The Revolution Business tmp-5

by Charles Stross

  “Here are your numbers.” Herz read out the eight-digit sequence from the letter. The audience fell silent, like witnesses at an execution. As, in a manner of speaking, they were: Alvarez and Hu the hangmen, adjusting the noose; Herz the prison governor, handing over the death warrant; and parties unknown standing on the trapdoor . . . well, at least they won’t feel a thing, she told herself. More than you can say for their victims, over the years. “Remember, we want a sixty-second delay. If the package doesn’t disappear in front of your eyes within ten seconds, then turn the key to safe ARMBAND and enter the abort code. Are you ready?”

  “We’re ready,” Alvarez called.

  “Ready!” Hu echoed.

  Alvarez carefully closed the cover on the detonation controller, but—Herz noted—neglected to latch it shut. That wasn’t in the checklist, at a guess.

  The silence was oppressive. Finally, Dr. James cleared his throat. “Major Alvarez, with the authority vested in me by the executive order you have received, I order you to proceed.”

  Three days ago, the bulk of the Clan’s mobile security force had concentrated in a field near Concord, arriving in buses disguised as costumed medievalists. Now, in the predawn light, they’d made it three miles down the road—riding in the backs of steam-powered livestock trucks, disguised as filthy, fight-worn anachronists. Their leader, the duke, and his paramedic and bodyguards, led by the lady Olga, had split off ten minutes ago, heading for an uncertain rendezvous and a waiting ambulance. That left Carl, captain of Security, with a reduced command and a monstrous headache; but at least it was better than being bottled up in that stone death trap.

  “You’re sure this is the spot.” He fixed Morgan with a well-practiced stare.

  “Yuh-ess.” Morgan yawned hugely. “My apologies, sir Captain. We are two miles southwest of the gates of the Hjalmar Palace, fifty yards north of the milestone, and the cross yonder”—he gestured—“marks the center of the road.” The road was little more than a dirt track, but had the singular advantage of being a known quantity. “Last night the pretender’s forces were encamped a mile down the road from the gatehouse, dispersed in tents through the woods to either side. Watchers on the hill slope, of course. I cannot be sure—we have no recent intelligence—but I don’t believe the camp extended more than two miles down the road to Wergatsfurt. So we should be a few hundred yards beyond their rear perimeter, as of last night.”

  “Right.” Carl turned to Helmut. “Are the men ready?”

  “As ready as we can be.” Helmut’s normally taciturn demeanor was positively stony. Which wasn’t good.

  “How much ammunition did we end up leaving behind?”

  “For the Dragons? Most of it. Stefan’s got just eight rounds. The SAWs are better—we divided up the belts. I’d say, three thousand rounds per gun. And of course the light arms, we’re fully equipped from the castle’s armory. But food and water—it’s not good.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to do the job before that becomes an issue.” Carl paused in thought. “Have the men dose up with prophylactics before we cross over. We need a marker for the crossover point on the other side”—he pointed at the rough wooden crucifix that marked Morgan’s survey point—“and make sure everyone knows that if we move to retreat, that’s the rendezvous point. Have Olaf’s section position their M47 fifty yards forward of that marker, with one of the SAWs for covering fire”—Carl paced towards the perimeter of the fenced-in field to which the Lee’s trucks had brought them—“and get Erik’s people to cross over here. Hmm. If there’s any sign of the Pervert’s bodyguard, Little Dimmir’s lance can concentrate on nailing them with support from Erik’s people, and Arthur’s SAW section if they’re dug in there.” He continued laying out the deployment as Helmut and two sergeants followed him around the perimeter, making notes. It was all ad hoc, dangerously underplanned and hasty, but if there was one thing they didn’t have, it was time for a careful setup. Finally, he finished: “That’s it. Brief your men and get them into position. We go in, hmm, zero-six-hundred, that’s just under half an hour. Get moving!”

  Otto’s itchy sense of unease grew stronger with every step he took towards the moat. Ahead of him, the roar of the royal cannon provided a drumbeat punctuation to the sounds of advance: men shouting, chanting the king’s name; boots tramping out the rhythm of the march in time to the beat of their drummers; horses clattering on the cobbled roadbed, neighing, jingling of kit; and periodically a spastic belch of machine-gun fire arcing overhead, crackling and whining off the stony roofline of the walls.

  They’re not shooting back, he realized, a hundred yards past the gatehouse, as he paused in a dip in the ground. Sometime in the past couple of hours the witches had cleared out. Which means—

  “Forward for the Gruinmarkt!” The voice behind the cry was half-hoarse, but instantly recognizable as the royal life guards took up the call. “The witches have fled before us!” The life guards flooded forward like a pack of hounds following an injured deer.

  “Well, fuck it,” Otto grunted. “Jorg!”

  “Sir.”

  “Tell Heidlor to set his guns up here and range in on the keep’s door. Indirect fire.”

  “Sir!” Jorg paused. “But aren’t we—”

  “Do it!”

  Otto raised his glasses and studied the near horizon, shockingly close. In the predawn gloom the castle was a brooding presence up ahead, its upper ramparts topping the huge dry moat beyond the rise. They’ve had two days to prepare for this, and they like blowing things up. What would I do in their shoes? “Jorg!”

  Jorg, panting, hurried back towards him. “Sir?”

  “Tell Heidlor to range in on the keep’s door and to keep a watch out behind us, ranged in on the road past the gatehouse.”

  “The gatehouse, sir? But we came that way—”

  “Exactly.” Otto bared his teeth at the man; Jorg ducked his head hastily and ran back towards the gunners and their overloaded mules.

  Otto settled down, kneeling, to watch the lines of advance. The lack of fire from the castle worried him, but he had scarcely raised his glasses again when a loud and hearty hail demanded his attention. “Ahem, my lord Neuhalle!” The interruption leaned over the pommel of his horse to look down at Otto. It was Geraunt, Earl Marlburg, one of the king’s younger and more enthusiastic vassals.

  “Yes, Sir Geraunt?” Otto stared up at him, annoyed.

  “His majesty sends word!” Geraunt was obviously excited. He drew a message tube out of his sleeve and extended it towards Otto. “A change to your disposition. You are to turn around and withdraw to the gatehouse, there to cover the approaches to the castle, he says.”

  “Right.” Otto took the tube. A wave of palpable relief washed through him. Not that he was a coward—certainly the past month of campaigning had given the lie to that—but the idea of advancing into a booby-trapped castle did not fill him with joy. If the king wanted him to stake out the approaches to the castle, against the stab in the back with a witch’s knife that Otto himself half-expected, then that was a reassuringly known quantity. More importantly it suggested that his majesty was, if not exactly sane, then no crazier than any other fox. “Can you tell me what his majesty intends?”

  Sir Geraunt hunkered down, putting his horse between Otto and the keep. Otto looked up at him: “His majesty is most exercised; he says the witches have fled before him, and probably laid mines to bring down the keep, so he intends to secure the inner walls, then bring in sappers to find the—”

  The world flashed white, twice, in a tenth of the beat of a heart. Everything was white as the face of the noonday sun, except for the knife-edge shadow of Sir Geraunt, freakishly cast across Otto’s upper body and head.

  Otto blinked as a wave of heat washed across his skin. A giant the size of a mountain had opened the door of a kiln full of molten iron big enough to forge the hammer of the gods, and the glare surged overhead, stifling and oppressive. The sensation of heat faded over the duration
of two heartbeats and he opened his eyes, but everything was blotchy and purple-white with afterimages. Was that an explosion? he thought numbly, as reflex or shock made him collapse back into the ground cover. What was left of Sir Geraunt’s mount, with what was left of Sir Geraunt still astride it, began to fall sideways into his depression. Neither of them lived, which was perhaps a mercy, because while Sir Geraunt and his horse were intact and unblemished on the side that fell towards Otto, their opposite side—that had faced the castle—was scorched to charcoal around a delicate intaglio of bone.

  The castle was no longer there. Where the keep had crouched within its courtyard, shielded by the outer walls and their rammed-earth revetments, a skull-shape of dust and fire was rising, its cap looming over the ramparts like a curious salamander crawling from its volcanic home to survey its surroundings.

  As Otto fell, a blast of fiery wind pulsed across the burning grass that covered the approaches to the castle, casting aloft the calcined bodies of the men and animals who had been caught in the open at the moment of the heat flash. Burning sticks and a shotgun blast of fractured gravel caromed off the ground. A scant second later the shock front reversed, sucking back towards the roiling bubble of flames as it rose from the center of the fortification on a stem of dirt and debris.

  Otto inhaled a mouth-watering stench of cooking meat and hot air and tried to collect his scattered wits. Something was holding his legs down. He couldn’t see anything—just violet afterimages stubbornly refusing to fade when he screwed his eyes shut. Panicking, he tried to kick, but without vision he couldn’t see the dead horse lying atop him. His back was a dull mass of pain where he’d fallen, and the smell—have they taken me down to Hel, the choosers of the slain? he wondered dizzily as he turned his damaged eyes towards the furious underside of the mushroom cloud.

  Carl stared at the turbulent caul of smoke rising above the ridgeline and swallowed, forcing back the sharp taste of stomach acid at the back of his tongue. His head pounded, but his eyes were clear. Around him, soldiers stared slack-jawed at the ominous thunderhead. The predawn sky was just turning dark blue, but the fires ignited by the bomb brought their own light to the scene, so for the moment their faces were stained ruddy with a mixture of awe and fear.

  “Is that what I think it is?” asked Helmut.

  Baron Hjorth cleared his throat. “It can’t be,” he said confidently. “They’re all supposed to be under lock . . . and key. . . .” He trailed off into an uncertain silence.

  Carl took him by the elbow. More soldiers were spilling in out of the air, staggering or bending over in some cases—two world-walks in three hours was a brutal pace, even for the young and fit—and Carl had to step around them as he steered Oliver a hundred meters up the road in the direction of the castle. “That.” He gestured. “Is. A mushroom cloud. Yes?”

  Oliver blinked rapidly. “I think so.” He swallowed. “I’ve never seen one before.”

  “Well. Where the fuck did it come from?”

  “Don’t ask me!” Oliver snarled. “I didn’t do it! God-on-a-stick, what do you take me for? All our bombs are accounted for as of last Tuesday except for the one Matthias”—he stopped dead for a moment—“Oh dear.”

  “If that bastard Matthias—”

  Oliver cut him off with a slashing gesture. “Trust me, Matthias is dead.” He closed his eyes, composing himself. “This is someone else. Sending us a message.” He opened his eyes. “How old is that . . . thing?”

  Carl glanced up, uneasily sniffing the air: The tang of wood smoke spoke of pine trees on the reverse slope ignited by the heat flash. “I don’t know. Not old—see the stem? It hasn’t drifted.” His guts loosened as he realized, if I’d timed this just a little later we’d still have been there. He licked his thumb and held it up. There was a faint breeze from the south, blowing towards the castle. “Um. What, if anything, do you know about fallout?”

  “The poison rain these things shed? I think we should forget the Pervert and get your men out of here. Forced march. If you want to set up guns south of Wergatsfurt and catch any stragglers you’re welcome to them, but if they were camped a mile yonder”—he gestured towards the cloud—“I don’t know. They might have survived, if they dug in for the night. Although I don’t give much for their chances if that fire starts to spread.”

  Carl grinned humorlessly. “Have you ever known the Pervert to refuse a chance to stab us in the back, my lord? Dawn attacks a speciality, remember?”

  Oliver shook his head.

  “Come.” Carl turned his back on the cloud. “I’ll leave two men to scout the area in an hour’s time. The rest—let’s hit the road. I’ll have time to worry about whoever’s sending us messages when I’ve hunted down and killed the last of the pretender’s men.”

  Behind them a dark rain began to fall on the battlefield, fat drops turbid with radioactive dust scorched from the stones of the castle and the bones of the men who had followed their usurper-king into the radius of the fireball. The survivors, burned and broken—those that could move—cupped their hands to catch the rain and drank greedily.

  Otto Neuhalle, and the ten survivors of his company, were among them. They did not know—nor could they—that the man-portable nuclear weapon responsible for the fireball had a maximum yield of only one kiloton, and that such bombs are inherently dirty, and that this blast had been, by nuclear standards, absolutely filthy; that it had failed to consume even a tenth of its plutonium core, and had scooped up huge masses of debris and irradiated it before scattering it tightly around ground zero.

  Dead men, drinking bitter rain.

  Realignments

  If he’s dead, we’re so screwed.”

  Brill’s fingers whitened on the steering wheel, but Miriam took Huw’s gloomy appraisal as a conversational opportunity. They were coming less frequently today, as the reality of driving across a continent took hold. “Isn’t that a little pessimistic?”

  Huw closed the lid of his laptop and carefully unplugged the cable from the satphone. He slid them both into their pockets in the flight case before he replied. “It’s not sounding good. They got him into the high dependency unit more than seventy-two hours after the initial intracerebral hemorrhage. He’s still alive, but he’s confused and only semiconscious and, uh, I’ve done some reading. More than forty percent of patients with that kind of hemorrhage die within a month.”

  Yul, sprawled across the van’s third bench seat, chose that moment to emit a thunderous snore. Elena, who’d been lying asleep with her head in his lap, shuddered and opened her eyes, then yawned. “What?”

  “He’s not dead yet,” Miriam observed tiredly. “He’s not going to die of anything nonmedical, not with Olga looking out for him. And he’s got the best treatment money can buy.”

  “Which is not saying a lot.”

  Brill hunched her shoulders behind the wheel, pulling out to inch past a big rig. “Listen, Huw, why don’t you just shut up?” she snapped.

  “Wha? . . .” Huw gaped.

  “Hush, Brill, he doesn’t know my uncle—his grace—like you do.” Miriam glanced in her sunshade mirror and spotted Elena sitting up, clearly fascinated. “Sorry, but he’s right. I hope he does pull through, but the odds aren’t much better than fifty-fifty. And we ought to have some idea about what to do if we get there and . . .” She trailed off, diving back into her thoughts.

  “I don’t want to think about it,” said Brill. “I’m sorry, Huw. I should not exercise myself over your words. Many will be thinking them. But I feel so helpless.” She thumped the steering column. “I wish I could drive faster!”

  “If you get pulled for speeding, and he does recover—” Elena began.

  Miriam snorted. “Enough of that, kid. What’s more important to you, Brill: getting there, or going fast? You don’t want to get a traffic stop. Think of the poor cop’s widow and orphans, if it helps.”

  “You are perfectly correct, as usual, milady.” Brill sighed. “What other news, Sir H
uw?”

  “Um.” Huw stretched, extending his legs under Miriam’s seat and his arms backwards to touch the ceiling above his brother’s head. “There’s a condition red lockdown. Avoid commercial flights, avoid all contact with the authorities, avoid unnecessary travel, lock the doors and bar the windows. Something about a major battle near Wergatsfurt, and something really bad happening to the Pervert’s army. Sounds like my Lord Riordan opened a can of whoop-ass or something. But you’d expect them to sound a little less tense if they’d nailed the bad guys properly, wouldn’t you?”

  “Not necessarily.” Miriam sounded thoughtful. “If there’s been an army running wild through the countryside in a civil war, it could take a long time for things to get back to normal. Look at Iraq: They went in weeks ago and it’s still a mess, whether or not the President declared ‘Mission Accomplished.’ ” She paused. “Egon could be down, but what about the rest of his vassals? The Duke of Niejwein, this that and the other baron or earl or whatever. It’s not over until the council hammers out a settlement that ends the fighting.” She rubbed her belly thoughtfully, then paused. “And I need to see a doctor.” The test kit had been unequivocal, but the uncertainty over the sex of the fetus remained. “Then get a seat at the table before they decide I’m just one of the chess pieces.”

  “A chess piece with a posse!” Elena giggled.

  “Not funny,” Huw chided her.

  Her moué mirrored Brill’s, for an entirely different reason. “I suppose not,” she said. “I was just joking.”

  “Bored now,” Yul mocked, having woken up in the preceding minute or two. “Are we there yet?” he squeaked in a falsetto imitation.

  “Bastard!” Elena thumped him over the head with a travel pillow.

  “Children! . . .” Huw shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he mouthed at Miriam by way of the mirror.

  Miriam glanced sidelong at Brill. “How long have you known these reprobates?”