Empire Games Series, Book 1

by Charles Stross

  “Just a couple of miles, but it’s a bumpy ride.”

  “Why not put the camp on top of, of whatever it is we’re going to?”

  “You’ll see.”

  They bumped and jounced down a narrow trail between trees. Once Julie had to back up, then pull over to let a returning pickup truck swagger past, its load bed tarped down and bulging with something or other. The driver, Rita noted, was wearing battle dress and body armor. She suddenly felt underdressed, unprepared. She’d surreptitiously bookmarked the knotspace coordinates of the para-time transport facility back in Maryland, but this chilly, heavily wooded valley worried her. There was no telling whether she’d be able to jaunt back to Earth prime from this place if … if anything went wrong, God forbid.

  Finally the track widened and turned out into a clear-cut dirt vehicle park. A low-loader bearing a huge generator squatted at one side, suckling on a fat pipe. “Okay, end of the road. We walk from here.” Julie parked beside a row of other cars. Rita climbed out and followed her to the checkpoint. The guards here were armored up, their helmet visors mirroring her approach. “Dr. Straker and Rita Douglas for Colonel Smith,” Julie called, holding up her ID badge. After a second, Rita followed suit.

  “Approach and ID, ma’am.” The guard was politely impersonal, but kept his rifle ready and didn’t blink until Rita and Julie lit up green on the inside of his network terminal. “Okay, you can go right in.” He waved them past the barrier. “Ms. Douglas hasn’t been here before, have you? You’ll need to take her through the robing room, Dr. Straker.”

  “I’ll do that,” Julie promised.

  “Dr. Straker?” Rita asked, looking at her askance.

  “Yes: archaeological science. Camp Singularity is my main posting. It’s where I did my PhD. Unfortunately my thesis is classified, otherwise I’d give you a copy…”

  It was too much to absorb: bubble-headed blonde to DHS agent to scientist in one hour flat. “What was that about a robing room?” Rita asked, trailing after her.

  “We need protective gear before we enter the dome—”

  “The dome?”

  Julie grinned at her. “I said there were ruins, didn’t I? I just didn’t say what kind of ruins.”

  “But—a dome?” Confused visions of cathedrals and igloos spun in her mind.

  “Yes: a high-tech one. Ancient high-tech, and still contaminated with long half-life fallout. It’s okay—we just use disposable overshoes and bunny suits. But you don’t want to eat or drink anything in here.”

  “It’s radioactive?”

  “Yeah, but it’s not as bad as the sarcophagus at Chernobyl…”

  The path wandered between trees and came to an abrupt terminus in the shape of a three-story stack of prefab container offices, behind which loomed a white concrete dome the size of a football stadium. “What the f—hell?”

  “Welcome to the dome!” Julie was annoyingly smug. “Let’s hit the robing room and get you set up. Then I can show you around.”

  CAMP SINGULARITY, TIME LINE FOUR, JULY 2020

  As Julie and the Colonel had intimated, the dome was a headfuck. Worse: as it all sank in, Rita found it raised more questions than it answered.

  “Who built it?” she asked Julie.

  A shrug. “Nobody knows. Not us, not anyone from our time line. Sure as hell wasn’t the Clan world-walkers, though. We call them the forerunners, because they were building nuclear reactors back when the Romans were building water wheels.”

  “Are there any”—she swallowed, staring at the carefully gridded-out archaeological excavations around the trashed buildings that lined the northern quadrant of the dome—“people?” Remains, she nearly said.

  “Yes.” Julie’s expression through her faceplate was somber. “There were. They were all moved to the forensic lab years ago, though. This is just about a museum-quality preservation site now. The real action is behind the curtain wall over there.”

  The curtain wall looked recent, illuminated in merciless shadow-free detail by the huge floodlights the excavation team had suspended from the roof. The Camp Singularity archaeologists had installed it to surround something within. Julie referred to it obliquely as the capital-G Gate while they were robing up in their antiradiation suits. The suits were white plastic, with canned air supplies to protect them from any dust that might have been kicked up by human activities here. “What’s it there to contain?”

  “It’s the security cordon around the Gate airlocks. Which are there to hold in the air.” Julie lumbered round to face Rita. “When they first found this place, the entire valley was full of mist. I mean, clear blue sky above and freaky thick fog down below, like something out of a Stephen King movie. The first crew into the valley found the air pressure dropping. When they got to the dome, there was a gale blowing through the crack in its side”—the dome had been breached by some long-ago catastrophe—“and the air pressure was well below half a bar. The first job they had was to figure out how to plug the Gate before it sucked the entire atmosphere away.”

  “Wait—a gate? What kind of gate?”

  “You’ll see for yourself,” Julie said. “But anyway, that was twelve years ago.”

  “They found this place twelve years ago?”

  Julie nodded clumsily, emphatically. “C’mon. It’s really quite something.” She led Rita forward, delivering a running commentary all the way.

  “The dome has no entrance as such. It was a perfect sealed sphere until it was cracked open like an eggshell. We think what did it was some kind of directed orbital gamma ray strike, about two thousand years ago.”

  Rita looked around, awed by the age of the site. The floor inside the dome was flat, unnaturally smooth where the excavations had swept aside nearly two millennia of dirt and muck that had blown in or grown in.

  “It’s concrete,” Julie explained, “but reinforced with graphene fibers. And there are embedded semiconductor chips all through the top few millimeters—synthetic sapphire substrate, powered by ambient light and microwave radiation. And I mean all through it—if you scraped up a cubic yard of the top layer, it’d contain more processing power than Google’s biggest data center. They don’t work anymore, though. Burned out centuries ago. They’re just junk, electronic waste.”

  “What were they for?” Rita asked.

  “We don’t know. The usual ubiquitous computing stuff, maybe: looking for and fixing cracks, monitoring the micro-environment, fly’s-eye optical sensors on the surface-dwelling chips, sniffing the ambient microbiological genome for biowar threats. Who knows? Radiation damage killed them after the dome breach. Ion migration over the centuries since then has blurred the surface features so badly that the geek squad can’t reverse-engineer them. It’s pretty cool stuff, but nothing we won’t be able to do ourselves within the next decade or two—if anyone wants to pour concrete that costs a million dollars a cubic yard. But that’s just one of the puzzles.”

  They walked across the floor of the dome toward a cluster of white-walled buildings. Steel scaffolding surrounded them, stabilizing and providing ladders to the upper-story openings. “We think this was a barracks,” Julie continued. “There were external catwalks but they’d collapsed. Damaged in the attack, again. We think maybe they were fire escapes, if anyone made fire escapes out of 3-D-printed titanium alloy.”

  “This was a military base, wasn’t it?” Rita asked.

  “Probably, yes, and it’d explain the exotic metals: mil-spec suppliers seem to be a universal constant. But there’s other weird stuff you need to see. This is building 102. C’mon upstairs?”

  Rita followed Julie up the aluminum stepladder that the DHS archaeologists had used to replace the fallen fire escapes. They entered on the first floor. “Where’s the light coming from?”

  “The ceiling is wall-to-wall pixels, and while the display driver died centuries ago the backlight still works just fine. Although it took the PaleoComp people a couple of years to figure out how to power it.”

&n
bsp; Rita looked around the structure. It was a room: as rectilinear and vacant as any other she’d seen. Which should, she felt, be a sign of something. The walls were lined with rows of what looked like bunk beds, layered three high. Yellowing polymers had crumbled away to reveal metal frames within. They had individual shutters to block out the light, high-density kit lockers between the head-end of one unit and the feet of the next. “It looks … efficient.”

  “We think it was refuge accommodation. You’d see the same in any nuclear emergency bunker today.” Julie gestured around. “Tell me what you don’t see.”

  “There are—” Rita blinked. “Where’s the bathroom? Where are the doors?” Suddenly the room made no sense at all. “You’re telling me they had to go out on the fire escape and downstairs and into another building to use the restroom?”

  “It’s worse than that.” Julie gestured at the door they’d entered through. “That was an emergency exit, not an entrance. The ground floor is full to ceiling height with what seems to be a filtered HVAC system, bottled air for a day or so, and water tanks.”

  “But how did they go to the bathroom?”

  “Imagine they were world-walkers. How do you think they went to the bathroom?”

  Rita stared at Julie for a few seconds. “The bathroom is in another time line?”

  Julie nodded. “Very good: that’s what George—he’s our site director—thinks.” She turned slowly round, taking in the entire room. “They built a para-time fortress because they were being hunted by a para-time-capable adversary. We think it consists of several installations scattered across identical geographical locations in several time lines. They’d use some of the installations for offensive operations, others as logistics depots or hospitals and other rear-echelon facilities. All in the equivalent location, but in different time lines. Without having a knotspace map of the facility, the enemy couldn’t roll them all up. This one was the air raid shelter—passive, no emissions, hidden as well as they could. The entire outer shell of the dome is riddled with smart dust. We think it was stealthed to the point of optical and infrared invisibility, using the ground underneath it as a heat sink. If they came under attack, they could just jaunt in here for a few hours or until they could find an evac route. Eat ration packs and shit in a paper bag until it was time to leave.”

  “Wow.” Rita looked around. “It’s the bomb shelter under—inside—a five-dimensional Army base? What killed them?”

  “Our best theory is it took a gamma ray laser. Fired from low orbit, pumped by a megaton-range hydrogen bomb. But c’mon, let me show you the Gate. It’ll top anything you’ve seen so far.” Julie waved her toward the escape hatch/doorway and the ladder beyond.

  Rita followed her, duck-walking laboriously in her protective suit. World-walkers with death rays and H-bombs. A hollow sense of dread gnawed at her sternum. What could top that?

  CAMP SINGULARITY, TIME LINE FOUR, JULY 2020

  On the other side of the cinder-block wall that bisected the floor of the dome, there was another dome. It was a dome within a dome, Rita noted, but this one lacked the strangely smooth curves and textures of the forerunner ruins. A bunch of modular buildings nuzzled up around its rim. Beyond them the excavation area on the dome floor took on a chaotic, jumbled geometry, as if the forerunner installation had been badly damaged there. “That’s where the mach wave converged,” Julie explained. “When the forerunners’ adversary cracked the outer dome the radiation pulse created a shock wave of superheated air. It expanded, hit the inside of the dome, and rebounded, focusing on this area. If you were standing anywhere else on the apron when it hit, you’d have been fried and blasted: but at the focal point you’d have been crushed instead, just by the overpressure.”

  Rita shuffled along behind her in mild shock, her thoughts whirling. “What’s in the, the small dome?”

  “That’s ours: we built it. Follow me and I’ll show you.” Julie led her along a reverberating metal catwalk that spanned a ten-meter-wide excavation site. The arachnoid shapes of archaeology robots crawled back and forth below their feet, ablating and recording everything as they drilled slowly down through the wreckage. “This is where I work most of the time,” Julie added brightly. “It’s an archaeologist’s dream job.”

  “Most of the time? What else do you do?”

  “Write reports and position papers. I don’t get to play at spy stuff except when something unusual happens, like when the Colonel roped me in for that thing with Gomez and Jack because he needed another body with all the right clearances. The talent pool’s tiny when you get down to it.” She sounded irritated.

  “So that’s why you were along with HaptoTech?” Rita asked, biting back her instant angry response. Was the entire trade show job a ploy to get me into a sandbox, surrounded by DHS agents? It seemed excessive, even knowing about the JAUNT BLUE technology.

  “Partly. We use their motion capture implants for driving bots around, some of the time.” Rita couldn’t be sure, but she thought the other woman was shaking her head inside her bulky headgear. “Come on, we need to de-suit before we can enter the clean room.”

  A door gaped open onto another white space, a NASA-esque vision of a space station airlock vestibule. A bench ran the width of one wall, occupied by empty suits with their backs docked to small hatches. Julie helped Rita sit down and showed her how to lean back against the suit-lock. “Duck down to get your head out from under the helmet rim, grab the overhead rail, and swing yourself out,” she advised.

  After a minute of mild claustrophobia Rita managed to worm her way down and out through the back of her radiation suit. She found herself in a cramped robing room. “Ms. Douglas?” A lightly built man was waiting for her. He wore a skintight but weirdly quilted outfit that left only his face bare. “You haven’t been here before so I’m going to have to authenticate you. Hi, Julie, you can go in, but you’ll need to help Ms. Douglas suit up for the Gate.”

  “The Gate?” Rita looked from face to face. “Is that radioactive, too?”

  “No, but you need vacuum protection. I’ll hang around, Jose.”

  “Wait—‘vacuum’?” It was one too many surprises for a single afternoon: Rita was beginning to feel petulant and resentful at the way it was all piling up.

  “Yes, like I said, all the air in the valley was being sucked out through the Gate when we found it.”

  Jose took Rita through the increasingly familiar DNA sample and password authentication routine. “Okay, in the next room Julie will help you into one of these,” he explained, pointing to his own outfit. “It’s a mechanical counterpressure suit—it compares to a normal space suit the way a wet suit is to an old-school canvas diving suit. Keeps you from blowing out in vacuum because it’s elasticated and squeezes you, while a regular NASA suit is an airtight bag. The reason we use them is we have to work in confined spaces beyond the Gate, and ambient pressure suits are too bulky.” He raised his left arm and pointed to an intricate tracery of red seams stitched across the fabric around his torso. “Got to get it skintight first, though.”

  Rita swallowed. “What is this Gate?” she asked, trying to keep a plaintive note out of her voice.

  “They didn’t tell you?” Jose stared at her. “It’s the Gate. Uh, it’s a para-time portal. The one that nearly vented all the air in this time line into vacuum, except we caught it before that happened and it’s small enough that it would have taken tens of thousands of years anyway.”

  You have got to be kidding me, Rita thought as Jose, with Julie’s assistance, strapped her into a space suit that felt like an inch-thick body stocking, hung a slim life-support vest around her, and screwed a helmet onto the steel ring that hung around her collarbone. I’m going to wake up any moment now, she told herself uncertainly. This is just crazy. World-walking she could handle: she could do it herself. But she’d never heard even a hint that the government was sitting on top of some kind of gate between time lines. She felt numb. The implications of what she was being shown
today were too big to get her head around: she ought to be freaking out, she felt, but over what particular aspect of the whole shocking secret?

  “I’m monitoring your vitals remotely,” Jose added. “In event of a pressure emergency the helmet will seal automatically; there’s a short-range voice channel over infrared: the transponder’s on top of your head.” Julie, already suited, raised a hand and tapped a protrusion on her helmet that Rita had taken for a headlight.

  “What about Mission Control?” Rita asked.

  “I am Mission Control. We requisitioned this stuff from NASA—space station spares and prototypes they never flew—but we don’t have their manpower. Or their budget.”

  “But what”—Rita turned to face Julie—“do you need me for?”

  Julie waved her forward, toward a rectangular metal door at the far end of the robing room. “Jose? You don’t need to hear this.”

  “Gotcha. I’ll be in the office; page me if you need me.” He ducked out.

  “This way,” Julie said.

  “You haven’t said why.” Rita stood her ground, stubborn.

  “The Colonel told me to give you the dog and pony show.” Julie momentarily looked mulish. “If you want to know what this is really about, you’ll have to ask Colonel Smith: I’m mostly just a researcher here.” She looked around warily. Rita couldn’t be sure—the humming aircon and the muffling effects of her helmet liner messed with her hearing—but Julie seemed tense. Almost as if she was afraid of being listened in on.

  “I’m not arguing, but—” Rita stopped. “You’ve got a script, you’ve got a dog and pony show to give me, I get that, but do we need to do this drip-drip thing? Why couldn’t you show me the video or something instead of dragging me out here?”

  “Because the Colonel wants you to see it with your own eyes,” Julie said snippily. “You wouldn’t believe us if we just showed you a video. This stuff’s real. It’s also so crazy that most people go straight into denial unless they see it for themselves.” She took a deep breath. “If I had to make a guess—this is just a guess, you with me? I don’t know that this is what’s happening—I’d guess that he’s worried about your commitment. But you’re not stupid or crazy, so he’s giving you enough of the background to make up your own mind.”