Empire Games Series, Book 1

by Charles Stross

  There was a big crew-cab pickup parked outside. The Colonel was waiting beside it. “Come on,” he said. She climbed into the back and found herself the unwelcome filling in a Gomez-and-O’Neill sandwich. “Okay, we’re just about ready,” said Smith, leaning in through the window. “See you at the zone.”

  They rode in silence most of the way. Rita felt acutely uncomfortable, trying not to touch the prickly Gomez or cozy up too tight to Patrick. Nobody spoke. Eventually she pulled out the inertial mapper and tried to follow the route on it. It nailed I-476, as accurately as a satnav. “Huh,” said Gomez, looking over her shoulder. “You want to put that away. Save the battery for later.”

  Rita blanked the backlit screen. “What are you even doing here anyway?” she asked.

  “I’m guarding your sorry ass in case the Clan come after you.” Gomez wouldn’t meet her gaze, so she focused on the brooch the woman wore: two superimposed gold triangles, pointing upward. Isn’t that a Scientology symbol? Rita wondered. “Just do your job and we can all go home happy tonight.”

  “The Clan isn’t going to come after me.” Rita shut her eyes.

  “Rita”—it was Patrick—“don’t go there, please.”

  “I am sick and tired of internal politics.” She rounded on Gomez: “You’ve been on my case ever since we met. What is it with you? Is it my skin color or something?”

  Gomez recoiled. “You’re a spoiled bitch carrying a shitload of suppressive baggage around with you and if it was up to me you wouldn’t be cleaning the toilets—”

  “Ladies!” Patrick was clearly annoyed. “Not in public.”

  “Shit.” Rita yawned, then caught herself. Gomez stared determinedly up front, to where a pair of uniforms Rita hadn’t met were pointedly ignoring them. So much for Patrick’s offer of help, she thought grimly.

  “Keep a lid on it for another half hour.” Patrick gave them both a look. “Try to play nice. Do you want me to ask Eric to arbitrate?”

  Rita bit her lip. There had to be some other reason the Colonel was keeping Gomez in the Unit: hard-case cops were ten a penny. Hard-case cops with connections, maybe less so. Perhaps he wanted Gomez around because he knew she was leaking to one of the internal factions? Or perhaps he thought he needed to keep Rita on her toes, and didn’t realize how badly Gomez was harassing her? But whatever the reason, it was stressing her out.

  They traveled the rest of the way in silence. They turned off the interstate, drove through the darkened streets of South Philly, then across the expressway and into the Navy grounds near the river, and finally arrived at a parking lot close by the Office of Naval Intelligence. They weren’t alone. A small gaggle of DHS crew-cabs and unmarked sedans clustered together. Traffic cones connected by crime scene tape cordoned off a square on one edge. Patrick opened his door. “Showtime,” he said quietly. “Site survey says the other side is pretty much fallout-free. Break a leg.”

  Rita nodded. She no longer felt like speaking. She was simultaneously tired and keyed up. Let’s get this over with, she thought wearily.

  The Colonel was waiting in the taped-off area. “You know the plan,” he said quietly. “Eyes open, mouth shut, free-form. Come back whenever you find yourself outside your comfort zone. Call me on this and we’ll come fetch you.” He handed over a tiny dumbphone, the voice-and-text-only variety that had a monthlong standby life. “And remember the real objective.”

  “Okay. If I’m not back in two minutes, expect me in three to eight hours.” Rita grinned, then rolled back her left sleeve, squeezed her forearm, and clicked her heels. “There’s no place like home—”

  She jaunted.

  The parking lot vanished. She stumbled in the dark, felt damp grass underfoot. It was colder here. In her ear, the clicking of a radiation counter. Time line one was still hot from the nuking of the Gruinmarkt, even this far south. She raised her wrist, cued up the next trigger engram, and jaunted again.

  Noise assaulted her: a screech of metal on metal. She stumbled, felt hard asphalt underfoot, took a step backward, and nearly tripped over a curbstone. She managed to catch her balance on a narrow strip of sidewalk. The amber washout glare of streetlights cast multiple shadows in all directions. There was a windowless building behind her, concrete or stone. Steel rails gleamed as a streetcar rumbled and swayed toward the spot where she’d been. The narrow strip of paving she’d found was barely wide enough to stand on, and as the streetcar passed she saw more tracks beyond it, and heard the snap and crackle of overhead wires. If it isn’t one train station it’s another, she thought, dismayed, then kicked herself mentally. No, it’s a streetcar depot. The Colonel said they’re big on public transport. I’m standing in the middle of the tracks. She looked round at the wall. It vanished into the near distance, and high overhead there was a vaulting arch of metal girders supporting a dark ceiling.

  The streetcar was slowing. Across four or five tracks she saw a low platform, notice boards that might have been timetables, and boxy station furniture that might have been ticket machines. Did the driver see me? she wondered. She’d nearly jaunted in front of the tram. I could have been run over, she thought with a sick feeling.

  There was no platform in this part of the station, and no way out that didn’t involve crossing several tracks. Swallowing, she glanced at her wrist and tried to jaunt again. She felt a silvery flash of pain, but nothing happened. “Ow!” She squeaked aloud, seeing the station still around her. She stepped sideways and tried again. This time it worked: she was back in the rainy nighttime forest. She closed her eyes, trying to remember how far away the station wall was. Took another step sideways, holding out her right arm to avoid obstacles. Stepped sideways once more. There was no tree in this direction. Now she looked at her wrist, squeezed to light up tired phosphors. “Come on,” she murmured, focusing again.

  She dropped almost a foot to the ground, landing hard. This time the wall was to her left. She stood on a broad sidewalk. Turning, she saw buildings opposite in a variety of unfamiliar styles. It was dizzyingly, achingly close to familiar: street markings that were somehow wrong, signposts bearing old-fashioned traffic directions but in a style nothing like the road signs she had grown up seeing. It was dark, the street lighting dim and the walls stained black with old soot. Half the storefronts were shuttered with metal grilles. The brick and stone of the buildings gave them a curious air of permanence, and they hunched close together. “Okay, I’m round the back of the downtown station,” she whispered into the tiny mike in her lapel. She pulled out the inertial mapper and tapped a waypoint. “Let’s see if I can find the front.”

  The station was, in some ways, comfortingly familiar: neoclassical in style, with the same stone columns and arches as many another nineteenth-century railway station. The surrounding buildings were less reassuring, though. There were few people about, although she spotted a man pushing a wheelbarrow slowly along a sidewalk, using long-handled tongs to pick detritus from the pavement. Mouselike, she scurried past behind his back. In front of the station there was a wide-open traffic circle, with many roads radiating away from it, like pictures she’d seen of Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. A huge plinth dominated the island in the middle, supporting a statue of a man on a horse. The color of the streetlights was somehow wrong, too orange for her eyes. They flickered slightly, and as she watched, one of them dimmed abruptly to a sullen neon red, then faded to dark.

  There were one or two pedestrians out, bundled in long coats against the morning chill. Rita walked up to the front of the station and found metal gates drawn shut. A rattle of chains drew her eyes toward a uniformed man in an odd-shaped hat, the brim pinned up on either side. He was unfastening the gate at the far end, fumbling with a padlock. “Opening time,” she said quietly. “They’re just opening the public entrance now.” She checked her wrist. “Zero six zero nine. Hmm. They’re not early risers in the city.”

  She turned and looked across the circle. Picking a street at random—three lanes wide in either direction, wit
h broad sidewalks and four- to six-story buildings on either side—she jaywalked across as fast as she could go without running. On the other side she found herself looking into the darkened windows of storefronts. For some reason they didn’t seem to go in for big expanses of plate glass: the windows consisted of panes a couple of feet wide set in wooden or metal frames. Some things were constants, though. Proprietors’ names were proudly emblazoned across doorways and on signboards hanging in front. Headless dressmakers’ dummies swathed in odd-looking outfits loomed in the twilight. “Downtown shopping district, I think,” she whispered.

  Rita heard the unmistakable sound of a truck in the distance and spooked. The recessed vestibule of a shop offered her cover, gilt lettering on the door proclaiming it to be Barrow’s Millinery. She stepped backward. The engine note was growing louder rapidly. Then the truck turned the corner. All she caught was a confused glimpse of a long hood and dark windows behind bright headlights. It pulled over on the far—left—side of the street. Doors opened, male voices called. Several men got out. Doors slammed, and the truck began to move again. She heard boots on the sidewalk, the men talking conversationally as they walked along the far side of the road.

  Rita turned her face toward the shop’s interior. Let’s try and look as if I belong here, she decided. They’re probably just clerks arriving to open up shop …

  Something metal-cold shoved up hard against the back of her neck. “Dinna move,” said the man behind her. His throat was hoarse, his voice deep. “I said, dinna move, woman. Dinna speak. Dinna even breathe.”

  Rita froze from the belly out. She’d been so focused on the carload on the far side of the street that she’d never even heard his approach. Her left arm hung uselessly by her side. Her head-up display could flash a trigger engram if she asked, but the finger wrapped around the trigger of the gun at her head would be faster.

  “When I stop talkin’ I want you to slowly turn an’ face the wall. Hands up and brace yerself, lean in. Then go ter yer knees.

  “I am placing thee under arrest by authority of the Commonwealth Guard…”

  Contact

  IRONGATE, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020

  “I am placing thee under arrest by authority of the Commonwealth Guard. Slowly turn—now.”

  Rita did as she was told: turned, raised her hands, braced against the wall in front of her. Please let him take the gun away, she prayed. Her lifelogger was keyed to a single word: bugout. All she needed was a second—

  “I said, raise your hands and lean in! Do it now! Kneel!”

  Shit. Rita slowly lowered herself to her knees.

  “Over here!” her captor shouted, deafening in the confined space. The cold gun barrel at the back of her head wobbled slightly but didn’t withdraw. A handcuff locked around her left wrist. “Wrists together!” The gun barrel ground painfully into her hair. The other cuff closed. The one on the left covered the e-ink tattoo. Her initial terror was subsiding into an adrenaline spike and a sense of gnawing apprehension. They’re cops. They were obviously on some kind of sweep. What happens next? She had a feeling that jaunting was going to be easier said than done.

  The gun muzzle withdrew, but before she could react someone yanked a canvas sack down over her head. Panicking anew, Rita tensed and reared up. They kicked her in the ribs, slamming her face into the wall. For a while she lost track of everything but the pain in her face and the difficulty of breathing.

  Shattered fragments of memory captured unpleasant sensations. Being lifted and slung, hard, into the back of a vehicle. Motion, bouncing, and alarm bells ringing insistently above and behind her. Being lifted again and dragged through doorways and along corridors. The sack coming off her head in time for the final drop, facedown, onto a fetid, lumpy mattress that smelled of piss and terror.

  By the time the cell door opened again, Rita had regained a tiny measure of control. Her head was sore, her ribs ached badly, and she felt nauseous: but she could think and assess her situation. They’d left her bound hand and foot. With the key generator behind her back, she couldn’t jaunt. She was alone in a graffitied jail cell, the walls white and covered in tiles. The only furniture was the filthy mattress she lay on. The door looked to be made of sturdy wood bound in riveted strips of iron. A spy hole completed the dismal ensemble.

  I’m fucked, Rita realized. For the short term, anyway. But they’d have to take the manacles off sooner or later, wouldn’t they? And when they did, she’d be ready.

  She rolled sideways, trying to work out if everything was still in place. They’d taken her hat. But the inertial mapper was in a concealed pocket … no, the inertial mapper was not in its concealed pocket. Shit and more shit. Alien technology would definitely flag her as an illegal. She shivered, flushing hot and cold. She could already see the Colonel shaking his head in pained disappointment. It was odd, she realized, how much this job had come to mean to her in so short a time. They somehow caught me, she realized, unsure whether she meant the police here, or the DHS, who had somehow managed to make her give a shit about the job, just in time for it to go horribly wrong.

  She was still exploring this unwelcome new realization when then the door opened. “Up with ye.” Hands gripped her armpits and heaved painfully. “Open yer mouth. I said open it, wummun!” A meaty hand clutching a cotton swab on a stick appeared in front of her face.

  Rita opened her mouth hastily: the prospect of another beating, or worse, terrified her. The swab stabbed at her tongue, twirled nauseatingly, and withdrew just as she began to retch. The hands supporting her let go, and she flopped down on the mattress. She heard rattling and clicking behind her, and tried to turn her head, but the door slammed shut before she got an impression of anything other than navy-blue uniforms and odd-shaped hats.

  It was cold in the cell, and they left her alone for nearly an hour. She was shivering, and uneasily wondering if she was going to piss herself, when the door opened again.

  “Get those leg-irons off her!” The speaker was outside the door, beyond her field of vision, but the voice belonged to a woman and her tone of authority brooked no argument. Men in uniform moved in and tugged at Rita’s legs. “You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?” the woman asked her. It was a thinly veiled threat. “These nice gentlemen are going to pick you up now. If you don’t fight they won’t hurt you. Then we can have a little chat.” Her accent was half familiar, half strange.

  “Who—” Rita cleared her throat and licked her lips. “Who are you?”

  “I’m asking the questions. Boys, lift her.” Two uniformed men—cops or jailhouse guards, Rita couldn’t tell—raised her by her arms. After a second or two she managed to steady herself and turned to face the doorway.

  The woman was blond, in her thirties, and wore minimal or no makeup; perhaps it wasn’t a thing here. Her hair curled around her shoulders and she wore some sort of uniform, unfamiliar and strange. She held a leather attaché case or folio in one hand. “Bring her,” she told Rita’s guards, then turned and walked away. They nudged her along; after a moment she stumbled into motion, feet numb and head still sore and dizzy.

  Rita caught more impressions of the jail as they marched her through whitewashed corridors with scuffed wooden floors. The overhead illumination came from long glowing tubes—old-style fluorescent lights, Rita realized, not LED strips. (She hadn’t seen tube-lights in years. They were banned back home—something to do with mercury.) They came to a metal elevator. The guards crowded her inside, almost nose-to-nose with her would-be interrogator. The woman smelled faintly of rose water and sweat. She spared Rita a dry smile as she pushed a button printed with the digit 8. “I’d take you higher if we had any extra floors,” she said, almost apologetically, as the elevator began to rise.

  Rita swallowed. She had a sinking sense in her stomach, an intuition that the woman wasn’t doing this at random. She knew Rita could jaunt. Jaunting at ground level would have been safe. Jaunting from the eighth floor was another matter …


  The guards hurried her along another corridor, with windows on one side looking out across an unfamiliar cityscape. Then she found herself inside a barely furnished room with a table and three wooden chairs. The table was bare but for a telephone out of an old movie, a box with pigtail wires and a rotary dial. One of the guards stood close behind her while the other closed the door. “Constable, please remove the cuffs.” A tugging on her arms as the guard unlocked her wrists. “Have a seat,” said the woman. Rita sat, apprehensive. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.” Her interrogator unzipped the folio and removed a sheath of odd-sized documents. “At ease, Jeremiah. Bill, I’m sure our guest would appreciate a cup of coffee.” She raised an unplucked eyebrow. Rita nodded. “Do you take it with milk or sugar?”

  “Milk,” Rita said reluctantly, then berated herself: I’m already giving information to the enemy …

  “I’m Inspector Alice Morgan,” said the woman. “And in case you hadn’t guessed, this is the district headquarters of the Commonwealth Transport Police.” She didn’t smile. “I have a few questions for you. Starting with, what is your name, and what exactly were you doing in the Irongate South satellite switchyard at four o’clock in the morning last Friday?”

  She reached into her folio and removed a small black sphere, then placed it on the table. Rita swallowed, her mouth abruptly dry. It was one of her webcams.