Dark State--A Novel of the Merchant Princes Multiverse

by Charles Stross

  She beat a hasty retreat from the dining room, with its forbidding ambiance of an old man’s club: Erasmus followed her as fast as he could. His hips and knees weren’t particularly bad for his years, but he was of an age he had never consciously expected to reach, and was finding it full of unpleasant surprises. The constant low-level pain from aching joints and tendons were by no means the worst of it. As they passed through the doorway into the main corridor, he asked, quietly, “Where is she?”

  “I left her in your office, sir. She appears to be distressed.”

  The staffer looked at him with wide eyes. She can’t be more than twenty, Erasmus realized. Dark suit, blond hair with a permanent wave so tight it might have been lacquered into immobility. Divergent fashions aside, she was of a type he recognized instantly from the imported American political drama shows his wife watched at home when she needed to relax completely after work. (Which was all too seldom, these days.) “How distressed is she?” he asked gently.

  “She borrowed my handkerchief, sir…”

  Now worried, Erasmus sped up as best he could. Damn this warren, he thought: the marble floor took a toll on feet and knees. What can have happened? His wife was not, in general, given to melodramatic emotional meltdowns—especially not in public, wearing her Commissioner’s face. Hardheaded was an apt way of describing her. She hadn’t even cried at her mother’s funeral.

  He found Miriam in his inner office, wearing a face more suited to news of a friend’s passing. “Leave us,” he said gently, and shut the door before the staffer could enter. He crossed the carpet to meet her. She leaned into his embrace hard, almost driving the breath from his ribs as she hugged him. She was shaking: “What is it?” he asked.

  “The bastards. The bastards.”

  “Hush.” Her shoulders were rigid with tension. They didn’t relax as he stroked her back. “Take your time. You’ve got time, I take it?”

  “I’m due in front of the budget select committee in half an hour to discuss next year’s requirements, and then I’ve got a briefing on the teacher in-placement program—” She stopped. “I ought to cancel everything. I can’t focus.” She slowly relaxed her grip on Erasmus, but kept her chin on the crook of his neck and shoulder. She sniffed, betraying a passing congestion.

  “What bastards? What did they do?”

  “The US government. I’m convinced”—her bosom pushed against him as she inhaled deeply—“it’s deliberate. They knew, or guessed, that I’d survived. That’s why they sent her.”

  “Her? This is the DHS illegal everyone was talking about yesterday?”

  “Yes.” She let go of him, reluctantly. “Ras, if you learned that Annie—you said she died in childbed, in one of the camps—what if you learned that your child survived? And had been raised by Crown loyalists? What would you do?”

  He felt sick to his stomach. “That can’t be…” He fell silent in the face of her expression.

  “You know I had a daughter twenty-six years ago,” Miriam said quietly. “Not a world-walker. My mother pushed me into giving her up for adoption. Or maybe I half-wanted to do that anyway: or my first husband, back when we were together … it’s hard to remember. My little accident. She was right here, where you’re standing now, just half an hour ago.”

  “They— How did they find her?” Erasmus stared at her. His wife looked ashen.

  “They’ve got the Clan breeding program records. Hell, we’ve got the records Iris copied from Dr. ven Hjalmar’s computer. My people had her on a hands-off watch list for years, keeping an eye on her via social media from a safe remove. A resident agent in Italy, something like that. Anyway, nobody really noticed until the day before yesterday—when the transit cops picked her up, and Olga scrambled to catch up—but her Facebook updates turned oddly anodyne nearly a year ago. It looked like she was posting entries but she wasn’t friending or unfriending anyone or joining new apps, there was just a thin layer of Astroturf covering multiple month-long gaps in her time line. She’s my girl, Ras, I’m sure of it. We don’t have a DNA match yet—the best our people can come up with will take another couple of days to come back from the lab—but she’s got her father’s looks and she was born on the right day in the right hospital. They made her into a world-walker, Erasmus, they worked out how to switch on the gene or whatever it is in carriers, and she, I think she hates me…”

  She reached blindly behind herself until she found one of the visitor chairs and sat down heavily. Miriam did not weep easily: nor did she sob loudly. But the tear tracks on her cheeks told Erasmus everything.

  “You think they knew you were here, and they deliberately sent her?” he asked, pulling up a chair and sitting next to her. He fumbled for his handkerchief and passed it to her; she took it gratefully and mopped at her face.

  “Either that, or they guessed there was a high probability I’d be here. They knew about me back then, after all. They had a profile of the Clan leadership, of their presumed enemies. I can’t see what else it could be…”

  “Miriam. How old are the other carriers your people were tracking? I thought you said they were all teenagers? Your daughter, how old is she, twenty-six? It might simply be that she was the oldest and best-trained.”

  “Maybe.” She sniffed, and looked at him bleakly. “But there are other implications. She’s a world-walker. We have witness reports.”

  “Could they have shrunk the gadget, whatever it is they use…?”

  She shook her head. “If they did, the arresting officers couldn’t find it on her person. Also, they applied the world-walker containment checklist and report that her reactions were exactly what you’d expect. Finally, she admitted it under questioning. The Department for Homeland Security absorbed the old Family Trade Organization, and that’s who she’s working for. They’re tasked with protecting the United States from threats from parallel universes—sound familiar? She even mentioned an old-timer who sounds like that Air Force colonel Mike Fleming worked for. It’s the same people, love, playing the same fucking head games with us. Only this time it’s personal.”

  PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  Less than an hour after her inconclusive conversation with Miss Thorold, Rita was in a secure office with Colonel Smith. Smith’s boss, Dr. Scranton, had been notified and was on her way. The rubberneckers from head office had been peeled away and sent to a waiting area to cool their heels. And the guards who had nearly machined-gunned her when she jaunted into the middle of the secured transit area had been dismissed. “They’re idiots,” Colonel Smith fumed. “‘Secure the area in case the opposition send us a whoopee cushion,’” he mimicked, fingers waggling in air quotes. “At least now I can tell them to get lost next time they try to stick their noses under the tent flap.” He looked as if he hadn’t slept for the entire duration of her trip. “How did it go wrong, Rita? Sitrep, please.”

  “It was a mess,” she said faintly. “’Scuse me.” She sat down in the visitor chair. Smith looked more concerned than angry. He nodded silently as he waited for her to open up. “They caught me.” There, I said it. “There’s some sort of power struggle going on. The railroad police got me first, and asked lots of questions. They knew exactly what I was: they kept me in cuffs and blindfolded until they got me on the top floor of a high-rise.”

  Smith swore quietly. “And?”

  “They grabbed me almost as soon as I arrived and questioned me pretty much continuously until this morning. No sleep deprivation or violence,” she added hastily. “Also—they knew about world-walking, but they didn’t seem to know anything about the United States. I mean, at one point I got into this crazy loop trying to explain where Seattle is … Anyway, then a woman in a wheelchair turned up, acted like”—her eyes narrowed—“Dr. Scranton. Seriously, she had a bodyguard and issued orders and the police tripped over their own feet getting out of her way. She sprang me from police custody, said she was one jump ahead of a rival group from the secret political police. So then she hauled me of
f to New York in a helicopter—”

  “New York?”

  “That’s where their capital is. There’s, uh, there’s no D.C. in their time line. Anyway, she took me to see”—Rita swallowed—“my birth mother. Who is something—”

  A snapping sound made her look up. The Colonel shook his head. “Continue,” he said, carefully placing the broken halves of his fountain pen beside the legal pad he’d been jotting notes on.

  “—She’s something in their government, extremely high up. She, uh, she gave me a sealed letter for you—”

  “Fuck.” Smith looked pained. “Excuse my French. Go on.”

  “—Said she wants, her faction wants, to open diplomatic negotiations. To stop us nuking them, or them nuking us. Colonel, they’re in the middle of a cold war! She said, said they’ve got nine thousand H-bombs pointed at, at France? The French Empire? They want to talk. And she gave me a set of times and coordinates that are safe at their end—that is, her people will be waiting if I or, uh, some other world-walker, goes through to deliver a message.”

  “I see.” Smith looked at her, frown lines forming a furrow across his forehead. “What else did you observe? Impressions? Technologies?”

  Rita swallowed. The past day was all fading into a jumbled mass of impressions, swirling around the maelstrom of darkness that was her conversation—mere minutes—with the woman in the office. “They’ve got helicopters, sir. Big military-looking things, like a Black Hawk. Cars, trucks, buildings. They don’t go in for skyscrapers like we do, but there’s plenty of concrete and elevators and men in uniforms with machine guns. She said they’ve got nuclear power—”

  “We already knew they’ve got nukes,” the Colonel said flatly. “Did the woman who said she was your birth mother have a job? Where was she?”

  “They took me to see her in a big, uh, a big neoclassical building. Instead of downtown Manhattan they’ve got a bunch of palaces, former royal palaces. She was introduced as the, uh, Party Commissioner in charge of the Ministry of Intertime Technological Intelligence. Like it’s a big deal…”

  Rita trailed off, dumbstruck. She’d never thought of the Colonel as a man prone to emotional outbursts or demonstrative behavior. To see him lower his head and rest his face in his hands was profoundly disorienting.

  After a moment he looked up. The bruised skin under his eyes lent them the appearance of slowly rotting fruit. “This letter, Rita. Give it to me. And the other papers.”

  “Uh, I can’t, the security detail took—”

  “Jesus wept.” Smith picked up his desk handset and barked angrily: “Gomez, Colonel Smith here. Agent Douglas returned half an hour ago and there appears to have been a mix-up. You will personally locate all the clothing and items that were removed by the reception crew, I repeat all of them, everything, and bring them directly to my office. In particular, there’s a, a—”

  “—A leather document case—”

  “—You are looking for a leather document case. If anyone opened it, have them arrested and bring them here. If it’s open and the contents have been removed, find them and bring it. If it’s disappeared, notify me at once then put the site on lockdown and arrest everyone who might have handled it. If it’s still sealed, keep it that way when you bring it.”

  He listened for a few seconds, then put the phone down and stared tiredly at Rita. “I’m going to start recording now, Rita. I want you to talk me through everything that happened, and then we’re going to go through it again when Dr. Scranton gets here. In minute detail. Take your time, but I want you to get everything out. Do you understand?”

  “I—I understand. I fucked up,” she said hollowly.

  “That remains to be seen. We generally apportion blame to the officer who issued the orders, not the hands that carried them out, and in this case Dr. Scranton’s orders came from the Oval Office by way of the National Security Council.” He picked up the wreckage of his pen, which appeared to be quite an expensive one, and rolled the broken barrel between his palms. “You seem to think we expect perfection. That’s not true. We just expect you to do the best you can. We’re not omniscient, we’re not super-intelligent. Everyone in this business is muddling along in the dark, concocting plans and executing them then revising when the outcomes don’t match what they expected.

  “And in any case, there are very few rules for conducting the kind of mission we’ve been sending you on—very few indeed. Moscow Rules, maybe. So.” He put down the pen and moved his fatphone into the middle of the desk and tapped at its screen. “Testing … good. Colonel Smith, first debriefing of Rita Douglas after return from Phase Three. Rita, in your own words. What happened to you when you arrived in BLACK RAIN?”

  CAMBRIDGE, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  Boston, at four o’clock in the morning:

  A SWAT team was moving in on an enemy of the state.

  They’d called in support from the Boston PD and the state troopers, cutting off access to the apartment building where the target lived on her own in a second-floor condo. Drivers trying to take that particular street would find their vehicles under police override, diverted into a nearby parking lot for inspection. Manual cars and trucks—not that there were many at this time of night—would be waved down by the state troopers. Papers would be demanded, DNA samples taken, trunks searched.

  Overhead, a pair of silent drones kept infrared cameras trained on the block. Celldar—secondary radar that stitched together an image using the reflections of the pervasive cell phone and wi-fi carrier signals—filled in the blind spots. More recondite backup enforced the blockade. The neighborhood cell stations and wi-fi hot spots were all under government override, calls and Internet connections diverted, the locations of every phone and television and computer pinned down to within inches. Smart gas and electric meters monitored for signs of anomalous power spikes. Some of the more modern wireless routers, equipped with phased-array antennae capable of beam-shaping their wall-penetrating emissions, scanned buildings and mapped the location of human bodies. Webcams in tablets and laptops in every apartment came to life, activated without a betraying indicator LED: game consoles in dens and living rooms leapt to attention, repurposed as vigilant motion-sensing security guards. A translucent 3-D model of the building assembled itself in the team’s war room, every object accurately mapped to within millimeters, right down to the nails and wiring embedded in the walls.

  The enemy of the state was asleep in her apartment bedroom. Spyware injected into her phone that night, masquerading as a software update, had boosted the sensitivity of the device’s twin mikes. The phone had heard the traitor awaken an hour earlier and shuffle to the toilet for a late night piss. It had listened as she returned to the bedroom, yawned, and burrowed back under her comforter. Breath came uneven at first, then slowed, falling into a tempo indicative of sleep. Analysis software now indicated that she was probably in stage II sleep, moving toward REM sleep within the next five minutes: dreaming deeply, her muscles paralyzed. In a control room on the far side of the city, the officers in the war room put their heads together and came to a consensus. It was time to move.

  Five minutes to contact:

  The front door to the apartment building obligingly unlocked itself for the SWAT team. Simultaneously, e-locks and fingerprint readers throughout the complex turned quisling. The front doors of all but one of the apartments in the complex sealed themselves shut, securing the residents inside, save only the targeted front door. That one silently unlocked.

  Four minutes to contact:

  The target’s phone, sitting in a cradle on the bedside table, had a front-facing camera. The target was lying on her side, facing the device. While the light level was sub-optimal, variations in specular reflection from her closed eyelids suggested rapid eye movements. Meanwhile, breath analysis confirmed ongoing deep sleep. The fire team now assembled on the second-floor landing outside the apartment. Their HUDs updated, showing them an exact map of the interior as they took up their posi
tions.

  One minute to contact:

  The target was still asleep as a quadrotor drone spiraled down to hover in position thirty feet outside the bedroom window. Curtains hid the occupant from direct view, but the drone’s active teraherz radar could penetrate concrete and drywall and glass, confirming the accuracy of the map created by the rooted wi-fi routers. The UAV moved closer, motors whining as it lined its payload up on the window.

  Fifteen seconds to contact:

  Answering the press of a distant button the suppressed shotgun in the drone’s chin turret coughed, propelling a breaching round through the upper half of the window, shattering glass and ripping the curtain away from the opening. The target twitched, began to spasm: then the shotgun fired again, this time aiming at the sleeper. The slug it fired was a fearsomely complex machine, half air bag and half Taser. Exploding to boxing-glove dimensions just before impact, it punched the target down onto the mattress and drove wired barbs through her skin, then unloaded its capacitors through them.

  Contact:

  The bedroom door burst open and the overhead lights came on. Armed men filled the room, guns pointing, shouting orders. The target moaned in pain, but lay supine as the DHS antiterrorist team zip-tied her wrists, ripped bedding aside to tie her at knees and ankles, then gagged and bagged her in a cocoon-like transporter threaded with biomonitors and a shock belt to enforce compliance. The rendition protocol was designed to minimize risk for the arresting officers, to take by surprise even a hardened assassin, lying sleepless with gun in hand. The target this time was a fifty-two-year-old single white female: unarmed, untrained, and unprepared.

  Contact plus two minutes:

  The SWAT team carried the pick-up downstairs and out to the waiting prisoner transport. Behind them, the apartment door locked itself, awaiting the arrival of the CSI team when regular office hours rolled around. As the arrest wagon rolled away behind its escort of cruisers with flashing lights, the security perimeter shut down. Cell and Internet services reverted to normal, traffic diversions cleared themselves, state troopers took calls and moved on to the next appointment of the night.