Dark State

by Charles Stross

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  In memory of Anthony Wedgwood Benn MP, 3 April 1925–14 March 2014

  TIME LINES

  TIME LINE ONE:

  History diverged from our own around 200–250 BCE in Time Line One. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all absent and the collapse of the Roman Empire into dark ages was complete rather than just partial. Since then, civilization in Europe reemerged and quasi-medieval colony kingdoms sprang up on the eastern seaboard of North America. (The western seaboard was settled by Chinese traders.)

  The Gruinmarkt, one such kingdom, was home to the Clan—rich merchant-traders with the ability to cross between time lines. As world-walkers, they made a good living as the only people who could send a message coast-to-coast in a day in time line one. They could also guarantee a heroin shipment would arrive without fear of interception in time line two. But all good things come to an end, and the vicious civil war that broke out in 2003 (by time line two reckoning) led to the Clan’s discovery by the US government. Their escalating cycle of retaliation ended in a nuclear inferno.

  TIME LINE TWO:

  This is a world almost identical to your time line, as the reader of this book—right up to a key date in 2003. Here world-walkers from the Clan’s conservative faction detonated a stolen nuclear weapon in the White House. They assassinated the president and forced the government to reveal the existence of parallel universes and the technology for reaching them.

  Our story starts in time line two.

  TIME LINE THREE:

  This time line was discovered by Miriam Beckstein. In this alternate world, England was invaded by France in 1760 and the British Crown-in-Exile was established in the New England colonies. There was no American War of Independence and no French or Russian Revolutions. Therefore the Ancien Regime—despotism by absolute monarchy—shaped the world order until the Revolution of 2003. Here, the New British Empire’s Radical Party overthrew the government and declared a democratic Commonwealth. The country is now known as the New American Commonwealth.

  The French invasion of England stifled the Industrial Revolution in its crib, so industrialization began a century later than in time line two. But economics and science have their own imperatives. And even before Miriam led the survivors of the Clan into exile in the Commonwealth, the pace of technological innovation was beginning to pick up.

  TIME LINE FOUR:

  Currently uninhabited, this time line is in the grip of an ice age—with an ice sheet covering much of Europe, Canada, and the northern states of the US.

  But it hasn’t been uninhabited forever. The enigmatic Forerunner ruins pose both a threat and a promise …

  MAIN CHARACTER PROFILES

  ERIC SMITH

  Born in 1964 in time line two, Colonel Smith, USAF (retired) has been a government man all his life. He worked for the United States’ National Security Agency, then inside a top secret unit within Homeland Security. It was tasked with defending the States against threats from other time lines; these included world-walkers, those who could cross between these alternative worlds and his own time line. Many might consider this easy—after all, most known time lines are uninhabited, or populated by stone age tribes at best. However, the exceptions are the problem. The notorious Clan and their world-walkers came from time line one. And contact with this secretive organization resulted in a national trauma—dwarfing both 9/11 and the war on terror.

  Smith knows that there are other inhabited time lines out there. At least one civilization is far ahead of the United States’ technology levels, fighting—and losing—a para-time war against parties unknown. And then there’s the BLACK RAIN time line, where reconnaissance drones and human spies go missing.

  Defending the nation is easier said than done when you can’t even be sure what you’re defending it from. But you can make a good guess …

  KURT DOUGLAS

  Born in 1941 in time line two, Kurt Douglas grew up in the German Democratic Republic—East Germany—during the cold war. Drafted at eighteen, he ended up in the Border Guards. Then in late 1968 he escaped over the Berlin Wall to the West, and emigrated to the United States. Marrying Greta, another East German defector, he made a new life for himself. Kurt raised a family, and lived quietly with his son, daughter-in-law, and their adopted children—Rita and River.

  The East German foreign intelligence service didn’t send Kurt to the West to spy on the United States—they had longer-term objectives in mind. However, that was before the end of the cold war and the collapse of East Germany. Old skills don’t fade easily, and Kurt has given Rita the best training he could for living in a police state. And she knows, if she ever gets in over her head, that she can count on Grandpa Kurt—and his friends—for help.

  MIRIAM BURGESON

  Born in 1968 in time line two, Miriam grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. She worked as a tech sector journalist before discovering, in her early thirties, that her mother had been lying to her for most of her life; mother and daughter were fugitives from the Gruinmarkt—a small kingdom in time line one, which had reached medieval levels of technology. They were women of noble birth, whose designated role was to produce more world-walkers and to serve the Clan. Miriam world-walks “home” by accident and is expected to conform. But that had never been Miriam’s style. So in short order, she discovered a route to a new inhabited time line and built a business start-up—using it to import high-tech innovations into this new territory. This triggered a crisis within the Clan, reviving a dormant blood feud and causing civil war.

  Now seventeen years have passed since the Clan and the Gruinmarkt were both destroyed. Clan reactionaries made a disastrous miscalculation that led to a very brief war with the United States—ending when the US nuked the Gruinmarkt. Miriam saw the writing on the wall and led anti-Clan survivors into exile in the new world she’d discovered. But here she found a revolution in progress—and a new vocation.

  Miriam is now older and wiser, and a minister in government. She works for the New American Commonwealth, the ascendant democratic superpower of time line three. She’d taken part in the revolution that overthrew the absolute monarchy of the New British Empire, now defunct. And ever since, she’s been warning the new government, “the USA is coming.” For seventeen years, she’s been working feverishly to ensure that when the US drones arrive overhead, the Commonwealth will be ready to meet them on equal terms. But she wasn’t expecting them to be expecting her—and to have made plans accordingly.

  RITA DOUGLAS

  Born in 1995 in time line two, and adopted at birth by Franz and Emily Douglas, Rita was eight when Clan renegades from time line one nuked the White House. Growing up in President Rumsfeld’s America she has learned to keep
her head down and her nose clean. But there’s only so much you can do to avoid attention in a national security state when the government has you under constant surveillance in case the woman who gave you up for adoption (or her relatives) takes a renewed interest in you.

  Rita has a history and drama studies degree, a pile of student loans, and no great employment prospects. At twenty-five years of age she doesn’t really know where she’s going. But that’s okay. Because the government has big plans for Rita.

  ELIZABETH HANOVER

  Born in 2002, just before the revolution that overturned the New British Empire and sent the Crown into exile in St. Petersburg, Elizabeth Hanover is the only child of his Royal Majesty John Frederick the Fourth, Emperor-in-Exile of the New British Empire. Unmarried, she’s a pawn in her father’s dynastic plans, which will come to fruition on the death of Adam Burroughs, First Man of the Commonwealth. But her father’s plans revolve around a royal marriage into the Bourbon dynasty, to a prince twice her own age (who possesses a mistress and, according to rumor, the pox). Elizabeth isn’t stupid. She’s been watching the Commonwealth’s technological progress from afar, and laying plans of her own. Plans which will bring two nuclear-armed superpowers to the brink of war …

  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 brother

  KURT DOUGLAS, Franz’s father, retiree

  GRETA DOUGLAS, Kurt’s wife (deceased)

  SONIA GOMEZ, DHS agent

  ANGIE HAGEN, electrical contractor, childhood friend

  PAULETTE MILAN, a spy

  PATRICK O’NEILL, Rita’s supervisor

  DR. EILEEN SCRANTON, deputy assistant to Secretary for Homeland SeCURITY, Colonel 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 of 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, Hulius’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

  PART ONE

  PRISONER

  America is the place where you cannot kill your Government by killing the men who conduct it. The only way you can kill government in America is by making the men and women of America forget how to govern.

  —Woodrow Wilson, 1919

  Moscow Rules

  NEW LONDON, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020

  Rita Douglas’s head was spinning.

  It had been scarcely twenty-eight hours since her reconnaissance mission to the time line codenamed BLACK RAIN had gone spectacularly bad, culminating in her capture and interrogation by the National Transport Police in the city of Irongate, near Philadelphia in time line two. The detention of a world-walker from the United States had ignited a firestorm of political maneuvering in the Commonwealth, as different agencies vied to capture her. Then the enigmatic Miss Thorold of the DPR had shown up in Irongate with a warrant and a helicopter to spirit her away to a secret meeting in the capital with a very senior politician—a woman who claimed to be her birth mother—which ended badly.

  But now they were letting her go. It seemed almost too good to be true.

  In the outer office they gave Rita a leather shoulder bag to hold the diplomatic letters and a DNA sample to prove the identity of her high-ranking contact. Then Inspector Morgan and Miss Thorold—her wheelchair pushed by her bodyguard—escorted Rita back out to the helicopter-like aircraft waiting on the pad behind the ministerial palace. There were no handcuffs or blindfolds this time. None were needed, for she was going home. She ought to have been happy, or at least relieved. Instead of facing further interrogation, she was going home to report to Colonel Smith. Instead of being buried in a prison cell she’d be able to sleep in her own bed, or her girlfriend Angie’s. She should have been happy, but instead her stomach was a pit of curdled despair. I fucked that up brilliantly, didn’t I? The look on the evil queen’s face when she said I was younger than you are now was going to haunt her dreams.

  The guard helped Miss Thorold into the seat beside Rita. Rita accepted a headset as the aircraft screamed into mechanical life, small jets howling at the tips of each rotor blade. As they lurched into the air, she felt so mortified she half-wished the gyrodyne would crash. The moment passed. Then, a minute later, Miss Thorold poked her sharply in the fleshy part of her upper arm and spoke through her earphones. “Well done, kid. Very well done. I hope you’re proud of yourself.”

  “Proud of what?” Rita said defensively. She wrapped her arms around the shoulder bag. “You set me up! You set us both up. And it’s true. She put me up for adoption. She abandoned me.”

  “I see we have some issues to work through here.” Olga gave her a critical look. “She was twenty-three. Had it occurred to you that it might not have been a decision she made on her own? I’d tell you to ask her mother, but Iris died fourteen years ago.”

  “My grand—” Rita made a fist of her left hand and jammed it against her lips to hold back the scream of frustrated anger she could feel building inside her.

  “Iris was always good at manipulating Miriam,” Olga added after a while. “Miriam only really thrived once her mother was gone. This is a horrible thing to say, but Iris was a tyrant. Quite, quite ruthless, although she had her reasons—mainly her own mother. But as I understand things, Iris simply didn’t want to have a baby around in those days. Especially—in her eyes—a half-caste bastard whelped by a non-world-walker. Iris grew up in the Gruinmarkt before she ran away. It’s where I grew up, too. It leaves its mark on you: that’s how people there thought. Totally medieval. They were still having honor killings and multi-generational blood feuds when the USAF closed the book on them.”

  “You’re telling me I, I—” Rita choked to a halt.

  “Do your job and fuck off back to the United States,” Olga said tiredly. “They’ll debrief you, yell at you for getting yourself caught, then send you back here eventually. Because that’s easier than expanding their threat perimeter to marshal more world-walking assets. Which is all you are to them, frankly. Meanwhile, my advice to you, which you will probably ignore, is to think before you open your mouth again. I know Miriam. If you really don’t want to talk to her she’ll respect that, but if you want to hit the reset button and start over, I’m pretty sure she’ll listen. She likes to think the best of people. Just … try to get your facts straight before the next time you gut someone.”

  Rita nodded, not trusting herself to reply. Then she reached up to the overhead console and unplugged her headphones. She brooded for the remainder of the hour-long flight, her emotional isolation enforced by the muffled thunder of the rotors. I already have a mother, she thought confusedly, thinking of her adoptive parents, Emily and Franz: What does Mrs. Burgeson even mean to me? But that led to other questions, starting with What do I mean to her?—questions that she had no answers for, which left her feeling increasingly queasy.

  BOSTON, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  Kurt Douglas pa
id no heed to the early-morning rain shower as he shuffled slowly along a tree-lined path, searching for his wife’s headstone in the graveyard.

  Greta had died more than twelve years earlier, of emphysema brought on by her lifelong cigarette habit. The echoes of her choking laughter haunted the empty corners of Kurt’s life as he rattled around in the clean-as-a-whistle house his son Franz had bought him, next door to Franz’s own home in Phoenix. Greta would have helped him fill it—assuming that she hadn’t hated it so much she insisted they live elsewhere. Soulless, he could hear her ghost tutting in the recesses of his skull.

  Kurt shook his head. Droplets of water hazed the surface of the glasses he wore, misting the world around him with damp uncertainty. A normal man might have moved on by now. But Kurt couldn’t leave Greta’s memory behind as easily as he’d left her body in this Boston graveyard when he followed his son and daughter-in-law to Phoenix. The events of November 1989 had seen to that, shattering their shared life’s purpose. Everything since then had seemed like a bitter joke, until now.

  Greta was not only his wife but his life-long co-conspirator. They’d come to the United States to perform a mission of vital importance, only for it to be deprived of all meaning by the collapse of East Germany. Now she was here, sleeping beneath the damp green sward of an alien nation she had never really approved of. And he was here too, brokenly ticking along like a clockwork man held upright by the rusting armature of a promise he’d made forty years ago. A Lutheran pastor he’d known in his youth had a way with words: You might not believe in God, the man had told him waspishly, but that does not mean God does not believe in you. Kurt no longer believed in the great work that had brought him to this shore, but it was the cracked and time-worn faith on which he’d built his life. Renunciation would be the final straw: an admission in his twilight years that his entire life had been meaningless.