The Merchants’ War

A hypothesis took root and refused to shake free: Imagine a nuclear installation or a missile command site or a magic wand factory. Or something. There’d been a war. It all happened a long time ago of course—hundreds of years ago. Everyone was dead, nobody lived here anymore. During the war, someone took a shot at the dome with a high energy weapon. Not an ordinary H-bomb, but something exotic—a shaped nuclear charge, perhaps, designed to punch almost all of its energy out into a beam of radiation going straight down. Or a gamma-ray laser powered by a couple of grams of isomeric hafnium. Maybe they used an intercontinental ballistic magic wand. Whatever it was, not much blast energy reached the ground—but the dome had been zapped by a stabbing knife of plasma like Lightning Child’s fiercest punch, followed by a storm of secondary radiation.

Huw looked up at the underside of the dome. A gust of wind set up a sonorous droning whistle, ululating like the ghost of a dead whale. The dome was thick. He froze for a moment, staring, then raised his binoculars again. He raised his dictaphone, and began speaking. “The installation is covered by a dome, and back in the day it was probably guarded by active defenses. You’d need a nuke to crack it open because the stuff it’s made of is harder and more resilient than reinforced concrete, and it’s at least three, maybe four meters thick. Coming down from the zenith, perhaps eighty meters off-center, the shotgun-blast of lightning-hot plasma has sheared through almost fifteen meters of this—call it supercrete? Carbon-fiber reinforced concrete?—and dug an elliptical trench in the shallow hillside. It must have vaporized the segment of the dome it struck. How in Hell the rest of the dome held —must have a tensile strength like buckminsterfullerene nanotubes. That’s probably what killed the occupants, the shockwave would rattle around inside the dome…”

The tree branches rustled overhead as the drone of the dead whale rose. Huw glanced up at the clouds, scudding past fast in the gray light. He sniffed. Smells like snow. Then he glanced over his shoulder, and turned, very deliberately, to raise a hand and wave.

Elena was the first to catch up with him. “Crone’s teeth, Huw, what have you found?”

“Stand away from there!” He snapped as she glanced curiously at the edge of the gaping hole in the dome. “It’s radioactive,” he added, as she looked round and frowned at him. “I think whatever happened a long time ago was…well, I don’t think the owners are home.”

“Right.” She shook her head, looking up at the huge arch that opened the dome above them. “Wow. What are we going to do?”

“Yo.” Yul trotted up, rifle cradled carefully in his arms. “What now—”

Huw checked his watch. “We’ve got half an hour left until it’s time to head back to base camp. I don’t know about you guys, but I want to do some sightseeing before I go home. But first, I think we’d better make sure it doesn’t kill us in the process.” He held up his Geiger counter: “Get your tubes out.” A minute later he’d reset both their counters to click, rather than silently logging the radiation flux. “If this begins to crackle, stop moving. If it buzzes, back away from wherever the buzzing is highest-pitched. If it howls at you, run for your life. The higher the pitch, the more dangerous it is. And don’t touch anything without checking it out first. Never touch your counter to a surface, but hold it as close as you can—some types of radiation are stopped by an inch of air, but can kill you if you get close enough to actually touch the source. Got that? If in doubt, don’t touch.”

“What are we looking for again, exactly?” Yul raised an eyebrow.

“Magic wands. C’mon, let’s see what we’ve got.”

The trouble with trains, in Miriam’s opinion, was that they weren’t airliners: you actually went through the landscape, instead of soaring over it, and you tended to get bogged down in those vast spaces. About the best thing that could be said about it was that in first class you could get a decent cooked meal in the dining car then retire to your bedroom for a night’s sleep, and wake up seven or eight hundred miles from where you went to bed. On the other hand, the gentle swaying, occasional front-to-back lurching of the coaches, and the perpetual clatter of wheels across track welds combined to give her a queasy feeling the like of which she hadn’t felt since many years ago she’d let her then-husband argue her into a boating holiday.

I seem to be spending all my time throwing up these days. Miriam sat on the edge of her bed, the chamber pot clutched between her hands and knees in the pre-dawn light. What’s wrong with me? A sense of despondency washed over her. All I need right now is a stomach bug…she yawned experimentally, held her breath, and let her back relax infinitesimally as she realized that her stomach was played out. Damn. She put the pot back in its under- bunk drawer and swung her legs back under the sheets. She yawned again, exhausted, then glanced at the window in mild disgust. Might as well get started now, she told herself. There was no way she’d manage another hour’s sleep before it was time to get up anyway: the train was due to pause in Dunedin around ten o’clock, and she needed to get her letter written first. The only question was what to put in it…

She glanced at the door to the lounge room. Erasmus insisted on sleeping in there—not that it was any great hardship, for the padded bench concealed a pullout bed—which would make it just about impossible for her to get the letter out without him noticing. Well, there’s no alternative, she decided. She was fresh out of cover stories: who else could she be writing to, when she was on the run? Sooner or later you’ve got to choose your allies and stick by them. So far, Erasmus had shown no sign of trying to bar her from pursuing her own objectives. I’ll just have to risk it.

Sighing, she rummaged in the bedside cabinet for the writing-box. People here were big on writing letters—no computers or e-mail, and typewriters the size of a big old laser printer meant that everyone got lots of practice at their cursive handwriting. There was an inkwell, of course, and even a cheap pen—not a fountain pen, but a dipping pen with a nib—and a blotter, and fine paper with the railway corporation crest of arms, and envelopes. Envelopes. What she was about to attempt was the oldest trick in the book—but this was a world that had not been blessed by the presence of an Edgar Allan Poe.

Biting her lip, Miriam hunched over the paper. Best to keep it brief: she scribbled six sentences in haste, then pulled out a clean sheet of paper and condensed them into four, as neatly as she could manage aboard a moving train.

Dear Brill, I survived the massacre at the palace by fleeing into New Britain. I have vital information about a threat to us all. Can you arrange an interview with my uncle? If so, I will make contact on my return to Boston (not less than seven days from now).

Folding it neatly, she slid the note into an envelope and addressed it, painstakingly carefully, in a language she was far from easy with.

Next, she took another sheet of paper and jotted down instructions upon it. This she placed, along with a folded six-shilling note, inside another envelope with a different name and address upon it.

Finally, she took the locket from under her pillow, and copied the design onto the envelope, making a neat sketch of it in place of a postage stamp—taking pains to cover each side of the knotwork as she drew the other half, so that she couldn’t accidentally visualize the whole.

And then she waited.

Dunedin was the best part of a thousand miles from New London, a good nine hundred from Boston—the nearest city in her own world to it was Joliet. In this world, with no Chicago, Dunedin had grown into a huge metropolis, the continental hub where railroad and canal freight met on the southern coast of the great lakes. There was a Clan post office in Joliet, and a small fort in the unmapped forests of the world the Clan came from—a no- man’s-land six hundred miles west of the territory claimed by the eastern marcher kingdoms—and now a post office in Dunedin too, a small house in the suburbs where respectable-looking men came and went erratically. Miriam had been there before, had even committed the address to memory for her courier runs: an anonymous villa in a leafy suburb. But the train would only pause for half an hour to change locomotives; she wouldn’t have time to deliver it herself.

Eventually she heard shuffling and muttering from the other side of the door—and then a tentative knock. “Who is it?” she called.

“Breakfast time.” It was Erasmus. “Are you decent?”

“Sure.” She pulled on her shoes and stood up, opening the through door. The folding bunk was stowed: Erasmus looked to have been up for some time. He smiled, tentatively. “The steward will bring us our breakfast here, if you like. Did you sleep well?”

Miriam yawned. “About as well as can be expected.” She steeled herself: “I need to post a letter when we get to Dunedin.”