The Merchants’ War

already set to be a burning hot summer day. “Which way?”

“Over here.” Simms walked over to one of the disused warehouse units. The walls were simple metal sidings and the doors and windows were missing, the building itself just a hollow shell.

“Here? But it’s abandoned—”

“It’s meant to look that way. Building forty-seven. If you’d follow me? Sir?”

The secret service agent was clearly sure of himself. Someone’s spent a lot on camouflage, Eric told to himself, clutching his briefcase and following behind. What’s going on? The inside of the warehouse was no more promising than the exterior. Huge ceiling panels were missing, evidently the holes where air conditioning units had been stripped out. The concrete loading bay at the rear of the building was dusty and decrepit, the doors missing. Simms walked over to the near side, where a rusty trailer was propped up on blocks. Eric glanced past him, and for the first time noticed something out of place—a black dome, about the size of his fist, fastened to the wall somewhere above head height. Closed circuit cameras? In an abandoned shed?

Simms climbed a ramshackle flight of steps and opened the door of the trailer. “This way, sir.”

Eric relaxed, everything clicking into place. The camera, the abandoned trailer, the shadows thick and black under the trailer—it was all intended to deal with visitors from the Clan. “Okay, I’m coming.” He climbed the steps and found himself in a small lobby behind Simms, who was waiting in front of an inner door with a peephole set in it. The door was made of steel and opened from the inside.

“Agent Simms, Colonel Smith of FTO, visiting JAUNT BLUE,” Simms announced.

A speaker crackled. “Close the outer door now.”

Eric reached back and pulled the door shut. The inner door buzzed for a moment, then whined open sideways to reveal the bare metal walls of a freight elevator. “Neat,” he said admiringly as they descended towards the tunnels under the laboratory complex. “If you can’t go up without being obvious, go down.”

“This all used to be part of the high-energy physics group, back in the sixties,” Simms said laconically. “They repurposed it this year. There are several entrances. Dr. James told me to show you in through the back door.” A back door disguised as a derelict building, complete with spy cameras and probably some kind of remotely controlled defense system: whatever James had going on down here, he didn’t welcome unexpected visitors.

The freight elevator ground to a halt and Eric did a double-take. Jesus, I’ve just fallen into The Man from U.N.C.L.E! He glanced around at the rough-finished concrete walls, fluorescent lights, innumerable pipes and conduits bolted overhead—and at the end of the passage, a vast, brightly lit space.

“Badges, please.” The Marine guards waiting in an alcove off one side of the corridor were armed, and not for show. Smith extended the badge he’d been issued and waited while one of the guards checked him off a list. “You may proceed, sir.”

“Where’s Dr. James’s group?” he asked Simms’s receding back.

“Follow me, sir.”

Smith followed, trying not to gape too obviously. He was used to security procedures on Air Force bases and some other types of sensitive installations, but he’d never seen anything quite like this. The main tunnel was domed overhead, rising to a peak about fifty feet up; it stretched to infinity ahead and behind. There were no windows, but more conduits and the boxy, roaring ducts of a huge air conditioning system overhead. The concrete piles that had once supported a mile-long linear accelerator were still visible on the floor, but the linac itself had long since been removed and replaced by beige office partitions surrounding a forlorn-looking clump of cubicles, and a line of mobile office trailers that stretched along one wall like a subterranean passenger train. The train didn’t go on forever, though, and after they’d walked a couple of hundred feet from the “back door” they reached the end of the column. Beyond it, the concrete tunnel stretched dizzyingly towards a blank wall in the distance, empty but for a grid of colored lines painted on the floor. Lots of room for expansion, he realized.

Simms gestured at the trailer on the edge of the empty floor space. “Dr. James uses Room 65 as his site office when he’s visiting. I believe he’s in a meeting until fifteen hundred, but he told me to tell you that Dr. Hu will be along to give you the dog and pony tour at eleven thirty. If you make yourself at home, I’ll find Dr. Hu and get things started.”

Eric paused at the door to the trailer. “Dr. James didn’t exactly tell me what it is you people do out here,” he said slowly. “Can you fill me in on what to expect?”

Simms frowned. “I think I ought to leave that to Dr. Hu,” he said.

“Is Dr. Hu one of Professor Armstrong’s team?”

Simms nodded. “I’ll go get him.”

“Okay.” Eric climbed the step up to the site office trailer and went inside to wait.

Begin Transcript

“You wanted to s-see me, sir?”

“Yes, yes I did. Have a seat, lad. Your parents: doing well, I hope?”

“…”

“Calm down, there’s a good fellow. Try to relax, I’m not going to bite your head off. I’m sure they’ll be perfectly fine, current emergency notwithstanding. No, the pretender isn’t about to go haring off into the Sennheur marches, and if he does, they’ll have plenty of warning to evacuate. Now, where was I…? Ah, yes. I wanted to ask you about your studies.”

(Mumble.)

“Yes, I know. In the current situation, it’s difficult. But I think it may be possible for you to go back there in the fall, if things work out well.”

“But I’ll be behind. I should be working right now, with my roommates—it’s not like a regular school. They’ll want to know where I was while they were working on our project.”

(Snorts.) “Well, you’ll just have to tell them you were called away by urgent family business. A dying relative, or something. Don’t look at me like that: worse things happen in war time. If you go back to your laboratory at all you will be luckier than many of our less talented children, Huw. But as it happens, I have a little research project for you that I think will smooth your way. One that you and your talking-shop friends will be able to get your teeth into, and that will be much more profitable in the long term.”

“A research project? But you don’t need someone like me—I mean, the kind of research your staff do, begging your pardons in advance, your grace, aren’t exactly where my aptitude lies—”

“Correct. Which is why I want you for a different kind of research.”

“I don’t understand.”

“On the contrary, I think you’ll understand all too well.” (Pause.) “Red or white?”

“Red, please.” (Sound of glass being filled.) “Thank you very much.”

“Show me your locket.”

“My” (coughing) “locket? Uh, sure. Here—”

“Put it there. Yes, open. Don’t focus on it. Now, this one. You can see the difference if you look at them—not too close, now! What do you think?”

“I’m—excuse me, it’s easier to study them if you cover part of the design and compare sections. Less distracting.”

“You sound as if you’ve done that before.”

(Hurriedly): “No sir! But it’s only logical. We’ve been using the Clan sigil for generations. Surely” (pause) “hey, I think the upper right arc of this one is different!”

“It is.” (Sound of small items being cleared away.) “It came from our long-lost, lamentably living, cousins. The Lees. Who, it would appear, discovered the hard way that redesigning the knotwork can have catastrophic consequences.”

(Pause.) “I’d heard they used a different design. But…” (Pause.) “Nobody thought to experiment? Ever?”

“Some of the Lee family did, generations ago. Either they failed to world-walk, or they didn’t come back. After they lost a couple, their elders banned further experimentation. For our part, with no indication that other realms than the two we know of might exist, who would bother even trying? Especially as most of the simple variations don’t work. Look at yourself, Sir Huw! The finest education we can buy you, a graduate student at MIT, and you, too, took the family talent for granted.”

“I, I think—hell. I assumed that if it was possible to do something, it would already have been done,