Empire Games Series, Book 1

by Charles Stross

  He unslung his messenger bag and slid the jacket off his shoulders. Inverted it again, other way out; pulled the spectacles out of their pouch and put them on before he picked up the messenger. A quick glance at the bike: Farewell, trusty steed. The train was already slowing. Nobody had looked up: nobody was watching him. He glanced at the ceiling, seeing the cluster of pinhead-sized camera pickups. Ops had assumed they were off-line recorders, just logging foot traffic and faces for digestion at the end of the day. But: what if that monstrously expensive network upgrade had been enough to carry live video streams of all the cameras on all the trains? A decade ago it would have been preposterous, but these days—

  Hulius turned and ran to the other end of the car.

  Fifty-second Street station. The train rattled and squealed to a stop: doors banged open up and down its length.

  Two MTA transit cops entered the rear carriage, scanned the seated passengers with practiced eyes. A bicycle, shackled to a vertical rail, told its story. One of them swore under his breath as the doors closed again. As the train began to move, the door at the end of the carriage—the one giving passage to the next car along—squealed and banged open, admitting a rattle of tracks and a gust of stale subway air.

  Hulius was already stepping onto the platform when the transit cops got on the carriage behind the one he was leaving. He kept his eyes down, shoulders hunched. Two more cops waited by the turnstile, heads cocked slightly to one side, listening to their earpieces as they waited for the handful of passengers to leave the platform.

  Fuck, it’s a sweep. Mouth dry and heart pounding, Hulius walked toward the barriers. Two on the train at the back to push forward, two on the gates to stop anyone from escaping—it’d be the same ahead, all the way to the end of the line. Subway trains were beautiful things right up until they turned into a killing ground. He mentally rehearsed what he’d have to do, but kept his hands free. Pepper spray in one pocket, drop knife concealed under the cuff of his right wrist. I don’t want to do this, he realized distantly. They were just transit cops, doing a dirty and unrewarding job—

  The turnstile buzzed. He walked through. An incurious glance, and they were behind him. Sometimes the oldest tricks are the best: they’d be looking for a man with a bicycle in a green jacket, and here was a guy in spectacles and a blue jacket, no bike. Still. He tensed, and lengthened his stride. If the trains are networked then any moment now they’ll hear that the mobile team found the bike.

  Escalator. Legs pumping, Hulius bounded up, shoving his way past an older man with a walking stick, a woman wearing earbuds. The cry came later than he expected: “Hey, you! Stop, police!”

  Hulius ran.

  They were near the bottom of the escalator, but he was almost at the top. There was more shouting—he didn’t stop to listen—then he saw the emergency stop button. Punched it in passing, and a bright pain shot up his left hand. An alarm bell began to clang behind him, and he heard a loud mechanical grating noise, accompanied by indignant yelling. People falling down: good, under the circumstances.

  He made it into the daylight, breathing hard, and kept running.

  The surveyed return point was an alleyway that ran between a foreclosed house and a shuttered head shop, just around the block from the station. Hulius took the corner at a run, certain the cops were on his heels: they might be holding fire because of bystanders, but that was no guarantee of safety against New York’s Finest. There was no time to check for witnesses: he was going to burn this site. Hulius ran to the spot beside the fire escape they’d surveyed on a previous mission, pulled on the elastic strap of his wristwatch, and flipped the device upside down, so that the crystal lay against his wrist and the back was visible. Engraved into the burnished metal of the casing was an interlocking knotwork of tail-chasing complexity. He focused on clearing his mind and stared at the pattern that would take him back to time line one, just as the first officer rounded the corner, gun in hand, and opened fire.

  Hiatus.

  FORT GEORGE, NEW YORK, TIME LINE THREE, MARCH 2020

  It took two world-walking jumps in quick succession to return to the Commonwealth from time line two. Normally Hulius would take his time to recover between trips, find a fallen tree or something to sit on: but he was spooked, and took the second jump too fast. Pain spiked through his forehead as he dropped the messenger bag and bent forward, retching, his ears still ringing with the echo of the single gunshot. He stood in the center of a large room, high-ceilinged and with whitewashed walls, his knees wobbling like jelly. That was much too close, he thought numbly. Painted markings on the floor corresponded to the layout of the alleyway. Helpful hands took the messenger bag, while others eased a wheelchair into place behind him. “Easy there, Major. Please sit down…”

  “Thanks,” he tried to say, tongue-tied. That was a really bad mission exit, he thought. Just about the second-worst outcome possible. I’m getting too old for this shit. In his late thirties, he was old for an agent—especially a world-walking agent running courier missions into a hostile high-tech surveillance state. The idea of shuffling quietly into a desk job and then a slow slide down to retirement usually lacked appeal, but right now he was experiencing a dizzying perspective shift. Retirement was a welcome prospect, compared with the alternative so recently on offer.

  “Medic? Medic?”

  He settled into the chair as someone slipped a blood pressure cuff around his left arm and began to inflate it. Home again, he thought. “Blood pressure’s 165/116, sir. If you lie back, we’ll get that down. This won’t hurt…”

  Hulius relaxed, feeling the familiar sting of a needle seeking a vein in his left forearm. Over to the left, the Forensics and Biologicals teams were taking inventory of the courier bag, checking for unwanted passengers. Everyone wore surgical masks and overalls. Access to the Quarantine/Arrival Room was via an operating theater–grade scrub and robing area. Nobody wanted to risk importing plagues or parasites from a parallel universe.

  The doctor and paramedics crowded around his chair, waiting to slip their latest potion into his bloodstream: a cocktail of potassium-sparing diuretics and a fancy new calcium channel blocker, guaranteed to smack down post–world-walking hypertension within minutes. It was far better than the old prescriptions the Clan’s doctors had fumbled together, back before they had a superpower’s entire pharmaceutical industry to call on.

  His arrival and reception had been recorded by the bulky cameras in the corners of the room, while technicians logged everything on the crude locally made computer terminals lined up against the far wall. The Department of Para-historical Research was meticulous about data collection on these runs. Missions to the United States of America were extremely hazardous: nobody could guess in advance what might be of interest to the board of inquiry if a world-walker was lost.

  “Open wide, sir?”

  Hulius gaped for the dentist’s forceps. A sharp tug and the man held up the false crown for inspection: “All clear.” He transferred the crown to a labeled jar. “Hmm. I’d like to book you in for descaling and a regular check: there’s a bit of plaque developing. Otherwise, you can go whenever Brian is through with you.”

  “I want to take another blood reading in five minutes.” Brian, the doctor with the sphygmomanometer and the antihypertensives, was taciturn. “I’ll sign you off for decontamination when it’s back within sight of normal, but not a moment sooner.”

  “More than your job’s worth, eh?” Hulius asked, joking. But judging from the medic’s frown, it was no joking matter.

  “If I let you go early and you suffer an apoplectic fit, it wouldn’t just be my job that’s on the line. With the flu doing the rounds, we’ve got only eighty-four walkers available for active ops this week.”

  “Eighty—” He swallowed a curse. Of course. Plagues could travel piggyback on a world-walker in either direction, and importing a nasty epidemic wasn’t the only risk the Department of Para-historical Research ran when it authorized a transfer mission.
The other time line was terrifyingly proficient at automated genome scanning and biowarfare defense. If a flu strain from the Commonwealth ever got loose over there, the US authorities would rapidly deduce the existence of the DPR’s espionage program. Pinpointing exactly where patient zero had arrived would follow, and then—

  The consequences would be bad. Starting with the enemy waking up and plastering Manhattan Island in time line one with sensors and killer drones, then going rapidly downhill from there.

  Hulius waited while the medics fussed, trying to relax. As usual, it did little to speed things up. After a couple of inconclusive blood pressure checks and then a better one, Brian grudgingly pronounced himself satisfied and an unseen attendant wheeled Hulius into the robing area. He stripped, showered, and dressed himself in civilian clothes—every step following strict decontamination protocols. It was a soothing and familiar ritual. He’d performed it more than a thousand times in the sixteen years since he’d joined the Department of Para-historical Research, and in rudimentary form for years before that. It was far more elaborate and effective than anything the Clan had bothered with back in the old days: more like the routine his bright younger brother Huw had come up with for probing new time lines. But the DPR didn’t dance to the same tune as the fractious families of merchant princes who had made their homes in the Gruinmarkt. Far from it.

  The guards in the lobby of the building saluted politely enough, but kept a close eye on him. “Sign here, Citizen Major,” said the sergeant waiting by the turnstile with a clipboard. Hulius nodded, signed. “Thank you,” the sergeant continued. “You may leave the secure zone now.” He gave no sign of recognition, even though he’d been on this posting for several months and had spoken exactly the same words to Hulius at least thirty times. Inter-service rivalry could be brutal in the postrevolutionary Commonwealth, and the troops were drawn from the Commonwealth Guard, a body loyal to the Party rather than the state.

  Outside the squat, concrete shed, Hulius paused for a minute to take in the evening air. Then he headed toward the office block where he would make his report in person.

  Fort George was still centered on a century-old shingle-roofed brick barracks, but it had lately been overrun by an infestation of concrete. There was fresh cement everywhere from the driveways to the new multistory office buildings, including the sinister hemispheres facing out toward the Atlantic coast, their embrasures concealing antiaircraft missile launchers. About the only new structures that weren’t made of the stuff were the radar dishes and the flagpole.

  The twenty-first century was definitely the age of concrete, Hulius mused. Concrete and blast doors and automobiles with floor-mounted gearshifts. Sidewalks and orange-glaring streetlights that turned the night to day, the gold to chrome. It was all horribly industrial, as far from nature as one could get. Computer terminals with chord-keyboards and green phosphor screens and magnetic cartridge drives: sometimes it seemed as if the Commonwealth was desperate to turn itself into an echo of the paranoid place he had just visited.

  A growing shriek like the howl of a demented, mindless god split the sky overhead. Hulius glanced up in time to see a pair of silvery arrowheads disappearing into the eastern sky, trailing orange fire. A few seconds later double thunderclaps rattled the windows. They were probably off to protect the Commonwealth’s airspace from encroaching French bombers. A job at which they were very good, although it was anybody’s guess how effective such second-generation fighter jets would be if they were called upon to defend the homeland against the stealth drones and advanced electronics of the United States …

  CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, TIME LINE THREE, SPRING 2018

  Another day, another public opening ceremony. The Commonwealth public loved factory-opening ceremonies. Opening ceremonies meant jobs, money, and the white heat of a new technological revolution. Drama, television cameras, a news autogyro circling overhead to get the best shots of a vast new complex. They’d be highlighting the shiny new parking lots and monorail stations linking the factory to the planned workers’ satellite towns. I just wish I could hire an actor to stand in for me, Miriam thought wearily as she adjusted her white gloves. Erica, her makeup assistant, fussed around her hair, making sure every strand was in place: “I want to matte your forehead some more, madame,” she said. “Otherwise, the cameras will—”

  “Certainly.” Miriam sat still. Her legs ached. Her back ached. Sometimes it felt like she was a single ache held together by willpower: she was a year off fifty, and middle age was not proving to be fun, even without the cancer scare the other year. “As long as you’re done in ten minutes.”

  “Don’t worry, Minister.” That was Jeffrey, her young new PA. Was it just her, or were PAs getting younger every year? And changing faster and faster? Hell, Radical Party Commissioners seemed to be getting younger by the day too, especially since she’d ended up running a ministry of her own—the then-unforeseen but retrospectively inevitable outcome of that prison camp meeting all those years ago. “You’re looking wonderful, madame.”

  “Great.” She kept her face still as Erica dusted her, brushes flicking. Fashions had changed slowly in the New British Empire of old, at least until relatively recently. Fabric and labor had been more expensive than in the United States, so clothing had to be made to last. The Revolution that had overturned the old monarchy and created the New American Commonwealth had done away with the baroque court dress of the old royal court—for which Miriam was sincerely grateful—but the outfits she was expected to wear, as a female Minister presiding over public events, were still elaborate compared with what she’d grown up with. It meant her entourage was large—dressers and makeup artists as well as bodyguards and personal assistants. “Do we have time for one last run-through?”

  Half an hour later she was on stage, standing before a bouquet of bulbous microphones and a flicker of press camera flashes. Beside her were the Mayor of Cambridge, the Citizen Commissioner of Development for the Republic of Massachusetts, and a collection of local Party members and handpicked workers. Then it was time for speechifying:

  “Today is a great day for Cambridge and Massachusetts—and more important, for the entire Commonwealth. The Commonwealth has made great progress in the past fifteen years, but many of our fellow citizens have yet to be exposed to the revolutionary potential of micro-electronics, much less the potential of automation, information technology, and computing that the microprocessor makes possible.”

  Before she’d discovered—or been discovered by—the Clan and learned to world-walk, Miriam had grown up in the United States. She’d worked as a tech journalist during the dot-com boom era. The hackneyed Silicon Valley rhetoric of revolutionary change came easily to her. But to ears raised in the New American Commonwealth it sounded fresh, exciting, and new: they’d barely had vacuum tubes when she arrived. “This factory will showcase the Watertown Semiconductor Cooperative’s first fully integrated fab line: a historic breakthrough. And one day in the future, we’ll be able to put a minicomputer in every school and workplace across the Commonwealth”—not to mention eventually providing the brains for the secure terminals required by the People’s Logistic Allocation Network, in every factory and warehouse and farm across three continents—“training our children for the computerized future they will live in…”

  Keep it as short as possible was one of her guidelines: Miriam had sat through too many of these events, on the other side of the mikes and cameras, to enjoy abusing her captive audience. But: Make it too short and nobody will notice anything you say. And Miriam needed to milk every opportunity to be heard. It wasn’t just everyday politics: it was vitally important to keep the master plan visible in the public eye at all times, gathering momentum, delivering the goods. Or in this case, delivering the first indigenous, crude, eight-bit microprocessors from the Commonwealth’s first civilian semiconductor factory.

  All because the USA was coming.

  Finally it was time for the ribbon-cutting and confetti—the
latter an imported prop, one that had been latched onto with enthusiasm by the locals—and the band struck up a jaunty revolutionary march. Miriam took her place at the end of the receiving line in the factory canteen, beside the union convener and the plant’s magistrate. They were both old hands, deeply wary of each other and of her world-walking self: they clearly had no intention of burying their worker/management hatchet without some discreet external head-banging.

  “Play nicely, now,” she said, smiling at the magistrate over a glass of passable sparkling zinfandel: “We’re in this to make life better for everyone, not just a select few.”

  “In my experience, the nobs don’t settle for just their share of the cake if they think they can ’ave it all,” said the union rep.

  “You’ve got my office number. If you think the managers are overreaching, I assure you my staff will be very interested to hear about it. Just try to remember that my task is to ensure the best outcome for the nation as a whole.” She smiled again to take some of the sting out of the words. “This plant isn’t going to stand still and hammer out the same products for the next thirty years, you know. Today’s chips will be obsolete in five years’ time. The only constant will be change—”

  The line shuffled forward while she shook hands, chatted over her shoulder, and exchanged smiles and the odd greeting with the people before her: they were into the workers now, mostly skilled technical personnel who’d been taken on to run the silicon foundry. She was glad she was wearing gloves: about one in four of them seemed to want to cripple her with their robust handshakes, but at least she wouldn’t need to worry about picking up the flu.

  A young man stood before her, wide-eyed. Something about him didn’t seem quite right: it wasn’t his clothing (a regular worker’s suit, with a cravat after the modern style) or hair (curly, with flyaway locks escaping the grip of his pomade), but rather his curiously fixed expression. Somehow it reminded her of someone she’d seen before. “Hello,” she said, smiling professionally, and reaching out to take his right hand, “how are you today—”