The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3)

by Charles Stross

  ‘You think he’s going to use me as a lever against you?’

  ‘It’s gone too far for that, I’m afraid. If he knows about your relatives and knows about our arrangement, he will see me as a direct threat. He’ll have to move fast, within the next hours or days. Your household is almost certainly under surveillance as an anomaly, possibly suspected of being a group of monarchists. Damn.’ He looked at her. ‘I really should inform Sir Adam immediately – if Stephen has acquired a secret cell of world-walking assassins, he needs to know. I wouldn’t put a coup attempt beyond him. Normally we should stay here for two or three hours at least, as if we were having a liaison. If I leave too soon, that would cause alarm. But if he’s moving against your people right now – ’

  ‘Wait.’ Miriam took his arm. ‘You’re forgetting we have radios . . .’

  *

  The morning had dawned bright with a thin cloudy overcast, humid and warm with a threat of summer evening storms to follow. Brilliana, her morning check on the security points complete, placed the go-bag she’d prepared for Helge on the table in the front guard room; then she went in search of Huw.

  She found him in one of the garden sheds behind a row of tomato vines, wiring up a row of instruments on a rough-topped table from which the plant pots had only just been removed. He didn’t notice her at first, and she stood in the doorway for a minute, watching his hands, content. ‘Good morning,’ she said eventually.

  He looked up then, smiling luminously. ‘My lady. What can I do for you?’

  She looked at the row of electronics. ‘It’s a nice day for a walk into town. Will your equipment suffer if you leave it for a few hours?’

  Obviously conflicted, Huw glanced at his makeshift workbench, then back at her. ‘I suppose – ’ He shook his head. Then he smiled again. ‘Yeah, I can leave it for a while.’ He rummaged in one of the equipment boxes by the foot of the table, then pulled a plastic sheet out and began to unfold it. ‘If you wouldn’t mind taking that corner?’

  They covered the electronics – Brilliana was fairly certain she recognized a regulated power supply and a radio transceiver – and weighted the sheet down with potsherds in case of rain and a leaky roof. Then Huw wiped his hands on a swatch of toweling. ‘This isn’t a casual stroll, is it?’ he asked.

  ‘No, but it needs to look like one.’ She eyed him up, evidently disapproving of his choice of jeans and a college sweatshirt. ‘You’ll need to get changed first. Background story: You’re a coachman, I’m a lady’s maid, and we’re on a morning off work. He’s courting her and she’s agreed to see the sights with him. I’ll meet you by the trades’ door in twenty minutes.’

  ‘Are you expecting trouble?’

  ‘I’m not expecting it, but I don’t want to be taken by surprise. Go!’

  (An observer keeping an eye on the Beckstein household that morning would have seen little to report. A pair of servants – he in a suit, worn but in good repair, and she in a black dress, clutch bag tightly gripped under her left elbow – departed in the direction of the streetcar stop. A door-to-door seller visited the rear entrance, was rebuffed. Two hours later, a black steamer – two men in the open-topped front, the passenger compartment hooded and dark – rumbled out of the garage and turned towards the main road. With these exceptions, the household carried on much as it had the day before.)

  ‘Where are we going?’ Huw asked Brilliana as they waited at the streetcar stop.

  ‘Downtown.’ She stared along the tracks. ‘Boston is safer than Springfield, but still . . . I want to take a look at the docks. And then the railway stations, north and south both. It’s best to have a man at my side: less risk of unwelcome misunderstandings.’

  ‘Oh.’ He sounded disappointed. ‘What else?’

  She slid her fingers through his waiting hand. ‘I thought if there is enough time after that, we could visit the fair on the common.’

  ‘That’s more like it.’

  ‘It’ll look good to the watchers.’ She squeezed his thumb, then leaned sideways, against his shoulder. ‘Assuming there are any. If there aren’t – by then we should know.’

  ‘Indeed.’ He paused. ‘I’m carrying, in case you were wondering.’

  ‘Good.’ With her free hand she shifted the strap of her bag higher on her shoulder. ‘Your knot . . . ?’

  ‘On my wrist-ribbon.’

  ‘That too.’ She relaxed slightly. ‘Oh look, a streetcar.’

  They rode together in silence on the open upper deck, she sitting primly upright, he discreetly attentive to her occasional remarks. There were few other passengers on the upper level this morning, and none who might be agents or Freedom Riders; the tracks were in poor repair and the car swayed like a drunk, shrieking and grating round corners. They changed streetcars near Haymarket Square, again taking the upper deck as the tram rattled its way towards the back bay.

  ‘What are we looking for?’ asked Huw.

  ‘Doppelgänger prisons.’ Brill looked away for a moment, checking the stairs at the rear of the car. ‘They use prison ships here. If you were a bad guy and were about to arrest a bunch of world-walkers, what would you – ’

  Rounding the corner of a block of bonded warehouses, the street-car briefly came in sight of the open water, and then the piers and cranes of the docks. A row of smaller ships lay tied up inside the harbor, their funnels clear of smoke or steam: In the water beyond, larger vessels lay at anchor. The economic crash, and latterly the state of emergency and the new government, had wreaked havoc with trade, and behind fences great pyramids and piles of break-bulk goods had grown, waiting for the flow of shipping to resume. Today there was some activity – a gang of stevedores was busy with one of the nearer ships, loading cartloads of sacks out of one of the ware-houses – but still far less than on a normal day.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Brill, pointing at a ship moored out in the open water, past the mole.

  ‘I’m not sure’ – Huw followed her direction – ‘a warship?’ It was large, painted in the gray-blue favored by the navy, but it lacked the turrets and rangefinders of a ship of the line; more to the point, it looked poorly maintained, streaks of red staining its flanks below the anchor chains that dipped into the water. Large, boxy superstructures had been added fore and aft. ‘That’s an odd one.’

  ‘Can you read its name?’

  ‘Give me a moment.’ Huw glanced around quickly, then pulled out a compact monocular. ‘HMS Burke. Yup, it’s the navy.’ He shoved the scope away quickly as the streetcar rounded a street corner and began to slow.

  ‘Delta Charlie, please copy.’ Brill had her radio out. ‘I need a ship class identifying. HMS Burke, Bravo Uniform Romeo – ’ She finished, waited briefly for a reply, then slid the device away, switching it to silent as the streetcar stopped, swaying slightly as passengers boarded and alighted.

  ‘Was that entirely safe?’

  ‘No, but it’s a calculated risk. We’re right next to the harbor and if anyone’s RDFing for spies they’ll probably raid the ships’ radio rooms first; they don’t have pocket-sized transmitters around here. I set Sven up with a copy of the shipping register. He says it’s a prison ship. Currently operated by the Directorate of Reeducation. That would be prisons.’

  ‘You don’t know that it’s here for us.’ Huw glanced at the staircase again as the streetcar began to move.

  ‘Would you like to bet on it?’

  ‘No. I think we ought to head back.’ Huw reached out and took her hand, squeezed it gently.

  She squeezed back, then pulled it away. ‘I think we ought to make sure nobody’s following us first.’

  ‘You think they might try to pick us up . . . ?’

  ‘Probably not – this sort of action is best conducted at night – but you can never be sure. I think we should be on guard. Let’s head back and tell Helge. It’s her call – whether we have to withdraw or not, whether Burgeson can come up with a security cordon for us – but I don’t like the sound of that ship.�
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  *

  Brilliana and Huw had been away from Miriam’s house for almost an hour. Miriam herself had left half an hour afterwards. An observer – like the door-to-door salesman who had importuned the scullery maid to buy his brushes, or the ticket inspector stepping repeatedly on and off the streetcars running up and down the main road and curiously not checking any tickets – would have confirmed the presence of residents, and a lack of activity on their part. Which would be an anomaly, worthy of investigation in its own right: A household of that size would require the regular purchase of provisions, meat and milk and other perishables, for the city’s electrical supply was prone to brownouts in the summer heat, rendering household food chillers unreliable.

  An observer other than the ticket inspector and the salesman might have been puzzled when, shortly before noon, they disappeared into the grounds of a large abandoned house, its windows boarded and its gates barred, three blocks up the street and a block over – but there were no other observers, for Sir Alasdair’s men were patrolling the overgrown acre of Miriam’s house and garden and keeping an external watch only on the approaches to the front and rear. ‘If you go outside you run an increased risk of attracting attention,’ Miriam had pointed out, days earlier. ‘Your job is to keep intruders out long enough for us to escape into the doppelgänger compound, right?’ (Which was fenced in with barbed wire and patrolled by two of Alasdair’s men at all times, even though it was little more than a clearing in the backwoods near the thin white duke’s country retreat.)

  Sir Alasdair’s men were especially not patrolling the city around them. And so they were unaware of the assembly of a battalion of Internal Security troops, of the requisition of a barracks and an adjacent bonded warehouse in Saltonstall, or the arrival on railroad flatcars of a squadron of machine-gun carriers and their blackcoat crew. Lady d’Ost’s brief radio call-in from the docks was received by Sven, but although he went in search of Sir Alasdair to give him the news, its significance was not appreciated: Shipping in the marcher kingdoms of the Clan’s world was primitive and risky, and the significance of prison ships was not something Sir Alasdair had given much thought to.

  So when four machine-gun-equipped armored steamers pulled up outside each side of the grounds, along with eight trucks – from which poured over a hundred black-clad IS militia equipped with clubs, riot shields, and shotguns – it came as something of a surprise.

  Similar surprise was being felt by the maintenance crew at the farm near Framingham, as the Internal Security troops rushed the farmyard and threw tear-gas grenades through the kitchen windows; and in a block of dilapidated-looking shops fronting an immigrant rookery in Irongate – perhaps more there than elsewhere, for Uncle Huan had until this morning had every reason to believe that Citizen Reynolds was his protector – and at various other sites. But the commissioner for internal security had his own idea of what constituted protection, and he’d briefed his troops accordingly. ‘It is essential that all the prisoners be handcuffed and hooded during transport,’ he’d explained in the briefing room the previous evening. ‘Disorientation and surprise are essential components of this operation – they’re tricky characters, and if you don’t do this, some of them will escape. You will take them to the designated drop-off sites and hand them over to the Reeducation Department staff for transport to the prison ship. I mentioned escape attempts. The element of surprise is essential; in order to prevent the targets from raising the alarm, if any of them try to escape you should shoot them.’

  Reynolds himself left the briefing satisfied that his enthusiastic and professional team of Polis troops would conduct themselves appropriately. Then he retired to the office of the chief of Polis, to share a lunch of cold cuts delivered from the commissary (along with a passable bottle of Chablis – which had somehow bypassed the blockade to end in the Polis commissioner’s private cellar) and discuss what to do next with the doctor.

  *

  Huw’s first inkling that something was wrong came when the street-car he and Brilliana were returning on turned the corner at the far end of the high street and came to a jolting stop. He braced against the handrail and looked round. ‘Hey,’ he began.

  ‘Get down,’ Brill hissed. Huw ducked below the level of the railing, into the space she’d just departed. She crouched in the aisle, her bag gaping open, her right hand holding a pistol inside it. ‘Not a stop.’

  ‘Right.’ Taking a deep breath, Huw reached inside his coat and pulled out his own weapon. ‘What did you see?’

  ‘Barricades and – ’

  He missed the rest of the sentence. It was swallowed up in the familiar hammering roar of a SAW, then the harsh, slow thumping of some kind of heavy machine gun. ‘Fuck! Let’s bail.’ He raised his voice, but he could barely hear himself; the guns were firing a couple of blocks away, and he flattened himself against the wooden treads of the streetcar floor. Brill looked at him, white-faced, spread-eagled farther back along the aisle. Then she laid her pistol on the floor and reached into her handbag, pulling out the walkie-talkie. Fumbling slightly, she switched channels. ‘Charlie Delta, Charlie Delta, flash all units, attack in progress on Zulu Foxtrot, repeat, attack in progress on Zulu Foxtrot. Over.’

  The radio crackled, then a voice answered, slow and shocky: ‘Emil here, please repeat? Over.’

  Brill keyed the transmit button: ‘Emil, get Helge out of there right now! Zulu Foxtrot is under attack. Over and out.’ She looked at Huw: ‘Come on, we’d better – ’

  Huw was looking past her shoulder, and so he saw the head of the IS militiaman climbing the steps at the rear of the carriage before Brilliana registered that anything was wrong. Huw raised his pistol and sighted. The steps curled round, and the blackcoat wasn’t prepared for trouble; as he turned towards Huw his mouth opened and he began to raise one hand towards the long gun slung across his shoulder.

  Huw pulled the trigger twice in quick succession. ‘Go!’ he shouted at Brill. ‘Now!’

  ‘But we’re – ’ She flipped open the locket she wore on a ribbon around her left wrist, for all the world like a makeup compact.

  More machine-gun fire in the near distance. Shouting, distant through tinnitus-fuzzed ears still ringing from the pistol shots. Huw shoved his sleeve up his arm and tried to focus on the dial of the handless watch, swimming eye-warpingly close under the glass. The streetcar rocked; booted feet hammered on the stair treads. Brilliana rose to a crouch on her knees and one wrist, then disappeared. Something round and black bounced onto the floor where she’d been lying, mocking Huw. He concentrated on the spinning, fiery knot in his eyes until it felt as if his head was about to explode; then the floor beneath him disappeared and he found himself falling hard, towards the grassy ground below.

  Behind him, the grenade rolled a few inches across the upper deck of the streetcar, then stabilized for a second before exploding.

  *

  The man behind the desk was tall, silver-haired, every inch the distinguished patriarch and former fighter pilot who’d risen to lead a nation. But it was the wrong desk; and appearances were deceptive. Right now, the second unelected president of the United States was scanning a briefing folder, bifocals drooping down his nose until he flicked at them irritably. After a moment he glanced up. ‘Tell me, Andrew.’ He skewed Dr. James with a stare that was legendary for intimidating generals. ‘This gizmo. How reliable is it?’

  ‘We haven’t made enough to say for sure, sir. But of the sixteen ARMBAND units we’ve used so far, only one has failed – and that was in the first manufactured group. We’ve got batch production down and we can swear to ninety-five-percent effectiveness for eighteen hours after manufacture. Reliability drops steeply after that time – the long-term storable variant under development should be good for six months and self-test, but we won’t be able to swear to that until we’ve tested it. Call it a year out.’

  ‘Huh.’ The president frowned, then closed the folder and placed it carefully in the middle of the des
k. ‘CARTHAGE is going to take sixty-two of them. What do you say to that?’

  Is that it? Dr. James lifted his chin. ‘We can do it, sir. The units are already available – the main bottleneck is training the air force personnel on the mobile biomass generators, and that’s in hand. Also the release to active duty and protocol for deployment, but we’re basically repurposing the existing nuclear handling protocols for that; we can relax them later if you issue an executive order.’

  ‘I don’t want one of our planes failing to transition and executing CARTHAGE over domestic airspace, son. That would be unacceptable collateral damage.’

  Dr. James glanced sidelong at his neighbor: another of the ubiquitous blue-suited generals who’d been dragged on board the planning side of this operation. ‘Sir? With respect I think that’s a question for General Morgenstern.’

  The president nodded. ‘Well, General. How are you going to ensure your boys don’t fuck up if the doctor’s mad science project fails to perform as advertised?’

  The general was the perfect model of a modern military man: lean, intent, gleaming eyes. ‘Mark-one eyeball, sir: that, and radio. The pilot flying will visually ascertain that there are no landmarks in sight, and the DSO will confirm transition by checking for AM talk-radio broadcasts. We’ve done our reconnaissance: There are no interstates or railroads in the target zone, and their urban pattern is distinctively different.’

  ‘That assumes daylight, doesn’t it?’ The president had a question for every answer.

  ‘No sir; our cities are illuminated, theirs aren’t, it’s that simple. The operation crews will be tasked with activating the ARMBAND units within visual range of known waypoints and will confirm that they’re not in our world anymore before they button up.’

  ‘Heavy cloud cover?’

  ‘Radio, sir. There’s no talk radio in fairyland. No GPS signal either. Sir, they aren’t going to have any problem confirming they’re in the correct DZ.’