Charles Stross - The Merchant’s War

"Ri- ight," drawled Rich. Judith glared at him, keeping her face frozen. That's right, I'm a woman in black from a secret government agency, she thought. I've got no sense of humor and you better not get in my way. Even i f the black outfit was a wind cheater with a big FBI logo, and a pair of 501s.

The cop recoiled slightly. "Hey, what's up with you guys?"

"You have no need to know." Judith relented slightly. "Seriously. You won't read about this In the newspapers, but you've done a good job here today." She winced slightly as another sledgehammer blow spalled chips off the edge of the hole in the wall. Which was growing now, to the point where a greased anorexic supermodel might be able to wriggle through. A large slab of wall fell inward, doubling the size of the hole. "Ah, showtime. If you guys could get the jack into position and then clear the area I think we will take it from here." If only Mike Fleming was about. This is his fault, she thought venomously.

Ten minutes later the big orange jack was screwed light against the top of the opening, keeping the cinder blocks above the hole from collapsing. The SWAT team was outside in the parking lot, packing their kit up and shooting random wild-assed guesses about what the hell it was they'd been called in to do, and why: Judith glanced at the wristwatch-shaped gadget strapped to her left wrist and nodded. It was still clean, showing background count of about thirty becquerels per second. A tad high for suburban Boston, but nothing that couldn't be accounted for by the fly ash mixed into the cinder blocks. The idea of wearing a Geiger counter like a wristwatch still gave her the cold shudders when she thought about it, but that wasn't so often these days, not after three weeks of it- and besides, it was better than the alternative.

A big gray truck was backing in to the lot tail-first. Rich waved directions to the driver, as if he needed them: the truck halted with a chuff of air brakes, live feet short of the open door to the small warehouse unit. The tailgate rattled up to reveal a scene right out of The X-Files -half a dozen men and women in bright orange inflatable space suits with oxygen tanks and black rubber gloves, wheeling carts loaded with laboratory instruments. They queued up in front of the tail lift. "Is the area clear?" Judith's earpieces crackled.

She glanced around. "Witnesses out." The SWAT team was already rolling up the highway a quarter of a mile away. They were far enough away that if things went really badly they might even survive.

"Okay, we're coming in." That was Dr. Lucius Rand, tall and thin, graying at the temples, seconded to the Family Trade Organization from his parent organization. Just like Judith, like Mike Fleming, like everyone else in FTO- only in his case, the parent organization was Pantex. He was in his late fifties. Rumor had it he'd studied at Ted Taylor's knee; Edward Teller had supervised his Ph.D. The tailgate lift ground into operation, space-suited figures descending to planet Earth.

"We haven't checked for booby traps yet," she warned.

"Well, what are you wailing for?" Rand sounded impatient.

Judith nodded to Rich as she pulled on a pair of disposable plastic shoe protectors: "Let's go inside."

The hole in the wall was about two feet wide and three feet high, a jagged gash. She switched on her torch-a tiny pocket LED lantern, more powerful than a big cop-style Maglite-and swept the floor. There were no wires. Good. She ducked through the hole, coughing slightly. Her Geiger watch still ticked over normally. Better. She stood up and looked around.

The room was maybe twenty feet long and eight feet wide, with a ten-foot ceiling. Naked unpainted cinder block walls, a galvanized tin ceiling, and a concrete floor completed the scene. There was a big rolling door at one end and dust everywhere. But what caught her attention was the sheer size of the cylinder that, standing on concrete blocks, dominated the room. "Sweet baby Jesus," she whispered. It was at least ten feet long, and had to be a good four feet in diameter. There was barely room to walk around the behemoth. She shone her torch along the cylinder, expecting to see-"what the hell?" "Herz, report! What have you seen?" "It's a cylinder," she said slowly. "About ten, twelve feet long, four, five feet in diameter. Supported on concrete blocks. One end is rounded; there's some kind of collar about three feet from the other end and four vanes sticking out, sort of like the fins on 'a bomb..." She trailed off. Like the fins on a bomb, she thought, dazed. Jesus, this can't be here! She shook herself and continued, "there's some kind of equipment trolley near the back end, and some wires going into the, the back of the bomb." She glanced down at her watch. The second hand was spinning round. It was a logarithmic counter, and it had jumped from tens of becquerels per second to tens of thousands as she crossed the threshold. Gamma emission from secondary activation isotopes created by neutron absorption, she heard the lecture replay in her mind's eye; Geiger counters can't detect neutrons until the flux is way too high for safety, but over lime a neutron source will tend to activate surrounding materials. "I'm reading secondaries. I think we've got a hot one. I'm coming out now." A quick sweep across the screen door in front of the gadget's nose revealed no telltale trip wires. "No sign of booby traps."

"Acknowledged. Judith, I want you and Rich to go back into the van and wait while I do a preliminary site survey. Don't touch anything on your way out. I want you to know, you've done good." She realized she was shaking. Don't touch anything. Right. She clambered out through the hole in the wall, blinking against the daylight, and stood aside as two figures in bright orange isolation suits duckwalked past her. The cylinders hanging from their shoulders bounced under their rubber covers like hugely obese buttocks as they bent down to crawl through the hole. Two more suits waved her down with radiation detectors and stripped off her shoe protectors before pronouncing her clean and waving her into the truck.

The back of the NIRT truck was crowded with eon-soles and flashing panels of blinkenlights, battered lap-lops plastered with security inventory stickers, and coat rails for the bulky orange suits. This was a NIRT survey wagon, not the defuse-and-disarm trailer-those guys would be along in a while, as soon as Dr. Rand confirmed he needed them. Too many NIRT vehicles in one parking lot might attract the wrong kind of attention, especially in these days of Total Information Awareness and paranoia about security, not to mention closed-circuit cameras everywhere and journalists with web access spreading rumors. And rumors that NIRT were breaking into a lockup in Boston would be just the icing on a fifty-ton cake of

shit if Homeland Security had to take the fall for a botched Family Trade operation. Rumors of any kind about NIRT would likely trigger a public panic, a run on the Dow, and a plague of boils inside the Beltway.

"Coffee?" asked Rich, picking up a vacuum flask. "Yes, please." Judith yawned, suddenly becoming aware that she felt tired. "I don't believe what I just saw. I just hope it turns out to be some kind of sick prank." Low-level lab samples of something radioactive stashed in an aluminum cylinder knocked together in an auto body shop, that would do it. But it can't be, she realized. Nobody would be that crazy, just for a joke. Charges of wasting police time didn't even begin to cover it. And it wasn't as if some prankster had tried to draw attention to the lockup: quite the opposite, in fact.

"Like hell. That thing had fins like a fifty-six Caddy. I swear I was expecting to see Slim Pickens riding it down..." Don poured a dose of evil-looking coffee into a cup and passed it to her. "Think it'll go off?"

"Not now," Judith said with a confidence she didn't feel. "Dr. Strangelove and his merry men are going over it with their stethoscopes." There was a chair in front of one of the panels of blinkenlights and she sat down on it. "But something about this whole setup feels wrong."

Her earphone bleeped, breaking her out of the introspective haze. "Yes?" she asked, keying the throat pickup.

"Judith, I think you'd better come back in. Don't bother suiting up, it's safe for now, but there's bad news along with the good."

"On my way." She put her coffee down. "Wait here," she told Rich, who nodded gratefully and took her place in the swivel chair.

When she straightened up inside the warehouse she found it bright and claustrophobic, the air heavy with masonry dirt and the dust of years of neglect. It reminded her of a raid on a house in Queens she'd been in on, years ago: one the mob had been using to store counterfeit memory chips. Someone here had found the long-dead light fitting and replaced the bulb. Seen in proper light, the finned cylinder looked more like a badly made movie prop than a bomb. Two figures in orange inflatable suits hunched over the open tail of the gadget, while another was busy taking a screwdriver to the fascia of the instrument cart that was wired into it. Dr. Rand stepped around the rounded front of the cylinder: "Ah, Agent Herz. As I said, I've got good news and bad news." There was an unhealthy note of relish in his voice.

Judith gestured towards the far end of the lockup from the NIRT team operatives working on the ass-end of the bomb. "Tell me everything I need to know."

Rand followed her then surprised Judith by unzipping his hood and throwing it back across his shoulders. He reached down to his waist and turned off the hissing air supply. His face was flushed and what there was of his hair hung in damp locks alongside his face. "Hate these things," he said conversationally. "It's not going to go off," he added.

"Well, that's a relief." She raised an eyebrow. "So, is this the one?"

"That would be the bad news." Rand frowned. "Let me give it to you from the top."

"Be my guest." Sarcasm was inappropriate, she realized, but the relief-

"I've met this puppy before," said Rand. "It's a B53-Y2. We built a bunch of them in the sixties. It's a free-fall bomb, designed to be hauled around by strategic bomber, and it's not small-the physics package weighs about six thousand pounds. It's an oralloy core, high-purity weapons-grade uranium rather than plutonium, uses lithium deuteride to supply the big bang. We originally made a few hundred, but all but twenty-five were dismantled decades ago. It's basically the same as the warhead on the old Titan-II, designed to level Leningrad in one go. The good news is, it won't go off. The tritium booster looks to be well past its sell-by date and the RDX is thoroughly poisoned by neutron bombardment, so the best you'd get would be a fizzle." He looked pensive. "Of course, what I mean by a fizzle is relative. A B53 that's been properly maintained is good for about nine megatons-this one would probably top off at no more than a quarter megaton or so, maybe half a megaton."

"Half a- " Her knees went weak. She stumbled, caught herself leaning against the nose of the hydrogen bomb, and recoiled violently. A quarter of a megaton? The flash would be visible in New York City: the blast would blow out windows in Providence. "But-"

"Calm down, it's not going to happen. We've already made sure of that." "Oh. Okay." Jesus. If that's the good news- "Funny thing about the timer, though," Rand said meditatively. "Sloppy wiring, dry joints where they soldered it to... well, the battery ran down a long time ago. Judging by the dust it's been there for years." "Timer?"

"Yes." Rand shook himself. "It was on a timer," he explained. "Should have gone off ages ago, taking Boston and most of Cambridge with it. Probably back during the Bush I or Reagan administrations, at a guess. Maybe even earlier."