Charles Stross - The Merchant’s War

The back door, opening off the kitchen, stood open, let-; ting in a wave of humidity. Hulius and Elena stood in the overgrown yard, Elena facing Yul's back as he crouched down. "Ready?" called Huw.

"Yo!"

Huw placed the first aid kit carefully on the deck besidffl him, then unzipped the art portfolio. "Elena, you ready?"

"Whenever big boy here gets down on his knees."

"I didn't know you cared, babe-"

Huw stifled a tense grin. "You heard her. Piggyback up, I'm going to uncover in ten. Good luck, guys."

Hulius crouched down and Elena wrapped her arms around his chest from behind. He held his hands out and she carefully placed her feet in them. With a grunt of strain, he rose to his feet as Huw dropped the front cover of the folio, revealing the print within-carefully keeping it facing away from himself. "Go!"

He tripped the stopwatch, then put the folio down, closing it. Heart hammering, he watched the yard, stopwatch in hand. Five seconds. Elena would be down and looking around, a long, slow, scan, her headset capturing the view. Ten seconds. The weather station on her belt should be stabilizing, reading out the ambient temperature, pressure, and humidity. Fifteen seconds. Her first scan ought to be complete, and the smart radio scanner ought to be logging megabits of data per second, searching for signs of technology. If there were no immediate threats she should be taking stock of Yul, making sure his blood pressure was stable from the 'walk. Thirty seconds. Huw began to feel a chilly sweat in the small of his back. By now, Hulius should have planted a marker and be on his way to the nearest cover, or would be digging in to wait out the one-hour minimum period before he could return. He'd have a bad headache right now-if he used the one-hour waypoint he'd be in bed for twenty hour hours afterwards, if not puking his guts up. Otherwise he'd stay a while longer...

Fifty- five. Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. Sixty. Oh shit. Sixty-one Sixty-two.

The scenery changed. Huw's heart was in his mouth for a moment: then he managed to focus on Elena. She was holding her hands out, thumbs-up in jubilation.

"Case green! Case green!"

Huw sat down heavily. I think I'm going to he sick. It had been the longest minute of his life. "What happened?" he asked, his voice thick with tension: "Which schedule is Yul running to?"

She climbed the steps to the rear stoop. Her submachine gun was missing. "Let's go inside, I need to take some of this stuff off before I melt."

Huw held the door open for her with barely controlled impatience. "What happened?" He demanded. Relax, it's all right, really." She began to unfasten her helmet and Huw moved in hastily to unplug the camera. It was beaded with moisture and he swore quietly when he saw that the lens was fogged over.

"You need to remove the telemetry pack first, I need to get this downloaded."

"Oh all right then! Here's your blasted toy." For a moment she worked on her equipment belt fastenings, then held it up at arm's length with an expression of distaste. Huw grabbed it before she let it drop. "It's perfectly safe over there. A lot cooler than it is here, and there are trees everywhere-"

"What kind of trees?"

She shrugged vaguely. "Trees. Like in the Alps. Dark green, spiny things. Christmas tree trees. You want to know about trees? Send a tree professor."

"Okay. So it's cold and there are coniferous trees. Anything else?"

Elena laid her helmet on the kitchen worktop and began to unfasten her body armor. "It was raining and the rain was cold. We couldn't see very far, but it was quiet- not like over here."

Huw shook his head: City girl.

"Anyway, I checked over Yul and he said he felt fine and there was no sign of anybody, so I gave him the P90 and tripped back over. Whee!"

Huw managed to confine his response to a nod. "When is he coming back?"

"Uh, we agreed on case green. That means four hours, right?"

"Four hours." Elena laid her armor out on the kitchen table then began to unlace her combat boots. "Then we can break out the wine, yay!"

"I'll be in the front room," Huw muttered, cradling the telemetry belt. "Would you mind staying here and watching the back window for a few minutes? If you see anything at all, call me."

In the front room, Huw poked at the ruggedized PDA, switching off the logging program. He plugged it into the laptop to recharge and hotsync, then sighed. The video take would be a while downloading, but the portable weather station had its own display. He unplugged it from the PDA, flicked it on, and looked at the last reading. Temperature: 16 Celsius. Pressure: 1026 millibars. Relative humidity: 65%. "What the fuck?" He muttered to himself. Sixteen Celsius-sixty Fahrenheit-in Maryland, in August? With high pressure? That was the bit that didn't make sense. It was over ninety outside, with 1020 millibars. "It's twenty Celsius degrees colder over there? And the trees are conifers?"

The penny dropped. "No wonder nobody could use the Wu family knotwork up in Massachusetts-it's probably under half a mile of ice!"

"Hey, you talking to me?" Elena called from the kitchen.

Huw glanced at the laptop. "Be right back, buddy," he told it, then carefully put it down on the battered cargo case, picked up the brown paper bag with the wine, and walked back towards Elena to wait for Hulius's return.

It was afternoon, according to the baleful red lights on the small TV opposite Mike's bed. He blinked at it sleepily, feeling no particular inclination to reach out for the remote control that sat on the trolley beside his bed. The curtains were drawn across what he took for a window niche, and he was alone in the small hospital room with nothing for company but the TV, the usual clutter of spotlights and strange valves and switches on the wall behind his bed, and the plastic cocoon they'd wrapped his leg in. The cocoon- it's like something out of Alien, he thought dreamily. Drainage tubes ran from it to the side of the bed, and there was a trolley with some kind of gadget next to him, and a hose leading to his left wrist. A drip. That was it. I'm on a drip. Therefore, I must be home. I drip, therefore I am. The thought was preposterously funny in a distant, swirly kind of way. Come to think of it, all his thoughts seemed to be leaving vapor trails, bouncing off the inside of his skull in slow motion. His leg ached, distantly, but it was nothing important. I'm home. Phone home. Maybe I should phone Mom and Pop? Let them know I'm all right. No, that wouldn't work-Mom and Pop died years ago, in the car crash with Sue. Forget it. He managed to roll his eyes towards the table the TV stood on. There was no telephone. Some hospital bedroom this is...

He was too hot. Much too hot. He was wearing pajamas: that was it. Fumbling for the buttons with his right hand, he realized he was fatigued. It felt as if his arm was weak, a long way away. He managed to get a couple of buttons undone, just as the door opened.

"As you can see he's, oh my-"

"Mike? Can he hear me?"

"I'm too hot." It came out funny.

"I'm real sorry, Mr. Smith, but he's running a fever. We've got him on IV penicillin for the infection, and morphine-"

"Penicillin? Isn't that old-fashioned; I mean, aren't most bacteria resistant to it these days?"

"That's not what the path lab report says about this one, thank Jesus; you're right, most infections are resistant, but he's had the good fortune to pick up an old-fashioned one. So, like I was saying, he's on morphine, his leg's an almighty mess, and they used a whole lot of Valium on him last night so he wouldn't pull out his tubes."

"Mike?"

The voice was familiar, conjuring up images of a whirring hand exerciser, a tense expression. "Boss?"

"Mike? Did you try to say something?"

Lips are dry. He tried to nod.

"Ah, h- heck. Is it the Valium? Or the morphine?"

"He ought to be better in a couple of hours, Mr. Smith."

"Okay. You hang in there, Mike. I'll be right back."

The door closed on discussion, and the sound of footsteps walking away. Mike closed his eyes and tried to gather his thoughts. In the hospital. Doped up. Leg hurts a little. Morphine? Colonel Smith. Got to talk to the colonel...

An indefinite time later, Mike was awakened by the rattle of the door opening.

"Huh- hi, boss." The cotton wool wrapping seemed to have gone away: he was still tired and a little fuzzy, but thinking didn't feel like wading through warm mini any more. He struggled, trying to sit up. "Huh. Water."

There was a jug of water sitting on the bedside trolley, and a couple of disposable cups. Eric sat down on the side of the bed and filled a cup, then passed it to him carefully. "Can you manage that? Good."

" 'S better." What's the colonel wanting? Must he really anxious for news to he here himself... He cleared his throat experimentally. "How... how long?"

"It's Sunday afternoon. You were dumped on our doorstep on Friday evening, two and a half days past your due date. Do you feel like talking, or do you need a bit more time?"

"More water. I'll talk. Is... is official debrief?"

"Yes, Mike. Fill me in and I promise to leave you alone to recover." Eric smiled tightly. "If you need anything, I'll see what I can sort out. Guess you're not going to be in the office for a while." He passed the refilled cup over and Mike drained it, then struggled to sit up.

"Here, let me-gotcha." The motorized bed whined. Colonel Smith placed a small voice recorder on the bed side table, the tape spool visibly rotating inside it. That comfortable?"

"Y- yeah. You want to know what happened? Every thing was on track until I got into the palace grounds. Then everything went to hell..."

For the next hour Mike described the events of the past week in minute detail, racking his brains for anything remotely relevant. Eric stopped him periodically to flip tape cassettes, then began to supply questions as Mike ran down. Mike held nothing back, his own ambiguous responses to Miriam notwithstanding. Finally, Eric switched the recorder off. "Off the record. Why did you tell her we'd play hardball? Did you think we were going to burn her? How did you think it's going to sound if we have to go to bat with an oversight committee to keep your ass out of jail?"

Mike reached towards the water again. He swallowed, his throat sore. "You should know: if you want to run HUMINT assets, you can't treat them like machines. They have to trust you-they absolutely have to trust you. So I gave her the unvarnished truth. If I'd spun her a line of bullshit, do you really think she'd have believed me? She knows me well enough to know when I'm lying."

Smith nodded. "Go on."

"Her situation is shitty enough that-hell, her mom said she's on the run-she's short on options. If I'd told her we'd welcome her with open arms she'd have smelled a rat, but this way she's going to carry on thinking about it, and then eventually start sniffing the bait. At which point, we can afford to play her straight, and she's starling with low expectations. Offer her a deal-she cooperates with us fully, we look after her-and you'll get her on board willingly. You'll also get leverage over her mother, who is still in place and in a position to tell us what the leadership is up to. But I think the most important thing is, you'll have a willing world-walker who will do what wc want, and-I figure this is important-try to be helpful. I can't quantify that, but I figure there's probably stuff wc don't know that a willing collaborator can call out for us, stuff a coerced subject or a non-world-walker would be useless for. If Doc James gets some crazy idea about turning her into a ghost detainee, we're not going to be able to do that, so I figured I'd start by lowering her expectations, then raise the temperature at the next contact."