Dark State--A Novel of the Merchant Princes Multiverse

by Charles Stross

  “We have one more jump—wait, don’t move.” He tried to catch his breath.

  “Are we in another world?”

  “Yes.” His head hurt almost as badly as his ribs. “I need to pick you up so that we can complete the next jump,” he said as gently as he could. “I’m not going to hurt you. But we can’t afford to stay here. This is a wilderness world. Do you understand?”

  “I—” She nodded, face pale and eyes wide. “Yes.”

  This time she helped, wrapping her arms around his shoulders as he lifted her. Dark spots swam in his vision as ribs grated. He jaunted, and everything went black as he dropped her.

  A clatter of plastic told him she’d stumbled into the cleaning cart. “Don’t move,” he said quietly. “I’ll get the light.”

  His flashlight lit up the cluttered closet. Elizabeth’s eyes were wide, either appalled or excited—it was hard to tell which. Hulius breathed hard, trying to ignore the ache in his chest. “Where are we?”

  “In a janitor’s closet in the schloss—it’s a museum in this version of history.”

  “A museum?” She shook her head and half-smiled ruefully, as if amused by the absurdity of the proposition. “So you’re one of them? It’s true, then.” Her smile faded. “You, you shot those men. I think you killed them.”

  “I hope not.” Another deep breath. “They fired, too. They forgot you were there.”

  “But Lieutenant Gorki shot—” Elizabeth stared at him. “He shot you!”

  “I’m wearing armor.” Perhaps it was better not to tell her that it had barely done its job. The lieutenant’s revolver was a cavalry pistol, firing a big ball round. They were designed to blast a rider out of the saddle or kill his horse. Even if it hadn’t penetrated, it had definitely cracked one or more of his ribs. “Now, I want you to sit down and try to compose yourself for a minute. We need to walk through a public space to get to my automobile, and it will not do to look agitated. Do you understand?”

  “I understand that we’re in a museum in another world,” she said slowly. “Is this how they dress there? Is there still a finishing school—”

  “The schloss is a museum,” he said, trying to contain his pain-driven impatience. At this stage it was critically important not to frighten the target, to keep her in a pliable frame of mind, willingly cooperative rather than struggling to escape. “There will be some visitors, but it’s early. Pretend you, too, are visiting a museum. Follow my lead and talk to no one: there will be no more shooting.” He paused. “You will find many things in this world extremely confusing, but try not to react. Do not talk to anyone, just pretend you do not understand. If they see you they will think from your dress that you are poor and Turkish, maybe Romany. We will walk to the entrance, then out to an automobile parking lot. I have a vehicle waiting. I will drive you to the airfield.” Just talking was taking all his energy. And there was something he’d almost forgotten to do. “Just one minute.”

  He reached into the ripped messenger bag—firing the PDW through its end had sprayed lining fabric everywhere, and it stank of gun smoke and hot brass—and fumbled in one of the interior pockets until he felt a cheap candy-bar phone. His hands were trembling as he pulled it out and switched it on. He sat and waited for the phone to connect, trying to control his shakes and beat the after-fight terror back into whatever dark cupboard of the soul it had emerged from. That was far too close! After thirty seconds the phone beeped. There was only one number in its memory: he dialed it.

  “Hello?” said an unfamiliar woman’s voice.

  “Is that John?” he asked in English.

  “I’ll just get him.”

  A moment later, a man’s voice came on the line: “This is John. What news?”

  “I have the package. Experienced some damage during pick-up. Delivery scheduled for the usual place, usual time.” Hulius ended the call, then switched the phone off and dropped it into a bucket. There was a sluice in one corner of the janitor’s closet. He stood painfully, slopped bleach from a bottle into the bottom of the bucket, then topped it up from the tap until the phone was fully submerged.

  Elizabeth was watching him curiously. “What did you do that for?” she asked.

  “Communication security.” Shorted-out burner phones told no tales, and strong bleach was as good an anti-DNA agent as any. “Come on, it’s time to go.”

  Hulius stood up painfully, trying not to shake his head or breathe too deeply. He felt ill. It wasn’t just the physical after-effects of combat. Few men of his age had come through the Clan’s disastrous final civil war without experiencing violence, and he had shot at men before—possibly killed men—but this had been more than an unwanted complication. He was gripped by a sense of something having gone irrevocably wrong, even though he knew his actions had been justified, at least in terms of the mission. “The guards in your room. They shouldn’t have been there. What happened?”

  Words tumbled out: “Yesterday, when someone, when you, delivered the bundle of clothes and the note, you were seen. One of the teachers. Captain Bertrand was notified and he obtained Madame Houelebecq’s permission to station guards. They searched my room and ordered me to follow your script, they wanted to catch—”

  “I see, yes.” Hulius nodded. Dark spots danced in front of his eyes. If they’d caught him alive, a world-walker attempting to abduct Princess Elizabeth, the repercussions would have been seismic. They might still be. With a pile of bleeding bodies and a missing heir, nothing could silence accusations of assassination short of the sight of the Princess, smiling and shaking hands with the First Man in front of the TV cameras. We’re committed now. “Well, we’re safe from Captain Bertrand, but this is not your world. There are other hazards. I must get you to a place of safety as fast as possible.” He reached for the door handle, suppressing a whimper of pain. “Follow me.”

  AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION, UNDISCLOSED TIME LINE/AN AIRLINER, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  Freedom, Paulette reflected, was multivalent; an idea so flexible that if you applied yourself diligently you could invoke it to justify almost any atrocity. As she watched the prison clerks process her release documents, she didn’t feel very free at all. Or perhaps it was just the realization that she was swapping a cell in a supermax prison for a jail the size of a continent that stifled her sense of relief.

  The thing strapped to her right ankle itched.

  They’d shoved a change of clothing through the slot in her cell door that morning, underwear and a dress and jacket taken from her own bedroom wardrobe. They’d even provided shoes and some toiletries. But before they let her out of the cell they’d manacled her again, and then fastened a plastic cuff below her shin. It made an odd bulge under her leggings, as if her ankle was deformed. “Don’t tamper with it,” the technician who fastened it told her. “Don’t immerse it in water, don’t try to cut the band, don’t try to open it up. You don’t want it to activate.”

  “What if I need a shower?” she asked. “Is it a tag? Or something else?”

  But he didn’t reply. Instead the guards marched her through a series of claustrophobic, windowless corridors punctuated by doors like coffin lids that buzzed as they closed automatically behind her. The white noise of air conditioning was everywhere, deadening and enervating. Finally they came to an office with desks and a control station and a warden with paperwork. “Do you know who’s meeting you?” the warden asked, incuriously.

  “I was told I’m being released into the custody of another agency.”

  “Sit down.” He pointed at a chair.

  She sat. Things were looking up: they didn’t chain her to a ring in the floor, or hit her.

  After a while, another door opened. It was Colonel Smith, with a couple of people she didn’t recognize but whose posture toward him was deferential. “Ah, Ms. Milan.” He nodded at her, then held up an ID card for the warden to scan. “I’m her pick-up.”

  They unlocked her cuffs and removed the manacles. Then there were more tunnels,
a couple of checkpoints guarded by headless robots shaped like German shepherd dogs with gun muzzles for heads. Finally they came to a yard flanked by flagpoles flying the Stars and Stripes, and a tall motorized gate surmounted by razor wire and laser beams. “Welcome to freedom,” said the Colonel. Freedom apparently meant the backseat of a gray government car that smelled faintly of stale sweat. “It must be kind of disorienting. Would you like a coffee?”

  To her surprise, Paulette burst into tears. They were tears of anger directed at this tissue-thin simulation of compassion, but the Colonel seemed oblivious, or mistook them for something else. He even offered her a Kleenex.

  The car drove itself, but the two minders up front—a black guy called Pat and a Hispanic woman called Sonia—kept an eye on it. Pat, at least, was packing a concealed carry, if Paulette was any judge of such things. The jail was set in its own patch of land, surrounded by high fences and camera masts, then a bare killing field before they reached the tree line. At the end of a short driveway they entered a windowless garage and parked up briefly, while a screen on the wall opposite counted down to zero and her ears popped. Then the next door opened, onto a feeder road leading to a four lane highway surrounded by strip malls. “Where are we going?” she finally asked.

  “Starbucks first.” Smith raised his voice so that the two riding up front could hear: “Then the airport.” He continued in a lower tone, pitched for her ears: “It’s going to be a long drive, so we’re going to make a couple of rest stops. Don’t bother trying to get away. The cuff you’re wearing has got a Taser component and a sedative injector as well as a tracker.”

  “How nice.” Paulette looked out of the back window. They were somehow in the middle of suburbia: there was no sign of the trees or the jail beyond the windowless garage as they pulled away. The supermax prison was stashed in another, uninhabited time line. The DHS had entire continents to use for their GULAG, not so much an archipelago as a galaxy: even if she’d managed to escape, there would have been nowhere for her to go.

  “We got them from China by way of Saudi Arabia. The Saudis use them to control servants and women. We use them to control valuable assets who might go walkabout if given the opportunity. Keep your nose clean and cooperate, and we might take it off…”

  Paulette grimaced. “There’s no point running,” she said, then bit her tongue before she could add, you’ve turned the entire world into a prison. It was amazing what you could do in the name of liberty if you felt the need to defend it strongly enough.

  They left the highway, paused at the window of a drive-through Starbucks, and were on their way again before Paulette could get the smell of stale automobile aircon out of her lungs. Three hours, two hundred miles, and one toilet stop later they left the interstate, this time taking a feeder road that led toward—

  “An Air Force base?” Paulette asked against her better judgment.

  “No, we get to fly Air DHS.” They were waved through a checkpoint with speed and efficiency that suggested they were expected, then drove toward a hangar well away from the row of menacing gray drones parked alongside the runway. Inside, an unmarked C-37A was waiting for them. Polite but professionally incurious ground crew ushered them up the steps to a cabin kitted out in austere Federal grays and blues, rather than the walnut and leather luxury of a commercial Gulfstream. The door had barely closed behind them when the engines began to spool up. “Next stop, Tempelhof Air Force Base. We should arrive there around nine p.m. local time, five in the morning here.”

  Paulette took a deep breath. She hadn’t really believed the Colonel’s glib patter until the moment the pitch of the engines rose to a full-throated howl and shoved her back into her seat. “Why are you taking me to Berlin, Colonel? What do you want me to do?” And what will you do to me if I try to say no? Since he’d shown her the photograph of Hulius Hjorth, she’d had a horrible suspicion that she knew exactly what he was going to ask of her. And she wasn’t sure she could live with herself if she did it.

  Smith looked at her mildly. “In about eighteen hours’ time you’re going to talk an armed fugitive down from a hostage situation. In doing so, you’re going to save a number of lives. Do you have a problem with that?”

  She licked her too-dry lips. “How many lives?”

  The Colonel glanced away. “At least eighteen million,” he said with heavy emphasis, “more likely over a hundred million. That’s our best estimate of the minimum death toll from a limited nuclear exchange between the United States and the North American Commonwealth.” He settled back in his recliner. “Try to get some sleep. You’re going to need it.”

  Exception Amber

  CAMP SINGULARITY, TIME LINE FOUR, AUGUST 2020

  Julie had handed Jose, Max, and Dr. Scranton their coffee cups when things began to go wrong.

  “That’s funny.” It was Jose.

  “Could you be more specific?” Scranton asked.

  “There’s something up with the feed from the wide-angle array…” The wide-angle cameras on ERGO-1 that were to give them their first close-up view of the inner debris belts and the inner accretion disk of blazing-hot gas that circled the black hole like a hellish parody of Saturn’s rings.

  “Where’s ERGO-1?”

  Julie looked at the big status board. According to the mission schedule, ERGO-1 was now less than a thousand nautical miles above the black hole, diving ever-faster toward it—traveling at nearly two-thirds of Earth escape velocity, in fact, faster than a satellite in low-Earth orbit. Off to one side, a display showed the distribution of known debris in the inner field, five hundred nautical miles below the plunging probe—

  “Fuck me.” Max winced apologetically. “Flare in progress, Doctor. There are lots of raw gamma emissions coming from the accretion disk”—the whirling disk of white-hot gas and debris swept up around the equator of the black hole—“it’s heating up like crazy—”

  “Forget the accretion disk.” Jose pointed to the density map of the inner debris field, a couple of hundred miles further out than the central disk (a mere half mile in diameter). “Shit’s moving down there.”

  “Define ‘shit’ and ‘moving,’” Scranton demanded. She didn’t seem offended by the language: merely impatient.

  “Objects Alpha-104 through Alpha-118 are moving, Doctor. They’re not where they ought to be anymore.”

  “How long have they been in stable orbits for?”

  “Since observations began—”

  “How fast are they accelerating?”

  “If I had active primary radar—”

  “You don’t, so just give me a best guess.”

  “Alpha-104 is now … oh shit, oh shit.” Jose hammered on his keyboard, old-school, pulling up simultaneous equations from an orbital mechanics worksheet. “I make that about thirty meters per second squared. Uh, no. Make that forty-four, forty-six. Uh, the acceleration is increasing.”

  “Five gees?” Scranton asked. Her face was colorless.

  “The accretion disk is flaring, Doctor.” Max’s tone bespoke urgency. “Two degrees off-equator, six orders of magnitude brightness increase across the spectrum in the past minute.” A millionfold increase of brightness in under a hundred seconds. “Still growing. Black body temperature just doubled to eighty-five million degrees.”

  Julie glanced over her shoulder, toward the door.

  “Where’s ERGO-1 now?” asked Scranton.

  “Perigee in just under two and a half minutes. Main engine ignition and high bandwidth recording are go in one-twenty-two seconds. Five hundred and sixty miles to go—”

  “Where are the moving bogies? What are they doing?”

  Jose mumbled to himself. Louder: “They’re killing their angular velocity relative to the hole. Means they’re going to drop in closer, as if they’re getting ready to execute a slingshot intercept on ERGO-1—”

  Never awaken anything you can’t put down again, Julie jittered in the privacy of her own head, suddenly aghast. They’d rattled Xenu’s cag
e: was it any surprise that the old enemy’s sleeping war machines might lumber back into life in orbit around the black hole? She half-raised a hand to clutch for the Scientology bangle she used to wear around her neck. Silly.

  “Ms. Straker.” It was Dr. Scranton. “Please activate the bridge evacuation plan. Then phone Camp Singularity and notify Colonel Sanderson that I’m declaring an amber alert. That’s amber alert.”

  Julie reached for the hard-wired guardhouse phone, trying to keep her hand from shaking. Scranton had been in the army: she’d been a junior officer during the Kuwait war, hadn’t she? The GI bill sent her to Stanford, then ascending into the stratosphere of the national security complex during the current administration. Right now her voice had a flat lack of affect that hinted at the overcontrol of an officer trying not to spook her troops with bad news.

  Julie worked her way through the phone tree until she reached the officer commanding Camp Singularity, vaguely aware that in the background Max and Jose were frantically tracking ERGO-1 and the ominous unidentified objects maneuvering deep in the black hole’s gravity well. Scranton watched transfixed. In the distance, partly blocked by the sound-deadening foam of the trailer walls, a klaxon began blatting, the racket reverberating across the interior of the dome.

  “Accretion disk flare rising to X-1, about forty-five percent coverage and rising. We’re getting 4 x 10-3 watts per square meter in soft X-rays. Good thing the crew are all clear…” Max sounded shaky, for good reason. Julie’s skin crawled. The hole was pumping out a stupendous amount of hard radiation now. If the flare intensified much further they’d need to evacuate the control room and the trailer on this side of the gate: the aluminum airlock doors wouldn’t keep the sleet of X-rays out. “Alpha-104 now accelerating at one two one meters per second squared, a little under thirteen gees. If ERGO-1 fails to ignite Alpha-104 will make intercept in three minutes.”

  “It’s definitely an interceptor?” Scranton asked.

  “I see no other—” Jose interrupted himself. “ERGO-1 main engine ignition in twenty seconds—no other reasonable alternative.” At thirteen gees, a human pilot would be mashed flat and unconscious in the cockpit. And the radiation level down there right now would cook them from the inside out in minutes, like a reactor core after a nuclear meltdown.