Empire Games Series, Book 1

by Charles Stross

  By “trade” he meant paperwork-free shipping: the Clan had become phenomenally rich by smuggling narcotics into the United States via their home time line. Miriam suppressed a shudder. She’d been given a leather trench coat by their captors: a gesture of privilege for the leader of the Clan refugees. Worn over a cable-knit sweater and heavy wool skirt it was at least right for the climate. Now she pulled it tight around her shoulders, as if against a sudden draft. The old trade—smuggling—was how the Clan had gotten into trouble in the first place, and if Helmut thought restarting the trade was a good idea, so must a whole lot of other relatives.

  “We can’t go back.” She shook her head, denial personified. “They’ll be on the lookout for us everywhere in time line two: everybody knows about us, thanks to those idiots. Trying to restart the traditional smuggling trade in Europe or China is a nonstarter. Also,” she added, almost as an afterthought, “the American government will come after us if they see signs of suspicious activity.”

  Helmut wasn’t dropping it: “Look out there!” he said, angrily gesturing at the iced-over window. “This is where they’ve put us!” Beyond the window, rows of snowcapped barracks huddled together in chilly solidarity within high brick walls topped with broken bottles set in hastily applied mortar. Guards with bolt-action rifles patrolled beyond the wall. These were the Special Prisoner quarters, given over to the world-walkers, asylum seekers from a parallel universe where history had taken a different course. “It’s insupportable! I know you sought alliance with the revolutionaries, but they treat us like—”

  “Stop your foolishness!” Iris Beckstein erupted. She looked older than her sixty years, and she was slowly dying. Hunched inside the hood of the half-broken invalid chair their captors had donated, she shuddered briefly, then glared at ven Rindt with a death stare she’d clearly inherited from her mother, the dowager duchess. “Pursuing the old trade is what put us in this camp, in case you’ve forgotten. And we’re not doing badly compared to the neighbors.”

  The rest of the camp was full of Politicals—captured Royalist troops and members of the aristocracy who hadn’t made it onto the refugee ships in time to escape the revolution that had toppled the British Empire in early 2003. After the civil war, the Politicals didn’t rate heating and full bellies in the famine-struck winter of the Emergency. Almost two feet of snow lay on the ground outside the huts. Prisoners working under guard removed the frozen bodies from the Politicals’ side of the camp every morning. The Clan refugees, in contrast, had fuel for their stoves and food for their children.

  “It can’t be worse than—”

  “For once in your life, just shut up and listen,” Iris grumbled, then subsided in a fit of coughing.

  “Mom? Are you all right?” Miriam asked anxiously.

  Iris waved away the offer of help: “’M surviving,” she said hoarsely. “Been better. Carry on.”

  Helmut, possibly due to some residual respect for authority, was momentarily silent. Miriam took advantage to continue her urgent pitch. “Helmut is absolutely right that we’ve got no power or influence here. But I think we can remedy that. Our new goal must be to make ourselves indispensable. And the easiest way to do that is to give them information. We can give them technological and industrial know-how—knowledge this time line won’t discover themselves for many decades.”

  “Are you suggesting industrial espionage as a business model?” asked Huw. Gangly and inquisitive, he was one of Miriam’s most reliable allies within the Clan. She could count on him for an easy prompt. The downside, though, was that if the majority didn’t feel that their concerns were being adequately addressed by her plan, more and more of them would sign on with Helmut and drift back to their old ways. Before the exile, the Clan’s members had been held together by fear and a ruthless internal police organization; now that the worst had happened, Miriam really had no way of compelling them to follow her.

  “This goes a lot further than industrial espionage,” she said gratefully. “We aren’t going to feed them isolated tidbits—we’re going to promise a whole new way of life. What we need to do here is what I tried and failed to do in the Gruinmarkt—accelerate social development for all.” The Gruinmarkt, one of the eastern kingdoms of North America in time line one, had barely medieval levels of technology: the privileged few with Clan connections had been able to import US tech by means of world-walking, and had rejected attempts at modernization for the masses. “Here in the Commonwealth they’ve just conveniently smashed their aristocracy: there’s nobody with entrenched privilege to defend. That’s an opportunity for us to exploit, if we’re smart enough.”

  “Just how are you going to go about that?” Helmut asked acidly. “From inside a prison camp?”

  Miriam reined in her annoyance; she responded badly to provocative sarcasm: “We need to somehow get the Commonwealth leadership to commit to full-scale industrial development and modernization. Right now, the USA is about sixty years ahead of anyone in this time line. But I think the Commonwealth can close the gap completely in less than forty years—maybe thirty—with our help. And if they can do that before the USA discovers us here, we’ll be infinitely safer. Make no mistake—sooner or later, they will find us. And even though we didn’t kill their president, they’ll expect us to pay the price.”

  “Is it even possible for a society to progress that rapidly?” asked Brilliana, who was usually loath to disagree with her leader. She perched on a desk in the corner of the room, keeping one wary eye on the door. (As Miriam’s first-sworn bodyguard, she took Miriam’s security personally.) “It’s 2003. Let’s say the USA have a sixty-year lead now. In thirty years it’ll be 2033. You’re talking about catching up to a ninety-year lead in thirty years, not a sixty-year lead. Are you sure about your projections?”

  “Yes. That’s why I said it might take nearer to forty.” Miriam’s shoulders slumped slightly. A forty-year plan: that was a lifetime’s work, a daunting project for anyone. “But it’s not impossible. Look at the Korean Peninsula in time line two. North Korea and South Korea started out level-pegging in 1953. They were both oppressive dictatorships with flattened cities and superpower sponsors, and they were still pretty much even as late as 1973. But today, South Korea’s got a higher GDP than Japan, while in North Korea they’ve gone backward.

  “Folks, this is it. This is the time line we have to live in. We don’t get to go home to the Gruinmarkt, in time line one: it glows in the dark. Even if we could, would we want to? I will remind you that the only things that made the Gruinmarkt tolerable were enormous local wealth and access to luxuries imported from the United States. We don’t have the local wealth and we can’t import stuff from the USA anymore—we’re not welcome there, in case you’d forgotten.” Any Clan member trying to make a life in the United States risked ending up in a supermax prison for the rest of their life—or at least until their date with a federal executioner.

  “We’re stuck in time line three, stuck in the Commonwealth here, unless you think striking out at random in search of something better is a solution. At least here we’ve got the ear of the First Man,” she said, referring to the founder and head of the Radical Party, who had consolidated power in the wake of the Revolution. “We can work with that. But running away again isn’t an option unless our backs are up against the wall. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to go and live in a cave somewhere, or a drafty castle with no antibiotics and no general anesthesia. I happen to like civilization, and this is the nearest thing we’ve got.”

  Miriam looked round at her audience. She’d taken care to ensure that half of them were women, and she could tell at a glance that she had their attention. The state of civilization in the Gruinmarkt had been medieval, except where world-walkers had traded in US goods, such as the imported medicines that meant they didn’t have to endure repeated risky pregnancies and bury half their babies before their fifth birthday.

  “My plan, which I intend to sell to the First Man, is to turn t
his camp into the Commonwealth’s source of miracle technologies and scientific insights. We’re going to engage in knowledge transfer on a historically unprecedented scale, acquiring and disseminating the necessary skills and ideas to enable the Commonwealth to play catch-up with the United States in time line two. Then, once we get ourselves out of this camp and into strategic positions within their economic and industrial planning apparatus, we’ll be able to move mountains. We can turn this time line into somewhere we’re proud to live, a place where we’re safe from the US government. And there’s one more thing: once we have official government backing for the project, we’re going to skew it to suit our own agenda.”

  Suddenly Helmut looked interested. “And what is that going to be, as you see it?”

  “Revolutions typically run their course in a generation.” Miriam had been doing a lot of reading about revolutions. “Our job is to survive this one. Things look chaotic right now, but eventually there’s going to be a new normal, and I intend us to get back all the stuff you’re complaining about losing. Power, influence, wealth, a place in the sun.”

  “All well and good,” said Helmut. “But how are you going to make our captors follow your agenda? Unless you can do that—” He sat down, clearly feeling that he’d made his point.

  Miriam stared at him, perplexed: what more did he want? “We’re going to catalyze disruptive technological development—” she began, just as Iris cleared her throat. “What, Mom?”

  “The problem is political, as usual. You youngsters never make sufficient allowances for that. You especially, Helmut; your tool of choice is the club, not the olive branch.” Then she looked at her daughter. “I found that book of the First Man’s writings most interesting. If your friend Erasmus can get me anything else by Sir Adam, or more reading matter of that kind, I’d be most grateful. And keep your own eyes open for useful signs in Sir Adam’s writings too. But I assure you, your plan will only work if he is willing to learn from the mistakes of other revolutions—and is receptive enough to contemplate a New Economic Policy.”

  Miriam frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? You’ve been focusing on the idea of technological development. But you’ve been doing it in isolation, looking at means without considering the ends.”

  “But I have—the ends are the development of civilization—”

  “Sir Adam Burroughs won’t see it like that!” Iris snapped. “You are thinking like a technocrat. But Adam, the First Man, is not a technocrat, he is a revolutionary. He has a vision of what should be, of a shining city on a hill, which is based—if I read him correctly—on the rights of man and woman. A vision that went out of fashion long ago in the United States. It was probably doomed by the failure of the First International, in the world you grew up in. Your late father would set you straight.”

  Miriam flinched: Iris had raised her in exile in time line two, marrying Morris, an idealistic but ultimately ineffectual political activist. The kind of guy who had walked out of the Revolutionary Communist Party because they didn’t do enough charity work, feeding the sick and clothing the poor. “No, Miriam. We need to prove ourselves to Sir Adam by giving him tools that he considers useful, not what you consider important.”

  “And what would these tools be?” Huw asked, intrigued by the turn the conversation was taking.

  “Political levers, not shiny scientific toys.” Iris’s eyes twinkled. “That’s not to say that they cannot be the same thing, but presentation is all. Sir Adam has just led a revolution. The first successful democratic revolution in the history of this world. Forget technology for the time being: you have a crystal ball! It is your duty to bring him dismal tidings—all the myriad ways in which revolutions can come to grief. Your first job must be to produce a comprehensive report on all the failed democratic revolutions of time line two, with specific analyses of how and why they failed to achieve their objectives.

  “Show him that, and then—if you can—show him a revolution that succeeded. Show him he can learn from it and use it as an object of emulation—and he’ll listen to you. In fact, if you can do that, he’ll give you everything you ask for. Which is how you go about setting up your, uh, para-time industrial development program. But before all else, you need to demonstrate your usefulness. And the easiest way to do that is to show him all the ways to fail that he has not imagined, so that he can avoid them.”

  Brilliana nodded, then grinned at Miriam. “It’s the oldest trick in the book, isn’t it? Work out what they’ll get hooked on, then give them the first hit for free…”

  NEW YORK, TIME LINE TWO, MARCH 2020

  Hulius Hjorth was about to start his very last courier mission—although he didn’t know it yet. There was a standardized protocol for world-walking agents entering a hostile surveillance zone: the goal was to do it quietly and anonymously and stay one jump ahead of the surveillance cameras. He’d been doing it for more than twenty years, from his first teenage outing as a Clan messenger to his current status. These days he was a major in the Commonwealth’s Department of Para-historical Research—and he was good at his job. Unfortunately, the adversaries were getting better, too, and it was harder to stay ahead of the enemy every year.

  Hulius entered time line two via a quiet side street in Brooklyn. It was lined with red-brick warehouse conversions playing home to start-up businesses and specialist mail-order supply shops. Few people lived here, and some of the buildings were empty, their windows boarded up as their owners waited out the slack in the business cycle. After 8 p.m., as twilight descended, a certain quiet fell. And it was then that the door of one such boarded-up building opened.

  An onlooker would have seen a tall, heavily built man in his late thirties or early forties step out, glance up and down the street, and wheel a bicycle onto the sidewalk. With horn-rimmed spectacles, drainpipe jeans, plaid shirt, and knitted cardigan, he could be mistaken for a hipster. He bore a capacious messenger bag, an obscure name-brand item chosen to harmonize with the rest of his outfit. He checked carefully for cross-traffic, then locked the warehouse door and pedaled up the road, wobbling slightly.

  (The warehouse itself was empty, seemingly abandoned when the business that had previously occupied it went bust. Only a rectangular area on the stained concrete floor, marked out with duct tape, would tell an informed observer that there was anything out of the ordinary about it. That, and the fact that anyone reviewing the previous day’s camera footage of the front and back of the building in search of Hulius’s arrival would have a fruitless task.)

  Every stage of this type of insertion was hazardous. The warehouse might have been let to a new tenant in the week since the preliminary reconnaissance designated it as an entry point. Or some unfortunate event might have attracted unwanted police or DHS attention. Once one was out of the entry building, the risks continued. Unable to use a trackable phone or GPS device, Hulius had memorized the neighborhood—a good solution, but only effective as long as he stuck to known territory. And he had to keep moving confidently, for he couldn’t stop and consult a paper map. If his motion kinematics seemed weird, software running on the sensors embedded in the street signs on major roads would notice and call the cops. He’d then face a search for alcohol or drugs. This could not be allowed.

  In this world-walker-aware city, there were cameras with motion tracking firmware at every major intersection. They were designed to spot a sudden appearance out of thin air: so transfer had to be effected inside a disused building. Hulius’s managers back in the Commonwealth didn’t think the DHS was capable of monitoring every doorway in the United States for foot traffic: only federal buildings and security zones like airports had that level of surveillance. But sooner or later the feds would start clamping down on pedestrians and cyclists who had no radio-frequency devices like phones or ID cards. It would make covert operations infinitely harder. At present it was still possible for a courier to dip into the quiet backstreets of a big city for a couple of hours without
courting disaster, but the end of Commonwealth intelligence operations on US soil was clearly in sight: the USA was already a harder nut for foreign infiltrators to crack than the Soviet bloc had ever been.

  At the end of the street, Hulius stopped at the four-way and diligently checked for oncoming traffic. Most New York cyclists didn’t bother—it wasn’t necessary, now that anticollision radar was mandatory on cars and trucks—but he was patient. An accidental collision with another cyclist or a hot-wired car would be a mission kill at best. If it put him in the back of an ambulance, it would most likely prove fatal: he’d have to use the suicide capsule he carried in a false wisdom tooth.

  He pedaled on across an avenue and took a left, then wobbled slowly uphill along the main road for a block. A few streets later, he reached his destination and dismounted. He linked the bike to a railing and pretended to arm the bike lock, then (after looking for passersby) turned his reversible jacket inside out and put it on again. Pocketing his conspicuous glasses, he walked round the corner and straight into a cheap local diner.

  His contact was waiting in a seat facing the front door, toying with the wreckage of a burrito and a bottle of juice. The bottle was positioned to the left of her plate: a simple sign that meant, I am not under duress. She was around fifty, thin-faced, her black hair scraped back in a severe bun: she looked like a tired office worker. Hulius paid her no obvious attention, and she gave no sign of recognition. Instead, he walked to the counter and bought tostadas and a root beer. He turned to casually survey the diner as if looking for empty seats, then carried his portion over to her table and sat down facing her.

  “Good morning, Ms. Milan.”

  She nodded politely. “Always a pleasure to see you, Mr. Jefferson. How did the ball game go?”