"Charles Stross - Merchant princes 03 - The Clan Corporate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

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