Empire Games Series, Book 1

by Charles Stross

  Then she glanced down at the desk and realized what she had seen but not registered.

  There was a computer on the desk. It was an old-school bulky beige box with a metal cover, not a tablet or a flat display panel. A keyboard you could club someone to death with sat proudly in the middle of the blotter, but something about it didn’t quite look right. She fumbled for a moment with her webbing, then managed to pull out the super-zoom camera. “Come on, damn you,” she muttered under her breath. The autofocus didn’t want to work in darkness. She glanced around, nervously, then switched the flash to automatic and squeezed her eyes shut as she depressed the shutter button. Then she zoomed in on the image she’d captured. It was a keyboard, all right, but the key layout was all wrong. The keys weren’t staggered; there were too many columns and not enough rows. I guess we’re not in QWERTY City anymore, she told herself.

  She was still boggling at the museum exhibits when the platform light came on.

  PART THREE

  DARK STATE

  History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

  —Karl Marx

  Extraction

  THE COMMONWEALTH, TIME LINE THREE, MAY 2020

  Miriam and Erasmus spent a night in the bunker waiting for the bombs to fall, drinking bad coffee and grinding through a crisis agenda inconclusively.

  Elsewhere, hundreds of pilots spent the night keyed up and sleepless in the cockpits of their nuclear-armed interceptors, wondering if this time the French were finally coming. And they were not alone, for the Commonwealth War Command responded to the uncertain threat in accordance with the age-old syllogism of the uncertain; something must be done, this is something, therefore this must be done.

  Petard carriers—bombers—and their escort tankers scrambled, then flew out to orbit their hold-back points in the howling darkness above the Arctic Ocean. They flew armed and ready for the deadly one-way dash to the enemy capitals: to London, Paris, Cairo, Beijing, Bombay, and the heart of the enemy empire itself, Royal St. Petersburg. Across the flat prairies of Lakotaland, flight crews descended into their silos and pumped liquid fuel aboard their bulbous first-generation ICBMs. In the oceans, submarine captains received their low-frequency alert codes and brought their nuclear-powered vessels to periscope depth while the missile teams readied their birds. But it was an exercise in impotence: none of the bombers or ICBMs or SLBMs carried the world-walkers who were a necessity if they were to engage the real threat.

  By dawn of the day after this deathwatch, it became clear that the sum of all fears had not come to pass. The high-altitude drone was not the harbinger of Armageddon. Across the New American Commonwealth’s three continents and scattered territories, the unsleeping Air Defense forces saw nothing else unusual. After twelve hours of intense concentration—for, as Dr. Johnson had so memorably observed, nothing concentrates the mind like the knowledge that one is to be hanged—the Commonwealth War Command began to draw down their forces unit by unit, backing slowly away from the brink of a nuclear war with the only adversary they knew how to fight.

  All except for JUGGERNAUT, of course. But the JUGGERNAUT superweapon was behind schedule and over budget. It might never be ready. And even if it was viable, it was anyone’s guess whether it would work. After all, the Commonwealth war planners knew that bombers and ICBMs and ballistic missile submarines worked: they’d supped at the fount of dark wisdom supplied by the Ministry of Intertemporal Technological Intelligence. They’d studied the Cuban Missile Crisis, the emergency at the end of the Yom Kippur War, and the ghastly intersection of Operation RYaN and Able Archer 83 that had brought the Soviet Union and the United States to the edge of nuclear annihilation in the mid-1980s. They’d majored in cold war studies: Hiroshima and Nagasaki and New Delhi and Islamabad were on the syllabus of the staff college at Rochester. But nobody in any time line they knew of had ever built anything quite like JUGGERNAUT, much less developed doctrine for using it …

  NEW LONDON, TIME LINE THREE, JUNE 2020

  “How long has he got?” Miriam asked bluntly.

  Dr. Porter, the oncology consultant, looked tired. He’d probably answered the question sixteen times before breakfast already. “It’s anyone’s guess,” he said unhelpfully. “The Lord will know his own.”

  Miriam glanced sidelong at her husband. Erasmus appeared to be paying more attention to the writing pad on his lap than to her interrogation of the doctor. It was an old habit of his. “I know cachexia when I see it,” she said. “I also know acute spinal degeneration secondary to metastatic tumors, and peripheral neuropathy—”

  Dr. Porter’s eyes widened. “I see ma’am is up to date on the new foreign literature,” he said.

  Ma’am is actually very out of date indeed, but Miriam decided not to mention her uncompleted premed to him. She merely smiled tensely. “What’s his prognosis? Days or weeks?”

  “Ah, well.” Porter looked faintly relieved. “Well, the First Man may not be as close to death’s door as you believe. You met him at his worst last week. He’s currently responding well to a combination treatment—fluorouracil and cisplatin—and radiation as well. I will not mince words with you: his prognosis is terminal. But while one can never rule out sudden setbacks, he might hang on for as long as six months.”

  Fluorouracil and cisplatin were 1970s chemotherapy drugs, but the Commonwealth was nowhere near ready to begin production of monoclonal antibody and epigenetic interference therapies. And Adam himself had refused, point blank, to consider a discreet trip to a private Brazilian clinic in time line two. “It is my duty to stand by my people and, if necessary, to suffer as they do,” he’d pointed out to Erasmus when they’d come to visit his bedside the day before. “If there’s an easy escape for the likes of us, when will we ever develop the indigenous technology”—he’d glanced at Miriam, eyelids fluttering—“to rescue our people?”

  Sixteen years ago, Sir Adam had swallowed her two-phase proposal completely—so completely, he was willing to die by it. She’d lobbied to establish a ministry to use world-walkers to import knowledge and ideas and spread the spoils via educational establishments. But it was essential that they use these tools only to develop native infrastructure, from schools and universities to research establishments and factories. The Commonwealth must stand on its own, rather than becoming addicted to a steady drip of illicit imports from another time line, as the Gruinmarkt had. It had seemed like a really good idea at the time, she thought—not without bitterness—until the saintly Father of the Nation decided they were words to live and die by.

  “‘Setbacks.’” Miriam tried not to scowl, not entirely successfully. “Well, Doctor. While I appreciate your doing everything within your capabilities to help keep the First Man going, I was … shall we say, taken aback? As you might understand, the state of his health ultimately affects my commission. And my husband’s”—it still felt strange calling him that, even after fourteen years—“duties, too, as Commissioner of Propaganda. We both have necessary and sufficient reason to be added to the distribution list for his daily updates.”

  “Um, ah.” Dr. Porter looked unhappy. “If the First Man consents, of course. Otherwise power of attorney in respect of his physiodynamic needs rests with the Secretary to the Inner Party.”

  Oh hell. Miriam failed to suppress a twitch this time. Nor did she miss the tension that suddenly appeared in the set of Erasmus’s shoulders. “Then I will take this up with the secretariat,” she assured Dr. Porter. Standing, she turned to her husband: “I think we’ve heard enough, dear.” Erasmus rose, and offered her his arm. “Thank you, Doctor.”

  Dr. Porter, too, rose, and bowed and ushered them out of his office with old-school formality.

  “Well, fuck,” Miriam whispered as they passed through the waiting room, which was crowded with no small number of Deputy Commissioners, Secretaries, and a handful of nursing orderlies and junior doctors. The Manhattan Palace was sprouting medical facilities, as if engaged in a bizarre bid to rival the teach
ing hospitals of New London. “We’ll have to soft-soap Adrian,” she confided in Erasmus.

  Her husband’s face was a closed book. “I trust our friend the Secretary as far as I can throw him,” he hissed.

  “Can’t be helped. Have to confront him sooner or later. Better now than in cabinet when Sir Adam’s too sick to keep up the pretense anymore.”

  Outside the palace medical center they picked up their respective retinues of clerks and administrative assistants, and proceeded by common consent toward what had once, before the Revolution, been the Empress’s Chambers. They walked together: two distinguished-looking politicians, formally clad in the subdued version of the finery that courtiers had once deployed—austere gray and black tailoring over white silk—rather than the prerevolutionary efflorescences of crimson and purple over explosions of lace. Like magpies surrounded by the crowlike figures of their attendants, they made their way toward the center of the web ruled by the Party Secretary, Adrian Holmes.

  Holmes was indeed home this morning. They passed through an outer office, in which clerks rattled the keys of no fewer than six computer terminals (wired, no doubt, to one of the municipal government mainframes that formed the beating heart of the Commonwealth Cybernetic Agoric Allocator, the real-time central planning system that ran the state). Then they were ushered into the windowless inner office, and the presence of the New Man himself.

  “Ah, the Commissioners Burgeson!” Adrian Holmes hauled himself to his feet, beaming with a bonhomie Miriam suspected he cultivated only for high-ranking visitors: he could certainly switch it on and off like a lightbulb. A tall man, dour of disposition, he was also a supremely effective administrator. Which was why Adam had elevated him to the Party Secretariat at such a young age—he was barely forty.

  (“A bloody Robespierre,” Olga had spat when she heard the news. Miriam had pretended not to notice, but over time she’d come to suspect that her younger protégé might have been right when she’d said, “You mark my words, my lady: give him his head and he’ll reap all of ours, even if he has to build his own guillotine.” Erasmus had not quite agreed. “Not a Robespierre,” he’d said gloomily, “but he might grow into Stalin’s shoes.”)

  “And what can I do for you today?”

  “It’s the boss,” Erasmus said, affecting a slight nasality in his voice that elevated his tone but left it just short of a whine. It made him sound slightly stupid. He’d developed the trick, Miriam had learned, while on the run before the Revolution—as a way of convincing the political police he was harmless. “Nobody told us…”

  “We want to be added to the daily distribution list for Sir Adam’s medical status,” Miriam added. “Our commissions have definite need to know.”

  “I’m sure they do,” Adrian agreed affably. “Propaganda and industrial espionage—defending the indefensible, eh?” He beamed, then continued: “I’ll see you’re added to the list right away. Can’t think why you weren’t on it to begin with, honestly.” He sat down. “Will you stay for a while? I’m not busy, and it’s been too long since we’ve had a chance to chew the cud.”

  More likely he meant, It’s been too long since I had a chance to pick your brains. Adrian was often in the office for eighteen hours a day, burning the midnight electricity. He had a mind like a mantrap, a superb memory, a grasp of the tiniest minutiae, and a pleasant demeanor. Miriam would have been entranced by him, and even considered him a possible suitable successor for the First Man, if she hadn’t also suspected him of being as ideologically flexible as a rubber band. A courtier’s courtier, rather than a man of integrity. “We really ought to get together some time.” Miriam smiled at him. “Unfortunately I’ve got to chair a meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee this afternoon, and Erasmus has—what do you have, dear?”

  “Contingency planning.” Erasmus gave Holmes a fey smile. “Black crepe, martial music, state funeral with gun carriage and cathedral, and then what, eh? It’s coming, Ade. Someone has to manage how we are seen in our hour of grief, an’ all that.”

  Don’t rub it in too hard, you moron! Miriam wished, not for the first time, that marital vows conferred spousal telepathy: at times like this it would have been more than handy. “What he means to say is that, strictly speaking, the dismal contingency facing us is going to dominate the news cycle for weeks, and he’s already in the throes of planning for it.”

  “Well, don’t let me keep you.” Adrian grinned at her, or bared his teeth—it was much the same expression. “But we really must talk soon, you know. Before we’re overtaken by events.”

  “You must come round for dinner sometime next week,” Miriam offered. “Have your people talk to my people: I’m sure we can sort out a quiet tête-à-tête, just the three of us.”

  “Absolutely,” he said, his tone pleasant. “I’ll see when they can fit you in. My diary’s filling up rather fast, I’m afraid. Ciao!”

  It was a dismissal. Not so long ago, a dismissal of that kind, in that tone, would have been the prerogative of the First Man and none other—you simply did not dismiss two People’s Commissioners of cabinet rank. But thanks to a freakish piece of medical bad luck, time was running out for the First Man. And it was anybody’s guess who would pick up the reins when the driver left the carriage for the last time.

  PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO; IRONGATE, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020

  The lights along the railway platform switched on without warning. There were dozens, maybe even hundreds of them. Hot, pinkish-white tungsten filaments sheathed in frosted white glass.

  Rita jumped down from the bench she’d been standing on and ran, shielding her glare-bruised eyes. Behind the station office, the side facing the brick wall was unlit, the shadows around it thick and deep. It’s just this platform, she realized as she flattened her back against the wall. She checked the time in her head-up display: three forty-nine. The rest of the switchyard was in darkness, but now she heard a rattle and a click, footsteps walking along the front of the building she’d taken shelter behind. Scheisse. The tracks. The tracks between her and the survey point for her jaunt home gleamed in reflected light. The switchyard floodlights were out, but up the line she saw signal lamps switch from red to blue. Night train coming.

  She licked her suddenly dry lips and took stock. I’m above ground level. The platform was about five feet above the track beds. She whispered: “Maps, inertial, display current-equivalent location.” The head-up display delivered. She was about a third of a mile away from the Colonel’s big tent revival camp. If she jaunted home, she’d come out across a highway, maybe in someone else’s parking lot, maybe inside a shuttered Target. A sickening sense of relief turned her knees to jelly and threatened her with blackout. She’d risk a sprained ankle, but so what. The telemetry box could look after itself, in a pinch. One-shot ARMBAND units cost only a few tens of thousands of dollars these days, according to Patrick. She took a deep breath. So let’s stay and see what’s going on …

  More footsteps, then male voices, gruff and muffled by distance and corners. They were just at the edge of hearing, their accents strange. “Aye Bill, that wert right clever.” (Inaudible reply.) “Well youse can jist get thyself across to tha’ signals and set the track block to am-pass. Oh, an’ light up the yard. They’re due in ten minutes.”

  A rattle of keys in a lock: more footsteps, then a heavy thud and a crunching of boots on ballast as someone—Bill, at a guess—jumped down onto the tracks and headed away. The light changed, brightening slightly: possibly because Bill’s interlocutor had entered the station office and turned on more lamps. “Video feed, last node,” Rita whispered.

  A grainy video window sprang to life in her head-up display: the interior of the station office. A middle-aged, overweight man with bushy sideboards and comic-opera headgear—Is that a tricorn hat?—flopped down behind the computer terminal, punching laboriously at the keys with meaty index fingers. His coat or cloak or other outer garment (it was hard to tell: ruffles and frogging obscured
part of it) hung over a hook on the back of the open door. Without looking, he reached sideways and picked up an antique telephone handset that trailed a pigtail coil of wire. “Station mate’s office,” he said (his voice tinny but completely audible through the glass and the webcam pickup), “Eugene hailing.” (A pause.) “Yes, you should have a good signal in another minute.” He hung up.

  Rita felt, rather than heard, a faint rumble, followed by a hiss and shimmer of tracks rubbing against their tie-downs. She looked sideways and saw the lights of a train, then heard a deep rumble and the crack of a spark as it approached, pantograph flaring momentarily against the overhead power cables. It was, she saw, a short passenger train. Like a commuter train, it had multiple doors spaced along each of its five carriages; but like a European high-speed express, it was streamlined and bullet-nosed. The windows were lit, showing an indistinct mass of people in dark coats sitting and standing within. Brakes sighed as it rolled alongside the platform and drifted to a standstill; then the doors opened with a hiss to disgorge a torrent of bodies onto the front of the platform.

  Rita shuddered, wrung out on an adrenaline spike, and slid farther into the shadows. Doors rattled elsewhere in the station as the crowd stamped and shuffled their way toward an unseen exit. In her head-up display she watched as the stationmaster—station mate, she reminded herself—picked up his phone and pushed buttons on a blocky console below it: “Eugene hailing. The four o’clock shift change multiple is discharging onto platform two now. Prithee let the night shift in as soon as you sight the discharge? Thanking you kindly.”

  There was more rumbling elsewhere in the switchyard. A long, slow freight train hove into view behind an oddly quiet locomotive. It hummed as it approached, a deep sixty-cycle thrumming sound that carried even over the voices and echoing feet of the men from the passenger train. They were spreading out like an ant-trail leading into an open doorway just visible from one of Rita’s other webcams. There have to be three hundred of them, she realized. Maybe more. There’d been standing room only on the train. Men and women in coats or overalls, indistinctly glimpsed in the harsh station lights. She tried to get a look at them. Acquiring some idea of local fashions, Patrick had pointed out, was important in laying groundwork for future infiltration missions. But all she could really tell, without stepping out from her hiding place, was that most of them wore shapeless berets or caps and hats. She’d have to rely on the webcams for detail.