Empire Games Series, Book 1

by Charles Stross

  “So? That’s my choice to make, girl.” Angie shrugged, but Rita saw the tension around her eyes. What would she do if she woke up one morning and found spooks pressuring her? Just by wanting Angie in her life she’d put her in danger, added her to some kind of watch list for significant others, made her a target for some LOVEINT operation. Any creepy stalker with a security clearance could get at Angie, now. But before she could say this, Angie went off on a tangent. “Say, you didn’t run a deep background check on me, did you?”

  Rita shook her head. “I don’t have that kind of access. They want me for a sparkly clandestine asset. CAs get security-cleared, but we don’t get to see anything—we live in a velvet-lined box so we can’t give anything away if we’re captured. Maybe if I get burned and have to retire to an analysis desk they’ll give me the keys to the kingdom. But for now all I’ve got on you is whatever you put on Facebook.”

  “Oh, well that’s okay, then. Because back in the day I’d have been through your profile like a ferret on crack.” Angie smiled. “That was then, and today I’m just another vet. Listen, I’d like to write Kurt a letter. For old times’ sake. I’ll hold back if you don’t want me to, but…”

  “I shouldn’t—” Rita stared at her. “Oh what the hell—you’ll do it if you feel like it anyway, huh?” Her cheek quirked. “I’m not going to say don’t—I don’t want you to feel like you need to lie to me.” Rita’s eyes lost some of their sparkle. “But please don’t take any risks on my behalf. It’s not worth it. And for fuck’s sake, please don’t let Gramps go all James Bond on me?”

  “Too late: I’m already taking a risk on you, and your grandpa will do whatever he wants. Where did I leave the truck?… I want you to come stay with me. Shouldn’t I know what I’m inviting into my home?”

  Angie drove Rita back to her place. Rita kept noticing her stealing furtive glances, and shivered. Is it worth it? she wondered, then realized she couldn’t imagine life in any other way—a horribly, gratifyingly unexpected change to undergo in less than a week. Then what should I do next? There was no obvious answer.

  * * *

  The next morning, after dropping Rita off back at the hotel, where her employers wanted to keep her under their thumb, Angie stopped off at a big-box Staples and bought a couple of notepads and pencils and a packet of envelopes. Then, over her lunch break, she began to laboriously draft a letter to Ri’s grandpappy Kurt. Once she got home she retreated under the comforter with a dog-eared copy of a paperback her parents had taught her how to use long ago, and the draft of the letter. She was very rusty: it took her a long time to transcribe it using a prearranged page in the book as the key to a one-time pad. But that was okay. Cipher skills came back once you started using them again, and she had a feeling that after Kurt wrote back with his instructions she’d be getting all the practice she needed.

  PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  Evening, morning, a new day, a new headache:

  “Walk with me,” said the Colonel. Rita noticed the missing “please”: attendance was mandatory. Smith led her into the open-plan area of the light industrial unit, past a temporary cubicle farm for the nonclassified workers, past the makeup, wardrobe, and props departments—the membrane dividing Hollywood production from Hollywood product was gossamer-thin in a short-term clandestine ops headquarters. They ended up at the door to the Faraday-shielded office trailer that served as a classified site office. Inside, the Colonel’s own mobile office was barely big enough to hold two chairs and a folding desk. “We have a problem,” Smith told her.

  Rita tensed. “What kind?” He said “we,” she reminded herself. She clung to the choice of pronoun as she waited for him to continue.

  Smith frowned at her, the rictus slowly deepening into a grimace of anger or frustration. His mood finally snapped like an overstretched rubber band: “Fucking morons!” He slumped into the chair behind his desk. “Siddown, Rita. I am”—he raised his hands—“so sorry I have to tell you this.”

  “What?” She sat, bewildered. She’d been nerving herself for a grilling about Angie for the past seventy-two hours. Things weren’t as bad as they were during the crazy noughties, but there were still plenty of crazies willing to throw the Defense of Marriage Act in your face if you stood up to be counted. (Pro-marriage activists had moved on to trying to get the federal ban on sodomy laws revoked, now that they’d rolled back Roe v. Wade.) “Is it about my, uh, friend…”

  Smith put her mind at ease: “Your new girlfriend isn’t an issue.” He waved a hand dismissively: “She held a Top Secret clearance back in the day. That ticks most of the boxes on the form. No, it’s the … it’s what Eileen was worrying about the day before yesterday. Too many chefs spoil the broth, and right now we’ve got sixteen different chiefs trying to run the kitchen. They can’t even agree on whether it’s sushi or McDonald’s.”

  He pointed at the tablet on his desk stand: “O’Neill and Gomez had your third mission profile mapped out pretty much as I wanted it and we were ready to run you through it today. Then the shit hit the fan. From the Homeland Security Council, no less.” Smith’s frown turned thunderous, as if he were contemplating the wreckage of his midlife-crisis sports car, crumpled under the front fender of an uninsured pickup truck. “They’ve given me a Priority One tasking to look at the state of geological and paleontological research and confirm that BLACK RAIN was created in the Year of Our Lord 4004 B.C., just like our own time line.”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s not all.” Smith looked grim. “Additionally, you’re supposed to find evidence that BLACK RAIN has been visited by the Grays from Zeta Reticuli, and look for, uh, ‘flying saucer secrets.’ Someone else wants to know if the locals have located the Golden Plates of Moroni. Then there’s a request for information on the state of anthropogenic climate change in BLACK RAIN, and that one actually makes sense, except it contradicts Executive Order 4603 banning use of federal funds for research into … You get the picture.”

  Rita closed her mouth. “What is this stuff?” she asked plaintively.

  Smith rubbed his eyes and sighed. “It’s open season, or silly season, or both. We’ve unintentionally created a honeypot for excitable whackjobs of every creed, and they’re trying to piss all over the mission requirements with their own agendas.” He tapped his tablet again. “Case in point: there’s a Priority One tasking to locate the site of the Martian implant control station in upstate New York.”

  Rita closed her mouth. She opened it, and closed it again, speechless.

  “You get the picture. We’re in danger of turning into the ball in a psychoceramic football tournament.” He looked at her pensively. “You’re sure you’re not deeply religious, Rita? No terribly deep convictions about anything?”

  “I was raised Lutheran, kinda-sorta.”

  “Well, that’s something. At least you’re not going to turn missionary on me.” His smile was disturbingly weak.

  She shrugged. “Is that sort of thing common?”

  “More than you might think. More than one idiot used discretionary funds to pay for their church outreach program under the guise of running a string of informers.” Smith shook his head. “This game attracts kooks. Before my time, we used to have a real problem with swivel-eyed witch finders pointing and shrieking ‘Communist!’ back when there was a cold war to run. Then we went through the Great Muslim Panic—and look how well that turned out. Now we’ve got a multiverse to police, and no clear idea what’s going on out there. So people with a clear idea of what they want yell the loudest and set policy. And we end up with terms of reference that are total bullshit…”

  Smith raised a hand, took two deep gulps of air, deflated visibly, and gave a quietly unhappy chuckle. “You didn’t hear this, Rita. You didn’t see me lose my shit. Understood?”

  She nodded.

  “I think you need to know about the shit-storm upstairs, even though Eileen and I are going to do our best to keep you sheltered under our umbrella.
In case of emergency, if I’m incapacitated and you can’t contact anyone else, I’m going to send you a number in Baltimore that will put you through to Dr. Scranton or her boss. You get to use it once, no questions asked, and if someone is making trouble for you the White House will make them go away. But you only ever use it if you can’t reach me. For the time being”—he shrugged—“the overt mission and the covert mission are still in alignment, ‘kinda-sorta,’ as you young folks say. I’ve made you aware of the priorities of our lords and masters, so I can check that off my list. Now, back to work…”

  He spun his tablet round so she could see it. “We punched another couple of micro-drones through, too small and too low to light up their air defense radar. There’s a city where Philadelphia is in this world, as you’d expect: it’s smaller and denser, with more high-rise buildings and less suburban sprawl, but it’s there. We’ve located a passenger railway station, too. These folks are big on public transport and streetcars, less so on automobiles. So we’re going to put you through a quarter hour before dawn, and you’re going to hang out and people-watch for a couple of hours. You’ll be carrying a military inertial nav system. It works like a handheld GPS map except it’s entirely self-contained, and we’ve filled it with lots of waypoints for safe jaunt sites. If there’s any trouble, you just run away. How long you stay there is up to you—it’s entirely up to your comfort zone—except the mapper only has a seven-day fuel cell charge. And we’d rather you came back the same day.”

  “Wait, but what am I going to do for clothes? Money?” Rita stared at him. “How will I fit in?”

  Smith shook his head. “We don’t know. That’s why you’re going walkabout. I suggest you study what people are wearing, how they talk, what they do. Wardrobe has run up an outfit based on what you video’d at the railhead. It should pass at a distance. If begging is legal, you could try and get us some cash to copy. Go window-shopping, see what things cost. Building a retail price index will tell us a lot about their economy, which in turn tells us a lot about the constraints imposed on their military by the funding envelope. If you get a chance to talk to people, take it—within reason, we don’t want you running risks. Finally, back in 2003 we got a memo from the Office of Legal Counsel. The Attorney General approves the legal theory that people in other time lines are not subject to the protections and laws of the USA, even if they’re in the equivalent geographical territory. We’re not giving you a gun because if you find yourself in a situation where you might need to defend yourself you should jaunt immediately. But anything you do over there falls outside the scope of our laws over here, if you follow my drift: you have total immunity.”

  “Got it. Tomorrow morning, quarter before dawn—that’s about six fifteen, isn’t it? Walk around for a few hours. Not less than two, unless I’m in danger, not more than a day or you start getting edgy. See the sights, play penniless tourist. Anything else?”

  “Yes.” Smith nodded. “You’re going to spend the rest of today in a wardrobe fitting, then with props—they’ll orient you on the inertial map system. In particular we want you, if you get a chance, to log waypoints over there for a couple of different types of sites—abandoned houses or retail establishments in particular. Government offices, too. Then you’re sleeping here tonight, I’m afraid. Four-thirty wake-up call for makeup.” He rose. “Good luck and Godspeed.”

  Mission Abort

  IRONGATE, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020

  The Colonel, his staff in the Unit, their seniors in the Office of Special Programs, and everyone in the DHS who was aware of the JAUNT BLUE program and the BLACK RAIN time line assumed that Rita’s aborted mission had been completed largely without consequence.

  They couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Rita had been clearly seen by station mate Vance Schofield, age fifty-six. He was a forty-year veteran of the Irontown Regional Permanent Way and its successor, the Commonwealth Eastern Regional Rails, or the CERR. A sober-sided widower and abstainer from spirits, he had challenged Rita to display her ticket of travel: at which point she had vanished into thin air.

  Aghast and worried that his eyes were failing him, Schofield had summoned his platform attendant, one Barnett Garrison, an Observer Corps veteran—who had also noticed Rita loitering near the end of the platform, but assumed she was merely a night-shift worker taken short and turned a discreet eye. Together they searched the platform and adjacent tracks. Returning with Schofield to the platform office, Garrison noticed an Unidentified Object attached to one of the windowpanes he had cleaned the evening before. And that’s when Schofield recalled the electronic memoranda about Persons Vanishing in Broad Daylight, Unidentified Objects, and If You See Something, Say Something.

  Ten minutes later Schofield laboriously pushed the SEND button on the teletype terminal that linked his office, via telephone line, to the powerful new time-sharing mainframe in Port Richmond (which the CERR had installed to coordinate their railroad network’s back-office business just five years ago). Sixteen minutes later—the Commonwealth intercomputer network was chronically congested, the modems almost permanently engaged as messaging traffic grew by leaps and bounds—his message reached the in-box of one Inspector Alice Morgan of the Commonwealth Transport Police.

  Inspector Morgan was in a morning briefing, so did not receive his e-mail at once. But half an hour after her return to a deskful of paperwork, she began to read—and the shit hit the fan. The Commonwealth Transport Police was responsible for securing a rapidly developing infrastructure network that had gone from steam locomotives and biplanes to passenger jets and high-speed rail in just seventeen years. They had been re-formed and trained along modern lines in the wake of the Revolution, as one of the key security services of the Commonwealth Deep State. They were fully briefed on world-walking and its implications. And Alice Morgan had not risen to the rank of Police inspector (in a society that was, in many ways, still deeply conservative and unaccustomed to such newfangled ideas as women working and voting) without being something of an overachiever.

  News usually propagates slowly, if at all, through any bureaucracy not built on advanced information technology. Of necessity, the faster channels of communication are scarce and must be reserved for important bulletins. The Commonwealth’s Deep State planners were aware of this. They were also aware of their most likely adversary’s infowar doctrine (even though it relied on technologies that seemed like the most bizarre overextrapolation of current trends) and the vital need to get inside their decision loop. Inspector Morgan’s subsequent on-site report, filed from Schofield’s own railway network terminal using her priority key, went straight over the wire to the National Security Network, carbon-copied to the Force Commander and to the Director of the Department of Para-historical Research, flagged as a FLASH alert.

  At three o’clock that afternoon, Miriam Burgeson took her seat at the head of a boardroom table to chair the resulting emergency briefing.

  “Background first. What have we found, Commander?” she asked.

  “Lots.” Commander Jackson looked extremely unhappy—as he should have, under the circumstances. “I’ve had men combing the Irongate South satellite switchyard since ten o’clock this morning. So far they’ve identified four suspicious objects, believed to be miniature televisor cameras with attached storage devices: so-called webcams. The first was spotted by accident by the platform attendant who cleaned the office window it was adhering to the previous day. He retrieved it and after Forensics finished with it—taking fingerprints and surface samples for DNA matching—it was handed over to a DPR courier. The other three devices have been left in situ by order of the incident controller until we know what you want us to do with them. They are attached to the left upper door windowpane on Signal Box Two, the side of one of the support pillars on the platform awning, and above the northern side door of the supervisor’s office on Platform Three.

  “The switchyard is currently closed while my officers conduct a fingertip search of the enti
re yard, including the track beds. An hour ago, they identified another suspicious object: a device concealed in a lump of timber that had been placed on a walkway between tracks eight and nine. It’s a small sealed weatherproof plastic container, and it radiates magnetoelectric vibrations.” Jackson’s terminology was archaic, a product of an education that predated the arrival of the Clan exiles and the deluge of new science and technology they’d catalyzed.

  “So. Witness sighting of a person who vanished into thin air—from a normally reliable member of staff—and indirect confirmation in the shape of concealed monitoring devices.” Miriam frowned. She wished she felt sufficiently at ease to relax her politician’s mask and actually vent her true emotions—scream and shout, maybe throw something at the wall—but it would send entirely the wrong message at this point. Deep breathing time. “Ken. Analysis? What do your people say? Anything else?”

  Ken McInnes, her deputy director in charge of Operational Analysis, shook his head. “We’re still putting it together. There’s been a marked uptick in UFO sightings in Pennsylvania in general over the past month, described variously as ‘giant hornets’ or ‘tiny airplanes.’ Air Defense Command confirms some anomalous sightings, both from the Observer Corps and radar, but the objects were flying low and slow and nobody managed to get a lock. They scrambled interceptors for two of the sightings, but there was nothing there when the jets arrived. I would speculate—let me caution that this is uncorroborated guesswork—that the adversary might be using very small drones to conduct localized probes. If they pop into our airspace less than a thousand feet up, spend most of their time barely above treetop height, and hang around for less than fifteen minutes, we’ll have the devil’s own job spotting them.

  “On the upside: there’s no sign of activity anywhere else. Whatever’s going on, it’s highly local. We haven’t seen any sign of UFOs over the Pacific Northwest or the Andes, for example. They’re focusing on Irongate and Philadelphia, so I think what we may be seeing is airborne activity in support of a ground-based clandestine insertion.”