The Merchants’ War

by Stross, Charles

  “Half a—” Her knees went weak. She stumbled, caught herself leaning against the nose of the hydrogen bomb, and recoiled violently. A quarter of a megaton? The flash would be visible in New York City: the blast would blow out windows in Providence. “But—”

  “Calm down, it’s not going to happen. We’ve already made sure of that.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Jesus. If that’s the good news—

  “Funny thing about the timer, though,” Rand said meditatively. “Sloppy wiring, dry joints where they soldered it to…well, the battery ran down a long time ago. Judging by the dust it’s been there for years.”

  “Timer?”

  “Yes.” Rand shook himself. “It was on a timer,” he explained. “Should have gone off ages ago, taking Boston and most of Cambridge with it. Probably back during the Bush I or Reagan administrations, at a guess. Maybe even earlier.”

  “Holy, uh, wow.”

  “Yes, I can see why you might say that.” Rand nodded. “And we are going to have real fun combing the inventory to find out how this puppy managed to wander off the reservation. That’s not supposed to happen, although I can hazard some guesses…”

  “Huh. Six—did you say it weighs six thousand pounds?” Herz stared at the nuclear weapons engineer.

  “Well, of course it does; did you think air-dropped multimegaton hydrogen bombs were small enough to fit in a back pocket? Why do you think we ship them around in B-52s?”

  “Uh.” She took a deep breath. “And it’s a, like, a single unit? You couldn’t dismantle it easily?”

  “No, I don’t think so. We’ll need to truck it away intact and examine it for—”

  “Then we’ve messed up.”

  “What makes you say that?” Rand sounded offended.

  “Because it’s too big. A world-walker can’t haul something any larger than they can lift. So it doesn’t belong to the Clan.”

  “Oh,” said Rand. He sounded at a loss for words.

  “You can say that again.” Judith turned to head back to the hole in the wall. “Listen, I’ve got to go, this isn’t Family Trade business anymore, okay? Run it through the normal NIRT channels, I’ve got to go report to the colonel now. See you around.” And with that, she ducked through the hole in the lockup wall, and headed back to the car park. Rich was waiting next to the truck. “Come on,” he said, waving at her car.

  “What’s the story?”

  “It’s a nuke, but it’s not our nuke,” Herz said as she started the car.

  “Oh.”

  “Yes. Come on, I’ve got to get back to the office and report to Eric.”

  “Shit.”

  “Language, please.” Judith put the car in gear and crept out of the parking lot, leaving the gray NIRT van and the orange rubber-suited atomic bomb disposal specialists behind like a bad memory. “What a way to start the week.” Somewhere out there in the city there was supposed to be another bomb. One that was activated four months earlier by Matt, when he defected from the Clan, as an insurance policy to hold over the Family Trade Organization’s head. But Matt was dead, and Mike Fleming had failed to wheedle the location of the bomb out of him before he died—all they knew was, it was on a one-year countdown, and they had maybe two hundred days left to find it before they had to evacuate three or four million folks from Boston and Cambridge to avoid a disaster that would make 9/11 look like a parking violation.

  Miriam had run through the emotional gamut in the past six hours, oscillating wildly between hope and terror, despair and optimism. Being taken out of the cellar room and escorted up to the top of this rickety pile of brick and lath by a pair of thugs, and ushered into a garret where a middle-aged woman with a kindly face and eyes like a hanging judge sat at a writing desk, and then being expected to give an account of herself, was more than Miriam was ready for. All she had to vouch for this woman was Erasmus Burgeson’s word: and there was a lot more to the tubercular pawnbroker than met the eye. He had some very odd friends, and if he’d misread her when he suggested she visit this “Lady Bishop,” then it was possible she’d just stuck her head in a noose. But on the other hand, Miriam was here right now, and there were precious few alternatives on offer.

  “I’d quite understand if you thought I was mad,” Miriam said, shivering slightly—it was not particularly warm in this drafty attic room. “I don’t really understand everything that’s going on myself. I mean, I thought I did, but obviously not.” She felt her cheek twitch involuntarily.

  Margaret Bishop leaned forward, her expression concerned. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  Miriam twitched again. “No, I’m—” She took a deep breath. “A few bruises, that’s all. And I’m lucky to be alive, people have been trying to kill me all evening.” She took another deep breath. “Sorry…”

  “Don’t be.” Lady Bishop rose to her feet and opened the door a crack. “Bring a pot of coffee, please. And biscotti. For two.” She closed it again. “Would you like to tell me about it? Start from the beginning, if you please. Take your time.” She sat down again. “I must apologize for the pressure, but I really need to know everything if I am to help you.”

  “You’d help me?” Miriam blinked.

  “You’ve been very helpful to us in the past. We tend to be suspicious, with good reason—but we look after our friends.” Lady Bishop looked at her gravely. “But I need to know more about you before I make any promises. Do you understand?”

  Miriam’s vision blurred: for a moment she felt vertiginous, as if the stool she sat upon was half a mile high, balanced in a high wind. Relief combined with apprehension washed over her. Not alone—it was like waking suddenly from a nightmare. The world had been narrowing around her like a prison corridor for so long that the idea that there might be a way out, or even people who would help her willingly, seemed quite alien for a moment. Then the dizziness passed. “I’ll tell you everything,” she heard herself saying, in a voice hoarse with gratitude. “Just don’t expect too much.”

  “Take your time.” Lady Bishop sat back on her chair and waited while Miriam composed herself. “We’ve got all night.”

  “There are at least three worlds.” Miriam squeezed her tired eyes shut as she tried to fumble her way towards an explanation. “I’m told there may be more, but nobody knows how to reach them. The people who can reach them…they’re my relatives, apparently. It’s a hereditary talent. It’s what geneticists call a recessive trait, meaning you can’t inherit it unless it was present in both sides of your family tree. It’s difficult to do—painful if you do it too often, and you need a focus, a kind of knotwork design to look at to make it work—but it’s made the families, the people who have the ability, rich. The world they live in is very backward, almost medieval: something went wrong, some blind alley in history a couple of thousand years ago, but they’ve risen into the nobility of the small feudal kingdoms that exist up and down the New England coastline.

  “I’m…I’m an outsider. About fifty years ago the families started killing one another, there was a huge blood feud—what they called a civil war. My mother, who was pregnant at the time, was on the losing side of an ambush: she fled to the, the other of the three worlds we know about. Uh, I should have explained that the Clan families didn’t know about this one at the time. There’s a lost offshoot family of the Clan who ended up here more than a hundred years ago, who can travel from here to the Clan’s world: they were the ones who kept the civil war going by periodically assassinating Clan leaders and pointing the evidence at the other families. The other world, the one I grew up in, is very different from either this one or the one the Clan comes from.”

  There was a knock on the door. Miriam paused while one of the guards came in and deposited a tray on the table where Lady Bishop had been working on her papers. The coffee pot was silver, and the smell drifting from it was delicious. “May I…?”

  “Certainly.” Margaret Bishop poured coffee into two china mugs. “Help yourself to the biscotti.” The guard depar
ted quietly. “Tell me about your world.”

  “It’s—” Miriam frowned. “It’s a lot less different from yours than the Clan’s world is, but it’s still very different. As far as I can tell, they were the same until, um, 1745. There was an uprising in Scotland? A Prince Charles Stuart? In my world he marched on London and his uprising was defeated. Savagely. A few years later a smoldering war between Britain and France started—and while France eventually won a paper victory, there was no invasion of England. The wars between France and Britain continued for nearly eighty years, ending with the complete defeat of France and the British dominating the oceans.”

  Lady Bishop shook her head. “What is the state of the Americas in this world of yours?” she asked.

  “There was a revolution…Why, is it important?”

  “No, just fascinating. So, continue. Your world is very different, it seems, but from a more recent point of change?”

  “Yes.” Miriam took a mouthful of coffee. “Something went wrong here. I think it was something to do with the French administration of England after the invasion, in the eighteenth century. In my world, a lot of the industrialization you’ve had here in the past hundred years happened in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in England. Over in this world it started late and it’s still happening here, in New Britain. Things are further ahead in the United States, the nation on this continent where I come from. And in other countries in the other world. That doesn’t mean things are necessarily better—they’ve got big problems, too. But no kings, at least not many: most countries got rid of them over the past century. And better science and technology. Cures for tuberculosis.”

  “How do your relatives, this Clan, account for their power? I’d have thought that if they live in a backward society it would be difficult to rise.”

  Miriam put her mug down. “They’re smugglers,” she said bluntly. “In their own world, they are the only people who can get messages across the continent in anything less than weeks. They use the U.S. postal service to accomplish miracles, in the terms of their own world. And they’ve got modern firearms and lots of toys, because in my world they smuggle illegal drugs: they can guarantee to get them past the Coast Guard and police and border patrols. They’re immensely rich merchant princes. But they’re trapped by the society they live in. The old nobility don’t accept them, the peasants resent them, and the crown—” She shook her head, unable to continue.

  “You said someone tried to kill you today. Which world did this happen in?”

  “The Clan’s,” Miriam said automatically. She picked her mug up, took a sip, rolled it nervously between her palms. “I, when they discovered me, I needed to figure out a way to make some space for myself. I’m not used to having a big extended family who expect me to fit in. And there aren’t enough of them. They wanted me to marry for political reasons. I tried to—hell, I made a big mistake. Tried to get political leverage, to make them leave me alone. Instead I nearly got myself killed. They left the, the political marriage as a compromise, a way out. Tonight was meant to be the official betrothal. Instead…”

  She put the mug down. “The groom is dead,” she said. “No, no need for condolences—I barely knew him. There was an attack on the betrothal party, and I only just managed to escape. And the United States government has found out about the Clan and discovered a way to get at the Clan’s world.”

  Her eyes widened. “Hey, I wonder if Angbard knows?”

  Mike’s first hint that something had gone badly wrong was the scent of burning gunpowder on the night air.

  He hunkered down behind a large, gnarled oak tree at the edge of the tree line and squinted into the darkness. Hastert and his men had night vision goggles, but they hadn’t brought a spare pair for Mike and the moon wasn’t an adequate substitute. The stone wall across the clear-cut lawn was a looming black silhouette against a slightly lighter darkness. The sounds drifting over the wall told their own story of pain and confusion and anger: it sounded like there was a riot going on in the distance, still punctuated with the flat bangs of black powder weapons and the bellowing of men like cattle funneled into the killing floor of an abattoir.

  A shadowy figure moved across the empty space. Someone tapped Mike lightly on the shoulder, and he jerked half-upright. “Let’s move,” whispered Hastert. “After me.” He rose lightly, and before Mike could say anything he faded into the gloom.

  Mike forced himself to stand up. He’d been crouching for so long that his knees ached—and the nervous apprehension wasn’t helping, either. What have I gotten myself into? It seemed to be the story of his life, these days. He shifted his weight from side to side, restoring the circulation in his legs, then took a step through the undergrowth around the big oak tree.

  There was a sharp cracking noise, a moment’s vibration as if a bowstring the size of a suspension bridge had just been released, and an excruciating pain lanced through his left leg, halfway between ankle and knee. He gasped with agony, too shocked to scream, and began to topple sideways. The serrated steel jaws buried in his leg were brought up sharply by the chain anchoring them to the oak tree, and dug their teeth into his shattered leg. Everything went black.

  An indeterminate time later, Mike felt an urgent need to spit. His mouth hurt; he’d bitten his tongue and the sharp taste of blood filled his mouth. Why am I lying down? he wondered vaguely. Bad thought: In his mind’s inner eye his leg lit up like a torch, broken and burning. He drew breath to scream, and a hand covered his mouth.

  “O’Neil, get me a splint. Lower leg fracture, looks like tibia and fibula both. Fleming, I’m going to stick a morphine syrette in you. Don’t worry, we’ll get you out of here. Fuck me, that’s a nasty piece of work.” The hand moved away from his mouth. “Here, bite this if it helps.” Something leathery pushed at his lips. Mike gritted his teeth and tried not to scream as the bones grated. “I’m going to have to get this fucker off you before we can splint your leg and get you out of here.” A tiny sharpness bit into his leg near the searing agony. “How does it…eh. Got it. This is going to hurt—”

  A sudden flare of pain arrived, worse than anything that had come before. Mike blacked out again.

  The next time he woke up, the pain had subsided. That’s better, he thought drowsily. It was comfortable, lying down on the ground: must be the morphine. Someone was tugging at his leg, lifting and moving it and tying stuff tightly around it. That was uncomfortable. Something told him he ought to be screaming his head off, but it was too much effort right now. “What is it?” he tried to ask aloud, but what came out was a drunken-sounding mumble.

  “You stuck your foot in some kind of man trap. Spring-loaded, chained to the tree, scary piece of shit. It broke your leg and chewed up your calf muscles like a hungry great white. Fuck, why didn’t nobody tell us these medievals had anti-personnel mines?” Hastert sounded distinctly peevish, in a someone’s-going-to-get-hurt way. “Now we’re going to have to carry you.”

  “Don’t—” Mike tried to say. His mouth was dry: but he felt okay. Just let me lie here for a couple of hours, I’ll be fine, he heard himself thinking, and tried to laugh at his own joke. The darkness was florid and full of patterns, retinal rod cells firing in aimless and fascinating fractals to distract him from the pain. Medieval minefield, medieval minefield, he repeated over and over to himself. Someone grunted and dragged his arm over their shoulder, then heaved him upright. His left leg touched ground and he felt light-headed, but then he was dangling in midair. Shark bite. Hey, I’m shark bait. He tried not to giggle. Be serious. I’m in enemy territory. If they hear us…

  There was a wall. It was inconveniently high and rough, random stones crudely mortared together in a pile eight feet tall. He was floating beside it and someone was grunting, and then there was a rope sling around him. That was rough as it dragged him up the side of the wall, but Hastert and O’Neil were there to keep his leg from bumping into the masonry. And then he was lying on top of the wall, which was bumpy but wid
e enough to be secure, and on the other side of it he could see a dirt road and more walls in the darkness, and a couple of shadowy buildings.

  His mangled leg itched.

  Consciousness came in fits and starts. He was lying on the muddy grass at the base of the wall, staring up at the sky. The stars were very bright, although wisps of cloud scudding in from the north were blotting them out. Someone nearby was swearing quietly. He could hear other noises, a rattling stomping and yelling like a demonstration he’d once seen, and a hollow clapping noise that was oddly familiar, pop-pop, pop-pop—hooves, he realized. What do horses mean?

  “Fuck.” The figure bending over him sounded angry and confused. “O’Neil, I’m going to have to call four-oh-four on Fleming. Cover—”

  What’s he doing with the knife? Mike wondered dizzily. The hoofbeats were getting louder and there was a roar: then a rattling bang of gunfire, very loud and curiously flat, not the crack of supersonic bullets but more like high caliber pistol shots, doors slamming in his ears. There was a scream, cut off: something heavy fell across him as an answering stutter of automatic fire cut loose, O’Neil with his AR-15. Who’s trying to kill whom, now? A moment of ironic amusement threatened to swallow Mike, just as a second booming volley of musket fire crackled overhead. Then there was more shouting, and more automatic fire, stuttering in short bursts from concealment at the other end of the exposed stretch of wall: we climbed the wall right into a crossfire!

  He tried to focus, but overhead the stars were graying out, one by one: shock, blood loss, and morphine conspired to put him under. But unlike the others, he was still alive when the Clan soldiers covering the escape of their leaders from the Thorold Palace reached the killing zone and paused to check the identity of the victims.