Charles Stross - MP 6 -The Trade of Queens

They turned into an alleyway behind the bookmaker's. "You have ten seconds to make yourself invisible," Huw told his shivering prisoner, who stared at him with stunned disbelief for a moment before taking to his heels.

"Was that clever?" asked Yul.

"No, but it had to be done," Huw told him. "Or were you really planning on walking into a people's tribunal behind him?"

"Urn. Point, bro." Yul paused. "What do we do now?"

"We sell this next door." Huw tightened his grip on the satchel, feeling the gold ingots inside. "And then we go to the post office and post a letter."

"But it's not running! You saw the barricades? It's the Freedom Party headquarters."

"That's what I'm counting on," Huw said calmly—more calmly than he felt. "They've got a grip on the mass media—the phones, the email equivalents, the news distribution system. They're not stupid, they know about controlling the flow of information. Which means they're the only people who can get a message through to that friend of Miriam's—the skinny guy with the hat. Remember the railway station?" Brilliana had coopted Huw and his team, dragged them on what seemed at first like a wild goose chase to a one-platform stop in the middle of nowhere. They'd arrived in the nick of time, as Miriam's other pursuers—a political officer and a carload of police thugs—had surrounded the ticket office where she and Erasmus Burgeson were barricaded inside. "The problem is getting their attention without getting ourselves shot. Once we've got it, though . . ." He headed towards the bookmaker's, where a pair of adequately fed bouncers were eyeing the passersby. ". . . We're on the way."

The committee watched the presidential address, and the press conference that followed it, in dead silence.

The thirty-two-inch plasma screen and DVD player were alien intrusions in the wood-and-tapestry-lined audience room at the west of the royal palace. The portable gasoline generator in the antechamber outside throbbed loudly, threatening to drown out the recorded questions, played through speakers too small for a chamber designed for royal audiences in an age before amplification. The flickering color images danced off the walls, reflecting from the tired faces of the noble audience. Many of them still wore armor, camouflage surcoats over bulletproof vests and machine-woven titanium chain mail. They were the surviving officers of the Clan's security organization, and such of the Clan's other leaders as were deemed trustworthy, ignorant of or uninvolved in the abortive putsch mounted by the lords of the postal corvee. Wanted men, one and all.

Finally, Olga paused the DVD—recorded off-air by one of the few communications techs Riordan had ordered to stay behind in Cambridge. She looked around the semicircle of faces opposite, taking in their expressions, ranging from blank incomprehension to shock and dismay. "Does anyone have any questions, or can I move on to present our analysis?" she asked. "Strictly questions, no comment at this time."

A hand went up at the back. Olga made eye contact and nodded. It was Sir Ulrich, one of the progressive faction's stalwarts, a medic by training. "Can they do it?" he asked.

"You heard him." Olga's cheek twitched. Dread was a sick sensation in the pit of her stomach. "Let me remind you of WARBUCKS's history; he's a hawk. He was one of the main sponsors of the Project for a New American Century, he's the planner behind the Iraq invasion, and he's an imperialist in the old model. What most of you don't know is that back in the 1980s he was one of our main commercial enabling partners in the Western operation. And he's gone public about our existence. Getting back to your question: He's defined the success of his presidency in terms of his ability to take us down. The Americans will follow their king-emperor unquestioningly—as long as he delivers results. BOY WONDER used Iraq as a rallying cry after 9/11; WARBUCKS has pinned the target on us."

"So you think—" Ulrich paused. "Sorry."

"It's quite all right." Olga gestured at the front rank. "My lord Riordan, I yield the floor."

Riordan walked to the front of the room. "Thank you, Lady yen Thorold," he started. Then he paused, and looked around at his audience. "I'm not going to tell you any comforting lies. We have lost"—he raised a folio and squinted at it—"thirty-nine world-walkers of our own, and sixty-six of the conservative faction. Eleven more are in custody, awaiting a hearing. Most of them we can do naught with but hang as a warning. Remaining to us in the five great families"—he swallowed—"we have a total of four hundred and sixteen who can world-walk regularly, and another hundred and nineteen elderly and infants. Twenty-eight womenfolk who are with child and so must needs be carried. In our offshoots and cadet branches there are perhaps two thousand three hundred relatives, of whom one thousand and seven hundred or thereabouts are married or coming into or of childbearing age. One hundred and forty one of their children are world-walkers."

He stopped, and exchanged the folio for a hip flask for a moment.

"The American army is largely occupied overseas, for which we should be grateful. They have more than six hundred thousand men under arms, and five hundred warships, and with their navy and air forces their military number two warriors for every peasant in the Gruinmarkt. Our account of Baron Hjorth's treachery is that he purloined no less than four but certainly no more than six of their atomic bombs. That leaves them with"—he consulted the folio—"ah,

six thousand

or thereabouts, almost all of which are more powerful than those Oliver Hjorth absconded with." He closed the folio and stared at his audience.

"In strategic terms, the technical term for our predicament is:

fucked.

"The only ray of hope is the possibility that their new king-emperor is bluffing about their ability to visit destruction upon our heads. But our analysis is that there is no way that he could afford to threaten us politically unless he has the capability to follow through, so the Anglischprache probably

do

have a world-walking ability. It might be a matter of captured cousins, but I doubt it. There's the destruction of the Hjalmar Palace to consider, and they had Special Forces soldiers scouting around Niejwein as long ago as the betrothal feast between Prince Creon and Her Majesty. We know therefore that they had the ability to maintain a small scouting force over here four months ago. That implies they could not, back then, send a major expeditionary force across at that time. What they can do now—"

A hand went up in the front row. Riordan stopped. "Your grace," he said, with labored and pointed patience.

"Believe them," Patricia Thorold-Hjorth called tiredly from her wheelchair. She clasped her hands on top of her walking stick and frowned, her face still haggard. The medic's intervention had kept her breathing, but the poisoning had taken its toll. "During the late civil war, I was—with the express consent of my late brother—negotiating with the current president. His agent broke off communications with a sudden ultimatum: our immediate surrender in return for our lives. He spoke of a mechanical contrivance for world-walking, for moving vehicles. One of my daughter's proteges was tasked by my brother with investigating the nature and limitations of world-walking, and has made a number of discoveries; in particular, some wheeled contrivances can—under some circumstances—be carried along." A muttering spread through her audience. "And to this date, four more worlds have been discovered, and two new knots." The muttering grew louder.

"Silence!" shouted Riordan. "Damn you, I will hear one speaker at a time!" He looked at the dowager. "You have more?"