Charles Stross - The Hidden Family

“Where are you going?” asked Olga.

“Follow.” Miriam pushed on.

“Eh, I say! Young woman!”

A man Miriam didn’t recognize, bulky and gray-haired, was blocking her way. Evidently he wanted to buttonhole her. She smiled blandly. “If you don’t mind, sir, there’ll be time to talk later. But I urgently need to have words with—” She gestured as she slid past him, leaving Kara to soothe ruffled feathers, and shoved the door open.

“Ma!”

It was a small side room, sparsely furnished by Clan standards. Iris looked around as she heard Miriam. Angbard looked round, too, as did a cadaverous-looking fellow with long white hair who had been hunched slightly, on the receiving end of some admonition.

“Helge,” Angbard began, in a warning tone of voice.

“Mother!” Miriam glared at Iris, momentarily oblivious.

“Hiya, kid.” Iris grinned tiredly. “Allow me to introduce you to another of your relatives. Henryk? I’d like to present my daughter.” Iris winked at Angbard: “Cut her a little slack, alright?”

The man who’d been listening to Angbard tilted his head on one shoulder. “Charmed,” he said politely.

The duke coughed into a handkerchief and cast Miriam a grim look. “You should be circulating,” he grumbled.

“Henryk was always my favorite uncle,” Iris said, glancing at the duke. “I mean, there had to be one of them, didn’t there?”

Miriam paused uncomfortably, unwilling to meet Angbard’s gaze. Meanwhile, Henryk looked her up and down. “I see,” she said after a moment. “Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?”

“Helge.” Angbard refused to be ignored. “You should be out front. Mixing with the guests.” He frowned at her. “You know how much stock they put in appearances.” Harrumph. “This is their first sight of you. Do you want them to think you’re a puppet? Conspiring with the bench?”

“I am conspiring with you,” she pointed out. “And anyway, they’d eat me alive. You obviously haven’t done enough press conferences. You don’t throw the bait in the water if you want to pull it out intact later, do you? You’ve got to keep these things under control.”

Angbard’s frown intensified. “This isn’t a press conference; this is a beauty show,” he said. “If you do not go out there and make the right moves they will assume that you cannot. And if you can’t, what are you good for? I arranged this session at your request. The least you can do is not make a mess of it.”

“There’s going to be a vote later on,” Iris commented. “Miriam, if they think you’re avoiding them it’ll give the reactionary bastards a chance to convince the others that you’re a fraud, and that won’t go in your favor, will it?”

Miriam sighed. “That’s what I like about you, Ma, family solidarity.”

“She’s right, you know,” Henryk spoke up. “Motions will go forward. They may accept your claim of title, but not your business proposals. Not if names they know and understand oppose it, and you are not seen to confront them.”

“But they’ll—” Miriam began.

“I have a better idea!” Olga announced brightly. “Why don’t you both go forth to charm the turbulent beast?” She beamed at them both. “That way they won’t know who to confront! Like the ass that starved between two overflowing mangers.”

Iris glanced sidelong at Miriam. Was it worry? Miriam couldn’t decide. “That would never do,” she said apologetically. “I couldn’t—”

“Oh yes you can, Patricia,” Angbard said with a cold gleam in his eye.

“But if I go out there Mother will make a scene! And then—”

Miriam caught herself staring at Iris in exasperation, sensing an echo of a deeper family history she’d grown up shielded from. “The dowager will make a scene, will she?” Miriam asked, a dangerous note in her voice: “Why shouldn’t she? She hasn’t seen you for decades. Thought you were dead, probably. You didn’t get along with her when you were young, but so what? Maybe you’ll both find the anger doesn’t matter anymore. Why not try it?” She caught Angbard’s eye. Her uncle, normally stony-faced, looked positively anesthetized, as if to stifle an image-destroying outburst of laughter.

“You don’t know the old bat,” Iris warned grimly.

“She hasn’t changed,” Angbard commented. “If anything, she’s become even more set in her ways.” Harrumph. He hid his face in his handkerchief again.

“She’s been getting worse ever since she adopted that young whipper-snapper Oliver as her confidante,” Henryk mumbled vaguely. “Give me Alfredo any day, we’d have straightened him out in time—” He didn’t seem to notice Iris’s face tightening.

“Ma,” Miriam said warningly.

“Alright! That’s enough.” Iris pushed herself upright in her wheelchair, an expression of grim determination on her face. “Miriam, purely for the sake of family solidarity, you push. You, young lady, what’s your name—”

“Olga,” Miriam offered.

“—I know that, dammit! Olga, open the doors and keep the idiots from pushing me over and letting my darling daughter sneak away. Angbard—”

“I’ll start the session again in half an hour,” he said, shaking his head. “Just remember.” He turned a cool eye on Miriam, all trace of levity gone: “It cost me a lot to set this up for you. Don’t make a mess of it.”

Down in the post office in the basement of Fort Lofstrom, two men waited nervously for their superior to arrive. Both of them were young—one was barely out of his teens—and they dressed like law firm clerks or trainee accountants. “Is this for real?” the younger one kept asking, nervously. “I mean, has it really happened? Why does nobody tell us anything? Shit, this sucks!”

“Shut up and wait,” said the elder, leaning against a wall furnished with industrial shelving racks, holding a range of brightly colored plastic boxes labeled by destination. “Haven’t you learned anything?”

“But the meeting! I mean, what’s going on? Have the old guys finally decided to stop us going over—”

“I said, shut the fuck up.” The older courier glared at the kid with all the world-weary cynicism of his twenty-six years. Spots, tufts of straggly beard hair— Sky Father, why do I get to nurse the babies? “Listen, nothing is going to go wrong.”

He nudged the briefcase at his feet. Inside its very expensive aluminium shell was a layer of plastic foam. Inside the plastic foam nestled a bizarrely insectile-looking H&K submachine gun. The kid didn’t need to know that, though. “When the boss man gets here, we do a straight delivery run then lock down the house. You stay with the boss and do what he says. I get the fun job of telling the postmen to drop everything and yelling at the holiday heads to execute their cover plans. Then we arrest anyone who tries to drop by. Get it? The whole thing will be over in forty-eight hours, it’s just a routine security lockdown.”

“Yes, Martijn.” The kid shook his head, puzzled. “But there hasn’t been an extraordinary meeting in my lifetime! And this is an emergency lockdown, isn’t it? Shutting down everything, telling all our people on the other side to go hide, that sucks. What’s going on?”

The courier looked away. Hurry up and get the nonsense out of your system, he thought. “What do you think they’re doing?” he asked.

“It’s obvious: They envy us, don’t they? The old dudes. Staying over, fitting in. You know I’m going back to college in a couple of weeks, did I tell you about the shit my uncle Stani’s been handing out about that? I’ve got a girlfriend and a Miata and a place of my own and he’s giving me shit because he never had that stuff. What do you need to learn reading for if you’ve got scribes? he told me. And you know what? Some of them, if they could stop us going back—”