The Merchants’ War

taking pains to avoid mapped killing grounds and is sleeping and working surrounded by troops. Do you have any constructive suggestions, or shall we move on?”

There was a crunching sound. Eyes swiveled towards Carl’s hand, and the wreckage of what had been a Pelikan Epoch mechanical pencil. Carl grunted. “A conventional infiltrator could get close to him…”

The chairman nodded, very slightly, and a certain tension left the room. “That might work, but as you already observed, if it takes too long it doesn’t buy us anything. He’s already in the field, and levies are being recruited to his vassals’ forces. I’ve had no reports of the pretender adding to his own body of men. To all intents and purposes he is surrounded by a thousand bodyguards at all times. Moreover, if we just kill him, it’ll trigger a race for the succession among his vassals—and the only outcome that is guaranteed is that every last one of them will consider us a mortal threat. To resolve this problem, we’re going to have to defeat his forces in detail as well as producing an heir to the throne.”

“But he’s refusing to concentrate where we can hit him!” Carl opened his meaty hand above his blotter: two hundred dollars’ worth of pencil scattered across the pad in fragments. “We must do something to bring him to battle! Otherwise he will continue to make us look like fools!”

“You’re quite right.”

Carl looked up at the chairman. “Your grace?”

“I’d like to call Eorl Riordan next, Carl. Eorl Riordan, would you care to explain next week’s operation to the baron?”

“Certainly, your grace.” The new speaker, square-jawed and short-haired, had something of a wardroom air about himself. “On the basis of intelligence indicating that the pretender is preparing a major offensive against one of our most prominent fortifications, his grace asked me to prepare a plan for the defense of Castle Hjorth—which we have reason to believe is the most likely target—with fallback plans to ensure that our other high-value fortifications remain defensible. The resulting plan requires us to stockpile supplies at the likely targets in preparation for the arrival of a mobile reinforcement group. The reinforcement group will be based in this world, while courier elements in our Gruinmarkt assets will rotate regularly and report on their status. As soon as one of our sites goes dark, or as soon as we receive confirmation of contact from one of our scouts in the field, the reinforcement group will redeploy to the target area. The primary target, Castle Hjorth, is already locked down and defended by a platoon of outer family guards, backed up by a team of eighteen couriers on logistic support. When the enemy attacks, here’s how we intend to defend ourselves…”

The dome was big.

Huw hadn’t been able to grasp the scale of it at first: it was buried in the forest, and apart from the segment looming over the clear roadway, the trees had obscured its curvature. But as he studied it, moving quietly from tree trunk to deadfall as Elena and Hulius stood watch, he came to realize that it was huge. It was also very old, and looked—although he wasn’t about to jump to any conclusions—abandoned.

There was a convenient fallen tree trunk about twenty meters out from the rough white dome. Huw settled down behind it, waved to the kids, and pulled out his compact binoculars and the walkie-talkie. “Yul, do you read?”

“Yes, bro.” Yul sounded almost bored. “Got you covered.”

“Copy,” Elena added tersely.

“No features visible on the outside.” Huw scanned laterally with the binoculars, looking for anything that would give him traction on the thing. “Going by the trees…I make it fifty to eighty meters in radius. Very approximate. There’s green stuff on the surface. Looks rough, like concrete. I’m going to approach it when I finish talking. If anything happens I’ll head towards the road. Over.”

Nothing was moving. Huw took a deep breath. He was nervously aware of his heartbeat, thudding away like a bass drum: What is this doing here? All too acutely, he felt a gut-deep conviction that historic consequences might hinge on his next actions. Helge didn’t feel anything like this when she stumbled on the Wu family’s world, did she? Well, probably not—but that world was inhabited, and by people who spoke a recognizable language, too. No evidence of weird climatological conditions, no strange concrete domes in ancient subarctic forests. He checked his web cam briefly, then stood up in full view of the dome.

Anticlimax: nothing happened. Well, that’s a relief. The small of his back itched. He walked around the deadfall, pacing towards the dome. Close up, he realized it was bigger than he’d thought: the curve of its flank was nearly vertical at ground level, stretching away above and to either side of him like a wall. Hmm, let’s see. He looked down at the base, which erupted smoothly from a tumble of ferns and decaying branches. Then he looked up. From this close, he could see the treetops diverge from the curve of the convex hull. “Scratch the size estimate, it’s at least a hundred meters in radius.”

A gust of wind rattled the branches above him. The top of the dome was hard to make out against the background of gray clouds. Huw shivered, then reached out and touched the dome. It was cold, with the grittiness of concrete or sandstone. He leaned close and peered at it. The surface was very smooth, but occasional pockmarks showed where it had been scarred by the surface cracking away under the chisel-like blows of ice forming in tiny fissures on its surface. Finally, he leaned against it and listened.

“I don’t hear anything, and it’s cold—probably at ambient temperature. I think it’s empty, possibly abandoned. I’m going to proceed around it, clockwise.”

The direction he’d chosen took him downslope, away from the road. He walked very slowly, pausing frequently, taking care not to look back. If someone was observing him, he didn’t want to tip them off to Yul and Elena’s presence. The dome extended, intact, curving gradually away from the road. In places, trees had grown up against it, roots scrabbling for purchase in the poor soil. It took Huw a quarter of an hour to realize that none of them had actually levered their way into the concrete or stone or whatever the dome was made of. “It’s not quite a flawless finish,” he reported, “but I’ve got a hunch it’s been here a very long time.” He rubbed his gloved hands together to warm them: there was a distinct bite in the air, and the gusts were growing more frequent.

In the end, the hole in the dome came as a surprise to Huw. He’d been expecting some sort of opening, low down on the slope: or perhaps a gatehouse of some sort. But one moment he was walking around the huge, curving flank of the thing, and the next moment the curved edge of the dome disappeared, as if a giant the size of the Goodyear blimp had taken a huge bite out of it. Huw stopped for a minute, inspecting the edge of the hole with his binoculars. “The opening starts at ground level and extends two thirds of the way to the top of the dome. Must be at least fifty meters wide. I’m going closer…the edge looks almost melted.” He looked down. The trees were thinner on the ground, shorter, and the ground itself fell away in front of the opening, forming a shallow bowl. Like a crater, he realized. Hey—a trickle of water emerged from the shadowy interior of the dome, feeding down a muddy, overgrown channel into a pond in the depression. The pond was almost circular. Something cracked the dome open. Something from—he walked away from the opening, trying to get a perspective on it—something firing downwards, from above.

He shook his head, and suddenly the whole scene dropped into perspective. The dark shadows inside the dome, looming: piles of debris. The melted edges: either the dome is self- healing, or it’s made of something a whole lot more resilient than concrete. It hadn’t shattered like masonry—it had melted like wax. He keyed his walkie-talkie again: “The dome’s split open here. Something energetic, punching down out of the sky. A long time ago.” The way the crater had filled with water, the way the trees were so much shorter than their neighbors, almost as if—

Huw fumbled with his telemetry belt, then slipped one hand free of its glove in order to pull out the Geiger tube. “Got you,” he muttered, holding it out in front of him. “Let’s see.” He flicked the switch on the counter pack, then advanced on the depression. The counter clicked a few times, then gave a warning crackle, like a loose connection. Huw paused, swinging around. It popped and crackled, then as he took a step forward it buzzed angrily. “Hmm.” He turned around and walked back towards the dome. The buzzing subsided, back down to a low crackle. He moved towards the edge of the dome. As he approached the melted-looking edges the counter began to buzz— then rose to an angry whine as he brought the tube to within a couple of centimeters of the edge. “Shit!” He jumped back. “Yul, Elena, listen up—the edge of the hole is radioactive. Lots of beta and maybe alpha activity, not much gamma. I don’t think—” he swallowed “—I don’t think we’re going to find anyone alive in here. And I don’t want you touching the edge of the dome, or walking through the stream running out of it.”

He swallowed again. What am I going to tell the duke this time? He wondered.