The Protectors war

"Ah, you like Boccaccio too?" Sir Nigel said. "Chaucer as well?"

"Indeed," she replied. She'd requested soda bread for breakfast, and Crossing Tavern's staff included someone who made a very passable batch. "I do that, professionally and personally."

"You were a musician before the Change?"

"Mostly," she said. And he seems genuinely interested. It's a rare man who's a good listener on first acquaintance.

"Celtic and folk. Which meant you were a stage performer as much as a singer, and a tale-teller nearly so."

"And now you're a ruler," he said.

"By some yardsticks," she replied, and they both laughed. "Immeasurably so."

Mike Havel cleared his throat, obviously anxious to get down to business. It's a grim sort you are at times, Mike, she thought. And besides that, it's a terrible habit, putting mustard on bacon like that.

The sausages were very good; a little spicier than the cooks at Dun Juniper made them. She waited as Sir Nigel sipped his semitea and smoothed down his white-streaked yellow mustache.

"Well," he said, clearing his throat. "It didn't take long to learn what it was that the Protector wanted. The problem was that Captain Nobbes was rather more taken in than I'd have liked: "

Portland Protectorate, Willamette Valley, Oregon

April 6th, 2007 AD-Change Year Nine

The di

"So you see," Norman Arminger said, leaning back and turning the stem of his wineglass in his long fingers, "I'm sympathetic to your mission. Certainly I've no desire to see nerve agents brought back into common use! A pity the Change couldn't have taken care of those as well."

The crackling fire on the hearth behind him left his face in shadow, despite the candles on the table-only a half dozen of those had been lit. Nigel suspected that was calculated, to let him see his guests' faces clearly without revealing all of his own. His wife was smilingly inscrutable in her wimple and cotte hardi.

"Dear, I suppose even God has to let some chemical functions go on unaltered," Sandra Arminger said, taking a precise nibble of sliced apple and then a bite of blue-veined cheese on a rye cracker. "Or at least that's what Pope Leo says, at great length sometimes."

"There's no danger of their being brought into common use," Nigel Loring said. "The industrial processes needed to mass-produce the organophosphates are impossible post-Change. You could make tiny amounts on a laboratory scale, I fear, but nothing beyond that: and that would be quite hideously dangerous, don't you know. And they can be destroyed; dropping them into a large quantity of water will do nicely. The sea, or a large river."

"That's a relief," Arminger said. "The storage facility at Umatilla is uncomfortably close, and the area's chronically unstable, currently having a civil war. It wouldn't do to have the gas fall into the wrong hands. You're an expert, Sir Nigel?"

Before he could demur, Nobbes cut in: "S'truth! Couldn't have done half what we've done without this bloke."

"I had some experience with them before the Change," Nigel said. "I wasn't a chemical-warfare specialist, though. More from the other side, if anything, poking around the Middle East and Eastern Europe looking for them."

"As close to an expert as anyone's going to get," Nobbes said with a

"Surely most of it wouldn't be operational anyway," Arminger said.

Loring sighed mentally and cut in. Nobbes would blabber if he didn't, and the information wasn't exactly secret anyway: "Well, most of the artillery and rocket-delivered ones wouldn't be usable," he said. "They're generally binary agents that can't be mixed except by firing the shell or warhead-which is scarcely practicable in our time, eh? The mustard gas is corrosive and I'd be surprised if any is left that hasn't eaten its way through the containers, without preventative maintenance."

"And according to my intelligence, the staff at Umatilla poured gasoline into the storage bunkers and set them on fire before leaving," Arminger said.

His hands clenched on the arms of his chair in anger at the thought. I don't think we were supposed to see that,

Nigel thought. And our good host probably didn't think of checking for some time after the Change.

"Well, then," Nigel began, a sentence that would end with: Not much point in poking about there, eh?

"We'd still have to check," Nobbes said. "We've got protective gear on the Pride, right enough. The spray dispensers for the nerve gas might still be functional, eh? Isn't that what you said, Sir Nigel?"

Nigel Loring sighed aloud this time. "Yes, I'm afraid that's a distinct possibility," he said.

"Well, then," Arminger said. "We can't have that. I'll give you all the assistance I can."

Half an hour later, the lord of Portland gri

"Just what we needed," he said, tossing a few of the nut-meats into his mouth. "We may even be able to win without a war, after a few demonstrations. I'll even offer the idiots in the south Valley fairly easy terms. Subject to subsequent modifications, of course."

A maid came in with a fresh pot of tea; she wore a black-and-white uniform of gown, t-tunic and tabard. "Thank you, Isabelle," Sandra Arminger said, and poured for them both as the girl left.

"I'm glad you got over that fetish period and agreed to have the staff properly clothed," she said. "Body hairs in the soup: God, how embarrassing. One lump or two?"

Arminger snorted. "Two: I know you, my love. You've got something unpleasant to say. You always bring up an over-and-done-with quarrel before starting a new one."

"Only ones I won," she said tranquilly. "And face it, the skimpily clad maiden thing lost its thrill fairly fast, didn't it? Both the looking and the touching."

"To an extent," Arminger admitted.

"That's why I didn't say anything at the time," she said, with a gracious smile that grew wider when he gritted his teeth. "I knew you'd get over it. I must admit it was fun to watch you have your wicked way with them, occasionally, all the screaming and thrashing. Very occasionally."

"Always room for three," Arminger pointed out.

Sandra smiled again, and drew a line through the air with one finger, as if tracing the edge of a draftsman's set-square used to draw straight lines. "Sorry, dear. Raw oysters never did appeal."

"The point, dearest wife? Besides the fact that being Supreme Overlord turns out to be more like being a bu-reaucraft than I anticipated?"

"That you tend to confuse fantasy and reality sometimes, my lord Protector, and not just the way you pander to those old Society geeks' taste for romantic terminology. You've: nobbled Captain Nobbes, the Aussie extrovert. But Sir Nigel is quite another kettle of fish. Much more subtle under that bluff hearty Squire Western exterior. I think he's seen through you-us, for that matter."

An eyebrow went up on the Protector's knob-cheeked face. "You think so?"

"I know he knows you're after that nerve gas for your catapults."

"Gliders too," Arminger said absently. "A very little VX apparently goes a very long way. It might make some of our more independent-minded vassals think twice about pulling their drawbridges up on me as well if I could spray them like bugs from the air."

"Raid as opposed to raids," Sandra said with a chuckle.

He gri

"Then strike while the iron's hot, my dear. Before he can talk Captain Nobbes into withdrawing his protective gear and trained team: I gather it's not practical without them?"