Empire Games Series, Book 1

by Charles Stross

  She pointed at the door. “On the other side of that airlock there’s a walkway into the Gate. It’s a gate into another time line. One where there’s no Earth. We built a receiving area and laboratory on the far side, but there’s a risk of micrometeoroid impacts, hence the suits. Part of the dog and pony show is that the Colonel wants you to use your magic JAUNT BLUE thing to log your knotspace location before you step through the Gate, and again on the other side. You’re not to try and jaunt there, you understand—you’d die, with or without a space suit. But he wants to see if you can log it, and if it agrees with readings we’ve taken using other devices.”

  Her heart pounded. “But why? I mean, couldn’t they just map the knotspace location anyway?”

  “He wants you to do it. So that you get to see what’s on the other side of it.”

  “But what’s so hazardous? Apart from vacuum?”

  “There’s no there there. The lab is anchored to the Gate and there’s gravity, but there’s no surface, just a point mass several thousand miles down. Because on this side the Gate is sitting on the surface of the Earth, the far side is being carried around the point mass at a few hundred miles per hour as the Earth rotates. That’s well below orbital velocity, so if you jaunted through to that time line you’d fall below ground level really fast. Best case, if you didn’t fall right into the center, is that you’d eventually drift up: in which event, if you jaunted back at exactly the right moment and had a parachute, you might survive. But if you drifted too far down, or got too close to the center—”

  “Yeah, I get it.” Rita’s mouth was dry. “So the Gate’s in two time lines at once, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. That’s why it’s a gate.” Julie pulled the heavy airlock door open and walked inside. A red line painted along the floor of the room continued up the far wall, bisecting the door opposite. “Come on in. I’ve done this dozens of times—it’s routine as long as you don’t screw up.”

  “Okay. Just a minute.” Rita paused on the threshold and squeezed her left forearm, hoping she’d remembered the multitouch gesture correctly and that it would register through the padding of her skinsuit. Then she followed Julie into the chamber. “I’m ready now.”

  “Don’t let the airlock hit you on the ass.” Julie pulled the door closed and dogged it. “Hold the handrail and follow me.” Demonstrating, she walked across the red line. “Come on, nothing to it.”

  Rita followed her. A faint wave of nausea gripped her stomach as she stepped over the red line, but it had to be her imagination. There was no way her inner ear could register her sudden departure from the universe of light and air and gravity, was there?

  “That was the Gate. Easy, wasn’t it?” said Julie. She paused before the opposite airlock hatch. “Pressure’s equal. I’m opening up.” She rotated a handwheel and pulled the door open. “Come on inside.” Julie left the airlock; Rita followed, marveling. She’d seen the old movies 2001 and Apollo 13: Okay, so now I’ve fallen into a sci-fi flick she thought dizzily. It was a giant leap too far: all disbelief faded, burned out like an overloaded fuse. They were in a dimly lit corridor, lined with velcro pads and cable ducts, with drawers on all four walls. A docking node at the far end contained sealed hatches to either side. Inset in the floor, a cluster of windows like the nose of a Second World War bomber opened onto starry darkness. “That’s the cupola,” Julie told her. “It’s a duplicate of the one on the international space station.” Rita drifted toward it, fascinated.

  “Why is it here?” she asked.

  “We need to study the singularity. Right now there’s nobody posted here—they’re all in their regular weekly team meeting back in the dome. But we’ve usually got a crew who keep an eye on it: astrophysicists, mostly, but also the life-support engineers who keep the whole thing running. Unlike the international space station, we can feed it power and air and hydraulics through the Gate and commute home daily. So we ripped out a whole lot of stuff NASA would have needed. But it still takes a lot of TLC to keep it running and safe to work in.”

  “What’s the singularity?” Rita asked as she peered through the big circular window at the bottom of the cupola. There were stars. As her eyes adjusted to the semidarkness, she saw more and more of them. Centered in it was a dim, glowing blue cloud, about as big as the full moon but fuzzy around the edges. A violent pinprick glare at its heart illuminated it from within.

  “It’s a planetary-mass black hole. The glow you can see is coming from the accretion disk around it. The hole itself is only about a centimeter in diameter, but it’s still chowing down on all the gas and debris that leaked through the Gate before we plugged it. Stuff heats up down there due to friction and tidal drag as it falls in. So that glowing dot is actually at about a billion degrees, putting out as much energy as a ten-megaton nuke every second. Luckily it’s eight thousand kilometers away, or we’d be toast. We’re not in orbit around it: we’re effectively hanging off the end of a bridge to nowhere, the other end of which is anchored back in the dome. We think”—Julie paused—“it’s all that’s left of the Earth in this time line. After the forerunner adversaries crushed it.”

  Rita stared. “The Colonel wanted me to see…”

  “Yeah.” Julie was silent for a few seconds. “Whoever did this could still be out there, Rita. Somewhere in para-time.”

  Rita swallowed. “They crushed the Earth down to a black hole?”

  “Just like the Clan world-walkers nuked the White House.”

  Julie was watching her, Rita realized: wearing her DHS agent hat. Doubtless she’d write up a report for the Colonel. A horrible realization struck her. “This Earth, the one that was crushed—it was inhabited, wasn’t it?”

  Julie shrugged, the gesture almost invisible in her space suit. “Probably. Who can tell?”

  But why would anyone destroy an uninhabited planet? Rita thought, sickened. “But if they’re still out there…”

  Julie completed the thought for her: “… it’s our job to make sure this doesn’t happen to our time line.”

  Deployment

  NEW LONDON, TIME LINE THREE, MAY 2020

  Miriam was deeply asleep, dreaming of an earlier life in another world’s Boston, when the red telephone rang.

  Once upon a time she’d been a go-getting business journalist, working for a high-profile magazine that covered the BosWash tech community. Her particular beat was the Cambridge/Boston biotech start-up sector, but she’d covered other businesses too, until her investigation into the connection between a chain of secondhand car dealerships and a medical clinic had cost her her job—and nearly her life.

  That kind of journalism didn’t exist anymore in the United States. Caught in the crossfire between the Internet’s corrosive impact on advertising and the burgeoning security state’s disapproval of unauthorized snoopers and unembedded media, it had died out a decade ago; and in any case her path had taken her unimaginably far from there. But she still dreamed of it from time to time, oppressed by a vaguely claustrophobic sense of nostalgia for her youth in a land of opportunity, when she’d been driving toward goals she’d long since outgrown. These days her objectives were so huge, shimmering in the distant heat haze of the future like a Mosaic vision of the promised land: she no longer expected to live to see them.

  It was three in the morning, and she was dreaming that she was on a conference call in the Insider’s offices, waiting on the line to speak to a source in a monoclonal antibody start-up while an inexplicable earthquake rumbled. The telephone began to ring, louder and louder. It wasn’t the single long ring of an American phone, but a sequence of three short trills, then a pause, then three more. A Commonwealth telephone, summoning her to—

  She rolled over and, barely awake, reached for the handset on the nightstand. “Burgesons. Miriam here.” Beside her Erasmus thrashed and snorted loudly, stopped snoring, and sat up.

  “Commissioner? This is Commonwealth Crisis Command, I have General Benn on the line for you. Is Commissioner—the
other Commissioner—Burgeson with you? This is an all-ears Cabinet flash.”

  The bedside light flickered on. Miriam rolled on her back and pushed herself up against the headboard. Her husband looked at her: “Flash message for both of us,” she said.

  Seconds passed as Erasmus untangled the telephone cord on his side of the bed and other Commissioners joined the party line. Miriam waited, heart pounding. The cobwebs of sleep were fading, replaced by bone-deep fatigue and apprehension. Is it the French? she wondered.

  “Citizens?” A new voice came on the line: “This is Colonel-General Benn, watch commander at Triple-C. I am calling this Cabinet flash because Air Defense Command has just reported the shoot-down of a high-altitude radar-occult aircraft, sixty nautical miles off the New England coast. A capital weapon was used to complete the interception. Air Defense has had a system-wide alert in force just in case the intruder was French, but observation and backtracking suggests the intruder materialized out of nowhere—it was traveling out to sea when ADC lit it up—and was well within the Capital Defense Zone. In accordance with standing orders, we are declaring War Condition Two. The Continental Bombardment Force is scrambling its petard carriers to their dispersal stations. The Continuity Authority has been activated, and I am now notifying Commissioners and Senators of the crisis. Thank you for your attention.”

  The line crackled for a couple of seconds, then a new voice spoke. “Commissioners Burgeson and Burgeson? The First Man is on his way to his designated location. He has asked for you to join him for a meeting at nine.”

  Miriam made eye contact with Erasmus. He grimaced and mouthed a quiet obscenity. “We’ll be ready to go in fifteen minutes,” she told the caller.

  “Excellent, ma’am. A rotodyne is on its way to collect you. It will touch down on the near end of Soldier’s Field shortly.”

  Erasmus was already pulling on yesterday’s trousers as Miriam put the phone down and shoved the bedding aside to stand up. He coughed horribly for a few seconds, then straightened up. “This can’t be good.”

  “No.” Feeling shaky, Miriam opened her wardrobe and pulled out her emergency go-bag. There was an appropriate outfit folded neatly in a paper bag atop it, a ladies trouser-suit not unlike a shalwar kameez. She dressed rapidly, then rang the service bell. “Erasmus and I have been called away suddenly,” she spoke into the intercom. “We’ll need help with our luggage.”

  “I’ll send Jack up to carry it, ma’am.” It was Jenny the housekeeper; she sounded sleepy and confused. “How long shall you be gone?”

  “No idea,” Miriam said tersely. Her knees ached and her hair was a rat’s nest. Even so, Erasmus looked worse, his shirt rumpled and his neckcloth unfastened. “We need to be out at the double, on our way in ten minutes.”

  Soldier’s Field public park opened off the far end of the crescent their house faced. It was flat and level and the size of several football fields, surrounded by a border of neatly manicured trees. The huge rotodyne descended onto the grass with a screeching roar from the ramjets on the ends of its rotor blades, landing lights glaring. The rotors kept spinning while it squatted on the field, doubtless waking the dead across a radius of miles. The rotodyne was a triumph of brute-force engineering over subtlety, a heliplane—halfway between a big transport helicopter and a turboprop troop carrier—the product of a road not taken in the US due to noise and fuel-thirst, but effective nonetheless.

  Lights were coming on in homes all around as Miriam and Erasmus duck-walked toward it, guided by a pair of airmen. Doubtless radios and televisions were coming on too. The news that the Air Defense Command had just shot down an unidentified intruder nearly seventy miles out past Cape Cod using a corpuscular weapon couldn’t be kept quiet. The distant flare of the two-megaton warshot would have been visible all the way from Boston to Baltimore.

  It was too loud to talk inside the aircraft as it spun up to takeoff power, but once they transitioned to level flight and the tip jets throttled back, things were no worse than on any other military turboprop. Miriam managed to make herself heard: “How long are we going to be airborne?”

  “Only forty minutes, ma’am; we’re making nearly two hundred knots. We’ll have you inside the designated location within the hour.”

  Miriam frowned and glanced at Erasmus. He nodded, his face ashen. The New American Commonwealth didn’t—yet—have anything like the USA’s airborne command posts. The metallurgy for efficient high-bypass turbofans—engines that could keep a drone or a jumbo jet airborne for days on end—was tantalizingly close. In the meantime, the Commonwealth leadership had a radically different protocol for maintaining command during a nuclear war.

  “I’m going to dose up,” she told her husband. “They might need me to jump—”

  “Not on my watch,” he said firmly. “Not unless the petards are falling. We need you lucid, not moaning from a killer migraine.”

  “Thanks.” She squeezed his hand. “Still dosing up, mind.” The small bottle held two gelatin capsules: a devil’s brew of antihypertensives and painkillers. They were the Commonwealth’s best self-administered solution to the effects of world-walking.

  The rotodyne screeched on through the night, props and rotors thundering. Fifteen minutes into the flight the radio operator came aft, saluted, and handed Erasmus a teleprinted message. He skimmed it, then passed it wordlessly to Miriam.

  INTRUDER DETECTED 0219 HOURS

  RADAR CONTACT LAT 41°40′16.92″N LONG 69°24′32.15″W ALTITUDE 64,400 FEET BEARING 066°58′ GROUND SPEED 590 MPH

  FLIGHT PLAN ABSENT BREAK FOE IDENTITY FAILED BREAK HAIL UNANSWERED BREAK

  MISSILE INTERCEPT PLAN ISSUED AT 0230 HOURS

  MISSILE BATTERY ENGAGED TARGET AT 0234 HOURS

  INTRUDER PRESUMED DESTROYED BY ZEUS-IV MISSILE AT 0237 HOURS

  LAST CONTACT AT LAT 41°43′51.32″N LONG 68°18′9.44″W ALTITUDE 64,800 FEET BEARING 066°58′ GROUND SPEED 582 MPH

  “They didn’t mess around,” Miriam muttered, heedless of her throat mike. Zeus-IV was a long-range surface-to-air nuclear missile. It was unguided and unjammable, but able to reach out and swat an enemy aircraft with a two-megaton warhead from over a hundred miles away. Brute-force weapons like the old Nike-Hercules had gone out of fashion in the USA during the 1970s, as sensitive electronics proliferated. A Zeus strike would burn out every unshielded microprocessor within fifty miles. Luckily unshielded microprocessors were a rarity in the Commonwealth, and would remain so thanks to MITI-dictated national shielding standards.

  Miriam was still shaken from learning a nuclear weapon had just been fired in anger for the first time in nearly twenty years. And at a stealthy intruder capable of flying as high and fast as a U-2, that had appeared out of thin air. “This wasn’t the French,” she said in a thin voice. “They don’t have the tech and they know better than to tug our tail like that. No, this is an escalation over last month’s incidents.”

  The earlier American drones had popped up in controlled airspace far to the south-west, flying fat and happy at medium altitude. Air Defense Command had scrambled their shiniest missile-armed supersonic interceptors and used them for target practice. Afterward, DPR’s analysts had identified the recovered wreckage as coming from MQ-1 Predators, obsolescent unmanned turboprops so embarrassingly outclassed that even the French could have shot them down. This new contact was a much more potent adversary.

  “The sooner we get to the Redoubt the better.” Erasmus sounded no happier than she felt. Sick terror twisted her stomach, until she feared she’d need to reach for the bag under her seat. She hadn’t seen the bombs fall on the Gruinmarkt, but her mother had. Iris had described them in morbid detail, and suffered from nightmare flashbacks for the rest of her life. (A row of distant flashbulbs, their sullen heat refracted through cloud, popping in the distance. Then another row of hell-sparks, detonating closer. Ripples in the bloodstained sky as the overlapping shock waves tore apart the cloudscape. Panic as the burning rain crept closer, deceptively s
lowly, dripping from a storm front of bombers traveling just below the speed of sound.) They’d sent scouts to the Gruinmarkt shortly afterward—wearing dosimeters and protective clothing, and keeping a low profile in case the USA had monitors in place. When Miriam had seen the photographs, she’d thrown up, then slept badly for a week.

  “It’s too soon. We’re not ready; the JUGGERNAUT program is nowhere near ready—”

  He looked at her tiredly. “We can’t use that thing.”

  “No, but if we demonstrated we had a superweapon of that caliber they’d have to back down. Deterrence works, love. Game theory doesn’t lie. It worked for half a century back in my—in the old world. It’s working for us on the French. When JUGGERNAUT is complete and we’ve made overt contact, nobody will be crazy enough to attack us.”

  His chest rose and fell, wheezing. After a few seconds he reached into his coat pocket and removed a small metal aerosol inhaler. After he used it, the panting slowly subsided. A minute later he could speak again. “Your faith in psychology is wonderfully strong, dear.” He gave her a crooked little smile, clearly more worried than he was prepared to admit. “Right now, we’re boxing blindfolded with hand grenades taped to our gloves. We need intelligence; we need to know who and what we’re up against.”

  “I’ve got people working on it,” Miriam reassured him as the engine note of the turboprops shifted, heralding the start of their descent. I just hope they deliver before it’s too late.

  BALTIMORE, TIME LINE TWO, JULY 2020

  “What do you want from me?” Rita tried to keep a whine of frustration from creeping into her voice. “I don’t understand where this is going.”

  Smith looked at her disapprovingly from across the expanse of his desk. “Rita, calm down. It’s not about you.” The tension in his shoulders said something like God give me strength. “We have a problem. A very special kind of problem. One you might be able to help us with, if you can stop acting like a drama queen for five minutes.”