The Merchants’ War

security, with time off to serve his corvee duty with the postal service. And now, by a strange turnaround of fate that Huw still didn’t quite understand, he was sitting with a first-aid kit on the back stoop of a rented house at twilight, worrying his guts out about his kid brother, the tow-headed streak who’d grown up to be a bear of a man.

Huw checked his wristwatch for about the ten-thousandth time. It was coming up on eight fifteen, and the sun was already below the horizon. Another half hour and it would be nighttime proper. I could go over and look for him, he told himself. If he misses this return window, I could go over tomorrow. Elena’s video footage had been rubbish, the condensation on her helmet camera lens blurring everything into a madcap smear of dark green shade and glaring sunlight, but Hulius was wearing a radio beacon. If anything had happened—

Something moved. Huw’s head jerked round, his heart in his mouth for an instant: then he recognized Yul’s tired stance, and the tension erupted up from his guts and out of his mouth in a deafening whoop.

“Hey, bro!” Yul reached up and unfastened his helmet. “You look like you thought I wasn’t coming back!” He grimaced and rubbed his forehead as he shambled heavily towards the steps. “Give me medicine. Strong medicine.”

Huw grabbed him for a moment of back-slapping relief. “It’s not easy, waiting for you. Are you alright? Did anything try to eat you? Let’s get you inside and get the telemetry pack off you, then I’ll crack open the wine.”

“Okay.” Hulius stood swaying on the stoop for a moment, then took a heavy step towards the doorway. Huw picked up the first aid kit and laptop and hurried after him.

“Make your weapons safe, then hand me the telemetry pack first—okay. Now your backpack. Stick it there, in the corner.” He squinted at his brother. Yul looked much more wobbly than he ought to be. “Hmm.” Huw cracked the first-aid kit and pulled out the blood pressure cuff. “Get your armor off and let’s check you out. How’s the headache?”

“Splitting.” Hulius pawed at the Velcro fastenings on his armor vest, then dumped it on the kitchen floor. He fumbled at the buttons on his jacket. “I can’t seem to get this open.”

“Let me.” Huw freed the buttons then helped Hulius get one arm free of its sleeve. “Blood pressure, right now.”

“Aw, nuts. You don’t think—”

“I don’t know what to think. Chill out and try to relax your arm.” The control unit buzzed and chugged, pumping air into the pressure cuff around Yul’s arm. Huw stared at it as it vented, until the digits came up. “One seventy four over one ten.” Shit. “You remember to take your second-stage shots on time, two hours ago?”

“Uh, I, uh, only remembered half an hour ago.” Hulius closed his eyes. “Dumb, huh?”

Huw relaxed a little. “Real dumb. You’re not used to doing back-to-back jumps, are you?” Lightning Child, he could have sprung a cerebral hemorrhage! “The really bad headache, that’s a symptom. You need those pills. They take about an hour to have any effect, though, and if you walk too soon after you take them you can make yourself very ill.”

“It’s just a headache—”

“Headache, balls.” Huw began to pack up the blood pressure monitor. “All you can feel is the headache, but if your blood pressure goes too high the arteries and veins inside your brain can burst from it. You don’t want that to happen, bro, not at your age!” Relief was making him angry. Change the subject. “So how was it?”

“Oh, it was quiet, bro. I didn’t see any animals. Funny thing, I didn’t hear any birds either; it was just me and the trees and stuff. Quite relaxing, after a while.”

“Okay, so you had a nice relaxing stroll in the woods.” Why needle him? It’s not his fault you were chewing your guts out. “Sorry.” He glanced away from Hulius just as the door opened and Elena bounced in.

“Hulius! You’re back! Squeee!”

Huw winced as Elena pounced on his brother. Judging from the noises he made, the headache couldn’t be too serious. Huw cleared his throat: “I’ll be in the front room, downloading the take. You guys, you’ve got ten minutes to wash up. We’re going out for dinner, and I’m buying.” He picked up the telemetry pack and slunk towards the living room, trying to ignore the giggling and smooching behind him. Young love—he winced again. He might be out from under the matrons’ collective thumb, but being expected to chaperon Hulius and Elena was one of the more unpleasant side effects of the manpower shortage. If the worst happened…At least they’re both inner family, and eligible. A rapid wedding was a far more likely outcome than an honor killing if their affair came to light.

Back in the front room, he set the tablet PC down and plugged it in. Yul’s camera had worked out okay, although there wasn’t a hell of a lot to see. He’d come out in a forested area, with nothing but trees in all directions, and spent the next hours stooging around semi-aimlessly without ever coming across open ground. The weather station telemetry told its own story, though. Sixty degrees Fahrenheit had been the daytime peak temperature, and towards nightfall it dipped towards freezing. I bet there’s going to be a frost over there tonight.

Huw poked at the other instrument readings. The scanner drew a blank; nobody was transmitting, at least on any wavelength known to the sophisticated software-directed radio he’d acquired from a friend who was still working at the Media Lab. The compact air sampler wouldn’t tell him much until he could send it for analysis—much as he might want one, nobody was selling a backpack-sized mass spectroscope. He poked at the video, tripping it into fast-forward.

Trees. More trees. Elena hadn’t been wrong about the tree surplus. If we could figure out a way to get them back, we could corner the world market in cheap pine logs…Yul had followed the plan at first, zipping around in a quick search then planting a spike and a radio beacon. Then he’d hunkered down for a while, probably listening. After about half an hour, he’d gotten up and begun walking around the forest, frequently pausing to scrape a marker on a trunk. Good boy. Then—

“Oh you have got to be kidding me.”

Huw hit the pause button, backed up a few frames, and zoomed in. Yul had been looking at the ground, which lay on a gentle slope. There were trees everywhere, but for once there was a view of the ground the trees were growing in. For the most part it was a brownish carpet of dead pine needles and ferns, interspersed with the few hardy plants that could grow in the shadow of the coniferous forest—but the gray-black chunks of rocky material off to one side told a different story. Huw blinked in surprise, then glanced away, his mind churning with possibilities. Then he bounced forward through the next half hour of Hulius’s perambulations, looking for other signs. Finally, he put the laptop down, stood up, and went back into the hall.

“Yul?” he called.

“Hello?” A door opened, somewhere upstairs.

“Why didn’t you tell me about the ruins, Yul?”

Hulius appeared at the top of the staircase, wearing a towel around his waist, long blond hair hanging damply: “what ruins?”

“The black stones in the forest. Those ruins.”

“What stones—” Yul looked blank for a moment, then his expression cleared. “Oh, those. Are they important?”

“Are they—” Huw tugged at his hair distractedly. “Lightning Child! Do I have to explain everything in words of one syllable? Where’s Elena?”

“She’s in the—hey, what’s up?”

I’m hyperventilating again. Stop it, Huw told himself. Not that it seemed to help much. “There’s no radio, it’s really cold, and you stumbled across a fucking road! Or what’s left of one. Not a dirt track or cobblestones, but asphalt! Do I have to do all the thinking around here?”

“What’s so special about asphalt?” Hulius asked, hitching up his towel as he came downstairs.

“What’s so special? Well, maybe it means there was a civilization there not so long ago!” Nervous energy had Huw bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. “Think, bro. If there was a civilization there, what else does it mean?”

“There were people there?” Hulius perked up. “Hey, I think that rates at least a bottle of wine…”