The Merchants’ War

“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 cross-check 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 an outraged squeal —“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 gadgets 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 simple and light enough for one world-walker to shift in a week of spare time: 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 treetops a thousand feet below him. “Yes!”

The sky was as empty as a dead man’s skull; the sun burned 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