Charles Stross - The Merchant’s War

"Okay, talk." Mike's stomach twisted. Last lime someone said thai to me, he ended up dead.

She opened the passenger door. "Here, give me those, I'll put them in the trunk." A minute later she slid behind the wheel and moved off. "Your house is under surveillance."

"Yeah, I know."

She gave him a look. "Like that, is it? Care to explain why?"

"Because- " he stopped in mid-sentence "-what business of yours is it?"

She braked to a stop, near the end of the exit ramp, looking for a gap in the traffic. "It'd be kind of nice to know that I've been taken off hunting for a ticking bomb and told to stake out a colleague's house for a good reason." Her voice crackled with quiet anger.

Mike swallowed. Good cop, he realized. What to say...? "It's not me you're staking out. I'm expecting a visitor."

"Okay." She hit the gas hard, pushing out into a too-small gap in the traffic: a horn blared behind them for a moment, then they were clear. "But they'd better be worth it."

Mike swallowed again. "Listen. You know the spooks are calling the shots. I got dragged off into fairyland, but you don't have to follow me down the rabbit hole."

"Too late. I'm in charge of the team that's watching you. I just found out about it yesterday. If it's not you, who am I meant to be keeping an eye open for?"

"Someone who may be able to tell us whether he was bluffing or if there really is a bomb-and if so, where he might have planted it."

Herz swung left into the passing lane. "Good answer." Her fingers tightened on the wheel. "That's what I wanted to hear. Is it true?"

Mike took a deep breath. "The NIRT guys are still working their butts off, right?"

"Yes..."

"Then in the absence of a forensics lead or an informant you're not delivering much value-added, are you? They're the guys with the neutron scattering spectrometers and the Geiger counters. You're the detective. What did the colonel tell you to do?"

Herz took an on-ramp, then accelerated onto the interstate: "Stake you out like a goat. Watch and wait, twenty-four by seven. You're supposed to tell me what to do, when to wrap up the case."

"Hmm." What have I gotten myself into here? "I really ought to get the colonel to tell me whether I can fill you in on a couple of codewords."

Herz set the cruise control and glanced at him, sidelong. "He told me you'd been on something called CLEANSWEEP, and this is the follow-up."

Mike felt the tension ease out of his shoulders. "I hate

the fucking spook bullshit," he complained. "Okay, let me fill you in on CLEANSWEEP and how I got my leg busted up. Then maybe I can help you figure out a surveillance plan..."

Miriam watched from the back room while Erasmus systematically looted his own shop. "Go through the clothing and take anything you think you'll need," he told her. "There's a traveling case downstairs that you can use. We're going to be away for two weeks, and we'll not be able to purchase any necessities until we reach Fort Kinnaird."

"But I can't just-" Miriam shook her head. "Are you sure?"

"Whose shop is it?" He Hashed her a cadaverous grin. "I'll be upstairs. Got to fetch a book."

The traveling case in the cellar turned out to be a battered leather suitcase. Miriam hauled it up into the back mom and opened it, wrinkling her nose. It looked clean enough, although the stained silk lining, bunched at one side, made her wonder at its previous owner's habits. She stuffed the contents of her valise into it, then scoured the rails in the back for anything else appropriate. There wasn't much there: Erasmus had run down the stock of clothes since she'd last seen the inside of his shop. A search of the pigeonholes behind the counter yielded a line leather manicure case and a good pen. She was tucking them into the ease when Erasmus reappeared, carrying a couple of books and a leather jewelry case.

"What's that?" she asked.

"Stock I'm not leaving in an empty shop for two weeks." He pulled another suitcase out from a cubby behind his desk and opened it: "I'm also taking the books to prove I'm their rightful owner, just in ease." It all went in. Then lie opened the partition at the back of the counter and rummaged around inside. "You might want to take this..." He held a small leather box out to Miriam.

"What- " She flicked the catch open. The pistol was tiny, machined with the precision of a watch or a camera or a very expensive piece of jewelry. "Hey, I can't take-"

"You must," Burgeson said calmly. "Whether you ever need to use it is another matter, but I believe I can trust you not to shoot me by mistake, yes?"

She nodded, jerkily.

"Then put it away. I suggest in a pocket. The case and spare rounds can go-here." He picked out the pistol then slipped the case through a slit in the lining of the suitcase that Miriam hadn't even noticed. "It's loaded with three rounds in the cylinder, the hammer is on the empty fourth chamber. It's a self-arming rotary, when you pull the trigger it will cock the hammer-double action-do you see?" He offered it to her.

"I don't- " She nodded, then took the pistol. "You really think I'll need it?"

"I hope you won't." He glanced away, avoiding her gaze. "But these are dangerous limes."

He bustled off again, into the front of the shop, leaving Miriam to contemplate the pistol. He's right, she realized with a sinking heart. She double-checked that the hammer was, indeed, on the empty chamber, then slipped it into her coat pocket just as Erasmus returned, clutching a wad of envelopes.

"You have mail." He passed her a flimsy brown wrapper.

"I have- " She did a double take. "Right." There was no postage stamp; it had been hand-delivered. She opened it hastily. The neat copperplate handwriting she recognized as Roger's. The message was much less welcome:

Polis raided yr house, watching yr factory. Am being watched, can't help. Think yr stuff is still where it was, locked in the office.

"Shit!"

She sat down hard on the wooden stool Erasmus kept in the back office. "What troubles you?"

She waved the note at him. "I need to collect this stuff," she said.

"Yes, but-" he read the note rapidly, his face expressionless. "I see." He paused. "How badly do you need it?"

The moment she'd been half-dreading had arrived. How would Burgeson respond if she told him the unvarnished truth?

"Very." She meshed her lingers together to avoid fidgeting. "The machine I need to collect has... well, it's more than just useful to me. It stores pictures, and among them there's a copy of the original knotwork design I need if I'm going to get back to my own world by myself. If I've got it, I'm not stuck with a choice between permanent exile here and a, a feudal backwater. Or going back to the Clan. If I do decide to make contact with them and ask to be taken in, it's a bargaining lever that demonstrates my bona fides because I had a choice. And if I don't, it gives me access to my own, my original, world. Where it's possible to gel hold of things like the medicine I got you."

He waited for several seconds after she finished speaking. "That's not all, is it?" he said gently.

She swallowed. "Are you planning on keeping me a prisoner here?" She asked. "Because that's what denying me the ability to go back to the United States amounts to."

"I'm not!" He began explosively, then stopped to draw a deep breath: "I apologize. I did not mean to imply that I thought you were going to cut and run." He grimaced. "But there's more to this device of yours than a mere pictographic representation, isn't there?"

"Well, yes," she admitted. "For one thing, it contains a copy of every patent filed in my home country over more than a century." Erasmus gaped at her. "Why do you think I started out by setting up a research company?"

"But that must be-that's preposterous!" He struggled visibly to grapple with the idea. "Such a library would occupy many shelf-feet, surely?"

"It used to." Miriam felt a flash of hope. "But you saw the DVD player. Every second, that machine has to project thirty images on screen, to maintain the illusion of motion. How much storage do you think they take up? In my world, we have ways of storing huge amounts of data in very small spaces."

"And such a library would be expensive," he added speculatively.

"Not if it was old. And the cost of the storage medium was equivalent to, say, a reporter's notebook." Her patent database might not include anything filed in the past fifty years, but a full third of its contents were still novelties in New Britain.

"We must seem very primitive to you." He was scrutinizing her, Miriam realized, with a guarded expression that was new and unwelcome.

"In some ways, yes." She relaxed her hands. "In other ways-no, I don't think so. And anyway, there are probably any number of other worlds out there that are as far beyond this one, or the one I came from, as this is beyond the Gruinmarkt. Where the Clan come from," she clarified. "Bunch of medieval throwbacks." Throwbacks who are your family, she reminded herself. "Look, from my point of view, I need to make sure I've got something, anything, that'll stop them coming after me if they realize I survived the massacre." Assuming they survived. "If I've got the laptop I can threaten to throw myself on the mercy of the security agencies in the U.S., whoever Mike is working for. Or I can claim loyally and demonstrate that I didn't do that, even though I could have. And if I don't have anything to do with them I can use it to set up in business again, over here."

"Do you plan to throw yourself on the mercy of your friend's agency?" Erasmus asked, raising an eyebrow.

Miriam shuddered. "It's a last resort," she said slowly. "If the Clan come after me and try to kill me, they might be able to keep me alive." But then again -Mike's words came back to haunt her: They're using world-walkers as mules, there's a turf war inside the bureaucracy. Things might go really well. And then again, she might end up vanishing into some underground equivalent of Camp X-ray, into a nightmarish gulag that would make house arrest in Niejwein seem like paradise. "But I don't want to risk it unless I have to."

"So what are you going to do?" he asked gently. She blinked, and realized he was watching her hands. A double take: He gave me a pistol, she realized.

"I'm going to take back what's mine," she said calmly, "and I'm going to get clean away with it. Then we're going to go on a long rail trip while the fuss dies down." She stood up. "Do you mind if I go through your stock again? There's some stuff I need to borrow..."

Two hours later, a mousy-looking woman in black trudged slowly past a row of warehouses and business premises, pushing a handcart. Her back hunched beneath an invisible load of despair, she looked neither left nor right as she trailed past an ominously quiet light metal works and a boarded-up fabric warehouse. The handcart, loaded with a battered suitcase and a bulging sack, told its own story: another of the victims of the blockade and the fiscal crisis, out on her uppers and looking for work, or shelter, or a crust before nightfall.

The streets weren't deserted, but there was a lack of purposeful activity; no wagons loading and unloading bales of cloth or billets of mild steel, and a surfeit of skinny, down-at-heels men slouching, hands in pockets, from one works to another-or optimistically holding up crude signboards saying WILL WORK FOR FOOD. Some messages were universal, it seemed.

The woman with the handcart paused in the shadow of the textile mill, as if out of breath or out of energy on whatever meager rations she'd managed that morning. Her dull gaze drifted past a couple of idlers near the gates to a closed and barricaded glass factory: idlers a trifle better fed than the run of the mill, idlers wearing boots that-if she'd stopped to look-she might have noticed were suspiciously well-repaired.