The Hidden Family

by Charles Stross

  “Against the feds?” Sullivan shrugged. “We’re buttoned up tight; it’ll take them time to bring in explosives and cutting gear, and shields. At least, it will if we risk shooting back.”

  “The escape tunnel—”

  “—Someone sealed it at the other end. I don’t think it would help, anyway.”

  “Let’s hit the control room.” Roland started walking again. “Have I got this straight? We’re under siege and I’m the only walker who knows. The lord secretary came over, but he went missing before the siege began. So did his number-one sidekick. The outer rooms are shuttered and locked down and we’ve got supplies, power, and ammo, but no way out because somebody’s blown the escape tunnel. Is that it?”

  “Pretty much so,” Sullivan agreed. He looked at Roland tensely. “What are you going to do?”

  “What am I going to do?” Roland paused in the office doorway. “Shit, what can I do?” He opened the door and went in. The control room had desks with computer monitors around the wall. CCTV screens showed every approach to the building. Everything looked normal, except for the lack of vehicular traffic and the parked vans on every corner. And the van parked right up against the front door. Obviously the ram crew had used it for cover.

  “We have half a ton of post in transit at any one time,” Roland thought aloud. “There’s about fifty kilos of confidential memos, documents, shit like that—enough to flame out the entire East Coast circuit.” There was a knock on the door. Sullivan waved in the man outside, one of the colorless back-office auditors the Clan employed to keep an eye on things. “We’ve got another quarter of a ton of produce in transshipment. It was due out of here next week. That’s enough to bankroll our ops for a year, too.”

  Sullivan looked pissed. “Is that your priority?” he demanded.

  “No.” Roland waved him down. “My priority is number one, getting all of us out of here, and number two; not letting that fucker Matthias take down our entire operation.” Sullivan subsided, leaning back against the door frame with a skeptical expression. “It’s going to take eighteen walks to pull everyone out—more than I could do in a week. And about the same to pull out the goods.” Roland pulled out a chair and sat. “We can’t drive away or use the tunnel. How long for them to get in? Six hours? Twelve?”

  “I think it’ll be more like three, unless we start shooting,” Sullivan opined.

  “Shooting—” Roland froze. “You want me to authorize you to shoot at FBI or DEA agents. Other than in self-defense.”

  “It’s the only way,” said the auditor, looking a little green.

  “Huh. I’ll table it.” Roland unfrozen, drummed his fingers on the nearest desk. “I really don’t like that option, it’s too much like sticking your dick in a hornet’s nest. They can always point more guns at us than we can point back at them. Has anyone phoned the scram number?”

  “Huh?” Sullivan looked puzzled. “Bill?”

  “Tried it five minutes ago, sir,” the auditor said with gloomy satisfaction. “Got a number-unavailable tone.”

  “I am beginning to get the picture. Have you tried your cell phone?”

  “They’ve got a jammer. And snipers on the rooftops.”

  “Shit.” I am going to have to make a decision, Roland thought. And it had better be one I can live with, he realized sickly.

  “Someone needs to walk over and yell like hell,” Roland said slowly. Sullivan tensed. “But, I’m working on the assumption that this is deliberate. That bastard Matthias, I’ve been watching him.” It was easy to say this, now. “I sent the kid, what’s his name?”

  “Poul,” Bill offered.

  “I sent him over alone.” Roland’s eyes went wide. “Shit.”

  “What are you thinking?” Sullivan leaned forward.

  “My working assumption right now is that Matthias has betrayed the Clan. This is all preplanned. He rigged this raid to cover his escape. So he isn’t going to want any random courier walking into Fort Lofstrom and raising the alarm, is he?”

  Sullivan’s eyes narrowed as Roland stood up. “You and I,” he announced, trying to keep his voice from shaking, “are going to cross over together. I know what you’ve been thinking. Listen, Matthias will have left some kind of surprise. It’s going to be a mess. Your job is to keep me alive long enough to get out of the fort. Then there’s a, a back route. One I can use to get word to the Clan, later today. It’ll take me about six or seven hours to get from Fort Lofstrom to Niejwein, and the same again to come back with a bunch of help—every damn courier I can round up. I’m assuming Matthias sent everyone away from the fort before pulling this stunt. Can you hold out for twenty-four hours? Go into the sub-basement storm shelter with all the merchandise and blow the supports, bring the building down on top of you?” He addressed the last question to Bill, the auditor.

  “I think so,” Bill said dubiously.

  “Right. Then you’re going to have to do that.” Roland met his eyes. “We can’t afford for the feds to lay hands on you. And whatever you think I’m thinking, I figure you’re too valuable to write off. Any family member, inner or outer, is not expendable in my book. Sullivan, think you can handle that?”

  Sullivan grinned humorlessly at him. “I’ll do my best.” He nodded at the auditor: “He’ll be back. Trust me on this.”

  The extraordinary meeting resumed with an argument. “The floor is open for motions,” quavered the ancient Julius. “Do I hear—”

  “I have a motion!” Miriam raised her hand.

  “Objection!” snapped Baron Hjorth.

  “I think you’ll find she already has the floor,” Angbard bit out. “Let her speak first, then have your say.”

  “Firstly, I’d like to move that my venture into New Britain be recognized as a Clan subsidiary,” Miriam said, carefully trying to keep a still face. It was bitterly disappointing to risk ceding control, but as Olga had pointed out, the Clan took a very dim view of members striking out on their own. “As part of this motion I’d like to resolve that the issue of this sixth family be dealt with by participants in this subsidiary, because clearly they’re the members most directly affected by the situation.”

  “Objection!” Shouted someone at the back of the hall. “Clan feud takes precedence!”

  “Are you saying the Clan can afford to lose more people?” asked Miriam.

  “Damn the blood! What about our dead? This calls for revenge!” Ayes backed him up: Miriam forced herself to think fast, knowing that if she let the heckling gather pace she could very easily lose control of the meeting.

  “It seems to me that the lost family is sorely depleted,” she began. “They had to send a child to supervise an adult’s job. You know, as I know, that the efficiency of a postal service like the one responsible for the Clan’s wealth is not just a function of how many world-walkers we have. It’s also a function of the number of routes we can send packages over. They’re small, and isolated, and they’re not as numerous as we are. However, rooting them out in the name of a feud will uncover old wounds and risk depleting our numbers for no gain. I’m going to stick my neck out and assert that the next few years are going to be far more dangerous for the Clan than most of you yet realize.”

  “Point of order!” It was Baron Hjorth again. “This is rubbish. She’s trying to frighten us. Won’t you—”

  “Shut up” grated Angbard. “Let her finish a sentence, damn your eyes.”

  Miriam waited a moment. “Thank you,” she said. “Factors to think about. Firstly, a new world. This is going to be important because it opens up new opportunities for trade and development, as I’ve already demonstrated. Secondly, the state of the Clan’s current business. I don’t know how to approach this subtly so I won’t: You’re in big trouble.

  “To be perfectly blunt, your current business model is obsolescent. You can keep it running for another two to five years, but then it’ll go into a nosedive. In ten years, it’ll be dead. And I’m not just talking about heroin and cocaine shipm
ents. I mean everything.

  “You’ll have noticed how hard it has become to launder the proceeds of narcotics traffic on the other side in the past few years. With the current anti-terrorist clampdown and the beefing up of police powers, life isn’t going to get any easier. Things are changing very fast indeed.

  “The Clan used to be involved in different types of commerce: gold smuggling, gemstones, anything valuable and lightweight. But those businesses rely on anonymity, and like I said, the anti-terrorist clampdown is making anonymity much harder to sustain. Let me emphasize this, the traditional business models don’t work anymore because they all rely on the same underlying assumption—that you can be anonymous.

  “Many of you probably aren’t aware of the importance of electronic commerce, or e-commerce. I’ve been working with specialists covering the development of the field. What you need to know is that goods and services are going to be sold, increasingly, online. This isn’t an attempt to sell you shares in some fly-by-night dot-com; it’s just a statement of fact—communications speed is more important than geographical location, and selling online lets small specialist outfits sell to anyone On the planet. But with the shift to online selling, you can expect cash money to become obsolete. High-denomination euro banknotes already come with a chip, to allow transactions to be traced. How long do you think it’ll be before the greenbacks you rely on stop being anonymous?

  “The fat times will be over—and if you’ve spent all your resources pursuing a blood feud, you’re going to be screwed. No money on the other side means no imports. No imports mean no toys, antibiotics, digital watches, whatever to buy the compliance of the landowners. No guns to shoot them with, either. If you try to ignore reality you will be screwed by factors outside your control.

  “But this isn’t inevitable. If you act now, you can open up new lines of revenue and new subsidiaries. Take ancient patents from my world, the world you’re used to using as a toy chest, and set up companies around them in the new world, in New Britain. Take the money you raise in New Britain and import books and tools here. Set up universities and schools. Build, using your power and your money to establish factories and towns and laboratories over here. In a couple of generations, you can pull Gruinmarkt out of the mire and start an industrial revolution that will make you a true world power, whether or not you depend on the family talent.

  “You can change the world—if you choose to start now, by changing the way you think about your business.”

  There was total silence in the hall. A puzzled silence, admittedly, but silence—and one or two nodding heads. Just let them keep listening, Miriam thought desperately. Then voices began to pipe up.

  “I never heard such a—”

  “—What would you have us put our money into?”

  “—Hear, hear!”

  “—Gather that educating the peasants is common over—”

  “Silence,” Angbard demanded testily. “The chair has a question.”

  “Uh. I’m ready.” Feeling tensely nervous, Miriam crossed her fingers behind her back.

  “Describe the business you established in the new world. What did you take with you to start it? And what is it worth?”

  “Ah, that’s an interesting one.” Miriam forced herself to keep a straight face, although the wave of relief she felt at Angbard’s leading question nearly made her go weak at the knees. “Exchange rate irregularities—or rather, the lack of them—make it hard to establish a true currency conversion rate, and I’m still looking for a means of repatriating value from the new world to the United States, but I’d have to say that expenditure to date is on the order of six hundred thousand dollars. The business in New Britain is still working toward its first contract, but that contract should be worth on the order of fifty thousand pounds. Uh, near as I can pin it down, one pound is equivalent to roughly two to three hundred dollars. So we’re looking at a return on investment of three hundred percent in six months, and that’s from a cold start.”

  A buzz of conversation rippled through the hall, and Angbard made no move to quell it. The figures Miriam had come up with sounded like venture capitalist nirvana—especially with a recession raging in the other world, and NASDAQ in the dumps. “That’s by selling a product that’s been obsolete for thirty years in the U.S.,” Miriam added. “I’ve got another five up my sleeve, waiting for this first deal to provide seedcorn capital for reinvestment. In the absence of major disruptive factors—” like a war with the hidden family, she added mentally “—I figure we can be turning over ten to a hundred million pounds within ten to fifteen years. That would make us the equivalent of IBM or General Motors, simply by recycling ideas that haven’t been invented yet over there.”

  The buzz of conversation grew louder. “I’ve done some more spreadsheet work,” Miriam added, now more confident. “If we do this, we’ll push the New British economic growth rate up by one or two percent per annum over its long-term average. We could do the same, though, importing intermediate technologies from there to here. There’s no point trying to train nuclear engineers or build airports in the Gruinmarkt, not with a medieval level of infrastructure, and a lot of the technologies up for sale in the U.S. are simply too far ahead to use here. Those of you who’ve wired up your estates will know what I’m talking about. But we can import tools and ideas and even teachers from New Britain, and deliver a real push to the economy over here. Within thirty years you could be traveling to your estates by railway, your farmers could be producing three times as much food, and your ships could dominate the Atlantic trade routes.”

  Angbard rapped his gavel on the wooden block in front of him for attention. “The chair thanks Countess Helge,” he said formally. “Are there any more questions from the floor?”

  A new speaker stood up: a smooth-looking managerial type who smiled at Miriam in a friendly manner from the bench behind her grandmother. “I’d like to congratulate my cousin on her successful start-up,” he began. “It’s a remarkable achievement to come into a new world and set up a business, from scratch, with no background.” Oh shit, Miriam thought uneasily. Who is this guy, and when’s he going to drop the hammer? “And I agree completely with everything she says. But clearly, her efforts could be aided by an infusion of support and experience. If we accept her motion to transfer the new business to the Clan as a subsidiary enterprise, it can clearly benefit from sound management—”

  “Which it already has,” Miriam snapped, finally getting his drift. “If you would like to discuss employment opportunities—” and a pound of flesh in return for keeping out of my way, you carpetbagger “—that’s all very well—but this is not the time and place for it. We have an immediate problem, which is relations with the sixth family. I’ll repeat my proposal; that the new business venture be recognized as a Clan business, that membership in it be open to the Clan, and that handling the lost family be considered the responsibility of this business. Can we put this to a vote?”

  Oliver Hjorth made to interrupt, but Angbard caught his hand and whispered something in his ear. His eyes narrowed and he shut up.

  “I don’t see why we can’t settle it now,” muttered Julius. “Show of hands! Ayes! Count them, damn your eyes. Nays!” He brought his own hammer down briskly. “The Ayes have it,” he announced. He turned to Miriam. “It’s yours.”

  Is that it? Miriam wondered dumbly, feeling as if something vast and elusive had passed her by in an eyeblink while her attention was elsewhere.

  “Next motion,” said Angbard. “Some of you have been misinformed that I announced that I was designating Helge as my heir. I wish to clarify the issue: I did not do so. However, I do intend to change my designated successor—to Patricia Thorold-Hjorth, my half-sister. Can anyone dispute my right to do so?” He looked around the room furiously. “No?” He nudged Julius. “See it minuted so.”

  Miriam felt as if a great weight had lifted from her shoulders—but not for long. “A new motion,” said Oliver Hjorth. He frowned at Miriam.
“The behavior of this long-lost niece gives me some cause for concern,” he began. “I am aware that she has been raised in strange and barbarous lands, and allowances must be made; but I fear she may do herself an injury if allowed to wander around at random. As her recent history of narrow scrapes shows, she’s clearly accident-prone and erratic. I therefore move that she be declared incompetent to sit as a member of the Clan, and that a suitable guardian be appointed—Baroness Hildegarde—”

  “Objection!” Miriam turned to see Olga standing up. “Baron Hjorth, through negligence, failed to see to the subject’s security during her residence here, notionally under his protection. He is not fit to make determinations bearing on her safety.”

  Oliver rounded on her in fury. “You little minx! I’ll have you thrown out on the street for—”

  Bang! The gavel again. “Objection sustained,” Julius quavered.

  Oliver glared at him. “Your time will come,” he growled, and subsided into grim silence.

  “I am an adult,” Miriam said quietly. “I am divorced, I have created and managed a Clan subsidiary, and I am not prepared to surrender responsibility for my own security.” She looked around the hall. “If you try to railroad me out of the New London operation, you’ll find some nasty surprises in the title deeds.” She stared at Oliver: “or you can sit back and wait for the profits to roll in. It’s your choice.”

  “I withdraw my motion,” Oliver growled quietly. Only his eyes told Miriam that he resented every word of it. There’d be a reckoning, they seemed to say.

  “Check your gun.”

  “I don’t need to.”

  “I said, check it. Listen. I told Poul to go for help. Think he’ll have made it?”

  “I don’t see why not.” Sullivan looked dubious, but he ejected the magazine and worked the slide on his gun, then reloaded and safed it.

  “Matthias believes in belt and braces.” For a moment, Roland looked ill. “I think he’ll have left a surprise or two for us.”