The Merchants’ War

by Stross, Charles

  Old, but still radioactive? He felt like scratching his head. Really dangerous fallout was mostly dangerous precisely because it decayed very rapidly. If what had happened here was as old as it felt, then most of the stuff should have decayed long ago. The activity in the dome’s edge was perplexing.

  “You want a light, bro?”

  Huw glanced over his shoulder. Yul was holding out the end of a huge, club-like Maglite. “Thanks,” he said, shuffling the Geiger counter around so that he could heft the flashlight in his right hand. He pressed the button just as a cold flake of snow drifted onto his left cheek. “We don’t have long.”

  “It’s creepy in here,” Elena commented as he swung the light around. For once, Huw found nothing to disagree with in her opinion. The structures the dome had protected were in ruins. A flat apron of magic concrete peeped through the dirt in places, but the buildings—rectangular or cylindrical structures, rarely more than two or three stories high—were mostly shattered, roofs torn off, walls punched down. Their builders hadn’t been big on windows (although several of them sported gaping doorways). The skeletal wreckage of metal gantries and complex machinery lay around the buildings. Some of them had been connected by overhead pipes, and long runs of rust-colored ductwork wrapped around some of the buildings like giant snakes. “It looks like a chemical works that’s been bombed.”

  Huw blinked. “You know, you might be right,” he admitted. He walked towards the nearest semi-intact building, a three-story high cylindrical structure that was sheltered from the crack in the dome by a mass of twisted rubble and a collapsed walkway. “Let’s see, shall we?”

  The Geiger counter calmed down the farther from the entrance they progressed, to Huw’s profound relief. He picked his way carefully over a low berm of crumbled concrete-like stuff, then reached the nearest gantry. It looked familiar enough—a metal grid for flooring, the wreckage of handrails sprouting from it on a triangular truss of tubes—but something about its proportions was subtly wrong. The counter was content to make the odd click. Huw whacked the handrail with his torch: it rang like metal. Then he took hold of it and tried to move it, lifting and shoving. “That’s odd.” He squinted in the twilight. A thin crust of flaky ash covered the metal core. Paint, or something like it. That was comfortingly familiar—but the metal was too light. Yet it hadn’t melted. “Got your hammer?” He asked Yul, who was looking around, gaping like a tourist.

  “Here.”

  He took the hammer and whacked the rail, hard. “It’s not soft like aluminum. Doesn’t melt easily.” He tugged it, and it creaked slightly as it shifted. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “What’s wrong?” Hulius asked quickly.

  “This railing. It’s too light to be steel, it’s not aluminum, but who the fuck would make a handrail out of titanium?”

  “I don’t know. Someone with a lot of titanium? Are you sure it’s titanium? Whatever that is.”

  “Fairly sure,” Huw said absently. “I don’t have any way to test it, but it’s light enough, and hard, and whatever flash-fried the shit in here didn’t touch it. But titanium’s expensive! You’d have to know how to make lots of it really cheap before you got anywhere near to making walkways with it…” He trailed off, glancing up at the twilight recesses of the dome overhead. “Let’s get on with this.”

  The black rectangle, set in the cylindrical structure at ground level, looked like a doorway to Huw. It was high enough, for sure, but there were no windows and no sign of an actual door. He waited for Yul and Elena to close up behind him, then walked towards it. The counter was quiet. There was a pile of debris just inside the opening, and he approached it cautiously, sniffing at the air: there was no telling what might have made its lair in here. Thinking about the chill outside reminded him of wolves, of saber-toothed tigers and worse things. He shivered, and pointed the torch into the gloom.

  “Over there.” Elena scuttled sideways, her gun at her shoulder, pointing inside.

  “Where—” Huw blinked as she flicked on the torch bolted beneath her barrel. “Oh.” The thing she was pointing at might have been a door once, but now it lay tumbled on the floor across a heap of junk: crumbled boxes, bits of plastic, pieces of scaffolding. And some more identifiable human remains, although wild animals had scattered the bones around. “Good, that’s helpful.” He stepped across the threshold, noting in the process that the wall was about ten centimeters thick—too thin for brick or concrete—and the inner wall was flat, with another sealed door set in it.

  A skull leered at him from the far corner of the room, and as the shadows flickered across the pile of crap inside the doorway he saw what looked like a stained, collapsed one-piece overall. The overall glowed orange in the light, slightly iridescent, then darkened to black where ancient blood had saturated the abdominal area. Huw held his breath, twisting the flashlight to focus on the shoulder, where some kind of patch was embossed on the fabric. He squinted. “Yul, can you get a photograph of that?” he said, pointing.

  “What’s it say—” Yul closed in. “That’s not Anglische sprach. Or…Huh, I don’t recognize it, whatever it is.”

  “Dead right.” Huw held the light on the remains while Yul pulled out his camera and flashgunned it into solid state memory. “What do you think it means?”

  “Why would you expect Anglische here?” Elena asked archly.

  “No reason, I guess,” Huw said, trying to conceal how shaken he was. He pointed the torch back at the skull sitting on the floor. “Hang on.” He peered closer. “The teeth. Shit, the teeth!”

  “What?” Elena’s flashlight swung around wildly for a moment.

  “Point that away from me if you’re going to be twitchy—”

  “It’s okay, little brother. I’ve got it.” Yul hooked a finger into each eye socket and spun the skull upside down for Huw to examine. It had been picked clean long ago and had aged to a sallow dark yellow-brown, but the teeth were all there.

  “Look.” Huw pointed at the upper jaw. “Bony here has all his dentition. And.” He peered at them. “There are no fillings. It’s like a plastic model of what a jawbone ought to be. Except for this chipped one here, this incisor.”

  “Whoa!” Hulius lowered the skull reverently. “That’s some orthodontist.”

  “Don’t you get it?” Huw asked impatiently.

  “Get what?” Yull asked flippantly.

  “That’s not dentistry,” Huw said, gritting his teeth. “You know what it’s like back home! The Americans, they’re good at faking it, but they’re not this good.” He glanced at the door on the inner wall. No obvious hinges, he realized. Fits beautifully. “Domes the size of a sports stadium that try to heal themselves even when you crack them open with a nuke. Metal walkways made out of titanium. Perfect dentistry.” He snapped his fingers. “You got the ax?”

  “Sure.” Yul nodded. “What do you want me to hit?”

  “Let’s see what’s inside that door,” Huw decided. “But then we leave. Magic wands? Dentistry.”

  “They’re more advanced than the Americans,” Elena commented. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yes,” Huw said tensely. “I’m not quite sure what it means, though…”

  “What about their burglar alarms?”

  “After all this time?” Huw snorted. “Let’s see what else is in here. Yul?”

  “I’m with you, bro.” He winked at Elena. “This is a real gas!”

  And with that, he swung the fire ax at the edge of the door.

  The Boeing Business Jet had reached cruising altitude and was somewhere over the Midwest, and Brill had just about managed to doze off, when her satellite phone rang.

  “Who’s speaking?” She cleared her throat, trying to shake cobwebs free. The delay and the echo on the line made it sound like she was yelling down a drainpipe.

  “It’s me, Brill. Update time.”

  “Scheiss—one minute. I’ll take it in the office.” She hit the button to raise her chair then stoo
d up and walked back towards the door at the rear of the first-class cabin. Rather than a cramped galley or a toilet, it opened onto a compact boardroom. As the only passenger on the luxury jet she had it all to herself except for the cabin attendants, but she still preferred to have a locked door between herself and any flapping ears. “Okay, Olga. What ails you?”

  “Are you secure?”

  Brill yawned, then sat down. Beyond the windows, twilight had settled over the plains. It was stubbornly refusing to lift, despite the jet’s westward dash. “I’m on the BBJ, arriving at SFO in about three hours. I was trying to get some sleep. Yes, I’m secure.”

  “I’ve got to report to Angbard, so I’d better keep this brief. I went to see Fleming today. You know what that little shit Matthias did? He convinced the DEA, this new FTO outfit, everybody who matters, that he’d planted a gadget in downtown Boston. Then he managed to get himself killed before he could tell them where it was. So now they’re blaming us, and they want it handed over.”

  “He what?” Brill blinked and tried to rub her eyes, one-handed.

  “I’m not kidding. Fleming wasn’t kidding either—at least, he believed what he’d been told. I played dumb with him, pretending not to know what he was talking about, but afterwards I went and told Manfred and he ran an audit. The little shit was telling the truth. One of our nukes is missing.”

  “God on a stick! If the Council finds out—”

  “It gets worse. Turns out it’s one of our FADMs. Long-term storable, in other words, and there’s a long-life detonation controller that’s also turned up missing. The implosion charges were remanufactured eighteen months ago, so it’s probably nearing a service interval, but those charges were modified to survive storage under adverse conditions for up to a decade. If we don’t find it, we’re in a world of hurt—what do you think they’ll do if Boston or Cambridge goes up?—and if we do find it and hand it over as a sign of our commitment to negotiate, it’ll take them all of about ten seconds to figure out where it came from.”

  Brilliana closed her eyes and swore, silently for a few seconds. She’d known about the Clan’s nuclear capability; she and Olga were among the handful of agents whose job would be to emplace the weapons, if and when the shit ever truly hit the fan. But the nukes weren’t supposed to go walkies. They were supposed to sit on their shelves in the anonymous warehouse, maintained regularly by the engineers from Pantex while U.S. Marine Corps guards patrolled the site overhead.

  Based on a modified W54 warhead pattern, the FADMs were a highly classified derivative of the MADM atomic demolition device. They’d been built during the mid-1970s as backup for the CIA’s Operation Gladio, to equip NATO’s “stay behind” forces in Europe—after a Soviet invasion—with a storable, compact, tactical nuclear weapon. Most nukes required regular servicing to replace their neutron-emitting initiators and the plastic explosive implosion charges. The FADM had been tweaked to have a reasonable chance of detonation even after several years of unmaintained storage; the designers had replaced the usual polonium initiator with an electrically powered neutron source, and adding shields to protect the explosive lenses from radiation-induced degradation. The wisdom of supplying underground cells with what was basically a U.S. inventory–derived terrorist nuke had been revisited during the Reagan administration, and the weapons returned to the continental USA for storage—but they’d been retained long after the other man-portable demolition nukes had been destroyed, because the advantages they offered had been too good for certain spook agencies to ignore. More recently, the current administration—pathologically secretive and dealing with the aftermath of 9/11—had wanted every available arrow in their quiver, even if they were broken by design.

  And they were. Because the Clan, with their ability to get into places that were flat-out impossible for home-grown intruders, had been treating them as their own personal nuclear stockpile for the past two decades.

  “Listen, why are you telling me this? Why haven’t you briefed Uncle A? It’s his headache—”

  “Uncle A is fielding another problem right now: the pretender’s just rolled over the Hjalmar Palace and there’s a three-ring, full-dress panic going down in Concord. He’s pulling me in—I’m supposed to be looking for a thrice-damned mole, who everybody tells me is probably a disgruntled outer family climber, and in case you’d missed it, we’ve got a civil war on. The bomb’s been missing for months, it’ll wait a couple of hours more. But I think when you get back from the west coast you’re going to find that finding it is suddenly everyone’s highest priority. And I’ve got a feeling that the spy who’s feeding Egon and the nuclear blackmail thing are connected. Matt wasn’t working alone, and I smell a world-walker in the picture. So I figure you and I, we should do some snooping together.” She paused. “Just what are you doing out in California, anyway? Is it something to do with the Wu clan?”

  Brill sighed. “No, it’s Helge. We’ve located her. While I was flailing around in Boston doing the breaking and entering bit, she mailed me a letter via the New Britain office at Dunedin. The duty clerk caught it in time, opened it, and faxed the contents on: meanwhile we identified her aboard a westbound train that’s en route for Northern California. I need to find her before the New Britain secret police arrest her. So I’m taking a shortcut.”

  “Huh. Much as I like her, isn’t finding Matt’s plaything a slightly higher priority?”

  “Not when she’s carrying the heir to the throne, Olga.” She waited for the explosion of spluttering to die down. “Yes, I agree completely. You and I can have a little talk about professional ethics with Dr. ven Hjalmar later, perhaps? Assuming he survives the current unpleasantness, I’d like to make sure that he needs a new pair of kneecaps. But you’ve got to admit that we’ll need a king—or queen—after we nail Egon, won’t we? And if he really did artificially impregnate her with Creon’s seed, and if we have witnesses to the handfasting, then it seems to me that…well, which would you rather deal with? Egon trying to have us all hanged as witches, or Miriam as queen regent with Uncle A pulling the strings?”

  “I’m not sure,” Olga said grimly. “She’ll be furious.” She paused. “Gods, that’s why he sent you, isn’t it? She trusts you. If anyone can get her calmed down and convince her to play along, it’d be you. But if not…”

  “Uncle A wants her back in play,” Brill said, mustering up what calm she could. “But if she’s left loose, she’s as dangerous as that time bomb you’re hunting. Isn’t she?”

  “Yes,” Olga said, sounding doubtful.

  “She was getting too close to James Lee, the hostage,” Brill added.

  Olga’s voice went flat. “She was?”

  “We don’t need another faction on the board,” Brill said.

  “No. I can see that.” Olga paused. “You’ll just have to charm her, won’t you?”

  “Yes,” Brill agreed. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going back to sleep. Give my regards to Uncle.”

  “I’ll tell him. Bye…”

  Quietly closing the boardroom door behind her, Brill padded back to her first-class chair. She paused at the storage locker next to it, and opened it briefly: the specialized equipment was undisturbed, and she nodded, satisfied. It was the biggest single advantage of flying on the Clan Committee executive jet, in her opinion—in the course of her business she often required access to certain specialized items, and commercial airlines tended to take a dim view of her carrying her sniper kit as hand luggage. She sat down and strapped herself in, then tilted her chair back and dimmed the overhead lights. Tomorrow was going to be a long day, starting with arranging a reception for a train at a station she didn’t even know the precise location of, and trying to make contact with Miriam one jump ahead of the Homeland Security Directorate goon squad who’d surely be waiting for her when the train arrived.

  Bombardiers

  It was a good morning for flying, thought Rudi, as he checked the weather station on the north tower wall. No, make that a great
morning. After all, he’d never flown over his homeland before. It would be a personal first, not to mention one in the eye for the stick-in-the-muds. Visibility was clear, with a breeze from the southwest and low pressure, rising slowly. He bent over the anemometer, jotting down readings in the logbook by the dawn light. “Hans? I’ll be needing the contents of both crates. Get them moved into the outer courtyard. I’ll need two pairs of hands to help with the trike—make sure they’re not clumsy. I’ll be down in ten minutes.”

  “Aye, sir.” His footman, Hans, gave him an odd look, but hurried down off the battlements all the same. He clearly thought his master was somewhat cracked. Well, he’ll change his mind before the day is out, Rudi told himself. Along with everyone else. Just as long as nothing goes wrong. He was acutely aware that he hadn’t kept his flying hours up since the emergency began, and there were no luxuries (or necessities) like air traffic control or meteorology services over here.

  In fact, he didn’t even have as much fuel as he’d have liked: he’d managed to squirrel away nearly twenty gallons of gas before some killjoy or other—he harbored dark suspicions about Erik—had ratted out his scheme to Riordan, who’d had no option but to shout a lot and notify the duke. Who in turn had threatened to have him flogged, and lectured him coldly for almost half an hour about the idiocy of not complying with long-standing orders…

  Rudi had bitten his tongue while the duke threatened to burn the trike, but in the end the old man had relented just a little. “You will maintain it in working order, and continue to practice your skills in America, but you will not fly that thing over our lands without my explicit orders, delivered in person.” Eorl Riordan wasn’t the duke, but on the other hand, he was in the chain of command: and that was enough for Rudi. Flying today.

  It took him closer to half an hour to make his way down to the courtyard, by way of his room—his flying jacket and helmet were buried deeper than he’d remembered, and he took his time assembling a small survival kit. Then he had to divert via the guardhouse to check out a two-way radio and a spare battery. “Where do you think you’re going, cuz?” asked Vincenze, looking up from the girlie magazine he was reading: “A fancy dress party?”