Charles Stross - The Merchant’s War

The fridge was no more full than it had been the day before, but the grocery bag Smith had dumped in the kitchen turned out to be full of honest-to-god groceries, a considerate touch that startled Mike when he discovered it. He might be a hyperactive hard-ass, but at least he cares about his people, Mike decided. He fixed himself a breakfast of bagels and cream cheese and black coffee, then tried to catch up on the lighter housework, running some clothes through the washing machine and doing battle with the shower again-this time more successfully. I must be getting better, he told himself optimistically.

Around noon, he got out of the house for a couple of hours, driven stir-crazy by the daytime TV. It took him nearly ten minutes to get the car seat adjusted, and an hour of hobbling around Barnes and Noble and a couple of grocery stores left him feeling like he'd run a marathon, but he made it home uneventfully. Then he discovered that he hadn't figured on carrying the grocery sacks and bag of books and magazines up the front steps. He ended up so exhausted that by the time he got the last bag in and closed the door he was about ready to drop. He hobbled into the lounge clutching the bookbag, and lowered the bag onto the coffee table before he realized the lounger was already occupied.

"So, Mr. Fleming! We meet again." She giggled, ruining the effect. It was unnecessary, in any case: the pistol in her lap more than made up for her lack of menace.

"Jesus!" He staggered, nearly losing his balance.

"Relax. I do not intend to shoot you. Are you well?"

"I'm- " He bit back his first angry response. What are you doing in my house? That question was the elephant in the living room: but it wasn't one he felt like asking the Russian princess directly, not while she was holding a gun on him. "No, not very." He shuffled towards the sofa and lowered himself down into it. "I'm tired. Been shopping," he added, redundantly. And how did you get past Judith's watch team? "What brings you here?"

"Patricia sent me to see how you were," she explained, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for killer grannies from another dimension to send their ice-blonde hit-woman bodyguards to check up on him. "She was concerned that you might be unwell-your leg was hard to keep clean in the carriage."

"Yeah, right." Mike snorted. "She's got nothing but my best interests at heart."

Olga leaned forward, her eyes wide: "It is the truth, you know! You will be of little use to us if you die of battle fever. Are you well?"

"I'm as well as-"he bit back the words, any man facing an armed home intruder -"can be expected. Spent a couple of days in hospital. Off work for the next several weeks." He paused. "Getting about. A bit."

"Good." Olga sat back, then made the pistol disappear: "Excuse me." She looked apologetic. "Until I was sure it was you..."

"Thai's alright," Mike assured her gravely. "I quite understand. We're all paranoids together here." A thought struck him. "How did you get in?"

She smiled. "Your housekeeper is taking the day off."

"Ah." Shit. Mike had a sharp urge to bang his head on the wall. Who's staking who out? Of course, she'd had time to set everything up while he was in hospital; possibly even before they'd dropped him back in the right universe. The Russian princess and her world-walking friends could have been watching his apartment for days before Herz and her team moved in to set up their own surveillance op. They don't work like the Mafia, they work like a government, he recalled. A feudal government. "So Pat-what did you call her? Sent you to check up on me. I thought she was going to mail me instead?"

"Your mail is being intercepted," Olga pointed out. "Consequently, we felt it besl to talk to you in person. There is mail, too, and you can respond to it if you wish. Have you reported to your liege yet?"

"Have I?" The sense of grinding gears was back: Mike forced himself to translate. "Uh, yes." He nodded, stupidly. "I have a cellular phone for you. It's off the official record. There's a preprogrammed number in if that goes direct to my boss's boss. He's authorized to negotiate, and if necessary he can talk to the top. Office of the Vice President. But it's all deniable, as I understand things." He pointed at the paper bag on the side table. "It's in there."

Olga didn't move. "What guarantee have we that as soon as we dial the number, you assassins won't locate the caller? Or that there isn't a bomb in the earpiece?"

"That's- " Mike swallowed. "Don't be silly."

"I'm not being silly. Just prudent." She reached out and took the bag, removed the phone, and started to fiddle with the case. "We'll be in touch. Probably not with this telephone, however."

"There are certain requirements," Mike added.

"What?" She froze, holding the battery cover in one hand.

"The sample that Matthias provided." He watched her minutely. "I'm told they're willing to negotiate with you. But there's an absolute precondition. Matt told us he'd planted a bomb, on a timer. We want it disarmed, and we want the pit. If it goes off, there's no deal-not now, not ever."

Olga's expression shifted slightly. Ship's not a poker player, Mike realized. "A time bomb? I understand that is not good, but what do your lords think we can do about such a thing? Surely it's no more than a minor..." She trailed off. "What kind of bomb?"

Mike said nothing, but raised an eyebrow.

"Why would he plant a bomb?" she persisted. "I don't see what he could possibly hope to achieve."

Too much subtlety, maybe. "He brought a sample of plutonium with him when he wanted to get our attention. It worked."

"A sample of ploo-what?" Her expression of polite incomprehension would have been hilarious in any other context.

"Oh, come on! What world did you-" Mike slopped dead. Whoops. "You're serious, aren't you?"

"I don't understand what you're talking about," she said coolly.

He boggled for a moment, as understanding sank in. She's not from around these parts, is she? "Do you know what an atom bomb is?"

"An atom bomb?" She looked interested. "I've seen them in films. An ingenious fiction, I thought." Pause. "Are you telling me they're real?"

"Uh." You're really not from around here, are you? On the other hand, if you stopped a random person in a random third-world country and asked them about atom bombs and how they worked, what kind of answer would you get? He licked his lips. "They're real, all right. Matthias had a sample of plutonium." No sign of recognition. "That's the, the explosive they run on. It's very tightly controlled. Even though the amount he had is nothing like enough to make a bomb, it caused a major panic. Then he claimed to actually have a bomb. We want it. Or we want the rest of your plutonium, and we want to know exactly how and where you got it so that we can verify there's no more missing. That's a nonnegotiable precondition for any further talks."

"Huh." She frowned. "You are serious about this. How bad could such a bomb really be? I saw The Sum of All Fears but that bomb was so magically powerful-"

"The real thing is worse than that." Mike swallowed. He'd spent the past couple of weeks deliberately not thinking about Mall's threat, trying to convince himself it was a bluff: but Judith had told him about the broken nightmare they'd found in the abandoned warehouse, and it wasn't helping him get to sleep.

"Assuming Matthias wasn't bluffing, and planted a real atom bomb near Faneuil Hall. Make it a small one. Imagine it goes off right now." He gestured at the window. "It's miles away, but it'd still blow the glass in, and if you were looking at it directly, it would burn your eyes out. You'd feel the heal on your skin, like sticking your head into an open oven door. And that's all the way out here." If it was the size of the one Judith found, Boston and Cambridge would be a smoking hole in the coastline-but multi-megaton H-bombs weren't likely to go world-walking and were in any ease unlikely to explode if they weren't maintained properly. "We don't want to lose Boston. More importantly, you don't want us to lose Boston. Because if we do -"he noticed that she was looking pale "-you saw the reaction to 9/11, didn't you? I guarantee you that if someone nukes one of our cities, the response will be a thousand times worse."

"I- I don't know." The Russian princess was clearly rattled: "I was not aware of this. This bomb that Matthias claimed to-I don't know about it." She shook her head. "I will have to tell Patricia. We'll have to investigate."

"You will? No shit." Mike didn't even try to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. "This other faction in your clan-if it's theirs, they're playing with lire. Maybe they don't understand that."

She finished extracting the battery from the mobile phone. "You said that this, it goes to the vice president?" "To one of his staff," Mike corrected her. "We'll be in touch." She slid it into a pocket gingerly, as if it might explode. "I will see you later." She stood up briskly and walked into the front hall, and between one footstep and the next she vanished.

Mike stared at the empty passage for a moment, then shook his head. The shakes would cut in soon, but for now all he could feel was a monstrous sense of irony. "What a mess," he muttered. Then he reached for the phone and dialed Colonel Smith's number.

The dome was huge, arching overhead like the wall of a sports stadium or the hull of a grounded Zeppelin. Small, stunted trees grew in the gap in its wall, their trunks narrow and tilted towards the thin light. Mud and rubble had drifted into the opening over the years, and the dripping trickle of water suggested more damage deep inside. Huw shuffled forward with arthritic caution, poking his Geiger counter at the ground, the rocks, the etiolated trees-treating everything as if it might be explosive, or poisonous, or both. The results were reassuring, a menacing crackle that rarely reached the level of a sixty-cycle hum, much less the whining squeal of real danger.

As he neared the dribble of water, Huw knelt and held the counter just above its surface. The snap and pop of stray radiation events stayed low. "The pool outside the dome is hot, and the edges of the dome are nasty, but the stream inside isn't too bad," be explained to his microphone. "If the dome's leaky, the stream probably washed most of the hot stuff out of it ages ago." He looked up. "This place feels old"

Old, but still radioactive? He felt like scratching his head. Really dangerous fallout was mostly dangerous precisely because it decayed very rapidly. If what had happened here was as old as it felt, then most of the stuff should have decayed long ago. The activity in the dome's edge was perplexing.

"You want a light, bro?"

Huw glanced over his shoulder. Yul was holding out the end of a huge, club-like Maglite. "Thanks," he said, shuffling the Geiger counter around so that he could heft the flashlight in his right hand. He pressed the button just as a cold flake of snow drifted onto his left cheek. "We don't have long."

"It's creepy in here," Elena commented as he swung the light around. For once, Huw found nothing to disagree with in her opinion. The structures the dome had protected were in ruins. A flat apron of magic concrete peeped through the dirt in places, but the buildings- rectangular or cylindrical structures, rarely more than two or three stories high-were mostly shattered, roofs torn off, walls punched down. Their builders hadn't been big on windows (although several of them sported gaping doorways). The skeletal wreckage of metal gantries and complex machinery lay around the buildings. Some of them had been connected by overhead pipes, and long runs of rust-colored ductwork wrapped around some of the buildings like giant snakes. "It looks like a chemical works that's been bombed."