Empire Games Series, Book 1

by Charles Stross

  “One hundred percent!” Now he sounded triumphant: “We finally made it!”

  “Oh my. Oh my.” The butterflies made it hard to breathe. “Who else have you notified?”

  “You’re the first. Rudi’s calling the First Man’s office, and I believe Director Kemp is on the phone to the Communication Ministry—”

  She could barely believe it. The long series of launchpad fires and explosions seconds after liftoff had been a never-ending embarrassment, even though they’d only been trying to place satellites in orbit for a couple of years—and were barely twenty years on from fabric-skinned biplanes. “I think I can scare up a news crew this evening. Do you have a prepared statement you can wire me?”

  “I don’t, but Rudi does! I’ll get the propaganda office to e-mail it over immediately.”

  Huw cut the call short: intercontinental trunk calls were still hugely expensive. “Well!” Miriam looked at Olga.

  “Was that what I think it was?” Olga gripped her armrests.

  “Yup.” She took a deep breath. “They did it. Dawn One is in low Earth orbit and talking.” Dawn One wasn’t just this world’s first satellite. They’d gone for broke: the four-ton behemoth was actually the prototype for what would, one day soon, be a manned vehicle. (And then there was the other, more radical space program: but that hadn’t launched anything yet…)

  “Sorry, Olga, I’m going to have to cut this short.” She picked up the phone again. “Hi, Galen? Can you round up a news crew? They’re going to want to interview me just as soon as they hear what’s just happened…”

  Yes, the USA is coming. Let them come: we’ll be ready.

  NEW LONDON, MANHATTAN ISLAND, TIME LINE THREE, SPRING 2020

  Two years later, Miriam was thinking back to that momentous phone call as her limousine—one of the clean, efficient diesel cars that were replacing the steam vehicles of yesteryear—pulled up in front of her current New London residence. As a senior Party member, she merited a grand brownstone town house on Manhattan Island, within a mile’s radius of the First Man’s mansion. The mansion itself was the Manhattan Palace: it squatted at the southern end of the fortified inner city of New London, near the southern end of the island. The city had been renamed multiple times, most recently in 1759 when the British Crown moved to the Americas in the wake of the French invasion of England. Miriam’s brownstone was sited midway along a curving avenue, almost exactly where Washington Square Park was located in that other Manhattan.

  “We’re here, ma’am,” the ministerial chauffeur said redundantly as she yawned and gathered her papers, shoving them into her briefcase. It was half past eleven at night: it had been a long day. “Jack’s getting the door.”

  “No need to wake everyone up for me.” The door opened and she slid out, stretching. She’d caught the newly electrified express train down from a plenary session in Boston that afternoon. The trip had taken just two hours, but the evening reception and the rides to and from the stations had eaten the night. The air was warm and damp, the faint sweet-sick open sewer stink from the Hudson River fighting with the honeysuckle bushes lining the front of the terrace of state houses. “That’s all for now. Just make sure someone’s here to collect me at eight tomorrow before you go off shift.”

  She climbed the front steps slowly and the door opened for her. Jenny the housekeeper had stayed awake. “Ma’am? He’s still up—in the lounge.” Jenny seemed uncharacteristically anxious.

  “Thank you.” Miriam nodded. “How is he?”

  “Much the same.” Jenny closed the front door and threw the bolt. “Will you be wanting anything?”

  “A mug of chocalatl, if you don’t mind. Unsweetened.” Miriam paused outside the lounge doorway as Jenny took her coat, and heard an outbreak of coughing from behind the closed door. “Damn.”

  “Are you all right?” she asked as she entered the room.

  “I’m”—more coughing—“fine.” Her husband, Erasmus, was sitting in a wingback armchair, putting his handkerchief away. “There’s no blood, if that’s what you were wondering.”

  “I was.” She sat down carefully in the armchair opposite him. “It still worries me. And if you don’t promise you’ll see the doctors about it this week, I’ll keep nagging you.”

  “It’s not the phthisis.” Tuberculosis, she translated mentally. He briefly closed his eyes, and for a moment looked a decade older than his fifty-five years. “It’s just a winter cough—the humidity disagrees with me. I know the white death well. If it was coming back—”

  There were two piles of document folders on the occasional table: one tall, one smaller. She picked the top item off the taller pile. “Progress Report, State Committee on Metropolitan Optical Fiber Cable Infrastructure, March, Year 17,” she said lightly. Year 17 of the Revolution, or 2020 AD, in the old style. “Just think how they’ll manage without you if you die of tuberculosis through self-neglect—thanks to staying up after midnight reading reports!”

  He glanced sidelong at the briefcase by her chair: “I’ll give up when you give up, dear.”

  A dizzying sense of drifting perspective seized her. “I’ll give up when the Americans—when the United States—when we’re safe—”

  “In other words, never.” He spared her a sad smile. “You can’t lie to me: I’ve known you too long.”

  Another dizzying look down from the pinnacle of the present into the yawning canyon of the past. “I can’t believe it’s been eighteen years already.”

  “But you only said ‘yes’ to me fourteen years ago.” His tone was light, as if he was trying to make a weak joke of it, but the years weighed heavily on them both.

  “I was still gun-shy. You would be too, if your previous marriage was anything like my two.” Her fingers tightened on his hand. “Tell me what your schedule is for the rest of the week and I’ll tell you what to drop so you can make room for a doctor’s appointment. Please?”

  “You’re going to blackmail me now, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I want you to get your lungs checked out. Erasmus, I make a terrible widow.”

  “On one condition, then: I think you’ve been working too hard. If I get my lungs fluoroscoped, will you agree to take a nice quiet vacation with me, my dear?”

  The door opened. It was Jenny, bearing a tea tray with two steaming mugs, which she deposited on the table before tactfully leaving them to it. Miriam picked up one of the mugs of chocalatl. “Have you taken your pills?”

  “What? The—yes, I have.” Erasmus picked up his mug and blew on it thoughtfully. “Thank you—and I will see the doctor. After the cabinet meeting tomorrow morning. I expect in the afternoon I’m going to be drawing up policy guidelines for how we spin our latest satellite launch. Such is the lot of the Commissioner for State Communications. I should have been more careful what I wished for.”

  “Space: the final frontier,” Miriam suggested. “Rockets are exciting, Erasmus. And for propaganda purposes, rockets that don’t kill people are even better than ones that do.”

  “Our adversaries are still terrified, though. Wouldn’t you be, in their position?”

  “Yes.” She put her mug down and rested her chin on her right fist. “The technology gap is widening all the time—we’re at least ten years ahead of them, more in some areas. They’ve barely begun to develop battlefield rockets beyond the gunpowder stage. They’re testing a turboprop bomber; they’ve got atom bombs. But we’ve got nuclear submarines and sea-launched intercontinental missiles. They can’t even shoot down our reconnaissance planes, let alone our spy satellites.”

  “Yes.” Erasmus rubbed his forehead. “So I’m going to push the rockets-for-peace message as hard as I can. Otherwise we risk terrifying the French into starting a preemptive war—especially if they listen to our idiot exiles. Letting the former emperor and his family sail off into the sunset was, I fear, a long-term misjudgment on Adam and the Radical Party’s account. It will come back to haunt us.”

  “I’m not so sure,”
Miriam countered. “What were the alternatives? Give him a trial and execute him? It would have created a martyr—”

  “Another Charles the First, yes.”

  “No, it would have been worse. Charles the First was a nasty piece of work: the Rump Parliament only put him on trial and chopped his head off after the third civil war he started. He deserved what he got! But John Frederick isn’t in the same league, and we want to reduce the level of violence in politics, not inflame it. Convince our public that it’s possible to transfer power peacefully. I’ve seen your polling: half of them still don’t understand the idea of a loyal opposition, even after fifteen years of explaining till we’re blue in the face. Executing the King would have set us up for a counterrevolution. His son turns out to be an asshole who sends assassins our way, and he still wants a Monarchist uprising to put his family back on the throne over here. But he isn’t covering himself in glory at the Dauphin’s court, is he? If we hold our shit together for another ten years of building microprocessor factories and jet airliners, everyone’s going to see him for the irrelevant throwback he is. As long as we manage to avoid starting a fourth world war.”

  “Yes, but in the meantime, he’s inflaming passions at the French court, Miriam. A king-in-exile is a romantic cause, and he can promise the more entrepreneurial grand dukes a continental ransom. Especially if he auctions off that pretty young daughter of his to someone with ambitions. Meanwhile, they’re terrified of us. We represent the peasants on the march—every noble’s worst nightmare. Worse: they know we’re not just a mob of pitchfork-wielding yokels. They’ve read Adam’s books. They’ve read mine. They understand that this is an existential conflict between those who adhere to the monarchical system and those who honor the new social contract: equality before the law, liberty within the law, nobody above the law. They won’t give up their privileges without a struggle, and they know it’s a fight they’re losing. Our satellites”—he pointed through the window, indicating the southern horizon—“are signs and portents in the heavens. It tells them who owns the skies. They can’t ignore that. It’s decades beyond anything they can do—” He paused. “How much stolen US technology went into the space program?”

  “None. We were very careful about that.”

  “What?” The light was just bright enough for her to see his pupils dilate.

  “Oh, we bought textbooks. Lots of textbooks. And it soaked up almost a quarter of our Skills Transfer Program for five years.”

  The STP recruited unemployed graduate researchers and teachers from time line two—their reach, in combination with ex-Clan world-walkers and the nuclear submarines of the Commonwealth Navy, was global—and made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. “We hired rocket scientists by the double-handful, mostly from Russia and Europe. And Rudi made sure Space Force ate their own dog food: we didn’t let them copy anything directly. We’ve got a launcher that looks like an R-7—the missile that evolved into the Russian Soyuz system—and runs on the same fuel, liquid oxygen, and kerosene. But it’s entirely homegrown. We may have lost the first four launch attempts, but compared with the early days of the United States or Soviet space programs, Rudi’s made amazing progress.”

  “Well, that’s as may be,” Erasmus grumped, “but I have to use it to enthuse our people without frightening the French into attacking us. And they’re going to panic all over again when we tell them we’re going to put an astronaut up there next month.” They pondered the implications. “Tomorrow evening it’s the Guild of News Editors annual ball, where I shall be expected to speak—and, oh, the invitation should be in your diary as well, because wives are invited—”

  “Wait, what about the female editors—”

  “Yes, and their wives are invited too.” Miriam gave him a look: Erasmus’s sardonic sense of humor could sometimes get the better of him. “The wording of the invitation assumes the membership are all men,” he explained. “The guild is full of deadwood because we needed somewhere to store it where it couldn’t do any more harm … Hmm. How would you like to borrow my bully pulpit to talk about equality? I’m sure they won’t dare make a fuss. After all, the invitation was addressed to ‘Commissioner Burgeson’: they simply forgot to specify which Commissioner Burgeson they were inviting to speak—”

  “Oh you!” Miriam chuckled. “No, dammit. Picking fights with newspaper and wireless editors is—” She glanced sidelong. “You weren’t serious, were you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Erasmus drained his mug. “Sometimes I don’t know my own mind. We are surrounded by bigwigs and stuffed shirts. I’d be delighted to see you tear into them, but…” He shrugged. “We’d never hear the last of it.”

  “Enough of them seem to hate us simply for existing.”

  “You’re a constant reproach: a woman and a tireless overachiever. And I”—he spread his right hand above his heart, striking a dramatic pose—“am the henpecked husband! Merely the Commissioner for State Communications.” In charge of what had once been the State Ministry of Propaganda: now with oversight of all broadcasting, film, and print media, not to mention the embryonic network of clunky mainframe computers that were destined to grow into the Commonwealth’s Internet. “Miriam, you terrify them. The Ministry of Intertemporal Technological Intelligence scares everybody. What was that phrase? ‘Creative disruption’? Nobody is sure that your organization won’t make their own pocket empire obsolete tomorrow, but none of them dares move against you while MITI delivers the goods. Just don’t”—he paused to examine his mug—“underestimate the attraction of a little bit of decadence to old revolutionaries who think they’re due their reward.”

  “I don’t,” Miriam said tersely. She finished her mug of cocoa. “Now I’m tired. It’s been a long day. Come to bed, Erasmus.”

  “All right, but only if you promise to consider a vacation.”

  She rose to her feet. “A vacation? We might be able to make some time for it next year—”

  “No, Miriam, I mean this year. Next year we might not be here. Or there might be another crisis. One damn crisis after another: pretty soon you look round and realize you have no time left.”

  “All right,” she relented. “Let’s look into it tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow. But first, to bed.”

  Empire Games

  MARACAIBO AERONAVAL COMPLEX, SOUTH AMERICA, TIME LINE THREE, SPRING 2020

  Two vast concrete buildings sweltered beneath the noonday heat on the northern shore of Lake Maracaibo in New Granada, bleached white by sun and storm-driven spray from the Gulf of Venezuela to the north. Both buildings supported gigantic level platforms on their roofs. Bunkers and warehouses off to the west were linked to the platforms by gravel roadbeds. The complex was surrounded on all sides by razor-wire fences, patrolled by sweating soldiers from the Commonwealth Guard, who stuck to the air-conditioned interiors of their half tracks as much as possible.

  On the far side of the isthmus, gleaming silver arrowheads waited beside a broad military runway, baking hot despite the canvas shades draped across their bubble canopies. The distant buzz of a trainer conducting touch-and-go landings on the second runway rose and fell periodically, disturbing the too-still air. But nobody ventured outside in the noonday heat without good reason.

  Then, as if in competition with the somnolent drone of the trainer’s engine, another engine note began to rise. It was the shrill jet-howl of a government courier plane, on final approach into the sprawling lizard-stillness of the Maracaibo Aeronaval Complex. The Explorer-General’s wife (who according to persistent rumors was herself involved at a high level in MITI’s para-time espionage program) was returning from the capital, two thousand miles to the north.

  The Explorer-General himself was being fitted for a pressure suit when the telephone rang. He was standing in a sagging mass of fabric and artificial rubber, suspended by its shoulders from a scaffold while a pair of technicians worked on his inner helmet: “If it’s for me, I’ll be ten minutes,” he said. “Oh, and find ou
t who—” Only a very few people could get through to him while he was spending either of the two days a week he jealously clung to for practical work, as opposed to the endless meetings and administrative sessions that had eaten his life since he became a senior officer.

  “Sir, it’s your wife. She said to say she’s landed and she’ll meet you in staging area two in an hour.”

  “Oh.” Huw nodded—or tried to, inasmuch as nodding wasn’t terribly practical while wearing a rigid helmet with a raised glass visor. “Let’s finish up with the helmet today and we can sort out the legs tomorrow—”

  “Sir? Would you mind holding still for a minute?”

  Huw surrendered. The pressure suit was a new model, loosely copied from a Russian Sokol KV-2 that Brilliana had somehow obtained for him by way of the DPR: a survival space suit, designed to keep cosmonauts alive inside their Soyuz capsules in the event of an in-flight emergency. It weighed only ten kilos: cumbersome, but far easier to move in than a full-up EVA-certified suit. Huw wanted it very badly. It was intended to keep Explorer Corps world-walkers alive during the critical minutes it might take before they could escape, if they found themselves trailblazing a time line with a nonbreathable atmosphere. But being fitted for any space suit was tedious—like all pressure garments, it had to be tailored to the individual wearer and adjusted for a good fit. And he’d insisted on seeing for himself, a decision he was now regretting.

  Half an hour later the suit team allowed him to undress, their final set of measurements recorded. “We should have it ready for you by next Wednesday,” said the seniormost fitter, “assuming they’ve got enough umbilical sets. There was a parts shortage last month.”

  “Fine,” Huw grunted. The astronaut corps was greedy for all the space-rated kit. But it wasn’t as if his part-time project was going anywhere in the next week anyway. “Send me a memo when it’s ready.” He pulled up his trousers. “See you on Wednesday.”