The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3)

by Charles Stross

  He gestured in the direction of Baron Horst of Lorsburg, one of the few conservatives to have been conclusively proven to have been on the outside of the coup attempt – a tiresomely business-minded fellow, fussy and narrowly legalistic. ‘Sir, I believe you wish to express an opinion?’

  Lorsburg removed his bifocals and nervously rubbed them on his shirt sleeve. ‘You appear to be saying that Clan Security can’t protect us. Is that right?’

  ‘Clan Security can’t take on the United States government, no, not if they develop world-walking machines.’ Riordan nodded patiently. ‘Do you have something more to say?’

  Lorsburg hunkered down in his seat. ‘If you can’t save us, what good are you?’ he asked querulously.

  ‘There’s a difference between saying we can’t win a direct fight, and not being able to save you. We can save the Clan – but not if we sit and wait for the Anglischprache to come calling. What we can’t save are the fixed assets: our estates and vassals. Anything we can’t carry. We are descended from migrant tinkers and traders, and I am afraid that we will have to become such again, at least for a while. Those of you who think the American army will not come here are welcome to go back to your palaces and great houses and pretend we can continue to do business as usual. You might be right – in which case, the rest of us will sheepishly rejoin you in due course. But for the time being, I submit that our best hope lies elsewhere.

  ‘We could cross over to America, and live in hiding among a people who hate and fear us. The Clan has some small accumulated capital; the banking committee has invested heavily in real estate, investment banks, and big corporations over the past fifty years. We would be modestly wealthy, but no longer the rulers and lords of all we survey, as we are here; and we would live in fear of a single loose-tongued cousin unraveling our network, by accident or malice. We could only survive if all of us took a vow of silence and held to it. And I leave to your imagination the difficulty of maintaining our continuity, the braids –

  ‘But there is a better alternative. My lady voh Thorold?’

  Olga stood up. ‘I speak not as the director of intelligence operations, but as a confidante of the queen-widow,’ she said, turning to face the room. ‘As we have known for some time, there are other worlds than just this one and that of the Anglischprache. Before his illness, Duke Lofstrom detailed a protégé of Helge’s to conduct a survey. Helge has continued to press for these activities – we now know of four other worlds beyond the initial three, but they are not considered suitable for exploitation. If you desire the details, I will be happy to describe them later. For the time being, our best hope lies in New Britain, where Her Majesty is attempting to establish negotiations with the new revolutionary government – ’ Uproar.

  ‘I say! Silence!’ Riordan’s bellow cut through the shouting. ‘I’ll drag the next man who interrupts out and horse-whip him around the walls! Show some respect, damn you!’

  The hubbub subsided. Olga waited for the earl to nod at her, then continued. ‘Unlike the Anglischprache of America, we have good relations with the revolutionaries who have formed the provisional government of New Britain. We have, if nothing else, a negotiable arrangement with our relatives there; I’m sure a diplomatic accommodation can be reached.’ She stared at Lorsburg, who was looking mulishly unconvinced. ‘Her Majesty is a personal friend of the minister of propaganda. We supplied their cells in Boston with material and aid prior to the abdication and uprising. Unlike the situation in the United States, we have no history of large-scale law-breaking to prejudice them against us; nothing but our aristocratic rank in the Gruinmarkt, which we must perforce shed in any case if we abandon our way of life here and move to a new world.’ She paused, voluntarily this time: Lorsburg had raised a hand. ‘Yes? What is it?’

  ‘This is well and good, and perhaps we would be safe from the Americans there – for a while. But you’re asking us to abandon everything, to take to the roads and live like vagabonds, or throw ourselves on the mercy of a dubious cabal of regicidal peasants! How do you expect us to subsist in this new world? What shall we do?’

  ‘We will have to work.’ Olga smiled tightly. ‘You are quite right; it’s not going to be easy. We will have to give up much that we have become accustomed to. On the other hand, we will be alive, we will be able to sleep at night without worrying that the next knock on the door may be agents of the state come to arrest us, and, as I said, there is a business plan. Nobody will hold a gun to your heads and force you to join those of us who intend to establish first a refuge and then a new trade and source of wealth in New Britain – if you wish to wait here and guard your estates, then I believe the Council will be happy to leave you to it. But there is one condition: If the Americans come, we don’t want you spilling our plans to their interrogators. So I am going to ask everyone to leave the room now. Those of you who wish to join our plan, may come back in; those who want no truck with it should go home. If you change your minds later, you can petition my lord the earl for a place. But if you stay for the next stage of this briefing you are committing yourselves to join us in New Britain – or to the silence of the grave.’

  WAR TRAIN ROLLING

  Holed up back in a motel room with a bottle of Pepsi and a box of graham crackers, Mike opened up his planner and spread his spoils on the comforter – room service had tidied the room while he’d been burglarizing Miriam’s booby-trapped home. He was still shaking with the aftermath of the adrenaline surge from the near-miss with the police watch team. Thirty seconds and they’d have made me. Thirty seconds and – Stop that: you’ve got a job to do.

  Two items sat on the bed: a cassette and a bulging organizer, its edges rounded and worn by daily use. He added the remaining contents of his shopping bag, spoils of a brief excursion into a Walgreens: a cheap Far Eastern walkman, and a box of batteries. ‘Let’s get you set up,’ he muttered to the machine, then did a double take. Talking to myself. Huh. It wasn’t a terribly good sign. It had been a couple of days – since his abortive meeting with Steve Schroeder – since Mike had exchanged more words with anyone than it took to rent a car. It wasn’t as if he was a gregarious type, but hanging out here with his ass on the line had him feeling horribly exposed. And there were loose life-ends left untied, from Oscar the tomcat (who had probably moved in with the neighbors who kept overfeeding him by now) to his dad and his third wife (whom he didn’t dare call; even if they weren’t in custody, their line was almost certainly on a fully-staffed watch by now). ‘The time to throw in the towel is when you start talking back to yourself, right? Oh no it isn’t, Mike . . .’ The batteries were in, so he hit the playback button.

  A beep, then a man’s voice: ‘Miriam? Andy here. Listen, a little bird told me about what happened yesterday and I think it sucks. They didn’t have any details, but I want you to know if you need some freelance commissions you should give me a call. Talk later? Bye.’

  Mike paused, then rewound. Andy went on his notepad, along with freelance commissions. Probably nothing useful, but . . .

  Click. ‘Hi? Paulette here, it’s seven-thirty, listen, I’ve been doing some thinking about what we dug up before they fired us. Miriam, honey, let’s talk. I don’t want to rake over dead shit, but there’s some stuff I need to get straight in my head. Can I come around?’

  He sat up. Fired, he wrote on his pad, and underlined the word twice. This Paulette woman had said we. So Miriam had been fired. ‘When?’ That was the trouble with answerphones; the new solid-state ones had timestamps, but the old cassette ones were less than useful in that department. On the other hand, she hadn’t wiped these messages. So they’d arrived pretty close to whatever had brought her into contact with the Clan.

  Next message: a man’s voice, threatening. ‘Bitch. We know where you live. Heard about you from our mutual friend Joe. Keep your nose out of our business or you’ll be fucking sorry.’

  Mike stopped dead, his shoulders tense. Joe, he wrote, then circled the name heavily and added a couple of
question marks. Not Clan? he added. The Clan weren’t in the cold-call trade; concrete overcoats and car bombs were more their style. Still, coming on top of Paulette’s message this was . . . suggestive. Miriam had been fired from her job, along with this Paulette woman, for digging up something. ‘She’s a journalist, it’s what she does.’ Next thing, there was a threatening phone call. Some time not long after, Miriam disappeared. Some time after that, her house was systematically searched for computers and electronic media, by someone who wasn’t interested in old paperwork. And then it was booby-trapped and staked out by the FTO . . . ‘Stop right there!’ Mike flipped the organizer open and turned to the address divider. ‘Paulet, Paulette, Powell-et? How do you spell it, it’s a first name . . .’

  He read for a long time, swearing occasionally at Miriam’s spidery handwriting and her copious list of contacts – She’s a journalist, it’s what she does – until he hit paydirt a third of the way through: Milan, Paulette. Business intelligence division, The Weatherman. That was where Miriam had worked, last time he looked. ‘Bingo,’ Mike muttered. There was a cell number and a street address. He made a note of it; then, systematic to the end, he went back to the cassette tape.

  The next message was a call from Steve Schroeder – his voice familiar – asking Miriam to get in touch. It was followed by an odd double beep: some kind of tape position marker, probably. Then the rest of the tape: a farrago of political polls, telesales contacts, and robocalls that took Mike almost an hour to skim. He took notes, hoping some sort of pattern would appear, but nothing jumped out at him. Probably the calls were exactly what they sounded like: junk. Which left him with a couple of names, one of which seemed promising, and a conundrum. Someone had threatened Miriam, right after she’d been fired for stumbling over something. Was it Clan-related? And was this Paulette woman involved? ‘There’s only one way to find out,’ Mike told himself unhappily. His stomach rumbled. ‘Time to hit the road again.’

  *

  The coded electrogram from Springfield followed a circuitous course to Erasmus Burgeson’s desk.

  Huw’s bluff had worked; the cadre at the post office were inexperienced and undisciplined, excited volunteers barely out of the first flush of revolutionary fervor, more enthusiastic than efficient. There was no command structure as such, no uniforms and no identity papers, and as yet very little paranoia: The threats they expected to defend the post office against were the crude and obvious violence of counterrevolutionary elements, fists and guns rather than the sly subtlety of wreckers and saboteurs from within. Their revolution had not yet begun to eat its offspring.

  When Huw claimed to be part of a small reconnaissance cell in the countryside and asked to send a message to the stratospheric heights of the party organization, he was met at first with gape-jawed incomprehension and then an eagerness to oblige that was almost comically servile. It was only when he and Yul prepared to slip away that anyone questioned the wisdom of allowing strangers to transmit electrograms to New London without clearance, and by the time old Johnny Miller, former deputy postmaster of the imperial mail (now wearing his union hat openly), expressed the doubtful opinion that perhaps somebody ought to have detained the strangers pending the establishment of their bona fides, Huw and Yul were half a mile down the road.

  Despite deputy postmaster Miller’s misgivings, the eighty-word electrogram Miriam had so carefully crafted arrived in the central monitoring and sorting hall at Breed’s Hill, whereupon an eagle-eyed (and probably bored) clerk recognized the office of the recipient and, for no very good reason, stamped it with a PARTY PRIORITY flag and sent it on its way.

  From Breed’s Hill – where in Miriam’s world one of the key battles of the American War of Independence had been fought – the message was encrypted in a standard party cypher and flashed down cables to the Imperial Postal Headquarters building on Manhattan Island, and thence to the Ministry of Propaganda, where the commissioner on duty in the message room saw its high priority and swore, vilely. Erasmus was not in town that day; indeed, was not due back for some time. But it was a PARTY PRIORITY cable. What to do?

  In the basement of the Ministry of Propaganda were numerous broadcasting rooms; and no fewer than six of these were given over to the letter talkers, who endlessly recited strings of words sapped of all meaning, words chosen for their clarity over the airwaves. So barely two hours after Huw and Yul had shown the cadre in Springfield two clean pairs of heels, a letter talker keyed his microphone and began to intone: ‘Libra, Opal, Furlong, Opal, Whisky, Trident’ – over the air on a shortwave frequency given over to the encrypted electrospeak broadcasts of the party’s network, a frequency that would be echoed by transmitters all over both Western continents, flooding the airwaves until Burgeson’s radio operator could not help but hear it.

  Which event happened in the operator’s room on board an armored war train fifty miles west of St. Anne, which stood not far from the site of Cincinatti in Miriam’s world. The operator, his ears encased in bulky headphones, handed the coded message with his header to the encryption sergeant, who typed it into his clacking, buzzing machine, and then folded the tape and handed it off to a messenger boy, who dashed from the compartment into the train’s main corridor and then along a treacherous, swaying armored tunnel to the command carriage where the commissioner of state propaganda sat slumped over a pile of newspapers, reading the day’s dispatches as he planned the next step in his media blitz.

  ‘What is it now?’ Erasmus asked, glancing up.

  The messenger boy straightened. ‘Sor, a cript for thee?’ He presented the roll of tape with both hands. ‘Came in over the airwaves, like.’

  ‘I see.’ The train clanked across a badly maintained crossing, swaying from side to side. Erasmus, unrolling the tape, drew the electric lamp down from overhead to illuminate the mechanical scratchings as he tried to focus on it. It had been under at least three pairs of eyeballs since arriving here; over the electrograph, that meant . . . He blinked. Miriam? She’s here? And she wants to talk? He wound back to the header at the start of the message that identified the sending station. Springfield. Burgeson chuckled humorlessly for a moment. HAVE INTERESTING PROPOSAL FOR YOU RE TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER AND FAMILY BUSINESS. To put that much in an uncoded message was a giveaway: It reeked of near-panic. She’d said something about her relatives being caught up in a civil war, hadn’t she? Interesting.

  Burgeson reached out with his left hand and yanked the bell rope, without taking his eyes off the message tape. A few seconds later Citizen Supervisor Philips stuck his head round the partition. ‘You called, citizen?’

  ‘Yes.’ Burgeson shoved the newspaper stack to one side, so that they overflowed the desk and drifted down across the empty rifle rack beside it. ‘Something urgent has come up back East. I need to be in Boston as soon as possible.’

  ‘Boston? What about the campaign, citizen?’

  ‘The campaign can continue without me for a couple of days.’ Burgeson stared at Philips. Dried-out and etiolated, the officer resembled a praying mantis in a black uniform: but he was an efficient organizer, indeed had pulled together the staff and crew for this campaign train at short notice. ‘We’ve hit New Brentford and Jensenville in the past two days, you’ve seen how I want things done: Occupy the local paper’s offices, vet the correspondents, deal with any who are unreliable and promote our cadres in their place. Continue to monitor as you move on.’ The two-thousand-ton armored war train, bristling with machine guns and black-clad Freedom Riders, was probably unique in history in having its own offset press and typesetting carriage; but as Erasmus had argued the point with Sir Adam, this was a war of public perception – and despite the technowizardry of the videography engineers, public perceptions were still shaped by hot metal type. ‘Keep moving, look for royal blue newspapers and ensure that you leave only red freedom-lovers in your wake.’

  ‘I think I can do that, sir.’ Philips nodded. ‘Difficult cases . . . ?’

  ‘Use your discret
ion.’ Here, have some rope; try not to hang yourself with it. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can. Meanwhile, when’s the next supply run back to Lynchburg departing?’

  ‘If it’s Boston you want, there’s an aerodrome near Raleigh that’s loyal,’ Philips offered. ‘I’ll wire them to put a scout at your disposal?’

  ‘Do that.’ Burgeson suppressed a shudder. Flying tended to make him airsick, even in the modern fully-enclosed mail planes. ‘I need to be there as soon as possible.’

  ‘Absolutely, citizen. I’ll put the wheels in motion at once.’ And, true to his word, almost as soon as Philips disappeared there came an almighty squeal of brakes from beneath the train.

  *

  The past week had been one long nightmare for Paulette Milan.

  She’d been a fascinated observer of Miriam’s adventures, in the wake of the horrible morning a year ago when they’d both lost their jobs; and later, when Miriam had sucked her into running an office for her – funneling resources to an extradimensional business startup – she’d been able to square it with her conscience because she agreed with Miriam’s goals. If the Clan, Miriam’s criminal extended family, could be diverted into some other line of business, that was cool. And if some of their money stuck to Paulie’s fingertips in the form of wages, well, as long as the wages weren’t coming in for anything illegal on her part, that was fine, too.