The guy from the DOE, Bob, looked up. “What am I doing here?” he rumbled. “Is NIRT a stakeholder?”
Smith looked straight at him. “Yes,” he said softly. “The Nuclear Incident Response Teams are a stakeholder.”
There was a hissing intake of breath: Mike glanced round in time to see Judith Herz look shocked.
“We have reason to believe that fissionable materials are involved.”
FERTILE DISCUSSIONS
The Countess Helge and her attendants traveled in convoy with other residents of Thorold Palace that evening, to the Östhalle at the east end of the royal run that formed the artery linking the great houses at the center of Niejwein. Niejwein was the royal capital of the kingdom of Gruinmarkt, which occupied most of the territory of Massachusetts and chunks of New Jersey and New York, over here. As near as Miriam had been able to work out, the first Norse settlements on the eastern seaboard had died out in the eleventh or twelfth centuries, but their replacements—painstakingly carved out by the landless sons of the northern European nobility around the start of the sixteenth century—had flourished, albeit far less so than in her own world. They had no skyscrapers, spacecraft, or steam engines; no United States of America, no Declaration of Independence, no church or Reformation. Rome had fallen on schedule but the dark ages had been darker than in her world. With no Christianity, no Judaism, no Islam, and with no centers of scholarship to preserve the classics, the climb back up had been correspondingly more painful and protracted.
This was the world the Clan came from, descended from an itinerant tinker who had by accident discovered the ability to walk between worlds—to her own New England, land of dour puritan settlers, to the north of the iron triangle of the sugar and slave trade. He was lucky not to be hanged as a witch, Helge thought morosely as she stared out of her carriage window, shielding her face behind a lacquered fan as the contraption jolted along the cobblestone street. Or institutionalized, like a Kaspar Hauser. Strange things happened to disoriented adults who appeared as if out of thin air, speaking no known language, bewildered and lost. It had nearly happened to Miriam, the first time she accidentally world-walked. But at least now I understand what I’m doing, she thought.
World-walking was a recessive gene–linked trait, one whose carriers far outnumbered those who had the ability. To have the ability in full both parents must at least be carriers: the three-generation long braids knotted the Clan’s six inner families together, keeping the bloodlines strong, while the outer families occasionally threw up a cluster of world-walking siblings. In the past hundred and fifty years—since the world Helge had grown up in as Miriam had industrialized—the Clan had used their ability to claw their way up from poor merchants to the second seat of power in the kingdom. The ability to send messages from one side of the continent to another within a day gave their traders a decisive edge, as did the weapons and luxury goods they were able to import from America.
The maids squeezed into the bench seat opposite Helge giggled as one wheel clattered off a pothole. She glanced at them irritably from behind her fan, unsure what the joke was, her hochsprache inadequate to follow the conversation. The carriage stank of leather and a faint aroma of stale sweat beneath the cloying toilet waters of the ladies. Helge used no such scents (it was Miriam’s habit to bathe daily and wear as little makeup as possible), but Kara was sometimes overenthusiastic, the young Lady Souterne who traveled with them this evening seemed to think that smelling like a brothel would guarantee her a supply of suitors, and as for the last Clan notables to borrow this coach from the livery stable attached to the palace . . .
The four horses harnessed to the coach—not to mention the outriders and the carriages in front—kicked up a fine brown dust, dried out by the hot summer afternoon. It billowed so high that the occupants were forced to keep the windows of the carriage closed. They were thick slabs of rippled green glass, expensive as silver salvers but useful only insofar as they let beams of dusty evening sunlight into the oppressively hot interior. Helge could barely make out the buildings opposite behind their high stone walls, the shacks and lean-tos of the porters and costermongers and pamphleteers thronging the boulevard in front of them.
With a shout from the coachmen up top, the carriage turned off the boulevard and entered the drive up to the front of the Östhalle, passing cottages occupied by royal pensioners, galleries and temporary marquees for holding exhibitions of paintings and tapestries, the wooden fence of a bear pit, and the stone-built walls around the barracks of the Royal Life Guards. People thronged all around, the servants and soldiers and guards and bond-slaves of the noble visitors mingling with the royal household in residence and with hawkers and beggars and dipsters and chancers of every kind. A royal party could not but transpire without a penumbra of leaky festivities trickling down to the grounds outside.
The carriage stopped. A clatter of steps and the door opened: four brass horns cut through the racket. “Milady?” Kara asked. Helge rose first and clambered out onto the top step, blinking at the slanting orange sunlight coming over the trees. For a moment she was sure she’d caught her dress on something—a hinge, a protruding nail—and that presently it would tear; then she worried that a gust of wind would render her ridiculous on this exposed platform, until finally she recognized one of the faces looking up at her from below: “Sieur Huw?” she asked hopefully.
“Milady? If it would please you to take my hand—” he answered in English, accented but comprehensible.
She made it down the steps without embarrassing herself. “Sieur Huw, how kind of you.” She managed to smile. Huw was another of those interchangeable youngbloods who infested Clan security, hot-headed adolescent duelists who would have been quite intolerable had Angbard not the means to tame them. When they grew up sufficiently to stop seeking any excuse for a brawl they could be usefuclass="underline" those who had two brain cells to rub together, doubly so. Huw was one of the latter, but Helge had only met him in passing and barely had his measure. Beanpole thin and tall, with brown hair falling freely below his shoulders and a receding chin to spoil what might otherwise have been rugged good looks, Huw moved with a dangerous economy of motion that suggested to those in his path that they had best find business elsewhere. But he wore neither sword nor gun at his belt today. Bearing arms in the presence of the king was a privilege reserved for the royal household and its guards. “Where’s everything happening?” she asked him out of the side of her mouth.
“Around the garden at the back. Most notables have arrived already but you are by no means late. We can go through the north wing, if you want to give the impression you’ve been here discreetly all along,” he offered.
“I suppose you were looking for me,” she said, half-jokingly.
“As a matter of fact”—his gaze slid across the footmen holding the huge doors open for them—“I was.” He nodded, a minute gesture toward a bow, as he crossed the threshold, then paused to bow fully before the coat of arms displayed above the floor. Miriam—remembering her manners as Helge—dropped a brief curtsey. Are we being watched? she wondered. Then, sharply, Who told Huw to wait for me? Huw waited for her politely, then offered his arm. She took it, and they walked together into the central hall of the north wing of the Östhalle.