The suit-fitting department was part of a clump of windowless, fiercely air-conditioned buildings along one side of the road leading to the staging platforms. Huw walked to the parking lot, surrounded by the clump of bodyguards, assistants, and factotums that seemed to adhere to anyone of any importance. The cars were waiting under a shaded awning, engines already running. “Take me to staging area two,” he said, climbing into the back of the frontmost vehicle.
“Sir.” The cars moved off in convoy, chillers roaring in the heat. Huw glanced out at the parched, browning vegetation. Six days, he noted. This was the sixth consecutive day in which the nighttime temperature hadn’t fallen below thirty-seven Celsius. Daytime temperatures were in the death zone—without forced ventilation or HVAC, people couldn’t work outdoors here. Global warming had already bitten this time line hard: its population wasn’t any smaller than that of time line two, and they’d stayed on coal-and wood-burning fires longer than the more developed world. Another decade or two of rising sea levels and strengthening hurricanes and they’d probably have to abandon Maracaibo completely: even the desperate plan to switch the Commonwealth over to nuclear power in the next ten years would be too little and too late to stop the warming in its tracks.
The cars scurried like shiny-carapaced ants from shadow to shadow, until they pulled up beside a windowless door opening onto the second of the big staging area platforms. The guard in the front passenger seat jumped out and held the door for Huw: he stepped into the searing oven-heat of early afternoon. His entourage followed: a few seconds later they reached the lobby. The doors opened automatically; the guards saluted, opening the inner doors before them. “She said you can find her in Hangar B,” said the sergeant on duty.
“Good.” Huw nodded, then walked straight down the main access corridor, leading a cometary trail of followers.
“Sir, if you’ve got just a minute…” His secretary—a junior manager, in this continent’s office culture—hurried to keep up with him.
“Yes?”
“It’s about the corps task assignments for next week: according to my manifest we’ve just been assigned a new world-walker, a major on transfer from Fort George—”
Huw stopped dead. “A major?” The secretary nodded. “Would he by any chance be called Hulius Hjorth?”
“Yes sir, how did you—”
“Excellent!” Huw carried on, this time with a spring in his step. “He’ll be with her in Hangar B,” he predicted.
“Possibly, sir, I don’t really—”
Huw barged through a side door, across a freight corridor, dodged a slowly reversing forklift truck, and walked onto the floor of Hangar B, pausing briefly for the security check.
The hangar formed a sports stadium–sized open space at the center of the staging platform. Right now, the domed roof was closed and the hydraulic elevator rested at ground level, safety gates down and payload area accessible. Cranes rolled back and forth above it on their tracks, deftly lifting twenty-ton freight containers from a line of flatbed railway wagons and stacking them carefully on the deck of the massive hovercraft that occupied almost the entire surface of the elevator platform. Meanwhile maintenance crews checked over the vast rubber skirts of the vehicle and refueled the engines that would, for a few brief minutes, lift the entire stack a handful of centimeters off the ground.
Minutes were all that it needed, minutes during which the world-walker on board would concentrate, focusing on a carefully tailored knotwork design that would shift them—and everything they were grounded to—to another time line with a leveled receiving area. World-walkers were a scarce resource, only able to make two trips per day on a regular schedule: but a world-walker using one of the staging platforms at MAC could transfer two thousand tons of freight at a time, and much larger carriers were on the drawing board.
Huw made a beeline for the site office beside the side entrance, marched in, and took the stairs up to the second floor two at a time. The door to the committee room was open: he charged in. “Brill!” He embraced her, then: “Bro!”
Hulius stepped forward. They hugged. “It’s been too long.”
“Far too long. How’s Elena?” Huw caught Brilliana’s look. “What?”
“Out.” She waved irritably at the secretary who had just arrived, trailing slightly breathlessly behind Huw. “Shut the door. Where’s the security light?”
Huw flipped the switch for the red SECRET light outside the door. “What’s so urgent?”
“Yes—” Hulius turned to face Brilliana. “We’re here now.” He raised an eyebrow. “I see no Anglisch…?”
“Speak hochsprache,” Brilliana replied in the same tongue. It wouldn’t guarantee secrecy, but it would place a major obstacle in the way of casual eavesdroppers. The Gruinmarkt’s language was effectively dead, spoken only by refugees born in time line one. “Family matters.”
“Family—” Hulius stopped. He dragged out a chair and straddled it, arms resting on its back. “I thought this was official business?”
“It is.” Brill frowned. “Huw, are you up to date on the weekly intelligence assessments?”
Huw blinked rapidly. “I believe so. Why?”
“When I went north to collect Yul for the flight training project, I thought it was routine, but I caught up with the take from his previous month’s dead drop just as he got back from the latest, and it looks like we’ve got a major problem. So major that I had to take time off to brief Miriam, who’s going to raise it with the Survival Committee. They haven’t met yet, but I’m telling you right now because I’m pretty sure they’re going to order you to bring the project forward.”
Clearly upset, she began to pace. “That fucking quack.”
“Quack?” Hulius looked puzzled.
“Are we talking about him?” asked Huw.
“Yes.” Brill nodded. “Dr. Griben ven Hjalmar, deceased and unlamented Gynecologist to the Clan and sometime would-be kingmaker before he defected to the dark side. We’re pretty sure—from what the old Duchess admitted to—that he kept a copy of the database from that crazy breeding project Duke Angbard was running. Artificial insemination to breed … you know.” Her lips wrinkled, cheeks tensing. “It probably fell into the hands of one or the other of the US government agencies that were stalking us, back in the day. Anyway, we had a copy, too, and, well, let’s say my people have been keeping an eye on them via social networks like Facebook and Google, using throwaway overseas accounts and software running on rented servers in places like Indonesia and Turkey.”
“Oh shit,” said Huw, running one step ahead of her. “You mean they—”