Wine of the Gods 26: Embassy (21 page)

"That city may have claimed to be Pittsburg, but it ain't our Pittsburg."

"Thee King will dissolve Parliament if they remain contentious on the matters of the Lunar Redoubt?" Lancing gulped. "That sounds really . . . different."

"And no doubt some day we'll get to meet all those people and find out if they really mean Lunar when they say Lunar." Albrecht rolled the paper and stuck it in Phillip's backpack. "Let's see if there are any more fascinating places to go from here."

The track ended in a circle. "Another alley. Same as last time, guys." Albrecht led the way through. This alley faced a board fence in need of paint. The place smelled of wood smoke, horse and cow manure, coal fires . . . Phillips retreated and Albrecht came around the corner at a run. "Go!" she yelled.

Hanger turned and ran for the tunnel, waving Lancing through ahead of him. Albrecht and Phillips were on his heels as he jumped through. He got out of the way and turned to watch the circle. "What happened?"

"They pointed at me and started screaming in horror. I think it was the clothes. All the women were all bundled up, the men in tunic-like things. They started grabbing anything club-like handy, so I figured I'd retreat."

"They'll see us and the trees, won't they come through?"

She looked at him and sighed. "From that side I just saw the side of a building. A hologram, maybe, and they don't bother out in the woods?"

"I suppose." Hanger frowned at the frustrating circle. "That seems like a bit of an overreaction to your clothing, though."

"I wonder. We're so trained to pretend to not notice, and definitely not say anything, but they were all really pale. Maybe they've never seen anyone with dark skin?" Albrecht jumped suddenly, clapping a hand to her head set. Phillips started and looked around anxiously.

"They've found them! The raiders are definitely here . . . Danzinger?" Albrecht's attention flicked from headset to them. "Damn it, they've gone quiet."

"Let's see if we can get a good sight of that place from up here." Hanger suggested. There was a little deer track sort of wandering up the hill and he took it. The others followed, and they got above the local thicket and studied the situation at the mansion. It didn't look good. There were bodies all over the patio, twelve that he could see.

"Gassed? We know they had something of that nature." Albrecht's hands were clenched around her binoculars.

I hope we're invisible up here. No one here, Bad Guys. Just us little squirrels and birds. Maybe a deer.

"What are they doing with them?" Lancing whispered. Men were pulled the agents around, away from the mansion. "Putting them on carts? Where are they taking them?"

"This direction. Damn it all. Let's head south, try to stay above the tunnels, see if we can spot them." Their effort to be quiet slowed them down, and they found themselves above and still north of their entry tunnel when they found a line of sight on two men picking up MacKinnion by the arms and legs and tossing him through the tunnel. Apparently he was the last. One of the men from the raid on the senator's party stepped out of the tunnel and spoke to a young woman. She nodded and sat on the ground, and two more men hopped and jumped out of the tunnel. Then the bright light swirled down the drain and disappeared. The six men laughed and one offered the woman a hand up and escorted her rather obviously down the hill.

There were no carts in sight, and Hanger puzzled over that while they crept cautiously down the hill. Hanger was last down to the gate, and smiled a little grimly to see the others bobbing and weaving like dancers who'd lost their music.

"I give up," Albrecht flapped her hands. "Where is it Hanger?"

"I saw it shrinking." He looked carefully and could see the thin slice down into the ground. "I, umm, don't see it at all now." He walked across the line, but nothing happened.

"Hanger, that's not what I want to hear."

"Can't help that, Ma'am. I brought some food. We could hide up in the hills, and watch to see what they do, if they open the tunnel back up."

She stared at him in frustration, then reluctantly nodded. "Right, let's find a vantage point."

With some climbing about, they found a spot from which they could watch both the former tunnel site and the mansion. As the sun set, electric lights came on here and there about the mansion, then the pool lit up and a horde of children raced out to jump in.

Clothing was definitely optional, and most of the children were naked. Four girls might have been pre-teen, all the rest were definitely younger, two and three year olds, all swimming like fish, but with a lot of adults out keeping an eye on them. Most of the women looked pregnant, two had small babies. Even the 'authors' had toddlers, and a couple of them sat on some wide steps and let the babies splash and play.

"All nine of the women from the robbery are there, plus extras. Seventeen women total. Some coming and going with food and drinks. The food and drinks ones were not in on the robbery."

"I never did get what those women did in the robbery. " Lancing whistled. "Damn those are good looking women. They just showed up in the departing shots, they weren't in the ballroom."

One of the men down at the pool was mobbed by the kids and apparently talked into being their personal catapult, throwing the kids up in the air to fly screaming into the pool.

"Interesting, the kids, it looks like three of the three year olds are boys and two of the toddlers. All the rest are girls. Do they abandon boy babies?" Hanger went back to studying the windows of the mansion.

"Could just be random. Five to twelve isn't that bad a ratio for a small sample, and we don't know about the littlest babies." Lancing pointed out. "I'm counting twelve pregos. This is a really weird gang."

"They're all here. I've just spotted the twelfth man. Library, second floor left end." Hanger said.

"Yeah, the tall black haired guy. He's one of the ones we shot. Masters said his DNA was really weird—he's genetically XX, female—but with those changes to the chromosomes."

Albrecht studied the library. "That's him, eh? The biology guys were really freaked by the strange stuff. He raped one woman, and one of the other guys raped her as well. She's one of the ones that accepted our offer. The mother of the twin boys my brother and sister adopted, in fact. Genetically the boys are . . . well. They've got that guy's X chromosomes, the other rapist's Y chromosome and a bunch of his other genes. There's only about a five percent match between the mother's genes and the children's genes."

Hanger looked at her in consternation.

"The other three babies are much the same. More theirs than ours."

"Like parasitic wasps or something." Lancing muttered. "They didn't try and eat their way out of the mothers, did they?"

"No. Everything's normal but the genetics. And three boys to two girls, so the imbalance isn't explained that way."

Hanger chewed that over while staring at the library window. Two other men walked in, another from the robbery, and a stranger. They all sat and had what looked like a serious talk. All three occasionally gestured toward the ridge—presumably talking about the tunnels or the Feds that had come through them.

The rest of the men were migrating toward the pool and the women. They swam, played with the kids, but didn't show any particular affinity to any particular kid or kids. The kids showed clear favorites, or perhaps just knew who wouldn't play with them.

They watched off and on while they broke out food—Albrecht had dried fruit, Lancing and Phillips jerky and Hanger granola bars. The kids wore out and one by one were carried off, presumably to bed, by their mothers. Then the wine came out and rest of the clothes came off. They made no attempt to find privacy for the rapidly developing orgy.

"It's like an upscale commune." Hanger mutter. "Commune of the Rich and Infamous."

"I was thinking Rome and decadence, myself, but there appears to be a good deal of female domination down there."

"Yeah, especially that woman on the left there. Sheesh, she's pregnant enough to pop anytime, you wouldn't think she'd be interested."

"Let alone monopolize three at once."

"I swear that redhead sitting on the edge of the pool is in labor. She keeps clutching her belly."

"My sister said sex was a great way to get contractions started." Lancing shrugged at their looks. "She swore she only did it when she was overdue."

"Ick!" Albrecht dropped her binocs to give him a good glare.

"Hey, I'm just repeating what she says, and she's had three babies."

Eventually the orgy wound down and the patio and pool lights were extinguished. Albrecht told Hanger and Lancing to sleep. "We'll wake you if anything interesting happens. Or when we need to be spelled."

Hanger slept for, by his watch, five hours before he was nudged awake.

"It's mostly quiet down there, but there are some rooms lit up and movement. I think they're delivering babies, although I may be wrong."

"Babies, plural?"

"Hell yeah." Lancing gave a jaw cracking yawn. "You saw how incredibly preggers they all were. And carrying on."

And indeed a lot of the windows in the right wing came and went over the course of the early hours of the morning, and in the mid morning eight of the men walked out past the pool and took the track to the tunnels. Unfortunately they passed up the trail to their home, and walked to the "dry brushy" tunnel. Hanger caught a discussion of breakfast, and whether they'd bring back any for the others.

"All their cooks had babies last night?" Hanger muttered. He looked at his watch. Almost noon, back home. "I hope to hell all those bodies they slung through the tunnel were alive."

"If they don't stop talking about hot pastries, I'm going to kill them, personally." Albrecht growled. "If we skimp, we can last three days out here, then we'll either have to risk one of the tunnels, or raid the mansion."

"Or find other people on this world." Hanger pointed up the hill. "Let's climb up there this evening, and look for other lights and roads and such."

"If we wanted to raid the mansion, right now would be the time. Eight of the fourteen men gone, most of the women in no shape to fight." Phillips nodded at the tunnel the men had taken. "We could get them first, before they come back. The labs said there was no radio frequency transmission through the tunnels, so they couldn't warn anyone."

Albrecht looked tempted, but finally shook her head. "And what if we captured them all? Do we ask them, pretty please to open a tunnel back to our home so we can put them in jail?"

"Oh. Damn. What do we do if they don't open a tunnel back home?"

"I don't know. Give me that newspaper. Maybe we should read up on the King and the Lunar Redoubt."

They spent the whole day reading and analyzing. The Lunar Redoubt was apparently a large and expensive resort on the Moon. A combined low gravity retirement community for the super rich and a casino apparently well infested with prostitutes, although there were no acknowledged brothels. The Question before the Parliament was the continuation of tax support for a space program that was mostly in support of vice and millionaire's retirement. The King was for the Space program, and emphasized science and tech advances in every speech. The Members of Parliament were trying to tiptoe between satisfying the voters and not angering the businessmen and lobbyists that contributed to their income.

"The more things change, the more they stay the same." Lancing muttered. "I was hoping for a war with Aliens, you know?"

Hanger nodded. "So the last place, the women bundle up, the men wear tunics and frankly it stunk to high heavens, and the Brushy place has hot pastries, and that lot went there in pants and shirts. If we get desperate, I vote for pastries."

Albrecht looked at the newspaper. "Yeah. I guess it depends on how much we do or don't want to make a splash. We can walk in and start claiming to be from a parallel world, hence the lack of ID and money and marketable skills and see if they are benevolent or paranoid. If the Brushy World is still using horses, it would be a step down in tech, but we probably wouldn't need ID, we could work for food immediately . . . I dunno, though. Best we scout it out and find out about civil rights, slavery, and begging you three's pardon, women's status there. Humph. It's not good any way you look at it."

The octet of men returned in the late afternoon, staggering a bit. Breakfast had apparently been followed by a liquid lunch.

They worked their way south to the highest point in the ridge that partially wrapped the tunnel sites. The view was worth the effort. The ocean stretched across the horizon, north and south the surf beat on rocky points. Between the mansion and the ocean side cliffs, cattle and horses grazed in meadows.

"Solar panels." Albrecht was studying the house. "No wires, no poles, no driveway, no roads."

"Can, umm, could parallel worlds not have any people on them?" Phillips bit his lip. "Maybe they just live here for the climate and the view, and go out to other worlds to rob and rape and buy their solar panels."

"And walk over to the next world for hot pastries whenever they want to."

"One big job a year, like that robbery, would probably keep them in luxury forever."