Empire Games Series, Book 1

by Charles Stross

  Until the authorities got around to putting RFID chips in every stamp, or banning cash transactions completely, the loopholes would remain open. Cypherpunks and paranoid libertarians might loudly swear that they would never! never! surrender their encryption keys to The Man. But in Kurt’s view, there was a lot to be said for quietly archaic tradecraft.

  It was mid-afternoon, and Franz was at work. It was Emily’s day off, but she was on a grocery run—she used shopping as an excuse to get out of the house—and River was in college. Kurt ambled to his front door, locked it behind him, and stepped out into the street. There was no sidewalk, but it wasn’t dangerous. Most everyone who lived here had upgraded their wheels to self-driving in recent years to avoid the insurance premium hike for manual. Shuffling slowly, he passed the dividing line between his lot and his son’s. It was almost invisible—they’d pulled out the white picket fence when they bought both houses—but the grass on his side was slightly greener even though he never watered it. It was astroturf, as artificial as this strange lifestyle he’d fallen into in his twilight years. He shook his head, then approached the driveway. The flag on the mailbox was up. He stopped to rummage, retrieved the contents, briefly finger-checked for magnetic travel bugs on the mailbox’s underside—there were none, as was usually the case since Rita had left—then walked up to the kids’ front door and let himself in.

  He sorted the mail quickly and stacked it on the breakfast bar. There wasn’t a lot: random junk flyers from local businesses, a package from Amazon for River; bills and banking were mostly taken care of online these days, except by old-timers. But in among the gravel there was gold dust, in the shape of a letter with a handwritten address and an honest old-fashioned self-adhesive stamp. And it was addressed to K. Douglas. Kurt smiled, tucked it inside his shirt, and headed back to his house.

  It was Kurt’s habit to regularly take an hour-long afternoon nap in his bedroom. Lights out, phone left downstairs. He climbed the steps patiently, with scissors, pencils, envelope, and a pad of paper in hand. An hour and a half later he came back down, a pensive frown on his face, carrying the envelope, its enclosed letter, and the page he had laboriously transcribed from its contents. A lidded saucepan, a few drops of cooking oil, and a match would erase their troubling contents. After a trip through the dishwasher this evening there would be nothing left save memories to trouble his sleep, and that of his circumspect correspondent.

  “I am going to have to tell her the truth,” he told himself unhappily, as if trying on a prisoner’s orange uniform for size. “Sooner or later I will be compelled to tell her, eh?” He gave a sad-dog sigh. “Later rather than sooner.” He opened the fridge door and pulled out a beer. Drinking alone in the mid-afternoon, he made the picture of a sad old widower. Too bad, he thought, that Greta couldn’t live to see this day. The pang of loss was a pro forma emotion, barely registering any more than a phantom pain from the stump of a long-amputated limb. She’d have laughed herself sick. His long-dead wife had been glorious in irony, back in the day. She could see the funny side of everything.

  “What a strange age we live in: history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce…”

  Switches

  WESTERN NEW YORK, TIME LINE THREE, MAY 2020

  They were out of the side door as soon as the rotodyne stopped bouncing on its shock absorbers. The rotor disk high overhead was still shrieking as a squad of Commonwealth Guards rushed them to a squat blockhouse, checked their IDs, and led them into an elevator. The door concertina’d shut just as the aircraft began to spool up again, vacating the pad to make way for the next aircraft to land under the barrels of the point-defense guns.

  There was nothing terribly subtle about the Redoubt, where the First Man and half the cabinet would take shelter from the gathering nuclear storm. Thousands of tons of concrete and rebar had been poured into a hole in the ground, forming a cradle around a sunken bunker that sat atop a platform suspended on huge shock absorbers. Nearby hills supported a forest of antennae; radar dishes twirled continuously overhead, tracking everything in the sky and feeding constant updates to the guns and missile batteries emplaced around the headquarters.

  But the Redoubt had one unique twist that placed it in a class of its own, unlike anything ever built in the United States by anyone … except the Clan. The entire four-story command complex sat atop an air cushion; and hollow doppelganger Redoubts, identical save for a hole in place of the command complex, had been built in three neighboring empty time lines. With a world-walker permanently on station, ready to move the entire core of the Redoubt to safety, there was no need to drill a cathedral-sized bunker under Cheyenne Mountain for protection from a hard nuclear rain. Only a first strike executed in parallel in multiple time lines would stand a hope of succeeding—or so the designers hoped.

  Over her years in government, Miriam had developed a bitter hatred for nuclear command bunkers. She’d spent more than her fair share of time holed up in them, taking her turn as Commissioner for Continuity of Government—a euphemism for Queen of the Smoking Aftermath, in her opinion. Bunkers stank of failure. They smelled metallic, their bottled air pumped through particle filters and monitored by Geiger counters. The corridors were unpleasantly narrow and the ceilings low, the walls painted a nauseous mustard yellow and the floors battleship gray. Hard, narrow bunk beds (space being at a premium) and ill-lit, cramped meeting rooms surrounded by men (and, increasingly these days, women) with drawn faces and bags under their eyes, all of them hoping that the axe wouldn’t fall: even if they survived, their families would be left behind on the surface.

  The First Man’s Redoubt was larger, but no different in kind. So at nine o’clock, with only a couple of hours’ sleep behind her, Miriam found herself bellied up against a conference table with her back almost touching the wall behind her. She was drinking bitter coffee and reading a steady stream of incoming reports in the vain hope of staying alert, in a meeting room full of People’s Party Commissioners and general staff officers, waiting for Sir Adam to arrive.

  The door opened. A woman in the uniform of one of the nursing orders shuffled in backward, pulling a wheeled chair: Miriam blinked her eyes into focus before she recognized the hunched figure within. She glanced sideways, caught Erasmus’s shocked look and rapidly suppressed reaction.

  “Good morning, everybody,” husked the First Man as his nurse turned him to face the table. His smile was watery, his skin sallow and drawn tight across the bones of his face. “I see we are all present and correct.”

  Miriam forced her hands into immobility to avoid betraying herself by raising them to her mouth in shock. She had last seen Adam four weeks previously. He’d been walking, then: clearly increasingly frail, but not exceptionally so. She’d read the carefully coded memo: The First Man is not currently accepting new public engagements due to nervous exhaustion. He sends his best wishes and urges everyone to carry on regardless. But this wasn’t nervous exhaustion. Sir Adam looked at her, and for a moment his gaze carried its old weight, striking like a rod of iron. But then he faded as she watched.

  “General Josephus. Your latest update, please?”

  “Certainly, sir,” said Josephus, his delivery polished. “Current prevailing winds are blowing northeasterly off Cape Cod, and as you know the Zeus-IV petard was designed to produce little radiative residue. So the fallout plume is blowing offshore. Unfortunately this means that the French will detect it within four days—possibly sooner if their spy trawlers on the Grand Banks are equipped with detectors. Even if they didn’t spot the first light, this will provide confirmation of an air burst off our coast. We therefore anticipate increased French diplomatic and espionage activity within the week, even in the absence of other engagement.”

  “What about the target?” asked Sir Adam. “Is anything known about it?”

  “We can’t be certain, sir. There is only a very remote possibility that the French have acquired the capability to build something like this. Coming two weeks af
ter the previous US intrusion—confirmed from the wreckage—we can reasonably assume that they have upped the ante. Published sources suggest that the target matched the profile of a Tier Three unmanned autonomous drone—a long-range, high-altitude strategic reconnaissance probe.”

  “Thank you, General. Mrs. Burgeson, do you have any insights?”

  Sir Adam stared at her, his head lolling slightly to one side. Weak neck muscles, she noted. Generalized cachexia. Muscle wastage. Looks like stage IV, probably liver or pancreatic cancer. Oh shit.

  “Miriam?”

  She blinked. “I’m sorry,” she said automatically. “If it isn’t the United States, we’ve had the supreme misfortune to have come to the attention of another Class Two para-time civilization at the worst possible moment. But it’s almost certainly the United States. Their standard protocol seems to be to send over a black box—just to check for atmosphere on the other side—then a medium-altitude mapping drone. Air Defense Command shot down the first, so a week later they sent another. It’s not unknown for them to malfunction or crash. But ADC shot down the next one, and two hull losses on consecutive flights are statistically improbable, so this time they sent a bigger, faster, higher-altitude drone with wide-angle cameras.” She knuckled her tired eyes. “And ADC, bless their little cotton socks, shot it down again. So if they didn’t know we were here before, they certainly do now.”

  She looked round at a circle of dismayed faces. “The good news is, we’re still alive,” she said. “Either they’re off-balance, or they’re not on a war footing at all. We have some breathing space—although I have no idea how much.”

  Sir Adam opened his mouth. For a moment she was terrified that he would be unable to speak, but after a false start, almost a stutter, he followed through. “I will not order a preemptive strike by means of capital weapons.” He spoke into the sudden silence. “None of the reports I have read from the DPR suggest that their current president is a sociopath. I expect her to behave similarly.” (“Sociopath” was one of the most useful concepts that Miriam’s Memetic Engineering Task Force had imported from the United States: Erasmus’s Propaganda Ministry had been working overtime to raise awareness of it as an Anti-Democratic Problem: “People who think People are Things.” Sometimes she thought that educating the Commonwealth about social psychology and teaching them about cognitive biases, authoritarian personality types, and game theory had done more good than all the STEM research they’d imported. Enlightenment was an uphill struggle, but if it reduced the likelihood of wars and reigns of terror it was well worth the cost.)

  Miriam cleared her throat. “They tried it on the Gruinmarkt,” she said. “It didn’t succeed.”

  Scott Schroeder, the assistant Commissioner for Defense, snorted. “Obviously they should have tried harder.” Miriam looked at him sharply for a moment, trying to discern any hint of ironic intent. “Just playing devil’s advocate,” he added.

  Miriam shook her head. “Imagine if the French dropped a megaton-range capital weapon on this bunker right this second, killing us all—Sir Adam included.” Eyes instinctively turned to the invalid. He watched them right back, calculatingly passive, guarding his remaining vitality. “How exactly would our people respond?”

  “They’d—” Schroeder stopped. “I take your point.”

  “The United States started out as a revolutionary republic, just like our Commonwealth,” Sir Adam said, a faint smile tugging at the corners of his sunken eyes. “They may have succumbed to the twin corruptions of oligarchy for the elite and bread and circuses for the masses, but their Deep State still has sinews of steel. Moreover, their form of government is extremely resilient. They are no more capable of surrendering than we are. War is unthinkable. If it is unleashed, the conflagration will spread until all are consumed.”

  He paused for a few seconds. “As you can see, I am indisposed.” He looked at them across the table, deliberately making eye contact. “So I delegate this task to you who are assembled here. You are to devise a strategy for engaging directly with the government of the United States. I want you to lock them into a dance of, ah, I believe the term they will understand is, ‘Mutually Assured Destruction.’” He smiled directly at Miriam: a fey, frightening expression. “It will give them the comfort and certainty of a well-thumbed rule book for avoiding the holocaust. And then”—he paused for a few more seconds, until Miriam was about to ask his nurse to intervene—“once the immediate situation is stabilized, you are to investigate ways and means of bringing democracy to the United States of America.”

  PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  Rita’s first foray to the switchyard had taken place at 3:15 a.m. on a Thursday. It had taken six minutes, and she’d spent the next six hours being debriefed no less than three times, first by Patrick and then over a secure video link by Colonel Smith and a tired-looking posse of senior agents, all of whom were presumably going to brief their various superiors over the following days. Then they stuck her in a box with a tablet while she wrote up everything she remembered. A transcript of this would be carefully embalmed with the telemetry dumps from the equipment she’d been wearing. It would then be buried so deep in the Office of Special Programs’ vaults that she herself wouldn’t be able to retrieve it.

  One committee briefing would inevitably lead to another, and by the time the ripples had spread out into the organization it was Friday lunchtime. The head-scratching over when to schedule her next jaunt to the switchyard then commenced. If it had been up to Rita, she’d have gone back over in the small hours of Friday morning, but Patrick told her that the Colonel couldn’t authorize another trip without obtaining a consensus from his supervisors. “The BLACK RAIN discovery has rattled teeth all the way up to cabinet level. He wanted to send you out tonight, but he’s got the Homeland Security Council breathing down his neck. OSP doesn’t usually get this level of oversight, much less at his level—”

  “He’s a colonel, isn’t he?” Rita frowned. “I thought that was pretty senior…” She trailed off.

  “He’s not a colonel, he’s a retired colonel,” Patrick said. He paused to take a mouthful of coffee. He winced: too hot or too bitter. “A colonel would be a pretty junior officer to be running this sort of operation; colonels usually command a battalion or an Air Force squadron. Eric isn’t a colonel, he’s a spook, and it’s all alphabet soup. He may have started out in the Air Force, but he moved sideways into NSA, was assigned to the FTO in the early days, FTO became the OSP, OSP did a reverse-takeover of the DHS, and then he set up the Unit as his personal project. That’s us, the human intelligence arm within what used to be the OSP, which used to be the FTO, which is what happened when the federal government discovered parallel universes and went WTF. Colonel was his rank when he retired from the Air Force; these days he punches above Major General.”

  “Um.” Rita shook her head. “So he’s called a Colonel but is actually a Major General?”

  “Never mind.” Patrick grinned suddenly. “Don’t worry about it. Let’s just say he’s extremely senior. This started out as his personal hobbyhorse, but it’s suddenly attracted the attention of a lot of even more senior people in the administration. He’s not going to risk giving anyone an excuse to take his toy away from him, so nothing is going to happen before Monday. Hurry up and wait, in other words. You might as well take the weekend off: I’ll clear it for you. You’ve earned some downtime.”

  Rita yawned. “I’m in the wrong time zone,” she complained. “My family are in Phoenix, most everyone I know is in Cambridge, and I’m stuck in a motel in Allentown. What am I going to do?”

  “Go get some beauty sleep, then pretend you’re a tourist visiting exotic Philadelphia.”

  “I guess…”

  Rita drove back to the motel, lost in thought. Back in her room she started by phoning her parents: her usual weekly sonar ping was rendered slightly stilted by the certainty that everything she said would be transcribed and forwarded to whoever the Colonel had
assigned to monitor her. She’d been on the inside of DHS for only a matter of weeks, but that was enough to be certain that there was no way in hell an organization like the Unit would trust a newbie like her with a key technology like JAUNT BLUE without putting her under surveillance. It was probably Gomez, she guessed: Gomez was a hard-assed bitch and had been on her back since the beginning. If not Gomez, then Jack, the good cop to Sonia’s bad cop.

  “Your grandfather’s here,” River told her when the idle big-sis/little-brother chat began to bore him. “Wanna talk to him?”

  “Yeah. Hi, Gramps.”

  “Hello, Rita. Are you well?” he asked gravely.

  “I’m fine, work’s fine,” she said happily. “I can’t talk about it, though.” “Talk” was their prearranged code word: it meant everything was indeed fine. “Discuss,” in contrast, meant “Send help,” and “mention” was not to be mentioned save in extremis. “That book you lent me was weird. Are there any others like it?”

  They chatted about trivia for another five minutes, until Kurt tired. “Why don’t you look up your old school friends, see if anyone lives nearby?” he asked. “I’m tired; I need my nap.”

  “Yes, Gramps, I’ll do that,” she said, and hung up. Hearing Mom and Dad and River and Gramps’s voices had given her a brief boost, but the chill of isolation began to descend again. Rita could feel alone in the middle of a crowded party; being stuck in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere with a bugged phone and monitored Internet feed was beyond lonely.