Charles Stross - The Merchant’s War

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."

"Holy, uh, wow."

"Yes, I can see why you might say that." Rand nodded. "And wc are going to have real fun combing the inventory to find out how this puppy managed to wander off the reservation. That's not supposed to happen, although I can hazard some guesses..."

"Huh. Six-did you say it weighs six thousand pounds?" Herz stared at the nuclear weapons engineer.

"Well, of course it does; did you think air-dropped multimegaton hydrogen bombs were small enough to fit in a back pocket? Why do you think we ship them around in B-52s?"

"Uh." She took a deep breath. "And it's a, like, a single unit? You couldn't dismantle it easily?"

"No, I don't think so. We'll need to truck it away intact and examine it for-" "Then we've messed up."

"What makes you say that?" Rand sounded offended.

"Because it's too big. A world-walker can't haul something any larger than they can lift. So it doesn't belong to the Clan."

"Oh," said Rand. He sounded at a loss for words.

"You can say that again." Judith turned to head back to the hole in the wall. "Listen, I've got to go, this isn't Family Trade business anymore, okay? Run it through the normal NIRT channels, I've got to go report to the colonel now. See you around." And with that, she ducked through the hole in the lockup wall, and headed back to the car park. Rich was waiting next to the truck. "Come on," he said, waving at her car.

"What's the story?"

"It's a nuke, but it's not our nuke," Herz said as she started the car. "Oh."

"Yes. Come on, I've got to get back to the office and report to Eric." "Shit."

"Language, please." Judith put the car in gear and crept out of the parking lot, leaving the gray NIRT van and the range rubber-suited atomic bomb disposal specialists behind like a bad memory. "What a way to start the week." Somewhere out there in the city there was supposed to be another bomb. One that was activated four months earlier by Matt, when he defected from the Clan, as an insurance policy to hold over the Family Trade Organization's head, But Matt was dead, and Mike Fleming had failed to wheedle the location of the bomb out of him before he died-all they knew was, it was on a one-year countdown, and they had maybe two hundred days left to find it before they had to evacuate three or four million folks from Boston and Cambridge to avoid a disaster that would make 9/11 look like a parking violation.