The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2) (71 page)

‘Looks like a road to me,’ Yul offered.

‘I think you’re right.’ Huw cast around for more chunks of half-buried roadstone. Now that he knew what he was looking for it wasn’t difficult to find. ‘It ran that
way, north-northeast, I think.’ Turning to look in the opposite direction he saw a shadowy tunnel, just about as wide as a two-lane road. Some trees had erupted through the surface over the
years, but for the most part it had held the forest at bay. ‘Okay, this way is downhill. Let’s plant a waypoint and –’ he looked up at the heavy overcast ‘–
follow it for an hour, or until it starts to rain, before we head back.’ He checked his watch. It was just past two in the afternoon. ‘I don’t want to get too far from base camp
today.’

Hulius rammed another transponder spike into the earth by the road and Huw scraped an arrow on the nearest tree, pointing back along their path. The LED on top of the transponder blinked
infrequently, reassuring them that the radio beacon was ready and waiting to guide them home. For the next half hour they plodded along the shallow downhill path, Hulius leading the way with his
hunting rifle, Elena bringing up the rear. Once they were on the roadbed, it was easy to follow, although patches of asphalt had been heaved up into odd mounds and shoved aside by trees over the
years – or centuries – for which it had been abandoned. Something about the way the road snaked along the contours of the shallow hillside tickled Huw’s imagination. ‘It was
built to take cars,’ he finally said aloud.

‘Huh? How can you tell?’ asked Yul.

‘The radius of curvature. Look at it, if you’re on foot it’s as straight as an arrow. But imagine you’re driving along it at forty, fifty miles per hour. See how
it’s slightly banked around that ridge ahead?’ He pointed towards a rise in the ground, just visible through the trees.

They continued in silence for a couple of minutes. ‘You’re assuming –’ Yul began to say, then stopped, freezing in his tracks right in front of a tree that had thrust
through the asphalt. ‘
Shit.
’

‘What?’ Huw almost walked into his back.

‘Cover,’ Yul whispered, gesturing towards the side of the track. ‘It’s probably empty, but . . .’

‘What?’ Huw ducked to the side of the road – followed by Elena – then crept forward to peer past Yul’s shoulder.

‘There,’ said Hulius, raising one hand to point. It took a moment for Huw to recognize the curving flank of a mushroom-pale dome, lightly streaked with green debris. ‘You were
looking for company, weren’t you? Looks like we’ve found it . . .’

*

It wasn’t the first time Miriam had hidden in the woods, nursing a splitting headache and a festering sense of injustice, but familiarity didn’t make it easier: and
this time she’d had an added source of anxiety as she crossed over, hoping like hell that the Clan hadn’t seen fit to doppelgänger her business by building a defensive site in the
same location in their own world. But she needn’t have worried. The trees grew thick and undisturbed, and she’d made sure that the site was well inland from the line the coast had
followed before landfill in both her Boston and the strangely different New British version had extended it.

She’d taken a risk, of course. Boston and Cambridge occupied much the same sites in New Britain as in her own Massachusetts, but in the Gruinmarkt that area was largely untamed, covered by
deciduous forest and the isolated tracts and clearings of scattered village estates. She’d never thought to check the lay of the land collocated with her workshop, despite having staked out
her house: for all she knew, she might world-walk right into the great hall of some hedge-lord. But it seemed unlikely – Angbard hadn’t chosen the site of his fortified retreat for
accessibility – so the worst risk she expected was a twisted ankle or a drop into a gully.

Instead Miriam stumbled and nearly walked face-first into a beech tree, then stopped and looked around. ‘Ow.’ She massaged her forehead. This was bad: she suddenly felt hot and
queasy, and her vision threatened to play tricks on her.
Damn, I don’t need a migraine right now.
She sat down against the tree trunk, her heart hammering. A flash of triumph:
I
got away with it!
Well, not quite. She’d still have to cross back over and meet up with Erasmus. But there were hours to go, yet . . .

The nausea got worse abruptly, peaking in a rush that cramped her stomach. She doubled over to her right and vomited, whimpering with pain. The spasms seemed to go on for hours, leaving her
gasping for breath as she retched herself dry. Eventually, by the time she was too exhausted to stand up, the cramps began to ease. She sat up and leaned back against the tree, pulled her suitcase
close, and shivered uncontrollably. ‘What brought that on?’ She asked herself. Then in an attempt at self-distraction, she opened the case.

The contents of the hidden drawer were mostly plastic and base metal, but in her eyes they gleamed with more promise than a safe full of rubies and diamonds: a small Sony notebook PC and its
accessories, a power supply and a CD drive. With shaking hands she opened the computer’s lid and pushed the power button. The screen flickered, and LEDs flashed, then it shut down again.
‘Oh, of course.’ The battery had run down in the months of enforced inactivity. Well, no need to worry: New Britain had alternating current electricity, and the little transformer was
designed for international use, rugged enough to eat their bizarre mixture of frequency and voltage without melting. (Even though she’d had a devil of a time at first, establishing how the
local units of measurement translated into terms she was vaguely familiar with.)

Closing the suitcase, she felt the tension drain from her shoulders.
I can go home
, she told herself.
Any time I want to
. All she had to do was walk twenty-five paces north,
cross over again at the prearranged time, and then find an electric light socket to plug the computer into. She glanced at her watch, surprised to discover that fifty minutes had passed.
She’d arranged to reappear in three hours, the fastest crossing she felt confident she could manage without medication. But that was before the cramps and the migraine had hit her. She stood
up clumsily, brushed down her clothes, and oriented herself using the small compass she’d found among Burgeson’s stock. ‘Okay, here goes nothing.’

Another tree, another two hours: this time in the right place for the return trip to the side alley behind the workshop. Miriam settled down to wait.
What do I really want to do next?
she asked herself. It was a hard question to answer. Before the massacre at the betrothal ceremony – already nearly a week ago – she’d had the grim luxury of certainty. But now .
. .
I could buy my way back into the game,
she realized.
The Idiot’s dead so the betrothal makes no sense anymore. Henryk’s probably dead, too. And I’ve got valuable
information, if I can get Angbard’s ear.
Mike’s presence changed everything. Hitherto, all the Clan’s strategic planning and internecine plotting had been based on the
assumption that they were inviolable in their own estates, masters of their own world. But if the U. S. government could send spies, then the implications were going to shake the Clan to its
foundations.
They’ve been looking for the Clan for years,
she realized. But now they’d found the narcoterrorists –
One world’s feudal baron is another
world’s drug lord
– the whole elaborate game of charades that Clan security played was over. The other player could kick over the card table any time they wanted.
You can
doppelgänger a castle against world-walkers, but you can’t stop them crossing over outside your walls and planting a backpack nuke
. In an endgame between the Clan and the
CIA’s world-walking equivalent, there could be only one winner.

‘So they can’t win a confrontation. But if they lose . . .’ They had her mother.
Could I let her go
? The thought was painful. And then there were others, the ones she
could count as friends. Olga, Brill, poor innocent kids like Kara. Even James Lee. If she cut and run, she’d be leaving them to –
No, that’s not right.
She shook her
head. Where did this unwelcome sense of responsibility come from?
I haven’t gone native!
But it was too late to protest: they’d tied her into their lives, and if she just
walked out on them, much less walked willingly into the arms of enemies who’d happily see them all dead or buried so deep in jail they’d never see daylight, she’d be personally
responsible for the betrayal.

‘They’ll have to go.’ Somewhere beyond the reach of a government agency that relied on coerced and imprisoned world-walkers. ‘But where?’ New Britain was a
possibility. Her experiment in technology transfer had worked, after all.
What if we went overt?
She wondered.
If we told them who we were and what we could do. Could we cut a
deal?
Build a military-industrial complex to defend against a military-industrial complex.
The Empire’s under siege. The French have the resources to . . .
She blanked.
I
don’t know enough.
A tantalizing vision clung to the edges of her imagination, a new business idea so monumentally vast and arrogant she could barely contemplate it. Thousands of
world-walkers, working with the support and resources of a continental superpower, smuggling information and ideas and sharing lessons leeched from a more advanced world.
I was thinking
small
.
How fast could we drag New Britain into the twenty-first century?
Even without the cohorts of new world-walkers in the making that she’d stumbled across, the product of
Angbard’s secretive manipulation of a fertility lab’s output, it seemed feasible. More than that: it seemed desirable.
Mike’s organization will assume that any world-walker is
a drug mule until proven otherwise. It won’t be healthy to be a world-walker in the USA after the shit hits the fan. But things are different in New Britain. We’ll
need
that
world.

Miriam checked her watch. The hours had drifted by: the shadows were lengthening and her headache was down to a dull throb. She stood up and dusted herself down again, picked up her suitcase,
and focused queasily on the locket. ‘Once more, with spirit . . .’

Bang
.

Red-hot needles thrust into her eyes as her stomach heaved again: a giant gripped her head between his hands and squeezed. Cobblestones beneath her boots, and a stink of fresh horseshit. Miriam
bent forward, gagging, realized
I’m standing in the road
– and a narrow road it was, walled on both sides with weathered, greasy brickwork – as the waves of nausea
hit.

Bang.

Someone shouted something, at her it seemed. The racket was familiar, and here was a car (or what passed for one in New Britain) with engine running. Hands grabbed at her suitcase: she tightened
her grip instinctively.

‘Into the car!
Now!
’ It was Erasmus.

‘’M going to be
sick
– ’

‘Well you can be sick in the car!’ He clutched her arm and tugged.

Bang
.

Gunshots?

She tottered forward, stomach lurching, and half-fell, half-slid through the open passenger compartment leg well, collapsing on the wooden floor. The car shuddered and began to roll smoothly on
a flare of steam.

BANG.
Someone else, not Erasmus, leaned over her and pulled the trigger of a revolver, driving sharp spikes of pain into her ear drums. With a screech of protesting rubber the car
picked up speed.
BANG.
Erasmus collapsed on top of her, holding her down. ‘Stay on the floor,’ he shouted.

The steam car hit a pothole and bounced, violently. It was too much: Miriam began to retch again, bringing up clear bile.

‘Shit.’ It was the shooter on the back seat, wrinkling his face in disgust. ‘I think that’s –’ he paused ‘ – no, they’re trying to follow us
on foot.’ The driver piled on the steam, then flung their carriage into a wide turn onto a public boulevard. The shooter sat down hard, holding his pistol below seat level, pointing at the
floor. ‘Can you sit up?’ he asked Miriam and Erasmus. ‘Look respectable fast, we’re hitting Ketch Street in a minute.’

Erasmus picked himself up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his voice shaky. Miriam waited for a moment as her stomach tried to lurch again. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Head hurts,’ she managed. Arms around her shoulders lifted her to her knees. ‘My suitcase . . .’

‘On the parcel shelf.’

More hands from the other side. Together they lifted her into position on the bench seat. The car was rattling and rocking from side to side, making a heady pace – almost forty miles per
hour, if she was any judge of speed, but it felt more like ninety in this ragtop steamer. She gasped for air, chest heaving as she tried to get back the wind she’d lost while she was throwing
up. ‘Are you all right?’ Burgeson asked again. He’d found a perch on the jump seat opposite, and was clutching a grab-strap behind the chauffeur’s station on the right of
the cockpit.

‘I, it never hit me like that before,’ she said. Amidst the cacophony in her skull she found a moment to be terrified: world-walking usually caused a blood pressure spike and
migraine-like symptoms, but nothing like this hellish nausea and pile-driver headache. ‘Something’s wrong with me.’

‘Did you get what you wanted?’ he pressed her. ‘Was it worth it?’

‘Yes, yes.’ She glanced sideways. ‘We haven’t been introduced.’

‘Indeed.’ Erasmus sent her a narrow-eyed look. ‘This is Albert. Albert, meet Anne.’

Gotcha
. ‘Nice to meet you,’ she said politely.

‘Albert’ nodded affably, and palmed his revolver, sliding it into a pocket of his cutaway jacket. ‘Always nice to meet a fellow traveler,’ he said.

‘Indeed.’
Fellow traveler, is it?
She fell silent. Burgeson’s political connections came with dangerous strings attached. ‘What’s with the car? And the
rush?’

‘You didn’t hear them shooting at us?’