The Merchants’ War

by Stross, Charles

  “Yes.” He looked distant. “Little things like a universal franchise, regardless of property qualifications and religion and marital status. Some of the committee wanted women to vote, too—but that was thought too extreme for a first step. And we wanted a free press, public decency and the laws of libel permitting.”

  “Uh.” She closed her mouth. “But you were…”

  The frown turned into a wry smile. “I was a young hothead. Or easily led. I met Annie first at a public meeting, and then renewed her acquaintance at the People’s Voice where she was laying type. She was the printer’s daughter, and neither he nor my uncle approved of our liaison. But once I received my letters and acquired a clerk’s post, I could afford to support her, which made her father come round, and my uncle just muttered darkly about writing me out of his will for a while, and stopped doing even that after the wedding. So we had a good four years together, and she insisted on laying type even when the two boys came along, and I wrote for the sheets—anonymously, I must add—and we were very happy. Until it all ended.”

  Miriam raised her glass for another sip. Somehow the contents had evaporated. “Here, let me refill that,” she said, taking Erasmus’s glass. She stood up and walked past him to get to the bar, wobbling slightly as the carriage jolted across a set of points. “What went wrong?”

  “In nineteen eighty-six, on November the fourteenth, six fine fellows from the northeast provinces traveled to the royal palace in Savannah. There had been a huge march the week before in New London, and it had gone off smoothly, the petition of a million names being presented to the black rod—but the king himself was not in residence, being emphysemic. That winter came harsh and early, so he’d decamped south to Georgia. It was his habit to go for long drives in the country, to take the air. Well, the level of expectation surrounding the petition was high, and rumors were swirling like smoke: that the king had read the petition and would agree to the introduction of a bill, that the king had read the petition and threatened to bring home the army, that the king had this and the king had that. All nonsense, of course. The king was on vacation and he refused to deal with matters of state that were anything less than an emergency. Or so I learned later. Back then, I was looking for a progressive practice that was willing to take on a junior partner, and Annie was expecting again.”

  Miriam finished pouring and put the stopper back in the decanter. She passed a glass back to him: “So what happened?”

  “Those six fine gentlemen were a little impatient. They’d formed a ring, and they’d convinced themselves that the king was a vicious tyrant who would like nothing more than to dream up new ways to torment the workers. You know, I think—judging by your own history books—how it goes. The mainstream movement spawns tributaries, some of which harbor currents that flow fast and deep. The Black Fist Freedom Guard, as they called themselves, followed the king in a pair of fast motor carriages until they learned his habitual routes. Then they assassinated him, along with the queen, and one of his two daughters, by means of a petard.”

  “They what?” Miriam sat down hard. “That’s crazy!”

  “Yes, it was.” Erasmus nodded, calmly enough. “George Frederick himself pulled his dying father from the wreckage. He was already something of a reactionary, but not, I think, an irrational one—until the Black Fist murdered his parents.”

  “But weren’t there guards, or something?” Miriam shook her head. What about the secret service? she wondered. If someone tried a stunt like that on a U.S. president it just wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t be allowed to work. Numerous whack-jobs had tried to kill Clinton when he was in office: a number had threatened or actually tried to off the current president. Nobody had gotten close to a president of the United States since nineteen eighty-six. “Didn’t he have any security?”

  “Oh yes, he had security. He was secure in the knowledge that he was the king-emperor, much beloved by the majority of his subjects. Does that surprise you? John Frederick goes nowhere without half a company of guards and a swarm of Polis agents, but his father relied on two loyal constables with pistols. They were injured in the attack, incidentally: one of them died later.”

  He took a deep, shuddering breath, then another sip of the brandy. “The day after the assassination, a state of emergency was declared. Demonstrations ensued. On Black Monday, the seventeenth, a column of demonstrators marching towards the royal complex on Manhattan Island were met by dragoons armed with heavy steam repeaters. More than three hundred were killed, mostly in the stampede. We were…there, but on the outskirts, Annie and I. We had the boys to think of. We obviously didn’t think hard enough. The next day, they arrested me. My trial before the tribunal lasted eighteen minutes, by the clock on the courtroom wall. The man before me they sentenced to hang for being caught distributing our news sheet, but I was lucky. All they knew was that I’d been away from my workplace during the massacre, and I’d been limping when I got back. The evidence was merely circumstantial, and so was the sentence they gave me: twelve years in the camps.”

  He took a gulp of the brandy and swallowed, spluttering for a moment. “Annie wasn’t so lucky,” he added.

  “What? They hanged her?” Miriam leaned toward him, aghast.

  “No.” He smiled sadly. “They only gave her two years in a women’s camp. I don’t know if you know what that was like…no? Alright. It was hard enough for the men. Annie died—” he stared into his glass “—in childbed.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “Use your imagination,” Erasmus snapped. “What do you think the guards were like?”

  “Oh god.” Miriam swallowed. “I’m so sorry.”

  “The boys went to a state orphanage,” Erasmus added. “In Australia.”

  “Enough.” She held up a hand: “I’m sorry I asked!”

  The fragile silence stretched out. “I’m not,” Erasmus said quietly. “It was just a little bit odd to talk about it. After so long.”

  “You got out…four years ago?”

  “Nine.” He drained his glass and replaced it on the occasional table. “The camps were overfull. They got sloppy. I was moved to internal exile, and there was a—what your history book called an underground railway. ‘Erasmus Burgeson’ isn’t the name I was known by back then.”

  “Wow.” Miriam stared at him. “You’ve been living under an assumed identity all this time?”

  He nodded, watching her expression. “The movement provides. They needed a dodgy pawnbroker in Boston, you see, and I fitted the bill. A dodgy pawnbroker with a history of a couple of years in the camps, nothing serious, nothing excessively political. The real me they’d hang for sure if they caught him, these days. I hope you don’t mind notorious company?”

  “I’m—” She shook her head. “It’s crazy.” You were writing for a newspaper, for crying out loud! Asking for voting rights and freedom of the press! And those are hanging offenses? “And if what you were campaigning for back then is crazy, so am I.” Her eyes narrowed. “What’s the movement’s platform now? Is it still just about the franchise, and freedom of speech? Or have things changed?”

  “Oh yes.” He was still studying her, she realized. “Eighty-six was a wake-up cry. The very next central council meeting that was held—two years later, in exile—announced that the existence of a hereditary crown was a flaw in the body politic. The council decreed that nothing less than the overthrow of the king-emperor and the replacement of their Lordships and Commons by a republic of free men and women, equal before the law, would suffice. The next day, the Commons passed a bill of attainder against everyone in the movement. A month after that the pope excommunicated us—he declared democracy to be a mortal sin. But by that time we already knew we were damned.”

  Hot Pursuit

  Another day, another Boston. Brill walked up the staircase to the front office and glanced around. “Where’s Morgan?” she demanded.

  “He’s in the back room.” The courier folded his news sheet and laid it caref
ully on the desk.

  “Don’t call ahead.” She frowned, then headed straight back to the other office, overlooking the back yard colocated with Miriam’s house’s garden in the other Boston, in New Britain.

  The house—Miriam’s house, according to the deeds of ownership, not that it mattered much once she’d allowed her commercial submarine to surface in the harbor of the Clan’s Council deliberations—was a stately lump of shingle-fronted stonework with a view out over the harbor. But over here the building was distinctly utilitarian, overshadowed by a row of office towers. The architecture in New Britain was stunted by relatively high material and transport costs: planting fifty-thousand-ton lumps of concrete and steel on top of landfill was a relatively recent innovation in New Britain, and hadn’t corrupted their skyline yet. But this one was different.

  Oskar was waiting outside the door to the rear office. He looked bored. The cut of his jacket failed to conceal his shoulder holster. “How long are you here for?”

  “I came to see Morgan.” She stared him in the eye. “Then I need to cross over, get changed into native garb, and draw funds. I may be some time. It depends.”

  “Cross over. Right.” Oskar twitched. “You know there’s a problem.”

  “Problem?”

  “You’d better ask the boss.” Oskar backed up, rapped on the door twice, then opened it for her.

  “Who—” Morgan looked up. He had his feet up on the mahogany desk, a half-eaten burger at his right hand, and judging by his expression her appearance was deeply unwelcome.

  “Hello there. Don’t let me keep you from your food.”

  “Lady Brilliana!” He swung his feet down hastily, almost knocking his chair over in his hurry to stand up.

  “Sit down.” She walked around the desk and pulled out the chair on his right, then sat beside him. “Oskar tells me there’s a problem. On the other side.”

  Morgan twitched even more violently than Oskar had. “You’re telling me. Have you come to fix it?”

  “Tell me about it first.”

  “You haven’t—” He swallowed his words, but the look of dismay was genuine enough in her estimate.

  “I need to cross over and run a search in New Britain,” she said evenly. “If there’s a problem with our main safe house in Boston, I need to know it.”

  “The Polis—the security cops? They raided the house. We barely pulled everybody out in time.”

  Brilliana swallowed a curse. “When was this?”

  “Three days ago. I thought everyone knew—”

  “Was it coordinated action?” she demanded.

  Morgan shook himself, visibly trying to pull himself together. “I don’t think so,” he admitted. “The situation over there’s been going to the midden, frankly, and the Polis are running around looking for saboteurs and spies under every table. Six weeks ago they turned over the workshop and shut it down: some of the staff were arrested for sedition. We were already lying low—”

  “What about Burgeson?” Brill demanded.

  “Oh,” he said. “That.”

  “Yes, that.” She nodded. “I came as soon as I heard. How long has the watch been running?”

  “All week, since before the raid. I can’t be sure, my lady, but I think our activities might be what attracted the interest of the Polis. We were using the house as a staging post, and when he went down to New York…” His shrug was eloquent.

  “I see.” Brilliana paused for a moment. It would fit the picture, she considered. If the Polis were already watching the house, and spotted strangers based there keeping watch on a suspect, that would get their attention. And if Burgeson headed for London and the strangers followed him…that would be when they’d bring down the hammer, right enough. “But you lost the trail in Man—New London.”

  “He started evading,” Morgan protested. “Like a seasoned agent!”

  “He was last seen with a female companion,” Brilliana pointed out coldly. “Which was the whole point of the watch on him.”

  “It’s not her,” Morgan dismissed her concern. “Some bint he picked up from a brothel in New London—”

  “You sound awfully sure of that. Would you like to place a little wager on it? Either way? The last joint on your left little finger, against mine?”

  She grinned as she said it: he turned white. “No, no,” he mumbled. “It’d be just my luck if—look, he was deliberately trying to throw his tail, that’s what Joseph said! And the business with them changing trains? I had Oskar and Georg waiting at the station but Burgeson and his companion weren’t on it when it pulled in.”

  “Morgan. Morgan.” Brill smiled again. The way it made Morgan wince was truly wonderful. On the other hand, he probably thought she was reporting direct to the thin white duke. “I already know that you’re undermanned and don’t have enough pairs of boots on the ground. And you’ve lost your forward base, due to enemy action, not negligence.” At least, not active negligence. Nobody could accuse Morgan of spontaneous activity—he might be stupid, but at least he possessed the mitigating quality of bone-deep laziness. His sins were seldom those of commission. “So why are you trying so hard to convince me it’s not your fault? Anyone would think you were trying to hide something! Whereas if it’s just Burgeson giving you the slip…” She shrugged.

  “It’s embarrassing, that’s what it is.” He squinted at her suspiciously. “And I know what you think of me.”

  You do? Really? The temptation to tell him the truth was hard to resist, but she managed to restrain herself. Later. “The shop. You’ve checked the door alarm, haven’t you?”

  “I’ve had it staked out since the train departed.” Morgan looked pleased with himself.

  “Right. Team in the street? A wire and transmitter on the door?” He nodded. “You know there’s a secret back way in? And you know about Helge’s experience with trip wires?” His smile slipped. “Here’s what’s going to happen. Oskar and I are going to disguise ourselves then cross over via the backup transfer site. While we are checking the shop out—and I expect our birds have flown the coop, long since—you’ll finish your lunch then send a messenger across to cable the railway ticket office asking if they have any reservations in the name of, let’s see, a Mr. and Mrs. Burgeson would spring to mind? That is the alias they were using at the hotel? And if so, I want to know where they’re going, and where the train stops en route, so I can meet them before they get to the final destination.” Brill had allowed her voice to grow quieter, so that Morgan was unconsciously leaning towards her as she finished the sentence.

  “But if they’re on a train—they could be on their way to Buenos Aires, or anywhere!”

  “So what? The organization bizjet is on standby for me at Logan.” She stood up. “I’ll be back in two hours, and I expect a detailed report on the surveillance operation and Burgeson’s current location, so I can set up the intercept and work out who to draft in.” She took a deep breath. “We’d better be in time. And you’d better find out where they’re going, because if we lose her again, the duke will be really pissed.”

  The council of war took place in a conference room in the Boston Sheraton, just off the Hyatt Center, with air-conditioning and full audio-visual support. All but two of the eighteen attendees were male, and all wore dark, conservatively cut business suits: they were polite but distant in their dealings with the hotel staff. The facilities manager who oversaw their refreshments and lunch buffet got the distinct impression that they were foreign bankers, perhaps a delegation from a very starchy Swiss institution. Or maybe they were a committee of cemetery managers. It hardly mattered, though. They were clearly the best kind of customer—quiet, undemanding, dignified, and utterly unlikely to make a mess or start any fights.

  “Helmut. An update on the opposition’s current disposition, if you please,” said the graying, distinguished-looking fellow seated at the head of the table. “Are there any indications of a change in their operational deployments?”

  “Yes, your g
race.” Helmut—a stocky fellow in his mid-thirties with an odd pudding-bowl haircut, stood up and opened his laptop. His suit jacket flexed around muscled shoulders: he obviously worked out between meetings. “I have prepared a brief presentation to show the geographical distribution of targets…”

  The video projector flickered on, showing a map of the eastern seaboard as far inland as the Appalachians, gridded out in uneven regions that bore little resemblance to state boundaries. Odd names dotted the map, vaguely Germanic, as one might expect from a Swiss lending institution. Helmut recited a list of targets and names, clicking the laptop’s track pad periodically to advance through a time series of transactions. It was curiously bloodless, especially once he began discussing the losses.

  “At Erkelsfjord, resistance was offered: the enemy burned the house, hanged all those of the outer family and retainers who surrendered—twenty-eight in all—then stripped the peasants and drove them into the woods, firing the village. We lost but one dead and two injured of the inner families. At Isjlmeer, quarter was offered and accepted. The lentgrave accepted and, with his family, left the keep, whereupon he and all but two sons and one daughter were struck down by crossbow fire. The servants were flogged, stripped, and taken into slavery, but the villagers were left unharmed. The next day, a different company of light cavalry struck Nordtsman’s Keep. The baron was present and had raised his levies and, forewarned, had established a defensible perimeter: he took the enemy with enfilading fire from their left flank, forcing a retreat. Total enemy casualties numbered sixty-seven bodies, plus an unknown number who escaped.

  “At Giraunt Dire, the eorl emplaced his two light machine guns to either side of the bridge across the river Klee, beating off an attack by two companies of horse led by Baron Escrivain…”

  The map flickered with red dots, like smallpox burning up the side of a victim’s face. As the conflict progressed, dotted red arrows appeared, tracking the course of the pestilence. The litany of sharp engagements began to change, as more of the defenders—forewarned and prepared—put up an effective defense. Helmut’s presentation kept a running tally in the bottom right corner of the screen, a profit and loss balance sheet denominated in gallons of blood. Finally he came to an end.