The Trade of Queens tmp-6

by Charles Stross

  “Did the man who sent you here wear a black coat, by any chance? A party commissioner called Reynolds?”

  Lin shook his head. “Oh no,” he said earnestly. “The doctor sent me.” His nostrils flared with evident disdain: “Dr. ven Hjalmar.”

  “Would someone,” Erasmus said quietly but forcefully, “explain to me what exactly is happening?”

  “I think I can put it together,” said Miriam. “Lin, Dr. ven Hjalmar is working with Commissioner Reynolds, isn’t he? No need to confirm or deny anything—your brother and I had a conversation.”

  Lin nodded. “I was sent to remove a, a party radical who was opposed to our ends, in the doctor’s words.” He stared at Erasmus. “What will you do now?”

  “Have you met Stephen Reynolds?” Erasmus asked quietly. “He isn’t one for whom loyalty is a two-way street.”

  “I’ve discussed this with James,” said Miriam. “Lin, I’ve been negotiating a, a deal with Mr. Burgeson here. It’s similar to the arrangement your elders came to with the security commissioner.”

  “The difference is, I don’t send death squads to murder my rivals,” Erasmus added.

  Miriam looked straight at Lin: “That’s why I’ve been dealing with him. The arrangement can be extended to include your relatives. But not if you shoot him, or hand us over to the Internal Security directorate. Or Dr. ven Hjalmar.”

  Lin looked straight back at her. “You say this man is a friend of yours,” he said. “Do you mean that? Are you claiming privilege of kinship? Or is it just a business arrangement to which no honor attaches?”

  Miriam blinked. She tightened her grip on Erasmus’s shoulder as she felt him breathe in, preparing to say something potentially disastrous—“Erasmus is a personal friend of mine, Lin. This isn’t just business.” Which was true, she realized as she said it; not that they had gotten up to anything, not that there was substance to the cover story Burgeson’s bodyguards and enemies believed, but she could conceive of it, at some future time. “So yes, I claim privilege of kinship, and if you touch one hair on his head I’ll claim blood feud on you and yours. Is that what you want?”

  Lin looked away, then shook his head.

  “Good. We understand each other, I hope? Do you and yours claim Dr. ven Hjalmar?”

  Lin’s eyes widened. “Not yet. Nan was talking about finding him a wife, but—”

  “Then you have no claim if I declare him outlaw and anathema and deal with him accordingly?”

  He began to smile. “If your arrangement for the security of your clan can stretch to some more bodies—none whatsoever. What do you have in mind?”

  “First, I think we need to deliver Mr. Burgeson safely to South Station, where a train is waiting for him.” She felt Erasmus preparing to speak again. “And then I, and my sworn retainers, have an appointment with Dr. ven Hjalmar, and possibly with Commissioner Reynolds. Would you like to come along?”

  “It will be my pleasure,” Lin said gravely. He looked directly at Erasmus. “If you’d both care to come downstairs, my cousins and I have a wagon waiting on the other side of the wall of worlds. We were to use it to dispose of the evidence, but I think it will work just as well with living passengers.” He returned his pistol to a pocket holster, then raised an eyebrow. “Which platform do you want?”

  * * *

  The miracles of modern communication technology: With two-way radios, the survivors of Reynolds’s simultaneous raids called in and made contact within an hour. Miriam, her head pounding, hugged Erasmus briefly. “Try to take care,” she murmured in his ear.

  “My dear, I have every intention of doing so.” He grinned lopsidedly.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Get to my train on time, with the help of these fine fellows.” Behind her, Lin was filling two of his fellows in on the turn events had taken. “Then I shall first signal Sir Adam. Stephen’s gone too far this time—setting up a parallel arrangement with these cousins of yours and trying to frame me for subversion. I have my own supporters within the Freedom Guard; if necessary we can take it to the street.” He looked worried. “But that has its own price. What do you intend?”

  “I’m going to find my people,” she told him. “And then we’re going to take out the trash. Stay away from the old Polis headquarters building for a couple of hours, Erasmus. You might want to turn up later—around six, maybe—to take charge of the cleanup operation and to assemble a cover story.” She bit her lip. “It’s not going to be pretty. Reynolds is a problem, but the doctor is a worse one: a sociopath with the background and intellect to raise his own version of the Clan, given half a chance.”

  “You think your doctor is more important than Reynolds?”

  “I know it.” She looked him in the eye. “You and your boss can deal with Reynolds; he’s an attack dog, but if you put a chain on his collar you can keep him under control. But ven Hjalmar doesn’t wear a collar in the first place.”

  “Then you should take care,” he said gravely. “I should be going. But … take care. I would very much like to see you again.”

  “You too.” She leaned forward and, trying not to think too hard about her intentions, kissed him. She was aiming for his cheek, but he turned, and for a moment their lips touched. “Oh. Go on.”

  “Until this evening,” he said, coloring slightly as he took a step backwards, turning towards the cart, his temporary chauffeurs, and the somnolent mule between the traces.

  Miriam waited until he looked away, then walked over to Lin’s side. “Let’s do it,” she said. “My people first; then the Polis building.”

  * * *

  Three o’clock in the afternoon, and for Commissioner Reynolds the day was not going terribly well.

  In the communications room downstairs the telautographs were buzzing and clattering like deranged locusts; telespeakers clutching their earpieces hammered away on their keyboards, transcribing incoming messages from the snatch squads and the delivery teams charged with ferrying the detainees to the Burke. Periodically one of the supervisors or overofficers would collate a list of the most important updates and hurry them upstairs, where Reynolds would receive them in stony silence.

  “Ninety-six subjects isolated at Irongate and consigned for detention. Thirty-one confirmed as received by the Burke, the others still being in transit. Slow, too slow. Site B in Boston, heavy gunfire—damn you, man, what do you mean, heavy gunfire returned? That group has gun carriers! What’s going on out there?”

  The doctor, placidly munching on a dessert platter, paused to dab at his lips with a napkin. “I told you to expect organized resistance from that crowd,” he reminded Reynolds.

  “What is Site B putting up against our people?” Reynolds demanded.

  The overstaffofficer paled: “Sir, there is word of machine-gun fire from inside the grounds. Casualties are three dead and eight injured so far; the supervisor-lieutenant on site has cordoned off the area and our men are exchanging fire with the defenders. One of the gun carriers was damaged by some sort of artillery piece when it tried to force the front gates.”

  “Damaged, by god?” Reynolds glared at him. “This was how long ago? Why haven’t you called on the navy?”

  “Sir, I can’t order a shore bombardment of one of our own cities! If you want to request one it has to go up to the Joint Command Council for authorization—”

  Reynolds cut him off with a chopping gesture. “Later. They’re pinned down for now, yes? What about Site C?”

  “Site C was overrun on schedule, sir. One casualty, apparently self-inflicted—negligent discharge. Six prisoners consigned for detention and received by the Burke. Two dead, killed resisting arrest or attempting to flee.”

  “Good.” Reynolds nodded jerkily. “Site S?”

  “I don’t have a report for Site S, sir.” The overstaffofficer riffled through his message sheets, increasingly concerned. “Sir, by your leave—”

  “Go. Find out what happened. Report back. Dismissed.” Reyn
olds turned to ven Hjalmar as his adjutant made himself scarce. “Damn it, you’d almost think—”

  “They have radio—telautograph, I think you call it? Between sites. Between people.” Ven Hjalmar was clearly irritated. “I told you that timing was essential.”

  “But how can they have notified the—my men cut all the wires! The transmission wires are vulnerable, yes?”

  “Transmission wires?” Ven Hjalmar squinted. “What, you mean for transmitting the wireless signal? They don’t use wires for that—just a stub antenna, so big.” He spread the fingers of one hand. “I think we may have found a regrettable source of confusion: Their radios—the telautograph sets—are pocket-sized. They’ll all be carrying them, at least one per group when they’re off base—”

  “Nonsense.” Reynolds stared at him. “Pocket telautographs? That’s ridiculous.”

  “Really?” Ven Hjalmar pushed his chair back from the table. “I was under the impression that the Lee family had taught you that when visitors from other universes come calling it’s a good idea to keep an open mind.” He stood up. “Sitting around up here and trying to convey the appearance of being in charge of the situation is all very well, but perhaps it would be a good idea to take a more hands-on approach before the enemy get inside your decision loop—”

  A deep thudding sound vibrated through the walls and floor, rattling the crockery and shaking a puff of plaster dust from the ceiling.

  “Damn.” Reynolds flipped open the lid of his holster and headed towards the door. “We appear to have visitors,” he said dryly. He glanced back at ven Hjalmar. “Come along, now.”

  The doctor nodded and bent to pick up his medical bag, which he tucked beneath one arm, keeping a grip on the handle with his other hand. “As you wish.”

  The lights flickered as Reynolds marched out into the corridor. The two guards snapped to attention. “Follow me,” he told them. “This fellow is with us.” He strode towards the staircase leading down to the operations and communications offices below, just as a burst of rapid gunfire reverberated up the stairwell. “Huh.” Reynolds drew his gun.

  “We need to get to ground level as fast as possible,” ven Hjalmar said urgently. “If we’re at ground level I can get you out of here, but if we’re—”

  “The enemy are at ground level,” Reynolds cut him off. “They appear to be—” He listened. More gunfire, irregular and percussive, rattled the walls like an out-of-control drummer. “We can stop them ascending, however.” He gestured his guards forward, to take up positions to either side of the stairs. “We wait here until the communications staff have organized a barricade—”

  “But we’ve got to get down!” Ven Hjalmar was agitated now. “If we aren’t at ground level I can’t world-walk, which means—”

  But Commissioner Reynolds was never to hear the end of ven Hjalmar’s sentence.

  Sir Alasdair and his men—just two had stayed behind at Site B to keep the security militia engaged—had exfiltrated to the backwoods landscape of the Gruinmarkt. The vicinity of Boston was well-mapped, crisscrossed by tracks and occasional roads and villages: maps, theodolites, and sensitive inertial platforms had built up a good picture of the key landmarks over the months since Miriam had pioneered a business start-up a couple of miles from Erasmus Burgeson’s pawnbroker shop (and Leveler quartermaster’s cellar). The Polis headquarters building, not far from Faneuil Hall, was a site of interest to Clan Security; with confirmation from Lin Lee that Reynolds and ven Hjalmar were present, it took Sir Alasdair less than an hour to arrange a counterattack.

  Griben ven Hjalmar was not a soldier; he had no more (and no less) knowledge of the defensive techniques evolved by the Clan’s men of arms over half a century of bloody internicine feuding than any other civilian. Stephen Reynolds was not a civilian, but had only an outsider’s insight into the world-walkers. Both of them knew, in principle, of the importance of doppelgangering their safe houses—of protecting them against infiltration by enemy attackers capable of bypassing doors and walls by entering from the world next door.

  However, both of them had independently made different—and fatal—risk calculations. Reynolds had assumed that because Elder Huan’s “Eastern cousins” came from a supposedly primitive world, and had demonstrated no particular talent for mayhem within his ambit, the most serious risk they presented was the piecemeal violence of the gun and the knife. And ven Hjalmar had assumed that the presence of armed guards downstairs (some of them briefed and alert to the risk of attackers appearing out of nowhere in their midst) would be sufficient.

  What neither of them had anticipated was a systematic assault on the lobby of the headquarters building, conducted by a lance of Clan Security troops under the command of Sir Alasdair ven Hjorth-Wasser—who had been known as Sergeant Al “Tiny” Schroder, at the end of his five years in the USMC—troops in body armor, with grenades and automatic weapons, who had spent long years honing their expertise in storming defended buildings in other worlds. Nor had they anticipated Sir Alasdair’s objective: to suppress the defenders for long enough to deliver a wheelbarrow load of ANNM charges, emplace them around the load-bearing walls, and world-walk back to safety. Two hundred kilograms of ammonium nitrate/nitromethane explosives, inside the six-story brick and stone structure, would be more than enough to blow out the load-bearing walls and drop the upper floors; building codes and construction technologies in New Britain lagged behind the United States by almost a century.

  It was an anonymous and brutal counterattack, and left Sir Alasdair (and Commissioner Burgeson) with acid indigestion and disrupted sleep for some days, until the last of the bodies pulled from the rubble could finally be identified. If either ven Hjalmar or Reynolds had realized in time that their location had been betrayed, the operation might have failed, as would the cover story: a despicable Royalist cell’s attack on the Peace and Justice Subcommittee’s leading light, the heroic death of Commissioner Reynolds as he led the blackcoats in a spirited defense of the People’s Revolution, and the destruction of the dastardly terrorists by their own bombs. But it was a success. And as the cover-up operation proceeded—starting with the delivery of the captives held on board the Burke to a rather different holding area ashore, under the control of guards outside the chain of command of the Directorate of Internal Security—the parties to the fragile conspiracy were able to breathe their respective sighs of relief.

  The worst was over; but now the long haul was just beginning.

  * * *

  It was a humid morning near Boston; with a blustery breeze blowing, and cloud cover lowering across the sky, fat drops of rain spattered across the sidewalk and speckled the gray wooden wall of the compound.

  The wall around the compound had sprung up almost overnight, enclosing a chunk of land on the green outskirts of Wellesley—land which included a former Royal Ordnance artillery works, and a wedge of rickety brick row houses trapped between the works and the railroad line. One day, a detachment of Freedom Guards had showed up and gone door to door, telling the inhabitants that they were being moved west with their factory, moving inland towards the heart of the empire, away from threat of coastal invasion. There had been no work, and no money to pay the workers, for five months; the managers had bartered steel fabrications and stockpiled gun barrels for food to keep their men from starvation. Word that the revolutionary government did indeed want them to resume production, and had prepared a new home for them and would in due course feed and pay them, overcame much resistance. Within two days the district’s life had drained away on flatbeds and boxcars, rolling west towards a questionable future. The last laborers to leave had pegged out the line of the perimeter; the first to arrive unloaded timber from the sidings by the arsenal and began to build the wall and watchtowers. They did so under the guns of their camp guards, for these men were prisoners, captured royalist soldiers taken by the provisional government.

  After they’d built the walls of the prison they’d occupy, and the watchtowers a
nd guardhouses for their captors, the prisoners were set to work building their own cabins on the empty ground between two converging railroad tracks. These, too, they built walls around. They built lots of walls; and while they labored, they speculated quietly among themselves about who would get the vacant row houses.

  They did not have long to wait to find out.

  Family groups of oddly dressed folk, who spoke haltingly or with a strong Germanic accent, began to arrive one morning. The guards were not obsequious towards them, exactly, but it was clear that their position was one of relative privilege. They had the haunted expressions of refugees, uprooted from home and hearth forever. Some of them seemed resentful and slightly angry about their quarters, which was inexplicable: The houses were not the mansions of rich merchants or professionals, but they were habitable, and had sound roofs and foundations. Where had they come from? Nobody seemed to know, and speculation was severely discouraged. After a couple of prisoners disappeared—one of them evidently an informer, the other just plain unlucky—the others learned to keep their mouths shut.

  The prisoners were kept busy. After a few more carriageloads of displaced persons arrived, some of the inmates were assigned to new building work, this time large, well-lit drafting offices illuminated by overhead skylights. Another gang found themselves unloading wagonloads of machine tools, lightweight precision-engineering equipment to stand beside the forges and heavy presses left behind by the artillery works. Something important was coming, that much was clear. But what?

  * * *

  “What is this—hovel?” demanded the tall woman with the babe in arms, pausing on the threshold. She spoke hochsprache, with an aristocratic Northern accent; the politicals in their striped shirts, burdened beneath her trunk, didn’t understand her.

  Heyne shrugged, then turned to the convicts. “Leave it here and report back to barracks,” he told them, speaking English. He watched as they deposited the trunk, none too softly, and shuffled away with downturned faces. Then he gestured back into the open doorway. “It’s where you’re going to live for a while,” he told her bluntly. “Be thankful; this nation’s in the grip of revolt, but you’ve got a roof over your head and food on the table, and guards to keep you safe.”