Free The Trade of Queens by Charles Stross

direction-finding equipment, and if they’ve got their hands on Rudy’s ultralight … we’ve got to sit tight as long as possible. I’ve ordered Helmut to bring a couple of lances here as soon as he’s nailed down the Summer Palace and I’ve put orders out for the arrest of the entire postal committee and, I regret to say, your grandmother. We can weed that garden at our leisure once we’ve got it fenced in. Unless you have any other suggestions?”
    â€œYes.” Miriam swallowed. “Is there any word of my mother? Or, or Dr. Griben ven Hjalmar? I think they’re in cahoots.…”
    Riordan glanced at one of his men and barked a question in hochsprache too fast for Miriam to follow. The reply was hesitant. “No reports,” he said, turning to Miriam. “I’ll let you know if anything turns up. I assume you’re talking about the duke’s special, ah, medical program?” Miriam nodded. “I’m on it. Now, if you wouldn’t mind—” He looked pointedly at the security guard with the radio headset, who was waving urgently for attention.
    â€œGo to it.” Miriam shuffled awkwardly aside, towards the doorway into the burned-out wing of the farmhouse. “What do we do now?” she asked Olga.
    Olga grimaced. “We wait, my lady. And we learn. Or you wait, I have orders to send. Please.” She gestured at the bedrolls on the hard-packed floor. “Make yourself comfortable. We may be here some time.”
    *   *   *
    Twenty years ago, in the rookeries of a town called New Catford, Elder Huan had known a young and dangerous radical—a Leveler and ranter called Stephen Reynolds.
    In those days, Huan had been the public face of the family’s business involvements—a discreet railroad for money and dispatches that the underground made use of from time to time. Reynolds had been Huan Lee’s contact, and for a while things had gone swimmingly. Few organizations had as great a need for secrecy as the Leveler command, and indeed Huan had toyed with the idea of disclosing the family’s secret to him—for the family’s singular talent and the needs of the terrorists and bomb-throwers and other idealists were perfectly aligned, and the pogroms and lynchings of the English, tacitly encouraged by the government (who knew a good target for the mob’s ire when they saw it—and skin of the wrong color had always been one such), did nothing to endear the authorities to him. At least the revolutionaries preached equality and fraternity, an end to the oppression of all races.
    A series of unfortunate events had closed off that avenue before Huan started down it; raids, arrests, and executions of Leveler cells clear across the country. He, himself, had been forced to world-walk in a hurry, one jump ahead of the jackboots of the Polis troopers. And that had been the end of that . The first duty of the family was survival, then profit—martyrdom in the name of revolutionary fraternity wasn’t part of the package. In the wake of the raids he’d thought Stephen Reynolds dead—until he heard the name again, in a broadcast by the revolutionary propaganda ministry. Reynolds had survived and, it seemed, prospered in the council of the Radical Party.
    This didn’t entirely surprise Elder Huan. As he had described it to his brothers, some time later, “The man is a rat—sharp as a wire, personally courageous, and curious. The Polis will have a hard time taking him.” And now the fox was in charge of a hen coop of no small size, having emerged in charge of the Annapolis Freedom Riders, then promoted to organize the Bureau of Internal Security that the party had formed to replace the reactionary and untrustworthy Crown Polis.
    Now Elder Huan—through conduits and contacts both esoteric and obscure—had arranged for a meeting with the man himself. The agenda of