Dark State--A Novel of the Merchant Princes Multiverse

by Charles Stross

  “Sanderson here. Who is this?” He sounded distracted.

  “Scranton speaking. Colonel—”

  “We’re in the middle of an evacuation drill, some idiot pushed—”

  “It was me, and it isn’t a drill, Colonel. I want you to evacuate Camp Singularity all the way back home, immediate effect. I say again, this is not a drill, this is an Exception Amber emergency. Abandon in place and pull everyone back to time line two immediately.”

  “I’ll do that.” A pause. “I’d like it in writing.” (Not that he needed the paper trail. All calls via the Camp Singularity picocell network were recorded. But it was a line in the sand.) “Can I ask why?”

  Dr. Scranton picked her way around a fenced-off dig site and sped up, power walking toward the cinderblock wall bisecting the interior of the dome (and the airlock leading through it to the waiting trucks outside). “We just lost ERGO-1. Hostile action. We tickled the dragon’s tail and the dragon woke up. We now have unidentified objects maneuvering in the gravity well. They’re accelerating, they’re unmanned, and they’re heading for the bridge. We’ve got five minutes, tops. Best case, it’s a false alarm. Worst case, we’ve got incoming hostiles.”

  “Understood, get yourself to a place of safety and clear the line.”

  “Good luck. Scranton out.” The inner door gaped open: beyond it Dr. Scranton saw the boot barrier, the decontamination room—and the outer door also agape. The launch crew had legged it, which was exactly what they were supposed to do. She glanced round. Julie Straker was following her, looking slightly lost. “Keep moving, woman.” Dr. Scranton walked into the tunnel. “Have you seen Jose or Max?”

  “I thought they were right behind us. Jose said something about shutting down the bridge power supply to reduce its emission signature…”

  Eileen swore. “Too late for that: there’s no horizon in space. Come on.” She high-stepped over the boot barrier and kept walking. “When you drove down today, did you take a pool car or reserve your wheels?”

  “Reserved.”

  “Then you’re driving. Take me to the transporter. We’ll pick up anyone we’ve got room for on the way, but we’re going straight back to time line two.”

  “But the contamination—”

  “Forget it, this is an emergency.”

  The dome was almost half a kilometer in diameter. As Dr. Scranton left the airlock she dialed a number that rang straight through to voicemail. “This is the proxy voicemail dropbox for Dr. Eileen Scranton. Dr. Scranton is unavailable at this time. Your message will be transferred to her main voicemail in not more than one hour. Please leave a message after the—”

  “Roy.” Her secretary. “This is Eileen. I’m at Camp Singularity and I’ve just ordered a full evacuation. Exception Amber applies. We’ve lost ERGO-1 and there are presumed live Forerunner hostiles inbound. If I don’t make it out, you need to call Larry Stern at NSC and tell him to brief the president on BLACK MONOLITH and BLACK RAIN. You then need to call Eric Smith—yes, I know he’s out of the country—and tell him he’s running the shop and reporting direct to Larry until otherwise ordered.” She pulled up the keypad and punched a numeric shortcode in. The voicemail would be flagged as urgent and dumped into the next automated store-and-forward transfer to time line two: with luck her message would make it out even if she didn’t.

  Eileen tucked her phone back in her bag and concentrated on walking. She and the youngster were no longer on their own. All around them archaeologists in bunny suits, guards in fatigues, and ordinary base personnel in civvies were leaving their trailers and hurrying toward the huge crack in the edge of the dome. Diffuse daylight streamed in, illuminating the fine dust kicked up by dozens of pairs of boots. Decontamination later, Eileen thought absently. “Where did you park?” she asked, breathing harder.

  “This way.” Straker reached for her hand. Together they broke into a jog, heading for the path up the hill. The vehicle park was beyond the generator truck and tank farm, half a kilometer farther away from the dome. It had seemed close enough back when she’d helped lay out the plans for Camp Singularity. Now, to her sixty-year-old legs and lungs, it seemed much farther. “What happened back there?”

  “You know as much as I do. Less talking, more running.” Eileen worked out daily, Pilates and swimming. Jogging uphill on a dirt path did things to her joints that she didn’t want to think about. But the thought of the unidentified “debris” circling in the gravity well around the black hole on the other side of the bridge kept her moving, despite the shooting pains. The president would have to be briefed, of course. But, more than that, the evidence of Forerunner weapons systems that were still active after all these centuries put many things in an unwelcome new light. The Clan’s world-walking ability, for example. The implications of the current lethal diplomatic tango with the Commonwealth. That the program for which ERGO-1 had been a proof of concept and a busted flush at birth was the least of her worries. There were other ways of getting up to escape velocity without burning kerosene and LOX, beside relying on the dangerously active corpse of a murdered planet, if you had para-time technology …

  “Nearly there.” Julie wasn’t wheezing, but she sounded more breathy than usual as she gestured toward the row of dusty SUVs and trucks parked in the clearing. People were climbing into every available vehicle and peeling out as fast as they could.

  As they approached Julie’s SUV the doors popped automatically. Dr. Scranton was about to climb in when a couple of archaeology staff staggered up. “Room for passengers?”

  “Get in back.” Julie climbed in the driver’s door. Eileen glanced at her watch. Five and a half minutes had elapsed since she hit the big red button. Maybe it was already all over. She clambered into the front passenger seat and nearly collapsed. Her thigh muscles were suddenly rubbery and her knees had been replaced with hot spheres of pain.

  “Drive,” she gasped.

  “On it.” Julie hit the throttle as the archaeologists pulled the rear doors closed. The single-track road leading to the transit gate past the main encampment was full but the queue of vehicles was moving at nearly twenty miles per hour. Excellent traffic management under the circumstances. Nothing was coming the other way.

  It took them three minutes to drive the mile uphill to the fence around the permanent camp. The gates were open and guards with rifles were waving the traffic through. More soldiers marshaled a queue of traffic—now backed up all the way to the perimeter fence—as it jerked forward to the doors of the para-time transporter. It was like some kind of stage magic trick. The door opened: cars and trucks drove in. Then the door closed and reopened a few seconds later, revealing an empty garage. Eileen closed her eyes and breathed slowly. The archaeologists in the back were asking each other what was going on. “Are we going to make it?” Julie asked in a voice pitched for her ears only.

  “Yes.” There was no other answer she could give. If they made it, it was the honest truth. And if they didn’t, if the bogies somehow broke through the bridge and the gate, then it didn’t really matter. Better that the kid should spend her last minutes calm and hopeful than panicking on the steps of the scaffold.

  Bump.

  It wasn’t a hard impact. At first Dr. Scranton thought someone had gotten impatient and nudged the SUV. But then she realized they were five yards from the car in front and ten clear of the next astern. Her eyes turned to the rearview screen. She turned her head and squinted. Then she sat up, very straight. “Julie. New orders.”

  “Uh, yes?”

  “Drive over there.” She pointed at a spot fifty yards past the transporter building. “Park. Abandon wheels, we’re going across on foot.”

  “On it.” Julie put the car in gear and began to inch aside, out of the queue. One of the soldiers marshaling the vehicles jogged over, waving, and she wound her window down.

  “Hey, you can’t—”

  “She can, on my authority.” Dr. Scranton held up her ID badge. “There’s no time for this. We’r
e going over on foot, immediately: I want you to get everyone out of their vehicles and into the transporter. Pack ’em in like sardines if you have to.”

  “Ma’am, I don’t know—”

  Eileen glared at him. “Do not make me get Colonel Sanderson on the line. Did you feel that earth tremor just now?”

  Nobody could accuse the Army of assigning idiots to their para-time installations. He turned pale, snapped a shot of her badge with his glasses, then tapped his headset and began talking urgently. Julie continued to creep out of line, then stopped. “Will this do?” she asked.

  “Yes.” Eileen unsnapped her seat belt. “Everybody out. Follow me.”

  She marched toward the transporter building as the big vehicle door began to open again, and saw a sergeant raise his hand to block the truck that was about to roll through. Up and down the line soldiers were approaching drivers, giving them new instructions. The ground chose that moment to tremble again. It wasn’t much, magnitude three at the worst, but that it was happening at all—

  “Come on!” She waved the archaeologists over and pointed at the door at the far end of the transporter. “Everyone in! Close up tight! Let’s get as many people out as we can, folks!”

  Evacuees began to crowd in, blocking out the light. A babble of conversation, questions, and consternation. “What’s happening?” “Why are we evacuating?” “Why not stay with the trucks—”

  By the time there were nearly fifty people in the transporter it was becoming claustrophobic. The space would normally have held a couple of trucks or four SUVs. Dr. Scranton kept calling people to close up, move to the back. Julie cowered against the rear door and tried to keep calm as the gate at the entrance rose from the floor and then the door swung shut. The light overhead was dim. Her ears popped: a moment later a bell began to ring and the door she had her nose up against rose toward the ceiling, admitting a different shade of daylight.

  Julie stumbled forward. Dr. Scranton caught her elbow and led her out of the transporter. “Are they all going to make it?” she demanded.

  “I don’t know.” Scranton’s tone was abruptly grim. “But we made it and we were in the Bridge Control Room.”

  “What does that mean…?”

  “It means you’re coming with me, Ms. Straker.” Scranton’s usual calm reasserted itself. “We’re not in immediate danger, but I’ve got a job to do.” People around them were spilling out into the parking lot; HMMWVs and civilian minivans were drawing up at the opposite end, doors opening as some nameless saint on the base logistics team organized an ad hoc shuttle service to get the evacuees to a processing point. Scranton waved, marching toward an HMMWV and waving her badge. “We’re going to the forward control office to get an update on whatever’s happening back at the dome. Then Baltimore.”

  “Baltimore?”

  “Yes, Ms. Straker. Where we will be debriefed separately—you as a witness, myself as, as the officer responsible.”

  “Responsible for what?”

  “I don’t know, yet.” Dr. Scranton’s eyes glittered. “Disturbing, isn’t it?”

  APPENDIX

  A short, opinionated political overview of events leading up to the foundation of the New American Commonwealth

  The history of our time line, and that of time line three—the home of the Commonwealth—appear to have been uniquely similar prior to 1745. However, to understand why they rapidly diverged from that date onward, it is necessary to review some earlier history. The Commonwealth, like the United States, has its roots in British imperial colonization efforts in the New World. However, as a result of a motion carried by a single vote at a council meeting held on Wednesday October the 30th, 1745, these two continental superpowers were destined to develop along unimaginably different lines.

  The New England colonies settled in the seventeenth century—and the middle and southern colonies—were political ventures. Religion and politics were almost impossible to disentangle in seventeenth-century Europe, and in England in particular Catholicism was seen as a subversive, hostile doctrine. In the wake of King Henry VIII’s expropriation of the monasteries that controlled 20 percent of the nation’s wealth, Catholicism was synonymous with subversion and treason, much like the perception of Communism in the United States in the 1950s.

  Grants of land were made by King James the First of England and Scotland (two nations with a shared crown, which later merged to become the United Kingdom) against the background of a global struggle for supremacy with other imperial powers. Spain and Portugal (both Catholic powers) had gained an earlier lead in the central and southern Americas; France (a Catholic power), the Netherlands, and England were locked in a centuries-long struggle for domination over the northern coast of Europe and now focused on the northern continental mass. Thus, the colonization of North America can be seen as part of an ideologically motivated struggle between great powers seeking to encircle and strangle one another.

  Different groups, at different times, sought wealth in the colonies. In 1620, the Puritan colonists who set sail in the Mayflower from England and the Netherlands to found Plymouth Colony could be described as religious fanatics: their motivation was separatism and doctrinal purification, and a deep distrust of the suspiciously Catholic-leaning King Charles Stuart (Charles the First). Religious turmoil and a fiscal crisis combined boiled over when the King attempted to override the rule of Parliament in the late 1630s, resulting in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (England, Scotland, and Ireland), of which the English Civil Wars were the most notable. The King was executed, and a revolutionary Commonwealth declared: all sorts of radical politico-religious doctrines flourished under the rule of the Puritan Protestant Cromwells. But the Commonwealth did not long survive the death of its first Lord Protector, and the Stuart monarchy was restored under King Charles the Second. Charles II ruled cannily, giving the Protestants in Parliament sufficient sense of security, but his son, James the Second, proved both autocratic and suspiciously Catholic: the result was another parliamentary revolution in 1688 which invited in an invading Protestant Dutch monarch and his English Protestant queen—and the exile of the Stuart dynasty in France.

  Importantly, this period saw the creation of a Bill of Rights, resolving the tension over constitutional power between the Crown and Parliament and confirming that England would not be subjected to a Catholic monarch. Finally in 1714, after the death of Mary II, the crown was offered to a relative, George the First of Hanover, who was both in direct line of descent from the Stuarts and satisfactorily Protestant.

  If the period between 1620 and 1714 sounds chaotic and turbulent, it was: and it generated radically different groups of colonists at different times. During the Puritan-ruled period of the Commonwealth, many former aristocrats and supporters of the Stuart dynasty left to found plantations in the West Indies and the southern colonies. Irish Catholics exiled by Cromwell’s invasion, and later captured Scottish Covenanters, found their way to the New World as indentured laborers.

  These groups frequently retained their religious and national loyalties, and in some cases were ill-disposed toward each other. Even today the Deep South and its foundational mythology of aristocracy bears cultural echoes of the Stuart loyalist Cavalier exiles who founded many of the plantations, as New England bears the stamp of Puritanism. While the significance of the Reformation split has faded from contemporary American political memory, in the eighteenth century it was still raw.

  * * *

  We cannot be sure precisely when the histories of time lines two and three began to diverge, but we first become clearly aware of the growing rift on Wednesday, October the 30th of 1745.

  King James the Second of England did not take well to being chased into exile on the continent by his own Parliament, for the crime of being Catholic. And his son, James Francis Edward Stuart, maintained his claim to the throne in the face of the Hanoverian Protestant interlopers, despite being denounced as a pretender to the throne. With the transfer of the throne to a new monarch an
d a rocky transition of power—in 1715 the new Whig government proposed to prosecute the previous Tory ministry for financial irregularities—James, the pretender to the throne, fomented a rebellion by Jacobite loyalists (those loyal to his dynasty). It was badly mistimed, and James ended his life in exile.

  However, his son Charles (“the Young Pretender” as the Hanoverian dynasty and their loyalists dubbed him) also held to the goal of retaking his throne. And in 1745, during the War of the Austrian Succession, he saw an opportunity to mount an invasion and coup while the British army was largely operating overseas.

  In our own history books, those of time line two, “Bonnie Prince Charlie” landed in Scotland, raised the Stuart standard at Glenfinnan, rallied the highland clans to his banner, and marched on the Scottish capital, Edinburgh. After a brief battle at Prestonpans he captured Scotland: and then, on October 30, in a fateful council meeting, he announced his decision to go for broke and march on London. Militarily, it was a terrible decision. The Jacobites overran their supply lines and were fighting through increasingly hostile territory as their advance neared Derby. Meanwhile, Parliament had time to recall divisions from the continent and pursued the retreating Jacobite army to the site of their decisive defeat, at the Battle of Culloden.

  But in time line three, sober heads prevailed. We do not have the minutes of the meeting, but his advisors prevailed on Charles Stuart to hold Scotland, and await reinforcements from the French Crown before he attempted to take England. In the absence of railways and roads, the rugged countryside of the Borders formed a substantial barrier to any army advancing from the south. Traditionally, English monarchs had attacked Scotland from the sea: the Royal Navy attempted to establish a blockade of the Firth of Forth, but with questionable success in the face of a strong French naval presence in the suddenly friendly waters of the North Sea.