Free The Merchants' War by Charles Stross Page A

list of possibilities. Whatever the message meant, he needed to be on a train to the capital as soon as possible.
    An hour later, Erasmus was dressed and ready to travel, disguised as himself (electrograph in wallet, along with ID papers). He carefully shut off the gas supply and, going downstairs, hung up the CLOSED DUE TO ILLNESS sign in the shop window. It needed no explanation to such folk as knew him, and in any case the Polis had been giving him a wide berth of late, ever since his relapse in their cells. They probably think I'm out of the struggle for good, he told himself, offering it as a faint prayer. If he could ever shed the attention he'd attracted, what use he could make of anonymity with his age and guile!
    It took him some time to get to the new station besides the Charles River, but once there he discovered that the mid-morning express had not yet departed, and seats in second class were still available. And that wasn't his only good fortune. As he walked along the pier past the streamlined engine he noticed that it had none of the normal driving wheels and pistons, but multiple millipedelike undercarriages and a royal coat of arms. Then he spotted the string of outrageously streamlined carriages strung out along the track behind it, and the way the gleaming tractor emitted a constant gassy whistling sound, like a promise from the far future. It was one of the new turbine-powered trains that had been all the talk of the traveling classes this summer. Erasmus shook his head. This was unexpected: he'd hoped to reach New London for dinner, but if what he'd heard about these machines were true he might arrive in time for late lunch.
    His prognostications were correct. The train began to move as he settled down behind a newspaper, accelerating more like an electric streetcar than any locomotive he'd been on, and minutes later it was racing through the Massachusetts countryside as fast as an air packet.
    Burgeson found the news depressing but compelling. Continental Assembly Dismissed! screamed the front page headline. Budget Deadlock Unresolved . The king had, it seemed, taken a right royal dislike to his Conservative enemies in the house, and their dastardly attempts to save their scrawny necks by raising tariffs to pay for the Poor Law rations at the expense of the Navy. Meanwhile, the rocketing price of Persian crude had triggered a run on oil futures and threatened to deepen the impending liquidity crisis further. Given a choice between a rock and a hard place-between the need to mobilize the cumbersome and expensive apparatus of continental defense in the face of French aggression, and the demands of an exhausted Treasury and the worries of bondholders-the king had gone for neither, but had instead dismissed the quarrelsome political mosquitoes who kept insisting that he make a choice between guns and butter. It would have struck Erasmus as funny if he wasn't fully aware that it meant thousands were going to starve to death in the streets come winter, in Boston alone-and that was ignoring the thousands who would die at sea and on foreign soil, because of the thrice-damned stupid assassination of the young prince.
    There were some benefits to rule by royal edict, Erasmus decided. The movement was lying low, and the number of skulls being crushed by truncheons was consequently small right now, but with the dismissal of the congress, everyone now knew exactly who to blame whenever anything bad happened. There was no more room for false optimism, no more room for wishful thinking that the Crown might take the side of the people against his servants. The movement's cautious testing of the waters of public opinion (cautious because you never knew which affable drinking companion might be an agent provocateur sent to consign you to the timber camps, and in this time of gathering wartime hysteria any number of ordinarily reasonable folks had been caught up in the most bizarre excesses of anti-French and anti-Turkish