Wine of the Gods 26: Embassy (22 page)

"Add the millions from book sales . . . they must have people permanently on those other worlds. Who published those books?" Hunter looked at Albrecht.

She nodded. "A mid-sized publisher. They were bought by a holding company, who strongly recommended all five of the books. We're still working on finding the owner of the holding company. He's pretty slippery. A financial adviser. No children. When his wife died, he quit, formed this company and started enjoying life according to the phone interviews. We haven't met with him, and given the weirdness, we figured we need to check that he really is who he claims to be."

"And on some other world they no doubt run an upscale pawn shop, specializing in jewelry. I wonder which one? There were only four tunnels." Lancing looked down the hill.

The tunnels were out of sight to them. Hanger could see three bright spots, if he squinted. "I'll bet they sell to the Lunar Redoubt people and buy their electronics there. Did any of those books involve space travel?"

Albrecht and Phillips shook their heads. "Nope. So maybe there are more tunnels, and they're just closed up like the one to our world."

The sun slowly sank, and they munched frugally while they watched the sunset. Lights sprang up around the mansion, and the pool. Nowhere else across the hills, up and down the coast. Tonight all the men were minding the kids. A few women joined them—the two who'd been carrying babies yesterday and the three who hadn't been obviously pregnant. No orgy tonight. As soon as the kids were worn out the adults took them inside and the lights went out.

From their hill top, there were no other lights in sight.

"Tomorrow night we'll see about raiding their kitchen, or possibly going hunting for pastries. Hanger, why don't you and I take the early watch tonight?" Albrecht stared down the hill. "How much is an entire world worth?"

Hanger nodded. "Think about how much they've spent getting to Mars. And it's an unlivable wasteland. If there are no indigenous people here, a whole world for the taking. How are the scientists doing, on making tunnels?"

"Poorly, but they've got a full scale test apparatus that should be ready to try in six months. Once we understand enough to aim the thing, we could do tunnels all over."

"Every nation could have a world of their own, hell every state could have one." Hanger sighed. "Mining companies would pay a lot for a pristine, unmined world. I hate to think of ruining a whole second ecology, though."

"Pollution controls are old tech. And Lancing recognized these trees. I wonder if there are extinct animals here? Passenger pigeons, polar bears and pandas." Albrecht chuckled. "Woolly mammoths and sabretoothed tigers?"

"Umm, you know, I hadn't even thought about predators. I wonder what's out there?" Hanger listened carefully. A faint breeze through the trees. Frogs peeping. Something grunting way down the hill. "There were little birds all over during the day, squirrels. I remember some deer tracks, but I didn't actually see the deer."

"I guess our watch had better not just be on the mansion, just in case."

Hanger nodded. "Yeah, and I would love a campfire, right about now. And the next time I go chasing interdimensional criminals, I'm bring a sleeping bag."

But nothing tried to eat them in the night, and in the morning they slipped down hill again. They all eyed the brushy world tunnel as they walked by.

"Hot pastries," Albrecht muttered, and turned away. They walked around the corner and found themselves twenty meters from the raiders. Six men and three women falling suddenly quiet as they were spotted in turn.

"Stun them!" One of the men ran forward throwing up his hand. Lancing collapsed.

Hanger's first bullet spun the raider and dropped him. The others scattered into cover as Phillips grabbed Lancing and dragged him hastily back around the corner.

"Get him up the hill." Albrecht pointed at the tunnel. "We'll cover you. Meet us where we camped last night."

Phillips hoisted him up into a fireman's carry and staggered through the tunnel. Albrecht and Hanger retreated and dived through.

"Quick get around where they won't see us through there. If they think we're up the hill somewhere they won't try to . . . close . . . the . . . tunnel." Albrecht's quick orders trailed off as the audience registered. She flicked a look toward the tunnel and stepped aside. Hanger followed. Phillips braced himself under Lancing's weight.

"Dang. They gots der un cooridoor." The biggest of the scruffy looking group looked Albrecht up and down and smiled. "Haie, whot's a prutty laydee dune wit 'er oon cooridoor, eh?"

Hanger eyed the seven men and five women cautiously. "Sorry, we're not from around here. Where's the nearest town?"

"Gran town's jist dune there." A younger one jerked his thumb behind him and eyed Lancing. "He dead?" A huge horse loomed over his shoulder and eyed the limp body too.

Hanger hastily holstered his gun and checked. "No he's breathing fine." Albrecht was easing toward the back of the group, and they followed her lead, getting the locals between them and the tunnel.

The big one was looking it over, and one of the women joined him.

"There's some bad sorts on the other side. I wouldn't go through there if I was you." Hanger stumbled, trying to follow Albrecht while watching the locals. The big one stepped through—some people just took warnings the wrong way.

Albrecht got them out of sight behind some brush, and had Phillips put Lancing down in the shade of a scruffy tree. "He looks all right. Just stunned. All that man did was wave his hand."

"Oh sure, a stun spell." The young local had followed them. "Et'll wear off in an hour and he'll have a haid ache. Tyrone's getting' good at et. He practisizes on us."

It was recognizably English, if horribly accented.

"Magic World. Christ, we're all going to win our bets. At this rate." Phillips muttered.

"So, you guys in trooble? You in trooble with the guards?"

"No, with some outlaws. Although I don't know if your guards would be sympathetic."

"Huh. Well, if you'ah good guys, I 'spect you'll need t'talk t'm'cuin Mortimah. Captain Easterly, dat us. He's in t'King's Own, and he's a wizard. I'll go git him." The youngster swarmed up the harness on the big horse and trotted off.

Peering through the brush, Hanger watched the tunnel. The locals were coming and going, and two of the raiders stepped through and scanned up and down the road.

We're not here, just dry, dusty hills and brush.

They shrugged at each other and ducked back through the tunnel. The big local fellow came flying through, caught his balance and stalked right back through. Two others jumped in after him, and the women craned to look and then hustled through as well.

The tall black haired raider stepped through and looked around. Glared at the locals, shrugged. A raider woman came through behind him. "Shall I get Falchion out here to close it?"

"No. It's just these fools. We'll move it a little once they're gone." He frowned at the three young men hovering. "Get." They backed off, and finally turned to follow the horse.

The raiders turned and stepped back through the tunnel. After a long half hour a different raider woman, a redhead, stepped through and started shoving at the tunnel from the side. She shoved it slowly down the road, grunting a bit and cussing. She pushed it a couple of hundred meters, and then pushed it into the brush before stepping in and disappearing herself.

"Can you still see it?" Albrecht whispered.

"Yep. Plain as day."

"Good. Let's get out of here. I'm not sure we want to meet this Mortimah king's own captain or whatever that was."

Lancing was starting to twitch and blink, surely a good sign, so Hanger hitched his shoulder under Lancing' armpit, pulled his arm across his shoulder and staggered off down the road.

They made slow progress and were barely within sight of civilization before the youth on the big dark horse trotted back their way. A carriage followed. The pair of horses pulling the carriage stopped at a whoa from the driver.

The driver was close to two meters tall, and obviously muscular. Mousey hair, pale blue eyes. Dull, stupid eyes in a fancy uniform, blue with gold piping.
Oh crap. A dumb cop.
The bulk dismounted from the carriage easily, looking them over.

"I'm Captain Easterly, King's Own. Now what's this Lizard is telling me about a corridor and criminals?" Much less accent than the boy.

Probably related to someone important to be an officer.

Albrecht straightened and visible braced herself. "I am Agent Sommer Albrecht with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In pursuit of criminals, we . . . seem to have gotten lost in some, umm, parallel worlds." Her voice trailed off uncertainly.

Bet he didn't understand a bit of that.

"Ah." The clod blinked at her. "Sounds like you need to speak to t'Dimension Cops."

Captain Easterly turned out to not only extremely bright, but well educated and almost breathtakingly matter of fact about their situation. He had them in the carriage, and with the assistance of a tunnel, in his office within the hour.

"The bad news is that our, well, the D-cops best spotter mixed it up with a tank last winter. The good news is, she's recovering and will be fine. She's unbelievably good at the dimensional magic, so I'm sure she'll get you home."

"Once she's recovered." Albrecht inhaled the coffee a younger soldier had fetched.

"T'highly magical, when they're badly injured, go into this healing sleep. Sometimes more than a year. But her family says she's spending more time awake, so she's nearly done. In t'mean time I'll introduce you to t'D-cops, you can talk to t'ambassadors and so forth, and when you get home you'll be just stuffed with information about how this all works." He snorted. "That's t'official line. T'unofficial one is that we just started this all last year, and t'D-cops have a staff of seven, one of whom has been injured."

"So these D-cops aren't the rigid Nazi's wielding an iron fist to prevent contamination of cultures I've read about in fiction?"

"Nope. We figure if we can stop most of t'wars we'll be doing well. These damned criminals of yours—actually I suspect they're ours—are an unwanted complication. Cultural contamination hasn't even made t'list." Easterly shoved back from his desk and pulled out a laptop computer.

Lancing choked.

"I know. It's a serious anachronism. We buy them from t'other Worlds. And solar battery chargers. Now, do these people look familiar?"

A mixture of still photos and drawings, quite familiar.

"We call them the, uh, Combat Group. The women, umm, had no classical education, so they had no idea of what they were doing when they heard t'phrase 'Hors de Combat' and decided that should be their gang name. Some of them had been prostitutes. No, I am not kidding. T'Whores de Combat."

He scratched his head. "I expect our computers won't speak to yours, so let me print these out, and t'reports." He eyed them. "I should have offered to feed you, umm, I think this calls for the Tavern. They'll have rooms for you, and I'll fetch Xen and Garit, the current head D-cops. If they've got their little war under control, he'll be here really quick. If they don't, umm, he'll probably still get here sometime tomorrow."

A strikingly beautiful dark haired woman entered, sorting papers. "Why'd you print out the whole . . . " she stopped and eyed them.

"They're cops from another world. Tangled with t'Combat Group and wound up stranded here. I'm going to take them to t'Tavern , and then round up some troops to see if we can find their gate."

"Does Xen know?"

"Nope. He's next on my list. Why don't you go tell him what's up and that we'll be dining at t'Tavern."

"Right." She handed over the papers and left.

"Are you lot up to a five block walk or should I send for a carriage?"

"We'll walk." Albrecht followed him out.

The carriage had taken them from the small town they'd been approaching through what Easterly called a corridor, to a large city and a short drive to the security headquarters of the kingdom. Now they walked, and in the few blocks the buildings changed from official looking edifices to huge mansions to large mansions to normal mansions. Easterly led them up an alley. "A bunch of us have split a house up into apartments, and we've got a corridor to Harry's Tavern."

He waved to the guards as he walked into a small stable, and right into the back wall.

"It's an illusion." The man on guard was grinning. "Just walk."

Albrecht squared her shoulders, walked into the wall and disappeared. The men followed. "I think these are what we were calling tunnels."

"How come I can see through the illusions those the, umm, Combat people made, but not this one?" Hanger looked around another stable, a larger one, and then followed Easterly and Albrecht across a brick courtyard.

Easterly looked back at him. "If you can see through illusions, you've got some magic talent. But that one was made by Xen, and damn few people are strong enough to see through, or break his stuff."

Hanger gulped and got his feet back into motion.

Easterly pointed. "That's the privy, and there's a hot shower at the end—we haven't persuaded Harry to plumb for actual baths yet." He visibly hesitated then took the right hand door of the pair on the back of the main building.

It looked like something a vid director would design as a fantasy medieval tavern. Wooden floor, log walls, a big stone fireplace with a crackling fire. The old Mino serving drinks was too dark for period realism, but the polished wooden bar was perfect, a split log of what looked like mahogany. There were a dozen tables of various sizes and shapes, perhaps a quarter occupied. Easterly grabbed the big round table in the middle.

"Hi, Easterly. Do you know how many more people are coming?" The teenage girl had a mop of red hair.

"Nope, but I'll bet Xen and Deena at least. How's Q?"

"Still mostly sleeping. It got boring fast, so I came back. Aunt Rustle finally decided that she wasn't going to die if she took her eyes off of her, so she's in a speed bubble now." She was tossing silverware out as rapidly as she chattered. "Flare's grilling steaks, and there's chicken pot pie. You're not from this World are you? We have ale, red and white wine, lemonade, hot tea and hot coffee to drink."

Easterly grinned. "This is Raven, her cousin is the multidimensional expert I spoke of. I'm glad Q is sleeping and I'll have a steak, rare, and coffee."

Who would name a kid with red hair, Raven? Or are ravens red on this world?

They all went for the steaks, and Hanger opted for ale.

There was another waitresses, about the same age, black hair with a dramatic white streak through it. About half the diners were in uniform. "Are we near an army base or something?"

Easterly nodded. "Fort Crossroads. When we first started dimensional experiments, this is where we did them. We, ahem, figured out how t'open gates, but then we couldn't figure out how t'close them. Fortunately none of t'early gates went to a world that still held dinosaurs. The King decided that a fort between here and t'nearest town, not t'mention Karista itself, was a good idea."

"Yeah, no kidding." Lancing muttered.

Easterly just grinned. "So Fort Crossroads is ten miles south. Then we decided t'use one of t'Empty Worlds—a World with no people—and in fact nothing larger than a mouse—as a prison for some . . . special people. So even more soldiers. Unfortunately we hadn't gotten t'whole of t'Hors de Combat, and the loose ones helped t'prisoners escape. All t'prisoners, including a prince who killed his own nephew and so forth. Same nasty bunch you encountered."

"They're calling themselves the Black Island Pyramid, now." The black haired girl ducked her head, and refilled coffee cups.

Easterly tapped the printouts. "Dagger is Jade's daughter. As soon as she was old enough, had the magical strength and skill to open t'locks they had on their corridors, she bolted. She's still kinda shy. That lot are not good parents."

Hanger thought about the party raid, the casual rape and games.
They looked all right, playing around the pool, but no, not good influences.

Easterly's eyes lifted every time the back door opened. The people he was expecting arrived halfway through the large and delicious steaks.

Four men, with the dark haired woman from Easterly's office.

"Prince Garit Negue, Captain Xen Wolfson, Lon Hackathorn and Inso Clostuone. All Disco, and Captain Deena Janic, an officer of the King's Own, like me." Easterly waved at them. "These guys tangled with the Hors and wound up stranded."

He introduced them, getting all their names, ranks, and specific police forces correct.

"I really had hoped that lot would get lost. I don't much like the idea of them having a gate here." Negue was muscular, mid to late twenties with a beautiful head of blonde hair.

Wolfson was tall, two hundred and four cems easy. Medium tan skin, dark eyes, light brown hair. Very young, early twenties at a guess.

Hanger hid a smile as Albrecht's gaze swung from one to the other.
Don't drool!

"Pleased to meet you." Her voice sounded close to normal. "Agent Sommer Albrecht, Federal Bureau of Investigations . . . somewhere . . . "

Wolfson flashed a grin. "The FBI. Close to half the worlds I go to have one."

Lon Hackathorn on the other hand was middle-aged, weathered and confident. Northern European type. Used to doing things, probably from a senior position.

He nodded. "Precursor to the UEBI."

Inso Clostuone was harder to place. Middle Eastern phenotype, past middle-age, with whipcord muscles and predatory eyes that checked them all out, narrowing as he spotted their weapons. "Bloody trusting Fallen."

"They're cops." Easterly sat back. "How's your war shaping up?"

"It's devolved into a war of words. If Q hadn't come so close to getting herself killed it would have devolved into low comedy." Xen nodded to include them. "Has Easterly told you of our little problem? Cross dimensional invasion. The first magic user on the scene shifted the gate and started working on the soldiers."

Hanger frowned. "You lot don't appear to be carrying weapons . . . "

Xen scowled. "No such thing as a disarmed witch. They did finally manage to shoot her. She's got damn good shields. A fellow from one of the other Embassies realized what was happening and jumped through, grabbed her and brought her out. Umm, do you have magic in your world? No, well, perhaps I should just say Q laid a really interesting curse on the soldiers and the problem was solved."

What? A curse?

Easterly pinched the bridge of his nose. "Xen, I hope you realize there are days I wish I'd never met you." He smiled crookedly at the four from Earth. "Growing up, magic was just a tall tale. It got loose somehow recently and now we have things like this happening."

Albrecht shook her head. "For the sake of my sanity, I'm going to pretend that you are joking about a single person stopping an invasion."

Xen grinned. "It's generally safest that way."

"You and Q are going to end up burned at t'stake."

"Is there prejudice against magic, or against people who aren't magic?" Albrecht surveyed the room, thoughtfully. "I see a wide range of skin colors, but only the hired help is really Mino." She nodded at the bartender.

Xen and Easterly looked blankly at her, then at the old bartender.

"Mino?" Lon asked.

"Sorry. Racial Minority. Black. African."

"Harry owns the Tavern and he's one of the most powerful magic users in the Multiverse." Xen was clearly amused. "Over a thousand years and there's still racial prejudice?"

Deena poked him. "We're human, we always find something to be prejudiced against. Right Xen?"

"I do recall someone using Traveler as a pejorative, and threatening to do something I'm sure I don't recall to me if I told her she was a witch one more time." He sobered as he looked back at Albrecht. "Skin color seems to be one of the things we've adjusted to. Gender, magic, nationality, money, noble title or lack thereof, are most of ours."

"I . . . hate asking questions about magic, since I don't believe in magic." Chris squirmed a bit. "But this Q that got shot? No magic bullet proof shields?"

"Actually it was a bit of a fluke, and a bit of our being unaware of the power of some of the weapons." Xen shrugged. But there was a hint of tightness around his eyes that belied his casual air.

"Shields are
slick
. A complete shield that goes under your feet is worse than walking on slick ice. Nothing but prat falls, and who know how far you'll skid if you fall on a hill."

"Umm . . . really?"

"Really. So an experienced witch like Q is shielded everywhere but the soles of her feet. The machine gun knocked her off her feet and rolled her, until she got a magic grip on the ground, and sealed her shield all around herself while lying flat. I think she got hit by a bullet that penetrated enough ground while ricocheting to get under the edge of the shield. We'll be working on preventing that from happening again."

Albrecht nodded again. "So. Tell us more about these Hors de Combat."

They talked and ate. They knew the names of about half the raiders, the others had shown up at the prison break without provenance, so to speak. Several they knew personally.

"From Wizard's school. Heso, Zap, Ronnie and Eldon." Xen looked glumly at the list. "I taught Eldon there. He really wasn't as wild as the others, who pretty much hung out together getting into trouble. Then Ricardo came along. He was . . . precociously bad. Joined up with Heso and Zap to start getting into trouble. At first they were just nuisances. Sexual escapades with a royal prince."

"Oh yeah, I suppose we ought to have asked about your government." Albrecht sighed.