Charles Stross - The Merchant’s War

"Helmut. An update on the opposition's current disposition, if you please," said the graying, distinguished-looking fellow seated at the head of the table. "Are there any indications of a change in their operational deployments?"

"Yes, your grace." Helmut-a stocky fellow in his mid-thirties with an odd pudding-bowl haircut, stood up and opened his laptop. His suit jacket flexed around muscled shoulders: he obviously worked out between meetings. "I have prepared a brief presentation to show the geographical distribution of targets..."

The video projector flickered on, showing a map of the eastern seaboard as far inland as the Appalachians, gridded out in uneven regions that bore little resemblance to state boundaries. Odd names dotted the map, vaguely Germanic, as one might expect from a Swiss lending institution. Helmut recited a list of targets and names, clicking the laptop's track pad periodically to advance through a time series of transactions. It was curiously bloodless, especially once he began discussing the losses.

"At Erkelsfjord, resistance was offered: the enemy burned the house, hanged all those of the outer family and retainers who surrendered-twenty-eight in all-then stripped the peasants and drove them into the woods, firing the village. We lost but one dead and two injured of the inner families. At Isjlmeer, quarter was -offered and accepted. The lentgrave accepted and, with his family, left the keep, whereupon he and all but two sons and one daughter were struck down by crossbow lire. The servants were flogged, stripped, and taken into slavery, but the villagers were left unharmed. The next day, a different company of light cavalry struck Nordtsman's Keep. The baron was present and had raised his levies and, forewarned, had established a defensible perimeter: he took the enemy with enfilading fire from their left flank, forcing a retreat. Total enemy casualties numbered sixty-seven bodies, plus an unknown number who escaped.

"At Giraunt Dire, the eorl emplaced his two light machine guns to either side of the bridge across the river Klee, beating off an attack by two companies of horse led by Baron Escrivain..."

The map flickered with red dots, like smallpox burning up the side of a victim's face. As the conflict progressed, dotted red arrows appeared, tracking the course of the pestilence. The litany of sharp engagements began to change, as more of the defenders-forewarned and prepared-put up an effective defense. Helmut's presentation kept a running tally in the bottom right corner of the screen, a profit and loss balance sheet denominated in gallons of blood. Finally he came to an end.

"That's the total so far. Thirty-one attacks, twenty-two successful and nine beaten off with casualties. In general, we have lost an average of two inner members per successful attack and one per successful defense; our losses of retainers and outer family members are substantially higher. The enemy has lost at least three hundred dead and probably twice that number wounded, although we cannot confirm the latter figure. The four columns appear to be converging near Neuhalle, and it is noteworthy that this one has at no time ventured further than a fifteen-mile march from one of the pretender's sworn vassals' keeps."

The projector switched off: Helmut directed a brief half-how towards the other end of the table, then sat down.

The silence lay heavy for nearly a minute after he finished speaking, the only sounds in the room the white noise of the air-conditioning and the faint scribble of pens on the notepads of a couple of the attendees. Finally, the chairman directed his gaze towards a bluff, ruddy-faced fellow in early middle age, whose luxuriant handlebar mustache was twitching so violently that it threatened to take wing. "Carl. You appear to have something on your mind. Would you care to share it with us?"

Carl glanced around the table. "It's a calculated outrage," he rumbled. "We've got to nail it fast, too, before the decree of outlawry convinces everyone that we're easy game. While we're pinned down in our houses and keeps, the pretender can run around at will, taking whichever tar-gel is cheapest. It sends entirely the wrong message. Why hasn't he been assassinated yet?"

"We've tried." The chairman stared at him coldly. "It's difficult to assassinate a target when the target is taking pains to avoid mapped killing grounds and is sleeping and working surrounded by troops. Do you have any constructive suggestions, or shall we move on?"

There was a crunching sound. Eyes swiveled towards Carl's hand, and the wreckage of what had been a Pelikan Epoch mechanical pencil. Carl grunted. "A conventional infiltrator could get close to him..."

The chairman nodded, very slightly, and a certain tension left the room. "That might work, but as you already observed, if it takes too long it doesn't buy us anything. He's already in the held, and levies are being recruited to his vassals' forces. I've had no reports of the pretender adding to his own body of men. To all intents and purposes he is surrounded by a thousand bodyguards at all times. Moreover, if we just kill him, it'll trigger a race for the succession among his vassals-and the only outcome that is guaranteed is that every last one of them will consider us a mortal threat. To resolve this problem, we're going to have to defeat his forces in detail as well as producing an heir to the throne."

"But he's refusing to concentrate where we can hit him!" Carl opened his meaty hand above his blotter: two hundred dollars' worth of pencil scattered across the pad in fragments. "We must do something to bring him to battle! Otherwise he will continue to make us look like fools!"

"You're quite right."

Carl looked up at the chairman. "Your grace?"

"I'd like to call Eorl Riordan next, Carl. Eorl Riordan, would you care to explain next week's operation to the baron?"

"Certainly, your grace." The new speaker, square-jawed and short-haired, had something of a wardroom air about himself. "On the basis of intelligence indicating that the pretender is preparing a major offensive against one of our most prominent fortifications, his grace asked me to prepare a plan for the defense of Castle Hjorth-which we have reason to believe is the most likely target-with fallback plans to ensure that our other high-value fortifications remain defensible. The resulting plan requires us to stockpile supplies at the likely targets in preparation for the arrival of a mobile reinforcement group. The reinforcement group will be based in this world, while courier elements in our Gruinmarkt assets will rotate regularly and report on their status. As soon as one of our sites goes dark, or as soon as we receive confirmation of contact from one of our scouts in the field, the reinforcement group will redeploy to the target area. The primary target, Castle Hjorth, is already locked down and defended by a platoon of outer family guards, backed up by a team of eighteen couriers on logistic support. When the enemy attacks, here's how we intend to defend ourselves..."

The dome was big.

Huw hadn't been able to grasp the scale of it at first: it was buried in the forest, and apart from the segment looming over the clear roadway, the trees had obscured its curvature. But as he studied it, moving quietly from tree trunk to deadfall as Elena and Hulius stood watch, he came to realize that it was huge. It was also very old, and looked- although he wasn't about to jump to any conclusions- abandoned.

There was a convenient fallen tree trunk about twenty meters out from the rough white dome. Huw settled down behind it, waved to the kids, and pulled out his compact binoculars and the walkie-talkie. "Yul, do you read?"

"Yes, bro." Yul sounded almost bored. "Got you covered."

"Copy," Elena added tersely.

"No features visible on the outside." Huw scanned laterally with the binoculars, looking for anything that would give him traction on the thing. "Going by the trees... I make it fifty to eighty meters in radius. Very approximate. There's green stuff on the surface. Looks rough, like concrete. I'm going to approach it when I finish talking. If anything happens I'll head towards the road. Over."

Nothing was moving. Huw took a deep breath. He was nervously aware of his heartbeat, thudding away like a bass drum: What is this doing here? All too acutely, he felt a gut-deep conviction that historic consequences might

hinge on his next actions. Helge didn't feel anything like this when she stumbled on the Wu family's world, did she? Well, probably not-but that world was inhabited, and by people who spoke a recognizable language, too. No evidence of weird climatological conditions, no strange concrete domes in ancient subarctic forests. He checked his web cam briefly, then stood up in full view of the dome.

Anticlimax: nothing happened. Well, that's a relief. The small of his back itched. He walked around the deadfall, pacing towards the dome. Close up, he realized it was bigger than he'd thought: the curve of its flank was nearly vertical at ground level, stretching away above and to either side of him like a wall. Hmm, let's see. He looked down at the base, which erupted smoothly from a tumble of ferns and decaying branches. Then he looked up. From this close, he could see the treetops diverge from the curve of the convex hull. "Scratch the size estimate, it's at least a hundred meters in radius."

A gust of wind rattled the branches above him. The top of the dome was hard to make out against the background of gray clouds. Huw shivered, then reached out and touched the dome. It was cold, with the grittiness of concrete or sandstone. He leaned close and peered at it. The surface was very smooth, but occasional pockmarks showed where it had been scarred by the surface cracking away under the chisel-like blows of ice forming in tiny fissures on its surface. Finally, he leaned against it and listened.

"I don't hear anything, and it's cold-probably at ambient temperature. I think it's empty, possibly abandoned. I'm going to proceed around it, clockwise."

The direction he'd chosen took him downslope, away from the road. He walked very slowly, pausing frequently, taking care not to look back. If someone was observing him, he didn't want to tip them off to Yul and Elena's presence. The dome extended, intact, curving gradually away from the road. In places, trees had grown

up against it, roots scrabbling for purchase in the poor soil. It took Huw a quarter of an hour to realize that none Of them had actually levered their way into the concrete or stone or whatever the dome was made of. "It's not quite a flawless finish," he reported, "but I've got a hunch it's been here a very long time." He rubbed his gloved hands together to warm them: there was a distinct bite in the air, and the gusts were growing more frequent.

In the end, the hole in the dome came as a surprise to Huw. He'd been expecting some sort of opening, low down on the slope: or perhaps a gatehouse of some sort. But one moment he was walking around the huge, curving Hank of the thing, and the next moment the curved edge of the dome disappeared, as if a giant the size of the Goodyear blimp had taken a huge bite out of it. Huw slopped for a minute, inspecting the edge of the hole with his binoculars. "The opening starts at ground level and extends two thirds of the way to the top of the dome. Must be at least fifty meters wide. I'm going closer... the edge looks almost melted." He looked down. The trees were thinner on the ground, shorter, and the ground itself fell away in front of the opening, forming a shallow howl. Like a crater, he realized. Hey -a trickle of water emerged from the shadowy interior of the dome, feeding down a muddy, overgrown channel into a pond in the depression. The pond was almost circular. Something cracked the dome open. Something from -he walked away from the opening, trying to get a perspective on it- something firing downwards, from above.