The Revolution Business: Book Five of the Merchant Princes

by Charles Stross

  Which just went to show how misleading appearances could be.

  There were thirteen seats at the table today, but one of them—at its head—was vacant. The broad-shouldered man sitting to its left nodded to a younger fellow at the far end. "Rudi, please shut the door. If you would pay attention, please?"

  The quiet conversation ebbed as Rudi sat down again, the door securely locked behind him. "I think we'll begin with a situation report," Riordan said quietly. "Lady Thorold, if you wouldn't mind?"

  "Of course." Olga opened the leather conference folder she'd brought to the meeting; in a severe black suit, with her long blond hair tied back, she resembled a trial lawyer rather than an intelligence officer. "The duke's medical condition is stable. That's the good news."

  Olga read from her notes: "The average thirty-day survival figures for subarachnoid hemorrhage are around six-tenths. His grace has already come through the main danger period, but the doctors agree his chances of full recovery are slight. He's paralyzed on the left side, and his speech is impaired. They can't evaluate his mental functioning yet. He may recover some of his faculties, but he's likely to be mobility-challenged—probably wheelchair-bound, possibly bedridden—for life. They've scheduled a second MRI for him tomorrow to track the reduction of the thrombosis, and they should have more to report on Friday." She managed the medical terms with an ease that might have surprised Miriam, had she been present; but then, she'd checked her carefully cultivated airhead persona at the door. "The balance of medical opinion is that his grace will definitely not be able to resume even light duties for at least thirty days. Even if he makes a significant recovery, he is unlikely to be back in the chair"—her eyes tracked to the empty seat at the head of the table—"for half a year."

  The attentive silence she'd been speaking into dissolved in a buzz of expressions of shock and sharply indrawn breath. Earl Riordan brought his hand down on the edge of the table. "Silence!" he barked. "We knew it was going to be bad. Thank you, milady." He grimaced. "We have a chain of command here. I recognize that I am not equipped to replace his grace in his capacity of director of security policy, or in his management of the intelligence apparatus, but for the former we have the Council of Lords, and for the latter"—he glanced sideways: Olga inclined her head—"there is a parallel line of authority. For the time being I will assume operational command, until his grace resumes his duties or I am removed by order of the Council. Is that clear?"

  There was a vigorous outbreak of nodding. "Have you met with the Council yet?" asked Carl, with uncharacteristic hesitancy.

  "That's where I'm going as soon as we conclude this meeting." Riordan leaned back. "Does anyone else wish to comment? On the record?"

  "You're going to find it hard to convince the stick-in-the-muds to accept Lady Thorold as acting director of intelligence," remarked Carl, his arms crossed.

  "They'll like my second-choice candidate even less." Riordan bared his teeth. "Are you questioning her fitness for the role, or merely her sex?"

  Carl shook his head, his expression shuttered. "Just saying," he muttered.

  Riordan glanced round the table as Olga closed her file and leaned back, trying to keep all expression off her face.

  "I've worked with her for the past six years and I would not propose her for this position if I doubted her capability," Riordan said sharply. "The empty pots in the conservative club can rattle as much as they please; it's as good an issue as any to remind them that this is not business as usual."

  There was a general rumble of agreement. "You're in the saddle now," Olga murmured in Riordan's ear. "Just try not to fall off."

  Riordan flushed slightly. "Right. Next item." He glanced up. "Rudi. Your flying machine. You are hereby ordered to prepare a report on the feasibility of equipping, supplying, training, and operating a squadron of no fewer than six and no more than twelve aircraft, within the Gruinmarkt. Tasks will be scouting and surveillance, and—if you can work out how to do it medical evacuation. Your initial corvée budget is twelve tons. I want it on my desk, with costing, in three days' time. I understand that training pilots and observers takes time, so I want a list of candidate names—outer families for preference, we can't routinely divert world-walkers to a hazardous auxiliary duty. Any problems?"

  Rudi looked awestruck. "I can do it! Sir."

  "That's what I like to hear." Riordan didn't smile. "Kiril, Rudi's got priority over everything except first-class post; even ammunition resupply. We need an airborne capability; I've discussed it with Count Julius already, and it's going to happen. So. Next item, the Hjalmar Palace. Carl. What can you tell us?"

  The heavyset man shrugged lazily, almost indolently. Riordan took no offense; he'd worked with him long enough to know better than to think it an insult. "The palace is gone. Sorry, but that's all there is to say about it. Snurri and Ray took samples and we had them analyzed, and they found fallout. Cesium-131, strontium-90, lots of carbon-14. Snurri and Ray indented for new boots and fatigues and I've sent them to the clinic, just in case."

  "Scheisse." Nobody but Olga really noticed Riordan's one-word curse, because nobody but Olga was listening to anything but the sound of their own voices. Clan Security, though a highly disciplined organization in the field, tended to operate more like a bickering extended family behind closed doors. "Silence!" Riordan whacked the tabletop. "Let him finish, damn you!"

  "Thank you, cuz." Carl's face twisted in something horribly close to a smile. "They couldn't measure the crater because there isn't one. The keep was blown out, completely shattered, but the inner walls of the sunken moat caught the blast, and the foundations are solid stone, all the way down. But we got a good estimate of how big it was from the remains the pretender's men left on the field. Half a kiloton, and it probably went off in the vicinity of the treason room we used for the assault. Sir, do you know what's going on? Because if so, an announcement might quell some of the crazier rumors that are floating around. . . .

  Riordan sighed. "Unfortunately, the rumors hold more than a grain of truth." This time around he didn't try to maintain order. Instead, he leaned back and waited, arms crossed, for the inevitable flood of questions to die down to a trickle. "Are we ready now?" His cheek twitched. "Milady, I believe you have a summary."

  Olga glanced around the table. Twelve pairs of eyes looked back at her with expressions ranging from disbelief to disgust. "Eighteen years ago the Council, sitting in camera with the duke present, discussed the question of our long-term relationship with the United States. Of particular concern was the matter of leverage, if and when the American rulers discovered us."

  She picked up a glass and filled it from the jug on the table. Nobody spoke; curiosity was, it seemed, a more valuable currency than outrage. "A variety of strategies were discussed. Our predecessors' reliance on access to the special files of the American investigator Hoover was clearly coming to an end—Hoover's death, and the subsequent reorganization of the American secret police, along with their adoption of computerized files, rendered that particular channel obsolete. Computers in general have proven to be a major obstacle: We can't just raid the locked filing cabinets at night. So a couple of new plans were set up."

  She saw a couple of heads nodding along at the far end of the table and tried to suppress a smile. "I believe Piotr has just put two and two together and worked out why the duke took it upon himself to issue certain career advice. Piotr spent six years in the USAF, not as an aerial knight but as a black-handed munitions officer. Unfortunately he did not enter precisely the speciality the duke had in mind . . . but others did." More of her audience were clearly putting two and two together. Finally, Rudi raised a hand. "Yes?"

  "I looked into this. Nukes—they're not light! You couldn't world-walk one across. At the least, you'd have to disassemble it first, wouldn't you?"

  "Normally, yes." She nodded. "But. Back in the sixties, the Americans developed small demolition devices, the SADM, for engineers to use in demolishing bridges in enemy
territory. Small is a figure of speech—a strong man could carry one on his back for short distances—but it was ideal for our purposes. Then, in the seventies, they created a storable type, the FADM, to leave in the custody of their allies, to use in resistance operations. The friends they picked were not trustworthy"—an understatement: The Italian fascists who'd blown up the Bologna railway station in the 1970s had nearly sparked a civil war—"and the FADMs were returned to their stores, but they weren't all scrapped. A decade ago we finally placed a man in the nuclear inspectorate, with access. He surveyed the storage site, organized the doppelganger revetment, and we were in. Reverse-engineering the permissive action locks took less than two years. Then we had our own nuclear stockpile."

  She raised her glass, drank deeply. "The matter rested with his grace until the last year. It appears that the traitor Matthias had access to the procedures, and to his grace's seal. He ordered one of the devices removed from storage and transported to Boston." She waited as the shocked muttering subsided. "More recently, we learned that the Americans had learned of this weapon. Our traitor had apparently threatened them with it. They indicated their displeasure and demanded our cooperation in retrieving it. I think"—her gaze flickered towards Carl—"that most likely they found it and, by doing so, decided to send us a message. Either that, or our traitor has struck at us—but he is no world-walker. Meanwhile, we know the American secret police hold some of ours prisoner."

  "But how—"

  "What are we going to—

  "Silence!" The word having had its desired effect, Riordan continued, quietly. "They can hurt us, as they've demonstrated. They could have picked the Summer Palace in Niejwein. They could have picked the Thorold castle. We know they've captured couriers and forced them to carry spies over, but this is a new threat. We don't know what they can do. All we know for certain is that our strongholds are not only undoppelgangered, they may very well be traps."

  He fell silent. Carl cleared his throat. Deceptively mildly, he asked, "Can we get our hands on some more?"

  Olga, who had been rolling the empty water glass between her hands, put it down. "That's already taken care of," she said.

  "In any event, it's not a solution," Riordan said dismissively. "At best it's a minimal deterrent. We can hurt them—we can kill tens of thousands—but you know how the Americans respond to an attack. They are relentless, and they will slaughter millions without remorse to avenge a pinprick, should it embarrass them. Worse, their councils and congresses are so contrived that they cannot surrender. Any leader who advocates surrender is ridiculed and risks removal from office. And this leader—" She shook her head. "They haven't felt the tread of conquering boots on their land in more than a lifetime, and for most of a lifetime they have been an empire, mighty and powerful; there is a level at which they do not believe it is possible for them to be beaten. So if we're going to confront them, the last thing we should do is fight them openly, on ground of their own choosing."

  "Such as the Gruinmarkt," said one of the new faces at the table, who had been sitting quietly at the back of the room until now. Heads turned towards him. "My apologies, milady. But . . ." He shrugged, impatiently. "Someone needs to get to the point."

  "Quite right," muttered Carl.

  "Earl Wu." Riordan looked at him. "You spoke out of turn.

  "Then I apologize." Wu looked unrepentant.

  The staring match threatened to escalate into outright acrimony. Olga took a deep breath. "I believe his lordship is referring to certain informed speculation circulating in the intelligence committee over the past couple of days," she said. "Rumors."

  "What rumors?" Riordan looked at her.

  "We take our ability for granted." Olga raised a hand to her throat, to the thin gold chain from which hung a locket containing the Clan sigil. "And for a long time we've assumed that we were limited to the two worlds, to home and to here. But now we know there are at least two more worlds. How many more could there be? We didn't know as much as we thought we did. Or rather, much of what we thought we knew of our own limits was a consequence of timidity and custom." The muttering began again. "The Americans have told their scientists to find out how our talent works. They've actually told us this. Threatening us with it. They don't believe in magic: If they can see something in front of their eyes, then they can work out how it happens. They've demanded our surrender." She licked her lips. "We need contingency plans. Because they might be bluffing—but if they're not, if they have found a way to send weapons and people between worlds by science, then we're in horrible danger. The Council needs to answer the question, what is to be done? And if they won't, someone's going to have to do it for them. That someone being us."

  Getting to see the colonel was a nontrivial problem; he was a busy man, and Mike was on medical leave with a leg that wasn't going to bear his weight any time soon and a wiretap on his phone line. But he needed to talk to the colonel. Colonel Smith was, if not a friend, then at least the kind of boss who gave a shit what happened to his subordinates. The kind who figured a chain of command ran in two directions, not one. Unlike Dr. James and his shadowy sponsors.

  After James's false flag ambulance had dropped him off at the hospital to be poked and prodded, Mike had caught a taxi home, lost in thought. A bomb in a mobile phone, to be handed out like candy and detonated at will, was a scary kind of message to send. It said, we have nothing to talk about. It said, we want you dead, and we don't care how. We don't even care much who you are. Mike shuddered slightly as he recalled how Olga's cynicism had startled him: "How do we know there isn't a bomb in the earpiece?" she'd asked. Well, he'd denied it indignantly enough—and now she'd think he was a liar. More importantly, Miriam's Machiavellian mother, and whoever she was working with—would also be convinced that the diplomatic dickering the colonel had supposedly been trying to get off the ground was a sting. Dr. James has deliberately killed any chance we've got of negotiating a peaceful settlement, he realized. He's burned any chance of me ever being seen as a trustworthyhonorable—negotiator. And he's playing some kind of double game and going behind Smith's back. What the hell is going on?

  Mike's total exposure on the other side of the wall of worlds was measured in days, but he'd seen enough (hell, he'd smelled, heard, and tasted enough) to suspect that Dr. James was working on very incomplete information—or his plans had very little to do with the reality on the ground of the Gruinmarkt. Worse, he seemed to be just about ignoring the Clan, the enigmatic world-walkers who'd been a huge thorn in the DEA's collective ass for the past thirty years or more; it was almost as if he figured that a sufficient display of shock and awe would make them fold without a fight. But in Mike's experience, beating on somebody without giving them any way out was a great way to make them do their damnedest to kill you. Mike's instinct for self-preservation told him that pursuing the matter was a bad idea, and normally he'd have listened to it, but he had an uneasy feeling that this situation broke all the rules. If Dr. James was really off the rails someone needed to call him on it—and the logical person wasn't Mike but his boss.

  It took Mike a day to nerve himself to make his move. He spent it at home, planning, running through all the outcomes he could imagine. "What can possibly go wrong?" he asked Oscar, while making a list of bullet points on a legal pad. The elderly tomcat paused from washing his paw to give him such a look of bleak suspicion that Mike had to smile. "It's like that, huh?"

  The next morning, he shoehorned himself into his car and drove carefully to a nearby strip mall, which had seen better days, and where, if he remembered correctly, there might still be some beaten-up pay phones tucked away in a corner. His memory turned out to be correct. Staking out a booth and using his mobile as an address book, he dialed a certain exdirectory number. Seven minutes, he told himself. Ten, max.

  "Hello?" It wasn't Colonel Smith, but the voice was familiar. "Janice? It's Mike Fleming here. Can I please have a word with the colonel?"

  There was a pause. "Mike? Yo
u're on an unsecured line, you know that?"

  "I have a problem with my home phone. Can you put me through?"

  A longer pause. "I—see. Please hold." The hold music cut off after half a minute. "Okay, I'm transferring you now."

  "Mike?" It was Colonel Smith. He tensed. Until now, he hadn't been entirely sure it was going to work, but now he was committed, upcoming security vetting or no. I could be throwing my career away, he thought, feeling mildly nauseous.

  "Hi, boss."

  "Mike, you're still signed off sick. What's up?" Smith sounded concerned.

  "Oh, nothing much. I was wondering, though, if you'd be free to do lunch sometime?"

  "If I'd be—" There was a muffled sound, as of a hand covering a mic. "Lunch? Oh, right. Look, I'm tied up right now, but how about we brown bag it some time soon?"

  Mike nodded to himself. Message received: The last time the colonel had dropped round with a brown bag there'd been a bomb and a gun in it. "Sure. It's not urgent, I don't want to drag you out of the office—how about next Wednesday?" It was one of the older field-expedient codes: ignore negatives, treat them as emphasis. Mike just hoped the colonel had been to the same school.

  "Maybe sooner," Smith reassured him. "I'll see you around."

  When he hung up, Mike almost collapsed on the spot. He'd been on the phone for two minutes. His arms were aching and he could feel the sweat in the small of his back. Shit. He

  pulled out the antibacterial gel wipes and applied them vigorously to the mouthpiece of the phone—he'd held the receiver and dialed the numbers with a gloved hand, but there were

  bound to be residues, DNA sequences, whatever—then mentally crossed it off his list of untapped numbers, for good. That left the polygraph, but, he figured, raising chain-of-command concerns with one's immediate superior isn't normally a sacking offense. And Dr. James hadn't told him not to, either.