The Merchants’ War tmp-4

by Charles Stross

  Shit. “I’m sorry. Like I said, we’re looking. I’ll see if I can scare up some backup when we get back, okay?”

  “You’d better. Because falling on our swords is not on the agenda for this administration, son. We’re not going to hand the country to the other team just because some assholes from another dimension fuck with us, any more than we did when bin Laden got uppity and bit the feeding hand.” James paused. “I shouldn’t have blown up then. Forget I said anything, it’s not your fault. There’s a lot at stake here that you aren’t in on: the big picture is really scary. All the oil in fairyland, for starters.”

  “All the what?”

  Dr. James looked as if he’d bitten a lemon while expecting an orange. “Oil, son. Makes the world go round. You know what the business with al-Qaeda is about? Oil. We’re in Saudi Arabia because of the oil: bin Laden wants us out of Saudi. We’re going to go into Iraq because of the oil. Oil is leverage. Oil lets us put the Chinks and Europeans in their place. And we’re running short of it, in case you hadn’t noticed, there’s this thing called peak oil coming and we’ve got analysts scratching their heads to figure out how we’re going to field it. We’re not going to run out, but demand is going to exceed supply and the price is going to start climbing in a few years. Our planetary preeminence relies on us having cheap oil for our industries, while everyone else pays through the nose for it. But we can’t guarantee to keep prices low if we’re having to send our boys out to sit in the desert and keep the wells pumping. So it was looking bad until six months ago, but now there’s a new factor in the equation…”

  He took a deep breath. “The Clan. A bunch of medieval jerks, squatting on our territory—or a good cognate of it. What’s going down in Texas, Colonel Smith? Their version of Texas, not our Texas: what are they doing there? I’ll tell you what they’re doing: they’re sitting on twice as much oil as Saddam Hussein, and that’s what’s got Daddy Warbucks’s attention. Because, you see, if JAUNT BLUE delivers, eventually all that good black stuff is going to be ours…”

  “Are we nearly there yet?”

  Huw glanced in the driver’s mirror, taking his eyes off the interstate for a couple of seconds. Elena sprawled across one half of the back seat of the Hummer H2 truck, managing to look louche and bored simultaneously. Petulant, that was the word. A twenty-one-year-old Clan princess—no, merely a contessa in waiting, should she inherit—fresh from her Swiss finishing school and her first semester at college: out in the big bad world for the first time, with two brave knights to look after her. File off the serial numbers and you could mistake her for a spoiled preppy kitten. Of course, the jocks who’d be clustering around the latter type didn’t usually carry swords. Nor did normal preppies know how to handle the FN P90 in the trunk. Still, Huw let his eyes linger on her tight jeans and embroidered babydoll tee for a second longer than was strictly necessary, before he glanced back at the road and the GPS navigation screen.

  “About twenty miles to go. Eighteen minutes. We turn off in ten.”

  “Boring.” She faked a yawn at him, slim hand covering pink lip gloss.

  “I’m bored too,” snarked Hulius, from his nest in the front passenger seat. He took an orange from the glove box and began to peel it with his dagger. Citrus droplets swirled in the aircon breeze.

  “We’re all bored,” Huw said affably. “Are you suggesting I should break the speed limit?”

  Hulius paled. “No—”

  “Good.” Huw smiled. The white duke took a dim view of traffic infractions, and supplemented the official fines with additional punishments of his own choice: ten strokes of the lash for a first offense. Don’t ever, ever draw attention to yourselves was the first rule they drilled into everyone before letting them out the door. Which was why couriers on Post duty dressed like lawyers, and why the three of them were driving down the interstate at a sober two miles under the speed limit, in a shiny new Hummer, with every i dotted and t crossed on the paperwork that proved them to be a trio of MIT graduate students with rich parents, off on a field trip.

  The green dot on the map inched south along Route 95, slowly converging on Baltimore and the afternoon traffic. The aircon fans hissed steadily, but Huw could still feel the heat beating down on the back of his hand through the tinted glass. Concrete rumbled under the magically smooth suspension of the truck. The scrubby grass outside was parched, burned almost brown by the summer heat. He’d made a journey part of the distance down this way once before on horseback, in a place with no air-conditioning or cars: it had been a fair approximation of hell. Doing the journey in a luxury SUV was heaven—albeit a particularly boring corner of it. “Have you checked the charge on the goggles yet?”

  “They’re in the trunk. They’ll be fine.” Hulius pulled off a slice of orange and offered it to Huw. “you worry too much.”

  “It’s your neck I’m worrying over. Would you rather I didn’t worry, bro?”

  “If you put it that way…”

  The last half hour of any journey was always the longest, but Huw caught the sign in time, and took the exit for Bel Air and parts east: then a couple more turns onto dusty roads linking faceless tracts of suburb with open countryside. The dots converged. Finally he reached a stretch of trees and a driveway led up to an unprepossessing house. He brought the truck to a halt in front of the day room windows and killed the engine.

  “You’re sure this is the place?” Elena pushed herself upright then stretched, yawning.

  “Got to be.” Huw rooted around in the dash for the bunch of house keys and the letter from the realtor. Then he opened the door and jumped out, taking a deep breath as the oppressive summer humidity washed over him. “Number 344. Yup, that’s right.”

  Sneakers crunched on gravel as he walked towards the front door. Behind him, a clattering: Elena unloading the flat Pelikan case from the trunk. Huw glanced up at the peeling white paint under the guttering, the patina of dust. Then he rang the doorbell and waited for a long minute, until Elena, holding the case behind him as if it was a guitar, began tapping her toes and whistling a tuneless melody of impatience. “It pays to be cautious,” he finally explained, before he stuck the key in the lock. “People hereabouts take a dim view of unexpected visitors.”

  The key turned. Inside, the hallway was hot and close, smelling of dust and old regrets. Huw breathed a sigh of relief. He’d set this up by remote control, one of ten test sites running down the coastline and across the continent all the way to the west coast, spaced five hundred kilometers apart. The Realtor had been only too glad to rent it to him for a year, money paid up front: it had been unsalable ever since its former owner, a retired widower, had died of a heart attack in the living room one bleak winter evening. You could remove the carpet and the furniture, and even do something about the smell, but you couldn’t remove the reputation.

  Huw hunted around for the fuse board for a while, then flipped the circuit breaker. A distant whir spoke of long-dormant air-conditioning. He checked that the hall lights worked, then nodded to himself. “Okay, let’s get moved in.”

  It took the three of them half an hour to unload the Hummer. Besides backpacks full of clothing, they brought in a number of wheeled equipment cases, a laptop computer, and couple of expensive digital camcorders. Finally, the air mattresses. “Elena? You take the back bedroom. Yul, you and I are roughing it up front in the master room.”

  Huw dragged his mattress into the front room and plugged the electric pump in. Some of the houses were still furnished, but not this one. Be prepared wasn’t just for scouts. Her Grace Helge had done pretty much this same job, on a smaller, much less organized scale—but Huw had been thinking about it for the week since the white duke had called him in, and he thought he had some new twists on it. He mopped at his forehead. “Listen, we’re about done here and it’s half past lunchtime, so why don’t we head into town and grab a pizza while the air-conditioning makes this place habitable?”

  “Works for me.” Hulius grimaced. “Where
’s Lady Elena?”

  “Here.” Elena leaned against the banister rail outside the door. “Food would be good.” She grinned impishly. “How about a couple of bottles of wine?” Like all Clan members, her attitude to wine was very un-American—tempered only by the duke’s iron rule about attracting unwanted attention in public.

  Huw nodded—thoughtfully, for he was still getting used to playing the role of responsible adult around the other two. “We’ll pick something up if we pass a liquor store. But no drinking in public, okay?”

  “Sure, dude.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  An hour later they were back in the under-furnished living room with pizza boxes, a stack of six-packs of Pepsi, and a discreet brown paper bag. “Okay,” said Huw, licking his fingers. “Taken your pills yet?”

  “Um, ’scuse me.” Elena darted upstairs, returning with a toilet bag. “Hate these things,” she mumbled resentfully. “Make me feel woozy.” She threw back her head when she swallowed. What fine bones she has, thought Huw, watching her with unprofessional enthusiasm. That was one of the reasons she was along on this trip: because she was sixty kilograms, the stocky Hulius could carry her piggyback if necessary.

  “Where were we?” asked Hulius, pausing with a slice of Hawaiian halfway to his mouth.

  Huw checked his wristwatch. “About an hour and a half short of time zero. You guys eat, I’ll repeat the plan, interrupt if you want me to explain anything.”

  “Okay,” said Hulius. Elena nodded, rolling her eyes as she chewed.

  “First, we assemble the stage one kit. Clothing, boots, cameras, guns, telemetry belts. We triple-test the belt batteries and set them running at five minutes to zero hour. There’s no post on this trip, even if we get some results. Elena piggybacks on Yul, on the first attempt. If you fail, we call it a wash today, switch off the telemetry, and break open the wine. If you succeed, you evaluate your surroundings and proceed to Plan Alpha or Plan Bravo, depending. Now.” He tore off a wedge of cooling pizza: “It’s your turn to tell me what you’re supposed to do as soon as you find yourself wherever the hell you’re going. Hoping to go. Plan Alpha first. Elena, describe your job…?”

  The carvery in the hotel wasn’t anything Miriam would have described as a classy restaurant, but after being locked in the basement of a brothel for most of a week it felt like the Ritz. Miriam was ravenous from a day pounding the sidewalks: but Erasmus, she noticed over the soup, ate slowly but methodically, clearing his plate with grim determination. “Hungry?” she asked, lowering her spoon.

  “I try never to leave my food.” He nodded, then tore off another piece of bread to mop his soup bowl clean. “Old habit. Bad manners, I’m afraid: I apologize.”

  “No offense taken.” Miriam nodded. “You need to put on weight, anyway. I haven’t heard you coughing today, but you’re so thin!”

  “Really?” He made as if to raise his napkin to cover his mouth, then grinned at her. “When you start you know about it, but when something goes away…it’s an unnoticed miracle.” A waiter arrived, silently, and removed their bowls. “I don’t feel ancient and drained anymore. But you’re right, I need to eat. I wasn’t always a sack of bones.” He shook his head, and the grin slipped into rueful oblivion.

  “It was your time in the north, wasn’t it?” The statement slipped out before Miriam could stop it.

  Erasmus stared at her. “Yes, it was,” he said quietly.

  She licked her lips. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to say that.”

  “Yes you did.” He glanced sidelong at the other occupants of the room: no one was paying them any obvious attention. “But it’s all right, I don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mean to pry.” The waiter was returning, bearing two plates. She leaned back while he deftly slid her entree in front of her. When he’d gone, she looked back at Burgeson. “But I’d be crazy not to be curious. Months ago, when I said I didn’t care what your connections were…I didn’t expect things to go this way.”

  He shrugged, then picked up his knife and fork. “Neither did I,” he said shortly. “You are curious as to the nature of what you’ve gotten yourself into?”

  She took a sip of wine, then began to methodically slice into the overcooked lamb chops on her plate. “This probably isn’t the right place for this conversation.”

  “I’m glad you agree.”

  He wasn’t making this easy. “So. Tomorrow…train back home? Then what?”

  “It’ll be a flying visit. Overnight, perhaps.” He shoveled a potato onto his fork, holding it in place with a fatty piece of mutton: “I need to pick up my post, make arrangements for the shop, and notify the Polis.” His cheek twitched. “I’ve reserved a suite on the night mail express, leaving tomorrow evening. It joins up with the Northern Continental at Dunedin, we won’t have to change carriages.”

  “A suite?” She raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that expensive?”

  Erasmus paused, another forkful of food halfway to his mouth: “Of course it is! But the extra expense, on top of a transcontinental ticket, is minor.” He grimaced. “You expect travel to be cheaper than it is. It can be—if you don’t mind sleeping on a blanket roll with the steerage for a week.”

  “Yes, but…” Miriam paused for long enough to eat some more food: “I’m sorry. So we’re going straight through Dunedin and stopping in Fort Petrograd? How many days away?”

  “We’ll stop halfway for a few hours. The Northern Continental runs from Florida up to New London, cuts northwest to Dunedin, stops to take on extra carriages, nonstop to New Glasgow where it stops to split up, then down the coast to Fort Petrograd. We should arrive in just under four days. If we were really going the long way, we could change onto the Southern Continental at Western Station, keep going south to Mexico City, then cross the Isthmus of Panama and keep going all the way to Land’s End on the Cape. But that’s a horrendous journey, seven thousand miles or more, and the lines aren’t fast—it takes nearly three weeks.”

  “Hang on. The Cape—you mean, you have trains that run all the way to the bottom of South America?”

  “Of course. Don’t your people, where you come from?”

  They ate in silence for a few minutes. “I’d better write that letter to Roger right now and mail it this evening.”

  “That would be prudent.” Burgeson lowered his knife and fork, having swept his plate clean. “You’ll probably want to go through my bookcases before we embark, too—it’s going to be a long ride.”

  After the final cup of coffee, Burgeson sighed. “Let us go upstairs,” he suggested.

  “Okay—yes.” Miriam managed to stand up. She was, she realized, exhausted, even though the night was still young. “I’m tired.”

  “Really?” Erasmus led the way to the elevator. “Maybe you should avail yourself of the bathroom, then catch an early night. I have some business to attend to in town. I promise to let myself in quietly.”

  He slid the elevator gate open and as she stepped inside she noticed the heavily built doorman just inside the entrance. “If it’s safe, that works for me.”

  “Why would it be unsafe? To a hotel like this, any whiff of insecurity for the guests is pure poison.”

  “Good.”

  Back in the room, Miriam jotted down a quick note to her sometime chief research assistant, using hotel stationery. “Can you get this posted tonight?” she asked Erasmus. “I’m going to have that bath now…”

  The bathroom turned out to be down the corridor from the bedroom, the bath a contraption of cold porcelain fed by gleaming copper pipework. There was, however, hot water in unlimited quantities—something that Miriam had missed for so long that its availability came as an almost incomprehensible luxury.

  The things we take for granted, she thought, relaxing into the tub: the comforts of a middle-class existence in New Britain seemed exotic and advanced after months of detention in a Clan holding in Niejwein. I could fit in here. She tried the thought on for size. Okay, so domestic radios are t
he size of a photocopier, and there’s no Internet, and they use trains where we’d use airliners. So what? They’ve got hot and cold running water, and gas and electricity. Indoor plumbing. The chambers Baron Henryk had confined her to had a closet with a drafty hole in a wooden seat. I could live here. The thought was tempting for a moment—until she remembered the thin, pinched faces in the soup queue, the outstretched upturned hats. Erasmus’s hacking cough, now banished by medicines that she’d brought over from Boston—her own Boston. No antibiotics: back before they’d been discovered, a quarter to a third of the population had died of bacterial diseases. She sighed, lying back carefully to avoid soaking her brittle-bleached hair. It’s better than the Clan, but still…

  She tried to gather her scattered thoughts. New Britain wasn’t some kind of nostalgic throwback to a gaslight age: it was dirty, smelly, polluted, and intermittently dangerous. Clothing was expensive and conservative because foreign sweatshops weren’t readily available: the cost of transporting their produce was too high even in peacetime—and with a war time blockade in force, things were even worse. Politics was dangerous, in ways she’d barely begun to understand: there was participatory democracy for a price, for a very limited franchise of rich land-owning men who thought themselves the guardians of the people and the rulers of the populace, shepherding the masses they did not consider to be responsible enough for self-determination.

  It wasn’t only women’s rights that were a problem here—and that was bad enough, as she’d discovered: women here had fewer civil rights than they had in Iran, in her own world; at least in Iran women could vote—but here, anyone who wasn’t a member of the first thousand families was second-class, unable to move to a new city without a permit from the Polis, a subject rather than a citizen. “Fomenting democratic agitation” was an actual on-the-books felony that could get you sent to a labor camp in the far north. Outright chattel slavery might not be a problem—it seemed to have fizzled away in the late nineteenth century—but the level of casual racism she’d witnessed was jarring and unpleasant.