And by dawn, the only remaining sign that Paulette Milan had disappeared into night and mist would be the gaping hole in her bedroom window.
PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020
Dinner was Philly cheesesteak with fries for Kurt and a big crab salad bowl for Angie. Kurt allowed himself a large glass of wine with his food, and was in an expansive frame of mind when they left the restaurant and climbed back into Angie’s crew-cab.
Angie drove cautiously until they hit the interstate. Then she put the truck on autopilot and turned to face him across the center divider, which she had rigged as a mobile office. First she flipped a concealed switch under the dash. Then she opened one of the office cubbies and removed a padded chiller bag. She shook the bag out, then slid her phone inside and gestured for Kurt to follow suit. Once the phones were zipped away behind layers of muffling insulation, her shoulders slumped slightly. “The entertainment system’s powered down hard: I’m pretty sure we can’t be overheard. Rita hasn’t been back for two days,” Angie explained. Her voice quavered with worry. “I called her boss—she’d given me a number—but I got the brush-off. Kurt, what do you know about this thing she’s been dragged into?”
Kurt finger-flicked a brief acknowledgment. “Firstly, you must be clear on this: my son and daughter-in-law adopted Rita. We learned—much later—that her birth mother, and her mother (who arranged the fostering) were fugitives from the world-walkers. Did Rita tell you any of this?”
“That they tried to kidnap her? Or that the DHS said they did?” Angie’s scowl made her suspicions clear. “Yes, she told me about it. I know she’s not a, not one of the terrorists. But she didn’t tell me what they wanted her to do. Only that they’d worked out how to activate her ability to travel to other parallel Earths.”
Outside the windshield, in the darkness, the traffic flowed hypnotically. The truck indicated, then pulled out into the left lane to overtake a tanker.
“They want her for a spy,” Kurt said gently. “Quite ironic, is it not?”
Angie looked at him sharply. “Yes! Speaking of which … who set the Orchestra up, originally?”
“That’s ancient history.” Kurt stared at the lane dividers as they strobed past, gradually curving, the truck following the road by itself. “How much do you know about it?”
Angie hesitated. “My parents are part of it. So was Grandpa. I don’t remember when I first knew: I think after I came back from the second summer camp I guessed something, but there were games when I was a kid, stuff I barely remember. Papa teaching me a special kind of hide-and-seek in the mall when I was twelve. Socials with friends from the old country, and party games none of the other kids at school knew. A play-set polygraph when I was fifteen, and tricks to defeat it. The special Girl Scouts camps where everyone seemed to have parents who worked for the government and the merit badges were all about cryptography and tradecraft. I didn’t realize it was the real thing until I enlisted, during my clearance. They never told me explicitly. But I knew we were different and had to hide it.”
She kept using the correct personal pronoun, Kurt noted. He remembered a movie, decades ago: that word you keep using, it does not mean what you think it means. “There are two ways of looking at the Orchestra,” he said slowly. “Let me give you the children’s story first. Once upon a time there was a magic kingdom, which had been conquered by an ogre. And the ogre was unpleasant and bad-tempered and suspicious, and from time to time he ate people. The ogre thought people outside his kingdom were plotting against him, so he took some of his people and sent them abroad as spies. And, you know, there was a little truth in this: the ogre’s kingdom wasn’t popular, after all it was ruled by an ogre. But then a handsome prince—or maybe she was a princess—slew the ogre and freed the people. The spies were torn: if they went home, the new king, or queen, would not look on them favorably, for supporting the ogre’s regime. The people of the lands they now dwelt in would be angry if they admitted what they were! So there was nowhere for them to go but underground, hoping to live out their lives in anonymity.”
“Yeah, I got that early. Caused a few raised eyebrows when I came out with it in first grade, you know? But it sounded Grimm enough that the school counselor dropped it after a head-to-head with Mom.” Angie took a deep breath. “So I guess you’re not big on the workers’ paradise and the dictatorship of the proletariat?”
“I grew up there.” Kurt reached for his water bottle. “The ogre wasn’t all bad, but he was still an ogre: nobody sane would want to re-create his kingdom just for the healthcare coverage and the guaranteed employment.” A big road sign on a gantry hung overhead, closing fast. Kurt stared at it morosely. “On the other hand, there’s plenty wrong with this country, too. Sometimes it seems as if I haven’t moved very far at all.”
“But you said there’s another story—”
“Yes. The other way of looking at things—forget the fable we teach our preschoolers, let me give you the grown-up version—is that Colonel-General Markus Wolf established the last great Communist Bloc spy ring on Western soil during the sunset years of the GDR, in the 1970s through late 1980s. The Orchestra’s job wasn’t to spy, but to raise a generation of children in situ on American soil, natural-born Americans with perfect cover identities and enculturation, but loyal to the cause. The plan was that some of them would get jobs in government, as spies or agents of influence. But then the wall came down, and the controllers burned their files—starting with the most sensitive, those of the overseas illegals like your grandpa and me. We were cut loose, with nobody for aid but one another. We have no mission but survival, Angie. The nation we served is gone: it disintegrated nearly a third of a century ago. The irony is that my granddaughter, without even trying, has achieved an espionage coup—she has inadvertently penetrated a top-secret American HUMINT operation! The comrade general must be laughing in his grave. If the GDR was still around it would be the intelligence coup of the century.”
“But what does it mean?” Angie asked.
“What does what mean?” He raised an eyebrow: “It means fuck-all, unless you want to invent a meaning for it! It certainly means I am guilty of conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the US Attorney General, contrary to the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938. The country for which I trained as a spy no longer exists, but that won’t help my defense. It means your grandfather and parents are guilty also. But the spying is not so serious: at worst a couple of years in federal prison. More serious is that to talk about helping Rita—you must be very clear on this—makes you a party to a conspiracy to interfere with a federal agent. These people do not mess around, Angie, and I fear that to them Rita is disposable. But I want you to think very hard before you commit to helping her. There could easily be terrorism charges. Everything is terrorism these days: downloading, uploading, jaywalking with intent to cause fear. Terrorism has become a meaningless word, our version of anti-Soviet hooliganism, but for all that, accusations of terrorism are not the worst risk we run. What they’re using her for, this game of empires … if we’re caught meddling they might even try and make a treason charge stick. We could be executed.”
Angie swallowed. “I got that,” she said, and took the water bottle from his fingers.
“It boils down to this: are you to your friends and family loyal first, or to your nation? Or are you loyal to the people who say they are the government of your nation—do this! do that!—are you loyal to those who claim to rule? Because you were born here, and even if you are the child of illegals, this is your nation, and in any case the ogre is dead.”
She looked at him sidelong. “You know she means the world to me?”
Kurt was silent for a while. “I’m not blind, or bigoted.”
“I’d marry her if I could. When they repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.”
“Well, good for you,” he said, so drily that she stared at him for a few seconds, unsure whether to parse his words as support. “I me
an it: you made your choice. Did you know, you could marry her tomorrow if you were in Berlin? Your father can claim German citizenship by descent, and so can you. You were never in the HVA’s files: there’s no dirt to stick to you, or Rita. You and she could run away from the kingdom of the Ogre’s Son—this America—” He shrugged. “It’s up to you.”
“I’m certain they won’t let her go.” Her words were heavy with conviction. “I think they attach too much weight to her birth mother. She’s a world-walker to them, a tool not a citizen.”
“Do you know, back in the GDR ‘citizen’ was an insult? It meant something like ‘subject.’ Here, I think they’d say ‘civilian.’”
“Stop trying to distract me.” She crossed her arms. “What are we going to do?”
“A certain Herr Schurz, a Prussian politician, once said: ‘My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.’ Your choices—if Rita comes back, which I may remind you is not settled—are to look to your own well-being, or stay and fight to set things to rights here. Assuming you consider yourself to be a loyal American.” He saw the tension in her shoulders, the wrinkling of her brow: “But you won’t have to try and make that choice on your own. If you love her, talk to her. Then tell me what you want to do. Whether to fight or flee. And then I will see what the Orchestra can do to assist my granddaughter and the woman who wants to marry her.”
Best Laid Plans
FORT BASTION, TIME LINE TWELVE, AUGUST 2020
The Explorer-General was entertaining visitors.
A couple of days after his brother departed, a blue-ribbon delegation of VIPs drawn from the War Committee of the Chamber of Peoples’ Magistrates—the elected chamber of the Commonwealth’s legislature—had buzzed into Maracaibo. They had a long and tiresome list of questions, and seemed to believe they’d get better answers if they asked them in person by spending a huge amount of money on a fact-finding mission. Huw was not officially at the beck and call of the Chamber—the Department of Para-time Research answered to the Commissioner in charge of the Ministry of Intertemporal Technological Intelligence, who in turn as part of the Central Committee answered to the First Man. However, it was sensible to deal politely with the elected representatives of the people. The War Committee had reason to be concerned with the spiraling costs of the JUGGERNAUT program, and the drain of workers and resources it was sucking from both the ICBM program and the embryonic civilian space agency. And as a successful agency, MITI had enough enemies in the Deep State and the legislature to make it a target for empire-builders.
So all Huw could do was swear to himself in private and take a couple of days out from his normal job to glad-hand the lawmakers, conduct the delegation on a dog-and-pony tour of the facilities used for exploring other parallel universes conventionally, and then (having confirmed they had a sufficiently high security clearance) show them the JUGGERNAUT assembly area itself.
“This is one of the two staging platforms we use for transferring heavy freight across to Fort Bastion in time line twelve, which is our main dispatch and retrieval center for missions,” he told his audience of six very important elected representatives and their dozen or so personal assistants. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the hubbub, even though the pilot had shut down the motors of the passenger hovercraft, which had settled on its skirts in the middle of the huge hydraulic lift platform. “Normally we use this platform for heavy freight hovercraft, with up to a hundred twenty-foot containers at a time. But right now the prime mover is unloading an outsize cargo in time line twelve, so we’ve got the transit platform to ourselves.” Not for long: glancing to one side he saw the next freight train slowly rumbling and grinding into the siding, ready for the gigantic container cranes that lined the hangar-like building to unload. “We need this capacity because, as you’re going to see shortly, keeping Fort Bastion in business consumes huge quantities of supplies and fuel.”
One of the magistrates (a plain-faced middle-aged woman with a pudding bowl haircut, clearly made of stern stuff) raised her hand. “General Hjorth. Is it not possible to produce fuel locally? You have free access to the resources of time line twelve, after all.”
Huh: off the script already. Someone’s clearly been briefing against us. Huw nodded affably, inwardly irritated. “We considered it, and did the detailed costings,” he said. “The problem was that we’d have to build oil extraction sites, bring in tankers to move the crude around, then build a refinery before we could start manufacturing Jet-A or Blaugas. If we planned to run operations on our current model for another two decades, it would be cost-effective, but JUGGERNAUT should make aviation ops obsolete within a couple of years.”
He saw heads nodding. They’d seen the JUGGERNAUT line item go through, but it was a black program. And it was what they were really here for. Sticking their collective nose into a state secret that could not be discussed back in the capital, risking mischief when they got back home. Huw had already sent a sharply worded memo up the line, requesting a security review. For now, he’d just have to downplay things as much as possible. (Arresting the magistrates for spying would be indiscreet, and might draw unwelcome attention to the leak: it would be much better to obtain their willing complicity.) “We’ll get to JUGGERNAUT after siesta. First I want to show you our current operations in time line twelve. Pilot? If you could set me up, please.”
To his left, the pilot nodded and spoke into his headset, then started up the lift fans. Used only for world-walking transits within large buildings, the hovercraft had a paltry battery life—just enough to lift its cargo until it was electrostatically isolated from the ground, and hold it for a minute. The vehicle rose on its air cushion, compressors roaring, and began to drift forward. At a hand-signal from the pilot, Huw reached into a compartment in front of his observer’s seat and withdrew a laminated card bearing an oddly reticulated knotwork design. He steadied himself by grasping an unadorned metal grab-rail with his free hand, and focused on the card.
His ears popped, and a spike of pain knifed into his forehead. Behind him, the passengers’ gasps were almost audible over the roar of the hovercraft. Huw slid the card back into its binnacle. Beside him, the pilot nudged the craft toward one side of the flat concrete apron, clearing the transit area taped out on the platform. There was no roof in this time line, just open sky above. A huge hangar shaped like a bisected cylinder lying on its side loomed at the other side of the field. A minute later they were parked alongside it, and as the machine settled on its skirts the pilot deployed the stair-ramp. Huw massaged his forehead, then palmed a capsule from the bottle in his hip pocket. I’m getting too old for this, he told himself. The blood pressure spike that accompanied world-walking had once been a major cause of mortality for members of the Clan. Even with a well-funded research program and modern medicines the risk of a stroke rose with age and frequency. Good thing we’re due to stay here for lunch and after … The Explorer-General had opened more than his fair share of new time lines. He didn’t want to check out due to a cerebrovascular accident incurred while entertaining visiting legislators.
“Please follow me,” he told his audience. “As this is an active military installation I’d appreciate it if you could stay with the group, for your own safety.” Just like herding cats, he thought to himself as he walked toward the reviewing stand.
As he stepped onto the apron the Commonwealth Guard colonel in charge of the hangar crew stepped forward to meet the delegation. Colonel Manning was at the head of a detachment in parade uniforms: he’d brought the regimental brass band, Huw noted, trying not to wince. They were volunteers, not a formal ceremonial unit—a posting here could be prolonged and you needed to make your own entertainment.
“Earplugs, sir,” Manning whispered, offering Huw a small cardboard tube.
“Better not: they might have questions for me. But thank you anyway. How’s the schedule?”
“Everything’s running like clockwork, sir. Maybe a bit too fast�
�wind’s strengthening from the west.”
Huw nodded, then straightened his shoulders and stood to attention while the band ran briskly through the Commonwealth anthem then rested their instruments. A faint noise, not unlike feedback from a stringed instrument amp, continued to buzz after the band was muted.
Huw turned to the assembled delegates. “Welcome to Fort Bastion, time line twelve. This is the forward staging area for Expeditionary Task Force Two, from which we conduct preliminary airborne recon flights into newly identified time lines.” He glanced surreptitiously at his wrist watch. “One of which is due home just about … now…”
The buzzing grew louder. Huw looked up, above and beyond the delegates. Behind the bandsmen the radio operator was talking into his microphone. Off to one side, hot sunlight glared from the windows of the field control tower. “Within the next couple of minutes we should be able to see the exploration vehicle—”
The buzzing noise intensified until the airship finally came into view above the hillside overlooking the base. Seen nose-on it resembled an alien moon, silver-gray and faceted. It rose slowly, an illusion caused by its size. The engines, unblocked by terrain, bellowed hoarsely. “This is the AS-4 Fraternity, returning from a two week cruise across the South American continent of time line seventy-three. As you can see, at a whisker less than nine hundred feet long she’s the largest ship in service in our exploration fleet…”
Bigger than the LZ-129 Hindenberg—and much safer than the zeppelins of time line two, thanks to the Commonwealth having access to helium as a lifting gas and not using highly inflammable fabric dope—the Fraternity took nearly ten minutes to make its final approach to the giant airship hanger at Fort Bastion. In the meantime Huw gave his audience a brisk refresher course in the reasons for using airships as para-time reconnaissance platforms: the need to carry more than one world-walker, to stay airborne for long recovery periods between jaunts, to hover while deploying ground parties, and to cruise for long distances while mapping new territories. Not to mention other, more recondite problems.
Dark State--A Novel of the Merchant Princes Multiverse Page 4