with decals reading HISTORY FAIRE TOURING COMPANY. The passengers, mostly male but with some women among them, wore surcoats over chain mail, and the luggage racks overhead were all but rattling with swords and scabbards: the air conditioners wheezed as they fought a losing battle with the summer heat. They looked like nothing so much as the away team for the Knights of the Round Table, on their way to a joust.
The atmosphere in the coach was tense, and some of the passengers were dealing with it by focusing on irrelevancies. “Why do we have to wear all this crap?” complained Martyn, running his thumb round the neckline of his surcoat. “It’s about as authentic as a jet fighter at the battle of Gettysburg.”
“You’ll grin and bear it,” grunted Helmut. “It’s cover, is what it is. You can swap it for camo when we link up with the wardrobe department. And it’ll do in a hurry, if it comes to it…”
“Consider yourself lucky,” Irma muttered darkly. “Ever tried to fight in a bodice?”
Martyn blew a raspberry. “Are we there yet?”
Helmut checked the display on his GPS unit. “Fifteen miles. Hurry up and wait.” Someone down the aisle groaned theatrically. Helmut turned, his expression savage: “Shut the fuck up, Sven! When I want your opinion I’ll ask for it.”
The medieval knight at the wheel drove on, his shoulders slightly hunched, his face red and sweating. The lance members wore full plate over their machine-woven chain vests and Camelbak hydration systems—it was much lighter than it looked, but it was hellishly hot in the sunlight streaming through the coach windows. Heat prostration, Helmut reminded himself, was the reason heavy armor had gone out of fashion in this world—that, and its declining utility against massed gunfire. “Hydration time, guys, everyone check your buddies. Top off now. Victor, make with the water cart.”
A police cruiser pulled out to overtake the coach and Helmut tensed, in spite of himself. Thirty assorted knights and maids on their way to a joust and a medieval faire shouldn’t set the traffic cop’s alarm bells ringing the way that thirty soldiers in American-style body armor would, but there was a limit to how much inspection their cover could handle. If the police officer pulled them over to search the baggage compartment he’d be signing his own death warrant: Helmut and his platoon of Clan Security soldiers were sitting on top of enough firepower to reenact a much more modern conflict.
“Keep going.” The police car swept past and Helmut sent Martyn a fishy stare. “Mine’s a Diet Pepsi,” Martyn said, oblivious. Helmut shook his head and settled back to wait.
Some time later, the driver braked and swung the coach into a wide turn. “Coming up on the destination,” he remarked loudly.
Helmut sat up and leaned forward. “The others?”
“Braun is right behind me. Can’t see Stefan but I’d be surprised if—”
Helmut’s phone rang. Gritting his teeth, Helmut answered it. “Yes?”
“We see you. Just to say, the park’s clear and we’re keeping the bystanders out of things.”
“Bystanders?”
The voice at the other end of the connection was laconic: “You throw a Renaissance Faire, you get spectators. Ysolde’s telling them it’s a closed rehearsal and they should come back tomorrow.”
Helmut buried his fingertips in his beard and scratched his chin. “Good call. What about the—” he checked his little black book “—ticket seats?”
“They’re going up. A couple of problems with the GPS but we should be ready for the curtain-raiser in about an hour.”
Helmut glanced at his book again to confirm that
“Call me if there’s a change in status before we arrive,” Helmut ordered, then ended the call. “Showtime,” he added, for the benefit of the audience seated behind him.
“It’s not over until the fat lady sings,” Martyn snarked in Irma’s direction: she glared at him, then drew her dagger and began to ostentatiously clean her already-spotless nails.
The coach turned through a wide gateway flanked by signs advertising the faire, bumped across loose gravel and ruts in the ground, then came to a halt in a packed-earth car park at one end of a small open field. A couple of big top circus tents dominated it, and a group of men with a truck and a stack of scaffolding were busy erecting a raised seating area. To an untrained eye it might easily be mistaken for a public open-air event, close by Concord: that was the whole idea. Real SCA members or habitual RenFaire goers weren’t that common, and those that might notice this event would probably write it off as some kind of commercial rip-off, aimed at the paying public. Meanwhile, the general reaction of that public to a bunch of people in inaccurate historical costume was more likely to be one of amusement than fear. Which was exactly what Riordan had proposed and Angbard had accepted.
In fact, the strip mall on the far side of the open space was owned by a shell company that answered to a Clan council director—because it was doppelgangered, located on the identical spot occupied by a Clan property in the other world. And the supposed historical faire was one of several ClanSec contingency plans designed to cover the rapid deployment of military units up to battalion size into the Gruinmarkt.
“Let’s move those kit bags out,” Helmut barked over his shoulder as the driver scrambled to open the baggage doors on the side of the coach. “I’ll have the guts of any man who opens his kit before he gets it inside the assembly tent.” His troopers scrambled to drag their heavy sports bags towards the nearer big top: he’d checked that they’d been properly packed, and while any hypothetical witnesses would see plenty of swords and “historical shit” as Erik called it, they wouldn’t get even a hint of the SAWs and M16s that were the real point of this masquerade—much less the M47 Dragon that Stefan’s fire support platoon were bringing to the party.
The setup in the tent would have surprised anyone expecting a show. Half a dozen men and women—officers in Clan security, comptrollers of the postal service, and a willowy blonde in a business suit who Helmut was certain was one of the duke’s harem of assassin-princesses—were gathered around a table covered with detailed floor plans: three more, armed with theodolites, laser range finders, and an elaborate GPS unit were carefully planting markers around the bare earth floor. At the far side, a work crew was unloading aluminum scaffolding and planks from the back of a truck, while another gang was frantically bolting them together at locations indicated by the survey team. Helmut left his soldiers scrambling to pull camouflage surcoats and helmets on over their armor, and headed straight for the group at the table, halting two meters short of it.
The duke glanced up from the map. As usual, he was impeccably tailored, dressed for the boardroom: a sixty-something executive, perhaps, or a mid-level politician. But there was a feral anger burning in his eyes that was normally kept carefully banked: Helmut suppressed a shudder. “Third platoon is dismounting and will be ready to go in the next ten minutes,” he said as calmly as he could.
The duke stared at him for a moment. “Good enough,” he rasped, then glanced sideways at his neighbor, whom Helmut recognized—with a surprised double-take—as Earl Oliver Hjorth, an unregenerate supporter of the backwoods conservative cabal and the last man he’d have expected to see in the duke’s confidences. “I told you so.”
The earl nodded, looking thoughtful.
“Is there any word from Earl Riordan?” The duke turned his attention towards a plump fellow at the far side of the table.
“Last contact was fifty-two minutes ago, sir,” he said, without even bothering to check the laptop in front of him. “Coming up in eight. I can expedite that if you want…”
“Not necessary.” The duke shook his head, then looked back at Helmut. “Tell me what you know.”
Helmut shrugged. Despite the full suit of armor, the gesture was virtually silent—there was neoprene in all the right places, another of the little improvements ClanSec had made to their equipment over the years. World- walkers were valuable enough to be worth the cost of custom-fitted armor, and they hadn’t been idle in applying new ideas and materials to the classic patterns. “Stands to reason, he’s hit the Hjalmar Palace, or you wouldn’t have called us out. Is there any word from Wergatsfurt or Ostgat?”
The duke inclined his head. “Wergatsfurt is taken. Ostgat hasn’t heard a whisper, as of—” He snapped his fingers.
“Thirty-seven minutes ago,” said the ice blonde. She sounded almost bored.
