Charles Stross - The Merchant’s War

Answering seemed like too much of an effort, so Mike ignored her: it was much easier to simply close his eyes and try to keep his leg still. That way the weasels didn't seem to bite as hard.

A moment later, the cane poked him rudely in the ribs. "Answer when you're spoken to!" snapped the Russian princess. He opened his eyes again. The thing prodding his side wasn't a cane, and she might be pretty, but she was also clearly angry. Is it something I did? he wondered hazily. "Where am I?"

"In a carriage," said the old woman. "I'd have thought that was obvious." She snorted. "The question you meant to ask is, how did I end up in this carriage in particular?"

"Jah: and, how am I, it, to leave, alive?" The Russian princess gave his ribs a final warning poke, then withdrew into the opposite corner of the cramped cabin, next to the old woman. Mike tried to focus: as his eyes adjusted he saw that under her fur coat she was wearing a camouflage jacket. The rifle-he focused some more- was exotic, some sort of foreign bullpup design with a huge night vision scope bolted above its barrel. Blonde bombshell with fur coal and assault rifle. His gaze slid sideways to take in the older one, searching for reassurance: she smiled crookedly, one eyebrow raised, and he shuddered, d j vu spiking through his guts as sharply as the pain from his damaged leg.

"That's enough, Olga," the old lady said sharply, never taking her eyes off Mike. "We've met, in case you'd forgotten."

Oh shit. The penny dropped: that's the entire mission blown! He stared at her in mortified disbelief, at a complete loss for words. His mind Hashed back to events earlier in the evening, to a hurried snatch of conversation with Miriam, the way she'd stared at him in perplexity as if she couldn't quite fathom the meaning of his reappearance in her life: now he felt the same scene repeating, horribly skewed. "You were-" he paused. "Mrs. Beck-stein. Well..." His lips were as dry as the day when Miriam had casually suggested they stop off on their way to the restaurant to say hello, just for ten minutes, so you've met my mother -"I'm surprised. I thought you'd adopted Miriam? What are you doing here?"

Olga, the Russian princess as he'd started thinking of her, glared at him malevolently: her rifle pointed at the floor, but he had no doubt she could bring it to bear on his head in an eyeblink. But Mrs. Beckstein surprised him. She began to smile, and then her smile widened, and she began to chuckle, louder and louder until she began to wheeze and subsided into a fit of coughing. "You really believed that? And you saw us together? What kind of cop are you?" Something else must have tweaked her funny bone because a moment later she was off again, lost in a paroxysm of thigh-slappingly disproportionate mirth. Or maybe it was just relief at being out of the fire-fight.

"I do not see the thing that is so funny," Olga said, almost plaintively.

"Ah, well, but he was such a nice young-" Mrs. Beck-stein began coughing again. Olga looked concerned, but given a choice between keeping Mike under observation and trying to help the older woman-"Sorry, dear," she told Olga, when she got her voice back. "That's how Miriam described you." She nodded at Mike. "Before she changed her mind."

Mike closed his eyes again. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, is this a fuckup! He winced: obviously demons were feeding his leg-weasels crystal meth. "He's called Mike," Mrs. Beckstein continued remorselessly, "Mike something-beginning-with-F, I've got it in my diary. And he works for the Drug Enforcement Agency. Or he used to work for the DEA. Do you still work for the DEA, Mike?"

He opened his eyes, unsure what to do: the painkillers were subsiding but he still felt unfocused, blurry about the edges. "I'm not supposed to talk-"

"You will talk, boy." Mrs. Beckstcin glared at him, and he recoiled at the anger in her expression. "You can take your chances with me, or you can make your excuses to my half-brother's men, but you are going to talk sooner or later." She glanced at Olga. "Sometimes I can't believe my luck," she said dryly. She turned back to Mike, her expression harsh: "What have you done with my daughter?"

"I- " Mike stopped. Time seemed to slow. My brother's men. Jesus, she's been one of them all along! How deep does this go? He shuddered, his guts churning. Until now he'd known, understood in the abstract, that Miriam was involved with these alien gangsters, narcoterrorists from Middle Earth: even meeting Miriam, dressed up for a medieval wedding in the middle of an exploding castle, hadn't really shaken what he'd thought he knew. But Miriam's mother was a different matter entirely, a disabled middle-aged woman living quietly in a small house in New England suburbia- they're everywhere! He swallowed, choking back hysterical laughter. "I don't know where she went. She said she had a, one of the lockets, got it from a friend. Said she'd be in touch later. There was a pcrp in black, tried to stab her so I shot him-"

"Why?"

"Orders." He cleared his throat. "They told me, talk to her. Offer her whatever she... well, anything."

Mrs. Beckstein glanced at the Russian princess: evidently her expression meant something because a moment later she turned back to him. "You're colluding with Egon."

"Who?" His bewilderment must have been obvious, because a moment later she nodded.

"All right. So how did you get over here?"

Mike stared at her.

Mrs. Beckstein took a deep breath. "Olga. If Mr. Fleming here doesn't answer my questions, you have my permission to shoot him in the kneecap. At will."

"Which one?" asked the Russian princess.

"Whichever you want." Mrs. Beckstein sniffed. "Now, Mike. I want you to understand one thing, and one thing only-I'm concerned for my daughter's well-being. I'm especially concerned when an ex-boyfriend of hers with a highly dubious employment record appears out of nowhere at a-"she coughed "-joyous occasion, and all hell breaks loose. And I am more concerned than you can possibly begin to imagine that she has vanished in the middle of the sound and the fury, because there is an official decree in force that says if she world-walks without the permission of the Clan committee, her life is forfeit. She is my daughter, and blood is thicker than water, and I am going to save her ass. Call it atonement for earlier mis-lakes, if you like: I've not always been a terribly good mother." She leaned closer. "Now, you may be able to help me save her ass. If I think you might be useful to me, I can protect you up, to a point. Or." She nodded at Olga. "Lady Olga is a friend of Miriam's. She's concerned for her welfare, too. Miriam has more friends than she realizes, you see. Thousands and thousands of them... So the question is: are we all agreed that we are friends of Miriam, and that we intend to save her ass'? Or-"she fixed Mike with a vulture stare"-were you stringing her along?"

"No!" he exclaimed. "Whoa. Ow." The weasels had graduated from carnivore school and were working on their diplomas in coyote impersonation. "What do you want to know?"

"Let's start with, how you got over here."

"Same way Matthias got over to our-my-world." He could almost see the lightbulbs going on over Olga's and Mrs. Beckstein's heads. "Family Trade captured a couple of world-walkers. Forced them to carry." He tried to shrug himself into a more comfortable position, half-upright.

"Forced? How?" Olga stared at him. "And what is Family Trade?"

"Collar... bombs. They carry a cargo and come back, Family Trade resets the timer. They don't come back, it blows their head off. When they're not world-walking, FTO keeps them in a high-rise jail."

Mrs. Beckstein interrupted. "Family Trade-this is some spook agency, isn't it?"