Revolution Business by Charles Stross

Author:Charles Stross [Stross, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Barely a week had passed, but the atmosphere in this meeting was darker by far than its predecessor. The venue was the same-an air-conditioned conference room in a Sheraton hotel adjoining a conference center in the middle of downtown Boston, with heavily padded leather chairs arranged around a boardroom table. And now as then, the attendees were dressed as conservatively as a party of merchant bankers. But there were fewer of them today, barely a round dozen; some of the faces had changed, and two of the newcomers were women. It was, however, none of his business, decided the hotel facilities manager who was seeing to their needs; they were good customers-quiet, serious, utterly unlikely to start shooting each other or snorting crank in the rest room.

Which just went to show how misleading appearances could be.

There were thirteen seats at the table today, but one of them-at its head-was vacant. The broad-shouldered man sitting to its left nodded to a younger fellow at the far end. "Rudi, please shut the door. If you would pay attention, please?"

The quiet conversation ebbed as Rudi sat down again, the door securely locked behind him. "I think we'll begin with a situation report," Riordan said quietly. "Lady Thorold, if you wouldn't mind?"

"Of course." Olga opened the leather conference folder she'd brought to the meeting; in a severe black suit, with her long blond hair tied back, she resembled a trial lawyer rather than an intelligence officer. "The duke's medical condition is stable. That's the good news."

Olga read from her notes: "The average thirty-day survival figures for subarachnoid hemorrhage are around six-tenths. His grace has already come through the main danger period, but the doctors agree his chances of full recovery are slight. He's paralyzed on the left side, and his speech is impaired. They can't evaluate his mental functioning yet. He may recover some of his faculties, but he's likely to be mobility-challenged-probably wheelchair-bound, possibly bedridden-for life. They've scheduled a second MRI for him tomorrow to track the reduction of the thrombosis, and they should have more to report on Friday." She managed the medical terms with an ease that might have surprised Miriam, had she been present; but then, she'd checked her carefully cultivated airhead persona at the door. "The balance of medical opinion is that his grace will definitely not be able to resume even light duties for at least thirty days. Even if he makes a significant recovery, he is unlikely to be back in the chair"-her eyes tracked to the empty seat at the head of the table-"for half a year."

The attentive silence she'd been speaking into dissolved in a buzz of expressions of shock and sharply indrawn breath. Earl Riordan brought his hand down on the edge of the table. "Silence!" he barked. "We knew it was going to be bad. Thank you, milady." He grimaced. "We have a chain of command here. I recognize that I am not equipped to replace his grace in his capacity of director

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