The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3)

by Charles Stross

  His eyes narrowing, Erasmus Burgeson resolved to order some discreet research.

  *

  It wasn’t a regular briefing room: They’d had to commandeer the biggest lecture theater in the complex and it was still packed, shoulder-to-shoulder with blue and brown uniforms. Security was tight, from the Bradleys and twitchy-fingered National Guard units out on the freeway to the military police patrols on the way in. Everyone knew about the lucky escape the Pentagon had had, if only via the grapevine. The word on the floor was that the bad guys were aiming for a trifecta, but missed one – well, they mostly missed: Half a dozen guards and unlucky commuters were awaiting burial in a concrete vault with discreet radiation trefoils once Arlington got back to normal. But nobody in the lecture theater was inclined to cut the bad guys any slack. The mood, Colonel Smith reflected, was hungry. He tried to put it out of his mind as he walked to the podium and tapped the mike.

  ‘Good morning, everyone. I’m Lieutenant Colonel Eric Smith, lately of the air force, seconded to NSA/CSS Office of Unconventional Programs, and from there to an organization you haven’t heard of until now. I’ve been instructed to bring you up to speed on our existence, mission, and progress to date. I’ll be happy to take your questions at the end, but I’d be grateful if you could hold on to them for the time being. Just so you know where we’re going, this is about the attack yesterday, and what we – all of us – are going to be dealing with over the next months and years.’

  He hit the remote button to bring up the first slide. The silence was broken by a cough from the audience; otherwise, it was total.

  ‘For the past year I’ve been seconded to a black ops group called the Family Trade Organization, FTO. FTO is unlisted and draws on assets from Air Force, NSA, FBI, CIA, DEA, NRO, and the national laboratories. We’re tasked with responding to a threat which was only identified thirteen months ago. That’s when this man walked into a DEA office in Boston and asked for witness protection.’

  Click. A new slide, showing a polyethylene-wrapped brick of white powder, and a small metal ingot, side by side on a worktop. ‘He was carrying a kilogram of China White and a hundred-gram lump of plutonium 239, which we subsequently confirmed had been produced in one of our own breeders. This got our attention, but his story was so crazy that DEA nearly wrote him off as a kook – they didn’t take the plutonium brick seriously at first. However, it checked out.’

  Click. Surveillance video, grainy black-and-white, showing a view of a jail cell. A prisoner is sitting on the edge of a plastic bench, alone. He glances around. Then, after a few seconds, he rolls back his left sleeve to reveal some kind of tattoo on his wrist. He raises it in front of his face. Abruptly, the cell is empty.

  ‘Our witness claimed to be a member of a group or tribe of illegal aliens with the ability to travel between worlds. The place of origin of these aliens was initially unknown, but backward. They can will themselves between their own world – or location – and ours, by staring at a special knotwork design. They speak a language not familiar to anyone in the linguistics department at NSA, but related to Low German. And they use their ability to smuggle narcotics.’

  Click. A slide showing an odd, crude knotwork design.

  ‘DEA would have written source GREENSLEEVES off as a nut, but they raided one of his suggested locations and hit paydirt – a major transfer location for a cocaine distribution ring they’d been hunting for two years. At this point they began following up his leads and arrested a number of couriers. One of whom you just saw pulling a vanishing trick in front of a spy camera in a locked cell.’

  Click. A windowless laboratory, white glove boxes and racks of electronics bulking beside workbenches.

  ‘The initiative came from DEA but was escalated rapidly with the backing of OSP and NSA, to establish a cross-disciplinary investigative unit. About five months ago our collaborations at Livermore confirmed that there is indeed a physical mechanism at work here. What we’re looking at is not teleportation, but some sort of quantum tunneling effect between our world and a world very much like our own – a parallel universe. Other worlds are also believed to exist – many of them.’

  Click. Video from a camera bolted to the rear bulkhead of a helicopter’s flight deck, grainy and washed out from beneath by the low-light-level radiance spilled from the instrument consoles: a view of darkened ridgelines.

  ‘Project ARMBAND is now delivering prototype transfer units that can displace aircraft – or limited-scale ground forces – to what we have confirmed is this other world. There’s virtually no radio traffic or sign of advanced civilization other than stuff that these – the hostiles call themselves the Clan – have stolen from us. Our intelligence take is that this is a primitive version of our own world, one where the dark ages were very dark. The Clan, as they’re called, people with a biologically mediated ability to tunnel through into our world and back again – we don’t know where they came from, and neither do the prisoners we’ve been able to question. But they exist within a high medieval civilization along the east coast of North America, former Viking colonies. They’re not Christian: Christianity and Islam are unknown in their world. They’ve been using their access to us to build up their own power back home.’

  Click. Aerial photographs of a small city. Forests loom in an untamed blanket beyond the edge of town. Only a couple of narrow roads wind between the trees. Smoke rises from chimneys. There are walls, meandering along the hilltops around the center. Some way outside them, there is a small harbor.

  ‘This is the capital city of the local power where the Clan holds most authority, a small state called Niejwein, located roughly where downtown Boston is. Four months ago we were able to use our captured prisoners to transport a SPECOPS forward recon team into position. We’ve confirmed this story six ways: I’d like to emphasize this, we have an intelligence briefing on the enemy culture and you’ll find it in your in-tray when you check your e-mail. What we’re dealing with is a hostile power considerably more primitive and less well organized than Afghanistan, but sitting physically right on our doorstep – collocated with us geographically, but accessible only by means of ARMBAND devices or at will to the Clan’s members.’

  Click. An olive-drab cylinder approximately the size of a beer keg, with a green box strapped to it and connected by fat wires.

  ‘This is an FADM, field atomic demolition munition. Third-generation descendant of the W53 tactical device used in the Davey Crockett. Twelve of them were supposed to be in storage in Pantex. Source GREENSLEEVES claimed to have stolen and emplaced one in downtown Boston as insurance when he walked in and asked for witness protection – ’ Smith paused. ‘May I continue?’ He leaned close to the mike but kept his tone mild: Most of the audience out-ranked him considerably.

  ‘Thank you. There was an accident subsequently when GREEN-SLEEVES panicked and tried to escape custody, and GREENSLEEVES was killed; and there was some question over whether he was in fact lying. A routine inventory check reported that all the FADMs were present and accounted for. However, a month ago FTO personnel located and subsequently disarmed a device in downtown Boston, confirming that the FADM audit report was faulty. This triggered a PINNACLE EMPTY QUIVER and a full-up inspection, in the course of which it became apparent that no less than six FADMs had been stolen from Pantex at some time in the preceding three years. FADMs are on the inactive inventory and the plant was following standard asset risk management procedures for the weapon storage areas, with layered security, patrols and sensors, and secure vaults. Unfortunately our existing ARM failed to take into account the possibility that extradimensional narcoterrorists might appear inside the storage vaults, remove the weapon assemblies from their carriers, and replace them with dummies.’

  Smith paused. There was no point continuing right now – not with the muttering wave of disbelief and outrage – and besides, his throat was becoming sore. He raised his water bottle, then tapped the mike again.

  ‘If I may continue? Thank you. T
hose of you tasked with nuclear weapons security know more about the consequences of that particular event than I do; to those who aren’t, we’re in the process of upgrading our risk management model and temporarily escalated security is already in place for those parts of the inventory which suffer from compromised ARM. We’re not going to lose any more nukes, period.

  ‘Meanwhile, the background to this particular empty quiver event is that DEA’s initial approach to the Clan was that they were a major narcotics ring and should be dealt with accordingly. We’re talking about narcoterrorists on the same scale as the Medellín Cartel, with turnover in the four-to-six-billion-dollar-per-year range, and a membership in excess of a thousand individuals. What became apparent only later was that the scope of the threat, intrusions from another world, a parallel universe, is unprecedented and carries with it many unknown unknowns, if I may steal a phrase from the top. What we failed to appreciate at first was that the Clan were effectively a parallel government within their own nation, but not the government – an analogy with al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan is apposite – and that the local authorities wanted rid of them. The situation was highly unstable. I am informed that negotiations with the Clan for return of the stolen weapons were conducted, but internal factional disputes resulted in the, the consequences we’ve all witnessed this week.’

  Which was flat-out half-truths and lies, but the real story wasn’t something it was safe to talk about even behind locked doors in Crypto City: Smith’s boss, Dr. James, had anticipated a response, but not on this scale. Calculations had been botched, as badly as the decision in early 2001 to ignore the festering hatred in the hills around Kabul. ‘We need to get the hard-liners to talk to us, not the liberals,’ Dr. James had explained. Nobody had anticipated that the hard-liners’ idea of a gambit would be a full-dress onslaught – or if they had, they were burying the evidence so deep that even thinking that thing was a career-limiting move.

  ‘I can’t discuss the political response to the current situation,’ Smith continued, speaking into a hair-raising silence, ‘but I’ve been told I can mention the legal dimension. Other FTO officials are briefing their respective departments today. As of now, FTO and the existence of the extradimensional threat are no longer super-black, although the content of this briefing remains classified. The briefing process is intended to bring everyone up to speed before the orders start coming down. I’ve been told to alert you that a military response is inevitable – the president is meeting with the survivors of the House of Representatives and there is a briefing going on behind closed doors right now – and the War Powers Act has been invoked. Our NATO partners have already come through and invoked Clause Six of the North Atlantic treaty, meaning that we can count on any necessary assistance. White House counsel and the attorney general’s office agree that the usual treaty obligations requiring a UN mandate for a declaration of war do not apply to territory physically located within our own national borders, and posse comitatus does not apply to parallel universes – this remains to be confirmed by the Supreme Court, but we anticipate a favorable outcome.’

  As three of the four justices who died in the attack were from the liberal side of the bench – by sheer bad luck, they’d been attending an event at GWU that morning – this was an extreme understatement: The new Supreme Court, when it could be sworn in, would be hand-picked to make Chief Justice Scalia happy.

  Smith took a deep breath. ‘So, to summarize: We have been attacked by a new kind of enemy, using our own stolen weapons. But we’ve been studying them covertly, and we’ve got the tools to reach out and touch them. And we’re going to show them exactly what happens when you fuck with the United States.’ He stared straight at one of the generals in the front row, who had been visibly containing himself for several minutes. ‘Thank you for your patience. Now are there any questions?’

  The floodgates opened.

  *

  The day after his failed attempt to leak all over Steve Schroeder’s news desk, Mike Fleming deliberately set out to tickle the dragon’s tail. He did so in the full, cold foreknowledge that he was taking a huge personal risk, but he was running short on alternatives.

  Driving from motel to strip mall and around and about by way of just about any second-rate road he could find that wasn’t an interstate or turnpike, Mike watched the news unfold. The sky was blue and empty, contrail-free except for the occasional track of a patrolling F-15; as on 9/11, they’d shut down all civilian aviation. The fire this time had not come from above, but few people knew that yet, and as gestures went, grounding the airliners was a trivially easy way to signal that something was being done to protect the nation. It was the old security syllogism: Something must be done, this is something, ergo this must be done. Mike drove slowly, listening to the radio. There were police checkpoints on roads in and out of D.C.; the tattered remnants of Congress and the Supreme Court were gathering at an Undisclosed Location to mourn their dead and witness the somber inauguration of the new president. A presidential address to the nation was scheduled for the evening against a drum-beat of unreassuring negatives leaking from the Pentagon, This isn’t al-Qaeda, this isn’t the Iranians, this is something new. The pro-forma groundswell rumble of rage and fury at yet another unheralded and unannounced cowardly attack on America was gathering momentum. The nation was on the edge of its nerves, terrified and angry. Continuity of Government legislation was being overhauled, FEMA managers stumbling bleary-eyed to the realization that the job they’d been hired for was now necessary –

  At a pay phone in the back of a 7-Eleven, Mike pulled out a calling card and began to dial, keeping a nervous eye on his wristwatch. He listened briefly, then dialed a PIN. ‘Hello. You have no new messages.’

  He hung up. ‘Shit,’ he muttered, trudging back towards the front of the shop, trying hard not to think of the implications, not hurrying, not dawdling, but conserving the energy he’d need to carry him through the next day. He was already two miles away when the first police cruiser pulled up outside with its lights flashing, ten minutes too late: driving slowly, mind spinning as he tried to come up with a fallback plan that didn’t end with his death.

  If only Miriam’s mother had left a message, or Olga the ice princess, he’d have more options open – but they hadn’t, and without a contact number he was out in the cold. The only lines he could follow led back into an organization answering to a new president who had been in cahoots with the Clan’s worst elements and wanted the evidence buried, or to a news editor who hadn’t believed him the first time round – and who knew what Steve would think, now that the White House was a smoking ruin?

  I blew it, he thought bleakly. Dr. James has likely declared me a rogue asset already. Which was technically correct – as long as one was unaware that James himself was in it up to his eyeballs. The temptation to simply drive away, to take his papers and find a new life in a small town and forget he’d ever been Mike Fleming, was intense. But it wouldn’t work in the long term, he realized. The emergency administration would bring in the kind of internal ID checks that people used to point to when they wanted to denounce the Soviets. They’d have to: It wasn’t as if they could keep world-walkers out by ramping up the immigration service. What can I do?

  His options seemed to be narrowing down. Work within the organization had gone out the window with that car bomb. Talk to Iris Beckstein – about what? Talk to the press – no, that had seemed like a good idea yesterday: funny how rapidly things changed. He could guess what would happen if he fixed up another meeting with Steve Schroeder any time soon. Steve would try to verify his source, be coopted, spun some line about Mike being a conspirator, and reel him in willingly; and Mike had no tangible evidence to back up his claims. Try to turn a coworker – look how well that had worked for Pete Garfinkle. Pete had confessed misgivings to Mike; shortly thereafter he’d been put in a situation that killed him. Mike had confessed misgivings to Colonel Smith; shortly thereafter – join up the dots. The whole organi
zation was corrupt, from the top down. For all he knew, the bombs – his knuckles whitened upon the steering wheel – did the new president have big enough balls to deliberately maneuver the Clan into giving him everything he wanted, on a plate? To have helped them get their hands on the bombs, and then to have provoked them into attacking the United States? Not a crippling attack, but a beheading one, laying the groundwork for a coup d’état ?

  The scale of his paranoia was giving Mike a very strange sensation, the cold detachment of a head trip into a darkened wilderness of mirrors: the occupational disease of spies. If you can’t trust your friends, the only people left to trust are your enemies, he reminded himself. Miriam had tried to warn him; that suggested, at a minimum, something to hope for. But FTO’ll be watching her house. And her mother’s. In case anyone shows. He forced himself to relax his grip on the wheel and pay attention to his surroundings as a pickup weaved past him, horn blaring. How many watchers? Maintaining full surveillance on a building was extremely expensive – especially if nobody had bothered to look in on it for months.

  An ephemeral flash of hope lit up the world around him. If FTO had been watching Miriam’s house before, they might well have pulled out already – and yesterday’s events would have shaken things up even more. But what if they’re wrong? He remembered Matthias’s advice, from months ago: They think like a government. And Miriam’s important to them. She’s an insider – otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to warn me. Would we put a watch on a cabinet official’s house if we knew enemies had it under surveillance? Even if we were under attack? Trying to work through that line of thought threatened to give him a headache, but it seemed to be worth checking out. Best case, there’d be a Clan security post discreetly watching her place, and nobody else. Worst case, an FTO surveillance team – but knowing how FTO worked in the field, he’d have a good chance of spotting them. Find Miriam. Try to cut a deal: Warn her faction about the spy, about the president’s plans – in return, try to get them to hand over the murderers. Maybe find some way to cut a deal.