The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3) (78 page)

A deep thudding sound vibrated through the walls and floor, rattling the crockery and shaking a puff of plaster dust from the ceiling.

‘Damn.’ Reynolds flipped open the lid of his holster and headed towards the door. ‘We appear to have visitors,’ he said dryly. He glanced back at ven Hjalmar. ‘Come
along, now.’

The doctor nodded and bent to pick up his medical bag, which he tucked beneath one arm, keeping a grip on the handle with his other hand. ‘As you wish.’

The lights flickered as Reynolds marched out into the corridor. The two guards snapped to attention. ‘Follow me,’ he told them. ‘This fellow is with us.’ He strode
towards the staircase leading down to the operations and communications offices below, just as a burst of rapid gunfire reverberated up the stairwell. ‘Huh.’ Reynolds drew his gun.

‘We need to get to ground level as fast as possible,’ ven Hjalmar said urgently. ‘If we’re at ground level I can get you out of here, but if we’re –
’

‘The
enemy
are at ground level,’ Reynolds cut him off. ‘They appear to be – ’ He listened. More gunfire, irregular and percussive, rattled the walls like an
out-of-control drummer. ‘We can stop them ascending, however.’ He gestured his guards forward, to take up positions to either side of the stairs. ‘We wait here until the
communications staff have organized a barricade – ’

‘But we’ve got to get down!’ Ven Hjalmar was agitated now. ‘If we aren’t at ground level I can’t world-walk, which means – ’

But Commissioner Reynolds was never to hear the end of ven Hjalmar’s sentence.

*

Sir Alasdair and his men – just two had stayed behind at Site B to keep the security militia engaged – had exfiltrated to the backwoods landscape of the Gruinmarkt.
The vicinity of Boston was well-mapped, crisscrossed by tracks and occasional roads and villages: maps, theodolites, and sensitive inertial platforms had built up a good picture of the key
landmarks over the months since Miriam had pioneered a business start-up a couple of miles from Erasmus Burgeson’s pawnbroker shop (and Leveler quartermaster’s cellar). The Polis
headquarters building, not far from Faneuil Hall, was a site of interest to Clan Security; with confirmation from Lin Lee that Reynolds and ven Hjalmar were present, it took Sir Alasdair less than
an hour to arrange a counterattack.

Griben ven Hjalmar was not a soldier; he had no more (and no less) knowledge of the defensive techniques evolved by the Clan’s men of arms over half a century of bloody internicine feuding
than any other civilian. Stephen Reynolds was not a civilian, but had only an outsider’s insight into the world-walkers. Both of them knew, in principle, of the importance of
doppelgängering their safe houses – of protecting them against infiltration by enemy attackers capable of bypassing doors and walls by entering from the world next door.

However, both of them had independently made different – and fatal – risk assessments. Reynolds had assumed that because Elder Huan’s ‘Eastern cousins’ came from a
supposedly primitive world, and had demonstrated no particular talent for mayhem within his ambit, the most serious risk they presented was the piecemeal violence of the gun and the knife. And ven
Hjalmar had assumed that the presence of armed guards downstairs (some of them briefed and alert to the risk of attackers appearing out of nowhere in their midst) would be sufficient.

What neither of them had anticipated was a systematic assault on the lobby of the headquarters building, conducted by a lance of Clan Security troops under the command of Sir Alasdair ven
Hjorth-Wasser – who had been known as Sergeant Al ‘Tiny’ Schroder, towards the end of his five years in the USMC – troops in body armor, with grenades and automatic weapons,
who had spent long years honing their expertise in storming defended buildings, in other worlds. Nor had they anticipated Sir Alasdair’s objective: to suppress the defenders for long enough
to deliver a wheelbarrow load of ANNM charges, emplace them around the load-bearing walls, and world-walk back to safety. Two hundred kilograms of ammonium nitrate/nitromethane explosives, inside
the six-story brick and stone structure, would be more than enough to blow out the load-bearing walls and drop the upper floors; building codes and construction technologies in New Britain lagged
behind the United States by almost a century.

It was an anonymous and brutal counterattack, and left Sir Alasdair (and Commissioner Burgeson) with acid indigestion and disrupted sleep for some days, until the last of the bodies pulled from
the rubble could finally be identified. If either ven Hjalmar or Reynolds had realized in time that their location had been betrayed, the operation might have failed, as would the cover story: a
despicable royalist cell’s attack on the Peace and Justice Subcommittee’s leading light, the heroic death of Commissioner Reynolds as he led the blackcoats in a spirited defense of the
People’s Revolution, and the destruction of the dastardly terrorists by their own bombs. But it
was
a success. And as the cover-up operation proceeded – starting with the
delivery of the captives held on board the
Burke
to a rather different holding area ashore, under the control of guards outside the chain of command of the Directorate of Internal Security
– the parties to the fragile conspiracy were able to breathe their respective sighs of relief.

The worst was over; but now the long haul was just beginning.

*

It was a humid morning near Boston; with a blustery breeze blowing, and cloud cover lowering across the sky, fat drops of rain spattered across the sidewalk and speckled the
gray wooden wall of the compound.

The wall around the compound had sprung up almost overnight, enclosing a chunk of land on the green outskirts of Wellesley – land which included a former Royal Ordnance artillery works,
and a wedge of rickety brick row houses trapped between the works and the railroad line. One day, a detachment of Freedom Guards had showed up and gone door to door, telling the inhabitants that
they were being moved west with their factory, moving inland towards the heart of the empire, away from threat of coastal invasion. There had been no work, and no money to pay the workers, for five
months; the managers had bartered steel fabrications and stockpiled gun barrels for food to keep their men from starvation. Word that the revolutionary government did indeed want them to resume
production, and had prepared a new home for them and would in due course feed and pay them, overcame much resistance. Within two days the district’s life had drained away on flatbeds and
boxcars, rolling west towards a questionable future. The last laborers to leave had pegged out the line of the perimeter; the first to arrive unloaded timber from the sidings by the arsenal and
began to build the wall and watch-towers. They did so under the guns of their camp guards, for these men were prisoners, captured royalist soldiers taken by the provisional government.

After they’d built the walls of the prison they’d occupy, and the watchtowers and guardhouses for their captors, the prisoners were set to work building their own cabins on the empty
ground between two converging railroad tracks. These, too, they built walls around. They built lots of walls; and while they labored, they speculated quietly among themselves about who would get
the vacant row houses.

They did not have long to wait to find out.

Family groups of oddly dressed folk, who spoke haltingly or with a strong Germanic accent, began to arrive one morning. The guards were not obsequious towards them, exactly, but it was clear
that their position was one of relative privilege. They had the haunted expressions of refugees, uprooted from home and hearth forever. Some of them seemed resentful and slightly angry about their
quarters, which was inexplicable: The houses were not the mansions of rich merchants or professionals, but they were habitable, and had sound roofs and foundations. Where had they come from? Nobody
seemed to know, and speculation was severely discouraged. After a couple of prisoners disappeared – one of them evidently an informer, the other just plain unlucky – the others learned
to keep their mouths shut.

The prisoners were kept busy. After a few more carriageloads of displaced persons arrived, some of the inmates were assigned to new building work, this time large, well-lit drafting offices
illuminated by overhead skylights. Another gang found themselves unloading wagonloads of machine tools, lightweight precision-engineering equipment to stand beside the forges and heavy presses left
behind by the artillery works. Something important was coming, that much was clear. But what?

*

‘What is this –
hovel
?’ demanded the tall woman with the babe in arms, pausing on the threshold. She spoke Hochsprache, with an aristocratic Northern
accent; the politicals in their striped shirts, burdened beneath her trunk, didn’t understand her.

Heyne shrugged, then turned to the convicts. ‘Leave it here and report back to barracks,’ he told them, speaking English. He watched as they deposited the trunk, none too softly, and
shuffled away with downturned faces. Then he gestured back into the open doorway. ‘It’s where you’re going to live for a while,’ he told her bluntly. ‘Be thankful;
this nation’s in the grip of revolt, but you’ve got a roof over your head and food on the table, and guards to keep you safe.’

‘But I – ’ Helena voh Wu stepped inside and looked around. Raw brick faced with patches of crumbling plaster stared back at her; bare boards creaked underfoot.

The other woman was more practical. ‘Help me move this inside?’ she said, looking up at him as she bent over one end of the trunk. The boy, free of her hand, dashed inside and
thundered up the stairs, shouting excitedly.

‘Certainly, my lady.’ Heyne picked up the other end of the trunk and helped her maneuver it past the other woman. It gave them both a polite excuse to ignore her hand-wringing
dismay.

‘Is there any bedding? Or furniture?’ she asked.

‘Probably not.’ They finished shoving the trunk against the inner wall of the front room, and Heyne straightened up. ‘The previous tenants shipped out a week since, and
stripped their houses of anything worth taking. The matter’s in hand, though. We’ve got plenty of labor from the politicals in the workshop. Tell me the basics you need and I’ll
put in an order for it.’ He looked around. ‘Hmm. They
really
stripped this one.’ Walking through into the kitchen, he tutted. ‘Needs plaster and paint, then a
complete kitchen set, table and chairs, pots, a stove if we can find one. Beds’ – he glanced over his shoulder – ‘for three of you.’ Walking to the back, he stared
through the grimy window into the yard. ‘Chamber pots. Let’s check the outhouse.’

Outside in the sunlight, Kara spoke quietly. ‘I know we’re refugees, dependent on the generosity of strangers. But Helena can’t be the first like this . . . ?’

Heyne glanced back at the terraced house and shook his head. ‘No, she isn’t. Most people go through something like it, sooner or later; but they get over it eventually.’ He
looked back at the outhouse. ‘Good, they left the toilet seat. My lady, I know this accommodation is not up to your normal standards, but the fact is, we’re beginning again from
scratch, with barely any resources. We’re lucky enough that Her Majesty negotiated a settlement with the revolutionaries that gives us this compound, and resources to . . . well, I’m
not sure I can talk about that yet. But we’re welcome here for now, anyway, and we’re not going to starve.’ He turned and headed back through the kitchen door, glanced through
into the front room – where Helena was sitting on the trunk, rocking slowly from side to side – and then climbed the creaking staircase to the top floor and the two cramped bedrooms
below the attic.

The young boy was still crawling around the empty south-facing bedroom, jumping up and down and making believe in some exciting adventure. Heyne tested the windows. ‘The glass is all here
and the windows open. Good.’

‘How long will we be here?’ Kara asked bluntly.

‘As long as they want to keep us.’ He shrugged. ‘You don’t want to go back home, my lady.’ His eyes lingered a moment too long on her stomach. ‘Not now, maybe
not ever.’

‘But my husband – ’

‘He’ll follow us over here.’ Heyne’s tone brooked no argument, even though his words were spoken with the voice of optimism rather than out of any genuine certainty.
‘Don’t ever doubt it.’

‘But if we can’t go back’ – she frowned – ‘what use are we to them?’

Heyne shook his head. ‘Nobody’s told me yet. But you can be sure Her Majesty has something in mind.’

*

Stumbling through workdays like nothing he’d ever seen before, walking in a numb haze of dread, Steve Schroeder had spent the weeks since 7/16 waiting for the other shoe
to fall.

There was the horror of the day’s events, of course, and then the following momentous changes. Agent Judt sitting in one corner of the office for the first week, a personal and very
pointed reminder that he’d accidentally turned down the kind of scoop that came along once in a lifetime – a chance to interview Osama bin Laden on September the twelfth – and
then the consequences as the scale of the atrocity grew clearer. Then the surreal speech by the new president, preposterous claims that had no place in a real-world briefing; he’d thought Mr.
Cheney was mad for half an hour, until the chairman of the Joint Chiefs came on-screen on CNN, gloomily confirming that the rabbit hole the new president had jumped down was in fact not a rabbit
hole at all, but a giant looming cypher like an alien black monolith suddenly arrived in the middle of the national landscape –

And then the India–Pakistan war, and its attendant horrors, and the other lesser reality excursions – the Israeli nuclear strike on Bushehr, the riots and massacres in Iraq,
China’s ballistic nuclear submarine putting to sea with warheads loaded and the tense stand-off in the Formosa Strait – and then the looking-glass world had shattered, breaking out of
its frame: the PAPUA Act, arrests of radicals and cells of suspected parallel-universe sympathizers, slower initiatives to bring forward a national biometric identity database, frightening rumors
about the military tribunals at Guantánamo that had so abruptly dropped out of the headlines –