"Three
worlds?" Miriam raised an eyebrow.
"Yes!" Elena bounced up and down on the linen press she'd taken for a seat. She, too, was wearing native dress from the Clan's home world; she and Huw would have faded right into the background at any Renaissance Faire, if not for the machine pistol poking from her shoulder bag. "Three! It was very exciting! One of them was so warm Yul nearly fainted before he could get his oxygen mask off! The others—"
Huw cleared
his
throat, pointedly. "If I may?
That
one was subtropical, humid. Lots of cycads and ferns, very damp. We didn't see any people, or any animal life for that matter—but insects. Big dragonflies,
that
big." He held his hands a foot apart. "I was pretty light-headed by the time we left. I want to measure the atmospheric gas mix—think it's way on the high side of normal, oxygen-wise. Like the carboniferous era never ended, or came back, or something. And then there was another cold pine-forest world. Again, no life, no radio transmissions, no sign of people." He shook his head.
"The third?" Miriam pushed herself up against the pillows, fascinated.
"We nearly died," Elena said very quietly.
"You nearly—" Miriam stopped. "Huw, I thought you were taking precautions? Pressure suits, oxygen, guns?"
"We were.
That
one's inhabited—but not by anything alive." He clammed up. "Miriam. Uh. Helge. My lady. What's going on? Why are we here?"
Miriam blinked. "Inhabited? By what?"
"Robots, maybe. Or very fast minerals. Something surprised Yul so he shot it, and it ate his shotgun. After that, we didn't stick around. Why are we here? The major said you were in charge of, of something important—"
"I need to get out of bed." Miriam winced. "This wasn't part of the plan. Huw, we're here to make contact with the government. Official contact, and that means I need to be in there doing it."
"Official
contact?" His eyes widened.
"Yes." She took a deep breath. "We're finished in the United States. The Clan, I mean. Those mindless thugs in the postal arm, Baron Hjorth, my grandmother—they've completely wrecked any hope of us
ever
going back, much less normalizing relations. The US will follow us, to the ends of the universe. Ends of
every
universe, perhaps. Certainly they had agents in the Gruinmarkt . . . Riordan's not stupid, he saw this coming. That's what we're doing here. We're to open negotiations with the Empire of New Britain and sue for asylum. They've got problems too, stuff we can help with—the French, that is, the Bourbon monarchy in St. Petersburg. We've got access to science and technology that's half a century ahead of anything they've got in the laboratory here, much less widely deployed. That gives us a bargaining tool, much better than a suitcase full of heroin." She chuckled softly. It made her ribs hurt. "You know all the Roswell, Area 51, alien jokes? Crashed flying saucers, secret government labs full of alien technology? We're going to be their aliens. Except there's a slight problem."
"A problem." Huw's expression was a sight. "I can see several potential problems with that idea. What kind of problem do you find worrying enough to single out?"
"We're not the only people who've had a coup d'etat." Miriam sat up, bracing her arms against the headboard of the bed. "The king's under arrest, the country is in a state of crisis, and the contacts I'd made are high up in the new government. Which may sound like a great opportunity to you, but I'm not sure I like what they're doing with it. And before we can talk to them we need to square things with the cousins."
"The cousins—"
"Yes. Or they'll assume we're breaking the truce. Tell me, Huw—have you ever met James Lee?"
The huge, wooden radio in the parlor of the safe house near Framingham was tuned permanently to Voice of England, hissing and warbling the stentorian voice of Freedom Party–approved news as and when the atmospheric conditions permitted. The morning of the day after his arrival, Huw opened it up and marveled at the bulky tubes and rat's nest of wires within. It was a basic amplitude-modulated set, the main tuning capacitor fixed firmly in position by a loop of wire sealed with a royal crest in solder: comically easy to subvert,
if
the amateur engineer had been partial to five years in a labor camp. Huw shook his head, then added a crate of pocket-sized Sony world-band receivers to his next supply run shopping list, along with a gross of nicad batteries and some solar-powered chargers.
"How do you use it?" asked Brilliana, looking at it dubiously.
"You plug it back in"—Huw demonstrated, clipping the battery wire to the bulky lead-acid cell that filled much of the radio's plinth—"and turn it on like so." Hissing static filled the room.
She frowned. "It sounds horrible. How do you tune it?"
"You don't. I mean, we can adjust it slightly, within a permitted frequency range." Huw straightened up. "But the state owns the airwaves." Someone was talking in portentious tones through the wrong end of a trombone. "Welcome to the pre-transistor era, when radio engineers needed muscles."
"What use is a radio you can't—"
Miriam stopped in the doorway. "Wait!" She held up a hand, frowning. She was looking better this morning, Huw decided: There was color in her cheeks and she'd bothered to get dressed in native drag, something like an Indian shalwar suit, only with frightening amounts of embroidery. "Can you turn that up?"
"I guess." Huw tweaked the fine-tuning pot, then cranked up the volume.
"I know that voice!" Miriam stared at the radio, her eyes wide. "It's Erasmus!"
"Really?" Brill nodded, then cocked her head. "I suppose it might be."
"—Our enemies. Only through unceasing vigilance can we insure our safety in the face of the brutal attacks of the aristocratic gang and their lickspittle toadies. But be of good heart: They are a minority, and they swim against the current of history. The slave owners and gangmasters and mercantilists cannot bully us if we stand firm against them. The party is the backbone of the people, and we shall bear the full weight of the struggle against totalitarian monarchism on your behalf—"
"Yes, I think you're right," Brilliana said thoughtfully. "He's wordy enough. . . ."
"Jesus." Miriam swayed slightly. "It's too early for this. Is there any coffee?"
"In the kitchen, I think." Brill raised an eyebrow at Huw. "Enough with the radio," she said. Huw could take a hint: He switched it off, and waited for the glowing tubes to fade to gray before he followed them towards the waiting pot.
Miriam was sitting on one of the two chairs, her hands clutching an earthenware mug of black coffee. The kettle still steamed atop the coal-fired cast-iron cooking range. "He's on the
radio,"
she said, as if she didn't quite believe it. "Voice of England. That's the official news channel, isn't it? He must have made it to California and come back. This will make everything so much simpler." Her hands were shaking slightly. "But it also means we need to talk to the cousins now, not later."
"It's too dangerous." Brill looked mulish. "Travel, I mean! There are roving gangs, and we don't have a car, or—"
"They don't use cars here," Miriam pointed out. "At least not the way they do in our—my—America. There are trains. We're about three miles outside city limits and there's a railway station. You can catch a train to, to—where are the Lees? Do we have an address for them in Boston? If the service is running right now, and if they aren't demanding travel papers. But there's a small-scale civil war going on. They don't—neither side—have the resources to lock down travel, except across contested borders. We're on the east coast city belt here, the paper says it's all Freedom Party territory—"