The Family Trade Read online

  “The Family Trade shows that Charles Stross is no longer a beginner to watch, but a star to watch.”

  —Mike Resnick

  “Quirky, original, and entertaining. The Family Trade could be The Godfather of all fantasy novels.”

  —Kevin J. Anderson, New York Times bestselling author of A Forest of Stars

  The Merchant Princes

  The Family Trade

  The six families of the Clan rule the kingdom of Gruinmarkt from behind the scenes, a mixture of nobility and criminal conspirators whose power to walk between the worlds makes them rich in both. Braids of family loyalty and intermarriage provide a fragile guarantee of peace, but a recently-ended civil war has left the families shaken and suspicious.

  Caught up in schemes and plots centuries in the making, Miriam Beckstein is surrounded by unlikely allies, forbidden loves, lethal contraband, and, most dangerous of all, her family. Her unexpected return to this world will supercede the claims of other clan members to her mother’s fortune and power, and whoever killed her mother will be happy to see her dead, too.

  Behind all this lie deeper secrets still, which threaten everyone and everything she has ever known. Patterns of deception and interlocking lies, as intricate as the knotwork between the universes.

  “The Family Trade is one of those rare delights—a book that is fun, intelligently written, and which leaves a reader breathlessly wondering what will happen next. Readers Beware: Stross weaves a tale that continually builds to an engrossing climax. Once you get into this, you’ll find yourself hooked.”

  —David Farland

  “At last, a story in which a character from our world is plunged into another, and doesn’t act like a complete idiot. Miriam Beckstein is sharp-witted enough not to waste time trying to pretend that she can avoid the dilemmas that have been forced on her, while being human enough to let her emotions guide her into risky territory.”

  “Stross not only creates a alternate world that is fascinating and original, he even does the unheard of, for a fantasist: His depiction of our world is deep and real. Many a fantasist is able to create, or at least borrow from Tolkien, a reasonably interesting milieu in which the characters can cavort, but when they try their hand at showing something from the real world, like, in this case, the society of high finance, they embarrass themselves by revealing how little they know.”

  “No such problem with Stross. He knows this world backward and forward, and seems to have thought of everything. His characters behave in ways that make sense. They know all the things they should know, and don’t know the things they shouldn’t. The result is that we readers can trust this author completely, dive into this story and let it carry us wherever the current flows.”

  “Not to mention the fact that it’s simply a great adventure, full of dangers, of plots within plots, of forbidden love and political murder. Science fiction is in good hands with Charles Stross here to lead the new generation.”

  —Orson Scott Card

  “Charles Stross’s “The Family Trade is an intuitive, irreverant, and delightful romp into an alternate world where business is simultaneously low and high tech, and were romance, murder, marriage, and business are hopelessly intertwined—and deadly.”

  —E. Modesitt, Jr.

  For Steve and Jenny Glover

  Contents

  Part 1: Pink Slip

  Weatherman

  Pink Slippers

  Walk on the Wild Side

  Hide-and-Seek

  Part 2: Meet the Family

  Hotel Mafiosi

  Cinderella 2.0

  Economics Lesson

  In the Family Way

  Part 3: Hothouse Flowers

  Revenge of the Invisible Woman

  Court Appearance

  Wait Training

  Fire Wall

  Part 4: Killer Story

  Hostile Takeover

  Business Plan

  Part 5: Runaway

  Encounter

  Epilogue

  Preview

  Acknowledgments

  Part 1

  Pink Slip

  Weatherman

  Ten and a half hours before a mounted knight with a machine gun tried to kill her, tech journalist Miriam Beckstein lost her job. Before the day was out, her pink slip would set in train a chain of events that would topple governments, trigger civil wars, and kill thousands. It would be the biggest scoop in her career, in any journalist’s career—bigger than Watergate, bigger than 9/11—and it would be Miriam’s story. But as of seven o’clock in the morning, the story lay in her future: All she knew was that it was a rainy Monday morning in October, she had a job to do and copy to write, and there was an editorial meeting scheduled for ten.

  The sky was the color of a dead laptop display, silver-gray and full of rain. Miriam yawned and came awake to the Monday morning babble of the anchorman on her alarm radio.

  “—Bombing continues in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, in business news, the markets are down forty-seven points on the word that Cisco is laying off another three thousand employees,” announced the anchor. “Ever since 9/11, coming on top of the collapse of the dot-com sector, their biggest customers are hunkering down. Tom, how does it look from where you’re sitting—”

  “Shut up,” she mumbled and killed the volume. “I don’t want to hear this.” Most of the tech sector was taking a beating. Which in turn meant that The Industry Weatherman’s readers—venture capitalists and high-tech entrepreneurs, along with the wannabe day traders—would be taking a beating. Her own beat, the biotech firms, were solid, but the collapsing internet sector was making waves. If something didn’t happen to relieve the plummeting circulation figures soon, there would be trouble.

  Trouble. Monday. “I’ll give you trouble,” she muttered, face forming a grin that might have frightened some of those readers, had they been able to see it. “Trouble is my middle name.” And trouble was good news, for a senior reporter on The Industry Weatherman.

  She slid into her bathrobe, shivering at the cold fabric, then shuffled along stripped pine boards to the bathroom for morning ablutions and two minutes with the electric toothbrush. Standing before the bathroom mirror under the merciless glare of the spotlights, she shivered at what she saw in it: every minute of her thirty-two years, in unforgiving detail. “Abolish Monday mornings and Friday afternoons,” she muttered grimly as she tried to brush some life into her shoulder-length hair, which was stubbornly black and locked in a vicious rear-guard action against the ochre highlights she bombarded it with on a weekly basis. Giving up after a couple of minutes, she fled downstairs to the kitchen.

  The kitchen was a bright shade of yellow, cozy and immune to the gloom of autumn mornings. Relieved, Miriam switched on the coffee percolator and made herself a bowl of granola—what Ben had always called her rabbit-food breakfast.

  Back upstairs, fortified by an unfeasibly large mug of coffee, she had to work out what to wear. She dived into her closet and found herself using her teeth to tear the plastic bag off one of the three suits she’d had dry-cleaned on Friday—only to discover it was her black formal interview affair, not at all the right thing for a rainy Monday pounding the streets—or at least doing telephone interviews from a cubicle in the office. She started again and finally managed to put together an outfit. Black boots, trousers, jacket, turtleneck, and trench coat: as black as her Monday morning mood. I look like a gangster, she thought and chuckled to herself. “Gangsters!” That was what she had to do today. One glance at her watch told her that she didn’t have time for makeup. It wasn’t as if she had to impress anyone at the office anyway: They knew damned well who she was.

  She slid behind the wheel of her four-year-old Saturn, and thankfully it started fi
rst time. But traffic was backed up, one of her wiper blades needed replacing, the radio had taken to crackling erratically, and she couldn’t stop yawning. Mondays, she thought. My favorite day! Not. At least she had a parking space waiting for her—one of the handful reserved for senior journalists who had to go places and interview thrusting new economy executives. Or money-laundering gangsters, the nouveau riche of the pharmaceutical world.

  Twenty minutes later she pulled into a crowded lot behind an anonymous office building in Cambridge, just off Somerville Avenue, with satellite dishes on the roof and fat cables snaking down into the basement. Headquarters of The Industry Weatherman, journal of the tech VC community and Miriam’s employer for the past three years. She swiped her pass-card, hit the elevator up to the third floor, and stepped out into cubicle farm chaos. Desks with PCs and drifts of paper that overflowed onto the floor: A couple of harried Puerto Rican cleaners emptied garbage cans into a trolley laden with bags, to a background of phones ringing and anchors gabbling on CNN, Bloomberg, Fox. Black space-age Aeron chairs everywhere, all wire and plastic, electric chairs for a fully wired future.

  “’Lo, Emily,” she nodded, passing the departmental secretary.

  “Hi! With you in a sec.” Emily lifted her finger from the “mute” button, went back to glassy-eyed attention. “Yes, I’ll send them up as soon as—”

  Miriam’s desk was clean: The stack of press releases was orderly, the computer monitor was polished, and there were no dead coffee cups lying around. By tech journalist standards, this made her a neat freak. She’d always been that way about her work, even when she was a toddler. Liked all her crayons lined up in a row. Occasionally she wished she could manage the housework the same way, but for some reason the skill set didn’t seem to be transferable. But this was work, and work was always under control. I wonder where Paulie’s gotten to?

  “Hi, babe!” As if on cue, Paulette poked her head around the side of the partition. Short, blonde, and bubbly, not even a rainy Monday morning could dent her enthusiasm. “How’s it going? You ready to teach these goodfellas a lesson?”

  “‘Goodfellas?’” Miriam raised an eyebrow. Paulette took the cue, slid sideways into her cubicle, and dropped into the spare chair, forcing Miriam to shuffle sideways to make room. Paulie was obviously enjoying herself: It was one of the few benefits of being a research gofer. Miriam waited.

  “Goodfellas,” Paulette said with relish. “You want a coffee? This is gonna take a while.”

  “Coffee.” Miriam considered. “That would be good.”

  “Yeah, well.” Paulette stood up. “Read this, it’ll save us both some time.” She pointed out a two-inch-thick sheaf of printouts and photocopies to Miriam, then made a beeline for the departmental coffeepot.

  Miriam sighed and rubbed her eyes as she read the first page. Paulie had done her job with terrifying efficiency yet again: Miriam had only worked with her on a couple of investigations before—mostly Miriam’s workload didn’t require the data mining Paulette specialized in—but every single time she’d come away feeling a little dizzy.

  Automobile emissions tests in California? Miriam squinted and turned the page. Failed autos, a chain of repair shops buying them for cash and shipping them south to Mexico and Brazil for stripping or resale. “What’s this got to do with—” she stopped. “Aha!”

  “Nondairy creamer, one sweetener,” said Paulie, planting a coffee mug at her left hand.

  “This is great stuff,” Miriam muttered, flipping more pages. Company accounts. A chain of repair shops that—“I was hoping you’d find something in the small shareholders. How much are these guys in for?”

  “They’re buying about ten, eleven million in shares each year.” Paulette shrugged, then blew across her coffee and pulled a face. “Which is crazy, because their business only turns over about fifteen mill. What kind of business puts eighty percent of its gross into a pension fund? One that bought two hundred and seventy-four autos last year for fifty bucks a shot, shipped them south of the border, and made an average of forty thousand bucks for each one they sold. And the couple of listed owners I phoned didn’t want to talk.”

  Miriam looked up suddenly. “You phoned them?” she demanded.

  “Yes, I—oh. Relax, I told them I was a dealership in Vegas and I was just doing a background check.”

  “‘Background check.’” Miriam snorted. “What if they’ve got caller-ID?”

  “You think they’re going to follow it up?” Paulette asked, looking worried.

  “Paulie, you’ve got eleven million in cash being laundered through this car dealership and you think they’re not going to sit up and listen if someone starts asking questions about where those beaters are coming from and how come they’re fetching more than a new Lexus south of the border?”

  “Oh. Oh shit.”

  “Yes. ‘Oh shit’ indeed. How’d you get into the used car trail anyway?”

  Paulette shrugged and looked slightly embarrassed. “You asked me to follow up the shareholders for Proteome Dynamics and Biphase Technologies. Pacific Auto Services looked kind of odd to me—why would a car dealership have a pension fund sticking eight digits into cutting-edge proteome research? And there’s another ten like them, too. Small mom-and-pop businesses doing a lot of export down south with seven-or eight-digit stakeholdings. I traced another—flip to the next?”

  “Okay. Dallas Used Semiconductors. Buying used IBM mainframe kit? That’s not our—and selling it to—oh shit.”

  “Yeah.” Paulie frowned. “I looked up the book value. Whoever’s buying those five-year-old computers down in Argentina is paying ninety percent of the price for new kit in cash greenbacks—they’re the next thing to legal currency down there. But up here, a five-year-old mainframe goes for about two cents on the dollar.”

  “And you’re sure all this is going into Proteome and Biphase?” Miriam shook the thick sheaf of paper into shape. “I can’t believe this!”

  “Believe it.” Paulette drained her coffee cup and shoved a stray lock of hair back into position.

  Miriam whistled tunelessly. “What’s the bottom line?”

  “‘The bottom line?’” Paulette looked uncomfortable. “I haven’t counted it, but—”

  “Make a guess.”

  “I’d say someone is laundering between fifty and a hundred million dollars a year here. Turning dirty cash into clean shares in Proteome Dynamics and Biphase Technologies. Enough to show up in their SEC filings. So your hunch was right.”

  “And nobody in Executive Country has asked any questions,” Miriam concluded. “If I was paranoid, I’d say it’s like a conspiracy of silence. Hmm.” She put her mug down. “Paulie. You worked for a law firm. Would you call this…circumstantial?”

  “‘Circumstantial?’” Paulette’s expression was almost pitying. “Who’s paying you, the defense? This is enough to get the FBI and the DA muttering about RICO.”

  “Yeah, but…” Miriam nodded to herself. “Look, this is heavy. Heavier than usual anyway. I can guarantee you that if we spring this story we’ll get three responses. One will be flowers in our hair, and the other will be a bunch of cease-and-desist letters from attorneys. Freedom of the press is all very well, but a good reputation and improved circulation figures won’t buy us defense lawyers, which is why I want to double-check everything in here before I go upstairs and tell Sandy we want the cover. Because the third response is going to be oh-shit-I-don’t-want-to-believe-this, because our great leader and teacher thinks the sun shines out of Biphase and I think he’s into Proteome too.”

  “Who do you take me for?” Paulette pointed at the pile. “That’s primary, Miriam, the wellspring. SEC filings, public accounts, the whole lot. Smoking gun. The summary sheet—” she tugged at a Post-it note gummed to a page a third of the way down the stack—“says it all. I was in here all day yesterday and half the evening—”

  “I’m sorry!” Miriam raised her hand. “Hey, really. I had no idea.”

&
nbsp; “I kind of lost track of time,” Paulette admitted. She smiled. “It’s not often I get something interesting to dig into. Anyway, if the boss is into these two, I’d think he’d be glad of the warning. Gives him time to pull out his stake before we run the story.”

  “Yeah, well.” Miriam stood up. “I think we want to bypass Sandy. This goes to the top.”

  “But Sandy needs to know. It’ll mess with his page plan—”

  “Yeah, but someone has to call Legal before we run with this. It’s the biggest scoop we’ve had all year. Want to come with me? I think you earned at least half the credit…”

  They shared the elevator up to executive row in silence. It was walled in mirrors, reflecting their contrasts: Paulette, a short blonde with disorderly curls and a bright red blouse, and Miriam, a slim five-foot-eight, dressed entirely in black. The business research wonk and the journalist, on their way to see the editorial director. Some Mondays are better than others, thought Miriam. She smiled tightly at Paulette in the mirror and Paulie grinned back: a worried expression, slightly apprehensive.

  The Industry Weatherman was mostly owned by a tech venture capital firm who operated out of the top floors of the building, their offices intermingled with those of the magazine’s directors. Two floors up, the corridors featured a better grade of carpet and the walls were genuine partitions covered in oak veneer, rather than fabric-padded cubicles. That was the only difference she could see—that and the fact that some of the occupants were assholes like the people she wrote glowing profiles of for a living. I’ve never met a tech VC who a shark would bite, Miriam thought grumpily. Professional courtesy among killers. The current incumbent of the revolving door office labeled EDITORIAL DIRECTOR—officially a vice president—was an often-absent executive by the name of Joe Dixon. Miriam led Paulette to the office and paused for a moment, then knocked on the door, half-hoping to find he wasn’t there.