The Trade of Queens tmp-6

by Charles Stross

  There was quiet unrest too. Among the hedge-lords, whispered rumor spoke of the upstart tinker families becoming absent neighbors. Houses were mysteriously empty, houses that had weathered the campaign by the late pretender and survived the subsequent wave of murders that had engulfed the Clan. Some spoke of strangeness; families with children sent away, the parents’ bright-eyed cheer covering some grim foreboding. Rumors of tinker Clansmen in their cups maundering about the end of the world, grumbling about absent cousins trying to run before the storm surge while they, the heroic drunk, chose to stand firm against the boiling wave crests—

  And the queen, Prince Creon’s widowed pregnant wife, had not been seen in public for nearly two months.

  The queen’s absence was not in and of itself remarkable—she was pregnant, and a retreat from court engagements was not unexpected—but the totality of it attracted notice. She hadn’t been seen by anyone except, it appeared, her mother. The dowager duchess (herself mysteriously absent for a period of decades) was in residence in Niejwein in one of the Clan’s less badly damaged great houses, busying herself with the restoration of the Summer Palace (or rather, with commencing its reconstruction from the ground up, for its charred beams and shattered stones would not be fit for habitation anytime soon). And she had seen her daughter the queen-widow, and loudly testified to that effect—to her bouts of morning sickness and desire for seclusion. But. The queen hadn’t been seen in public for weeks now, and people were asking questions. Where was she?

  Now, high above the thin mares’ tails, a curious thing can be seen in the heavens.

  A row of strange straight clouds are rushing across the vault of the sky, quite unlike anything anyone remembers seeing in times gone by. True, for the past month or so the witch-clouds have been glimpsed from time to time, racing crisscross from east to west—but only one at a time.

  Today, two rows of knife-straight clouds are ploughing southwest, as if an invisible god has drawn two eighteen-toothed combs across the horizon, one comb flying two thousand feet above the other. They cover the dome of the sky from side to side, for they are not close together; a knowledgeable observer would count twelve miles between teeth.

  Flying just ahead of each tine is a B52H Stratofortress of Fifth Bomb Wing, Eighth Air Force, Air Combat Command. Thirty-five out of thirty-six aircraft carry in each bomb bay a rotary dispenser containing six B83 free-fall hydrogen bombs. The remaining bomber is gravid with a single device, a monstrous B53-Y1, a bloated cylinder that weighs over four tons and fills the BUFF’s central bomb bay completely. This aircraft flies near the eastern edge of the upper group. It is intended to deliver the president’s signature message to the enemy capital: shock and awe.

  * * *

  The track from Kirschford down to the Linden Valley was clear of tinker-lord traffic this afternoon. The flow of refugees had slackened to a trickle, for those who wanted to evacuate had for the most part already left. Helena voh Wu and her infants and sister-in-law had come this way a week before; while Gyorg was still occupied with the corvée, shuttling supplies between anonymous storage lockups in Boston and wine cellars in the Gruinmarkt, his dependents had achieved the tenuous sanctuary of a refugee camp in New Britain.

  So none of them paused to look up, slack-jawed, as the first wave of bombers commenced their laydown.

  A B83 hydrogen bomb isn’t very large; it weighs about a ton, and looks exactly like most other air-dropped bombs. The weapons the Fifth Bomb Wing were delivering were equipped with parachutes which retarded their descent from altitude, so that it would take each bomb more than three minutes to descend to its detonation altitude of twenty thousand feet. Flying parallel courses spaced twelve miles apart, wingtip-to-wingtip, the aircraft began to drop their payload at one-minute intervals, seeding a furrow of hells twelve miles apart. The distance between bombs was important; any closer, and the heat flash might ignite the Kevlar ribbon chutes of the other weapons.

  Three minutes and twenty seconds. The trails arrowed south across the sky of the Gruinmarkt, a faint rumble of distant thunder disturbing the afternoon quiet; and then the sky lit up as the first row of eighteen hydrogen bombs, spanning the kingdom from sea to inland frontier, detonated at an altitude of just under four miles.

  The flash of a single one-megaton hydrogen bomb, followed by a fireball which dims over a period of nearly a minute, is visible in good weather at a range of hundreds of miles—light from the flash is scattered by particles in the upper atmosphere, reflected around the curve of the earth. To an observer in Niejwein, the capital city located nearly two hundred miles south of the first row, the northern horizon would have begun to flicker and brighten as if a gigantic match had been held to the edge of the map. There was no sound; would be no sound for many minutes, for even though the shock waves from the detonations overtook the bombers, it would take a long time for the attenuated noise to reach the capital.

  To an observer located closer to the bombing line, it would have been the end of the world.

  The heat flash from a B83 detonating at twenty thousand feet is sufficient, in good weather, to ignite cardboard or cotton sheeting, heat damp pine needles to smoldering tinder, and char wood and flesh six miles from ground zero. The leading row of eighteen bombers were spaced close enough that over open ground no spot could remain unseared; only in the lee slope of a steep valley or the depths of a cellar or cave was there any hope of survival.

  Peasants working in the fields might have glanced up as the sky flashed white above them; it would have been the last thing they saw through rapidly clouding eyes. Their skin reddened and crisped as the grain stubble and trees around them began to smoke; screaming and stumbling for cover, they blundered towards their houses or the tree line, limned in the flaring red burn of a billion leaves igniting simultaneously. There were some survivors of the initial flash: women spinning thread or weaving cloth, millers tending their wheels, even a lucky few sitting behind dry-stone walls or swimming in cool water pools. But as they looked up in confusion they saw the same thing in every direction around them: trees, plants, buildings, even cattle and people smoking and flaming.

  And then the hammerblast of wind arrived from above, slamming into hedges and walls alike and splintering all before them.

  The aircrew saw nothing of this. They flew on instruments, insulated blackout screens drawn across the cockpit windows to prevent reflected light from blinding their pilots. Perhaps they glanced at one another as shock waves buffeted the tail surfaces of the bombers, bumping and dropping them before the pilots regained full control authority; but if they did so, it was with no sympathy for the unseen carnage below. A president had been killed, more thousands murdered by emissaries from this world; their word for the task they were engaged in was payback.

  Seventy seconds later, the second row of H-bombs reached their preset altitude and began to detonate, flashbulbs popping erratically on a wire two hundred and fifty miles wide. And seventy seconds after that, the process continued, weeping tears of incandescence across the burning coastline.

  There were a lot of flashes.

  * * *

  It took the aircraft nearly twelve minutes to reach Niejwein, two-thirds of the way through their carpet-bombing run. And here, there were witnesses. Niejwein, with a population of nearly sixty thousand souls, was the biggest city within four hundred miles; proud palaces and high-roofed temples rose above a sprawling urban metropolis, home to dozens of trades and no fewer than four markets. And the people of Niejwein had due notice. The flickering brightness on the horizon had been growing for almost a quarter hour; and lately there had been a rumbling in the ground, an uneasy shuddering as if Lightning Child himself was shifting, uneasy in his bed of clay. A strange hot wind had set the bells of the temple of Sky Father clanging, bringing the priests stumbling from their sanctuary to squint at the northern lights in disbelief and shock.

  And in the Thorold Palace, some of the residents realized what was happening.

  At
midafternoon, the dowager duchess Patricia was holding court, sitting in formal session in the east wing of the palace to hear petitions on behalf of her daughter. A merchant, Freeman Riss of Somewhere-Bridge, was bringing a complaint about the lord of his nearest market town, who, either in a fit of pique or for some reason Freeman Riss was reticent about disclosing, had banned said merchant from selling his wares in the weekly market.

  At another time, this complaint might well have interested Dame Patricia—also known for the majority of her life as Iris Beckstein—as much for its value as leverage against the earl in question as for its merit as a case. But it was a hot afternoon, and sitting in the stiff robes of state beneath a row of stained-glass windows which dammed the air and cast flickering multicolored shadows across the bench before her, she was prone to distraction.

  Riss was reciting, in a scratchy voice as if from memory, “And I deponeth thus, that on the third feastday of Sister Corn, the laird did send his armsmen to stand before my drover and his oxen and say—”

  Patricia raised a shaky hand. “Stop,” she said. Freeman Riss paused, his mouth open. “Surcease, we pray you.” She squinted up at the windows. They were flickering. “We declare a recess. Your indulgence is requested, for we are feeling unwell.” She closed her eyes briefly. I hope it isn’t another attack, she worried; the MS hadn’t affected her vision so far, but her legs had been largely numb all week, and the prickling in her hands was worsening. “Sergeant-at-arms—”

  There was a banging and clattering from outside the room. The courtiers and plaintiffs began to talk, just as the door burst open. It was Helmut ven Rindt, lord-lieutenant and commander of the second troop of the Clan’s security force, accompanied by six soldiers. Their camouflage surcoats sat uneasy above machine-woven titanium mail. “Your grace? I regret the need to interrupt you, but you are urgently required elsewhere.”

  “Really?” Iris stared at Helmut. Not you, too? The clenching in her gut was bad.

  “Yes, your grace. If I may approach”—she nodded; Helmut stepped towards her raised seat, then continued to speak, quietly, in English—“we lost radio nine minutes ago. There’s nothing but static, and there are very bright lights on the northern horizon. Counting them and checking the decay curves, it’s megaton-range and getting closer. With your permission, we’re going to evacuate right now.”

  “Yes, you go on.” She nodded approvingly, then did a slow double take as one of Helmut’s troops marched forward. “Hey—”

  The soldier bent to lift her from her throne in a fireman’s carry.

  Instant uproar among the assembled courtiers, nobles, and tradesmasters assembled in the room. “Stop him!” cried one unfortunate, a young earl from somewhere out to the northwest. “He laid hands on her grace!”

  That did it. As the soldier lifted Patricia, she saw a flurry of bodies moving towards the throne, past the open floor of the chamber, which by custom was not entered without the chair’s consent. “Hey!” she repeated.

  Helmut grimaced: “Earl-Major Riordan’s orders, your grace, you and any other family we set eyes on. We are to leave none alive behind, and you’ll not make a family-killer of me.” Louder: “To the evac cellar, lads! Double time!”

  The young earl, perhaps alarmed at the unfamiliar sound of Anglischprache, moved a hand to his hip. “For queen and country!” he shouted, and drew, lunging towards Helmut. Four more nobles were scarcely a step behind, all of them armed.

  For palace guard duty, in the wake of the recent civil disorder, Earl-Major Riordan had begun to reequip his men with FN P90s. A stubby, oddly melted-looking device little larger than a flintlock pistol, the P90 was an ultracompact submachine gun, designed for special forces and armored vehicle crews. Helmut’s men were so equipped, and as the misguided young blood ran at them they opened fire. Unlike a traditional submachine gun, the P90 fired low-caliber armor-piercing rounds at a prodigious rate, from a large magazine. In the stone-walled hall, the detonations merged into a continuous concussive rasp. They fired for three seconds: sufficient to spray nearly two hundred rounds into the crowd from less than thirty feet.

  As the sudden silence rang in Patricia’s numb and aching ears her abductor shuffled forward, carefully managing his footing as he slid across blood-slick flagstones. The wounded and dying were moaning and screaming distantly in her ears, behind the thick cotton-wool wadding that seemed to fill her head. The light began to flicker beyond the windows again, this time brightening the daylight perceptibly. Helmut led the way to the door, raising his own weapon as his guards discarded their empty magazines and reloaded; then he ducked through into the next reception room. Patricia looked down from the shoulder of her bearer, into the staring eyes of a dead master of stonemasons. He sprawled beside a lady-in-waiting, or the wife of a baron’s younger son. My people, she thought distantly. Mother dearest wanted me to look after them.

  They stumbled out of the cloister around the palace into the sunlit afternoon of a summer’s day, onto the tidily manicured lawn within the walled grounds. Something was wrong with the shadows, she noticed, watching Helmut’s feet: There were too many suns in the sky. “Don’t look up,” he shouted, loudly enough that she couldn’t help but hear him and raise her eyes briefly. Too many suns.

  The northern wall of the palace grounds was silhouetted with the deepest black, long shadows etched across the grass towards her, flickering and brightening and dimming. A moment of icy terror twisted at her guts as she saw that Helmut and his guard were hurrying towards one of the smaller outbuildings ahead. Its doorway gaped open on darkness. “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Gatehouse. There’s a cellar, doppelgangered.”

  She saw other figures crawling antlike across the too-bright lawn. Nukes, she realized. They must be using all the nukes. For a moment she felt every second of her sixty-two years. “Put me down,” she called.

  “No.” The response came from Helmut. Her bearer was panting hard, all but jogging. Her weight on his back was shoving him down: He had no more breath to reply than any other servant might.

  They were nearly at the building. Helmut hung back, gestured at her rescuer. “Now,” he snarled. “Drop her and go.”

  The man let Patricia slide to the ground, twisting to lay her down, then without pause rose and dashed forward to the entrance. Helmut knelt beside her. “Do you want to die?” he asked, politely enough.

  Behind him the sky cracked open again. Getting closer. She licked dry lips. “No,” she admitted. “But I deserve to.”

  “Lots of people do. It has nothing to do with their fate.” He slid an arm beneath her and, grunting, levered her up off the ground and into his arms. “Arms round my neck.” He stumbled forward, into the darkness, following his men—who hadn’t bothered to wait.

  “I failed them,” she confessed as Helmut’s boots thudded on the steps down into the cellar. “We drew this down on them.”

  “They’re not our people. They never were.” He grunted again, reaching the bottom. “We’re not part of them, any more than we were part of the Anglischprache who’re coming to kill us. And if you reached your age without learning that, you’re a fool.”

  “But we had a duty—” She stopped, a stab of grim amusement penetrating the oppressive miasma of guilt. It was the same old argument, liberal versus conservative by any other name. “Let’s finish this later.”

  “Now she talks sense.” There was an overhead electric light at the bottom, dangling from the top of the vaulted arch of the ceiling. The stonework grumbled faintly, dislodging a shower of plaster and whitewash dust; shadows rippled as the bulb shivered on the end of its cord. Someone had nailed a poster-sized sheet of laminated paper against the wall, bearing an intricate knotwork design that made her eyes hurt. Helmut stepped forward onto the empty circle chalked on the floor. The guards had already crossed over. “I’ll carry your grace,” he told her. Then he turned to face the family sigil and focus.

  “I’m not your grace anymore,” Iris tried
to say; but neither of them were there anymore when she finished the sentence.

  * * *

  Sixty miles north of Niejwein, the first wave of B52s finished unloading their rotary dispensers. Their crews breathed a sigh of relief as they threw the levers to close their bomb-bay doors, and the DSOs began the checklist to reactivate their ARMBAND devices for the second and final time. Meanwhile, the second wave of bombers smoothly took their place in the bomb line.

  One of them, the plane with the single device in its front bay, flew straight towards the enemy city. With the target confirmed in visual range, her DSO keyed a radio transmitter—a crude, high-powered low-bandwidth signal that would punch through the static hash across the line of sight to the other aircraft in the force. To either side, the formation split, the neighboring aircraft following prearranged courses to give it a wide berth. Twelve miles was an acceptable safety margin for a one-megaton weapon, but not for the device this aircraft carried.

  (“I’m going to send them a message,” the president had said. “Who?” his chief of staff replied, an ironic tilt to his eyebrow. “The Russians.” The president smirked. “Who did you think I meant?”)

  The single huge bomb crammed into the special bomber’s bay was a B53; at nine megatons, the largest H-bomb ever fielded by the US military: a stubby cylinder the size of a pickup truck. The bomber rose sharply as the B53 fell away from the bomb bay. A sequence of parachutes burst from its tail, finally expanding into three huge canopies as its carrier aircraft closed its bay doors and the flight crew ran the engines up to full thrust, determined to clear the area as fast as possible.

  To either side of the heavyweight, the megaton bursts continued—a raster burn of blowtorch flames chewing away at the edge of the world. Behind the racing bomber force the sky was a wall of darkness pitted with blazing rage, domed clouds expanding and rising and flaring and dimming with monotonous precision every few seconds. The ground behind the nuclear frontal system was blackened and charred, thousands of square miles of forest and field caught in a single vast firestorm as the separate waves of incineration fanning out from each bomb intersected and reinforced each other. The winds rushing into the zone were already strengthening towards hurricane force; the bombers struggled against an unexpected sixty-knot jet stream building from the south.