The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2)

by Charles Stross

  ‘Okay.’ With some trepidation, Mike lowered himself onto Courier Three’s back. The man grunted. Mike could feel his spine, the warmth of his ribs through the seat of his pants. This is weird, he began to think, just as Smith held something under Three’s nose. Then the world changed.

  *

  Mike blinked at the darkness. Someone tapped him on the back of the head with something hard. ‘Say your name.’

  ‘Mike Fleming.’ His seat groaned and began to collapse, and he fell over sideways. ‘What the fuck – ’

  A thud was followed by a muffled groan. ‘Okay, wiseass, cut that out!’ Light appeared, and Mike rolled over onto his back and tried to sit up.

  Someone else was groaning – Courier Three? he wondered. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘All under control, sir,’ drawled the man with the gun. ‘You just sort yourself out while we keep watch.’

  Mike nodded, taking stock of the situation. He was in some kind of room with no windows, a door, a dirt floor, three armed strangers, and a captured Clan courier wearing a bomb around his neck. The good news was that the desperados were pointing their guns at the courier, the door, and the ground, respectively – which left none for him. Ergo, they were friendly. ‘Which of you is Sergeant Hastert?’ he asked.

  ‘I am.’ Hastert was the one covering the ground. He grinned at Mike, an expression he’d have found deeply alarming if it wasn’t for the fact that any other expression would have been infinitely worse. Courier Three groaned again. Mike realized he was clutching his head. ‘Dennis, keep laughing boy here covered. Mr. Fleming, you’ve got the remote control. If you’d care to pass it to me, we can take care of the mule until it’s time for him to go home. Meanwhile, you’n I’ve got some talking to do.’

  ‘Okay.’ Mike unlocked his bracelet with a shudder of relief and passed it to the sergeant, who leaned over Courier Three while one of the others kept his AR-15 pointed at the prisoner the whole time.

  ‘Listen, you,’ said Hastert. ‘This here won’t go off now –’ He was speaking English, loudly and slowly.

  ‘He doesn’t understand,’ said Mike.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘He doesn’t speak English. He thought we were going to kill him, back in New York.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Hastert stared at him with pale blue eyes. ‘You try, then.’

  Mike stared at Courier Three. ‘You go. Soon, now, back over. Not die. Shoot if run? Yes.’

  The prisoner nodded slightly. Then went back to groaning quietly and clutching his head.

  ‘Not much to look at, ain’t he?’ Hastert was genial.

  ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  Hastert opened the door and led Mike through into another bare room with a dirt floor, leaving the two other soldiers with their precious courier. There was a window in here, with wooden shutters, and Hastert switched off his flashlight. As Mike’s eyes adjusted he got a good look at what the sergeant was wearing: rough woolen trousers and jerkin over another layer that bulged like a bulletproof jacket. ‘We stay indoors during the day,’ Hastert said, acknowledging his curiosity. ‘But this is a special occasion. Keep your voice low, by the way. It’s a crowded neighborhood.’

  ‘You know where the palace is?’

  ‘Yeah. We’ll get you there. Once laughing boy has gotten over his headache and gone home.’

  ‘Huh.’ Mike sank down into a crouch against one wall. It was whitewashed, he noticed, but the plaster or bricks underneath it were uneven. ‘This the best hotel you could get?’

  ‘You should see how they live hereabouts. This is the Sheraton. Let me fill you in . . .’

  Mike tried to listen, but he was too tense. There were noises outside: occasional chatter, oddly slurred and almost comprehensible snatches of Hochsprache. The thud of horses’ hooves passed the door from time to time, followed by the creak and rattle of carts. After about an hour, the inner door opened and one of the other soldiers came out. He nodded. ‘All done.’

  Mike shifted. ‘What now?’

  Hastert checked his watch. ‘One hour to go, then we move out. Jack, go dig out a couple of MREs, and you and Dennis chow down. Sir, do you know what this is?’ He held up a radio transmitter, like the one Colonel Smith had shown Mike earlier.

  ‘Yes.’ Mike nodded. ‘Radio transmitter. Right?’

  ‘Right.’ Hastert looked at him thoughtfully, then reached into a shapeless-looking sack on the floor beside him and pulled out an entrenching tool. ‘We’re going to put it in right – here.’ He buried the gadget under a thin layer of soil and tamped it down, then scattered the residue. ‘Think you can find it?’

  Mike mentally measured the distance from the door. ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Good. Your life depends on it.’ Hastert didn’t smile. ‘Because when you get back here, we won’t be around.’

  ‘I’ve been briefed.’ Mike tried not to snap. It was warm and stifling in the dirt-floored shack, and the endless waiting was getting to him.

  ‘Yes, sir, but I didn’t see you being briefed, so if you’ll excuse me we’ll go over it again, shall we?’

  ‘Okay . . .’ Mike swallowed. ‘Thanks.’

  The next hour passed a bit faster, which made it all the more shocking when the inner door opened and the other two men came through. ‘Ready when you are, boss.’ It was the taller one, O’Neil. Mike blinked. Hey, all three of them are white, he realized: a statistical anomaly, or maybe something else. No sugar trade here means no African slave trade. Just another personnel headache that Smith was dealing with behind his back, finding special forces troops who looked like locals.

  ‘Let’s go.’ Hastert stood up. ‘Far as the garden party, we’re your bodyguard. Once you’re inside, we’ll split. Anything goes wrong, make for the garden gate opposite the ceremonial parade ground – I’ll point it out to you.’

  *

  He opened the door. It was late afternoon outside, dusty and bright and hot, but with a breeze blowing off the sea that took the edge off the heat. The shack turned out to be one of a whole row fronting a narrow dirt track: a similar row faced them. Half the doors and windows were wide open, with chickens and geese wandering in and out freely to peck in the roadside dirt. There were people. Ragged, skinny children, stooped women and men in colorless robes or baggy trousers. People who looked away when Hastert stared at them, hastily finding somewhere else to go, something else to do. The road was filthy, an open gutter down the middle running with sewage. ‘Come on,’ said O’Neil, behind Mike. ‘You’re blocking the door.’

  Mike stepped forward, trying to project confidence. I’m a big man, he told himself. I’m armed, I’ve got bodyguards, my clothing’s new, and I’m well-fed. He glanced up the street. Nothing on this row was straight: whoever built it hadn’t heard of zoning laws, or even a straight line. A cart pulled by a couple of bored oxen, piled high with sacks, was slowly rattling toward them. Behind it, a mass of sheep bleated plaintively, spilling into doorways in a slow woolly flood. ‘Follow me, and try to look like you’re leading,’ Hastert muttered.

  The walk through the town seemed to take forever, although it was probably more like twenty or thirty minutes. Mike tried not to gape like a fool; sometimes it was hard. Smells and sounds assailed him. Wood smoke was alarmingly common, given that most of the houses were timbered. It almost covered up the pervasive stench of shit rising from the hot, fetid gutters. In the distance some kind of street vendor was shouting over and over again – briefly they walked past one edge of a kind of open square, cobblestoned and lined with a dizzying mess of stalls like open-walled huts. Wicker baskets full of caged chickens, scrawny and sometimes half-bald. A table covered in muddy beetroot. Rats, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, scurrying under cover. Is this where she’s been living? he wondered, momentarily aghast. Remembering Miriam’s attitude to food hygiene and her nearly aseptic kitchen worktop, he suddenly had a moment of doubt.

  Who am I kidding? Mike wondered, tensed up as if he was about to go through the
back door of some perp’s meth lab. This is crazy! I’ve got barely any grasp of the language, no way out, I’m in a hostile city in a foreign country and if they get their hands on me – a sick certainty filled him as they reached a much wider road and turned onto it – and I’m supposed to be making contact with an ex-girlfriend who dumped me the last time I called her! He forced himself to straighten his back and move out into the clear middle of this road (no open sewers here), then took it in. Big stone walls to either side, imposing gatehouses with solid wooden doors. No windows at ground level. Multistory piles some way behind the walls, like pocket castles. That’s what they are, he suddenly realized. This place is primitive. No police, but heaven help you if the mob catches you stealing. The rich have their own small armies. Warlords, like Afghanistan. A moment later his earlier thought overtook the latest one, colliding in a messy train-wreck: And Miriam’s rich. She’s one of the people who own these castles. What does that mean?

  There were more people hanging around this street, and stalls mounted on brightly colored cart wheels were selling food and (by the smell) slightly rancid beer to them. The road ended ahead, not in a junction but in a huge gate with a park beyond it. Or something that looked like a park. In the distance, a huge palace loomed above tents and crowd. Mike took a deep breath. ‘This it?’ he asked Hastert.

  ‘Yessir.’ Hastert passed him a rolled-up piece of heavy paper. ‘This will get you in. I’m told it’s an invitation.’

  ‘And you . . . ?’

  ‘Got to stop at the gate, sir. Turns out there’s a law against bringing guards. You’re allowed to bear a gentleman’s arms, you’re supposed to be Sieur Vincensh d’Lofstrom, but we’re . . . not. See that side gate? We’ll run a rotating watch on it. Any trouble, hotfoot it there and we’ll provide a distraction while we get you to Zone Green.’ ‘Check.’ Mike glanced nervously at a passing bear, which watched him with ancient eyes until its owner jerked viciously on the chain riveted to its iron collar. ‘If I’m not back in four hours, you’ll know I’m in trouble.’

  ‘Okay, four hours.’ Hastert nodded. ‘Good luck, sir.’ ‘Thanks.’ Mike shivered. ‘Hope I don’t need it.’ He took a deep breath and glanced at the guards by the gate, their bright red and yellow uniforms and eight-foot poleaxes. The other side of the gate was a confused whirl of people and sounds and smells, a Renaissance Faire with added stench and more alcohol. Are you somewhere in there, Miriam? he wondered. And: What am I going to say when I find you? Aloud: ‘Here goes.’

  INTERRUPTION

  Miriam sat alone in her bedroom for a couple of hours, her mind spinning like a hamster in a wheel. Should I stay or should I go? The old Clash song held a certain resonance. Give the bastards what they want and Iris doesn’t get hurt. The logic was sound, but the sick sense of humiliation she felt whenever she thought about it gave her a visceral urge to lash out. Go through with it. One year, two at the most. And then what?

  They’d use artificial insemination. She’d have one or more small infants, be exhausted from the effort – it wasn’t for nothing that it was called labor – and the babies would in turn be hostages to use against her. The idea of bringing up children didn’t fill her with enthusiasm; she’d seen friends turned old before their days by the workload of diaper changes and late-night feedings. It was probably different for royalty: she’d have servants and wet nurses on call. But still, wasn’t that a bit irresponsible? Miriam felt a twinge of conscience. She’d gotten into this mess of her own accord. It wouldn’t be fair to take out her resentment on a baby who wasn’t even around at the time. Or on the idiot prince. It wasn’t his fault.

  I wish I could just run away. She lay back on the bed and indulged her escape fantasies for a while, studiously not thinking about Iris. I could go back to New Britain. I’ve got friends there. But the Clan knew all about her company and her contacts. I’d have to start from scratch. Talk to Erasmus about a new identity. And without the Clan connection, she’d be a lot less useful to him and his friends. What if he wanted to stay in their good books? He could easily turn her over to Morgan. Worse, New Britain didn’t look like a hot place to spend the rest of her days, especially starting out halfway broke in the middle of a recession while trying to hide from the Clan. Which obviously ruled out technology start-ups, businesses based on her existing know-how, anything that might draw their attention. Iris found Morris. Who or what hope have I got?

  Her thoughts turned to Cambridge. Home. I could go back to being a journalist, she thought. Yeah, right. That would work precisely as long as it took for her to run into someone she’d interviewed at a trade conference. Or until she needed a bank account and a driving license. Post-9/11, disappearing and getting a new identity was becoming increasingly difficult –

  Which leaves the feds, she thought. I could go look up Mike. He worked for the DEA, didn’t he? Since Matthias went over the wall, something had clearly gone deeply wrong with the Clan courier networks. Matthias had blabbed to someone, and whatever he’d told them had caused the feds to start staking out safe houses. Which means they know something about the Clan, she told herself, with a dawning sense that she’d been far too slow on the uptake. She sat up. I’ve been an idiot. If I defected, I could join the Witness Protection Program and then –

  She hit a brick wall. A series of unwelcome visions began playing themselves out in the theater of her imagination. There went Angbard – a scheming old bastard he might be, but still her uncle – shoved into a federal penitentiary at his age. Lock him up for life and throw away the key. And there went Iris – The entire family, basically everybody, they could arrest us all for complicity, criminal conspiracy. Right? There went Olga. And Brill – probably for murder, in her case, come to think of it. The government would play hardball. They’d find some way to come over here and mess things up. If necessary, they’d chop up a captured world-walker’s brains to figure out what made them tick, grow it in a petri dish and mount it on a bomber. Before 9/11 she wouldn’t have credited it, but this was a whole different world, these were dangerous times, and the administration might do anything if it thought there was a serious threat to the nation.

  Forget law and order: it would be all-out war. Afghanistan was a source of hard drugs and terrorism before 9/11, and look what they’d done there when the rules changed. Everybody had cheered the collapse of the Taliban – and yes, those bastards had it coming – but what about the village goatherds on the receiving end of cluster bombs, intended for sheep that looked like guerillas when viewed in infrared from thirty thousand feet? What about the women and children killed when some bastard up the road with a satellite phone decided to settle a local long-running blood feud using a B-52 bomber, by phoning the CIA and telling them that there were al-Qaeda gunmen in the next village?

  I can’t do that. She flopped back on the bed again. I want out, sure. But do I want out badly enough to kill people? If the only person to suffer was Baron Henryk, perhaps the answer was yes – and that asshole doctor, she wouldn’t mind hurting him, or at least putting him through the same level of humiliation he’d inflicted on her. But the idea of turning everyone in the Clan over to the US government cut too close to the bone. I am one of them, she realized, turning the unwelcome idea over in her mind to examine it for feel. I don’t think like them and I hate the way they work, but I can’t hand my family over to the government. Leaving aside the fact that the Clan thought they were a government – and had a reasonable claim to being one – that thought clarified things somewhat.

  And then there’s Mom.

  Miriam took a deep breath. Her mood crashed, giving way to bleak depression. Henryk’s got me. Iris is right, I’m out of options. Unless something unexpected happens, I am stuck with this. I’ll have to go through with it. She winced. What did they say about pregnancy? You can’t world-walk while you’re expecting. Another unwanted, hostile imposition on her freedom. He won’t need a prison cell while I’m pregnant, she realized. And afterward . . . When Iris had made her e
scape she’d been young and healthy. By the time Miriam delivered, she’d be close to her mid-thirties.

  There was a knock. Miriam pushed herself upright and stretched. The knock repeated, tentative, uncertain of itself. Not the ferret, she thought, walking over to the door. ‘Yes?’ she demanded.

  ‘Milady, we’re to –’ She didn’t understand the rest, but she knew the tone of voice. She opened the door.

  ‘You are, me, to dress?’ Miriam managed haltingly. The two servants bobbed. ‘Good.’ She shrugged. This is going to happen, she realized dismally, walking toward the wardrobe as if on autopilot. Oh well. I guess I should leave this to Helge, then. Helge? ‘Now what am I to wear?’ she asked aloud, surprising herself with her diction.

  *

  The Clan weren’t big on subtle messages. Helge let the servants lace her into an underdress, then help her into a gown of black silk and deep blue velvet. It had long sleeves, full skirts, and a neckline that rose to a high collar. Current fashion favored a revealing décolletage, but she was in a funereal mood. She wrapped a thick rope of pearls around her waist as a belt, and looped another around her collar. Then she checked her appearance in the mirror. Her cheek was coming up in a fine bruise where Henryk had struck her, so she picked out a black lace veil, cloak, and matching gloves from her armoire. Let ’em wonder what kind of damaged goods they’re buying, she thought bitterly. This outfit wouldn’t give much away: truthfully, it looked like Victorian mourning drag. ‘I’m ready to go now,’ she announced, entering the reception room. ‘Where is that, that idle – ’

  ‘Right here.’ The front door was open, the ferret standing beside it. ‘My, how mysterious.’

  ‘Is the coach ready?’

  ‘Yes. If you would care to follow me . . .’

  She managed to descend the staircase without tripping, and she clambered into the coach that was waiting. A sealed coach, with shuttered windows, locked on the outside, she observed. Still a prisoner, I see. Someone doesn’t trust me.