The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3) (10 page)

He paused, then peered back at the map. Hunting upstream of the small town, at the fork in the river, he found what he was looking for. ‘Go get one of
our
maps. I want to confirm
that
this
is where we are,’ he said, moving one of the cardboard markers to sit atop the heptagonal feature he’d noticed. ‘They were here for a reason, and I want to know
what they were doing that needed nearly two hundred of the bastards.’

He straightened up and looked around. There were more tables dotted around, and a stack of empty kit bags, but the center of the tent was dominated by a two-story-high aluminum scaffold with
ramps and ladders leading up to platforms on both upper floors. Surveyor’s posts and reflector disks fastened to the uprights, and a pair of theodolites at opposite sides of the tent, made it
clear that whoever had built the scaffold had taken pains over its exact location. Smith frowned, thoughtful.
Nearly two hundred of them and they vanished into thin air in less than three
minutes. How did they avoid falling over each other?
A precision operation, like paratroops jumping in quick succession from the back of a plane.
And why did they do it out in public,
risking detection?
It had to be something to do with this location, and whatever it was collocated with in the other time line.

Herz was muttering into a walkie-talkie. ‘I need geographic input. Is Amanda – yes, I’ll hold, over.’

Smith walked partway round the scaffold. A faint memory began to surface, grade school on an Air Force base somewhere in Germany: knights in armor, huge creaking wooden contraptions grinding
their way across a field of battle towards a walled castle. The whole medieval thing.
It’s a siege tower
. A siege tower without wheels, because you could build it in a parallel
universe, butting right up against wherever you were going to go in. A siege tower without armor, and made of aluminum scaffolding components because they were easier to use than logs.

Voices pulled him back to the present. He glanced round, annoyed, then frowned. It was his political supervisor, Dr. James, he of the cadaverous face and the connections to the current occupant
of Number One Observatory Circle, plotting and scheming inside the beltway. A couple of flunkies – administrative assistants, pasty-skinned managerial types from Crypto city, even a discreet
Secret Service bodyguard doing the men-in-black thing – followed him. ‘Ah, Eric! Excellent. Martin, you can stop trying to reach him now. What’s your analysis?’

Smith took a deep breath, held it for a moment. The smells of crushed grass and gun oil and desperate men filled his nostrils. ‘It’s a siege tower. They weren’t running away
from us, they were breaking
into
something.’ He gestured at the theodolites and the scaffolding. ‘That’s positioned with extreme care. I think it’s a siege tower
– they had a target in their own world and this took them to a precise location. The map’ – Herz was waving at him – ‘excuse me.’ He walked over to the table.
‘Yes?’

‘You were right,’ she said. ‘We’re here.’ Her finger stabbed at the heptagonal structure. ‘This thing is about five hundred feet across, look, concentric
rings – does that remind you of anything?’

Smith nodded and turned to Dr. James. ‘If their map’s telling the truth, that structure is some kind of fortification. And we already know from CLEANSWEEP that some kind of internal
struggle was going down fourteen to sixteen days ago. We could do a lot worse than send a couple of scouts across in the next valley over.’ He cracked his knuckles, first the right hand then
his left. ‘It’s a shame we don’t have anything that can touch them, because they’re probably still bottled up in there, in strength.’

James grinned like a skull. ‘Well, I have an update for you. Let’s take a walk.’

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Erasmus Burgeson arrived in Fort Petrograd four days late, footsore and weary and out-of-pocket – but a free man, thanks to those extraordinary friends of Miriam Beckstein
who had arrived just in time to stop the secret police from collaring the two of them.

After the shoot-out at the one-cow railroad station in the middle of nowhere, he’d taken up Miriam’s invitation to help himself to the political officer’s no-longer-needed
steamer, and topped off both its tanks before cracking open the throttle and bumping across dirt tracks and paved military roads in the general direction of the southwest and the Bay Area. But the
car had run out of steam ten miles before he reached Miwoc City, and he’d had second (and third) thoughts about the wisdom of paying a mechanic to come out and get her rolling again, in light
of the car’s bloodstained provenance. (Not to mention the bullet hole in the left, passenger side, door.)

So he’d walked into Miwoc, dusty and sore-footed, and taken a room in a working men’s hostel, and spent the night lying awake listening to the fights and the begging and the runners
clubbing indigents outside the thin wall of his dive – and set off for Fort Petrograd the next morning, whistling and doubtless mangling a ditty he’d picked up from Miriam, about a
hotel in California.

It was a hundred miles to the big city, where the guns of Fort Petrograd loomed out across the headland of the bay, aiming south towards San Mateo. It shouldn’t have taken three days, but
Erasmus decided to avoid the railways – one close shave with the law was more than enough – and not risk buying an automobile: A solitary man driving alone was as good as a green flag
to a certain kind of highwayman, and it would swallow all his remaining funds besides. The buses and streetcars that connected the grids of these western townships were more than adequate, if one
made allowances for delayed connections . . . and the increasing number of checkpoints where nervous thief takers and magistrate’s men stood guard with shotguns while the transport Polis
examined internal passports and work permits. These, at least, Erasmus was equipped to deceive, thanks to the package Edward had given him in New London.

This worked until the third day, when the bus he was riding from Abadon reached Patwin (which Miriam would have pointed to on a map and called ‘Vallejo’), and ran into a general
strike, and barricades, and grim-faced men beneath a blue flag slashed diagonally with a cross of St. Andrew beneath the glaring face of a wild turkey. ‘Ye can gae nae farthur,’ said
the leader of the band blocking the high street, ‘wi’out any in calling ye strikebreaker.’ He stood in front of the bus with arms crossed in front of him and the stolid
self-confidence born of having two brothers-in-arms standing behind him with hunting rifles and an elderly and unreliable-looking carronade – probably looted from the town hall’s front
steps – to back
them
up.

‘I’m no’ arguing wi’ t’artillery,’ said the driver, turning to address his passengers. ‘End of t’road!’

An hour later, by means of various secret handshakes and circumlocutions, Erasmus was talking to the leader of the strike force, a lean, rat-faced man called Dunstable. ‘I was on my way to
Fort Petrograd on Party business when I was forced off the train and only just escaped with my life. I need to get there immediately.’

‘Let me see what I can do,’ said Dunstable, then vanished into the back of the Town Aldermen’s office, doubtless to cable for directions. The two hard-faced men with pistols
sat with Erasmus in silence; he made himself comfortable until Dunstable returned. ‘Aye, well, your story checks out.’ Dunstable nodded at the two men. ‘Joe, go and get the
mayor’s runabout. Frank, you stay with Mister Burgeson here. You and Joe will drive Mister Burgeson straight to Fort Petrograd, to the Crimea Barracks – you know how to find it? Good.
Our people hold it. When you get there, do as Mister Burgeson says.’

Erasmus stood. ‘I’ll send them back as soon as possible,’ he promised. ‘Good luck here.’

‘Luck?’ Dunstable snorted. ‘Luck’s got now’t to do with it: People are starving and the frogs are trying to retake New France!’

‘They’re
what?
’ Erasmus stared at him.

‘Oh, the king’s got it nailed down quiet like, but we know the score. Furrin troops in Red Club, a dauphin looking to set foot in New Orleans next week.’ Dunstable tapped the
side of his nose. ‘Got to look oot fer our selves in times of unrest, ’aven’t we?’

It took eight hours to drive the fifty miles from Patwin, overlooking the inner shore of the great bay, to Fort Petrograd and the downtown strip of barracks and museums and great houses that
defined the core of western society on the edge of the Pacific. The roads were good, but the two ferries they required ran only infrequently at present, and they had to stop every five to ten miles
to convince another roadblock, revolutionary caucus, civil defense brigade, emergency committee, republican guard, and ladies’ union that they were not, in fact, agents of the secret
political police, the French dauphin (who had simultaneously invaded New France, or Louisiana as the French called it, and Alaska, and the Brazilian Directorate, not to mention New London), or even
the Black Fist Freedom Guard (which last was worryingly close to the truth). Luckily the situation was so confused, the news so hazy, that Erasmus discovered that sounding vague and asking lots of
questions quickly convinced most of them that he was what he said he was – an innocent business traveler trapped on the road with his driver and bodyguard. A couple of the local militias made
halfhearted attempts to shake him down, but his invincible self-righteousness, combined with a pious appeal to the forces of order and justice once the emergency resolved itself, scared them off.
The British were, it seemed, still half-convinced that it was all a bad dream, and the breakdown of government – it seemed the exchequer had run out of money two days ago, and the king had
reconvened parliament, then told parliament to resign again when he didn’t like what they had to say, and parliament had refused, and the unpaid dragoons had refused to clear the benches
– was not quite real.

It was, in short, exactly the sort of confused pre-revolutionary situation that Erasmus had spent most of his life not praying, but hoping for. And he was in very nearly exactly the wrong place,
if not for having had the good luck to run into Dunstable and his fellow travelers.

The broad boulevards and steel-framed stone buildings of metropolitan Fort Petrograd were awash with excited strikers from the munitions factories and – not entirely to Erasmus’s
surprise – sailors from the vast naval base sprawling across the southwestern rim of the bay. Erasmus made a snap decision. ‘Forget the Crimea Barracks, take me to City Hall,’ he
told Joe.