Empire Games Series, Book 1

by Charles Stross

  Catharsis and sleep brought her to a better place by the time she woke early the next morning. The lack of manacles and orange jumpsuits was a positive sign. Her absent relatives might be enemies of the state, but the state had decided that she was not one of them. She forced herself to message her parents, flatmates, and a handful of friends, telling them she’d been delayed out west but was okay. She kept it to the sort of content-free fluff that would tell a censor nothing about her, and that might even be viewed as evidence of cooperation.

  By the time there was a knock on the door, she thought she’d managed to compose herself. But she learned she was wrong the hard way, as her heart pounded wildly. “Come in,” she said, as if her consent meant anything.

  The door opened. It was Gomez, her gaze as judgmental as before. “Get your stuff together; you’re coming with me,” she said. “Five minutes.” Then she stood just inside the entrance at parade rest, watching as Rita hastily flung her toothbrush and spare clothes into her bag.

  “Where are we going?” Rita asked.

  “Breakfast. Then an interview.” Gomez spoke as if words came at a price. She led Rita along a narrow corridor, then into a windowless ready room equipped with a metal sink and bare tables. A couple of bagged McDonald’s breakfast muffins and oily, bitter cups of coffee awaited. Rita managed to eat under Gomez’s stern gaze; is it the world-walker thing that bugs her so much? she wondered. Or is it my skin? Maybe the two were too deeply intertwined for Gomez to suspend her prejudice: Rita could have passed for Middle Eastern, and if Gomez saw her as a wanted terrorist’s left-behind baggage …

  Gomez drove her out of the prefab into the overcast morning light, steering an unmarked SUV under manual control. Her manner robotic, she scanned the rearview display constantly; perhaps she expected to be tailed by terrorists or attacked by world-walkers at any moment. She drove past a taxiway and a ramp studded with parked blue-gray drones, then hung a right into a tightly spiraling underpass leading to an underground parking lot. At the bottom, a security booth and barrier blocked her path. She halted, wound the window down, and presented an ID card to a uniformed security guard.

  The guard peered at the badge, then at Gomez—then stared at Rita, huddling in the passenger seat. “ID, please,” he said.

  “Agent Gomez with Candidate Red,” she told him. “Candidate has no ID but should be on your list. I’m signing for her on my cognizance.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He eyeballed Rita again, comparing her with an image on his glasses. “Look directly at me, ma’am.”

  Rita looked. Saw a Homeland Security uniform, a sidearm, warning notices, and thumbprint locks on the kiosk behind him.

  “Spit here,” he ordered, proffering a glass tube.

  Rita spat on demand, then she and Gomez waited for a couple of minutes as the guard processed the sample.

  “You’re cleared to proceed.” The barrier rose and the tire-height caltrops retracted into the concrete beneath it. “Have a good trip, y’all.”

  “A good—?”

  “Later.” Gomez’s tone was sharp. Another sharply spiraling ramp took them down another level: then another barrier retracted into the ground. Ahead, the ramp funneled them into something like a truck-sized freight elevator. Gomez inched forward, following directions on a large screen at the far side of the elevator car, then switched off the SUV’s motor. “You may need to swallow a couple of times to clear your ears,” she told Rita as the elevator door rose behind them.

  “Swallow?” Something flickered behind Rita’s eyes and her inner ears tightened painfully, as if she was in a rapidly descending airliner. “Uh, what was that?”

  Gomez said nothing until the elevator door opened again; then she backed the SUV out into the parking garage. It was brightly lit now, much too bright—

  Rita glanced up through the car’s glass roof and saw wisps of cirrus drifting across a blue sky overhead. She froze. When they’d driven in, the sky had been slate-gray with heavy cloud.

  “Welcome to time line four,” Gomez said drily. “Ever wondered if a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies? Because now’s your chance for a preview.”

  NEAR BOSTON, TIME LINE FOUR, MARCH 2020

  There was no airfield here. No underground parking lot, just a ramp leading down to a half-buried blockhouse surrounded by a razor-wire fence. There was a road (a one-lane blacktop with no sidewalk), a guard checkpoint with cameras, a couple of parked gunbots, and a flagpole flying the Stars and Stripes. Beyond it, Rita saw nothing but forest.

  Gomez drove slowly past the checkpoint, then along the road between the trees. “We’re still inside the outer perimeter of Camp Graceland,” she told Rita, losing some of her chilly reserve. “It goes on for miles.”

  “We’re in another time line,” Rita thought aloud. “That wasn’t a freight elevator, was it?”

  “Nope.” She caught Gomez’s withering sidelong glance, and the thought behind it: Are you really that stupid?

  “The, uh, world-walkers. They don’t know about this time line, do they?”

  Now Gomez looked at her properly, a slow appraising stare that would have made Rita nervous if they’d been driving much faster than the posted ten-mile-per-hour speed limit. The DHS agent looked back at the road. “Assumptions are dangerous, Ms. Douglas. I could tell you that we don’t think the Clan know of this world, and I might believe it too, but that doesn’t automatically make it so.”

  “The Clan? You mean, the world-walkers?”

  “The Clan is the organization we consider the States’ most lethal threat to national security. They’re world-walkers, yes.”

  “But.” Rita checked her assumptions. What she knew about world-walkers was drawn from the news media, and as Kurt had carefully taught her to see, the news media were often deliberately misleading. “You mean there’s more than one kind?”

  “Do bears do their business in the woods?” Gomez glanced at her again, then back to the road. It curved around a thick stand of trees, roots forcing the asphalt up into wrinkles on one side. A fork came into view and Gomez turned left. A minute later they arrived at a broad clearing, where a windowless metal and concrete building squatted in the middle of a clear-cut apron. Something buzzed in the distance, like a lawn mower or a weed whacker. Gomez parked between a Jeep Wrangler and a late-model Humvee, then opened her door. “End of the road, girl. Out and walk.”

  Somehow that one belittling word rankled, hurting more than all the fear and craziness of the past couple of days. Rita kept her face impassive as she climbed out and collected her bag from the backseat. “Why did you bring me here?”

  “There’s a man who wants to see you.”

  “What about? You bugged my phone! You already know everything that happened to me yesterday—”

  “Job interview, Ms. Douglas. Unless you want to go back to a zero-hours contract for a failing games SFX start-up, with the Clan looking for you?”

  Rita stopped mid-stride. “You have got to be kidding.”

  “The US government does not joke, Ms. Douglas.” Gomez’s eyes narrowed. She carried on walking. “This is the best offer you’re going to get. If it was up to me … Come on, let’s get this over with.”

  The front door of the building opened onto a very unwelcoming vestibule, watched over by cameras in armored mountings; the inner door was positioned on one side, out of direct line of sight of the outer door, and clearly armored. Gomez had Rita stand on a pair of painted yellow footprints so she could look at one of the cameras, while she called someone on her glasses. What unnerved Rita most was the lack of visible guards. Guards meant human interaction. Narrow slots in the walls and ceiling meant something much less pleasant: bullets, or gas.

  After a nerve-wracking wait, a concealed loudspeaker crackled. “Rita Douglas and Sonia Gomez, you may now enter the secure zone. Please proceed to briefing room G11. Ms. Douglas, do not step across any red lines you see painted on the floor. Use of lethal force is mandated.”

  Go
mez led Rita through a guardroom staffed by four soldiers in body armor, who watched them unblinkingly. Then came a door that led into a much more normal office suite. More doors blurred past until they came to G11. Gomez opened it without knocking.

  “Rita Douglas.” The man behind the desk stood. Crow’s-feet wrinkles around his eyes and a salesman’s outstretched handshake welcomed her. He looked about fifty, physically fit but balding, and wore an open-collared dress shirt with his suit. “Have a seat, please. Sonia, if you’d like to wait elsewhere while I discuss the situation with Ms. Douglas?”

  Gomez virtually jumped to attention, then fled hastily. Rita looked around, perplexed. Apart from the lack of windows it could have been just another slightly dingy government office. Cheap carpet, institutional desk, and a flag in the corner of the room. There was absolutely nothing to show that it was part of an ultra-secure secret compound in another time line.

  Rita was beyond diplomacy. “Who are you people, and what do you want with me?” she asked, trying to ignore the slushy fear in her belly. “Why am I here?”

  “Sit down.” He didn’t sound annoyed, exactly, but Rita suddenly found herself sitting, in a visitor’s chair that was slightly too soft and slightly too low. “That’s better. Can I offer you a coffee? With or without caffeine? This is going to take an hour or two so you might as well be comfortable.”

  A couple of minutes later the door opened again: it was one of the guards, bearing a cardboard coffee cup and a breakfast muffin. Just for her, apparently. “You can call me Eric,” he told her, smiling diffidently. “I also answer to ‘Colonel Smith,’ but that was in another land and long ago. I’m now officially retired from the Air Force.” His smile faded slightly. “You’re here because you came to our attention before the Clan managed to abduct you. Which was lucky, because if things hadn’t happened in that order you’d most likely be dead. And if not dead, you’d be in their hands. The questions you probably have are, why did that happen? And how can I stop it happening again? Am I right?”

  Rita nodded. “I was told, uh, I was given the impression, that you think my birth mother may have something to do with it.”

  Eric looked at her with disconcertingly bright eyes. He seemed to be about the same age as her father, she realized, but had the demeanor of a much younger man, full of a dangerous energy. “Yes. We’ve been monitoring you since you were eight,” he added, then waited for her to react.

  The enormity of it refused to sink in. Why would the DHS monitor an eight-year- old? It seemed flatly implausible, beyond even the paranoia of the Bizarro-world she’d glimpsed through Gramps’s rambling tales of East Germany. “This is about my birth mother, isn’t it?” She asked. Gomez and Jack said she was adopted, too, she remembered with a pang. It was an annoyingly humanizing fact: the first hint of a human face behind a silhouette she’d been trying to ignore all her life. She didn’t like it. “Why? Did you think she’d show up again after all these years? Like a wicked fairy in one of the Grimms’ tales, come to steal me back?”

  Eric shook his head. “Nothing so simple.” He put his coffee cup down, then picked up a hand exerciser ball. “What do you know about world-walkers?”

  “What everybody knows. They blew up the White House? They’re out there somewhere in the multiverse, and unlike us they don’t need machines to move between other time lines?” Everyone knew a bit about para-time, after the bombing. They’d discovered their enemy had come from another version of this world, where history had diverged from ours. There were an infinite number of such time lines out there. The US had machines that could transport both people and machinery between universes.

  But it was irrelevant to everyday life—unless you had the bad luck to be caught in the blast radius of a terrorist nuke planted by bombers from another time line, or had relatives who had been in India or Pakistan during World War 2.5. All you really needed to know was that they were the enemy, and that overthinking things aloud in public was a bad idea.

  “Yes, I get that one of them gave birth to me, once upon a time. But I’m not a—”

  “No,” Eric agreed. “You’re not a member of the Clan. And I’d like to distinguish between world-walkers—people with the inherited ability to think themselves from one time line to another—and the Clan, an organization of people with that ability. Like the difference between ordinary Muslims and members of Al Qaeda. The important thing is, one of your parents was a member of the Clan. That didn’t matter until recently, but … things have changed.”

  “What kind of things?” She didn’t even try to keep the frustration out of her voice. “What’s this got to do with me?”

  Eric picked up a tablet and began to read. “Let’s see. Rita Douglas, age twenty-five. Adopted and raised by Emily and Franz Douglas, in Boston and then New Jersey. Attended UMass, a major in history, a minor in drama. Languages: Spanish, some German. Then a succession of dead-end jobs while trying to pay off student loans and build a career in acting.” He smiled at her, a flash of teeth: obviously he found something amusing in this. “No criminal record, not so much as a parking ticket.” The smile vanished. “Congratulations. You’re very clean. You’d pass a background check for government service with flying colors.” He put the tablet down. “But it never occurred to you to apply. Any particular reason?”

  What the fuck? Rita stared at the ex-colonel, then used the too-hot container of too-bitter coffee to buy herself a few seconds. “I’m not the type,” she said cautiously. “I’m not interested in the military.” She’d heard too many horror stories from Libya and Bangladesh vets. And she’d had friends who’d enlisted, then dropped out of touch. “I really wanted to get into a graduate studies history program, or find a solid stage role, but that’s just not happening in this economy.” The post-2003 climate wasn’t terribly conducive to historical introspection. And as for the stage, a momentary twinge from the implant inside her left elbow reminded her what was wrong with that. “What is this about? Why am I here?”

  “You might want to put the coffee down.”

  She took a mouthful, swallowing hastily and burning the roof of her mouth. “Yes?”

  Smith looked straight at her, and she had an uncanny feeling that he could see right through to the back of her skull. “Speculate wildly, please. Why do you think you’re here? Why do you think I brought all that stuff up?”

  “I don’t know. You’re going to offer me a job? Because you’ve suddenly got a need for world-walkers who speak foreign languages and can act? What is this, Mission: Impossible? I’m not a spy and I’m not a world-walker—”

  “I agree.” The Colonel nodded. “You’re neither of those things. But we can fix that.” He waited politely for Rita to finish spluttering before he continued: “Here’s the proposition. We—by which I mean the organization I work for; you don’t get to meet anyone else at this point—are empowered to offer you a job, with strings attached. If you take it, you’ll spend most of the next two years going through induction and training. You’ll learn necessary skills to bring you up to speed, and be thoroughly evaluated along the way. It’ll be a lot like being in the Army, but without the uniform, the shouting, the saluting, and the shooting.

  “If you wash out, well, the pay’s decent and maybe you’ll take away some useful skills. If you pass but don’t have quite the right aptitude, you can quit or we can find you a job within DHS that’s suited to your abilities—interrogating Latino theatrical troupes or something, a safe office job with a pension at the end, if that’s what you want. But if you pass and demonstrate the right qualities, then, once you’re a probationary federal agent, we can talk about the other stuff.”

  “But I’m not a world-walker!”

  Smith smiled at her again, a Cheshire cat grin that froze her in her seat. “Like I said, that can be fixed.” He leaned forward: “And it’s the one sure way you can guarantee that the Clan won’t be able to touch you. But it’s only going to happen if you accept this job offer and give it your best sho
t. And maybe not even then. So. What do you say?”

  In a moment of crystal clarity Rita realized two things, one very good and one very bad. It was the best opportunity she’d had in years, if ever—and she wasn’t sure she’d be allowed to turn it down. So she licked her suddenly dry lips and gave what seemed to be the only safe answer: “I’d like to see the fine print, please.”

  Spies

  A PRISON CAMP NEAR BOSTON, TIME LINE THREE, JANUARY 2004

  “I think it’s quite simple. To use an analogy from US history in my time line, imagine this is Cape Canaveral and we’re their captured Nazi rocket scientists,” Miriam Beckstein told her audience.

  It was hot inside the crowded wooden hut, which was a small mercy. There was little enough fuel this winter, in the wake of the revolution that had brought down the British imperial crown in the Americas. But the privileged detainees in this hut had a stove and a supply of good Appalachian coal; droplets of water condensed on the inside of the windows, forming slug trails rather than freezing to the glass.

  “That’s an ambitious proposal.” Helmut ven Rindt was doubtful. A chunky fellow, formerly part of the Clan’s security organization, he was efficient if given a goal. But he wasn’t the most imaginative of leaders. “It seems to me we’ve got more immediate problems.” He raised a bushy eyebrow and looked round at everyone—the dozen or so members of the surviving Clan leadership who’d made it this far. “Like being imprisoned, and our families being held hostage. Just to start with.”

  After a rogue Clan faction had bombed the White House and Capitol, the US nuclear counterstrike had utterly destroyed their home country, the Gruinmarkt, in time line one. The survivors had sought exile here, in time line three, but the situation had been complicated, to say the least, by the recent revolution. Helmut continued, giving voice to the complaints Miriam had heard only whispered quietly so far.

  “This isn’t our home. In this new time line, we have no power and no future—unless we take action.” Helmut stood as he spoke, emphasizing words with gestures, fist striking palm in vehement emphasis. “Nor are the radical rabble well-disposed toward our kind. We should do better to seek exile in the French Empire and reestablish our trade on the other side of the Atlantic—”