The Clan Corporate (ARC)

by Charles Stross

  Helge quailed inside. King Alexis might be plump, short, and drunk, but he was the king. "What can I do for your majesty?" she managed to ask.

  "Six months." The guard returned, extended a glass of amber fortified wine for the king-and, an afterthought, a smaller fluted glass for Helge. "Just about any situation can change in six months, don't you know. Back then I said you were too old. Seems everyone is too old these days, or otherwise unsuitable, or married." He raised an eyebrow at her. "Wouldn't do to marry a young maid to the Idiot-come now, do you think I don't know what my own subjects call my youngest son?"

  "I've never met the . . . uh, met Creon," Helge said carefully. "At least, not to talk to. Is he, really?" She'd seen him before, at court. Prince Creon took after his father in looks, except that his father didn't drool on his collar. "My duties kept me away from court so much that I know too little-I mean to cause no offense-"

  "Of course he's an idiot," Alexis said grimly. "And the worst is, he need not have been. A tragedy of birth gifted him with a condition called, by the Clan's doctors, PKU. We knew this, for our loyal subjects render their services to the crown without stint. One can live with it, we are told, without problems, if one restricts the diet carefully."

  Aspartame poisoning? For a moment Helge was fully Miriam. Miriam, who had completed pre-med before switching educational tracks. She knew enough about hereditary diseases-of which phenylketonuria was quite a common one-to guess the rest of the story. "Someone in the kitchen added a sweetener to his diet while he was an infant?" she hazarded.

  "Oh yes," breathed the king, and for an instant Miriam caught a flicker of the rage bottled up behind his calm face. She flinched. "By the time the plot was exposed he was . . . as you see. Ruined. And the irony of it is, he is the one who inherited his grandmother's trait. My wife"-for a moment the closed look returned-"never learned this. She died not long after, heartbroken. And now the doctors have discovered a way of knowing, and they say Creon is a carrier while my golden boy, my Egon-is not."

  "How can they tell?" Helge asked artlessly, then concealed her expression with her glass.

  "In the past year, they have developed a new blood test." Alexis was watching her expression, she realized, and felt her cheeks flush. "They can tell which child born of a world-walker and an-a, another-inherit the trait, and which do not. Creon is, the duke your uncle tells me, a carrier. His children, by a wife from the Clan, would be world-walkers. And unless the doctors conspire to make it so, they would not inherit his condition."

  "I-understand," Helge managed, almost stammering with embarrassment. How do I talk my way out of this? she asked herself, with growing horror. I can't tell the king to fuck off-how much does he know about me? Does he know about Ben and Rita? Ben, her ex-husband, and Rita, her adopted-out daughter. Not to mention the other boyfriends she'd had since Ben, up to and including Roland. Would that work? Don't royal brides have to be virgins or something, or is that only for the crown prince? "It must be a dilemma for you."

  "You have become a matter of some small interest to us," Alexis said, smiling, as he took her elbow and gently steered her, unresisting, back toward the door and the dinner party. "Pray sit at my left side and delight me with inconsequentialities over supper. You need not worry about Mother, she won't trouble you tonight with her schemes. You have plenty of time to consider how to help us with our little headache. And think," the king added quietly, as the door opened before them and everybody turned to bow or curtsey to him, "of the compensations that being a princess would bring you."

  9

  Internment

  It had been twelve weeks, and Matt was already getting stir-crazy.

  "I'm bored," he announced from the sofa at the far side of the room. He looked moody, as well he might. "You keep me down here for weeks, months-no news! I hear no things about how my case is progressing, just endless questions, 'what is this' and 'what is that.' And now this dictionary! What is a man to do?"

  "I feel your pain." Mike frowned. Has it only been twelve weeks? That was how long they'd been holding Matt. For the first couple of weeks they'd kept him in a DEA safe house, but then they'd transferred him here-to a windowless apartment hastily assembled in the middle of an EMCON cell occupying the top floor of a rented office block. Matt's world had narrowed until it consisted of an efficiency filled with blandly corporate Sears-catalog furniture, home electronics from Costco, and soft furnishings and kitchenware from IKEA. A prison cell, in other words, but a comfortably furnished one.

  Smith had been quite insistent on the prisoner's isolation; there wasn't even a television in the apartment, just a flat-screen DVD player and a library of disks. A team of decorators from spook central had wallpapered the rooms outside the apartment with fine copper mesh: there were guards on the elevator bank. The kitchenette had a microwave oven, a freezer with a dozen flavors of ready meal, and plastic cutlery in case the prisoner tried to kill himself. Nobody wanted to take any chances with losing Matthias.

  Not that he was being treated like a prisoner-not like the two couriers in the deep sub-basement cell who lived like moles, seeing daylight only when Dr. James's BLUESKY spooks needed them for their experiments. But Matt wasn't a world-walker. Matt could tell Mike everything Mike wanted to know, but he couldn't take him there. As Pete Garfinkle had so crudely put it, it was like the difference between a pre-op transsexual and a ten-buck crack whore: Matt just didn't have the equipment to give FTO what they wanted.

  "Listen, I'd like to get you somewhere better to live, a bit more freedom. A chance to get out and move about. But we're really up in the air here. We don't have closure; we need to be able to question any Clan members we get our hands on ourselves. So my boss is on me to keep pumping you until we've got a basic grammar and lexicon so if anything happens to you-say you had a heart attack tomorrow-we wouldn't be up shit creek."

  "Stop bullshitting me." Matthias had been staring at the fake window in the corner of the room. (Curtains covering a sheet of glass in front of a photograph of the cityscape outside.) Now he turned back to Mike, clearly annoyed. "You do not trust me to act as interpreter, is all. Am I right?"

  Mike took a deep breath, nodded. "My boss," he said, almost apologetically. And to some extent it was true; never mind Colonel Smith, the REMF-James-acted like he didn't trust his own left hand to give him the time of day. And he reported to Daddy Warbucks by way of the NSC-and Mike had heard all about that guy. Read about him. "Using you as an interpreter would risk exposing you to classified information. He's very security-conscious."

  "As he should be." Matthias snorted exasperatedly. "All right, I'll work on your stupid dictionary. When are we going to start creating my new identity?"

  "New identity?" Mike did a double take.

  "Yah, the Witness Protection Scheme does try to provide the new identity, doesn't it?"

  "Oh." Mike stared at him. "The Witness Protection Program is administered by the Department of Justice. This isn't a DOJ operation anymore, it got taken off us-I was seconded because I was already involved. Didn't you know?

  Matthias frowned. "Who owns it?" he demanded. "The military?" Mike forced himself not to reply. After a moment Matt inclined his head fractionally. "I see," he murmured.

  Mike licked his suddenly dry lips. Did I just make a mistake? he wondered. "You don't need to worry about that," he said. "Nothing has changed."

  "All right." Matt sat down again. He sent Mike a look that clearly said, I don't believe you.

  Mike rubbed his hands together and tried to change the subject. "What would happen if-say-you were a world-walker, and you tried to cross over while you were up here?" he asked.

  "I'd fall." Matt glanced at the floor. "How high . . . ?"

  "Twenty-fourth floor." The set of Matt's shoulders relaxed imperceptibly. Mike had no problem reading the gesture: I'm safe from them, here.

  "Would you always fall?" Mike persisted.

  "Well-not if there was a mountain on the other side." Matt nodded t
houghtfully. "Might be doppelgangered with a tower, in which case he'd get a bad headache and go nowhere. Or the world-walker might be lying down, in contact with solid object-go nowhere then, too."

  "Do you know if anyone has ever tried to world-walk from inside an aircraft?" Mike asked.

  Matt laughed raucously.

  "What's so funny?" Mike demanded.

  "You Americans! You're so crazy!" Matthias rubbed his eyes. "Listen. The Clan, they know if you world-walk from high up you fall down, yes? Planes are no different. Now, a parachute-you could live, true. But where would you land? In the Gruinmarkt or Nordmarkt or the Debatable Lands, hundreds of miles away! The world is a dangerous place, when you have to walk everywhere."

  "Ah." Mike nodded. "Has anyone ever world-walked from inside a moving automobile?" he asked.

  "That would be suicidal."

  "Even if the person were wearing chain mail? Metal armor?" Mike persisted.

  "Well, maybe they'd survive . . ." Matt stared at him. "So what?"

  "Hmm." Mike made a mental note. Okay, that was two more of the checklist items checked off. He had a long list of queries to raise with Matt, questions about field effects and conductive boundaries and just about anything else that might be useful to the geeks who were busting their brains to figure out how world-walking worked. Now to change the subject before he figures out what I'm looking for. "What happens if someone world-walks while holding a hand cart?"

  "Hand carts don't work," Matt said dismissively.

  "Okay. So it really is down to whatever a world-walker can carry, then? How many trips per day?"

  "Well." Matt paused. "The standard corvée duty owed to the Clan by adult world-walkers requires ten trips in five days, then two days off, and is repeated for a whole month, then a month off. So that would be one hundred and twenty return trips per year, carrying perhaps fifty kilograms for a woman, eighty to a hundred for a man. More trips for professional couriers, time off for pregnant women, but it averages out."

  "There's an implicit 'but' there," Mike prodded.

  "Yes. Women in late pregnancy with a child that will itself be a world-walker cannot world-walk at all. Or if they try, the consequences are not pretty. But I digress. The corvée is negotiated. To a Clan member, the act of world-walking is painful. Do it once, they suffer a headache; twice in rapid succession and a hangover with vomiting is not unusual. Thrice-they won't do it three times, unless in fear of life and limb. There are drugs they can take, to reduce the blood pressure and swaddle the pain, but they are of limited effectiveness. Four trips in eight hours, with drugs, is punishing. I have seen it myself, strong couriers reduced to cripples. If used to destruction, you might force as many as ten crossings in a period of twenty-four hours; but likely you would kill the world-walker, or put them in bed for a month."

  "So." Mike doodled a note on his paper pad. "It might be possible for a strong male courier, with meds, to move, say, five hundred kilograms in a day. But a more reasonable upper limit is two hundred kilograms. And the load must be divided evenly into sections that one person can carry."

  Matthias nodded. "That's it."

  "Hmm." An SADM demolition nuke weighs about fifty kilos, but no way has the Clan got one of them, Mike told himself, mentally crossing his fingers. They'd all been retired years ago. If the thin white duke was going to do anything with his nuclear stockpile, it would probably be a crude bomb, one that would weigh half a ton or more and require considerable assembly on site. There was no risk of a backpack nuclear raid on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, then. Good. Still, if James's mules are limited like that, we won't be able to do much more than send a couple of spies over, will we?

  "Okay, so no pregnant couriers, eh? What do the Clan's women do when they're pregnant? I gather things are a bit basic over there; if they can't world-walk, does that mean you have doctors-" Mike's pager buzzed. "Hang on a minute." He stood up. There was an access point in the EMCON insulated room. He read the pager's display, frowning. "I've got to go. Back soon."

  "About the military-" Matthias was on his feet.

  "I said I'll be back," Mike snapped, hurrying toward the vestibule. "Just got to take a call." He paused in front of the camera as the inner door slid shut, so the guard could get a good look at him. "Why don't you work on the dictionary for a bit? I'll be back soon as I can."

  One of the guards outside Matt's room had a Secure Field Voice Terminal. Mike took it, ducked into the Post-Debriefing Office, plugged it into one of the red-painted wall sockets, and signed on to his voice mail. The joy of working for spooks, he thought gloomily. Back at DEA Boston, he'd just have picked up the phone and asked Irene, the senior receptionist, to put him through. No pissing around with encrypted Internet telephony and firewalls and paranoid INFOSEC audits in case the freakazoid hackers had figured out a way to hack in. Sometimes he wondered what he'd done to deserve being forced to work with these guys. Obviously I must have done something really bad in an earlier life. "Mike here. What is it?"

  "We got the thumbs-up." No preamble: it was Colonel Smith. "BLUESKY has emplaced the cache and on that basis our NSC cutout has approved CLEANSWEEP and you are go for action."

  "Whoops." Mike swallowed, his heart giving a lurch. "What now?"

  "Where are you?"

  "I'm on the twenty-fourth-sorry, I'm in Facility Lambda. Just been talking to Client Zero." More time-wasting code words to remember for something that was really quite straightforward.

  "Well, that's nice to hear. Listen, I want you in my office soonest. We've got a lot to discuss."

  "Okay, will comply. See you soon."

  Smith hung up, and Mike shut down the SFVT carefully, going through the post-call sanitary checklist for practice. (A radiation-hardened pocket PC running some exotic NSA-written software, the SFVT could make secure voice calls anywhere with a broadband Internet connection-as long as you scrubbed its little brains clean afterward to make sure it didn't remember any classified gossip, a chore that made Mike wish for the days of carrier pigeons. And as long as the software didn't crash.) "Got to go," he told the guard. "If Matt asks, I got called away by my boss and I'll be back as soon as I can."

  He signed out through the retinal scanners by the door, then waited for the armed guard in front of the elevator bank. Mike gestured at one of the doors. "Get me the twenty-second." The guard nodded and pushed the call button. He'd already signed Mike in, knew his clearances, and knew what floors he was allowed to visit. A minute later the elevator car arrived and Mike went inside. It could have been the elevator in any other office block, except for the cameras in each corner, the call buttons covered by a crudely welded metal sheet, and the emergency hatch that was padlocked shut on the outside. No escape, that was the message it was meant to send. No entry. High security. No alternative points of view.

  Mike found Smith in his office, a cramped cubbyhole dominated by an unfeasibly large safe. Smith looked tired and aggravated and energized all at once. "Mike! Grab a seat." He was busy with something on his Secure Data Terminal-a desktop computer by any other name-and turned the screen so that Mike couldn't see it from the visitor's chair. "Help yourself to a Diet Coke." There was a pallet-load of two-liter plastic bottles of pop just inside the door-it was Smith's major personal vice, and he swore it helped him think more clearly. "I'm just finishing . . . up . . . this!" He switched the monitor off and shoved the keyboard away from him, then grinned, frighteningly. "We've got the green light."

  Mike nodded, trying to look duly appreciative. "That's a big deal." How big? Sometimes it was hard to be sure. Green light, red light-when the whole program was black, unaccountable, and off the books, who knew what anything meant? "Where do I come into it?" I'm a cop, damnit, not some kind of spook.

  Smith leaned back in his chair. With one hand he picked up an odd, knobby plastic gadget; with the other he pulled a string that seemed to vanish into its guts. It began to whirr as he rotated his wrist. "You're going into fairyland."

  "Fairyland." />
  "Where the bad guys come from. Official code name for Niejwein, as of now. The doc's little joke." Whirr, whirr. "How's the grammar?"

  "I'm-" Mike licked his lips. "I have no idea," he admitted. "I try to talk to Matt in hochsprache, and I've got some grasp of the basics, but I have no idea how well I'll do over there until-" He shrugged. "We need more people to talk to. When can I have access to the other prisoners?"

  "Later." Whirr, whirr. "Thing is, right now they're our only transport system. Research has got some ideas, but there's a long way to go."

  "You're using them for transport? How?" Mike frowned.

  Smith smiled faintly. "You're a cop. You wouldn't approve."

  I'm not going to like this. "Why not?"

  "The first army lawyers we tried had a nervous breakdown as soon as we got to the world-walking bit-does posse comitatus apply if it's geographically collocated with the continental USA?-but I figure the AG's office will get that straightened out soon enough. In the meantime, we got a temporary waiver. These guys want to act like a hostile foreign government, they can be one-it makes life easier all round. They're illegal combatants, and we can do what we like with them. There's even some question over whether they're human-being able to cross their eyes and think themselves into another universe is kind of unusual-but they're still working on that case. Meanwhile, we've found a way to make them cooperate. Battle Royale."

  "Tell me." Mike sat up.

  Smith reached into one of his desk drawers and pulled something out. It looked like a giant padlock, big enough to go round a man's neck. "Ever seen one of these?"

  "Oh shit." Mike stared, sick to his stomach. "Shining Path used them . . ."

  "Yeah, well, it works for our purposes." Smith put the collar-bomb down. "We put one on a prisoner. Set it for three hours, give him a backpack and a camera, and tell him to bury the backpack in the other world, photograph the location, then come back so we can take the collar off. We're careful to use a location at least five miles from the nearest habitation in fairyland, to stop 'em finding a tool shop. So far they've both come back."