The Merchant’s War полностью

If we told them who we were and what we could do. Could we cut a deal? Build a military-industrial complex to defend against a military-industrial complex. The Empire's under siege. The French have the resources to... she blanked. I don't know enough. A tantalizing vision clung to the edges of her imagination, a new business idea so monumentally vast and arrogant she could barely contemplate it. Thousands of world-walkers, working with the support and resources of a continental superpower, smuggling information and ideas and sharing lessons leeched from a more advanced world. I was thinking small. How fast could we drag New Britain into the twenty-first century? Even without the cohorts of new world-walkers in the making that she'd stumbled across, the product of Angbard's secretive manipulation of a fertility lab's output, it seemed feasible. More than that: it seemed desirable. Mike's organization will assume that any world-walker is a drug mule until proven otherwise. It won't he healthy to he a world-walker in the USA after the shit hits the fan. We'll need New Britain.

Miriam shook herself and checked her watch. The hours had drifted by: the shadows were lengthening and her headache was down to a dull throb. She stood up and dusted herself down again, picked up her suitcase, and focused queasily on the locket. "Once more, with spirit..."

Bang.

Red- hot needles thrust into her eyes as her stomach heaved again: a giant gripped her head between his hands and squeezed. Cobblestones beneath her boots, and a stink of fresh horseshit. Miriam bent forward, gagging, realizing I'm standing in the road -and a narrow road it was, walled on both sides with weathered, greasy brickwork-as the waves of nausea hit.

Bang.

Someone shouted something, at her it seemed. The racket was familiar, and here was a car (or what passed for one in New Britain) with engine running. Hands grabbed at her suitcase: she tightened her grip instinctively.

"Into the car! Now!" Erasmus, she realized fuzzily. " 'M going to be sick-"

"Well you can be sick in the car!" He clutched her arm and tugged. Bang. Gunshots?

She tottered forward, stomach lurching, and half-fell, half-slid through the open passenger compartment leg well, collapsing on the wooden floor. The car shuddered and began to roll smoothly on a flare of steam.

BANG. Someone else, not Erasmus, leaned over her and pulled the trigger of a revolver, driving sharp spikes into her outraged eardrums. With a screech of protesting lubber the car picked up speed. BANG. Erasmus collapsed on top of her, holding her down. "Stay on the floor," he shouted.

The steam car hit a pothole and bounced, violently. It was too much: Miriam began to retch again, bringing up clear bile.

"Shit." It was the shooter on the back seat, wrinkling his face in disgust. "I think that's-"he paused"-no, they're trying to follow us on foot." The driver piled on the steam, then flung their carriage into a wide turn onto a public boulevard. The shooter sat down hard, holding his pistol below seat level, pointing at the floor. "Can you sit up?" he asked Miriam and Erasmus. "Look respectable fast, we're hitting Ketch Street in a minute."

Erasmus picked himself up. "I'm sorry," he said, his voice shaky. Miriam waited for a moment as her stomach tried to lurch again. "Are you all right?"

"Head hurts," she managed. Arms around her shoulders lifted her to her knees. "My suitcase..."

"On the parcel shelf."

More hands from the other side. Together they lifted her into position on the bench seat. The car was rattling and rocking from side to side, making a heady pace- almost forty miles per hour, if she was any judge of speed, but it felt more like ninety in this ragtop steamer.

She gasped for air, chest heaving, trying to get back the wind she'd lost while she was throwing up. "Are you alright?" Burgeson asked again. He'd found a perch on the jump seat opposite, and was clutching a grab-strap behind the chauffeur's station on the right of the cockpit.

"I, it never hit me like that before," she admitted. Amidst the cacophony in her skull she found a moment to be coldly terrified: world-walking usually caused a blood pressure spike and migraine-like symptoms, but nothing like this hellish nausea and pile-driver headache. "Something's up with me."

"Did you get what you wanted?" he pressed her. "Was it worth it?"

"Yeah, yes." She glanced sideways, tiredly. "We haven't been introduced."

"Indeed." Erasmus sent her a narrow-eyed look. "This is Albert. Albert, meet Anne."