Charles Stross - The Merchant’s War

"Jesus." Eric looked away. "That's disgusting."

"Yes. I know. But what else can we do?"

"Find the bomb."

"Yes!" James's frustration boiled over in Eric's: "If, you've got some kind of magic superpowers that let you stare through concrete walls and pinpoint missing nukes, then I'd like to hear about them, Colonel. Failing that, if you have any better ideas, I'm sure Daddy Warbucks would like to know what else to fricking do if terrorists nuke one of our cities?"

Shit. "I'm sorry. Like I said, we're looking. I'll see if I can scare up some backup when we get back, okay?"

"You'd better. Because falling on our swords is not on the agenda for this administration, son. We're not going to hand the country to the other team just because some assholes from another dimension fuck with us, any more than we did when bin Laden got uppity and bit the feeding hand." James paused. "I shouldn't have blown up then. Forget I said anything, it's not your fault. There's a lot at stake here that you aren't in on: the big picture is really scary. All the oil in fairyland, for starters." "All the what?"

Dr. James looked as if he'd bitten a lemon while expecting an orange. "Oil, son. Makes the world go round. You know what the business with al-Qaeda is about? Oil. We're in Saudi Arabia because of the oil: bin Laden wants ns out of Saudi. We're going to go into Iraq because of the oil. Oil is leverage. Oil lets us put the Chinks and Europeans in their place. And we're running short of it, in case you hadn't noticed, there's this thing called peak oil coming and we've got analysis scratching their heads to ligure out how we're going to field it. We're not going to run out, but demand is going to exceed supply and the price is going to start climbing in a few years. Our planetary preeminence relies on us having cheap oil for our industries, while everyone else pays through the nose for it. But we can't guarantee to keep prices low if we're having to send our boys out to sit in the desert and keep the wells pump-ing. So it was looking bad until six months ago, but now there's a new factor in the equation..."

He took a deep breath. "The Clan. A bunch of medieval jerks, squatting on our territory-or a good cognate of it. What's going down in Texas, Colonel Smith? Their version of Texas, not our Texas: what are they doing there? I'll tell you what they're doing: they're sitting on twice as much oil as Saddam Hussein, and that's what's got Daddy Warbucks's attention. Because, you see, if JAUNT BLUE delivers, eventually all that good black stuff is going to be ours..."

"Are we nearly there yet?"

Huw glanced in the driver's mirror, taking his eyes off the interstate for a couple of seconds. Elena sprawled across one half of the back seat of the Hummer H2 truck, managing to look louche and bored simultaneously. Petulant, that was the word. A twenty-one-year-old Clan princess-no, merely a contessa in waiting, should she inherit-fresh from her Swiss finishing school and her first semester at college: out in the big bad world for the first time, with two brave knights to look after her. File off the serial numbers and you could mistake her for a spoiled preppy kitten. Of course, the jocks who'd be clustering around the latter type didn't usually carry swords. Nor did normal preppies know how to handle the FN P90 in the trunk. Still, Huw let his eyes linger on her tight jeans and embroidered babydoll tee for a second longer than was strictly necessary, before he glanced back at the road and the GPS navigation screen.

"About twenty miles to go. Eighteen minutes. We turn off in ten."

"Bo- ring." She faked a yawn at him, slim hand covering pink lip gloss.

"I'm bored too," snarked Hulius, from his nest in the front passenger seat. He took an orange from the glove box and began to peel it with his dagger. Citrus droplets swirled in the aircon breeze.

"We're all bored," Huw said affably. "Are you suggesting I should break the speed limit?"

Hulius paled. "No-"

"Good." Huw smiled. The white duke took a dim view of traffic infractions, and supplemented the official fines with additional punishments of his own choice: ten strokes of the lash for a first offense. Don't ever, ever draw attention to yourselves was the first rule they drilled into everyone before letting them out the door. Which was why couriers on Post duty dressed like lawyers, and why the three of them were driving down the interstate at a sober two miles under the speed limit, in a shiny new Hummer, with every i dotted and t crossed on the paperwork that proved them to be a trio of MIT graduate students with rich parents, off on a field trip.

The green dot on the map inched south along Route 95, slowly converging on Baltimore and the afternoon traffic. The aircon fans hissed steadily, but Huw could still feel the heat beating down on the back of his hand through the tinted glass. Concrete rumbled under the magically smooth suspension of the truck. The scrubby grass outside was parched, burned almost brown by the summer heat. He'd made a journey part of the distance down this way once before on horseback, in a place with no air-conditioning or cars: it had been a fair approximation of hell. Doing the journey in a luxury SUV was heaven- albeit a particularly boring corner of it. "Have you checked the charge on the goggles yet?"

"They're in the trunk. They'll be fine." Hulius pulled off a slice of orange and offered it to Huw. "you worry too much."

"It's your neck I'm worrying over. Would you rather I didn't worry, bro?"

" If you put it that way..."

The last half hour of any journey was always the longest, but Huw caught the sign in time, and took the exit for Bel Air and parts east: then a couple more turns onto dusty roads linking faceless tracts of suburb with open countryside. The dots converged. Finally he reached a stretch of trees and a driveway led up to an unprepossessing house. He brought the truck to a halt in front of the day room windows and killed the engine.

"You're sure this is the place?" Elena pushed herself upright then stretched, yawning.

"Got to be." Huw rooted around in the dash for the bunch of house keys and the letter from the realtor. Then he opened the door and jumped out, taking a deep breath as the oppressive summer humidity washed over him. "Number 344. Yup, that's right."

Sneakers crunched on gravel as he walked towards the front door. Behind him, a clattering: Elena unloading the flat Pelikan case from the trunk. Huw glanced up at the peeling white paint under the guttering, the patina of dust. Then he rang the doorbell and waited for a long minute, until Elena, holding the case behind him as if it was a guitar, began tapping her toes and whistling a tuneless melody of impatience. "It pays to be cautious," he finally explained, before he stuck the key in the lock. "People hereabouts take a dim view of unexpected visitors."

The key turned. Inside, the hallway was hot and close, smelling of dust and old regrets. Huw breathed a sigh of relief. He'd set this up by remote control, one of ten test sites running down the coastline and across the continent all the way to the west coast, spaced five hundred kilometers apart. The Realtor had been only too glad to rent it to him for a year, money paid up front: it had been unsalable ever since its former owner, a retired widower, had died of a heart attack in the living room one bleak winter evening. You could remove the carpet and the furniture, and even do something about the smell, but you couldn't remove the reputation.

Huw hunted around for the fuse board for a while, then flipped the circuit breaker. A distant whir spoke of long-dormant air-conditioning. He checked that the hall lights worked, then nodded to himself. "Okay, let's get moved in."