The Merchants’ War tmp-4

by Charles Stross

  Around noon, he got out of the house for a couple of hours, driven stir-crazy by the daytime TV. It took him nearly ten minutes to get the car seat adjusted, and an hour of hobbling around Barnes and Noble and a couple of grocery stores left him feeling like he’d run a marathon, but he made it home uneventfully. Then he discovered that he hadn’t figured on carrying the grocery sacks and bag of books and magazines up the front steps. He ended up so exhausted that by the time he got the last bag in and closed the door he was about ready to drop. He hobbled into the lounge clutching the bookbag, and lowered the bag onto the coffee table before he realized the lounger was already occupied.

  “So, Mr. Fleming! We meet again.” She giggled, ruining the effect. It was unnecessary, in any case: the pistol in her lap more than made up for her lack of menace.

  “Jesus!” He staggered, nearly losing his balance.

  “Relax. I do not intend to shoot you. Are you well?”

  “I’m—” He bit back his first angry response. What are you doing in my house? That question was the elephant in the living room: but it wasn’t one he felt like asking the Russian princess directly, not while she was holding a gun on him. “No, not very.” He shuffled towards the sofa and lowered himself down into it. “I’m tired. Been shopping,” he added, redundantly. And how did you get past Judith’s watch team? “What brings you here?”

  “Patricia sent me to see how you were,” she explained, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for killer grannies from another dimension to send their ice-blonde hit-woman bodyguards to check up on him. “She was concerned that you might be unwell—your leg was hard to keep clean in the carriage.”

  “Yeah, right.” Mike snorted. “She’s got nothing but my best interests at heart.”

  Olga leaned forward, her eyes wide: “It is the truth, you know! You will be of little use to us if you die of battle fever. Are you well?”

  “I’m as well as—” he bit back the words, any man facing an armed home intruder—“can be expected. Spent a couple of days in hospital. Off work for the next several weeks.” He paused. “Getting about. A bit.”

  “Good.” Olga sat back, then made the pistol disappear: “Excuse me.” She looked apologetic. “Until I was sure it was you…”

  “That’s alright,” Mike assured her gravely. “I quite understand. We’re all paranoids together here.” A thought struck him. “How did you get in?”

  She smiled. “Your housekeeper is taking the day off.”

  “Ah.” Shit. Mike had a sharp urge to bang his head on the wall. Who’s staking who out? Of course, she’d had time to set everything up while he was in hospital; possibly even before they’d dropped him back in the right universe. The Russian princess and her world-walking friends could have been watching his apartment for days before Herz and her team moved in to set up their own surveillance op. They don’t work like the Mafia, they work like a government, he recalled. A feudal government. “So Pat—what did you call her? Sent you to check up on me. I thought she was going to mail me instead?”

  “Your mail is being intercepted,” Olga pointed out. “Consequently, we felt it best to talk to you in person. There is mail, too, and you can respond to it if you wish. Have you reported to your liege yet?”

  “Have I?” The sense of grinding gears was back: Mike forced himself to translate. “Uh, yes.” He nodded, stupidly. “I have a cellular phone for you. It’s off the official record. There’s a preprogrammed number in it that goes direct to my boss’s boss. He’s authorized to negotiate, and if necessary he can talk to the top. Office of the Vice President. But it’s all deniable, as I understand things.” He pointed at the paper bag on the side table. “It’s in there.”

  Olga didn’t move. “What guarantee have we that as soon as we dial the number, you assassins won’t locate the caller? Or that there isn’t a bomb in the earpiece?”

  “That’s—” Mike swallowed. “Don’t be silly.”

  “I’m not being silly. Just prudent.” She reached out and took the bag, removed the phone, and started to fiddle with the case. “We’ll be in touch. Probably not with this telephone, however.”

  “There are certain requirements,” Mike added.

  “What?” She froze, holding the battery cover in one hand.

  “The sample that Matthias provided.” He watched her minutely. “I’m told they’re willing to negotiate with you. But there’s an absolute precondition. Matt told us he’d planted a bomb, on a timer. We want it disarmed, and we want the pit. If it goes off, there’s no deal—not now, not ever.”

  Olga’s expression shifted slightly. She’s not a poker player, Mike realized. “A time bomb? I understand that is not good, but what do your lords think we can do about such a thing? Surely it’s no more than a minor…” She trailed off. “What kind of bomb?”

  Mike said nothing, but raised an eyebrow.

  “Why would he plant a bomb?” she persisted. “I don’t see what he could possibly hope to achieve.”

  Too much subtlety, maybe. “He brought a sample of plutonium with him when he wanted to get our attention. It worked.”

  “A sample of ploo-what?” Her expression of polite incomprehension would have been hilarious in any other context.

  “Oh, come on! What world did you—” Mike stopped dead. Whoops. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” she said coolly.

  He boggled for a moment, as understanding sank in. She’s not from around these parts, is she? “Do you know what an atom bomb is?”

  “An atom bomb?” She looked interested. “I’ve seen them in films. An ingenious fiction, I thought.” Pause. “Are you telling me they’re real?”

  “Uh.” You’re really not from around here, are you? On the other hand, if you stopped a random person in a random third-world country and asked them about atom bombs and how they worked, what kind of answer would you get? He licked his lips. “They’re real, all right. Matthias had a sample of plutonium.” No sign of recognition. “That’s the, the explosive they run on. It’s very tightly controlled. Even though the amount he had is nothing like enough to make a bomb, it caused a major panic. Then he claimed to actually have a bomb. We want it. Or we want the rest of your plutonium, and we want to know exactly how and where you got it so that we can verify there’s no more missing. That’s a nonnegotiable precondition for any further talks.”

  “Huh.” She frowned. “You are serious about this. How bad could such a bomb really be? I saw The Sum of All Fears but that bomb was so magically powerful—”

  “The real thing is worse than that.” Mike swallowed. He’d spent the past couple of weeks deliberately not thinking about Matt’s threat, trying to convince himself it was a bluff: but Judith had told him about the broken nightmare they’d found in the abandoned warehouse, and it wasn’t helping him get to sleep.

  “Assuming Matthias wasn’t bluffing, and planted a real atom bomb near Faneuil Hall. Make it a small one. Imagine it goes off right now.” He gestured at the window. “It’s miles away, but it’d still blow the glass in, and if you were looking at it directly, it would burn your eyes out. You’d feel the heat on your skin, like sticking your head into an open oven door. And that’s all the way out here.” If it was the size of the one Judith found, Boston and Cambridge would be a smoking hole in the coastline—but multimegaton H-bombs weren’t likely to go world-walking and were in any case unlikely to explode if they weren’t maintained properly. “We don’t want to lose Boston. More importantly, you don’t want us to lose Boston. Because if we do—” he noticed that she was looking pale “—you saw the reaction to 9/11, didn’t you? I guarantee you that if someone nukes one of our cities, the response will be a thousand times worse.”

  “I—I don’t know.” The Russian princess was clearly rattled: “I was not aware of this. This bomb that Matthias claimed to—I don’t know about it.” She shook her head. “I will have to tell Patricia. We’ll have
to investigate.”

  “You will? No shit.” Mike didn’t even try to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “This other faction in your clan—if it’s theirs, they’re playing with fire. Maybe they don’t understand that.”

  She finished extracting the battery from the mobile phone. “You said that this, it goes to the vice president?”

  “To one of his staff,” Mike corrected her.

  “We’ll be in touch.” She slid it into a pocket gingerly, as if it might explode. “I will see you later.” She stood up briskly and walked into the front hall, and between one footstep and the next she vanished.

  Mike stared at the empty passage for a moment, then shook his head. The shakes would cut in soon, but for now all he could feel was a monstrous sense of irony. “What a mess,” he muttered. Then he reached for the phone and dialed Colonel Smith’s number.

  The dome was huge, arching overhead like the wall of a sports stadium or the hull of a grounded Zeppelin. Small, stunted trees grew in the gap in its wall, their trunks narrow and tilted towards the thin light. Mud and rubble had drifted into the opening over the years, and the dripping trickle of water suggested more damage deep inside. Huw shuffled forward with arthritic caution, poking his Geiger counter at the ground, the rocks, the etiolated trees—treating everything as if it might be explosive, or poisonous, or both. The results were reassuring, a menacing crackle that rarely reached the level of a sixty-cycle hum, much less the whining squeal of real danger.

  As he neared the dribble of water, Huw knelt and held the counter just above its surface. The snap and pop of stray radiation events stayed low. “The pool outside the dome is hot, and the edges of the dome are nasty, but the stream inside isn’t too bad,” be explained to his microphone. “If the dome’s leaky, the stream probably washed most of the hot stuff out of it ages ago.” He looked up. “This place feels old.”

  Old, but still radioactive? He felt like scratching his head. Really dangerous fallout was mostly dangerous precisely because it decayed very rapidly. If what had happened here was as old as it felt, then most of the stuff should have decayed long ago. The activity in the dome’s edge was perplexing.

  “You want a light, bro?”

  Huw glanced over his shoulder. Yul was holding out the end of a huge, club-like Maglite. “Thanks,” he said, shuffling the Geiger counter around so that he could heft the flashlight in his right hand. He pressed the button just as a cold flake of snow drifted onto his left cheek. “We don’t have long.”

  “It’s creepy in here,” Elena commented as he swung the light around. For once, Huw found nothing to disagree with in her opinion. The structures the dome had protected were in ruins. A flat apron of magic concrete peeped through the dirt in places, but the buildings—rectangular or cylindrical structures, rarely more than two or three stories high—were mostly shattered, roofs torn off, walls punched down. Their builders hadn’t been big on windows (although several of them sported gaping doorways). The skeletal wreckage of metal gantries and complex machinery lay around the buildings. Some of them had been connected by overhead pipes, and long runs of rust-colored ductwork wrapped around some of the buildings like giant snakes. “It looks like a chemical works that’s been bombed.”

  Huw blinked. “You know, you might be right,” he admitted. He walked towards the nearest semi-intact building, a three-story high cylindrical structure that was sheltered from the crack in the dome by a mass of twisted rubble and a collapsed walkway. “Let’s see, shall we?”

  The Geiger counter calmed down the farther from the entrance they progressed, to Huw’s profound relief. He picked his way carefully over a low berm of crumbled concrete-like stuff, then reached the nearest gantry. It looked familiar enough—a metal grid for flooring, the wreckage of handrails sprouting from it on a triangular truss of tubes—but something about its proportions was subtly wrong. The counter was content to make the odd click. Huw whacked the handrail with his torch: it rang like metal. Then he took hold of it and tried to move it, lifting and shoving. “That’s odd.” He squinted in the twilight. A thin crust of flaky ash covered the metal core. Paint, or something like it. That was comfortingly familiar—but the metal was too light. Yet it hadn’t melted. “Got your hammer?” He asked Yul, who was looking around, gaping like a tourist.

  “Here.”

  He took the hammer and whacked the rail, hard. “It’s not soft like aluminum. Doesn’t melt easily.” He tugged it, and it creaked slightly as it shifted. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “What’s wrong?” Hulius asked quickly.

  “This railing. It’s too light to be steel, it’s not aluminum, but who the fuck would make a handrail out of titanium?”

  “I don’t know. Someone with a lot of titanium? Are you sure it’s titanium? Whatever that is.”

  “Fairly sure,” Huw said absently. “I don’t have any way to test it, but it’s light enough, and hard, and whatever flash-fried the shit in here didn’t touch it. But titanium’s expensive! You’d have to know how to make lots of it really cheap before you got anywhere near to making walkways with it…” He trailed off, glancing up at the twilight recesses of the dome overhead. “Let’s get on with this.”

  The black rectangle, set in the cylindrical structure at ground level, looked like a doorway to Huw. It was high enough, for sure, but there were no windows and no sign of an actual door. He waited for Yul and Elena to close up behind him, then walked towards it. The counter was quiet. There was a pile of debris just inside the opening, and he approached it cautiously, sniffing at the air: there was no telling what might have made its lair in here. Thinking about the chill outside reminded him of wolves, of saber-toothed tigers and worse things. He shivered, and pointed the torch into the gloom.

  “Over there.” Elena scuttled sideways, her gun at her shoulder, pointing inside.

  “Where—” Huw blinked as she flicked on the torch bolted beneath her barrel. “Oh.” The thing she was pointing at might have been a door once, but now it lay tumbled on the floor across a heap of junk: crumbled boxes, bits of plastic, pieces of scaffolding. And some more identifiable human remains, although wild animals had scattered the bones around. “Good, that’s helpful.” He stepped across the threshold, noting in the process that the wall was about ten centimeters thick—too thin for brick or concrete—and the inner wall was flat, with another sealed door set in it.

  A skull leered at him from the far corner of the room, and as the shadows flickered across the pile of crap inside the doorway he saw what looked like a stained, collapsed one-piece overall. The overall glowed orange in the light, slightly iridescent, then darkened to black where ancient blood had saturated the abdominal area. Huw held his breath, twisting the flashlight to focus on the shoulder, where some kind of patch was embossed on the fabric. He squinted. “Yul, can you get a photograph of that?” he said, pointing.

  “What’s it say—” Yul closed in. “That’s not Anglische sprach. Or…Huh, I don’t recognize it, whatever it is.”

  “Dead right.” Huw held the light on the remains while Yul pulled out his camera and flashgunned it into solid state memory. “What do you think it means?”

  “Why would you expect Anglische here?” Elena asked archly.

  “No reason, I guess,” Huw said, trying to conceal how shaken he was. He pointed the torch back at the skull sitting on the floor. “Hang on.” He peered closer. “The teeth. Shit, the teeth!”

  “What?” Elena’s flashlight swung around wildly for a moment.

  “Point that away from me if you’re going to be twitchy—”

  “It’s okay, little brother. I’ve got it.” Yul hooked a finger into each eye socket and spun the skull upside down for Huw to examine. It had been picked clean long ago and had aged to a sallow dark yellow-brown, but the teeth were all there.

  “Look.” Huw pointed at the upper jaw. “Bony here has all his dentition. And.” He peered at them. “There are no fillings. It’s like a plastic model of what a
jawbone ought to be. Except for this chipped one here, this incisor.”

  “Whoa!” Hulius lowered the skull reverently. “That’s some orthodontist.”

  “Don’t you get it?” Huw asked impatiently.

  “Get what?” Yull asked flippantly.

  “That’s not dentistry,” Huw said, gritting his teeth. “You know what it’s like back home! The Americans, they’re good at faking it, but they’re not this good.” He glanced at the door on the inner wall. No obvious hinges, he realized. Fits beautifully. “Domes the size of a sports stadium that try to heal themselves even when you crack them open with a nuke. Metal walkways made out of titanium. Perfect dentistry.” He snapped his fingers. “You got the ax?”

  “Sure.” Yul nodded. “What do you want me to hit?”

  “Let’s see what’s inside that door,” Huw decided. “But then we leave. Magic wands? Dentistry.”

  “They’re more advanced than the Americans,” Elena commented. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yes,” Huw said tensely. “I’m not quite sure what it means, though…”

  “What about their burglar alarms?”

  “After all this time?” Huw snorted. “Let’s see what else is in here. Yul?”

  “I’m with you, bro.” He winked at Elena. “This is a real gas!”

  And with that, he swung the fire ax at the edge of the door.

  The Boeing Business Jet had reached cruising altitude and was somewhere over the Midwest, and Brill had just about managed to doze off, when her satellite phone rang.

  “Who’s speaking?” She cleared her throat, trying to shake cobwebs free. The delay and the echo on the line made it sound like she was yelling down a drainpipe.

  “It’s me, Brill. Update time.”