The Merchants’ War

by Stross, Charles

  Rudi grinned at him. “Got a date with an angel,” he said. “See you later.”

  “Heh. I’ll believe it when I see it—” But he was talking to Rudi’s back.

  Down in the courtyard next to the stables, he found that Hans had enlisted a couple of guards to move the crates, but hadn’t thought to bring the long tubular sack or the trike itself. “Come on, do I have to do everything myself?” he demanded.

  “I didn’t know what you wanted, sir,” Hans said apologetically. “You said it was delicate…”

  “Huh. Okay. Come here. Take this end of the bag. I’ll take the other. It’s heavy. Now! The courtyard!”

  Half an hour later, performing in front of an audience of mostly useless gawpers (occasionally he’d need one of them to hold a spar in position while he tightened a guy wire), Rudi had the wing unpacked and tensioned. At eight meters long and weighing fifty kilos the Sabre 16 had been murder to world-walk across—it was too long to fit in the Post Office room—but it was about the smallest high performance trike wing he’d been able to find. At least he’d been able to unbolt the engine from the trike body. “Go get the trike,” he told Hans and the guards. “Push it gently, it’ll roll easily enough once you get it off the straw.”

  Another half hour passed by in what felt like seconds. By then he’d gotten the wing mounted on top of the trike’s mast and bolted together. The odd machine—a tricycle with a pair of bucket seats and a petrol engine with a propeller mounted on the back—was beginning to resemble a real, flyable ultralight. He was double-checking his work, making sure there was no sign of wear on any of the cables and that everything was secure, when someone cleared his throat behind him. He glanced round: it was Eorl Riordan, along with a couple of sergeants he didn’t recognize. “How’s it going?” asked Riordan, his tone deceptively casual.

  “It’s going all right, for now.” Rudi glanced up at the sky. Partial cloud cover, at least five thousand feet up—no problem for the time being. “Thing is, I’m about to trust my neck to this machine. There’s no backup and no air traffic control and no help if something goes wrong. So I want to make sure everything is perfect before I take her up.”

  “Good.” Riordan paused. “You’ve got a radio.”

  “Yeah. And binoculars.” He gestured to the small pile sitting beside the fuel drum. “If you need it, I can take a camera. But right now, this is going to be pretty crude, visual flying only in good weather, staying below two thousand feet, and if I see anything I’ll probably only be able to pinpoint it to within a mile or so. I max out at about fifty-five miles per hour, so that’s not going to take me far from here, and I’ve got enough fuel for a couple of three-hour-long flights, but I’d prefer not to go up twice in one day. It’s pretty physical.”

  “Three hours and a hundred and fifty miles ought to be enough.” Riordan nodded to himself. “What I wanted to say—I’d like you to do a circuit of the immediate area. If there’s any sign of troops on the ground within thirty miles, I’d like to know about it. We’re expecting a move from the southeast, and I know it’s well forested down there so I don’t expect miracles, but if you do see anything, it’s probably important. Also, I’d like you to take a look at Wergatfurt. We got an odd call half an hour ago, there’s something going on down there. Can you do that?”

  “Probably, yes.” Rudi patted his pocket. “I’m using relief maps from the other side for navigation, it’s close enough to mostly work, and the Wergat’s pretty hard to miss. The only thing I will say is, if the weather starts closing in I need to get down on the ground fast. The Hjalmar palace is about an hour, hour and ten minutes away from here, as the trike flies—it’ll cut into my ability to do a sweep around to the north. Are you sure you want that?”

  Riordan rubbed the side of his nose thoughtfully. “I think…if you don’t see signs of soldiers southeast of here within thirty miles, then I definitely want to know what’s going on down along the Wergat. If you see those soldiers, call me up and we’ll discuss it.” He nodded to himself. Then he pointed at Rudi’s survival kit. “Why the gun? Can you shoot from a moving aircraft?”

  “It’s not for when the trike’s flying: but if anything goes wrong while I’m forty miles out, over open forest…”

  Riordan nodded. “Good luck.”

  “Thank you, sir. I’ll try not to need it.”

  In the end, what saved them was Huw’s nose hair.

  It was, Huw sometimes reflected, one of those fine ironies of life that despite being unable to grow a proper beard, he suffered inordinately from the fine hairs that clogged his nostrils. Nostril hair was neither sexy nor obviously problematic to people who didn’t have to put up with it: it was just…icky. That was the word Elena had used when she caught him in the bathroom with an open jar of Vaseline and one finger up a nostril. Yet it played seven shades of hell with his sense of smell, and had driven his teenage self into an orgy of nose-picking that resulted in a series of nosebleeds before he’d figured out what to do about it. And now…

  In the flashlight-lit wreckage of a building inside a shattered dome, standing before a wall with a tightly sealed doorway in it, his kid brother raised a fire ax and swung it down hard towards the left side of the door.

  As the ax struck the door, Huw, who was standing a good two meters behind and to the left of him, sneezed. The sneeze had been building up for some time, aggravated by the cold, damp air in this new world and the low priority Huw had attached to his manicure in the face of the mission of exploration. Nevertheless, the eruption took Huw by surprise, forcing him to screw his eyes shut and hunch his shoulders, turning his face towards the floor. The noise startled Yul, who began to turn to his right, towards Huw. The movement took him out of the direct line of the door. And it also surprised Elena, who was standing off to the right near the entrance to the building with her vicious little machine pistol at the ready. She ducked, and this took her out of the direct line of sight on the portal.

  Which was why they survived.

  As the ax blade bit into the edge of the door, there was a brilliant flash of violet-tinted light. Huw registered it as as flicker of red behind his closed eyelids and might have ignored it—but the rising noise that followed it was impossible to write off.

  “Ouch! What’s that—” Yul began.

  Huw, opening his eyes and straightening up, grabbed his brother’s arm, and yanked. “Run!”

  The hissing sound from the edge of the door grew louder; the center of the door bowed inward slightly, as if under the pressure of a giant fist from their side. Yul barely spared it a glance before he dropped the axe and took to his heels. Huw was a stride behind him. Two seconds brought them to the twilit entrance to the room. “Hit the ground!” yelled Huw, catching one glimpse of Elena’s uncomprehending face as he threw himself forward and rolled sideways, away from the open doorway.

  Behind them, the creaking door—far thinner than Huw had realized—creaked once more, and gave way. All hell broke loose.

  The hissing and whistling gave way to a deep roaring, and the breeze in Huw’s face began to strengthen. Huw glanced over his shoulder once, straining to look over the length of his body towards the inner chamber. A strange mist curdled out of the air, obscuring whatever process was at work there. The wind was still strengthening. “Take cover!” he called out. “There’s hard vacuum on the other side of that—thing—watch out for flying debris!” It’ll blow itself out soon, he told himself. Won’t it? A sudden frisson of fear raised the hair on the back of his neck: That skeleton was old, the door can’t have held in a vacuum that long. So something’s pumping the air on the other side out, something that’s still working…

  But that didn’t make sense. Come on, Huw, think! The wind wasn’t slackening. Dust and leaves blew past, vanishing towards the gulping maw behind the doorway. Huw pushed himself up on hands and knees and began to crawl sideways, away from the damaged front of the building. He waved to Yul and Elena, beckoning them after. The seconds stretched o
ut endlessly. The wind was refusing to die. “Meet me behind the building!” He yelled, jabbing his hands to indicate the direction. Yul raised a thumb and began to crawl away, tracking round the building.

  Once Huw was away from the frontage, he risked standing up. Out of the direct line of the door, the wind was a barely noticeable breeze. “Huh.” He slapped the knees of his fatigues, then hurried round to meet Yul and Elena. It’s still running, he realized. Can’t be a pump; it’d take a jet engine to shift that much mass flow. He glanced around. A nasty idea was inching its way into his mind: Utterly preposterous, but…

  “Well, bro, what do you reckon?”

  Yul was characteristically unfazed by his near-miss. Elena, however, was anything but pleased: “What were you playing at? Hitting that thing with an ax, we could all have been killed!”

  “It looked like a door to me,” Yul shrugged.

  “Did you see the flash—”

  “Flash?” Huw glanced at her. “There was a flash?”

  “Yes, a bright flash of light as the big oaf here hit it!” Elena swatted Yul on the arm. “You could have been killed!” She chided him. Then she glared at Huw. “What were you playing at?”

  “I’m not sure yet.” Huw licked his left index finger and held it up to feel the breeze. “Yes, it’s still going. Hmm.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure,” Huw said slowly, “but I’ll tell you what I think. It was behind the door, sealed in until Yul broke something. It’s got hard vacuum on the other side. like a, a hole in space. Not a black hole, there’s no gravitational weirdness, but like—imagine a wormhole leading into yet another world? Like the thing we do when we world-walk, only static rather than dynamic? And the universe it leads to is one where there’s no planet Earth. You’d come out in interplanetary space.”

  “But why—”

  Huw rolled his eyes. “Why would anyone want such a thing? How would I know? Maybe they used to keep a space station there, as some kind of giant pantry? You put one of those doors in your closet, build airtight rooms on the other side of it, and you’ll never have to worry about where to keep your clothes again—it gives a whole new meaning to wardrobe space. But you keep an airtight door in front of the—call it a portal—just in case.”

  He gestured around the dome. “Something bad happened here, a long time ago. Centuries, probably. The guy with the perfect teeth was trying to hide in the closet, but didn’t make it. Over time, something went wrong on the other side—the space station or whatever you call it drifted off site—leaving the portal pointing into interplanetary space. And then we came along and fucked with the protective door.”

  Elena’s eyes widened. “But won’t it suck all the air out?”

  Huw shrugged. “Not our problem. Anyway, it’ll take thousands of years, at a minimum. There’s plenty of time for us to come back and drop a concrete hatch over it.” He brightened: “Or an airlock! Get some pressure suits and we can go take a look at it! A portal like that, if we can figure out how it works—” he stopped, almost incoherent with the sudden shock of enlightenment. “Holy Sky Father, Lightning Child, and Crone,” he whispered.

  “What is it, bro?” Yul looked concerned. “Are you feeling alright?”

  “I’ve got to get back to base and report to the duke right now.” Huw took a deep breath. “This changes everything.”

  After two days aboard the Northern Continental, Miriam was forced to reevaluate her opinion of railroad travel—even in luxury class. Back when she was newly married she and Ben had taken a week to go on a road trip, driving down into North Carolina and then turning west and north. They’d spent endless hours crawling across Illinois, the landscape barely changing, marking the distance they’d covered by the way they had to tune the radio to another station every couple of hours, the only marker of time the shifting patterns of the clouds overhead.

  This was, in a way, worse: and in another way, much better. Travel via the Northern Continental was like being sentenced to an enforced vacation in a skinny luxury hotel room on wheels. Unfortunately, New British hotels didn’t sport many of the necessities a motel back home would provide, such as air-conditioning and TV, much less luxuries like a health suite and privacy. Everything was kept running by a small army of liveried stewards, bustling in and out—and Miriam hated it. “I feel like I can’t relax,” she complained to Burgeson at one point: “I’ve got no space to myself!” And no space to plug her notebook computer in, for that matter.

  He shrugged. “Hot and cold running service is half of what first-class travel is all about,” he pointed out. “If the rich didn’t surround themselves with armies of impoverished unfortunates, how would they know they were well off?”

  “Yes, but that’s not the point…” Back in Baron Henryk’s medieval birdcage she’d at least been able to shunt the servants out of her rooms. Over here, such behavior would draw entirely the wrong kind of attention. She waved a hand in wide circles, spinning an imaginary hamster wheel. “I feel like I’m acting in a play with no script, on a stage in front of an audience I can’t see. And if I step out of character—the character they want me to play—the reviewers will start snarking behind my back.”

  “Welcome to my world.” He smiled lopsidedly. “It doesn’t get any better after a decade, let me assure you.”

  “Yes, but—” Miriam stopped dead, a sarcastic response on the tip of her tongue, as the door at the carriage end opened and a bellboy came in, pushing a cart laden with clean towels for the airliner-toilet-sized bathroom. “You see what I mean?” she asked plaintively when he’d gone.

  The train inched across the interior at a laborious sixty miles per hour, occasionally slowing as it rattled across cast-iron bridges, hauling its way up the long slope of the mountains. Three or four times a day it wheezed to a temporary halt while oil and water hoses dropped their loads into the locomotive’s bunkers, and passengers stretched their legs on the promenade platform. Once or twice a day it paused in a major station for half an hour. Often Miriam recognized the names, but as provincial capitals or historic towns, not as the grand cities they had become in this strange new world. But sometimes they were just new to her.

  On the first full day of the voyage (it was hard to think of anything so protracted as a train journey) she left the train for long enough to buy a stack of newspapers and a couple of travel books from the stand at the end of the platform at Fort Kinnaird. The news was next to impenetrable without enlisting Erasmus as an interpreter, and some of the stuff she came across in the travel books made her skin crawl. Slavery was, it seemed, illegal throughout the empire largely because hereditary indentured servitude was so much more convenient; one particular account of the suppression of an uprising in South America by the Royal Nipponese Ronin Brigade left her staring out of the window in a bleak, reflective trance for almost an hour. She was not surprised by the brutality of the transplanted Japanese soldiers, raised in the samurai tradition and farmed out as mercenaries to the imperial dynasty by their daimyo; but the complacent attitude to their practices exhibited by the travel writer, a middle-aged Anglican parson’s wife from Hanoveria, shocked her rigid. Crucifying serfs every twenty feet along the railway line from Manaus to São Paulo was simply a necessary reestablishment of the natural order, the correction of an intolerable upset by the ferocious but civilized and kindly police troops of the Brazilian Directorate. (All of whose souls were in any case bound for hell: the serfs because they were misguided papists and the samurai because they were animists and Buddhists, the author felt obliged to note.)

  And then there was the other book, and the description of the French occupation of Mesopotamia, which made the New British Empire look like a bastion of liberal enlightenment…

  What am I doing here? she asked herself. I can’t live in this world! And is there any point even trying to make it a better place? I could be over in New York getting myself into the Witness Protection Program…

  On the second day, she gav
e in to the inevitable. “What’s this book you keep trying to get me to read?” she asked, after breakfast.

  Erasmus gave her a long look. “Are you sure?” he asked. “If you’re concerned about your privacy—”

  “Give.” She held out a hand. “You want me to read it, right?”

  He looked at her for a while, then nodded and passed her a book that had been sitting on the writing desk in full view, all along. “I think you’ll find it stimulating.”

  “Let’s see.” She turned to the flyleaf. “Animal husbandry?” She closed it and glared at him. “You’re having me on!”

  “Why don’t you turn to page forty-six?” he asked mildly.

  “Huh?” She swallowed acid: breakfast seemed to have disagreed with her. “But that’s—” she opened it at the right page “—oh, I see.” She shook her head. “What do I do if someone steals it?”

  “Don’t use a bookmark.” He was serious. “And if someone does steal it, pray to the devil that they’re a fellow traveler.”

  “Oh.” She stared at the real title page, her brow furrowed: The Ethical Foundations of Equality, by Sir Adam Burroughs. “It’s a philosophy textbook?”

  “A bit more than that.” Burgeson’s cheek twitched. “More like four to ten years’ hard labor for possession.”

  “Really…” She licked her lips. It was a hot day, the track was uneven, and between her clammy skin and her delicate stomach she was feeling mildly ill. “Can you give me a synopsis?”

  “No.” He grinned at her. “But I should like it very much if you would give me one.”

  “Whoa.” She felt her ears flush. “And I thought you were being a perfect gentleman!”

  He looked at her anxiously. “Did I say something offensive?”