Charles Stross - MP 6 -The Trade of Queens

I'm

telling you is that we're caught in the middle of a fight that's been fixed, and if I don't get to talk to Miriam, a lot of people are going to die. The new president wants the Clan dead, because it's a necessary condition to cover up his own past connection with them: He ran their West Coast heroin-distribution arm for about seven years. He's had his fingers deep into their business since then, he's the one who nudged them into acquiring nukes and then prodded them into using them, and he's just been sworn in—we probably don't have much time to get the warning out. So are you going to help me? Or are you going to sit in your foxhole and stick your fingers in your ears and sing `La la la, I can't

hear

you'?"

"You're telling me it's the

president's

fault?" She stared. Fleming didn't

look

mad—

"Yes. I know where too many bodies are buried, that's why they tried to car bomb me four days ago. FTO itself is still secret: I know enough to blow the operation sky high. Black underground prisons on US soil, captured Clan members being forced to act as mules with bombs strapped to their necks, vivisection on subjects to find out what makes them tick, helicopters with black boxes containing bits of brain tissue—don't ask me how they got them—that can travel to the Gruinmarkt. There's an invasion coming, Ms. Milan, and they've been gearing up to attack the Clan in their own world for at least six months."

"Call me Paulie," she said automatically.

"It's not even the first time our government's considered setting off nukes on our own territory to justify an attack on someone else. Back in the early seventies, we figure Nixon—there was a bomb in Boston, you see, GREENSLEEVES planted it as a blackmail backup before he defected, and we ran across an older device while we were looking for his: a big one, the kind you airdropped from a B52 when you wanted to flatten Moscow. It dated to 1972, just before Nixon showed up in Beijing to make nice. Turns out it was his Plan B: Get rid of a bunch of useless liberals and wave the bloody flag at the Commies. They didn't do it then, but they've gone and done it now, with the fall guy's fingerprints all over the throwdown."

Paulie opened her mouth, then shut it again.

Fleming sighed. "I can see we're going to be here some time," he said. "Any chance of a coffee?"

Two days after Huw and Yul hiked into Springfield to post a letter at great personal peril (two days in which six more ClanSec world-walkers and a full half-ton of requisitioned supplies reached the safe house, two days during which the neighbors kept a remarkably low profile), Miriam was sitting in the makeshift living room, single-mindedly typing up her to-do list, when something strange happened.

With no warning, the bulky wooden cabinet in the corner of the room crackled into life. "This is the emergency widecast network. Repeat, this is the emergency widecast network. The following message is for Miss Beckstein, last known in Springfield. Will Miss Beckstein please go to the shop in Boston where her sick friend is waiting for her. Repeat—"

The repetition of the message was lost in a clatter. "Shit!" Miriam applied some other choice words as she bent to pick up the dropped laptop and check it for damage.

"What's happened?" Brill called from the direction of the kitchen.

"Dropped my—we've got contact!"

"What?" A second later Brill pushed the door wide open. "The radio." Miriam pointed at it. "Huw didn't say there's an emergency station! Erasmus wants to see me. In Boston." Brill looked at her oddly. Miriam realized she was cradling the laptop as if it were cut-glass. "Are you sure—"

"This is the emergency widecast network. Repeat—"

"I told you!"

"Okay." Brill nodded, then paused to listen. Her face tightened as she unconsciously clenched her jaw. "Oh yes. It worked. Well, my lady, you got what you wanted. What do we do now?"

"I'd think it was obvious—"

The other door opened; it was Sir Alasdair. "Hello? I heard shouting?"

Miriam stood up, shut the laptop's lid, and placed it carefully on the side table. "We're going to Boston," she announced. "Erasmus has made contact—"

Alasdair cleared his throat. "Made contact how—"

"Now look here!" Miriam and Huw both stopped dead. "Have I your full attention?" Brilliana demanded. "Because as your loyal retainer I think we should consider this with care. My lady, what do you intend to do? Need I remind you these are dangerous times?"

"No." Miriam looked at Sir Alasdair, who was watching Brilliana with the patience of a hound. "But this is exactly what we should have expected, isn't it? Erasmus is high in their ministry of propaganda, and we didn't tell him where I was. How else would he contact me, but a broadcast? So now the ball's back on our side of the court. I need to go visit him at the shop, because that's where he'll be. Unless you've got any better ideas?" Alasdair cleared his throat again. "Yes?" she asked.

"My lady d'Ost." He glanced at Brill. "What is your threat assessment?"

"Hard to say. Getting there—dangerous because all travel in this land is risky in the season of civil war. Once there . . . I do not believe Burgeson means ill of my lady; he is as close to a friend, in fact, as any in the world."

"But?" His word hung in the air for a few short seconds.

"Assuming the message is from Burgeson," Brilliana said reluctantly. "There is no word of his disposition. Should he be the victim of an internal plot, this might be a trap. I'd think it unlikely, but stranger things happen. And then, should he in fact be the speaker—what then?"

"Wait a minute." Miriam raised a hand. "The idea is to make contact. Then put my proposal to him and see what he thinks is achievable. At that point, once

we've

got a channel, it's down to diplomacy."

"And capabilities." Alasdair lowered himself onto one of the wooden dining chairs Huw and Yul had scared up in the furniture-hunting expedition. "Their expectation of our abilities must view us as a potential threat, just as the Americans do. They will want to know why we seek refuge here. If we tell them the unvarnished truth—"

"We

must."

Miriam was forceful. "Yeah, we may have to admit the Clan fucked up royally in the United States. But you know something? It's nothing but the truth. If we tell them we fucked up and we want to start afresh and turn over a new leaf, it's not only believable—it's true, and they'll get the same story from everyone they ask. If we start telling white lies or trying to bamboozle them . . . how many of our people have to remember to tell the same lie?

Someone

will get confused and let something slip over a glass of wine, and then Erasmus's people get to let their suspicions run riot. And let me remind you this country is in the middle of a revolution? Maybe they're going to come out of it peacefully, but most revolutions don't—we have a chance to try and influence that if we're on the inside, but we won't have a leg to stand on unless we're like Caesar's wife, above reproach. So my goal is simple: get us

in

with the temporal authorities, so deeply embedded that we're indispensable within months."

"Indispensable?"

"I've been doing some reading." Miriam turned tired eyes on Alasdair. "Revolutions eat their young, especially as they build new power structures. But they

don't

eat the institutions that prop them up. Secret police, bureaucrats, armies—that's the rule. They may hang the men at the top, and go hard on their external enemies, but the majority of the rank and file keep their places. I think we can come up with a value proposition that they can't ignore, one that would scare the crap out of them if we didn't