The Merchants' War: Book Four of the Merchant Princes

by Charles Stross

  “At Giraunt Dire, the eorl emplaced his two light machine guns to either side of the bridge across the river Klee, beating off an attack by two companies of horse led by Baron Escrivain…”

  The map flickered with red dots, like smallpox burning up the side of a victim’s face. As the conflict progressed, dotted red arrows appeared, tracking the course of the pestilence. The litany of sharp engagements began to change, as more of the defenders—forewarned and prepared—put up an effective defense. Helmut’s presentation kept a running tally in the bottom right corner of the screen, a profit and loss balance sheet denominated in gallons of blood. Finally he came to an end.

  “That’s the total so far. Thirty-one attacks, twenty-two successful and nine beaten off with casualties. In general, we have lost an average of two inner members per successful attack and one per successful defense; our losses of retainers and outer family members are substantially higher. The enemy has lost at least three hundred dead and probably twice that number wounded, although we cannot confirm the latter figure. The four columns appear to be converging near Neuhalle, and it is noteworthy that this one has at no time ventured further than a fifteen-mile march from one of the pretender’s sworn vassals’ keeps.”

  The projector switched off: Helmut directed a brief half-bow towards the other end of the table, then sat down.

  The silence lay heavy for nearly a minute after he finished speaking, the only sounds in the room the white noise of the air-conditioning and the faint scribble of pens on the note pads of a couple of the attendees. Finally, the chairman directed his gaze towards a bluff, ruddy-faced fellow in early middle age, whose luxuriant handle-bar mustache was twitching so violently that it threatened to take wing. “Carl. You appear to have something on your mind. Would you care to share it with us?”

  Carl glanced around the table. “It’s a calculated outrage,” he rumbled. “We’ve got to nail it fast, too, before the decree of outlawry convinces everyone that we’re easy game. While we’re pinned down in our houses and keeps, the pretender can run around at will, taking whichever target is cheapest. It sends entirely the wrong message. Why hasn’t he been assassinated yet?”

  “We’ve tried.” The chairman stared at him coldly. “It’s difficult to assassinate a target when the target is taking pains to avoid mapped killing grounds and is sleeping and working surrounded by troops. Do you have any constructive suggestions, or shall we move on?”

  There was a crunching sound. Eyes swiveled towards Carl’s hand, and the wreckage of what had been a Pelikan Epoch mechanical pencil. Carl grunted. “A conventional infiltrator could get close to him…”

  The chairman nodded, very slightly, and a certain tension left the room. “That might work, but as you already observed, if it takes too long it doesn’t buy us anything. He’s already in the field, and levies are being recruited to his vassals’ forces. I’ve had no reports of the pretender adding to his own body of men. To all intents and purposes he is surrounded by a thousand bodyguards at all times. Moreover, if we just kill him, it’ll trigger a race for the succession among his vassals—and the only outcome that is guaranteed is that every last one of them will consider us a mortal threat. To resolve this problem, we’re going to have to defeat his forces in detail as well as producing an heir to the throne.”

  “But he’s refusing to concentrate where we can hit him!” Carl opened his meaty hand above his blotter: two hundred dollars’ worth of pencil scattered across the pad in fragments. “We must do something to bring him to battle! Otherwise he will continue to make us look like fools!”

  “You’re quite right.”

  Carl looked up at the chairman. “Your grace?”

  “I’d like to call Eorl Riordan next, Carl. Eorl Riordan, would you care to explain next week’s operation to the baron?”

  “Certainly, your grace.” The new speaker, square-jawed and short-haired, had something of a wardroom air about himself. “On the basis of intelligence indicating that the pretender is preparing a major offensive against one of our most prominent fortifications, his grace asked me to prepare a plan for the defense of Castle Hjorth—which we have reason to believe is the most likely target—with fallback plans to ensure that our other high-value fortifications remain defensible. The resulting plan requires us to stockpile supplies at the likely targets in preparation for the arrival of a mobile reinforcement group. The reinforcement group will be based in this world, while courier elements in our Gruinmarkt assets will rotate regularly and report on their status. As soon as one of our sites goes dark, or as soon as we receive confirmation of contact from one of our scouts in the field, the reinforcement group will redeploy to the target area. The primary target, Castle Hjorth, is already locked down and defended by a platoon of outer family guards, backed up by a team of eighteen couriers on logistic support. When the enemy attacks, here’s how we intend to defend ourselves…”

  The dome was big.

  Huw hadn’t been able to grasp the scale of it at first: it was buried in the forest, and apart from the segment looming over the clear roadway, the trees had obscured its curvature. But as he studied it, moving quietly from tree trunk to deadfall as Elena and Hulius stood watch, he came to realize that it was huge. It was also very old, and looked—although he wasn’t about to jump to any conclusions—abandoned.

  There was a convenient fallen tree trunk about twenty meters out from the rough white dome. Huw settled down behind it, waved to the kids, and pulled out his compact binoculars and the walkie-talkie. “Yul, do you read?”

  “Yes, bro.” Yul sounded almost bored. “Got you covered.”

  “Copy,” Elena added tersely.

  “No features visible on the outside.” Huw scanned laterally with the binoculars, looking for anything that would give him traction on the thing. “Going by the trees…I make it fifty to eighty meters in radius. Very approximate. There’s green stuff on the surface. Looks rough, like concrete. I’m going to approach it when I finish talking. If anything happens I’ll head towards the road. Over.”

  Nothing was moving. Huw took a deep breath. He was nervously aware of his heartbeat, thudding away like a bass drum: What is this doing here? All too acutely, he felt a gut-deep conviction that historic consequences might hinge on his next actions. Helge didn’t feel anything like this when she stumbled on the Wu family’s world, did she? Well, probably not—but that world was inhabited, and by people who spoke a recognizable language, too. No evidence of weird climatological conditions, no strange concrete domes in ancient subarctic forests. He checked his web cam briefly, then stood up in full view of the dome.

  Anticlimax: nothing happened. Well, that’s a relief. The small of his back itched. He walked around the deadfall, pacing towards the dome. Close up, he realized it was bigger than he’d thought: the curve of its flank was nearly vertical at ground level, stretching away above and to either side of him like a wall. Hmm, let’s see. He looked down at the base, which erupted smoothly from a tumble of ferns and decaying branches. Then he looked up. From this close, he could see the treetops diverge from the curve of the convex hull. “Scratch the size estimate, it’s at least a hundred meters in radius.”

  A gust of wind rattled the branches above him. The top of the dome was hard to make out against the background of gray clouds. Huw shivered, then reached out and touched the dome. It was cold, with the grittiness of concrete or sandstone. He leaned close and peered at it. The surface was very smooth, but occasional pockmarks showed where it had been scarred by the surface cracking away under the chisel-like blows of ice forming in tiny fissures on its surface. Finally, he leaned against it and listened.

  “I don’t hear anything, and it’s cold—probably at ambient temperature. I think it’s empty, possibly abandoned. I’m going to proceed around it, clockwise.”

  The direction he’d chosen took him downslope, away from the road. He walked very slowly, pausing frequently, taking care not to look back. If someone was observing him, he didn�
�t want to tip them off to Yul and Elena’s presence. The dome extended, intact, curving gradually away from the road. In places, trees had grown up against it, roots scrabbling for purchase in the poor soil. It took Huw a quarter of an hour to realize that none of them had actually levered their way into the concrete or stone or whatever the dome was made of. “It’s not quite a flawless finish,” he reported, “but I’ve got a hunch it’s been here a very long time.” He rubbed his gloved hands together to warm them: there was a distinct bite in the air, and the gusts were growing more frequent.

  In the end, the hole in the dome came as a surprise to Huw. He’d been expecting some sort of opening, low down on the slope: or perhaps a gatehouse of some sort. But one moment he was walking around the huge, curving flank of the thing, and the next moment the curved edge of the dome disappeared, as if a giant the size of the Goodyear blimp had taken a huge bite out of it. Huw stopped for a minute, inspecting the edge of the hole with his binoculars. “The opening starts at ground level and extends two thirds of the way to the top of the dome. Must be at least fifty meters wide. I’m going closer…the edge looks almost melted.” He looked down. The trees were thinner on the ground, shorter, and the ground itself fell away in front of the opening, forming a shallow bowl. Like a crater, he realized. Hey—a trickle of water emerged from the shadowy interior of the dome, feeding down a muddy, overgrown channel into a pond in the depression. The pond was almost circular. Something cracked the dome open. Something from—he walked away from the opening, trying to get a perspective on it—something firing downwards, from above.

  He shook his head, and suddenly the whole scene dropped into perspective. The dark shadows inside the dome, looming: piles of debris. The melted edges: either the dome is self-healing, or it’s made of something a whole lot more resilient than concrete. It hadn’t shattered like masonry—it had melted like wax. He keyed his walkie-talkie again: “The dome’s split open here. Something energetic, punching down out of the sky. A long time ago.” The way the crater had filled with water, the way the trees were so much shorter than their neighbors, almost as if—

  Huw fumbled with his telemetry belt, then slipped one hand free of its glove in order to pull out the Geiger tube. “Got you,” he muttered, holding it out in front of him. “Let’s see.” He flicked the switch on the counter pack, then advanced on the depression. The counter clicked a few times, then gave a warning crackle, like a loose connection. Huw paused, swinging around. It popped and crackled, then as he took a step forward it buzzed angrily. “Hmm.” He turned around and walked back towards the dome. The buzzing subsided, back down to a low crackle. He moved towards the edge of the dome. As he approached the melted-looking edges the counter began to buzz—then rose to an angry whine as he brought the tube to within a couple of centimeters of the edge. “Shit!” He jumped back. “Yul, Elena, listen up—the edge of the hole is radioactive. Lots of beta and maybe alpha activity, not much gamma. I don’t think—” he swallowed “—I don’t think we’re going to find anyone alive in here. And I don’t want you touching the edge of the dome, or walking through the stream running out of it.”

  He swallowed again. What am I going to tell the duke this time? He wondered.

  A hypothesis took root and refused to shake free: Imagine a nuclear installation or a missile command site or a magic wand factory. Or something. There’d been a war. It all happened a long time ago of course—hundreds of years ago. Everyone was dead, nobody lived here anymore. During the war, someone took a shot at the dome with a high energy weapon. Not an ordinary H-bomb, but something exotic—a shaped nuclear charge, perhaps, designed to punch almost all of its energy out into a beam of radiation going straight down. Or a gamma-ray laser powered by a couple of grams of isomeric hafnium. Maybe they used an intercontinental ballistic magic wand. Whatever it was, not much blast energy reached the ground—but the dome had been zapped by a stabbing knife of plasma like Lightning Child’s fiercest punch, followed by a storm of secondary radiation.

  Huw looked up at the underside of the dome. A gust of wind set up a sonorous droning whistle, ululating like the ghost of a dead whale. The dome was thick. He froze for a moment, staring, then raised his binoculars again. He raised his dictaphone, and began speaking. “The installation is covered by a dome, and back in the day it was probably guarded by active defenses. You’d need a nuke to crack it open because the stuff it’s made of is harder and more resilient than reinforced concrete, and it’s at least three, maybe four meters thick. Coming down from the zenith, perhaps eighty meters off-center, the shotgun-blast of lightning-hot plasma has sheared through almost fifteen meters of this—call it supercrete? Carbon-fiber reinforced concrete?—and dug an elliptical trench in the shallow hillside. It must have vaporized the segment of the dome it struck. How in Hell the rest of the dome held—must have a tensile strength like buckminsterfullerene nanotubes. That’s probably what killed the occupants, the shockwave would rattle around inside the dome…”

  The tree branches rustled overhead as the drone of the dead whale rose. Huw glanced up at the clouds, scudding past fast in the gray light. He sniffed. Smells like snow. Then he glanced over his shoulder, and turned, very deliberately, to raise a hand and wave.

  Elena was the first to catch up with him. “Crone’s teeth, Huw, what have you found?”

  “Stand away from there!” He snapped as she glanced curiously at the edge of the gaping hole in the dome. “It’s radioactive,” he added, as she looked round and frowned at him. “I think whatever happened a long time ago was…well, I don’t think the owners are home.”

  “Right.” She shook her head, looking up at the huge arch that opened the dome above them. “Wow. What are we going to do?”

  “Yo.” Yul trotted up, rifle cradled carefully in his arms. “What now—”

  Huw checked his watch. “We’ve got half an hour left until it’s time to head back to base camp. I don’t know about you guys, but I want to do some sightseeing before I go home. But first, I think we’d better make sure it doesn’t kill us in the process.” He held up his Geiger counter: “Get your tubes out.” A minute later he’d reset both their counters to click, rather than silently logging the radiation flux. “If this begins to crackle, stop moving. If it buzzes, back away from wherever the buzzing is highest-pitched. If it howls at you, run for your life. The higher the pitch, the more dangerous it is. And don’t touch anything without checking it out first. Never touch your counter to a surface, but hold it as close as you can—some types of radiation are stopped by an inch of air, but can kill you if you get close enough to actually touch the source. Got that? If in doubt, don’t touch.”

  “What are we looking for again, exactly?” Yul raised an eyebrow.

  “Magic wands. C’mon, let’s see what we’ve got.”

  The trouble with trains, in Miriam’s opinion, was that they weren’t airliners: you actually went through the landscape, instead of soaring over it, and you tended to get bogged down in those vast spaces. About the best thing that could be said about it was that in first class you could get a decent cooked meal in the dining car then retire to your bedroom for a night’s sleep, and wake up seven or eight hundred miles from where you went to bed. On the other hand, the gentle swaying, occasional front-to-back lurching of the coaches, and the perpetual clatter of wheels across track welds combined to give her a queasy feeling the like of which she hadn’t felt since many years ago she’d let her then-husband argue her into a boating holiday.

  I seem to be spending all my time throwing up these days. Miriam sat on the edge of her bed, the chamber pot clutched between her hands and knees in the pre-dawn light. What’s wrong with me? A sense of despondency washed over her. All I need right now is a stomach bug…she yawned experimentally, held her breath, and let her back relax infinitesimally as she realized that her stomach was played out. Damn. She put the pot back in its under-bunk drawer and swung her legs back under the sheets. She yawned again, exhausted, then glanced at the w
indow in mild disgust. Might as well get started now, she told herself. There was no way she’d manage another hour’s sleep before it was time to get up anyway: the train was due to pause in Dunedin around ten o’clock, and she needed to get her letter written first. The only question was what to put in it…

  She glanced at the door to the lounge room. Erasmus insisted on sleeping in there—not that it was any great hardship, for the padded bench concealed a pullout bed—which would make it just about impossible for her to get the letter out without him noticing. Well, there’s no alternative, she decided. She was fresh out of cover stories: who else could she be writing to, when she was on the run? Sooner or later you’ve got to choose your allies and stick by them. So far, Erasmus had shown no sign of trying to bar her from pursuing her own objectives. I’ll just have to risk it.

  Sighing, she rummaged in the bedside cabinet for the writing-box. People here were big on writing letters—no computers or e-mail, and typewriters the size of a big old laser printer meant that everyone got lots of practice at their cursive handwriting. There was an inkwell, of course, and even a cheap pen—not a fountain pen, but a dipping pen with a nib—and a blotter, and fine paper with the railway corporation crest of arms, and envelopes. Envelopes. What she was about to attempt was the oldest trick in the book—but this was a world that had not been blessed by the presence of an Edgar Allan Poe.

  Biting her lip, Miriam hunched over the paper. Best to keep it brief: she scribbled six sentences in haste, then pulled out a clean sheet of paper and condensed them into four, as neatly as she could manage aboard a moving train.