Charles Stross - MP 6 -The Trade of Queens

The farmstead was a wreck. The guards had made a gesture towards clearing up, pushing the worst of the trashed furniture and shattered kitchenware up against one wall and sweeping the floor—the pretender's cavalry had briefly used it as a stable—but the scorch marks of a fire that had failed to take hold still streaked the walls, and there was a persistent, faint aroma of rotting meat. The guards had brought out camp chairs and a folding table, and Riordan had set up his headquarters there, organizing the guards to man a shortwave radio and track unfolding events on a large map. He looked up as Miriam arrived. "Welcome, Your Majesty."

"How bad is it?" Miriam asked.

"We're getting reports." He grimaced. "The evac plan is running smoothly and I've ordered all stations to check out the other side for unwelcome visitors. Didn't want to say why—things will be chaotic enough without setting off a panic about a civil war. The trouble is, we're fifteen miles out of Niejwein—the eye of the storm—half a day's ride; and I'm not happy about disclosing your location. In the worst case our enemies may have direction-finding equipment, and if they've got their hands on Rudy's ultralight . . . we've got to sit tight as long as possible. I've ordered Helmut to bring a couple of lances here as soon as he's nailed down the Summer Palace and I've put orders out for the arrest of the entire postal committee and, I regret to say, your grandmother. We can weed that garden at our leisure once we've got it fenced in. Unless you have any other suggestions?"

"Yes." Miriam swallowed. "Is there any word of my mother? Or, or Dr. Griben yen Hjalmar? I think they're in cahoots. . ."

Riordan glanced at one of his men and barked a question in hochsprache too fast for Miriam to follow. The reply was hesitant. "No reports," he said, turning to Miriam. "I'll let you know if anything turns up. I assume you're talking about the duke's special, ah, medical program?" Miriam nodded. "I'm on it. Now, if you wouldn't mind—" He looked pointedly at the security guard with the radio headset, who was waving urgently for attention.

"Go to it." Miriam shuffled awkwardly aside, towards the doorway into the burned-out wing of the farmhouse. "What do we do now?" she asked Olga.

Olga grimaced. "We wait, my lady. And we learn. Or you wait, I have orders to send. Please." She gestured at the bedrolls on the hard-packed floor. "Make yourself comfortable. We may be here some time."

Twenty years ago, in the rookeries of a town called New Catford, Elder Huan had known a young and dangerous radical—a Leveler and ranter called Stephen Reynolds.

In those days, Huan had been the public face of the family's business involvements—a discreet railroad for money and dispatches that the underground made use of from time to time. Reynolds had been Huan Lee's contact, and for a while things had gone swimmingly. Few organizations had as great a need for secrecy as the Leveler command, and indeed Huan had toyed with the idea of disclosing the family's secret to him—for the family's singular talent and the needs of the terrorists and bomb-throwers and other idealists were perfectly aligned, and the pogroms and lynchings of the English, tacitly encouraged by the government (who knew a good target for the mob's ire when they saw it—and skin of the wrong color had always been one such), did nothing to endear the authorities to him. At least the revolutionaries preached equality and fraternity, an end to the oppression of all races.

A series of unfortunate events had closed off that avenue before Huan started down it; raids, arrests, and executions of Leveler cells clear across the country. He, himself, had been forced to world-walk in a hurry, one jump ahead of the jackboots of the Polis troopers. And that had been the end of

that.

The first duty of the family was survival, then profit—martyrdom in the name of revolutionary fraternity wasn't part of the package. In the wake of the raids he'd thought Stephen Reynolds dead—until he heard the name again, in a broadcast by the revolutionary propaganda ministry. Reynolds had survived and, it seemed, prospered in the council of the Radical Party.

This didn't entirely surprise Elder Huan. As he had described it to his brothers, some time later, "The man is a rat—sharp as a wire, personally courageous, and curious. The Polis will have a hard time taking him." And now the fox was in charge of a hen coop of no small size, having emerged in charge of the Annapolis Freedom Riders, then promoted to organize the Bureau of Internal Security that the party had formed to replace the reactionary and untrustworthy Crown Polis.

Now Elder Huan—through conduits and contacts both esoteric and obscure—had arranged for a meeting with the man himself. The agenda of the meeting was to be the renewal of an old alliance. And Elder Huan intended to make Reynolds an offer that would secure the safety of the family throughout the current crisis.

For his part, Reynolds—a thickset fellow with brown hair, thinning at the crown, and half-moon pince-nez that gave him an avuncular appearance even when supervising interrogations—was looking forward to the meeting for entirely the wrong reasons.

"I want you and two squads to be ready outside the front door. Place another squad round the back. Plain clothes, two steamers ready for backup." He smiled, not warmly. Brentford, his secretary, nodded and scribbled in his notebook. "You should arrest everyone in the building or leaving it after my departure,

unless

I indicate otherwise by displaying a red kerchief in my breast pocket. Special Regime Blue, with added attention. The charges will be resisting arrest, treason, membership of a proscribed organization, and anything else that occurs to you. Have the Star Tribunal ready to sit on them and I'll sign off on the execution warrants immediately. Do you have that?"

Brentford nodded, impassive. These were not unusual orders; Citizen Reynolds took a very robust approach to dealing with subversives. "The, ah, exception, sir? Do you have any other instructions to deal with that case?"

"No." Reynolds made a fist, squeezing. "If anything comes up I'll handle it myself."

"The danger, sir—"

"They're petty smugglers and racketeers, citizen. I dealt with them before, during the Long Emergency; it's almost a certainty that they want to deal themselves a hand at the table, in which case they're in for a short, sharp surprise. I merely reserve the final judgment

in case

there's something more serious at hand." He stood, behind his desk, and straightened his uniform tunic, flicking invisible dust motes from one black lapel. "Plain clothes, I say again. I'll see you at eight."

Reynolds strode to the door as Brentford saluted. He didn't look back. Brentford was a reliable party man, a typical functionary of the new organization: He'd do as he was told, and look up to Reynolds as a bluff fellow who led from the front, as long as he occasionally indulged in eccentricities such as periodically going into the field to gather up nests of vipers and traitors with his own hands.

Reynolds didn't smile at the thought. There were risks attached to this behavior, and he didn't hold with taking risks unless there was something he held to be personally important at stake. Maintaining his carefully constructed public image was all very well, but placing himself in front of a desperate fugitive's knife was . . . it was

undignified.

On the other hand, sometimes it was necessary to deal with former Polis informers himself, to insure that they fell downstairs or swallowed their suicide pills. He considered it to be a small mercy—far less unpleasant than what fate held in store for them in the ungentle hands of his enthusiastic staff in Interrogations and Inquiries.