Charles Stross - Merchant princes 03 - The Clan Corporate

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The Clan Corporate-ARC

Book Three of the Merchant Princes

Charles Stross

Advance Reader Copy

Unproofed

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this

novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

The Clan Corporate: Book Three of the Merchant Princes

thereof, in any form.

Edited by David G. Hartwell

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stross, Charles.

The clan corporate / Charles Stross.- 1st ed.

p. cm. - (The merchant princes ; bk. 3)

“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

ISBN 0-765-30930-0 (acid-free paper)

EAN 978-0-765-30930-3

1. Women journalists-Fiction. 2. Merchants-Family relationships-Fiction. 3.

Family-Fiction. 4. Boston (Mass.)-Fiction. I. Title.

PR6119.T79C63 2006

813'.6-dc22

2005034504

First Edition: May 2006

Printed in the United States of America

For Andrew, Lorna, and James

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due James Nicoll, Robert “Nojay” Sneddon, Cory Doctorow,

Andrew Wilson, Caitlin Blasdell, Tom Doherty,

and my editors, David Hartwell and Moshe Feder.

TOR BOOKS BY CHARLES STROSS

The Clan Corporate

The Family Trade

The Hidden Family

1: Tied Down

Nail lacquer, the woman called Helge reflected as she paused in the

antechamber, always did two things to her: it reminded her of her mother, and

it made her feel like a rebellious little girl. She examined the fingertips of

her left hand, turning them this way and that in search of minute

imperfections in the early afternoon sunlight slanting through the huge window

behind her. There weren't any. The maidservant who had painted them for her

had poor nails, cracked and brittle from hard work: her own, in contrast, were

pearlescent and glossy, and about a quarter-inch longer than she was

comfortable with. There seemed to be a lot of things that she was

uncomfortable with these days. She sighed quietly and glanced at the door.

The door opened at that moment. Was it coincidence, or was she being watched?

Liveried footmen inclined their heads as another spoke. "Milady, the duchess

bids you enter. She is waiting in the day room."

Helge swept past them with a brief nod-more acknowledgment of their presence

than most of her rank would bother with-and paused to glance back down the

hallway as her servants (a lady-in-waiting, a court butler, and two

hard-faced, impassive bodyguards) followed her. "Wait in the hall," she told

the guards. "You can accompany me, but wait at the far end of the room," she

told her attendant ingénue. Lady Kara nodded meekly. She'd been slow to learn

that Helge bore an uncommon dislike for having her conversations eavesdropped

on: there had been an unfortunate incident some weeks ago, and the

lady-in-waiting had not yet recovered her self-esteem.

The hall was perhaps sixty feet long and wide enough for a royal entourage.

The walls, paneled in imported oak, were occupied by window bays interspersed

with oil paintings and a few more-recent daguerreotypes of noble ancestors,

the scoundrels and skeletons cluttering up the family tree. Uniformed servants

waited beside each door. Helge paced across the rough marble tiles, her spine

rigid and her shoulders set defensively. At the end of the hall an equerry

wearing the polished half-armor and crimson breeches of his calling bowed,

then pulled the tasseled bell-pull beside the double doors. "The Countess

Helge voh Thorold d'Hjorth!"

The doors opened, ushering Countess Helge inside, leaving servants and guards

to cool their heels at the threshold.

The day room was built to classical proportions-but built large, in every

dimension. Four windows, each twelve feet high, dominated the south wall,

overlooking the regimented lushness of the gardens that surrounded the palace.

The ornate plasterwork of the ceiling must have occupied a master and his

journeymen for a year. The scale of the architecture dwarfed the merely human

furniture, so that the chaise longue the duchess reclined on, and the spindly

rococo chair beside it, seemed like the discarded toy furniture of a baby

giantess. The duchess herself looked improbably fragile: gray hair growing out

in intricately coiffed coils, face powdered to the complexion of a china doll,

her body lost in a court gown of black lace over burgundy velvet. But her eyes

were bright and alert-and knowing.

Helge paused before the duchess. With a little moue of concentration she

essayed a curtsey. "Your grace, I are-am-happy to see you," she said haltingly

in hochsprache. "I-I-oh damn." The latter words slipped out in her native

tongue. She straightened her knees and sighed. "Well? How am I doing?"

"Hmm." The duchess examined her minutely from head to foot, then nodded

slightly. "You're getting better. Well enough to pass tonight. Have a seat."

She gestured at the chair beside her.

Miriam sat down. "As long as nobody asks me to dance," she said ruefully.

"I've got two left feet, it seems." She plucked at her lap. "And as long as I

don't end up being cornered by a drunken backwoods peer who thinks not being

fluent in his language is a sign of an imbecile. And as long as I don't

accidentally mistake some long-lost third cousin seven times removed for the

hat-check clerk and resurrect a two-hundred-year-old blood feud. And as long

as-"

"Dear," the duchess said quietly, "do please shut up."

The countess, who had grown up as Miriam but whom everyone around her but the

duchess habitually called Helge, stopped in mid-flow. "Yes, Mother," she said

meekly. Folding her hands in her lap she breathed out. Then she raised one

eyebrow.

The duchess looked at her for almost a minute, then nodded minutely. "You'll

pass," she said. "With the jewelry, of course. And the posh frock. As long as

you don't let your mouth run away with you." Her cheek twitched. "As long as

you remember to be Helge, not Miriam."

"I feel like I'm acting all the time!" Miriam protested.

"Of course you do." The duchess finally smiled. "Imposter syndrome goes with

the territory." The smile faded. "And I didn't do you any favors in the long

run by hiding you from all this." She gestured around the room. "It becomes

harder to adapt, the older you get."

"Oh, I don't know." Miriam frowned momentarily. "I can deal with disguises and

a new name and background; I can even cope with trying to learn a new

language, it's the sense of permanence that's disconcerting. I grew up an only

child, but Helge has all these-relatives-I didn't grow up with, and they're

real. That's hard to cope with. And you're here, and part of it!" Her frown

returned. "And now this evening's junket. If I thought I could avoid it, I'd

be in my rooms having a stomach cramp all afternoon."

"That would be a Bad Idea." The duchess still had the habit of capitalizing

her speech when she was waxing sarcastic, Miriam noted.

"Yes, I know that. I'm just-there are things I should be doing that are more

important than attending a royal garden party. It's all deeply tedious."

"With an attitude like that you'll go far." Her mother paused. "All the way to

the scaffold if you don't watch your lip, at least in public. Do I need to

explain how sensitive to social niceties your position here is? This is not

America-"

"Yes, well, more's the pity." Miriam shrugged minutely.

"Well, we're stuck with the way things are," the duchess said sharply, then

subsided slightly. "I'm sorry, dear, I don't mean to snap. I'm just worried

for you. The sooner you learn how to mind yourself without mortally offending

anyone by accident the happier I'll be."

"Um." Miriam chewed on the idea for a while. She's stressed, she decided. Is

that all it is, or is there something more? "Well, I'll try. But I came here

to see how you are, not to have a moan on your shoulder. So, how are you?"

"Well, now that you ask . . ." Her mother smiled and waved vaguely at a table

behind her chaise longue. Miriam followed her gesture: two aluminium crutches,

starkly functional, lay atop a cloisonné stand next to a pill case. "The

doctor says I'm to reduce the prednisone again next week. The Copaxone seems

to be helping a lot, and that's just one injection a day. As long as nobody

accidentally forgets to bring me next week's prescription I'll be fine."

"But surely nobody would-" Miriam's whole body quivered with anger.

"Really?" The duchess glanced back at her daughter, her expression unreadable.

"You seem to have forgotten what kind of a place this is. The meds aren't

simply costly in dollars and cents: someone has to bring them across from the

other world. And courier time is priceless. Nobody gives me a neatly itemized

bill, but if I want to keep on receiving them I have to pay. And the first

rule of business around here is, Don't piss off the blackmailers."

Miriam's reluctant nod seemed to satisfy the duchess, because she nodded:

"Remember, a lady never unintentionally gives offense-especially to people she

depends on to keep her alive. If you can hang on to just one rule to help you

survive in the Clan, make it that one. But I'm losing the plot. How are you

doing? Have there been any aftereffects?"

"Aftereffects?" Miriam caught her hand at her chin and forced herself to stop

fidgeting. She flushed, pulse jerking with an adrenaline surge of remembered

fear and anger. "I-" She lowered her hand. "Oh, nothing physical," she said

bitterly. "Nothing . . ."

"I've been thinking about him a lot lately, Miriam. He wouldn't have been good

for you, you know."

"I know." The younger woman-youth being relative: she wouldn't be seeing

thirty again-dropped her gaze. "The political entanglements made it a messy

prospect at best," she said, frowning. "Even if you discounted his

weaknesses." The duchess didn't reply. Eventually Miriam looked up, her eyes

burning with emotions she'd experienced only since learning to be Helge. "I

haven't forgiven him, you know."

"Forgiven Roland?" The duchess's tone sharpened.

"No. Your goddamn half-brother. He's meant to be in charge of security! But

he-" Her voice began to break.

"Yes, yes, I know. And do you think he has been sleeping well lately? I'm led

to believe he's frantically busy right now. Losing Roland was the least of our

problems, if you'll permit me to be blunt, and Angbard has a major crisis to

deal with. Your affair with him can be ignored, if it comes to it, by the

Council. It's not as if you're a teenage virgin to be despoiled, damaging some

aristocratic alliance by losing your honor-and you'd better think about that

some more in future, because honor is the currency in the circles you move in,

a currency that once spent is very hard to regain-but the deeper damage to the

Clan that Matthias inflicted-"

"Tell me about it," Miriam said bitterly. "As soon as I was back on my feet

they told me I could only run courier assignments to and from a safe house.

And I'm not allowed to go home!"

"Matthias knows you," her mother pointed out. "If he mentioned you to his new

employers-"

"I understand." Miriam subsided in a sullen silence, arms crossed before her

and back set defensively. After a moment she started tapping her toes.

"Stop that!" Moderating her tone, the duchess added, "If you do that in public

it sends entirely the wrong message. Appearances are everything, you've got to

learn that."

"Yes, Mother."

After a couple of minutes, the duchess spoke. "You're not happy."

"No."

"And it's not just-him."

"Correct." Her hem twitched once more before Helge managed to control the urge

to tap.

The duchess sighed. "Do I have to drag it out of you?"

"No, Iris."

"You shouldn't call me that here. Bad habits of thought and behavior, you

know."

"Bad? Or just inappropriate? Liable to send the wrong message?"

The duchess chuckled. "I should know better than to argue with you, dear!" She

looked serious. "The wrong message in a nutshell. Miriam can't go home, Helge.

Not now, maybe not ever. Thanks to that scum-sucking rat-bastard defector the

entire Clan network in Massachusetts is blown wide open and if you even think

about going-"

"Yeah, yeah, I know, there'll be an FBI SWAT team staking out my backyard and

I'll vanish into a supermax prison so fast my feet don't touch the ground. If

I'm lucky," she added bitterly. "So everything's locked down like a code-red

terrorist alert; the only way I'm allowed to go back to our world is on a

closely supervised courier run to an underground railway station buried so

deep I don't even see daylight; if I want anything-even a box of tampons-I

have to requisition it and someone in the Security Directorate has to fill out

a risk assessment to see if it's safe to obtain; and, and . . ." Her shoulders

heaved with indignation.

"This is what it was like the whole time, during the civil war," the duchess

pointed out.

"So people keep telling me, as if I'm supposed to be grateful! But it's not as

if this is my only option. I've got another identity over in world three and-"

"Do they have tampons there?"

"Ah." Helge paused for a moment. "No, I don't think so," she said slowly. "But

they've got cotton wool." She fumbled for a moment, then pulled out a

pen-sized voice recorder. "Memo: business plans. Investigate early patent

filings covering tampons and applicators. Also sterilization methods-dry

heat?" She clicked the recorder off and replaced it. "Thanks." A lightning

smile that was purely Miriam flashed across her face and was gone. "I should

be over there," she added earnestly. "World three is my project. I set up the

company and I ought to be managing it."

"Firstly, our dear long-lost relatives are over there," the duchess pointed

out. "Truce or not, if they haven't got the message yet, you could show your

nose over there and get it chopped off. And secondly . . ."

"Ah, yes. Secondly."

"You know what I'm going to say," the duchess said quietly. "So please don't

shoot the messenger."

"Okay." Helge turned her head to stare moodily out of the nearest window.

"You're going to tell me that the political situation is messy. That if I go

over there right now some of the more jumpy first citizens of the Clan will

get the idea that I'm abandoning the sinking ship, aided and abetted by my

delightful grandmother's whispering campaign-"

"Leave the rudeness to me. She's my cross to bear."

"Yes, but." Helge stopped.

Her mother took a deep breath. "The Clan, for all its failings, is a very

democratic organization. Democratic in the original sense of the word. If

enough of the elite voters agree, they can depose the leadership, indict a

member of the Clan for trial by a jury of their peers-anything. Which is why

appearances, manners, and social standing are so important. Hypocrisy is the

grease that lubricates the Clan's machinery." Her cheek twitched. "Oh yes.

While I remember, love, if you are accused of anything never, ever, insist on

your right to a trial by jury. Over here, that word does not mean what you

think it means. Like the word secretary. Pah, but I'm woolgathering! Anyway.

My mother, your grandmother, has a constituency, Miri-Helge. Tarnation. Swear

at me if I slip again, will you, dear? We need to break each other of this

habit."

Helge nodded. "Yes, Iris."

The duchess reached over and swatted her lightly on the arm. "Patricia! Say my

full name."

"Ah." Helge met her gaze. "All right. Your grace is the honorable Duchess

Patricia voh Hjorth d'Wu ab Thorold." With mild rebellion: "Also known as Iris

Beckstein, of 34 Coffin Street-"

"That's enough!" Her mother nodded sharply. "Put the rest behind you for the

time being. Until-unless-we can ever go back, the memories can do nothing but

hurt you. You've got to live in the present. And the present means living

among the Clan and deporting yourself as a, a countess. Because if you don't

do that, all the alternatives on offer are drastically worse. This isn't a

rich world, like America. Most women only have one thing to trade: as a lady

of the Clan you're lucky enough to have two, even three if you count the

contents of your head. But if you throw away the money and the power that goes

with being of the Clan, you'll rapidly find out just what's under the

surface-if you survive long enough."

"But there's no limit to the amount of shit!" the younger woman burst out,

then clapped a hand to her face as if to recall the unladylike expostulation.

"Don't chew your nails, dear," her mother said automatically.

It had started in mid-morning. Miriam (who still found it an effort of will to

think of herself as Helge, outside of social situations where other people

expected her to be Helge) was tired and irritable, dosed up on ibuprofen and

propranolol to deal with the effects of a series of courier runs the day

before when, wearing jeans and a lined waterproof jacket heavy enough to

survive a northeast passage, she'd wheezed under the weight of a backpack and

a walking frame. They'd had her ferrying fifty-kilogram loads between a gloomy

cellar of undressed stone and an equally gloomy subbasement of an underground

car park in Manhattan. There were armed guards in New York to protect her

while she recovered from the vicious migraine that world-walking brought on,

and there were servants and maids in the palace quarters back home to pamper

her and feed her sweetmeats from a cold buffet and apply a cool compress for

her head. But the whole objective of all this attention was to soften her up

until she could be cozened into making another run. Two return trips in

eighteen hours. Drugs or no drugs, it was brutal: without guards and flunkies

and servants to prod her along she might have refused to do her duty.

She'd carried a hundred kilograms in each direction across the space between

two worlds, a gap narrower than atoms and colder than light-years. Lightning

Child only knew what had been in those packages. The Clan's mercantilist

operations in the United States emphasized high-value, low-weight commodities.

Like it or not, there was more money in smuggling contraband than works of art

or intellectual property. It was a perpetual sore on Miriam's conscience, one

that only stopped chafing when for a few hours she managed to stop being

Miriam Beckstein, journalist, and to be instead Helge of Thorold by Hjorth,

Countess. What made it even worse for Miriam was that she was acutely aware

that such a business model was stupid and unsustainable. Once, mere weeks ago,

she'd had plans to upset the metaphorical applecart, designs to replace it

with a fleet of milk tankers. But then Matthias, secretary to the Duke

Angbard, captain-general of the Clan's Security Directorate, had upset the

applecart first, and set fire to it into the bargain. He'd defected to the

Drug Enforcement Agency of the United States of America. And whether or not

he'd held his peace about the real nature of the Clan, a dynasty of

world-walking spooks from a place where the river of history had run a

radically different course, he had sure as hell shut down their eastern

seaboard operations.

Matthias had blown more safe houses and shipping networks in one month than

the Clan had lost in all the previous thirty years. His psycho bagman had shot

and killed Miriam's lover during an attempt to cover up the defection by

destroying a major Clan fortress. Then, a month later, Clan security had

ordered Miriam back to Niejwein from New Britain, warning that Matthias's

allies in that timeline made it too unsafe for her to stay there. Miriam

thought this was bullshit: but bullshit delivered by men with automatic

weapons was bullshit best nodded along with, at least until their backs were

turned.

Mid-morning loomed. Miriam wasn't needed today. She had the next three days

off, her corvée paid. Miriam would sleep in, and then Helge would occupy her

time with education. Miriam Beckstein had two college degrees, but Countess

Helge was woefully uneducated in even the basics of her new life. Just

learning how to live among her recently rediscovered extended family was a

full-time job. First, language lessons in the hochsprache vernacular with a

most attentive tutor, her lady-in-waiting Kara d'Praha. Then an appointment

for a fitting with her dressmaker, whose ongoing fabrication of a suitable

wardrobe had something of the quality of a Sisyphean task. Perhaps if the

weather was good there'd be a discreet lesson in horsemanship (growing up in

suburban Boston, she'd never learned to ride): otherwise, one in dancing,

deportment, or court etiquette.

Miriam was bored and anxious, itching to get back to her start-up venture in

the old capital of New Britain where she'd established a company to build disk

brakes and pioneer automotive technology transfer. New Britain was about fifty

years behind the world she'd grown up in, a land of opportunity for a sometime

tech journalist turned entrepreneur. Helge, however, was strangely fascinated

by the minutiae of her new life. Going from middle-class middle-American life

to the rarefied upper reaches of a barely postfeudal aristocracy meant

learning skills she'd never imagined needing before. She was confronting a

divide of five hundred years, not fifty, and it was challenging.

She'd taken the early part of the morning off to be Miriam, sitting in her

bedroom in jeans and sweater, her seat a folding aluminum camp chair, a laptop

balanced on her knees and a mug of coffee cooling on the floor by her feet. If

I can't do I can at least plan, she told herself wryly. She had a lot of

plans, more than she knew what to do with. The whole idea of turning the

Clan's business model around, from primitive mercantilism to making money off

technology transfer between worlds, seemed impossibly utopian-especially

considering how few of the Clan elders had any sort of modern education. But

without plans, written studies, and costings and risk analyses, she wasn't

going to convince anyone. So she'd ground out a couple more pages of proposals

before realizing someone was watching her.

"Yes?"

"Milady." Kara bent a knee prettily, a picture of instinctive teenage grace

that Miriam couldn't imagine matching. "You bade me remind you last week that

this eve is the first of summer twelvenight. There's to be a garden party at

the Östhalle tonight, and a ball afterward beside, and a card from her grace

your mother bidding you to attend her this afternoon beforehand." Her face the

picture of innocence she added, "Shall I attend to your party?"

If Kara organized Helge's carriage and guards then Kara would be coming along

too. The memories of what had happened the last time Helge let Kara accompany

her to a court event made her want to wince, but she managed to keep a

straight face: "Yes, you do that," she said evenly. "Get Mistress Tanzig in to

dress me before lunch, and my compliments to her grace my mother and I shall

be with her by the second hour of the afternoon." Mistress Tanzig, the

dressmaker, would know what Helge should wear in public and, more important,

would be able to alter it to fit if there were any last-minute problems.

Miriam hit the save button on her spreadsheet and sighed. "Is that the time?

Tell somebody to run me a bath; I'll be out in a minute."

So much for the day off, thought Miriam as she packed the laptop away. I

suppose I'd better go and be Helge . . .

"Have you thought about marriage?" asked the duchess.

"Mother! As if!" Helge snorted indignantly and her eyes narrowed. "It's been

about, what, ten weeks? Twelve? If you think I'm about to shack up with some

golden boy so soon after losing Roland-"

"That wasn't what I meant, dear."

Helge drew breath. "What do you mean?"

"I meant . . ." The duchess Patricia glanced at her sharply, taking stock:

"The, ah, noble institution. Have you thought about what it means here? And if

so, what did you think?"

"I thought"-a slight expression of puzzlement wrinkled Helge's forehead-"when

I first arrived, Angbard tried to convince me I ought to make an alliance of

fortunes, as he put it. Crudely speaking, to tie myself to a powerful man who

could protect me." The wrinkles turned into a full-blown frown. "I nearly told

him he could put his alliance right where the sun doesn't shine."

"It's a good thing you didn't," her mother said diplomatically.

"Oh, I know that! Now. But the whole deal here creeps me out. And then." Helge

took a deep breath and looked at the duchess: "There's you, your experience. I

really don't know how you can stand to be in the same room as her grace your

mother, the bitch! How she could-"

"Connive at ending a civil war?" the duchess asked sharply.

"Sell off her daughter to a wife-beating scumbag is more the phrase I had in

mind." Helge paused. "Against her wishes," she added. A longer pause. "Well?"

"Well," the duchess said quietly. "Well, well. And well again. Would you like

to know how she did it?"

"I'm not sure." A grimace.

"Well, whether you want to or not, I think you need to know," Iris-Patricia,

the duchess Patricia, said. "Forewarned is forearmed, and no, when I was your

age-and younger-I didn't want to know about it, either. But nobody's offering

to trade you on the block like a piece of horseflesh. I should think the worst

they'll do is drop broad hints your way and make the consequences of

noncooperation irritatingly obvious in the hope you'll give in just to make

them go away. You've probably got enough clout to ignore them if you want to

push it-if it matters to you enough. But whether it would be wise to ignore

them is another question entirely."

"Who are 'they'?"

"Aha! The right question, at last!" Iris laboriously levered herself upright

on her chaise, beaming. "I told you the Clan is democratic, in the classical

sense of the word. The marriage market is democracy in action, Helge, and as

we all know, Democracy Is Always Right. Yes? Now, can you tell me who, within

the family, provides the bride's dowry?"

"Why, the-" Helge thought for a moment. "Well, it's the head of the

household's wealth, but doesn't the woman's mother have something to do with

determining how much goes into it?"

"Exactly." The duchess nodded. "Braids cross three families, alternating every

couple of generations so that issues of consanguinity don't arise but the Clan

gift-the recessive gene-is preserved. To organize a braid takes some kind of

continuity across at least three generations. A burden which naturally falls

on the eldest women of the Clan. Men don't count: men tend to go and get

themselves killed fighting silly duels. Or in wars. Or blood feuds. Or they

sire bastards who then become part of the outer families and a tiresome

burden. They-the bastards-can't world-walk, but some of their issue might, or

their grandchildren. So we must keep track of them and find something useful

for them to do-unlike the rest of the nobility here we have an incentive to

look after our by-blows. I think we're lucky, in that respect, to have a

matrilineal succession-other tribal societies I studied in my youth,

patrilineal ones, were not nice places to be born female. Whichever and

whatever, the lineage is preserved largely by the old women acting in concert.

A conspiracy of matchmakers, if you like. The 'old bitches,' as everyone under

sixty tends to call them." The duchess frowned. "It doesn't seem quite as

funny now I'm sixty-two."

"Um." Helge leaned toward her mother. "You're telling me Hildegarde wasn't

acting alone? Or she was being pressured by her mother? Or what?"

"Oh, she's an evil bitch in her own right," Patricia waved off the question

dismissively. "But yes, she was pressured. She and the other ladies of a

certain age don't have the two things that a young and eligible Clan lady can

bargain with: they can't bear world-walkers, and they can no longer carry

heavy loads for the family trade. So they must rely on other, more subtle

tools to maintain their position. Like their ability to plait the braids, and

to do each other favors, by way of their grandchildren. And when my mother was

in her thirties-little older than you are now-she was subjected to much

pressure."

"So there's this conspiracy of old women"-Helge was grasping after the

concept-"who can make everyone's life a misery?"

"Don't underestimate them," warned the duchess. "They always win in the end,

and you'll need to make your peace with them sooner or later. I'm unusual, I

managed to evade them for more than three decades. But that almost never

happens, and even when it does you can't actually win, because whether you

fight them or no, you end up becoming one yourself." She raised one finger in

warning. "You're relatively safe, kid. You're too old, too educated, and

you've got your own power base. As far as I can see they've got no reason to

meddle with you unless you threaten their honor. Honor is survival here. Don't

ever do that, Miriam-Helge. If you do, they'll find a way to bring you down.

All it takes is leverage, and leverage is the one thing they've got." She

smiled thinly. "Think of them as Darwin's revenge on us, and remember to smile

and curtsey when you pass them because until you've given them grandchildren

they will regard you as an expendable piece to move around the game board. And

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TheClanCorporate-ARCBookThreeoftheMerchantPrincesCharlesStrossAdvanceReaderCopyUnproofedThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisnovelareeitherfictitiousorareusedfictitiously.TheClanCorporate:BookThreeoftheMerchantPrincesCopyright©2006byCharlesStrossAllrightsreserved,includingthe...

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Charles Stross - Merchant princes 03 - The Clan Corporate.pdf

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Charles Stross - Merchant princes 03 - The Clan Corporate

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