“What do I—oh.” Mike frowned. “Okay, there’s no GPS where we’re going. The Clan don’t have heavy weapons, at least nothing heavier than machine guns—as far as we know. Unless they’ve somehow bought some missiles, and they’re pretty much limited to whatever they can carry by hand from one side to the other. So—” He glanced up at the rotor blade arching overhead and followed it out into the middle distance. “Hmm. Where we’re going there are a lot of trees. And the places we want to get inside of are walled. Is that going to be a problem?”
“You ever seen Black Hawk Down?” It was a rhetorical question. “We’ve got ways of dealing with trees. What we really don’t like—our second worst nightmare—is buildings with armed hostiles overlooking the LZ. In general, just don’t go there. The ground pounders can secure the target then we can land and pick them up. The alternative is to risk us taking one on the rotor head, in which case we all get to walk home.”
“What’s your worst nightmare?”
“MANPADs,” He said bluntly. “Man-portable air defense missiles, that is. Not your basic SAM-7, which is fundamentally obsolete, but late-model Stingers or an SA-16 Igla—that’s Russian-made and as deadly as a Stinger—can really ruin your day. From what I’ve been reading, your bad guys could carry them across, they only weigh about twenty kilos. We’ve got countermeasures and flare dispensers, of course, but if they’ve bothered to get hold of a bunch of MANPADs and learn how to use them properly we could be in a world of hurt.”
Mike nodded. “That wouldn’t be good.”
“Well.” MacDonald slapped the top of the instrument console affectionately. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. Because they won’t be expecting anyone to come calling by chopper. It’s never happened to them before, right? So they’ve got no reason to expect it now. Plus, we have God and firepower on our side. As long as the ARMBAND supply holds up we can ship over spec-ops teams and their logistics until the cows come home. You do not want to get between a Delta Forces specialist and his ticket home, if you follow my drift, it doesn’t give you a good life expectancy. So it’s all down to the guys with the black boxes.”
“I don’t know anything about that side of things.” Mike shrugged. “For that, you need to talk to the colonel. But I would guess that we’ve got a bunch of GPS coordinates you can feed into your magic steering box of tricks; sites the Clan used as safe houses in this world, so they’re almost certainly collocated with their installations in the other place. We don’t know what they look like over there, but that’s beside the point if we know where to find them.”
“Well, it also helps to know what we’re meant to do when we get there.” MacDonald grinned briefly. “Although that oughta be obvious—otherwise they’d have sent someone else. So what do you know that you can tell me?”
“I don’t. Know, that is. What you’re cleared for, for example.” Mike paused. “I’m just the monkey—Colonel Smith, he’s the organ-grinder. You’ve been over to the other world, you’ve got the basics, right? But this is new to me. Until this morning, I hadn’t had more than a hint that you guys even existed.”
“There are too many Chinese walls in this business. Not our fault.”
“Yeah, well, you know this didn’t come out of nowhere, did it?” Mike decided to take a calculated risk. “The folks who live over there found us first. And they’re not friendly.”
“No shit? I’d never have guessed.”
“Well, that’s the punch line. Because the target where they live—it’s another version of North America, only wild and not particularly civilized. I’ve been over there on foot and, hell, we’re not getting very far if we get stuck down there. So I would guess that’s where you guys come in. But I don’t know for sure because nobody’s told me”—He shrugged—“but I think we’re about to find out. Maybe we should go find that office now. Find out what the official line is.”
Party to Conspiracy
Throwing a party and inviting all your friends and family was not, Miriam reminded herself ruefully, a skill that she’d made much use of over the past few years—especially on the scale that was called for now.
For one thing, she had status; as a member of the council of regents that had assembled itself from the wreckage of the Clan Council’s progressive faction, and as a countess in her own right, she wasn’t allowed to do things by half. A low-key get-together in the living room with finger food and quiet music and a bring-your-own-bottle policy was right out, apparently. If a countess—much less a queen-widow—threw a party, arrangements must be made for feeding and irrigating not only the guests, but: their coachmen, arms-men, and servants; their horses; their hangers-on, courtiers, cousins, and children in the process of being introduced to polite society; her own arms-men and servants; and the additional kitchen and carrying staff who it would be necessary to beg, borrow, or kidnap in order to feed all of the above. Just the quantity of wine that must be brought in beggared the imagination.
“Old King Harald, he had a reputation for bankrupting any lord who made trouble for him. He used to invite himself and his court to stay for a couple of weeks, paying a house call—with six hundred mouths to feed.” Brill grinned at Miriam over the clipboard she was going through. “Two thousand three hundred bottles of spiced wine and eighty casks of small beer is nothing for a weekend retreat, my lady.”
“Oh god. Am I going to bankrupt myself if I make a habit of this?”
“Potentially, yes.” Brill lowered her clipboard. “You must know, a third of the royal budget was spent on food and drink for the court. I know this sounds insane to you, but this is the reality of our economy—peasants produce little surplus, knowing that it can be taken from them in taxes. However.” She made a note on her checklist: “Four oxen, two hundred turkey-fowl, twelve pigs, a quarter-ton of fresh-caught cod, six barrels of salted butter, two tons of wheat . . . yes, you can afford this from your household funds. Monthly, even. It increases your outgoings tenfold, but only for three days. And once you have demonstrated your hospitality, there is no reason to hold such entertainments merely for your courtiers: Say the word and those you wish to see will visit to pay their respects. Next week’s festivity demonstrates your wealth and power and establishes you on the social circuit.”
“You make that sound as if it’s something I’m going to have to repeat.”
“My lady.” Brilliana’s tone was patient rather than patronizing: “Nothing you do now can divert you from your destiny to become a shining star in the social firmament—well, nothing short of raving at the moon—but how seriously the other stars of the stratum take you depends on how you comport yourself in this affair. Many of your peers are shallow, vapid, prone to superficial gossip, and extremely malicious. Yet you—or I—cannot live without their sanction. Your status as queen-widow depends on their consent and their consent is contingent on you being the queen-widow they expect—in public.”
“Huh. By throwing a huge party I give them lots of stuff to gossip about, though.” Miriam frowned. “But if I don’t throw a huge party they’ll gossip anyway, with even less substance and possibly more malice because I haven’t stuffed their stomachs with good food. I can’t win, can I?”
Brill nodded. “My humble advice is to treat it as a matter of gravest business, and to attend to every plaint and whine that your supplicants—and you will have many—bring to your attention. Then ignore them, as is your wish, but at least let them talk at you.”