Charles Stross - The Family Trade

She put the gun down on the bedside table.

“Listen, Chateau Rothschild ‘98. Sound all right to you?” He brandished the bottle.

“Sounds perfect. Open it now, dammit, I need a drink!”

He peered at her. “You do, at that,” he said. “One moment…” He popped the cork carefully, then slowly filled two fluted glasses, taking care not to spray the champagne everywhere. He passed her a glass, then raised his own. ‘To your very good health.”

‘To us-and the future.” She took a sip. “Whatever the hell that means.”

“You were telling me about Olga.”

“Olga and I had a little conversation at cross-purposes. She was raised to never unintentionally cause offence, so she gave me time to confess before she shot me. Luckily, I confessed to the wrong crime. Did you know that you’re an, uh, ‘dried-up prematurely middle-aged sack of mannered stupidity’? She doesn’t want to marry you-trust me on this.”

“Well, it’s mutual.” Roland sat in the chair opposite the end of the bed, looking disturbed. “Have you any idea how the man got into her apartments?”

“Yup. Through my own, by way of the roof. Turns out that the rooms Baron Oliver assigned me aren’t doppelgangered-or rather they are, but the location on this side is unprotected. And aren’t I supposed to have bodyguards or something? Anyway, that’s why I came here. I figured it was safer than spending the night in an apartment that has a neon sign on the door saying assassins this way, with cousins next door who seem to have opened a betting pool on my life expectancy.”

“Someone tried to rape Olga?” Roland shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense to me.”

“It does if I was their first target and they meant to kill me, but couldn’t get at me directly: it was a contingency plan, to set up a blood feud between us.” Briefly, she told him about the open staircase, and her instructions to lock and bolt all the doors on the inside. “I don’t feel safe there, I really don’t.”

“Hmm.” He took a mouthful of wine. “I don’t know.” He looked thoughtful rather than shocked. “I can eliminate some suspects, but not everybody.” He glanced up at her, worry writ large across his face. “First, it’s not official. It’s family, not Clan business. If it was the Clan, they’d have sent soldiers. You’ve seen what we’ve got over here.” She nodded. “Our enforcement teams-you don’t bother resisting.

They’re better armed, better trained, and better paid than the FBI’s own specialist counterterrorism units.”

“Well, I guessed that much,” she said.

“Yes. Anyway, for seconds it’s too damned blatant-and that’s worrying. Whoever did it is out of control. Oliver Hjorth might dislike you and feel threatened, but he wouldn’t try to kill you in his own house. Not offering you a guard of honour is another matter, but to be implicated-no.” He shook his head. “As for Olga, that’s very disturbing. It sounds as if someone set her up to kill you or cause a scandal that would isolate you-one or the other. And you are probably right about being the intruder’s first target. That means it’s an insider-and that’s the frightening part. Someone who knows that you don’t know the families well, that you can be cut apart from the pack and isolated, that you are unguarded. Someone like that, who is acting like they’re out of control. A rogue, in other words.”

“Well, no shit, Sherlock.” She drained her glass and refilled it. “Y’know something? One of these days we may eventually make an investigative journalist out of you.”

“In your dreams-I’m a development economist.” He frowned at the floor in front of her feet, as if it concealed an answer. “Let’s start from where we are. You’ve told Olga about us. That means if we’re lucky she doesn’t tell Angbard. If she does, if Olga tells him about us, he could-do you have any idea what he could do?”

“What?” She shook her head. “Listen, Roland, I didn’t grow up under the Clan’s thumb. Thinking this way is alien to me. I don’t really give a flying fuck what Angbard thinks. If I behave the way they seem to expect me to, I will be dead before the week is out. And if I survive, things won’t be much better for me. The Clan is way out of date and overdue for a dose of compulsory modernization, both at the business level and the personal. If the masked maniac doesn’t succeed in murdering me, the Clan will expect me to go live like a medieval noble lady-fuck that! I’m not going to do it. I’ll live with the consequences later.”

“You’re-” he swallowed. “Miriam.” He held out his arms to her. “You’re strong, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve been trying to resist the pressure for years. It doesn’t work. The Clan will get you to do what they want you to do in the end. I spent years trying to get them to do something-land reform on their estates, educating the peasants, laying the groundwork for industrialization. All I got was shit. There are deeply entrenched political groupings within the Clan who don’t want to see any modernization, because it threatens their own source of power-access to imported goods. And outside the Clan, there are the traditional nobility, not to mention the Crown, who are just waiting for the Clan nobility to make a misstep. Jealousy is a strong motivating force, especially among the recently rich. If Angbard hadn’t stood up for me, I’d have had my estate forfeited. I might even have been declared outlaw-don’t you see?” There was anguish in his eyes.

“Frankly, no. What I see is a lot of frightened people, none of whom particularly like the way things work, but all of whom think they’ll lose out if anyone else disrupts it. And you know something? They’re wrong and I don’t want to be part of that. You’ve been telling me that I can’t escape the Clan, and I’m afraid you’re right-you’ve convinced me-but that only means I’ve got to change things. To carve out a niche I can live with.” She stood up and walked toward him. “I don’t like the way the families live like royalty in a squalid mess that doesn’t even have indoor plumbing. I don’t like the way their law values people by how they can breed and treats women like chattels. I don’t like the way the outer family feel the need to defend the status quo in order to keep from being kicked in the teeth by the inner families. The whole country is ripe for modernization on a massive scale, and the Clan actually has the muscle to do that, if they’d just realize it. I don’t like the dehumanizing poverty the ordinary people have to live with, and I don’t like the way the crazy fucked-up feudal inheritance laws turn an accident of birth into an excuse for rape and murder. But most of all, I don’t like what they’ve done to you.”

She leaned down and pulled him up by the shoulders, forcing him to stand in front of her. “Look at me,” she insisted. “What do you see?”

Roland looked up at her sceptically. “Do you really think you can take them all on?”

“On my own?” She snorted. “I know I can,” she said fiercely. “All it takes is a handful of people who believe that things can change to start the ball rolling. And that handful has to start somewhere! Now are you with me or against me?”

He hugged her right back, and she felt another response: He was stiffening against her, through his robe. “You’re the best thing that’s happened to me in years. If ever. I don’t want to lose you.”^

“Me too, love.”

“But how do you think you’re going to make it work?” he asked. “And stop whoever’s trying to kill you.”

“Oh, that.” She leaned into his arms, letting him pull her back in the direction of the bed. “That’s going to be easy. When you strip away the breeding program, the Clan is a business, right? Family-owned partnership, private shareholdings. Policy is set at annual meetings twice a year, next one at Beltaigne, that sort of thing.”