The Merchants’ War tmp-4

by Charles Stross

  Hulius rammed another transponder spike into the earth by the road and Huw scraped an arrow on the nearest tree, pointing back along their path. The LED on top of the transponder blinked infrequently, reassuring them that the radio beacon was ready and waiting to guide them home. For the next half hour they plodded along the shallow downhill path, Hulius leading the way with his hunting rifle, Elena bringing up the rear. Once they were on the roadbed, it was easy to follow, although patches of asphalt had been heaved up into odd mounds and shoved aside by trees over the years—or centuries—for which it had been abandoned. Something about the way the road snaked along the contours of the shallow hillside tickled Huw’s imagination. “It was built to take cars,” he finally said aloud.

  “Huh? How can you tell?” asked Yul.

  “The radius of curvature. Look at it, if you’re on foot it’s as straight as an arrow. But imagine you’re driving along it at forty, fifty miles per hour. See how it’s slightly banked around that ridge ahead?” He pointed towards a rise in the ground, just visible through the trees.

  They continued in silence for a couple of minutes. “You’re assuming—” Yul began to say, then stopped, freezing in his tracks right in front of a tree that had thrust through the asphalt. “Shit.”

  “What?” Huw almost walked into his back.

  “Cover,” Yul whispered, gesturing towards the side of the track. “It’s probably empty, but…”

  “What?” Huw ducked to the side of the road—followed by Elena—then crept forward to peer past Yul’s shoulder.

  “There,” said Hulius, raising one hand to point. It took a moment for Huw to recognize the curving flank of a mushroom-pale dome, lightly streaked with green debris. “You were looking for company, weren’t you? I’ve got a bad feeling about this…”

  It wasn’t the first time Miriam had hidden in the woods, nursing a splitting headache and a festering sense of injustice, but familiarity didn’t make it easier: and this time she’d had an added source of anxiety as she crossed over, hoping like hell that the Clan hadn’t seen fit to doppelganger her business by building a defensive site in the same location in their own world. But she needn’t have worried. The trees grew thick and undisturbed, and she’d made sure that the site was well inland from the line the coast had followed before landfill in both her Boston and the strangely different New British version had extended it.

  She’d taken a risk, of course. Boston and Cambridge occupied much the same sites in New Britain as in her own Massachusetts, but in the Gruinmarkt that area was largely untamed, covered by deciduous forest and the isolated tracts and clearings of scattered village estates. She’d never thought to check the lay of the land colocated with her workshop, despite having staked out her house: for all she knew, she might world-walk right into the great hall of some hedge lord. But it seemed unlikely—Angbard hadn’t chosen the site of his fortified retreat for accessibility—so the worst risk she expected was a twisted ankle or a drop into a gully.

  Instead Miriam stumbled and nearly walked face-first into a beech tree, then stopped and looked around. “Ow.” She massaged her forehead. This was bad: she suddenly felt hot and queasy, and her vision threatened to play tricks on her. Damn, I don’t need a migraine right now. She sat down against the tree trunk, her heart hammering with the release of tension. A flash of triumph: I got away with it! Well, not quite. She’d still have to cross back over and meet up with Erasmus. But there were hours to go, yet…

  The nausea got worse abruptly, peaking in a rush that cramped her stomach. She doubled over to her right and vomited, whimpering with pain. The spasms seemed to go on for hours, leaving her gasping for breath as she retched herself dry. Eventually, by the time she was too exhausted to stand up, the cramps began to ease. She sat up and leaned back against the tree, pulled her suitcase close, and shivered uncontrollably. “I wonder what brought that on?” She mumbled under her breath. Then in an effort to distract herself, she opened the case.

  The contents of the hidden drawer were mostly plastic and base metal, but they gleamed at her eyes with more promise than a chest full of rubies and diamonds. A small Sony notebook PC and its accessories, a power supply and CD drive. With shaking hands she opened the computer’s lid and pushed the power button. The screen flickered, and LEDs flashed, then it shut down again. “Oh, of course.” The battery had run down in the months of enforced inactivity. Well, no need to worry: New Britain had alternating current electricity, and the little transformer was designed for international use, rugged enough to eat their bizarre mixture of frequency and voltage without melting. (Even though she’d had a devil of a time at first, establishing how the local units of measurement translated into terms she was vaguely familiar with.)

  Closing the suitcase, she felt the tension drain from her shoulders. I can go home, she told herself. Any time I want to. All she had to do was walk twenty-five paces north, cross over again at the prearranged time, and then find an electric light socket to plug the computer into. “Huh.” She glanced at her watch, surprised to discover that fifty minutes had already passed. She’d arranged to reappear in three hours, the fastest crossing she felt confident she could manage without medication. But that was before the cramps and the migraine had hit her. She stood up clumsily, brushed down her clothes, and oriented herself using the small compass she’d found among Burgeson’s stock. “Okay, here goes nothing.”

  Another tree, another two hours: this time in the right place for the return trip to the side alley behind the workshop. Miriam settled down to wait. What do I really want to do? she asked herself. It was a hard question to answer. Before the massacre at the betrothal ceremony—already nearly a week ago—she’d had the grim luxury of certainty. But now…I could buy my way back into the game, she realized. The Idiot’s dead so the betrothal makes no sense anymore. Henryk’s probably dead, too. And I’ve got valuable information, if I can get Angbard’s ear. Mike’s presence changed everything. Hitherto, all the Clan’s strategic planning and internecine plotting had made the key assumption that they were inviolable in their own estates, masters of their own world. But if the U.S. government could send spies, then the implications were likely to shake the Clan to its foundations. They’ve been looking for the Clan for years, she realized. But now they’d found the narcoterrorists—one world’s feudal baron is another world’s drug lord—the whole elaborate game of charades that Clan security played was over. The other player could kick over the card table any time they wanted. You can doppelganger a castle against world-walkers, but you can’t stop them crossing over outside your walls and planting a backpack nuke. In an endgame between the Clan and the CIA or its world-walking equivalent, there could be only one winner.

  “So they can’t win a confrontation. But if they lose…” She blinked. They had Iris, Patricia, her mask-wearing mother. Could I let her go? The thought was painful. And then there were others, the ones she could count as friends. Olga, Brill, poor innocent kids like Kara. Even James Lee. She could cut and run, but she’d be leaving them to—no, that’s not right. She shook her head. Where did this unwelcome sense of responsibility come from? Damn it, I haven’t gone native! But it was too late to protest: they’d tied her into their lives, and if she just walked out on them, much less walked willingly into the arms of enemies who’d happily see them all dead or buried so deep in jail they’d never see daylight, she’d be personally responsible for the betrayal.

  “They’ll have to go.” Somewhere beyond the reach of a government agency that relied on coerced and imprisoned world-walkers. “But where?” New Britain was a possibility. Her experiment in technology transfer had worked, after all. What if we went overt? She wondered. If we told them who we were and what we could do. Could we cut a deal? Build a military-industrial complex to defend against a military-industrial complex. The Empire’s under siege. The French have the resources to… she blanked. I don’t know enough. A tantalizing vision clung to the edges of her imagination, a new business idea so m
onumentally vast and arrogant she could barely contemplate it. Thousands of world-walkers, working with the support and resources of a continental superpower, smuggling information and ideas and sharing lessons leeched from a more advanced world. I was thinking small. How fast could we drag New Britain into the twenty-first century? Even without the cohorts of new world-walkers in the making that she’d stumbled across, the product of Angbard’s secretive manipulation of a fertility lab’s output, it seemed feasible. More than that: it seemed desirable. Mike’s organization will assume that any world-walker is a drug mule until proven otherwise. It won’t be healthy to be a world-walker in the USA after the shit hits the fan. We’ll need New Britain.

  Miriam shook herself and checked her watch. The hours had drifted by: the shadows were lengthening and her headache was down to a dull throb. She stood up and dusted herself down again, picked up her suitcase, and focused queasily on the locket. “Once more, with spirit…”

  Bang.

  Red-hot needles thrust into her eyes as her stomach heaved again: a giant gripped her head between his hands and squeezed. Cobblestones beneath her boots, and a stink of fresh horseshit. Miriam bent forward, gagging, realizing I’m standing in the road—and a narrow road it was, walled on both sides with weathered, greasy brickwork—as the waves of nausea hit.

  Bang.

  Someone shouted something, at her it seemed. The racket was familiar, and here was a car (or what passed for one in New Britain) with engine running. Hands grabbed at her suitcase: she tightened her grip instinctively.

  “Into the car! Now!” Erasmus, she realized fuzzily.

  “’M going to be sick—”

  “Well you can be sick in the car!” He clutched her arm and tugged.

  Bang.

  Gunshots?

  She tottered forward, stomach lurching, and half-fell, half-slid through the open passenger compartment leg well, collapsing on the wooden floor. The car shuddered and began to roll smoothly on a flare of steam.

  BANG. Someone else, not Erasmus, leaned over her and pulled the trigger of a revolver, driving sharp spikes into her outraged ear drums. With a screech of protesting rubber the car picked up speed. BANG. Erasmus collapsed on top of her, holding her down. “Stay on the floor,” he shouted.

  The steam car hit a pothole and bounced, violently. It was too much: Miriam began to retch again, bringing up clear bile.

  “Shit.” It was the shooter on the back seat, wrinkling his face in disgust. “I think that’s—” he paused “—no, they’re trying to follow us on foot.” The driver piled on the steam, then flung their carriage into a wide turn onto a public boulevard. The shooter sat down hard, holding his pistol below seat level, pointing at the floor. “Can you sit up?” he asked Miriam and Erasmus. “Look respectable fast, we’re hitting Ketch Street in a minute.”

  Erasmus picked himself up. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice shaky. Miriam waited for a moment as her stomach tried to lurch again. “Are you all right?”

  “Head hurts,” she managed. Arms around her shoulders lifted her to her knees. “My suitcase…”

  “On the parcel shelf.”

  More hands from the other side. Together they lifted her into position on the bench seat. The car was rattling and rocking from side to side, making a heady pace—almost forty miles per hour, if she was any judge of speed, but it felt more like ninety in this ragtop steamer. She gasped for air, chest heaving, trying to get back the wind she’d lost while she was throwing up. “Are you alright?” Burgeson asked again. He’d found a perch on the jump seat opposite, and was clutching a grab-strap behind the chauffeur’s station on the right of the cockpit.

  “I, it never hit me like that before,” she admitted. Amidst the cacophony in her skull she found a moment to be coldly terrified: world-walking usually caused a blood pressure spike and migraine-like symptoms, but nothing like this hellish nausea and pile-driver headache. “Something’s up with me.”

  “Did you get what you wanted?” he pressed her. “Was it worth it?”

  “Yeah, yes.” She glanced sideways, tiredly. “We haven’t been introduced.”

  “Indeed.” Erasmus sent her a narrow-eyed look. “This is Albert. Albert, meet Anne.”

  Gotcha. “Nice to meet you,” she said politely.

  “Albert” nodded affably, and palmed his revolver, sliding it into a pocket of his cutaway jacket. “Always nice to meet a fellow traveler,” he said.

  “Indeed.” Fellow traveler, is it? She fell silent. Burgeson’s political connections came with dangerous strings attached. “What’s with the car? And the rush?”

  “You didn’t hear them shooting at us?” Erasmus looked concerned, as if questioning her sanity.

  “I was busy throwing up. What happened?”

  “Stakeout,” he said. “About ten minutes after your break-in they surrounded the place. If you’d come out the front door—” The brisk two-fingered gesture across his throat made the message all too clear. “I don’t know what you’ve stirred up, but the Polis are very upset about something. So I decided to call in some favors and arrange a rescue chariot.”

  “Albert” nodded. “A good thing too,” he said darkly. “You’ll excuse me, ma’am.” He doffed his cap and began to knead it with his fingers, turning it inside out to reveal a differently patterned lining. “I’ll be off at the next crossroads.” Erasmus turned and knocked sharply on the wooden partition behind the chauffeur: the car began to slow from its headlong rush.

  “Where are we—” Miriam swallowed, then paused to avoid gagging on the taste of bile “—where are we going?”

  The car slowed to a near halt, just short of a streetcar stop. “Wait,” said Erasmus. To “Albert” he added: “The movement thanks you for your assistance today. Good luck.” “Albert” nodded, then stepped onto the sidewalk and marched briskly away without a backward glance. The car picked up speed again, then wheeled in a fast turn onto a twisting side street. “We’re going to make the train, I hope,” Erasmus said quietly. “The driver doesn’t know which one. Or even which station. I hope you can walk.”

  “My head’s sore. But my feet…” She tried to shrug, then winced. Only minutes had passed, but she was having difficulty coming to terms with the ambush. “They were trying to kill me. No warnings.”

  “Yes.” He raised one eyebrow. “Maybe your friend was under closer surveillance than he realized.”

  Miriam shuddered. “Let’s get out of here,” she suggested.

  It took them a while to make their connection. The car dropped them off near a suburban railway platform, from which they made their way to a streetcar stop and then via a circuitous route Erasmus had evidently planned to throw off any curious followers. But an hour later they were waiting on a railway platform in downtown Boston, not too far from the site of Back Bay Station in Miriam’s home world. Geography dictates railroads, she told herself as another smoky locomotive wheezed and puffed through the station, belching steam towards the arched cast-iron ceiling trusses. I wonder what else it dictates? The answer wasn’t hard to guess: she’d seen the beggars waiting outside the ticket hall, hoping for a ride out west. Erasmus nodded to himself beside her, then tensed. “Look,” he said, “I do believe that’s ours.”

  Miriam glanced towards the end of the long, curving platform, through the thin haze of steam. “Really?” The long ant column of carriages approaching the platform seemed to vanish into the infinite distance. It was certainly long enough to be a transcontinental express train.

  “Carriage eleven, upper deck.” He squinted towards it. “We’ve got a bit of a walk…”

  The Northern Continental was a city on wheels—wheels six French feet apart, the track gauge nearly half as wide again as the ordinary trains. The huge double-deck carriages loomed overhead, brass handrails gleaming around the doors at either end. Burgeson’s expensive passes did more than open doors: uniformed porters took their suitcases and carried them upstairs, holding the second and third class passeng
ers at bay while they boarded. Miriam looked around in astonishment. “This is ridiculous!”

  Erasmus smiled lopsidedly. “You don’t like it?”

  “It’s not that—” Miriam walked across to the sofa facing the wall of windows and sat down, bemused. The walls of the compartment were paneled in polished oak as good as anything Duke Angbard had in his aerie at Fort Lofstrom, and if the floor wasn’t carpeted in hand-woven Persian rugs, she was no judge of carpet. It reminded her of the expensive hotels she’d stayed at in Boston, when she’d been trying to set up a successful technology transfer business and impress the local captains of industry. “Does this convert into a bed, or…?”

  “The bedrooms are through there.” Erasmus pointed at the other end of the lounge. “The bathroom is just past the servants’ quarters—”

  “Servants’ quarters?”

  Erasmus looked at her oddly. “Yes, I keep forgetting. Labor is expensive where you come from, isn’t it?”

  Miriam looked around again. “Wow. We’re here for the next three or four days?”

  A distant whistle cut through the window glass, and with a nearly undetectable jerk the carriage began to move.

  “Yes.” He nodded. “Plenty of time to take your shoes off.”

  “Okay.” She bent down automatically, then blinked stupidly. “This doesn’t come cheap, does it?”

  “No.” She heard a scrape of chair legs across carpet and looked up, catching Erasmus in the process of sitting down in a spindly Queen Anne reproduction. He watched her with his wide, dark, eyes, his bearing curiously bird like. Behind him, Empire Station slid past in ranks of cast-iron pillars. “But one tends to be interfered with less if one is seen to be able to support expensive tastes.”

  “Right…so you’re doing this, spending however much, just to go and see a man about a book?”

  A brief pause. “Yes.” Erasmus smiled faintly.