Finally, Olga paused the DVD—recorded off-air by one of the few communications techs Riordan had ordered to stay behind in Cambridge. She looked around the semicircle of faces opposite, taking in their expressions, ranging from blank incomprehension to shock and dismay. "Does anyone have any questions, or can I move on to present our analysis?" she asked. "Strictly questions, no comment at this time."
A hand went up at the back. Olga made eye contact and nodded. It was Sir Ulrich, one of the progressive faction's stalwarts, a medic by training. "Can they do it?" he asked.
"You heard him." Olga's cheek twitched. Dread was a sick sensation in the pit of her stomach. "Let me remind you of WARBUCKS's history; he's a hawk. He was one of the main sponsors of the Project for a New American Century, he's the planner behind the Iraq invasion, and he's an imperialist in the old model. What most of you don't know is that back in the 1980s he was one of our main commercial enabling partners in the Western operation. And he's gone public about our existence. Getting back to your question: He's defined the success of his presidency in terms of his ability to take us down. The Americans will follow their king-emperor unquestioningly—as long as he delivers results. BOY WONDER used Iraq as a rallying cry after 9/11; WARBUCKS has pinned the target on us."
"So you think—" Ulrich paused. "Sorry."
"It's quite all right." Olga gestured at the front rank. "My lord Riordan, I yield the floor."
Riordan walked to the front of the room. "Thank you, Lady yen Thorold," he started. Then he paused, and looked around at his audience. "I'm not going to tell you any comforting lies. We have lost"—he raised a folio and squinted at it—"thirty-nine world-walkers of our own, and sixty-six of the conservative faction. Eleven more are in custody, awaiting a hearing. Most of them we can do naught with but hang as a warning. Remaining to us in the five great families"—he swallowed—"we have a total of four hundred and sixteen who can world-walk regularly, and another hundred and nineteen elderly and infants. Twenty-eight womenfolk who are with child and so must needs be carried. In our offshoots and cadet branches there are perhaps two thousand three hundred relatives, of whom one thousand and seven hundred or thereabouts are married or coming into or of childbearing age. One hundred and forty one of their children are world-walkers."
He stopped, and exchanged the folio for a hip flask for a moment.
"The American army is largely occupied overseas, for which we should be grateful. They have more than six hundred thousand men under arms, and five hundred warships, and with their navy and air forces their military number two warriors for every peasant in the Gruinmarkt. Our account of Baron Hjorth's treachery is that he purloined no less than four but certainly no more than six of their atomic bombs. That leaves them with"—he consulted the folio—"ah,
six thousand
or thereabouts, almost all of which are more powerful than those Oliver Hjorth absconded with." He closed the folio and stared at his audience.
"In strategic terms, the technical term for our predicament is:
fucked.
"The only ray of hope is the possibility that their new king-emperor is bluffing about their ability to visit destruction upon our heads. But our analysis is that there is no way that he could afford to threaten us politically unless he has the capability to follow through, so the Anglischprache probably
do
have a world-walking ability. It might be a matter of captured cousins, but I doubt it. There's the destruction of the Hjalmar Palace to consider, and they had Special Forces soldiers scouting around Niejwein as long ago as the betrothal feast between Prince Creon and Her Majesty. We know therefore that they had the ability to maintain a small scouting force over here four months ago. That implies they could not, back then, send a major expeditionary force across at that time. What they can do now—"
A hand went up in the front row. Riordan stopped. "Your grace," he said, with labored and pointed patience.
"Believe them," Patricia Thorold-Hjorth called tiredly from her wheelchair. She clasped her hands on top of her walking stick and frowned, her face still haggard. The medic's intervention had kept her breathing, but the poisoning had taken its toll. "During the late civil war, I was—with the express consent of my late brother—negotiating with the current president. His agent broke off communications with a sudden ultimatum: our immediate surrender in return for our lives. He spoke of a mechanical contrivance for world-walking, for moving vehicles. One of my daughter's proteges was tasked by my brother with investigating the nature and limitations of world-walking, and has made a number of discoveries; in particular, some wheeled contrivances can—under some circumstances—be carried along." A muttering spread through her audience. "And to this date, four more worlds have been discovered, and two new knots." The muttering grew louder.
"Silence!" shouted Riordan. "Damn you, I will hear one speaker at a time!" He looked at the dowager. "You have more?"
"Not much." She looked pensive. "Wheelbarrows—it was suppressed by the lords of the post, I presume, during the civil war. Too much risk of a few young things going over the wall, if they realized how few bodies it would take to start a rival operation; we would have faced dissolution within months. But there is no obvious size limit; the limit was imposed by the exclusion problem, the risk of wheels intersecting with matter in the other world. Given a suitably prepared staging area, machined to high precision, who knows what they could send. Tanks? Helicopters? And we are on their doorstep. These people sent a hundred thousand soldiers halfway around the world. What can they send an hour's drive down the road?"
"I don't think we need worry about that just yet," Riordan declared, trying to regain control of the briefing. "But." He paused a moment, looking around the anxious faces before him. "At a minimum, we face teams of special forces and possibly backpack atomic bombs, like the ones that have already been used. At worst, if they have truly worked out how to travel between worlds, we may see a full-scale invasion. I think the latter is a very real threat, and we have the example of their recent adventure in the distant land of Iraq to learn from. If we sit and wait for them to come to us, we will be defeated—they outnumber all the Eastern kingdoms, not just the Gruinmarkt, by thirty bodies to one, and look what they did to Iraq. This is not a matter for chivalrous denial; it is a fight
we cannot win."
He gestured in the direction of Baron Horst of Lorsburg, one of the few conservatives to have been conclusively proven to have been on the outside of the coup attempt—a tiresomely
business-minded fellow, fussy and narrowly legalistic. "Sir, I believe you wish to express an opinion?"
Lorsburg removed his bifocals and nervously rubbed them on his shirt sleeve. "You appear to be saying that Clan Security can't protect us. Is that right?"
"Clan Security can't take on the United States government, no, not if they develop world-walking machines." Riordan nodded patiently. "Do you have something more to say?"
Lorsburg hunkered down in his seat. "If you can't save us, what good
are
you?" he asked querulously.
"There's a difference between saying we can't win a direct fight, and not being able to save you. We probably
can
save the Clan—but not if we sit and wait for the Anglischprache to come calling. What we can't save are the fixed assets: our estates and vassals. Anything we can't carry. We are descended from migrant tinkers and traders, and I am afraid that we will have to become such again, at least for a while. Those of you who think the American army will not come here are welcome to go back to your palaces and great houses and pretend we can continue to do business as usual. You might be right—in which case, the rest of us will rejoin you in due course. But for the time being, I submit that our best hope lies elsewhere.