The Merchants’ War

by Stross, Charles

  “That’s why all three of us are going, this time.” Huw took another mouthful. “And we’re all taking full packs instead of piggybacking. That ties us down for an hour, minimum, if we run into trouble, but going by your first trip, there didn’t seem to be anybody home. We might have wildlife trouble, bears or wolves, but that shouldn’t be enough to require an immediate withdrawal. So unless the duke says ‘no,’ we’re going camping.”

  They managed to finish their breakfast without discussing any other matters of import. Unfortunately for Huw, this created a zone of silence that Elena felt compelled to fill with enthusiastic chirping about Christina Aguilera and friends, which Hulius punctuated with nods and grunts of such transparently self-serving attentiveness that Huw began to darkly consider purchasing a dog collar and leash to present to his brother’s new keeper.

  Back at the rented house, Huw got down to the serious job of redistributing their packs and making sure everything they’d need found a niche in one rucksack or another. It didn’t take long to put everything together: what took time was double-checking, asking what have I forgotten about that could kill me? When finally they were all ready it was nearly noon.

  “Okay, wait in the yard,” said Huw. He walked back inside and reset the burglar alarm. “Got your lockets?” This time there was no need for the flash card, no need to keep all their hands free for emergencies. “On my mark: three, two, one…”

  The world shifted color, from harsh sunlight on brown-parched grass to overcast pine-needle green. Huw glanced round. A moment earlier he’d been sweating into his open three-layer North Face jacket: the chill hit him like a punch in the ribs and a slap in the face. There were trees everywhere. Elena stepped out from behind a waist-high tangle of brush and dead branches and looked at him. A moment later Hulius popped into place, his heavy pack looming over his head like an astronaut’s oxygen supply. “All clear?” Huw asked, ignoring the pounding in his temples.

  “Yup.” Yul hefted the meter-long spike with the black box of the radio beacon on top, and rammed it into the ground.

  “It looks like it’s going to rain,” Elena complained, looking up at the overcast just visible between the treetops. “And it’s cold.”

  Huw zipped his jacket up, then slid his pack onto the ground carefully. “Yul, you have the watch. Elena, if you could start unpacking the tent?” He unhooked the scanner from his telemetry belt and set it running, hunting through megahertz for the proverbial needle in a thunderstorm, then began to unpack the weather station.

  “I have the watch, bro.” Yul’s backpack thudded heavily as it landed in a mat of ferns, followed by the metallic clack as he chambered a round in his hunting rifle. “No bear’s going to sneak up on you without my permission.”

  “I’m so glad.” Huw squinted at the scanner, then nodded. “Okay, nothing on the air. Radio check. Elena?”

  “Oh, what? You want—the radio?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Elena reached into her jacket pocket and produced a walkie-talkie. “Can you hear me?”

  Huw winced and turned down the volume. “I hear you. Your turn, Yul—” Another minute of cross-checks and he was happy. “Okay. Got radio, got weather station, acquired the beacon. Let’s get the tent up.”

  The tent was a tunnel model, with two domed compartments separated by a central awning, for which Huw had a feeling he was going to be grateful. Elena had already unrolled it: between them they managed to nail the spikes in and pull it erect without too much swearing, although the tunnel ended up bulging in at one side where it wrapped around an inconveniently placed trunk.

  Huw crossed the clearing then, stretching as high as he could, slashed a strip of bark away from the trunk of the tree nearest the spike. Then he turned to Yul. “Where was that chunk of asphalt?”

  “That way, dude.” Hulius gestured down the gentle slope. The trees blocked the line of sight within a hundred meters. “Want to go check it out?”

  “You know it.” Huw’s stomach rumbled. Going to have to find a stream soon, he realized, or send Elena back over to fill up the water bag. “Lead off. Stay close and stop at twenty so I can mark the route.”

  It was quiet in the forest, much too quiet. After a minute, Huw realized what he was missing: the omnipresent creaking of the insect chorus, cicadas and hopping things of one kind or another. Occasionally a bird would cry out, a harsh cawing of crows or the tu-whit tu-whit of something he couldn’t identify marking out its territory. From time to time the branches would rustle and whisper in the grip of a breeze impossible to detect at ground level. But there was no enthusiastic orchestra of insects, no rumble of traffic, nor the drone of engines crawling across the upturned bowl of the empty sky. We’re alone, he realized. And: it feels like it’s going to snow.

  Yul stopped and turned round. He grinned broadly and pointed at the nearest tree. “See? I’ve been here before.”

  Huw nodded. “Good going.” His headache eased slightly. “How much farther is it?”

  “About six markers, maybe a couple of hundred meters.”

  “Right.” Huw glanced round at Elena. “You hear that?”

  “Sure.” She chewed rhythmically as she reached up with her left hand to flick a stray hair away from her eyes. She didn’t move her right hand away from the grip on the P90, but kept scanning from side to side with an ease that came from long practice—she’d done her share of summer training camps for the duke.

  “Lead on, Yul.” Huw suppressed a shiver. Elena—was she really as brainless as she’d seemed over breakfast? Or was she another of those differently socialized Clan girls, who escaped from their claustrophobic family connections by moonlighting as manhunters for ClanSec? He hadn’t asked enough questions when the duke’s clerk had gone down his list of names and suggested he talk to her. But the way she moved silently in his footsteps, scanning for threats, suggested that maybe he ought to have paid more attention.

  Ten, fifteen minutes passed. Yul stopped. “Here it is,” he said quietly.

  “I have the watch.” Elena turned in a circle, looking for threats.

  “Let me see.” Huw knelt down near the tree Hulius had pointed to. The undergrowth was thin here, barely more than a mat of pine needles and dead branches, and the slope almost undetectable. Odd lumpy protuberances humped out of the ground near the roots of the tree, and when he glanced sideways Huw realized he could see a lot farther in one direction before his vision was blocked by more trees. He unhooked the folding trench shovel from his small pack and chopped away at the muck and weedy vegetation covering one of the lumps. “Whoa!”

  Huw knew his limits: what he knew about archeology could be written on the sleeve notes of an Indiana Jones DVD. But he also knew asphalt when he saw it, a solid black tarry aggregate with particles of even size—and he knew it was old asphalt too, weathered and overgrown with lichen and moss.

  “Looks like a road to me,” Yul offered.

  “I think you’re right.” Huw cast around for more chunks of half-buried roadstone. Now that he knew what he was looking for it wasn’t difficult to find. “It ran that way, north-northeast, I think.” Turning to look in the opposite direction he saw a shadowy tunnel, just about as wide as a two-lane road. Some trees had erupted through the surface over the years, but for the most part it had held the forest at bay. “Okay, this way is downhill. Let’s plant a waypoint and—” he looked up at the heavy overcast “—follow it for an hour, or until it starts to rain, before we head back.” He checked his watch. It was just past two in the afternoon. “I don’t want to get too far from base camp today.”

  Hulius rammed another transponder spike into the earth by the road and Huw scraped an arrow on the nearest tree, pointing back along their path. The LED on top of the transponder blinked infrequently, reassuring them that the radio beacon was ready and waiting to guide them home. For the next half hour they plodded along the shallow downhill path, Hulius leading the way with his hunting rifle, Elena bringing up the rear. Once
they were on the roadbed, it was easy to follow, although patches of asphalt had been heaved up into odd mounds and shoved aside by trees over the years—or centuries—for which it had been abandoned. Something about the way the road snaked along the contours of the shallow hillside tickled Huw’s imagination. “It was built to take cars,” he finally said aloud.

  “Huh? How can you tell?” asked Yul.

  “The radius of curvature. Look at it, if you’re on foot it’s as straight as an arrow. But imagine you’re driving along it at forty, fifty miles per hour. See how it’s slightly banked around that ridge ahead?” He pointed towards a rise in the ground, just visible through the trees.

  They continued in silence for a couple of minutes. “You’re assuming—” Yul began to say, then stopped, freezing in his tracks right in front of a tree that had thrust through the asphalt. “Shit.”

  “What?” Huw almost walked into his back.

  “Cover,” Yul whispered, gesturing towards the side of the track. “It’s probably empty, but…”

  “What?” Huw ducked to the side of the road—followed by Elena—then crept forward to peer past Yul’s shoulder.

  “There,” said Hulius, raising one hand to point. It took a moment for Huw to recognize the curving flank of a mushroom-pale dome, lightly streaked with green debris. “You were looking for company, weren’t you? I’ve got a bad feeling about this…”

  It wasn’t the first time Miriam had hidden in the woods, nursing a splitting headache and a festering sense of injustice, but familiarity didn’t make it easier: and this time she’d had an added source of anxiety as she crossed over, hoping like hell that the Clan hadn’t seen fit to doppelganger her business by building a defensive site in the same location in their own world. But she needn’t have worried. The trees grew thick and undisturbed, and she’d made sure that the site was well inland from the line the coast had followed before landfill in both her Boston and the strangely different New British version had extended it.

  She’d taken a risk, of course. Boston and Cambridge occupied much the same sites in New Britain as in her own Massachusetts, but in the Gruinmarkt that area was largely untamed, covered by deciduous forest and the isolated tracts and clearings of scattered village estates. She’d never thought to check the lay of the land colocated with her workshop, despite having staked out her house: for all she knew, she might world-walk right into the great hall of some hedge lord. But it seemed unlikely—Angbard hadn’t chosen the site of his fortified retreat for accessibility—so the worst risk she expected was a twisted ankle or a drop into a gully.

  Instead Miriam stumbled and nearly walked face-first into a beech tree, then stopped and looked around. “Ow.” She massaged her forehead. This was bad: she suddenly felt hot and queasy, and her vision threatened to play tricks on her. Damn, I don’t need a migraine right now. She sat down against the tree trunk, her heart hammering with the release of tension. A flash of triumph: I got away with it! Well, not quite. She’d still have to cross back over and meet up with Erasmus. But there were hours to go, yet…

  The nausea got worse abruptly, peaking in a rush that cramped her stomach. She doubled over to her right and vomited, whimpering with pain. The spasms seemed to go on for hours, leaving her gasping for breath as she retched herself dry. Eventually, by the time she was too exhausted to stand up, the cramps began to ease. She sat up and leaned back against the tree, pulled her suitcase close, and shivered uncontrollably. “I wonder what brought that on?” She mumbled under her breath. Then in an effort to distract herself, she opened the case.

  The contents of the hidden drawer were mostly plastic and base metal, but they gleamed at her eyes with more promise than a chest full of rubies and diamonds. A small Sony notebook PC and its accessories, a power supply and CD drive. With shaking hands she opened the computer’s lid and pushed the power button. The screen flickered, and LEDs flashed, then it shut down again. “Oh, of course.” The battery had run down in the months of enforced inactivity. Well, no need to worry: New Britain had alternating current electricity, and the little transformer was designed for international use, rugged enough to eat their bizarre mixture of frequency and voltage without melting. (Even though she’d had a devil of a time at first, establishing how the local units of measurement translated into terms she was vaguely familiar with.)

  Closing the suitcase, she felt the tension drain from her shoulders. I can go home, she told herself. Any time I want to. All she had to do was walk twenty-five paces north, cross over again at the prearranged time, and then find an electric light socket to plug the computer into. “Huh.” She glanced at her watch, surprised to discover that fifty minutes had already passed. She’d arranged to reappear in three hours, the fastest crossing she felt confident she could manage without medication. But that was before the cramps and the migraine had hit her. She stood up clumsily, brushed down her clothes, and oriented herself using the small compass she’d found among Burgeson’s stock. “Okay, here goes nothing.”

  Another tree, another two hours: this time in the right place for the return trip to the side alley behind the workshop. Miriam settled down to wait. What do I really want to do? she asked herself. It was a hard question to answer. Before the massacre at the betrothal ceremony—already nearly a week ago—she’d had the grim luxury of certainty. But now…I could buy my way back into the game, she realized. The Idiot’s dead so the betrothal makes no sense anymore. Henryk’s probably dead, too. And I’ve got valuable information, if I can get Angbard’s ear. Mike’s presence changed everything. Hitherto, all the Clan’s strategic planning and internecine plotting had made the key assumption that they were inviolable in their own estates, masters of their own world. But if the U.S. government could send spies, then the implications were likely to shake the Clan to its foundations. They’ve been looking for the Clan for years, she realized. But now they’d found the narcoterrorists—one world’s feudal baron is another world’s drug lord—the whole elaborate game of charades that Clan security played was over. The other player could kick over the card table any time they wanted. You can doppelganger a castle against world-walkers, but you can’t stop them crossing over outside your walls and planting a backpack nuke. In an endgame between the Clan and the CIA or its world-walking equivalent, there could be only one winner.

  “So they can’t win a confrontation. But if they lose…” She blinked. They had Iris, Patricia, her mask-wearing mother. Could I let her go? The thought was painful. And then there were others, the ones she could count as friends. Olga, Brill, poor innocent kids like Kara. Even James Lee. She could cut and run, but she’d be leaving them to—no, that’s not right. She shook her head. Where did this unwelcome sense of responsibility come from? Damn it, I haven’t gone native! But it was too late to protest: they’d tied her into their lives, and if she just walked out on them, much less walked willingly into the arms of enemies who’d happily see them all dead or buried so deep in jail they’d never see daylight, she’d be personally responsible for the betrayal.

  “They’ll have to go.” Somewhere beyond the reach of a government agency that relied on coerced and imprisoned world-walkers. “But where?” New Britain was a possibility. Her experiment in technology transfer had worked, after all. What if we went overt? She wondered. If we told them who we were and what we could do. Could we cut a deal? Build a military-industrial complex to defend against a military-industrial complex. The Empire’s under siege. The French have the resources to… she blanked. I don’t know enough. A tantalizing vision clung to the edges of her imagination, a new business idea so monumentally vast and arrogant she could barely contemplate it. Thousands of world-walkers, working with the support and resources of a continental superpower, smuggling information and ideas and sharing lessons leeched from a more advanced world. I was thinking small. How fast could we drag New Britain into the twenty-first century? Even without the cohorts of new world-walkers in the making that she’d stumbled across, the product of Angbard�
�s secretive manipulation of a fertility lab’s output, it seemed feasible. More than that: it seemed desirable. Mike’s organization will assume that any world-walker is a drug mule until proven otherwise. It won’t be healthy to be a world-walker in the USA after the shit hits the fan. We’ll need New Britain.

  Miriam shook herself and checked her watch. The hours had drifted by: the shadows were lengthening and her headache was down to a dull throb. She stood up and dusted herself down again, picked up her suitcase, and focused queasily on the locket. “Once more, with spirit…”

  Bang.

  Red-hot needles thrust into her eyes as her stomach heaved again: a giant gripped her head between his hands and squeezed. Cobblestones beneath her boots, and a stink of fresh horseshit. Miriam bent forward, gagging, realizing I’m standing in the road—and a narrow road it was, walled on both sides with weathered, greasy brickwork—as the waves of nausea hit.

  Bang.

  Someone shouted something, at her it seemed. The racket was familiar, and here was a car (or what passed for one in New Britain) with engine running. Hands grabbed at her suitcase: she tightened her grip instinctively.

  “Into the car! Now!” Erasmus, she realized fuzzily.

  “’M going to be sick—”

  “Well you can be sick in the car!” He clutched her arm and tugged.

  Bang.

  Gunshots?

  She tottered forward, stomach lurching, and half-fell, half-slid through the open passenger compartment leg well, collapsing on the wooden floor. The car shuddered and began to roll smoothly on a flare of steam.

  BANG. Someone else, not Erasmus, leaned over her and pulled the trigger of a revolver, driving sharp spikes into her outraged ear drums. With a screech of protesting rubber the car picked up speed. BANG. Erasmus collapsed on top of her, holding her down. “Stay on the floor,” he shouted.

  The steam car hit a pothole and bounced, violently. It was too much: Miriam began to retch again, bringing up clear bile.