Similar surprise was being felt by the maintenance crew at the farm near Framingham, as the Internal Security troops rushed the farmyard and threw tear-gas grenades through the kitchen windows; and in a block of dilapidated-looking shops fronting an immigrant rookery in Irongate—perhaps more there than elsewhere, for Uncle Huan had until this morning had every reason to believe that Citizen Reynolds was his protector—and at various other sites. But the commissioner for internal security had his own idea of what constituted protection, and he’d briefed his troops accordingly. “It is essential that all the prisoners be handcuffed and hooded during transport,” he’d explained in the briefing room the previous evening. “Disorientation and surprise are essential components of this operation—they’re tricky characters, and if you don’t do this, some of them will escape. You will take them to the designated drop-off sites and hand them over to the Reeducation Department staff for transport to the prison ship. I mentioned escape attempts. The element of surprise is essential; in order to prevent the targets from raising the alarm, if any of them try to escape you should shoot them.”
Reynolds himself left the briefing satisfied that his enthusiastic and professional team of Polis troops would conduct themselves appropriately. Then he retired to the office of the chief of polis, to share a lunch of cold cuts delivered from the commissary (along with a passable bottle of Chablis—which had somehow bypassed the blockade to end in the polis commissioner’s private cellar) and discuss what to do next with the doctor.
* * *
Huw’s first inkling that something was wrong came when the streetcar he Brilliana were returning on turned the corner at the far end of the high street and came to a jolting stop. He braced against the handrail and looked round. “Hey,” he began.
“Get down,” Brill hissed. Huw ducked below the level of the railing, into the space she’d just departed. She crouched in the aisle, her bag gaping open, her right hand holding a pistol inside it. “Not a stop.”
“Right.” Taking a deep breath, Huw reached inside his coat and pulled out his own weapon. “What did you see?”
“Barricades and—”
He missed the rest of the sentence. It was swallowed up in the familiar hammering roar of a SAW, then the harsh, slow thumping of some kind of heavy machine gun. “Shit. Let’s bail.” He raised his voice, but he could barely hear himself; the guns were firing a couple of blocks away, and he flattened himself against the wooden treads of the streetcar floor. Brill looked at him, white-faced, spread-eagled farther back along the aisle. Then she laid her pistol on the floor and reached into her handbag, pulling out the walkie-talkie. Fumbling slightly, she switched channels. “Charlie Delta, Charlie Delta, flash all units, attack in progress on Zulu Foxtrot, repeat, attack in progress on Zulu Foxtrot. Over.”
The radio crackled, then a voice answered, slow and shocky: “Emil here, please repeat? Over.”
“Shit.” Brill keyed the transmit button: “Emil, get Helge out of there right now! Zulu Foxtrot is under attack. Over and out.” She looked at Huw: “Come on, we’d better—”
Huw was looking past her shoulder, and so he saw the head of the IS militiaman climbing the steps at the rear of the carriage before Brilliana registered that anything was wrong. Huw raised his pistol and sighted. The steps curled round, and the blackcoat wasn’t prepared for trouble; as he turned towards Huw his mouth opened and he began to raise one hand towards the long gun slung across his shoulder.
Huw pulled the trigger twice in quick succession. “Go!” he shouted at Brill. “Now!”
“But we’re—” She flipped open the locket she wore on a ribbon around her left wrist, for all the world like a makeup compact.
More machine-gun fire in the near distance. Shouting, distant through tinnitus-fuzzed ears still ringing from the pistol shots. Huw shoved his sleeve up his arm and tried to focus on the dial of the handless watch, swimming eye-warpingly close under the glass. The streetcar rocked; booted feet hammered on the stair treads. Brilliana rose to a crouch on her knees and one wrist, then disappeared. Something round and black bounced onto the floor where she’d been lying, mocking Huw. He concentrated on the spinning, fiery knot in his eyes until it felt as if his head was about to explode; then the floor beneath him disappeared and he found himself falling hard, towards the grassy ground below.
Behind him, the grenade rolled a few inches, then stabilized for a second before exploding.
* * *
The man behind the desk was tall, silver-haired, every inch the distinguished patriarch and former fighter pilot who’d risen to lead a nation. But it was the wrong desk; and appearances were deceptive. Right now, the second unelected president of the United States was scanning a briefing folder, bifocals drooping down his nose until he flicked at them irritably. After a moment he glanced up. “Tell me, Andrew.” He skewed Dr. James with a stare that was legendary for intimidating generals. “This gizmo. How reliable is it?”
Dr. James’s cheek twitched. “We haven’t made enough to say for sure, sir. But of the sixteen ARMBAND units we’ve used so far, only one has failed—and that was in the first manufactured group. We’ve got batch production down and we can swear to ninety-five-percent effectiveness for eighteen hours after manufacture. Reliability drops steeply after that time—the long-term storable variant under development should be good for six months and self-test, but we won’t be able to swear to that until we’ve tested it. Call it a year out.”
“Huh.” The president frowned, then closed the folder and placed it carefully in the middle of the desk. “CARTHAGE is going to take sixty-two of them. What do you say to that?”
Is that it? Dr. James lifted his chin. “We can do it, sir. The units are already available—the main bottleneck is training the air force personnel on the mobile biomass generators, and that’s in hand. Also the release to active duty and protocol for deployment, but we’re basically repurposing the existing nuclear handling protocols for that; we can relax them later if you issue an executive order.”
“I don’t want one of our planes failing to transition and executing CARTHAGE over domestic airspace, son. That would be unacceptable collateral damage.”
Dr. James glanced sidelong at his neighbor: another of the ubiquitous blue-suited generals who’d been dragged on board the planning side of this operation. “Sir? With respect I think that’s a question for General Morgenstern.”
The president nodded. “Well, General. How are you going to insure your boys don’t fuck up if the doctor’s mad science project fails to perform as advertised?”
The general was the perfect model of a modern military man: lean, intent, gleaming eyes. “Mark-one eyeball, sir: that, and radio. The pilot flying will visually ascertain that there are no landmarks in sight, and the DSO will confirm transition by checking for AM talk-radio broadcasts. We’ve done our reconnaissance: There are no interstates or railroads in the target zone, and their urban pattern is distinctively different.”
“That assumes daylight, doesn’t it?” The president had a question for every answer.
“No sir; our cities are illuminated, theirs aren’t, it’s that simple. The operation crews will be tasked with activating the ARMBAND units within visual range of known waypoints and will confirm that they’re not in our world anymore before they button up.”
“Heavy cloud cover?”
“Radio, sir. There’s no talk radio in fairyland. No GPS signal either. No sir, they aren’t going to have any problem confirming they’re in the correct DZ.”