Empire Games Series, Book 1

by Charles Stross

  DR. SCRANTON: Her birth mother, I assume you mean.

  COL. SMITH: Yes.

  DR. SCRANTON: Well, that would be … interesting.

  AGENT O’NEILL: In what way?

  COL. SMITH: Her mother looked like a nice middle-class tech beat reporter. Right up until she killed a lot of people.

  AGENT GOMEZ: But she was a terrorist! Rita has no connection to her. She doesn’t have any training—

  DR. SCRANTON: How would we know? Deep-cover agents don’t tell their children what they are. Any training is carefully disguised as childhood games. And what about her adoptives? Do you think her birth mother saddled her with a paranoid East German granddad who had run-ins with the Stasi by accident? What about all the Girl Scout wilderness adventure camp stuff they put her through? The self-defense courses?

  COL. SMITH: It’s almost like Miriam and Iris Beckstein chose her adoptive family to give her that type of upbringing. Perfect for a covert ops agent—or someone who’d keep a low profile because there’s a seven-digit reward for her birth mother’s head, dead or alive.

  DR. SCRANTON: Until you crank up the pressure there’s no way of knowing what Rita will do: whether she’ll break down in tears or turn into a rabid grizzly bear with a hangover.

  AGENT O’NEILL: Who were the Stasi? What do they have to do with this?

  DR. SCRANTON: (groans quietly) Youngsters. Forget it.

  COL. SMITH: Well, back to my point. We’re running this motivation and evaluation scenario on her and we kind of expect her to do the reasonable thing—use the tool we handed her, take the hint we put in her head. And she looks like a nice polite lady who’ll do the right thing. But she’s descended from pirates and monsters, even though they baby-farmed her out to a family who are so squeaky clean it’s like they sleep in a laundromat. I’ve got a funny feeling about this. Better keep your ammo handy.

  AGENT GOMEZ: Nothing bad’s going to happen. Trust me, it’s all going to go like clockwork.

  DR. SCRANTON: Oh, really?

  END TRANSCRIPT

  Evasions

  BOSTON, MARCH 2020

  The ride roughened as the car rolled to a stop by the side of the road. Rita heard voices, muffled through the carpet. A door opened, then slammed. Footsteps on gravel coming round the trunk. Okay, they figured it out. She tensed.

  Click.

  The trunk unlocked and the lid began to rise. Rita bounced upright, uncoiling like a jack-in-the-box, and slammed the wrench right to left along the length of the gap, two-handed. The impact nearly yanked it from her grip. Someone gasped, trying to inhale; she shouldered the tailgate open and lunged from the trunk, landed sprawling on top of a man who was trying to lever himself upright. She heard the warble and scream of sirens in the distance. Dry-mouthed terror lent her strength as she whacked the wrench into the side of his head, rolled off him, and came up in a crouch.

  Some subtle cue made her duck and spin; the fist that had been aiming for her face missed. She continued her turn and jabbed with the wrench. Her second assailant was a shadowy silhouette, backlit by the dim blue LED glow of the streetlights: he was taller and heavier than she was, and fast enough to dodge her inexpert attempt at punching him in the gut. She took a long stride backward, keeping the wrench extended, then another step, trying to open a gap. Long-ago classes in karate and Krav Maga and less-long-ago women’s self-defense courses had stressed the importance of not letting a big aggressor get within arm’s reach. The one she’d put down wasn’t moving, but his friend was following her warily, reaching for—oh shit—

  Rita spun and ran, jinking sideways. The taser dart whipped past her on its crackling tether. There was no traffic and no lit windows on this stretch of all-but-deserted highway, just shuttered exhaust shops and landscaping services. She made for the slope at the side of the road, looking for a gap between bushes and fences. Her phone buzzed in her pocket like a box of angry bees, but she ignored it. Then there were footsteps behind her. She was fast and he’d paused to ditch the taser, but if he caught up with her, this could only end badly. And if he didn’t chase her, but had a real gun, he’d eventually get hyped up enough to use it. The sirens, still distant, were fading now. She found a gap, a driveway leading into a row of closed shop units, and dashed through it.

  There was a whining noise overhead, and a pool of blindingly white light appeared around her. She threw up one arm to shield her eyes as an alarm began to beep frenetically. She heard a flat crack of gunshots—two, three—as she dove for the side of the nearest shop, trying to get out of view. The whine rose to a metallic screech above her, then cut off, followed half a second later by a tearing crash as something refrigerator-sized fell in the parking lot behind her. There was another volley of gunshots, then a roar of engine noise and a stentorian amplified voice commanding her to freeze.

  Rita lay facedown, shaking with fear. Her kidnapper had a gun. She could see him silhouetted in the light from the second drone, this one keeping a healthy distance overhead. He raised it, fired twice more, then swept round toward a target she couldn’t see. Two more shots rang out: not his. He dropped where he stood, like a marionette with cut strings. The amplified voice kept bellowing at him to lie still long after it was obvious he was beyond hearing. And her phone was still buzzing when the first cop—a for-real Highway Patrol officer, advancing in swivel-eyed starts with pistol drawn—reached her and put the cuffs on.

  Frying pan, meet fire.

  * * *

  Shock can affect short-term memory. Rita retained only fragments of the next half hour, sitting in the back of a parked police cruiser with her hands zip-tied behind her back. She saw more cruisers with light bars flaring against the night converging on the parking lot. There were a few terse questions—name, what was she doing here—repeated in tones of angry disbelief when she explained she’d been carjacked and had escaped. Someone took her emergency phone. Kidnappees were not supposed to escape, she gathered. Someone else asked her to identify her handbag, her phone. More questions: what was she doing, where had she been, had she seen her assailants, why are you lying to us? While they were asking, her fatphone vibrated for attention. One of the officers answered it, asking a couple of brusque questions. Then his manner changed completely.

  “Aw shit,” he said. “Okay, we’ll wait here.” He ended the call. “Did you get the ID to match?” he asked his partner.

  “Yup.” The partner in question eyeballed Rita in the rearview. “Name check is—”

  “Hey, listen up.” The cop cranked his head round to look at Rita. “Your friends want you out of here. They’ll be here in ten minutes.”

  “What friends?” she asked, but they had no answer for her.

  A gathering dust storm and the thunder of full-sized rotor blades brought Rita back from the dark place. She looked up dully, squinting puffy, red-rimmed eyes against the wind blast through the open front windows of the car. She’d been scared sick before, wondering how she was going to make bail—they’d find something to charge her with, just for inconveniencing them; that’s how it worked, wasn’t it?—but now something worse was descending, gravid with dark possibilities.

  The chopper touched down at the far end of the parking lot. To her uneducated eye it looked huge and menacing, studded with doors and odd protuberances. (In fact, it was a regular police Black Hawk, an ex-military transport chopper rigged for urban search operations, with cameras and satellite drones to augment its cyclopean searchlight stare.) The side doors opened and two men and a woman climbed out, ducking involuntarily beneath the swoosh of the slowing blades overhead. After a brief conference with the officers clustered around the incident control van, one of the men peeled off and walked toward the cruiser. As if it was a prearranged signal, the driver up front climbed out, walked round to the passenger door, and casually tugged her to get her moving.

  “Get the ties off her,” said Jack, holding an ID badge where the uniforms could see it. He sounded disgusted. “Is this some kind of Masshole thing
or do you always arrest kidnap victims?”

  “Wait, she’s a suspect pending identification, we caught her hanging around—”

  “Yeah, right; who do you think phoned in the incident?” He slid his badge away before Rita could read it. The cop ducked his head, unusually compliant, and stepped behind her. Jack moved to face her. “Unless you object, I’m going to take you into protective custody. We can start you on witness security tomorrow; right now it’s probably too dangerous for you to go home.”

  Rita finally found her voice as her wrists came free: “What the fuck is this about?” Her voice rose: “You set me up, didn’t you? You and Gomez!”

  “Hey, calm down.” Jack stepped close, lowering his voice. “We didn’t know they’d move this fast. Just plain lucky I was on a direct flight right after you. We didn’t expect anything like this. Not so soon.”

  “Like what?” Rita pointed to the taped-off area, now crawling with cops—both the uniformed kind and crime scene officers in overalls. “Who are they and what are they doing?”

  “I’m not sure.” Jack looked uncomfortable. “Walk with me.” He turned toward the helicopter and Rita followed, uncertainly. One of the cops trailed after them with her handbag and suitcase. “If I had to guess, I’d say they work for a faction opposed to your, uh, DNA donor. Your birth mother.”

  “My … why…”

  “Isn’t it obvious? The world-walkers want you dead, Ms. Douglas. We got a lead on them, chatter on some of their channels, and ran ahead of it. Luckily for you, as it turns out. If you’re asking why they want you dead, well, I’m sorry but we don’t read minds. On the other hand, we’re not in the business of letting terrorists murder our people, and you’re our best lead on them: this just confirmed they’re serious about you. So we’re going to try and keep you alive, and try to catch the bad guys and discover where they’re coming from. Then we’re going to deal with them.”

  It was all too fast and too slick, moving like a Hollywood production on well-greased runners. Rita was tired and hungry and shaking with cold-sweat fear, and still she didn’t believe him. “But they—” She stopped, her inner censor clamping down. Could have grabbed me and carried me to another world then cut my throat, she realized. Why didn’t they do that?

  “They employ ordinary criminals to do their legwork,” Jack continued. “Those guys were just hired muscle. You managed to bail before they made it to their handover point. But we’d better get you to a safe house before they try again. What do you say?”

  “I, uh, I…” She trailed off, nodding. “Yeah. Yeah, whatever you say.” What she really wanted to do was to phone Mom and Dad, reassure them that she was okay, then go and hide under the bed or take a long bath and not leave her home for a week. But her comfort zone seemed as far away as Pluto. “Whatever you think,” she said, surrendering to the inevitable. “Just get me out of here.”

  “Deal,” said Jack. He held the helicopter door open for her; it felt curiously flimsy after the trunk lid of her car. “Let’s fly. My boss wants to talk to you tomorrow: I think you’ll find what he has to say interesting.”

  BALTIMORE, MARCH 2020

  FEDERAL EMPLOYEE 004930391 CLASSIFIED VOICE TRANSCRIPT

  DR. SCRANTON: Well. What a mess.

  AGENT GOMEZ: I knew we should have fridged her adopters instead.

  COL. SMITH: And I remind you we don’t do that sort of thing these days.

  DR. SCRANTON: Please don’t squabble; it’s giving me a headache. I’ve got to work out what kind of spin to put on this. It’s not a matter of shoving it under the carpet … there isn’t enough carpet in Persia to cover up this mess.

  AGENT GOMEZ: The hired help were deniable assets.

  DR. SCRANTON: And may I remind you, the Massachusetts State Highway Patrol, the Boston PD, the local branch of the FBI, a bunch of hick security goons from Dorchester, and probably the MIT Campus Police and the Marching Band of the Massachusetts Rotary Club all got a slice of this cake? The folks upstairs are going to have a fit trying to keep the lid on it tomorrow. And guess who’s going to have to brief them? So you people are going to help me assemble a story, a narrative that holds water and explains just what we were trying to achieve and why this happened. And you’d better hope I can spin it convincingly, because it’s not just my job that’s on the line if we get it wrong.

  COL. SMITH: Right. So how about we run through the facts one more time?

  AGENT GOMEZ: Go for it.

  COL. SMITH: I’ll start. Subject: Rita Douglas. It was decided—

  AGENT GOMEZ: By this team collectively, let’s get that clear—

  COL. SMITH: Shut up. It was decided by this team that in order to expedite the voluntary recruitment of the candidate we should subject Rita Douglas to a motivational scenario. Frightening but basically harmless.

  DR. SCRANTON: Only it turned out she had bigger balls than expected.

  COL. SMITH: A pair of stringers were commissioned via a blind cutout to conduct the exercise. Small-time thugs. There’s no back-trail to us that doesn’t equally plausibly point at the adversaries.

  AGENT GOMEZ: Hell, it’s the sort of thing they do. We just stole a leaf from their playbook. If they’d identified her themselves they’d probably have done it for us—

  COL. SMITH: Don’t interrupt. Your concerns are noted and will be taken into account. Let me remind everyone who we’re dealing with here: Miriam Beckstein’s daughter.

  AGENT O’NEILL: Who was raised by total strangers, is an inactive carrier of the world-walking trait, and who is a Generation Z underachiever who works as a booth babe at trade shows.

  COL. SMITH: But who, despite being tased and shoved in a trunk, correctly evaluated her situation and turned the tables on her kidnappers. She did serious physical damage to one of them: subdural hematoma and major abdominal bruising. His condition is listed as critical by Mass General, by the way.

  DR. SCRANTON: Where did she get the blackjack?

  AGENT GOMEZ: It wasn’t a blackjack, it was a tire iron. And she had it in her car trunk. Under the carpet, where the muscle didn’t spot it.

  DR. SCRANTON: Lovely. Do please continue, Colonel.

  COL. SMITH: She called the cops. Why did it get through? I thought we had a divert on her phone?

  AGENT O’NEILL: We did indeed have a divert: it didn’t work. Turns out the hired goons took her handbag and phone off her—they weren’t idiots, and somebody forgot to hand them that part of the script. Turns out she had a survival kit in the trunk—blankets, first aid kit, tire iron, and a prepaid phone for emergencies—and nobody thought to search her car before she got to it, so we never found it.

  AGENT GOMEZ: If we’re parceling out the blame, I’d just like to note …

  DR. SCRANTON: Don’t bother. I’m not going to let this turn into a scapegoating exercise. Just stick to the story so that I know what I’m covering for.

  AGENT O’NEILL: She took down one goon and ran for it. Then because she got through to the real 911 service, the state police dogpiled the scene. Which made goon two lose his shit and light up one of their drones. And it all went downhill from there.

  DR. SCRANTON: So we can point to the goon going off-script by taking her bag, and her unusual degree of preparedness in having an emergency kit in her trunk. So my next question is, did she swallow the narrative? Have we spoiled her by accident? It’d be a real shame if all this mess was for nothing.

  COL. SMITH: That’s a good question. I don’t think we’re going to learn the answer to it until I’ve had a chance to talk to her myself, tomor—later today.

  AGENT O’NEILL: I make it 50/50. If she buys it, we might be able to recover and acquire a useful asset; I mean, she showed initiative and courage under pressure—that’s got to be a plus. But if she doesn’t buy the scenario …

  DR. SCRANTON: We’ll worry about how deep to bury her if and when that eventuates. Hopefully it won’t. Meanwhile, I call this a wrap. Let’s go and get some sleep. Tomorrow morning I’ll brie
f the folks upstairs. In the meantime, when Rita’s had a bit of time to think about things Sonia and Patrick can take her in and Eric can pitch her the offer. We’ll take it from there.

  END TRANSCRIPT

  BOSTON, MARCH 2020

  The helicopter spirited her away into night and mist. After a flight lasting less than thirty minutes, it landed in a distant corner of an airfield where the gray shadows of military transport aircraft lined the runway. Jack led her to a van with blacked-out windows, and it took them to a hangar. Then he led her inside, to a corner where a stack of modular prefab offices formed a multistory complex, completely invisible to the outside world. One of these was tricked out with another bland motel-style room with no windows and no handle on the inside of the door. Rita was unsure whether or not to feel grateful for the locks and the dog-sized six-legged robots with grenade launchers patrolling the darkness outside. She was beginning to suspect that perhaps the only foolproof way to tell the difference between a fortress and a jail was by the attitude of the guards to the inmates.

  She held herself together while she showered and unpacked enough of her personal effects to pretend that this room was yet another hotel suite rather than a fancy prison. But then the day’s events hit home. Curling up beneath the comforter, she clutched her phone, her traitorous link to the world, and hit up the local news sites, mindful that everything she surfed would be as transparent as glass to her custodians. There was, she discovered, absolutely no word of a lethal shoot-out near the interstate south of Boston. Nothing. She hadn’t been expecting to be the talk of the town, but the totality of the media blackout was chilling. Everybody understood that this sort of thing happened, that the First Amendment had to take a backseat to the requirements of national security from time to time. But witnessing the thoroughness with which everything from street cams through Twitter feeds fell silent before the demands of the Dark State gave her an eerie sense of detachment. It was as if she was coming adrift from her life, and all that was solid was melting into air. She began to shake; then the tears came.