Dark State--A Novel of the Merchant Princes Multiverse

by Charles Stross

  “Fascinating,” Scranton murmured. And it was, in a way, Julie saw: the “debris” they’d been watching for the past sixteen years, orbiting far below the Bridge to Nowhere, was now fully alive, accelerating to intercept the probe package. And it had somehow woken up at the same time as the huge flare of fusion activity that had pulsed through the roiling donut-cloud of gas and plasma around the black hole. Almost as if the black hole was somehow powering the alien interceptors—

  “Ignition.” The ERGO-1 status display shifted, numbers spinning up in real time as it came under acceleration. “Looking good so far. High bandwidth link streaming. Perigeon in eighty-nine seconds, camera rolling. We should have video—”

  A new window opened on the screen. It showed a backdrop of stars centered around an angry flare of light. The center of the disk was black, the sensors overloaded, like a battlefield laser burning through a wounded soldier’s retina.

  “Bogies are maintaining acceleration and changing vector.” Max sounded shaky. “Intercept in three minutes and fifty seconds if they don’t increase acceleration further.”

  “Not good,” Scranton said mildly. “How much delta vee do they have?”

  “So far? Three point seven kilometers per second and rising.” Max and the Doctor shared a loaded glance. Julie racked her brain: whatever this meant to them, their reaction was significant. Like anesthetists in an operating theater watching the patient’s vital signs deteriorate.

  “Two hundred nautical miles to perigeon,” Jose announced. “ERGO-1 is starting its Oberth maneuver. The differential gravimeter is picking up tidal forces on the order of one centimeter per second squared per meter at this point, and climbing.”

  “Flare is up to X-5,” said Max. “We ought to think about moving. Or at least closing the storm door. If it goes much higher ERGO-1 is going to drop into safe mode. We’ll lose most of the observations.”

  “Close the storm door now, unless it’s going to sever the telemetry feed,” Scranton directed. “We want to see this but we don’t need to die for a few seconds of extra footage.”

  “Bogies Alpha-106 and Alph-109 accelerating much faster!” Jose bounced upright in his seat, his back tense. “Thirty gees and rising.”

  Max swore. “It’s not going to—”

  The violet pinprick glare in the high-definition video window from ERGO-1 suddenly flared green. The window froze.

  “I’ve lost the ERGO-1 carrier signal,” said Jose. He poked at his console then slumped. His forehead was shiny with perspiration: “Was that what I think it was?”

  “Flare strength X-10 and rising.” Max stood up. “That looked like a directed energy strike to me. Are the bogies—”

  “Alpha-106 through 112 are still accelerating,” said Jose. He sat up again, rattled his keyboard. “They’re doing a close flyby, almost as if—”

  Dr. Scranton stood up. “I’ve seen enough. Slam the storm door and let’s go, we’re evacuating right now, people.” She calmly picked up her handbag and phone, then lifted the flap covering a big red button on the wall beneath a dog-eared sign saying NEVER PRESS THIS. “This is not a drill,” she added in Julie’s direction as she pushed the button firmly. She strode toward the door, coffee abandoned. “Hurry up!” She shouted over the chorus of sirens: “Unless you want to still be here when they find the bridge! Whoever and whatever they are.”

  PANKOW, BERLIN, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  Hulius led Elizabeth through the back-office corridor and out into the public spaces of the schloss. A handful of visitors—clumps of tourists and graying local pensioners—were exploring the building. They ignored the big man with the baggy jacket and the ripped messenger bag clutched to his chest. The Turkish woman was even more invisible, easily mistaken for an off-duty cleaner. Together they made down the main staircase and out through the vestibule. Hulius waited a few seconds for Elizabeth to catch up. She looked haunted. “It’s different,” she whispered.

  “The most familiar places are the most alien when you travel to other time lines,” he told her, then drew a shallow breath and winced. “Come on.”

  Despite his earlier admonition, Elizabeth’s head swiveled like a cat’s at a rat fanciers’ convention. Everything caught her eye, from the recessed external floodlights to the cars in the parking lot—cars which admittedly looked like weird, half-melted blobs of glass and metal compared to the chugging boxes-on-wheels of the Empire. He headed for the BMW, barely noticing the girl’s quiet gasp as its lights flashed and the doors whined open at his approach. “Get into the right-hand seat,” he told her.

  “The right—” Elizabeth circled around the car warily. “There’s no engineer. Who pilots it?”

  “That would be me.” Hulius dumped his bag in the leg well behind the driver’s seat and slid behind the wheel, suppressing a gasp of pain. “Shut the door. Just a gentle tug. Now fasten your seat belt—it’s that thing behind your right shoulder, pull it, it plugs in down there.”

  Elizabeth fumbled hesitantly. He reached past her, gritting his teeth, and tugged the seat belt. “It’s the law here. We can be stopped by the police if you are not visibly wearing it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.” He resisted the urge to rest his forehead on the steering wheel rim. “It’s part of a safety system. To save your life in event of a crash.”

  “Does it work?” Elizabeth gave the seat belt an experimental tug as he pushed the start button and selected forward drive. “Hey, how are we moving? Did the brakes fail? Oh, it’s so quiet!”

  Hulius concentrated on controlling the vehicle. He didn’t have the mental bandwidth to explain plug-in hybrids to a curious teenager. He felt hot and cold chills, a strange lassitude creeping over him. I should not be flying today, he thought grimly. Either the bullet had done more damage than he realized, or he was close to overdosing on the antihypertensive cocktail that allowed him to world-walk rapidly: maybe both. He coughed up something and swallowed instinctively, a hot metallic taste that was both familiar and worrying. The car park exit lay ahead. He squeezed the throttle, barely registered a quiet eep from the passenger seat as Elizabeth’s fingers whitened on the grab bar, then spotted a gap in the traffic and squeezed into it.

  He tapped on the dash and she gasped again as the satnav display switched on. She didn’t gasp at the head-up projection, but her eyes grew wide when the car began to give Hulius spoken directions in English. And the speed of traffic on the autobahn, even in the suburbs, clearly scared her. “I see why you need safety systems,” she said shakily.

  He concentrated on staying alert and not drifting into the wrong lane. His ribs still ached brutally and he couldn’t seem to get enough air in his lungs. “Car, enable lane following, constant distance, and preferred speed,” he said to the dash, then took his hands off the steering wheel and fumbled with his fleece. There was a hole to the right of his heart, just above the red-hot wire in his chest. He stuck a finger through, felt the rough edges of a hole in the ballistic vest. Shit. The horse-killing slug had punched deep into it. At point-blank range it probably packed as much force as a .45 Magnum round. He shoved harder, and nearly blacked out with a sudden rush of hollow, nauseating pain. His chest throbbed and he swallowed again, recognizing the taste this time: it was definitely blood. It didn’t matter if the jacket had stopped the slug—the slug had punched a couple of centimeters of Kevlar right into his ribs, probably puncturing a lung.

  Hulius moved his hands back to the steering wheel. There was no blood on his fingertips but he felt dizzy and weak. Shock, he realized, I’m going into shock. “Change of plan,” he said tightly. There was a junction coming up. He slid the car over to the right and turned off the highway, into a local main road connecting residential streets. Another turn, drifting slower, and he brought the car to a halt. Now he knew what was wrong, the pain was worse, sickening. He poked a wobbly fingertip at the satnav touchscreen, pulling up the address of the apartment he’d never intended to return to.

 
“What are you doing?”

  “Getting us to a safe house,” he said shakily. “Can’t fly like this. Maybe tomorrow.” He knew it was a fatuous idea even as it passed his lips.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Bulletproof vest stopped the slug. Think it cracked a couple of ribs. So I’m setting up”—a last stab at the screen and the satnav display changed, plotting a route across town—“a route to take us to an apartment. I’ll get a doctor in.” He grimaced, glanced in the rearview screen, and eased the BMW back out into the street. “Don’t worry, we planned for hitches. It’s just a delay.” More than that, his conscience murmured in the privacy of his head.

  He winced as he reached the end of the street and followed the instructions, turning back toward the autobahn, this time heading into the city. He wanted to cough something up, but his chest felt full of razor wire. There was something in his lungs. He was tired. Driving took all his attention and more, even with the calmly measured voice of the satnav directing him. Hostile horns blatted when he changed lanes erratically.

  He must have zoned out, because he only realized where he was as he turned into a familiar street. The car had automatic parallel parking, for which he was grateful. Liz’s eyes were as big as saucers as the car backed and crept into the space, steering wheel spinning without his input. “C’mon,” he grunted as the engine finally cut out and the parking brake engaged. “Out.”

  Liz fumbled with the seat belt release button until he pushed it for her. Then he was leaning against the front door of the apartment, forehead against the cold painted wooden surface and feet braced apart as he pawed ineffectually in his pockets for the door keys. He felt cold and hot and sick, and he couldn’t get enough air. A latch clicked and he stumbled forward into the flat. He heard footsteps behind him as the door closed.

  Hulius stomped unsteadily toward the abandoned bedroom and dumped the messenger bag with a clatter. Lights came on. He slid out of the fleece and tried to unbutton his shirt with fingers that felt like swollen sausages. He heard the Princess say, “Let me do that.” Cool fingers undid the fasteners and the shirt fell open. A small gasp. “Oh dear God.”

  He was sitting on the edge of the bed, bowed over, almost falling on his face. The rigid edge of the bulletproof vest shored him up like scaffolding around a building on the edge of collapse. He tried to remember something important about the messenger bag. “Bag,” he mumbled.

  The bag was in front of him. He reached inside. Side pocket. Phone. He tried to focus, but it was hard to think. Like being drunk or stoned, only with pain instead of euphoria. The screen swam before him as he swiped his PIN then speed-dialed a number in memory.

  “John here. Hey bro, I thought you’d cleared this gate?”

  “Doctor,” he gasped: “Get me a doctor.”

  Then the phone was speaking in a tinny, angry crackle, but he didn’t hear whatever it was because the carpet came up and hit him in the side of the head with a thud like the descending lid of a coffin.

  TEMPELHOF, BERLIN, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  The Gulfstream drilled on through the stratosphere, the afternoon sunlight dimming toward nightfall as it raced north and then east across the Atlantic. The cabin lights dimmed and the seats reclined: it was Paulette’s first experience of darkness in weeks, and she luxuriated in the drowsy twilight until falling asleep, somewhere over Greenland.

  Some time during the night she awakened to the sound of one-sided conversation. Colonel Smith was on the phone, talking quietly to a beige handset that looked as if it dated from the previous century. Satellite phone, she thought sleepily. He sat across the aisle from her. Eavesdropping was difficult. “… Trace on the subject,” he was saying, “… went wrong? What? Called private paramedics? Excellent…”

  She drifted off again, dreaming incoherently of a white-room interrogation by a faceless man who kept asking if she spoke German. The next time she awakened it was still nighttime outside the cabin windows, but there was a smell of coffee in the air, and the Colonel was sitting up in his chair, reading something on a tablet. “Ah, I see you’re with us once more, Ms. Milan.” His smile was feral in the undershot twilight cast by his illuminated screen.

  “Bathroom,” she husked, standing up unsteadily and making her way aft to the toilet. When she finished and returned to her seat she found someone had set it upright and swung it sideways to face the Colonel across the aisle. “What?”

  “Sit down,” he told her. She sat. There was a small side table propped up beside his chair, with lidded cardboard cups of coffee waiting. He passed one to her without asking. “Milk, no sugar, according to your file.”

  “Thank you.” He wanted her to know how thoroughly they knew her. “What do you want?”

  “We will be landing in a couple of hours,” he told her. “I have a job for you. If you do it to the best of your ability, and successfully, I will release you into the custody of Major Hulius Hjorth, who will extract you to the Commonwealth. Where you are Colonel Milan.”

  What? It sounded too good to be true: much too easy, even leaving aside the question of involuntary exile versus life in prison. “Why? Why are you doing this?”

  “To send them a message.” He grinned like a skull: “Pawn takes queen: check, Ms. Milan. Can you remember to say that, verbatim, those precise words? It’s a message for Miriam Beckstein—or Mrs. Burgeson, as she styles herself these days. Pawn takes queen. Check.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  Smith took a sip of his coffee and grimaced. “It’s a fucking chess move,” he said. “She’ll understand. We’ve been playing this game for sixteen years. Don’t tell me you never learned chess?”

  Paulette shook her head.

  “Well, that’s your loss.”

  They sat in silence for a couple of minutes, sipping their gradually cooling coffee. “You said I had a job. What do you want me to do?” Paulette finally asked, hating herself for this display of weakness.

  “I thought you’d never ask. We’re going to land at a major NATO base. From there we will drive to … well, there are a couple of possible target locations. One is a hangar at a regional airport. Another is an apartment in the suburbs of Berlin. Either way, the local police will provide security. You will simply walk inside the building, locate Major Hjorth, and give him a different message.”

  “What message?” She rubbed her lips with the back of her right wrist.

  The Colonel shrugged. “I’ll tell you when we arrive. What you do afterwards is immaterial, but you should be aware that by order of the Secretary of State you’ve been stripped of your US citizenship. My advice would be to go with Major Hjorth, Colonel, because you won’t be welcome in the United States—or Germany—afterwards. Just remember this—when you see her, tell Miriam, pawn takes queen: check.”

  Behind them, the distant roar of the engines abated. Beyond the cockpit door, the pilots were starting their descent.

  PANKOW, BERLIN, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  The Major fell forward in a dead faint.

  Elizabeth froze for a few seconds, appalled and fascinated. From the moment he’d picked her up—shocked into paralysis by the violence erupting around her—she’d felt a terrible freedom: a precipitous sense that, for the first time in her life, she was truly the agent of her own destiny. But with the Major’s loss of consciousness it threatened to slip away.

  The glowing glass gadget he’d been talking to slid from his nerveless fingers. It was buzzing, in a tinny emulation of telephonic conversation. How strange, she thought. She’d heard the sensational reports of course, the deranged-sounding claims that the Commonwealth was benefiting from super-advanced technology from another world. But until she’d sat in the passenger seat of the Major’s automobile she hadn’t quite credited it. Now, though, the presence of a telephone disguised as a self-illuminating pocket mirror seemed quite mundane compared to the things she’d glimpsed from the speeding motor’s window. She picked it up, worked out which end
was the earpiece, and held it to the side of her head, using her fingertips. “Hello?” she said.

  “Fox speaking. Who is this?” asked a man’s voice.

  “I’m Elizabeth. The Major just fainted. I think he needs a doctor. He’s been shot.”

  The man swore, most indelicately. “I’ll be right round. I have the backup tickets. You are at the apartment, yes?”

  “I think so.” She looked round. “White painted walls, a front door with the number sixty-eight on it—”

  “Ten minutes. Do you have any first aid training?”

  “Some,” she said doubtfully.

  There was a musical chime and the sound of silence disappeared: the phone-thing darkened, and when she looked at it, it displayed a tiny printed message: CALL ENDED. The letters writhed and moved across the screen as if alive. Disturbed, she stowed it in a pocket of the long coat-jacket the Major had given her, then dropped to her knees beside him. He was breathing, but there was a trickle of blood from his mouth and a wet sucking sound from his ribs. The stranger was coming, but could she trust him? On impulse, she went through the Major’s pockets. There was a wallet, made of some unfamiliar harsh fabric. Opening it she found a number of cards made out of stiff, glossy plastic, two bearing photographs of the Major’s face, and a handful of small, colorful banknotes. I’ll take it for safekeeping, she told herself, and tucked the wallet away in her coat pocket. His other hip pocket held a holster and a vicious-looking black pistol. She set it to one side to think about, then dropped the jacket over it.

  Stricken by uncertainty, Liz tried to remember what she’d learned about treating gunshot wounds—a not-uncommon hazard for hunters—then bent to work at the unfamiliar straps and fasteners that held the Major’s odd breastplate together. With the shirt out of the way she could see the deep crater where Lieutenant Gorki had shot him. There was blood: the slug had penetrated the full thickness of the armor, losing energy and distorting on the way through. Otherwise it would have killed him instantly. Now the blood bubbled every time the Major took a breath. Pneumothorax, she remembered from the field aid course. What to do about it? The most important thing was to stop more air getting into the wound, until help arrived … assuming, of course, that help was on its way. She was past having second thoughts about this whole enterprise, and was well into third and fourth ones. Seeing this brave new world put everything in a new and unnerving context. The Commonwealth really did have access to something like the future, which meant … am I fooling myself about my own importance to them? It was too much to think about right now, so Liz dealt with her confusion by compressing the Major’s chest.