The Merchant’s War

Not that life was entirely a bed of roses. He winced at a particularly loud burst of gunfire rattling past the carriage window. One of the women on the other bench seat rattled off something in hochsprache: he couldn't follow it but she sounded scared. The old one tut-tutted. "Sit down, you'll only get your head blown off if you give them a target," she said in English.

More hochsprache: something about duty, Mike thought vaguely.

"No, you shouldn't..."

The distinctive sound of a charging handle being worked, followed by a gust of cold air.

Crack. The sound of a rifle firing less than a meter from his ear penetrated Mike's haze. He pushed back against the seat back, rolling onto his back just as a particularly violent pot-hole tried to swallow one of the carriage's rear wheels, and the shooter fired again: a hot brass cartridge case pinged off the back of the seat and landed on his hand. Curiously, it hurt.

"Ow- " He twitched, shaking the thing off, wincing repeatedly as the woman in the fur coat leaning out of the carriage window methodically squeezed off another three shots. What's the word for... ? "My leg, it hurts," he tried.

"Speak English, your accent's atrocious," said the old woman. "It won't fool anyone."

Mike stared at her. In the semi-darkness of the carriage her face seemed to hover in the darkness, disembodied. Outside the window, men shouted at each other. The carriage lurched sideways, then bounced forward, accelerating. The shooter withdrew her head and shoulders from the window. "That is all of them for now, I believe," she announced, with an accent of her own that could have passed for German. She glanced at Mike, mistrustfully, and adjusted her grip on the gun. The real moon, outside, scattered platinum highlights off her hair: for a moment he saw her face side-lit, young and striking, like a Russian princess in a story, pursued by wolves.

"Close the window, you don't want to make a target of yourself," said the old biddy from beneath the pile of rugs. "And I don't want to catch my death of cold." A cane appeared from somewhere under the heap, ascending until it battered against the carriage roof. "Shtoppan nicht, gehen'su halt!" She was old, but her lungs were good. She glanced at Mike. "So you're awake, are you?"

Answering seemed like too much of an effort, so Mike ignored her: it was much easier to simply close his eyes and try to keep his leg still. That way the weasels didn't seem to bite as hard.

A moment later, the cane poked him rudely in the ribs. "Answer when you're spoken to!" snapped the Russian princess. He opened his eyes again. The thing prodding his side wasn't a cane, and she might be pretty, but she was also clearly angry. Is it something I did? he wondered hazily. "Where am I?"

"In a carriage," said the old woman. "I'd have thought that was obvious." She snorted. "The question you meant to ask is, how did I end up in this carriage in particular?"

"Jah: and, how am I, it, to leave, alive?" The Russian princess gave his ribs a final warning poke, then withdrew into the opposite corner of the cramped cabin, next to the old woman. Mike tried to focus: as his eyes adjusted he saw that under her fur coat she was wearing a camouflage jacket. The rifle-he focused some more- was exotic, some sort of foreign bullpup design with a huge night vision scope bolted above its barrel. Blonde bombshell with fur coal and assault rifle. His gaze slid sideways to take in the older one, searching for reassurance: she smiled crookedly, one eyebrow raised, and he shuddered, d j vu spiking through his guts as sharply as the pain from his damaged leg.

"That's enough, Olga," the old lady said sharply, never taking her eyes off Mike. "We've met, in case you'd forgotten."

Oh shit. The penny dropped: that's the entire mission blown! He stared at her in mortified disbelief, at a complete loss for words. His mind Hashed back to events earlier in the evening, to a hurried snatch of conversation with Miriam, the way she'd stared at him in perplexity as if she couldn't quite fathom the meaning of his reappearance in her life: now he felt the same scene repeating, horribly skewed. "You were-" he paused. "Mrs. Beck-stein. Well..." His lips were as dry as the day when Miriam had casually suggested they stop off on their way to the restaurant to say hello, just for ten minutes, so you've met my mother -"I'm surprised. I thought you'd adopted Miriam? What are you doing here?"