“Not to mention the fact that it’s simply a great adventure, full of dangers, of plots within plots, of forbidden love and political murder. Science fiction is in good hands with Charles Stross here to lead the new generation.”

—Orson Scott Card

“Charles Stross’s “The Family Trade is an intuitive, irreverant, and delightful romp into an alternate world where business is simultaneously low and high tech, and were romance, murder, marriage, and business are hopelessly intertwined—and deadly.”

—E. Modesitt, Jr.

For Steve and Jenny Glover

Contents

Part 1: Pink Slip

Weatherman

Pink Slippers

Walk on the Wild Side

Hide-and-Seek

Part 2: Meet the Family

Hotel Mafiosi

Cinderella 2.0

Economics Lesson

In the Family Way

Part 3: Hothouse Flowers

Revenge of the Invisible Woman

Court Appearance

Wait Training

Fire Wall

Part 4: Killer Story

Hostile Takeover

Business Plan

Part 5: Runaway

Encounter

Epilogue

Preview

Acknowledgments

Part 1

Pink Slip

Weatherman

Weatherman

Ten and a half hours before a mounted knight with a machine gun tried to kill her, tech journalist Miriam Beckstein lost her job. Before the day was out, her pink slip would set in train a chain of events that would topple governments, trigger civil wars, and kill thousands. It would be the biggest scoop in her career, in any journalist’s career—bigger than Watergate, bigger than 9/11—and it would be Miriam’s story. But as of seven o’clock in the morning, the story lay in her future: All she knew was that it was a rainy Monday morning in October, she had a job to do and copy to write, and there was an editorial meeting scheduled for ten.

The sky was the color of a dead laptop display, silver-gray and full of rain. Miriam yawned and came awake to the Monday morning babble of the anchorman on her alarm radio.

“—Bombing continues in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, in business news, the markets are down forty-seven points on the word that Cisco is laying off another three thousand employees,” announced the anchor. “Ever since 9/11, coming on top of the collapse of the dot-com sector, their biggest customers are hunkering down. Tom, how does it look from where you’re sitting—”

“Shut up,” she mumbled and killed the volume. “I don’t want to hear this.” Most of the tech sector was taking a beating. Which in turn meant that The Industry Weatherman’s readers—venture capitalists and high-tech entrepreneurs, along with the wannabe day traders—would be taking a beating. Her own beat, the biotech firms, were solid, but the collapsing internet sector was making waves. If something didn’t happen to relieve the plummeting circulation figures soon, there would be trouble.

Trouble. Monday. “I’ll give you trouble,” she muttered, face forming a grin that might have frightened some of those readers, had they been able to see it. “Trouble is my middle name.” And trouble was good news, for a senior reporter on The Industry Weatherman.