz of the engine. ‘Rudi, Pappa One, am under fire from the palace, over.’ He leaned back to the right, feeling a bullet pluck at the
fabric of his wing.
This shouldn’t be happening,
he told himself, disbelieving: the altimeter was still showing two thousand feet.
How are they reaching me?
A horrible
suspicion took hold. ‘Pappa One, Rudi, they’ve got – shit!’

For a moment he glanced down at the shattered casing of the radio, blinking stupidly. Then he leaned forward, trying to squeeze every shuddering mile per hour that was available out of the
air-frame, fuming and swearing at himself for not bringing a spare transceiver.

His unwelcome news – that whoever had taken the Hjalmar Palace had taken its heavy machine guns and knew how to use them – would now be delayed until he returned to Castle
Hjorth.

*

It took them two hours to stagger back up the track to the waypoints blazed on the trees, and another half hour to reach the marked transit point. Walking in near-darkness with
early flakes of snow whirling around them wasn’t Huw’s idea of a happy fun vacation: but his sense of urgency pushed him on, even though he was halfway to exhaustion.
We’ve
got to tell someone about this,
he kept telling himself.
Important
didn’t begin to describe the significance of the door into nowhere.
We might not be the only people who
can world-walk – or even the most effective at it.

Eventually he staggered into the clearing where they’d pitched the tent – now a dark hump against a darker backdrop of trees, lonely and small in the nighttime forest. ‘You
ready?’ he asked Yul.