The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2)

by Charles Stross

  ‘Yes, I think I do.’ Mike’s mouth was dry. So they’re taking this military? ‘You’re asking for a spy. Right?’ Can they do this? Legally? He had a feeling that any objections he raised would be steamrolled. And expressing them in the first place might be rather dangerous.

  ‘Not just a simple spy.’ James nodded thoughtfully. ‘You’re going to be recruiting, training, and running other officers, in a way that we haven’t really been good at since the Cold War. Over the past couple of decades we’ve come to rely too heavily on electronic intelligence sources – no offense,’ he added in Smith’s direction, ‘and we just can’t operate that way in fairyland. So you’re going to go in and run our field operation. We’re going in – we’re going over there, carrying the war to the enemy. That is the mission we are tasked with, from the top down. Got that?’

  ‘It’s a lot to take in,’ Mike said slowly. His head was spinning. What the hell? It sounds like he’s planning an invasion! ‘You mentioned some kind of special clearances, projects? Uh, CLEANSWEEP? BLUESKY?’

  James nodded to Smith. ‘You tell him.’

  Smith sat up. ‘The, uh, Clan pose a clear and present danger to the integrity of the United States of America,’ he said quietly. ‘In fact, it’s not overdramatizing things too much to say that they’re a rogue state. So word is that we’re to prepare, if possible, for a situation in which we can go in to, ah, impose a change of regime. BLUESKY is the intelligence enabler and CLEANSWEEP is the project to conduct espionage operations in hostile territory.’

  ‘All of this assumes we can reliably send spies into a parallel universe and bring them back again,’ Mike said quietly. ‘How would we do that?’

  Dr. James glanced at Colonel Smith. ‘You were right about him,’ he murmured. To Mike: ‘You aren’t cleared for that yet. Let’s just say that we’ve got some long-term ideas, research projects under way. But for the time being’ – he smiled at Mike, a frighteningly intense expression that revealed more teeth than a human being ought by rights to have – ‘we’ve got two enemy couriers, and they will work for us, whether they want to or not. We’ll use them to capture more. And then we’ll make those fuckers sorry they ever messed with the United States.’

  REPRODUCTIVE POLITICS

  It was a shaken, thoughtful Miriam who followed the coach attendant and the other passengers in her car up to the dining carriage. Some of them had dressed for dinner, but Miriam found she wasn’t too out of place once she shed the jacket: a lucky break, for she hadn’t been paying enough attention to maintaining her cover. As with the Gruinmarkt, issues of public etiquette frequently baffled her – it was easy to get things wrong, especially when she was worrying about other matters. What on earth is going on with that report? What does it mean? she wondered as the attendant ushered her into a seat between a ruddy-faced grandmother and her bouncing ten-year-old charge, evidently out of some misplaced concern for her solitary status. I’m being trolled. That’s the only explanation that makes sense. Someone expected me to look in the bag –

  ‘Marissa! Fold your hands and stop playing with your fork. I’m sorry, travel makes her unmanageable,’ the grandmother blared at Miriam. ‘Wouldn’t you say so?’

  Miriam smiled faintly, keeping a tight lid on her irritation at the interruption. ‘I don’t like to speak ill of people I hardly know.’

  ‘That’s all right, you know us now. Marissa, put that down! I’m Eleanor Crosby. You are . . . ?’

  Trapped. ‘I’m Gillian,’ said Miriam, rolling out the cover identity Clan logistics had prepared for her. They’d warned her it should be used as little as possible: it wouldn’t stand up to serious scrutiny. The steward was walking the length of the table with a tureen of soup balanced on one arm, ladling spoonfuls into bowls in time with the sway of the carriage. I’m trying to think, so kindly shut up and stop bugging me.

  ‘Wonderful! You must be traveling to see your family? Where are you from, London or the south?’

  ‘London,’ said Miriam. As soon as the waiter was past her she picked up her spoon and started on her bowl. The onion soup might have tasted good if she hadn’t burned her mouth on the first sip, but it was either tuck in now or deal with Mrs. Crosby’s curiosity all the way to Dunedin. As it was, she had to remain alert for the entire meal, because little Marissa’s every tic and twitch seemed to attract Eleanor’s loud and very vocal ire. Her place setting was a battlefield, and Mrs. Crosby seemed unable to grasp the possibility that Miriam might not want to be induced to spill her life’s story before a stranger. Which was doubly frustrating because right then Miriam would have been immensely grateful for someone to share her conundrum with – had it not been both a secret and a matter of life and death.

  After the ordeal of dinner, Miriam returned to her compartment to discover that someone had been there while she’d been eating. One of the bench seats had been converted into a compact bunk bed. For a moment her pulse raced and she came close to panic, but the carpetbag was untouched, still innocently stuffed into the luggage rack above the door. She bolted the door and carefully lifted the bag down, intending to continue her search.

  When she’d opened it before dinner, carefully checking the lock first, she’d discovered the bag didn’t contain the cargo she’d expected: no neatly taped bags of white powder here. Instead, there was a layer of clothing – her clothing, a skirt and blouse and a change of underwear from her house in the Boston of this world. Bastards! She’d felt faint for a moment as she stared at it. They set me up! Then she calmed down slightly. What if the Constabulary pulled her in for questioning and looked in her bag? What would they find? Miriam puzzled for a while. Surely they wouldn’t waste a precious cargo run just to test a cover identity? she asked herself. Which meant – ah. This is meant to survive a search, isn’t it?

  There were more items that smacked of misdirection in the bag: a small pouch of gold coin muffled inside the newssheet wrapping of an antique vase. That would buy her a hefty fine or a month in prison if they found it (they being the hypothetical police agents, searching everybody as they came off the train) and it would more than suffice to explain her nervousness. Then she’d come to the bottom of the bag and found the battered manila envelope with its puzzling contents, which she’d just had time to glance through before the cabin attendant knocked to tell her it was time for dinner.

  Now she sat on the bunk, reopened the bag, and pulled out the envelope. It contained a manuscript, printed in blurry purplish ink on cheap paper in very small type, the pages torn and yellowed at the edges from too many fingers: The Tyranny of Reason by Jean-Paul Mavrides, whoever he was. It looked to her eyes like something smuggled out of the old Soviet Union – battered and beaten but blazingly angry, a condemnation of the divine right of kings and an assertion that only in a perfect democracy based on the common will of humanity could the common man free himself from his oppressors. ‘Well, I wanted something to read,’ she told herself mordantly, ‘even if I wasn’t looking at a seven-year stretch for possession of republican propaganda . . .’

  She began to flick through it rapidly, pausing when she came to the real meat, which was embedded in it in neatly laser-printed sheets interleaved every ten pages or so. Purloined letter. She could see the setup now, in her mind’s eye, and it was less obviously a setup. They wouldn’t be planning to shop her – not with a bunch of DESTROY BEFORE READING Clan security correspondence on her person. Even though it was likely that the arresting constables would simply log it as an item from the Banned List and pitch it straight into the station fireplace. So it was just a routine precaution, multiple layers of concealment for the letters. Which didn’t help her much: with a few eye-catching exceptions they were mostly incomprehensible. She kept coming back to the letter from Dr. Darling to Angbard. What the hell is a W* heterozygote? she wondered. This is significant. What is Angbard doing, messing around with a fertility clinic? She could think of a number of explanations, none of them good –

  There was a knock at the
door.

  Sudden panic gripped her. She shuddered and shoved the incriminating samizdat into the bag, her palms slippery with sweat. The train was moving. If I have to try to get away –

  Another knock, this time quieter. Miriam paused, then let go of her left sleeve cuff with her right hand. The panic faded, but the adrenaline shock was still with her. She forced herself to take a deep breath and stand up, then shot the bolt back on the door. ‘Yes?’ she demanded.

  ‘Are you a constabule?’ asked the girl Marissa, staring up at her with wide eyes. ‘Coz if so, I wants to know, when’s you going to arrest my mam?’

  ‘I am not –’ Miriam stopped. ‘Come in here.’ The little girl moved as if to step back, but Miriam caught her wrist and tugged lightly. She didn’t resist but came quietly, as if sleepwalking. She didn’t seem to weigh anything. ‘Sit down,’ Miriam said, pointing at the bench seat opposite her bunk. She slid the door shut. ‘Why do you think I’m going to arrest your mam?’ Her mother? Miriam thought, aghast: she’d taken Mrs. Crosby for sixty, but she couldn’t be much older than Miriam herself. She suddenly realized she was looming over the kid. This can’t be good. She sat down on the bunk and tried to compose her features. ‘I’m not going to arrest anyone, Marissa. Why, did you think I was a constable?’

  Marissa nodded at her, looking slightly less frightened. ‘You’s look like the one as nicked my nuncle? You talk all posh-like, an’ dress like a rozzer. An’ you got that way of looking aroun’ at people, like you’s sizing them for a cage.’

  Am I frightening the little children now? Miriam laughed nervously. ‘I’m not a, a rozzer, girl.’ And what’s her mother afraid of ? Is that why she was grilling me over dinner? ‘But listen, it’s not safe to go asking people if they’re Polis. I mean, if they aren’t it’s rude, and if they are, you’re telling them you’re afraid. If you tell them you’re frightened they’ll ask why you’re frightened, understand? So you don’t do that, you just ignore them. Besides, if I was with the Polis, why would I tell you the truth?’

  Miriam paused, aware she’d sawn off the logical branch her argument was sitting on: Hope she doesn’t spot it. She stared at Marissa. Marissa had long, stringy hair lying heavy down her back and wore a smock that hadn’t been laundered too recently. When she was older she’d probably have cheekbones to kill for, but right now she just looked starved and frightened. She’s about the age Rita would be – stop that. Miriam hadn’t seen Rita, her daughter, since she gave her up for adoption at the age of two days: Rita had been a minor personal disaster, an unplanned intrusion while Miriam was in med school, and the less remembered the better. ‘Listen. I think you should go back to your mother – you didn’t tell her you were coming here, did you?’ A vigorously shaken head. ‘Good. You don’t tell her you came to see me because she’ll worry. And she’s got enough to worry about already, hasn’t she?’ Traveling first-class, but her kid hasn’t eaten much recently and her brother’s been arrested? Similarly vigorous nodding confirmed Miriam’s suspicions. ‘What did they arrest your uncle for?’

  ‘Sedition,’ Marissa said shyly.

  For a moment Miriam felt light-headed with anger. ‘Well.’ She reached down into the bag and fumbled around, finding the vase and its decoy contents. She fumbled in it with clumsy fingers then brought out a small coin. ‘Here, do you have somewhere to hide this?’

  The kid looked baffled for a moment, made as if to push it away.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Mam said not to – ’

  ‘Ah.’ Miriam paused for a moment. Take, and double-take: ‘Marissa, what will your mam do if she finds out you’ve been to see me?’

  The kid looked frightened. ‘You wouldn’t!’

  ‘Take. This.’ She pushed the coin into the girl’s hand, folding the fingers around the buttery gleam of the royal groat – withdrawn from circulation a decade since to offset the liquidity crisis following the Persian war, now worth a hundred times its face value. ‘Give it to your mam. Tell her the truth. You came to see me, to ask. I told you, you were silly and shouldn’t ask those questions. Then I gave you this.’ Marissa looked puzzled. ‘Go on. Your mam won’t thump you, not if you give her this. She’ll sleep better, because a constable wouldn’t do that.’ And maybe she’ll be able to buy you some more meals, Miriam added silently.

  Marissa jerked, as if she’d suddenly awakened from a bad dream. ‘Thank’y,’ she gasped, then turned and scrabbled at the door. A moment later she was gone, darting off down the corridor.

  Miriam shut and bolted the door again, then rubbed her forehead. ‘Bastards,’ she muttered. There was an unhappy picture here: she could put any number of interpretations to it, a countless multitude of sad little just-so stories to explain the desperate women in the frame. A mother and her kid selling the house, selling the furniture, using their savings to get away by the first train available. The uncle on his way to a work camp – whether he was a real uncle or a live-in companion made no odds, such things were winked at but not admitted publicly – by way of a beating and interrogation in the cells. Sedition. It was a movable feast. It could mean reading the wrong books (like the one in her bag, Miriam realized uncomfortably), attending the wrong meetings, even being seen in the same bars as campaigners for a universal franchise. (They campaigned for the universal male franchise, mostly – votes for women or nonwhites were the province of wild-eyed dreamers.) This is a police state, after all, Miriam reminded herself. Back home in the United States, most people had an overly romantic view of what a monarchy – not the toothless, modern constitutional monarchies of Europe, but the original l’état c’est moi variety – was like. In reality, a monarchy was just a fancy name for a hereditary dictatorship, Miriam decided.

  It was only later, lying awake in the stuffy darkness of her compartment, that Miriam’s worries caught up with her. And by then it was too late to take back the coin (What if the Clan counts the decoy cash?) or to unopen the bag (What if they’re testing me again?) or unread the peculiar memoranda (What’s a W* heterozygote?) or even the samizdat tract by the executed French dissident Jean-Paul Mavrides.

  *

  The remainder of her outbound trip went uneventfully. Miriam turned out of bed at seven in the morning, forced down as much of a light breakfast as she could manage in the already oppressive heat, then alighted with her bag at Dunedin station. From there it was a brief cab ride to the safe house, an anonymous classical villa in the middle of a leafy suburb on the edge of the city center. She knocked on the door, and her contact ushered her into a basement room. Then he waited outside while she opened one of the two lockets she wore on a fine gold chain around her neck and focused on it.

  The usual headache clamped around her head, making her feel breathless and sick. But she was back in the Gruinmarkt again – or rather, in an outpost in the middle of the Debatable Lands, the great interior void unclaimed by the eastern marcher states or the empire on the west coast. Three bored-looking men sat around a log table in the middle of the room, one dressed to play Davy Crockett and the other two in sharp suits and shades. It might have been a frontier cabin, except frontier cabins didn’t come with kerosene heaters, shortwave radio sets, and a rack of Steyr assault rifles by the door.

  ‘Courier route blue four, parcel sixteen,’ Miriam said in her halting Hochsprache as she stepped off the taped transit area on the floor and planted her carpetbag on the table. Davy Crockett passed her a clipboard wordlessly, boredom clear on his face. Miriam signed off.

  Sharp Suit Number One picked up her bag. ‘Well, I’ll be going,’ he said, signing the board. Walking over to the far side of the room he pulled a gleaming metal suitcase off the top of a chest, then stuffed the entire carpetbag inside it. Back on the transit area he picked up the case, nodded at Davy Crockett, then at Miriam, and clicked his heels together. ‘There’s no place like home,’ he intoned, staring into a niche in the wall that Miriam hadn’t noticed before. Then he wasn’t there anymore. He didn’t make a sound, she re
alized, massaging her forehead: not that she’d ever paid much attention to other world-walkers in their comings and goings, but – doesn’t teleportation imply air displacement?

  ‘Would you like coffee? Or wine?’ asked Sharp Suit Number Two.

  ‘Uh, coffee is be good –’ Miriam’s Hochsprache broke down completely as she made it to the table. ‘And ibuprofen.’ She fanned herself with her hat. ‘Is it always this hot here?’

  ‘Stupid question.’ At last Davy Crockett spoke. ‘I’ve had a requisition for a portable air conditioner and solar power pack in for, oh, two years.’

  Two years? Miriam quailed at the idea of being assigned to babysit a frontier safe house like this for any length of time.

  ‘Still not enough hands for a game of poker,’ Sharp Suit Number Two said regretfully. He blinked, slightly owlishly.

  ‘The clock is ticking,’ intoned Davy Crockett. ‘Two hours.’ He nodded at Miriam. ‘When’s your train?’

  ‘Um. The return leaves just after four, so allow an hour to get to the station – ’

  ‘No problem.’ He picked up his pack of cards, shuffled the deck, and began dealing some kind of a solitaire hand. ‘We’ll get you there.’

  ‘Is there anything to do here?’ Miriam asked.