Empire Games Series, Book 1

by Charles Stross

  But he would not do so unaided. First there were notes to be written and sent. Anonymous letters to the neighbors of his sleeping agents, letters containing signs and code words to remind them of the faith they once held, before the great betrayal and the Wiedervereinigung of 1990. Words to awaken them and call them to the flag. Words of action, saying: stand by.

  They—or their parents, or grandparents—had been loyal members of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, the foreign intelligence service of the Stasi, once upon a time. They’d been sent to these alien American shores to await an unspecified future mission. They were the members of the Wolf Orchestra, the last and greatest Communist sleeper ring, injected into the United States between the 1960s and the 1980s by order of the chief spymaster of the GDR, Markus Wolf himself. Comrade Wolf was long dead of old age, and the nation he had served was itself liquidated almost a third of a century ago, its ideology bankrupt and its walls smashed. The Stasi’s foreign files had burned before the capitalists, flush from their triumph over the Democratic Republic, could retrieve them. The members of the orchestra were stranded on foreign soil as aimless illegals, unable to return home despite (or because of) the end of their mission. But if they and their descendants held the faith—faith in each other, never mind the failed dream of a workers’ state—they would surely come to his aid when he called.

  And so Kurt Douglas allowed himself to be goaded into action by Rita’s guardian Angel—unreasonably angered at the bumbling conscription of his granddaughter by the amateurs and clowns who passed for spies in today’s America—and raised his baton to summon the Wolf Orchestra back to life, to play the cold war blues one last time.

  AFTERWORD

  Extract from “Beyond the Labyrinth: The Department of Homeland Security’s Secret War on the Multiverse, 2004–2020,” by Bruce Schneier—the Definitive Unauthorized History of the DHS

  The Office of Special Programs (OSP) was not, strictly speaking, part of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) chain of command. For the first two years of its existence it was an independent agency; where it relied on DHS assets, it maintained an arm’s-reach relationship just as it did with the FBI, NSA, and the other agencies from which it drew its personnel. It was only in the wake of the panicked dash to regroup after the attacks on the White House that the OSP was actually integrated into its parent agency. While everyone knew what the DHS was, what it stood for, and what it did, the Office of Special Programs stayed resolutely in the shadows.

  From its initial formation as the Family Trade Organization (FTO) during the first world-walker panic in mid-2002, the agency operated on a small scale. Operationally it was divided into three departments. Forward Intelligence controlled the deployment of agents and special forces in the Gruinmarkt; Interdiction provided the Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI with intelligence leads pointing to Clan smuggling operations on US soil; and Technology drew on the resources of the national laboratories to develop and manufacture world-walking machines (under the rubric ARMBAND). Prior to the nuclear attacks of 7/16, the FTO was one of the smallest organizations in the intel community. With fewer than four hundred staff it was even smaller than the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR).

  The events of 7/16, the retalliatory bombing of the small nation of Gruinmarkt in the Clan’s home time line and the subsequent congressional hearings, changed everything. The FTO brief became the policy football of warring rival bureaucracies. And the Department of Energy, DHS, and Immigration all made bids to become the parent stakeholder in the embryonic agency—in the case of DOE, because of the access to oil in other time lines that it promised. DHS “won,” much as a caterpillar that wins the race to eat the spores of a particularly grotesque parasitic fungus might be said to win. It engulfed the FTO and in the process renamed it the Office of Special Programs.

  But, in short order, the business of transportation security—the DHS’s prior focus, via the Transportation Safety Administration—took a backseat to the business of building and managing world-walking machinery. The new machines provided access to all the oil under all the uninhabited parallel-universe versions of Pennsylvania and California, and a similarly vast number of biospheres into which carbon waste emissions could be exported. Transportation security is not merely about terrorists and train crashes; energy security is a huge part of the picture.

  Protecting airliners, trains, and Greyhound coaches is only a hundred-billion-dollar-a- year industry. Oil is everything, and the para-time frontier is potentially infinite. The iron law of bureaucracy dictates that most of the people in any large organization will, after a time, be more preoccupied with preserving their own jobs than with fulfilling the mission statement of the agency. And the best way to ensure continuing employment is to build out the organizational empire. Who could possibly argue with that?

  After a decade and a half of integrating the OSP’s core mission into the DHS policy apparat, there were precious few people left over from the wild ride of the early years. Fewer still understood the fraught legacy of potential disaster left behind—the legacy created by the government’s initial reaction to the world-walkers’ attack on D.C. These remaining individuals were the few, the proud, and the cowboys: in this respect they were much like “Wild” Bill Donovan’s OSS operatives, who after 1945 went on to form the backbone of the Central Intelligence Agency but who were rapidly swamped by a rising tide of bureaucrats.

  Building on this foundation, the FTO sucked in staff from the FBI, NSA, DIA, NCS, Air Force Intelligence, and other more obscure provinces of the sprawling national security empire. The embryonic OSP was largely sidelined and left to its own devices. It should be no surprise that this branch of the organization is now known (dismissively) within the DHS as “our para-time CIA”—the subagency responsible for identifying and addressing threats to the United States originating from other time lines.

  OSP is small in comparison to the DHS as a whole (its budget in FY 2019 barely topped four billion dollars, making it responsible for less than 2 percent of the total Homeland Security budget), but its responsibilities are vast. In the decade and a half following the development of the ARMBAND technology—devices that used stem cells originally harvested from the brains of captured world-walkers to enable aircraft and vehicles to move between parallel universes—OSP drones mapped out paths to hundreds of new time lines.

  Three quarters of the newly discovered were uninhabited, and of the remainder, all but two held only scattered tribes of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. However, the two exceptions were cause for serious soul-searching within (and without) the OSP.

  The first inhabited nonpaleo time line to be identified was, of course, time line one, location of the Kingdom of the Gruinmarkt: the version of North America where the Clan originated. (Following the US retaliation on that time line, the East Coast is still unsafe to visit without protective gear and radiation detectors.) The other time line is Nova America four, an ice age version of our world that is dotted with the ruins of a long-extinct high-technology civilization. (This will be discussed at length in chapter 26, “A Bridge to Nowhere.”)

  Finally, there are the unknown unknowns, as President Rumsfeld so memorably characterized them. We know today that the world-walkers’ ability isn’t natural, or even evolved. It relies on self-replicating intracellular quantum-dot enabled nanotechnology, controlled by engineered genes and activated by what one researcher described as an “epigenetic hack.”

  Somewhere out there in the infinity of branching universes we call para-time, there is (or was) an advanced technological civilization—and almost certainly more than one of them. At least one of these civilizations understood the structure of the multiverse better than the best physicists in America today and built subtle machines to manipulate reality and bend it to their will. The world-walkers of the Gruinmarkt come from a primitive, preindustrial world. Exhaustive sequencing of the genome and epigenome of the few surviving prisoners has long since reve
aled interesting facts about their world-walking ability, which had been subtly damaged by a point mutation a couple of hundred years ago. Interrogated, they revealed a family history pointing back to a founder who had appeared in the 1760s. From where? Nobody knows. The obvious inference was that he was a fugitive, a runaway, a deserter. He kept a low profile, bedding in deep in the Gruinmarkt, willing to live a life of relative poverty in a quasi-medieval backwater in order to avoid the attention of … what?

  Nobody knows; and that fact, taken at face value, is deeply disturbing.

  PRINCIPAL CAST LIST

  UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  RITA DOUGLAS, struggling thespian

  FRANZ DOUGLAS, Rita’s father

  EMILY DOUGLAS, Rita’s mother

  RIVER DOUGLAS, Rita’s sister

  KURT DOUGLAS, Franz’s father, retiree

  GRETA DOUGLAS, Kurt’s wife (deceased)

  SONIA GOMEZ, DHS agent

  ANGIE HAGEN, electrical contractor, childhood friend

  JACK MERCER, DHS agent

  PAULETTE MILAN, a spy

  PATRICK O’NEILL, Rita’s supervisor

  DR. EILEEN SCRANTON, deputy assistant to Secretary of State for Homeland Security, Smith’s boss

  COLONEL ERIC SMITH, DHS, head of the Unit

  DR. JULIE STRAKER, colleague of Rita’s

  NEW AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH (AND FRENCH EMPIRE)

  MARGARET BISHOP, Party Commissioner

  MIRIAM BURGESON (previously Miriam Beckstein), Minister for economic development and inter–time line industrial espionage, Commonwealth Government

  ERASMUS BURGESON (Miriam’s husband), Minister for Propaganda, Commonwealth Government

  SIR ADAM BURROUGHS, First Man (head of state)

  THE DAUPHIN, heir to the throne of the French Empire

  PRINCESS ELIZABETH HANOVER, heir to John Frederick

  JOHN FREDERICK HANOVER, the Pretender, King in Exile of the New British Empire

  MAJOR HULIUS HJORTH (Yul), Brilliana’s brother-in-law, world-walker spy

  ELENA HJORTH, Huw Hjorth’s wife

  HUW HJORTH, Explorer-General

  BRILLIANA HJORTH (Huw’s wife), DPR (espionage agency) director

  ADRIAN HOLMES, Party Secretary

  ALICE MORGAN, Commonwealth Transport Police officer

  OLGA THOROLD, Miriam’s director of counter-espionage

  GLOSSARY OF TERMS

  Accretion disk

  A “whirlpool-like” disk of extremely hot gas that gathers around a black hole. As matter is sucked into a black hole it heats up until the radiation pressure from the inside of the accretion disk balances out the attractive force of the hole. It thus limits the rate at which a black hole can absorb matter. As most black holes rotate, the accretion disk is dragged round at very high speed: temperatures range from several millions of degrees up.

  ARMBAND

  Device used by US military and DHS to transport aircraft between parallel universes. Mechanism is secret; believed to include neural tissue harvested from world-walker “donors.”

  BLACK RAIN

  Code name assigned to time line three (home of the New American Commonwealth) by the US government.

  Bogies

  The chassis or framework carrying wheels, upon which a railway carriage rests.

  Clan

  An umbrella organization consisting of five (previously six) families of world-walkers, formerly resident in the Gruinmarkt in time line one. Coordinated the world-walkers’ inter-temporal trade and smuggling activities, provided security and a framework for the arranged marriages required to keep the world-walking bloodlines alive. The Clan was effectively disbanded in 2003, and the survivors sought asylum in time line three (with the New American Commonwealth).

  Corvee for the Clan postal service

  An obligation on world-walkers from time line one (who were members of the Clan). They had to make themselves available to transport goods between time lines a certain number of times every month. The organization is now defunct.

  CVS

  A big, well-known American pharmacy chain.

  DHS

  US Department of Homeland Security: in time line two, the agency responsible for transportation security, counter-terrorism, and para-time security (interception of world-walkers). Also responsible for organizing security of government and corporate sites in other time lines, and countering threats from all other time lines.

  DPR

  Department of Para-historical Research: a para-time industrial espionage agency established within MITI in the New American Commonwealth.

  ELINT

  Electronic Intelligence: covert intelligence gathering by electronic means (as opposed to HUMINT).

  Engram

  Among world-walkers, a knotwork design that can trigger the world-walking ability to transport them to another parallel universe.

  Family Trade Organization

  Precursor to the Office of Special Projects. It was a cross-agency organization established within the US government in 2002 in response to the discovery of world-walkers and the Clan.

  FISA Court

  United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court: a US Federal court established to oversee requests for surveillance warrants and other espionage-related secret legislation.

  Gruinmarkt

  A small kingdom on the eastern seaboard of North America in time line one, founded by Viking colonists in the 12th–14th centuries. Home of the Clan. It had reached a late mediaeval level of political and economic development before it was destroyed in a nuclear holocaust instigated by the United States.

  Hochsprache

  A Germanic family language spoken in the Gruinmarkt; now effectively extinct, remembered only by former members of the Clan.

  HUMINT

  Human Intelligence: intelligence gathered by means of human agents and informers (see also SIGINT, ELINT).

  ICBM

  Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile.

  MITI

  Ministry of Intertemporal Technological Intelligence: a government agency within the New American Commonwealth. This body is tasked with accelerating technological development by disseminating new developments discovered in other time lines.

  New American Commonwealth

  Successor nation to the New British Empire, which ruled North and South America and Australasia in time line three from 1761 to 2003. The New American Commonwealth is a revolutionary republic created by the former Radical Party to pursue the goal of spreading democracy throughout time line three.

  Niejwein

  Capital of the Gruinmarkt. Destroyed in 2003.

  NRO

  National Reconnaissance Office: US government secret agency in time line two responsible for launching spy satellites and developing photographic/radar intelligence from satellites.

  NSA

  National Security Agency: the US government agency in time line two tasked with SIGINT and ELINT, the interception and decryption of enemy communications. Noted for monitoring all phone, Internet, and data communications worldwide.

  Outer family

  Among the Clan world-walkers, the world-walking trait is recessive: only the children of two active world-walkers inherit the ability. However, the children of a world-walker and a non-world-walker may be carriers. The offspring of two such carriers may have the world-walking ability. Such carriers were monitored by the Clan and known as “outer family” members (the Clan had a strong interest in maximizing the pool of possible world-walkers available to them).

  Para-time

  Umbrella term for parallel universes diverging from a point in time. The cause of divergence may be some quantum event which may have multiple outcomes with macroscopic (observable) effects.

  POTUS

  President of the United States.

  RFID

  Radio Frequency ID: “smart” inventory control tags found on many items of packaging or clothing. RFID tags can be interrogated remotely and used to iden
tify the item they are attached to, unlike bar codes (which need to be scanned at close range). Same underlying technology as contactless payment cards.

  SCEP

  Special Counter-Espionage Police: a government agency within the New American Commonwealth of time line three. The organization is tasked with tracking down subversives, spies, and agents of both the British Crown in Exile and the French Empire.

  SIGINT

  Signals intelligence: intelligence obtained by analysing metadata derived from enemy radio, telegraph, Internet, and other signals.

  TL:DR

  “Too Long; Didn’t Read” (sarcastic dismissal of a long explanation or glossary).

  USAF

  United States Air Force.

  World-walker

  A person equipped with the ability to controllably teleport between parallel universes. It’s an inherited ability, the hereditable mechanism presumed to have been invented by a high technology civilization elsewhere in para-time.

  TOR BOOKS BY CHARLES STROSS

  THE MERCHANT PRINCES SERIES

  The Bloodline Feud

  (Originally published as The Family Trade and The Hidden Family)

  The Traders’ War

  (Originally published as The Clan Corporate and The Merchants’ War)

  The Revolution Trade

  (Originally published as The Revolution Business and The Trade of Queens)

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Charles Stross was born in Leeds, England, in 1964. He has worked as a pharmacist, software engineer, and freelance journalist, but now writes full-time. To date, Stross has won three Hugo Awards and been a finalist fifteen times. He has also won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, Best Novella, and Best Fantasy Novel, and has been a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award (twice) and for the Nebula Award. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife, Feòrag, a couple of cats, several thousand books, and an ever-changing herd of obsolescent computers.