Charles Stross - The Merchant’s War

A little further up the road, a shabby vendor with a baked potato stand was watching another boarded-up building. The woman's gaze slid past him, too. After a minute or so she began to put one weary foot in front of another, and pushed her cart along the sidewalk towards the boarded-up works.

As she hunched over the handles of her cart, Miriam rubbed her wrist and squinted at the small pocket watch she'd wound around it. Any minute now, she told herself, half-sick with worry. The last time she'd tried something like this she'd ended up in Baron Henryk's custody, guarded by cold-faced killers and under sentence of death. If she was wrong about the watchers, if there were more of them, this could end up just as badly.

From the alleyway running alongside the boarded-up workshop there was a crash and a tinkle of broken glass. Miriam shuffled slowly along, overtly oblivious as the potato-vendor left his stand and strolled towards the side of the building. Behind him the two idlers she'd tagged began to walk briskly in the opposite direction, setting up a pincer on the other end of the alley. She felt a Hash of triumph. Now all it would take was for the street kids Erasmus had paid to do their job...

The watchers were out of sight. Miriam dropped the handles of her cart, grabbed her suitcase, and darted towards the workshop's office doorway. A heavy seal and a length of rope held the splintered main door closed with the full majesty of the law, and not a lot besides: she grimaced and tugged hard at the seal, ducking inside as the door groaned and threatened to collapse on her. One minute only, she told herself. It might take them longer to work out that the urchins were a distraction, but she wasn't betting on it.

Inside the entrance the building was dark and still, and cold-at least, as cold as anything got at this time of year. Moving fast, with an assurance born of having worked here for months, Miriam darted round the side of the walled-off office and felt for the door handle. It had always been loose, and her personal bet-that the Polis wouldn't lock up inside a building they were keeping under surveillance-paid off. The door handle flexed as she stepped inside her former office, raising her suitcase as a barrier.

She needn't have bothered. There was nobody wailing for her: nothing but the dusty damp smell of an unoccupied building. The high wooden stools lay adrift on the floor under a humus of scattered papers and overturned drawers. A Hash of anger: The bastards didn't need to do this, did they? But in a way it made things easier for her. Dealing with a stakeout by the secret police hereabouts was trivially easy compared to sneaking her laptop out past Morgan and making a clean getaway.

Thirty seconds. The nape of her neck was itching. Miriam stumbled across the overturned furniture, then bent down, fumbling in the leg well below one scribe's position. The hidden compartment under the desk was still there: her hands closed on the wooden handle and pulled down and forward to open it. It slid out reluctantly, scraping loudly. She tugged hard, almost stumbling as it came out and the full weight of its contents landed on her arms.

The suitcase was on the floor. Forty-five seconds. She fumbled with the buckles for a heart-stopping moment, but finally the lid opened. Scooping the contents out of the hidden drawer-the feel of cold plastic slick against her fingertips-she swept them into the pile of bundled clothing within, then grabbed the bag by its handles. There was no time to buckle it closed: she picked it up in one hand and scurried back into the body of the empty works.

One minute. Was that a shout from outside? Miriam glanced briefly at the front door. Doesn't matter, she thought: they'll work it out soon enough. Moving by dead reckoning, her free hand stretched out to touch the wall beside her, she headed deeper into the building, following the deepening shadows. Another turn and the shadows began to lighten. At the end of the corridor she turned left and the grimy daylight lifted, showing her the dust and damage that had been brought to bear on her business, in the name of the law and by the neglect of her peers. It was heartbreaking, and she stopped, briefly unable to go on. I'll rebuild it, she told herself. Somehow. The most important tools were in her suitcase, after all.

Then she heard them. A bang from the front door, low-pitched male voices, hunters casting around for the scent. Burgeson's distraction had worked its purpose, but if she didn't hurry, it would be all for nothing. Grimly determined, Miriam stepped into the abandoned workshop and gripped her suitcase. Standing beneath the skylight, she pulled the locket out of her pocket and narrowed her eyes, focusing on it and clearing her mind of everything else as the police agents stumbled towards her through the darkness.

This is it, she told herself. No more nice-guy Miriam. Next time someone tries to do this to me, I'm not going to let them live long enough to regret it.

And then the world changed.

Huw slept badly after he finished drafting the e-mail report to the duke. It wasn't simply the noises Yul and Elena were making, although that was bad enough-young love, he reflected, was at its worst when there wasn't enough to go round-but the prospects of what he was going to have to face on the morrow kept him awake long after the other had fallen asleep.

A new world. There couldn't be any other explanation for the meteorological readings. Temperatures that low, that kind of subarctic coniferous forest, hadn't been found in this part of the world since the last of the ice ages. The implications were enormous. For starters, this was the second new world that the Wu family's knotwork could take a world-walker to. What happens if I use the original knot, from somewhere in this fourth world? Probably it takes me to yet another... even without discovering new topologies, ownership of both knotwork designs implied access to a lot more than three, or even lour, worlds. The knots define a positional transformation in a higher order space. Like the moves of different pieces on a chessboard-able to go forward or backward, but if you used your bishop to make a move in one direction, then swapped your bishop for a rook, you could go somewhere else. It meant everything was up for grabs.

For over a century the Clan's grandees had doppelgangered their houses-building defenses in the other world they knew of, to protect their residences from stealthy attack-without realizing that the Wu family could attack them from a third world. Now there was a fourth, and probably a fifth, a sixth... where would it end? Our core defensive strategy has just been made obsolete, overnight. And that wasn't the worst of it. The Wu family knot was a simple mistake, the lower central whorl superimposed over the front of the ascending spiral, rather than hidden behind it. There would be other topologies, encoding different positional transformations. That much seemed clear to Huw, although he'd had to limit his forays into Mathematica to half an hour per day-trying to work out the knot structure was a guaranteed fast-track route to a migraine. There will be other worlds.

He lay awake long after Yul and Elena had dozed off, staring at the ceiling, daydreaming about exploration and all the disasters that could befall an unwary world-walker. We'll need oxygen masks. (What if some of the worlds had never evolved photosynthesis, so that life was a thin scum of sulfur-reducing bacteria clustered around volcanic vents, at the bottom of a thick blanket of nitrogen and ammonia?) Trickster-wife, we may need space suits. (What if the planet itself had never formed?) Need to map the coastlines and relief, see if plate tectonics evolves de-terministically in all worlds...

He blinked at the sunlight streaming in through the

front window. How had it gotten to be morning? His mouth tasted of cobwebs and dust, but his head was clear. "Gaah." There was no point pretending to sleep.

Someone was singing as he wandered through into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. It was Elena: she'd found the stash of kitchenware and was filling the coffee maker, warbling one of the more salacious passages of a famous saga to herself with-to Huw-a deeply annoying air of smug satisfaction.

"Humph." He rummaged in the cupboard for a glass but came up with a chipped coffee mug instead. Rinsing it under the cold water tap, he asked, "Ready to face the day?"

"Oh yes!" She trilled, closing up the machine. She turned and grinned at him impishly. "It's a wonderful day to ex-' plore a new world, don't you think?"

"Just as long as we don't leave our bones there." Huw took a gulp of the slightly brackish tap water. "Yuck." Ease up, she's just being exuberant, he told himself. "Where's Yul?"

"He's still getting dressed-" She remembered herself and Hushed. "He'll be down in a minute."

"Good." Huw pressed his lips together to keep from laughing. Memo to self: do not taunt little brother's girlfriend, little brother will be tetchy. "Coffee would be good, too, thanks," he added.

"What are we going to do today?" she asked, eyes widening slightly.

"Hmm. Depends."

"I was thinking about doing breakfast." rumbled Hulius, from the doorway.

"That- " Huw brightened "-sounds like a great idea. Got to wait for the duke's say-so before we continue, anyway," he added. "Breakfast first, then we can get ready for a camping trip."

Huw drove into town carefully, hunting for the diner he'd spotted the day before. He steered the youngsters to a booth at the back before ordering a huge breakfast-fried eggs, bacon, half a ton of hash browns, fried tomatoes, and a large mug of coffee. "Go on, pig out," he told Elena and Hulius, "you're going to be sorry you didn't later."

"Why should I?" asked Elena, as the waitress ambled off towards the kitchen. "I'll be sorry if I'm fat and ugly before my wedding night!"

Huw glanced at his brother: Yul was studiously silent, but Huw could just about read his mind. Not the sharpest knife in the box... "We're going back to the forest," Huw explained laboriously, "and we're staying there for at least one night, maybe two, in a tent. It's going to be very cold. Your body burns more calories when you're cold."

"Oh!" She glared at him. "Men!" Yul winked at him, then froze as the waitress reappeared with a jug of coffee. "No sense of humor," she humphed.

"Okay, so we're humor-impaired" Huw started on his hash browns. "Listen, we-" he paused until the waitress was out of earshot "-it depends what orders we receive, alright? It's possible his grace will tell me to sit tight until he can send a support team... but I don't think it's likely. From what I can gather, we're shorthanded everywhere and anyone who isn't essential is being pulled in for the corvee, supporting security operations, or running interference. So my best bet is, he'll read my report and say 'carry on.' But until I get confirmation of that, we're not going across."

Elena stabbed viciously at her solitary fried egg. "To what end are we going?"

"To see if that stuff Yul found really is the remains of a roadbed. To look around and get some idea of the vegetation, so I can brief a real tree doctor when we've got time to talk to one. To plant a weather station and seismograph. To very quietly see if there's any sign of inhabitation. To boldly go where no Clan explorer has gone before. Is that enough to start with?"

"Eh." Yul paused with his coffee mug raised. "That's a lot to bite off."