The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3)

by Charles Stross

  ‘Dying, prob’ly.’ She wheezed for a second or two; it might have been laughter. ‘Poisoned the wine with pure heroin. The trade of queens.’

  ‘I see.’ Helmut turned to the wide-eyed messenger lad: ‘You. Run along and fetch a medic, fast.’ To the duchess: ‘There’s an antidote. We’ll get you – ’

  ‘No.’ Patricia closed her eyes for a long moment. ‘Ma, Hilde – Hildegarde. Started this all. Leave her. No trial. As for me . . .’ She subsided, slurring. A rattling snort emanated from the other chair and Helmut glanced at the door, before leaning to listen to the old woman’s chest.

  Helmut rose and, turning on his heel, strode towards the door. Crone save me, he subvocalized. The messenger was coming, a corpsman following behind. ‘I have two heroin overdoses for you,’ Helmut told him. ‘Forget triage; save the younger one first if at all possible.’

  ‘Heroin overdose?’ The paramedic looked startled. ‘But I don’t have – are you sure – ’

  ‘Deliberate poisoning. Get to it.’ Helmut stepped aside as the medic nodded and went inside. Helmut breathed deeply, then turned to the messenger. ‘Here.’ He pulled out his notepad and scribbled a brief memo. ‘Tell comms to radio this to Earl-Major Riordan in day code purple, stat.’ The lad took the note and fled. Helmut stared after him for a moment then shook his head. What a mess. Poisoning and attempted matricide versus kidnapping: petty treason versus high treason. How to weigh the balance? ‘Jester’s balls, if only I’d been delayed an hour on the road . . .’

  *

  Miriam lay in bed, propped up on a small mountain of pillows, staring blankly at the floral-patterned wallpaper behind the water jug on the dresser and thinking about death.

  I never wanted it. So why am I feeling so bad? she wondered. What the hell is wrong with me?

  It wasn’t as if she’d wanted to have a baby: Griben ven Hjalmar’s artificial insemination was, if not actual rape, then certainly morally equivalent. Only Huw’s offer to help her obtain a termination – if that was what she willed – had kept her from running, and not stopping until she arrived at the nearest available abortion clinic. As the immediate rage and humiliation and dread faded, she began to reevaluate the situation: not from an American woman’s perspective, but with the eyes of a Clan noblewoman catapulted headlong into the middle of a fraught political dilemma. I don’t have to love it. I don’t have to raise it. I just have to put up with eight months of back pain and morning sickness and get it out of my body. And in return . . .

  She’d signed a fraught compromise with her conscience. Perhaps she was just rationalizing her situation, even succumbing to Stockholm syndrome – the tendency of the abducted to empathize with their kidnappers – and while she hated what had been done to her, she was no longer eager to dispose of the unwanted pregnancy. She’d done it before, many years ago; it had been difficult, the situation looming no less inconveniently in a life turned upside down, but she’d persevered. She’d even, a year ago, harbored wistful thoughts about finding a Mr. Right and –

  Her body had betrayed her.

  I’m thirty-five, damn it. Not an ideal age to be pregnant, especially in a medieval backwater without rapid access to decent medical care. Especially in the middle of a civil war with enemies scheming for her demise, or worse. She’d been stressed, anxious, frightened, and still in the first trimester: and when the cramps began she’d ignored them, refusing to admit what was happening. And now it’s not going to happen. The royal dynasty that had ruled the Gruinmarkt for the past century and a half had bled out in a bedpan in New Britain, while the soldiers watched their maps and the nobles schemed. It wasn’t much worse than a heavy period (aside from the pain, and the shock, and the sudden sense of horror as a sky full of cloud-castle futures evaporated). But it was a death sentence, and not just for the dynastic plans of the conservative faction.

  She’d managed to hold her face together until she was away from Riordan’s headquarters, with Brill’s support. Ridden piggyback across to a farmhouse in the countryside outside small-town Framingham – not swallowed by Boston’s suburbs, in New Britain’s contorted history – that Sir Alasdair had located: abandoned, for reasons unclear, but not decayed.

  ‘We’ve got to keep you away from court, my lady,’ Brill explained, hollow-eyed with exhaustion, as she steered her up the staircase to an underfurnished bedroom. It had been a day since the miscarriage: a day of heavy bleeding, with the added discomfort of a ride in an oxcart through the backwoods around Niejwein. She’d begun shivering with the onset of a mild fever, not taking it all in, anomalously passive. ‘When word gets out all hell will follow soon enough, but we can buy time first. Miriam? How do you feel?’

  Miriam had licked her lips. ‘Freezing,’ she complained. ‘Need water.’ She’d pulled the bedding over her shoulders, curling up beneath without removing her clothes.

  ‘I’ll get a doctor,’ Brill had said. And that was about the last thing Miriam remembered clearly for the next forty-eight hours.

  Her fever was easily banished by bootleg drugs – amoxicillin was eerily effective in a world that hadn’t been overexposed to antibiotics – and she lay abed, weak but recovering. Brilliana had held the center of her world, drafting in her household staff as they surfaced after the coup, organizing a courier link to the Niejwein countryside, turning her muttered suggestions into firm orders issued in the name of the security directorate’s highest office. I don’t deserve these people, Miriam thought vaguely. Depression stalked her waking hours incessantly, and her mood fluctuated from hour to hour: She couldn’t tell from moment to moment whether she was relieved or bereft. Why do they put up with me? Can’t do anything right. Can’t build a business, can’t have a baby, can’t even stay awake –

  There was a knock at the door.

  She cleared her throat. ‘Enter.’ Her voice creaked like a rusting hinge, underused.

  The door opened. ‘Miriam?’

  She turned her head. ‘Ah! Sir Huw.’ She cleared her throat again. ‘Sorry. Not been well.’ Huw was still wearing Gruinmarkt-casual: leather leggings, linen blouson. She saw another face behind him: ‘And, and Elena? Hello, come on in. Sorry I can’t be more hos– hospitable.’ She tried to sit up.

  ‘Your Majesty!’ trilled Elena. Miriam tried not to wince. ‘Oh, you look so ill – ’

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ she interrupted, before the girl – Girl? By Clan standards she’s overdue to be married – started gushing. ‘I had a fever,’ she added, to Huw. ‘Caught something nasty while I was having the miscarriage. Or maybe I miscarried because . . .’ She trailed off. ‘How have you been?’ she asked. When at a loss for small talk, ask a leading question. That was what her mother, Iris – or Patricia, to her long-lost family – had brought her up to do. Once, it had made for a career –

  Huw took a deep breath. ‘We found more,’ he said, holding up three fingers. ‘And two viable knots. Then all hell broke loose and we only just got here.’

  ‘Three worlds?’

  ‘Yes!’ Elena bounced up and down on the linen press she’d taken for a seat. She, too, was wearing native Gruinmarkt dress; she and Huw would have faded right into the background at any Renaissance Faire, if not for the machine pistol poking from her shoulder bag. ‘Three! It was very exciting! One of them was so warm Yul nearly fainted before he could get his oxygen mask off! The others – ’

  Huw cleared his throat, pointedly. ‘If I may? That one was subtropical, humid. Lots of cycads and ferns, very damp. We didn’t see any people, or any animal life for that matter – but insects. Big dragonflies, that big.’ He held his hands a foot apart. ‘I was pretty light-headed by the time we left. I want to measure the atmospheric gas mix – I think it’s way on the high side of normal, oxygen-wise. Like the carboniferous era never ended, or came back, or something. And then there was another cold pine-forest world. Again, no life, no radio transmissions, no sign of people.’ He shook his head.

  ‘The third?’ Miriam pushed herself up again
st the pillows, fascinated.

  ‘We nearly died,’ Elena said very quietly.

  ‘You nearly – ’ Miriam stopped. ‘Huw, I thought you were taking precautions? Pressure suits, oxygen, guns?’

  ‘We were. That one’s inhabited – but not by anything familiar to us.’ He clammed up. ‘Miriam. Uh. Helge. My lady. What’s going on? Why are we here?’

  Miriam blinked. ‘Inhabited? By what?’

  ‘Robots, maybe. Or very fast minerals. Something surprised Yul so he shot it, and it ate his shotgun. After that, we didn’t stick around. Why are we here? The major said you were in charge of, of something important – ’

  ‘I need to get out of bed.’ Miriam winced. ‘This wasn’t part of the plan. Huw, we’re here to make contact with the government. Official contact, and that means I need to be in there doing it.’

  ‘Official contact?’ His eyes widened.

  ‘Yes. We’re finished in the United States. The Clan, I mean. Those mindless idiots in the postal arm, Baron Hjorth, my grandmother – they’ve completely wrecked any hope of us ever going back, much less normalizing relations. The US will follow us to the ends of the universe if necessary. Ends of every universe. Certainly they had agents in the Gruinmarkt . . . Riordan’s not stupid, he saw this coming. That’s what we’re doing here. We’re to open negotiations with the Empire of New Britain and sue for asylum. They’ve got problems too, stuff we can help with – the French, that is, the Bourbon monarchy in St. Petersburg. We’ve got access to science and technology that’s half a century ahead of anything they’ve got in the laboratory here, much less widely deployed. That gives us a bargaining tool, much better than a suitcase full of heroin.’ She chuckled softly. It made her ribs hurt. ‘You know all the Roswell, Area 51, alien jokes? Crashed flying saucers, secret government labs full of alien technology? We’re going to be their aliens. Except there’s a slight problem.’

  ‘A problem?’ Huw’s expression was a sight. ‘I can see several potential problems with that idea. What kind of problem do you find worrying enough to single out?’

  ‘We’re not the only people who’ve had a coup d’état.’ Miriam sat up, bracing her arms against the headboard of the bed. ‘The king’s under arrest, the country is in a state of crisis, and the contacts I’d made are high up in the new government. Which may sound like a great opportunity to you, but I’m not sure I like what they’re doing with it. And before we can talk to them we need to square things with the cousins.’

  ‘The cousins – ’

  ‘Yes. Or they’ll assume we’re breaking the truce. Tell me, Huw – have you ever met James Lee?’

  *

  The huge, wooden radio in the parlor of the safe house near Framingham was tuned permanently to Voice of England, hissing and warbling the stentorian voice of Freedom Party-approved news as and when the atmospheric conditions permitted. The morning of the day after his arrival, Huw opened it up and marveled at the bulky tubes and rat’s nest of wires within. It was a basic amplitude-modulated set, the main tuning capacitor fixed firmly in position by a loop of wire sealed with a royal crest in solder: comically easy to subvert, if the amateur engineer had been partial to five years in a labor camp next time it was inspected by the Polis. Huw shook his head, then added a crate of pocket-sized Sony world-band receivers to his next supply run shopping list, along with a gross of NiCad batteries and some more solar-powered chargers.

  ‘How do you use it?’ asked Brilliana, looking at it dubiously.

  ‘You plug it back in’ – Huw demonstrated, clipping the battery wire to the bulky lead-acid cell that filled much of the radio’s plinth – ‘and turn it on like so.’ Hissing static filled the room.

  She frowned. ‘It sounds horrible. How do you tune it?’

  ‘You don’t. I mean, we can adjust it slightly, within a permitted frequency range.’ Huw straightened up. ‘But the state owns the air-waves.’ Someone was talking in portentious tones through the wrong end of a trombone. ‘Welcome to the pre-transistor era, when radio engineers needed muscles.’

  ‘What use is a radio you can’t – ’

  Miriam stopped in the doorway. ‘Wait!’ She held up a hand. She was looking better this morning, Huw decided: There was color in her cheeks and she’d bothered to get dressed in native drag, something like an Indian shalwar suit, only with frightening amounts of embroidery and lace. ‘Can you turn that up?’

  ‘I guess.’ Huw tweaked the fine-tuning pot, then cranked up the volume.

  ‘I know that voice!’ Miriam stared at the radio, her eyes wide. ‘It’s Erasmus!’

  ‘Really?’ Brill cocked her head. ‘I suppose it might be.’

  ‘ – Our enemies. Only through unceasing vigilance can we ensure our safety in the face of the brutal attacks of the aristocratic gang and their lickspittle toadies. But be of good heart: They are a minority, and they swim against the current of history. The slave owners and gang-masters and mercantilists cannot bully us if we stand firm against them. The party is the backbone of the people, and we shall bear the full weight of the struggle against totalitarian monarchism on your behalf – ’

  ‘Yes, I think you’re right,’ Brilliana said thoughtfully. ‘He’s wordy enough . . .’

  ‘Jesus.’ Miriam swayed slightly. ‘It’s too early for this. Is there any coffee?’

  ‘In the kitchen, I think.’ Brill looked at Huw. ‘Enough with the radio,’ she said. Huw could take a hint: He switched it off, and waited for the glowing tubes to fade before he followed them towards the waiting pot.

  Miriam was sitting on one of the two chairs, her hands clutching an earthenware mug of black coffee. The kettle still steamed atop the coal-fired cast-iron cooking range. ‘He’s on the radio,’ she said, as if she didn’t quite believe it. ‘Voice of England. That’s the official news channel, isn’t it? He must have made it to California and come back. This will make everything so much simpler.’ Her hands were shaking slightly. ‘But it also means we need to talk to the cousins now, not later.’

  ‘It’s too dangerous.’ Brill looked mulish. ‘Travel, I mean! There are roving gangs, and we don’t have a car, or – ’

  ‘They don’t use cars here,’ Miriam pointed out. ‘At least not the way they do in our – my – America. There are trains. We’re about three miles outside city limits and there’s a railway station. You can catch a train to, to – where are the Lees? Do we have an address for them in Boston? If the service is running right now, and if they aren’t demanding travel papers. But there’s a small-scale civil war going on. They don’t – neither side – have the resources to lock down travel, except across contested borders. We’re on the east coast city belt here, the paper says it’s all Freedom Party territory – ’

  ‘You’ve got newspapers?’ Huw demanded, incredulity getting the better of him.

  ‘Yes, why wouldn’t we?’ Miriam was nonplussed. ‘They don’t have domestic television, Huw, no internet either. How do you expect they get their news?’

  ‘But, but – there’s a civil war going on!’

  ‘Yes, but that’s not stopping the local papers. We get visitors, Huw. We’ve had knife-grinders and pan-sellers and we get a book merchant who carries the weekly paper. As far as our neighbors know, we’re a bunch of squatters who moved in here when the farmer and his family ran away – they’re royalists, he was a snitch, apparently. They don’t mind having us around: Alasdair and Erik saw off a gang of hobos – probably deserters – the day before yesterday. So we, we try to keep informed. And we’re trying to fit in.’ She frowned. ‘Got to get you some local clothes.’

  ‘I’ll sort him out.’ Brill rose and poked at the firebox in the range cautiously. Between the summer warmth and an active fire the kitchen was unpleasantly warm, although Miriam still looked as if she was cold. ‘There’s a lot of work involved in establishing a safe house,’ she said, looking at Huw speculatively. ‘I’ve got a list. If you want to stick around, make yourself useful – ’

  ‘No,�
�� said Miriam. Brill looked at her. ‘I need to see Erasmus. In person.’ She tapped a finger on the table. ‘We need to send a message to James Lee, fix up a conference.’ Another tap. ‘And we need to get as many of our people as possible over here right now. And set up identities for them.’ A third finger-tap. ‘Which feeds back to Erasmus. If he’ll help us out, all our immediate troubles here go away.’

  ‘And if he doesn’t?’ asked Brill.

  ‘Then we’re so screwed it isn’t funny.’ Miriam took a sip of coffee. ‘So we’re not going to worry about that right now. I’m not well enough to travel today, but I’m getting better. Huw? I want you and Yul – you’re the expeditionary research team, aren’t you? – to go into Framingham today. Yeah, I know, so find him some clothes, Brill. Huw, I’ll give you a couple of letters to post, and a shopping list. Starting with a steamer. We’ve got gold, yes? More of the shiny stuff than we know what to do with. So we’re going to spend some of it. Get a steamer – a truck, not a passenger car – and buy food and clothing, anything that’s not nailed down, anything you can find from thrift stores. Some furniture, too, chairs and beds if you can get them – we’re short on stuff here – but that’s a secondary consideration.’ She was staring past him, Huw realized, staring into some interior space, transcribing a vision. ‘Along the way you’re going to post those letters, one to James Lee, one to Erasmus.’

  She cleared her throat. ‘Now here’s the hard bit. If you’re stopped by Freedom Riders, drop my name – Miriam Beckstein – and say I’m working for Erasmus Burgeson and Lady Margaret Bishop. Remember that name: Margaret Bishop. It’ll get their attention. If it doesn’t get their attention, don’t resist if they take you into custody, but make sure you emphasize that you’re working for me and I’m working for their bosses – Lady Bishop and Erasmus know about me, and about the Clan, at least in outline. Then get the hell away. You know how to do it, you’ve got your temp tats, yes?’

  Huw cleared his throat. ‘Do you want that to happen?’ Or is this just micromanagement due to nerves?