Empire Games Series, Book 1

by Charles Stross

  I’m not—Rita managed to hold the words back, with an effort. Familiarity was making it too easy to open up to Colonel Smith and his team of handlers. She needed to focus harder if she was to keep a grip on herself: even surrounded by increasingly familiar faces she felt lonely and defensive. “I’m listening.”

  “You’re listening—what?”

  “I’m listening, sir.”

  Smith nodded, stiffly. “That’s better.”

  “I don’t remember joining the services, sir. Sorry. I do know a, a sandbox when I’m in one. I’m not a mushroom; I don’t thrive in the dark on a diet of bullshit.”

  “No, I don’t suppose you do.” Smith’s lips were thin. “None of us do. And you’re perfectly right, you didn’t swear the oath. And you’re right we’re keeping you in a box. But the less you know about the rest of the Office of Special Programs and DHS, the less you can give away.”

  Give away. “This is the run-up to a covert deployment, isn’t it? You want me to spy for you.”

  “Yes, but”—Smith leaned back and stared at the wall behind and above her head—“I’m having some second thoughts.”

  “Why? Sir.”

  Smith glanced down to meet her gaze. His eyes were pale blue; she found his stare disturbingly intense. “It’s premature. Rita, in all honesty, you’re nowhere near ready for this. The usual recruitment and training structure for a clandestine operative is for us to sound them out in college, security-clear them before hiring, then deploy them on an analysis desk for years of intensive immersion—often with added language training—in the target culture. We evaluate, assess their progress, identify their shortcomings, and assign them more training until they’re perfectly acculturated for the destination. Then we generate their cover identity and background material and inject them.

  “Modern biometrics and DNA databases mean that a clandestine asset gets just one home run in an entire career. If they’re really lucky, if there are two different target nations with a shared culture that don’t get on well enough to share their frontier databases, they might get a second outing under a new identity: but one is the rule. After their covert identity is retired they come home and teach the next generation of agents, or retire to the analysis desk. But they can’t operate in the field again—two different names on passports with the same genetic fingerprint and facial bone structure will start alarm bells ringing. So we don’t deploy agents lightly. We only send the best of the best, and we train them for years first, to make sure we get the most bang for our bucks.”

  “But you—” Rita paused for a moment, assessing her next words carefully. “You grabbed me at zero notice and I’ve only been training for a few months. Did something go wrong? Or were you watching me before?”

  “Yes to both.” Smith leaned forward. “JAUNT BLUE is very new. You’re the first recipient. It only works on non-world-walking descendants of the, the Clan. And we don’t have many of them. If we’d known we’d have it five years ago, you’d probably have been contacted in college, steered toward the right degree. And we’d still be sitting here right now, but you’d be fully trained and cognizant of the reasons for what we’re doing. As it is, though, you’re barely one step above a raw recruit. To make matters worse, we’re completely in the dark about the target society. So we desperately need clandestine resources. You are all we’ve got, and some people I report to who you do not need to know about do not believe we can rely on you. I’d like to prove them wrong, but not at the cost of a blown operation and a dead agent. That would be you.”

  It hit her like a bucket of cold water in the face. “There’s no one else yet?” He shook his head, lips pursed. “How long until…?”

  “Three years, minimum.”

  “But I’m—” She stopped. “Why so long?”

  “We have a very limited pool of JAUNT BLUE candidates, Rita. You’re the oldest.”

  “I’m the oldest?”

  He spoke slowly at first. “Your birth mother and her mother were Clan runaways. There may be other deserters, but despite looking hard we haven’t found them yet. As for the rest … there’s a pool of inactive Q-machine carriers. The Clan were using a fertility clinic in Massachusetts to breed children carrying the trait by the thousand. We found a copy of the breeding program records: but the oldest of the cohort are just turning twenty-one now.”

  “So that’s why you sank all that money into JAUNT BLUE?”

  Smith nodded. “Spending half a billion dollars on one agent wouldn’t make much sense, would it? But if as many as five percent of the Clan’s breeding program clear their background checks and join up, we’ll have the nucleus of a decent clandestine para-temporal intelligence service in five to ten years’ time.”

  “But I’m a, a prototype?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the Clan tried to snatch me off the street because of my birth mother.”

  “Yes.” Smith paused for a fraction of a second too long. Gotcha, Rita thought sourly. “It’s the first hint we’ve had in seventeen years that she may have survived.”

  “Survived what?”

  His gaze focused beyond her again, on some unseen vista of historic failure: “Let’s just say, mistakes were made in the lead-up to 7/16.”

  Rita froze, riveted. “Does that mean what I think it does?”

  Smith refocused on her. “The CIA were in contact with Osama bin Laden before 2001, you know. But that doesn’t mean they were responsible for 9/11. Nor were the Clan an accidental creation of ours. They didn’t give us any concrete demands or try to negotiate before they bombed the White House: I want you to be very clear on that. We stumbled on them and tried to shut them down, and they attacked us with stolen demolition nukes. Escalated straight to mass murder. They left President Rumsfeld no option other than to respond in kind.”

  Rita shied away from thinking about it too hard. There’d been rolling video footage for weeks all over the TV and Internet when she was eight. First, the Washington Monument toppling on a shock wave, a fiery cloud rising where the White House had been. Then a month later, the horrors of New Delhi and Islamabad: when the news of world-walking broke, the cold war between India and Pakistan had abruptly turned nuclear. World War 2.5 they’d called it afterwards. Finally, unrolling beneath a camera mounted in the tail of a high-altitude US Air Force bomber, the TV news brought home the US government’s revenge on the world-walkers’ home time line. A field of ghastly flaming mushroom clouds had risen in parallel lines, spanning the horizon and bisecting the pale neck of history like a blow from a headsman’s axe.

  “You’ve seen Camp Singularity, and the dome and the Gate,” Colonel Smith nudged her mercilessly toward the precipice. “What happened there was even worse than 7/16. Rita, the forerunners may be dead, or they may still be out there. We don’t know. They may be connected with the Clan world-walkers. Again, we don’t know. The JAUNT BLUE Q-machines didn’t evolve naturally, that’s for sure. What we do know, via mitochondrial DNA studies of captured Clan members, is that they all share a common ancestor who lived less than two and a half centuries ago. From what we know of the Clan’s world they could no more build Q-machines than Benjamin Franklin could build an H-bomb. So all the evidence points to a high-technology para-time civilization that was active in the recent historic past. We think the Clan may actually be descended from a deserter or runaway from that civilization—like your birth grandmother—but as I said, we just don’t know for sure.”

  Without realizing she was doing it, Rita had raised her left fist to her mouth: now she found herself gnawing on her knuckles. “So you found them. That’s what this is all about.”

  “We don’t know,” Smith said gently. “We want you to find out.”

  “If they’re the Clan’s ancestors? Or, or the forerunners? Or their enemies?”

  “They might be any of the above, or something else entirely. We don’t know. All we know is that we opened up a new time line recently. This one was accessible via those parts of time li
ne one—the Clan’s former home—that don’t still glow in the dark. Which suggests a Clan connection. We lost three reconnaissance drones in rapid succession when we started trying to map it. But the fourth drone survived and brought back some highly-suggestive photographs.”

  “Another dome?”

  “Nothing so high-tech. It looks like a big railway freight switchyard, near the site of downtown Allentown on our time line. On the outskirts of Philly. There are buildings and probably a city as well, but it’s not ours.”

  “Railway freight—” Rita frowned, puzzling over the drip of data. “But so far all the time lines we’ve found have been uninhabited or Stone Age, haven’t they? Apart from Camp Singularity.”

  “Yes.” Smith gave her an encouraging smile. “Pretend you’re a fully trained analyst. What does that tell you?”

  “The forerunners built the Gate. They had unimaginable powers. Still, it’s hard to see them building railroads, isn’t it?”

  “Carry on.”

  “But … a freight yard?” The dust of history classes stirred in her memory. “That means they’re industrialized. They’ve got steam locomotives, at a minimum, and enough factories and stuff to need heavy rail freight? And we still use rail freight for shipping goods around. Hang on. We lost three drones?”

  Smith nodded again, seeing the horror dawning in her widening eyes. “Carry on.”

  “You found an industrial civilization that can shoot down high-altitude reconnaissance drones? With stealth technology? Oh sh—” She bit her knuckles again to stifle the curse.

  “Stealth isn’t a magic invisibility cloak. It’s more like camouflage: it works best from certain angles. And it doesn’t work at all if your opponents are sneaky enough. It’s no good being invisible to radar if you fly through a storm by mistake—the bad guys can look for the hole in the rain that’s moving at six hundred miles per hour. We’ve spent so long snooping on jihadis in the tribal territories on the Afghan border, or rock-bangers with flint hand axes in undeveloped time lines, that we’ve forgotten how to deal with a real threat. So now we’ve got this headache time line and we’re having to relearn old skills fast.

  “Now, we might be looking at a Victorian level of technology, given those railways—but it’s highly unlikely that we lost three UAVs by accident. It’s much more likely that we’re looking at, at a minimum, a time line with 1950s technology. That’s radar and surface-to-air missiles. Nuclear weapons are a distinct possibility. Which is why your superiors and mine are quietly screaming for intelligence that simply doesn’t exist. They’re looking in a mirror that’s showing them their own response to first contact with another para-time civilization, and they don’t much like what they see. Especially as there’s a risk that this time line is more developed than we are. Or that they’re being watched by the forerunners. We don’t know.”

  “Oh Jesus.” Rita stared at Smith, her mind whirling. “So, um. That’s what you want me for, isn’t it? You think a mid-twenties female with acting skills can sneak in and quietly look around and report back on … everything?” He didn’t need to nod this time. She continued: “It’s not going to be quick. We don’t know what language they speak, do we? Or what they wear? What they look like, whether I’ll stand out because of my appearance?”

  Smith nodded again. “If you take it on, it’s not going to be easy. In fact, it’s potentially extremely hazardous. If we had more time, I’d send you on courses in social anthropology and ethnography first. Also for training with field anthropologists. Not to mention more work on personal self-defense and espionage tradecraft, because you’re going to be unarmed except for your JAUNT BLUE ability. On the other hand, if you agree to do this for us, we’ll give you all the support we can provide. Clothing, money, covert recording instruments—”

  “Money?”

  “Well, assuming they use money and you can get us some samples, we have friends in the Treasury Department who spend all their time examining forgeries. This will be a nice change for them, don’t you think? And you’ve got another huge advantage over a conventional clandestine agent: you can choose your insertion point. It could be virtually anywhere, as long as nobody’s watching.”

  “Wow.” It was an enormous picture. Assuming it was true, it also shed a new light on his willingness to manipulate her. And despite having hard evidence that he’d lied to her in the past to railroad her into this position, she couldn’t imagine why he might want to lie to her about this now. “It’s huge, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Rita, it’s an enormous responsibility. It’s the sharp end of a mission that, done right, could save us from a nuclear war. Done wrong—you don’t want to think about that.”

  She bit her lip. “When do I start? And where?”

  “Tomorrow morning you’re going to an installation outside Philly—as near as we can place it to that railroad yard. The Unit is setting up a forward support site right now, and once you’re checked in we’ll begin drafting an operational checklist and insertion plan. If, that is, you’re volunteering?”

  The Unit. It had an ominous ring to it. Yet another sandbox, to keep Rita hemmed in and ignorant of what was really going on. “I don’t feel ready for this. There’s no alternative, is there?”

  Smith spoke haltingly: “I am not … going to … strong-arm you into saying yes. If there’s one thing worse than having no agent, it’s having an agent who is scared out of their wits and doesn’t want to be there. So, uh. You are allowed to say ‘no,’ if you really don’t think you’re up to it.”

  “But if I say no … there’s no one else who can do this job, is there?” she asked, deliberately pushing him toward another lie. Go on, tell me the truth, just this once. She knew it was foolish, but she found his evasion inexpressibly depressing.

  “I wish there were. I really wish there were. But we’re out of time.”

  Rita nodded reluctantly. So she was working for an unscrupulous liar. Worse: one who didn’t see anything wrong with lying because his motives were entirely pure. What should I do? she wondered. Then, What would Grandpa say?

  PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  “Rocks,” Rita said disbelievingly. “Really?”

  “Yup. Rocks.” Patrick, her supervisor from Camp Graceland and now, it seemed, her field officer, hefted a chunk of misshapen pink granite a couple of inches long. “Like this one.”

  “What’s so special about them?” Rita shifted her weight. The cheap conference seat creaked unfairly beneath her. I’m not that heavy! she complained silently. Like everything else on this site—an office suite attached to a light industrial unit in Allentown, on the outskirts of Philly—it was secondhand and had seen better days.

  “It’s instrumented. The batteries are good for seven days, during which it will continuously record meteorological conditions and high-definition video—optical and infrared—whenever anything moves around it. It can report over Bluetooth if you go within a hundred feet of it while carrying an active transponder that’s paired with it, but it doesn’t broadcast its presence. This one”—Patrick picked up another object, which resembled a battered length of two-by-four—“has a six-month life, and inertial sensors. It works with a transponder disguised as a different rock. You drop the transponder in the switchyard and toss the mobile unit on top of a caboose or a shunting engine and it builds a map of the track network as it gets pushed around, then calls in whenever it comes back to the same switchyard. Uh, you probably don’t want to put it on a goods wagon, though. Not unless you want it to go on an extended tour of North America.”

  “Uh-huh.” Rita stared at Patrick’s rock and scrap collection. “So what’s the plan?”

  “The plan is to build out our knowledge of the target time line, starting with somewhere relatively safe. We know there’s a railroad yard, so we want you to go through there at night and scatter sensors around a couple of key areas without being seen. The first mission will be a double-jaunt into the switchyard via a place you do not want to
linger in. It’ll be a quick in-and-out, fifteen minutes max. We leave the sensors in place for a day, then you go back to collect them. That gives us a preliminary site survey, so we can pick a better insertion site for the next mission, when you will plant hidden cameras and mikes on platforms and offices. We need to know a whole lot more—what language they speak, whether it’s related to any that we know, what their writing looks like, what they wear, their ethnicity or physical appearance—before we can develop a covert program.”

  “An entire program?” It was a daunting prospect. “But I’m just one woman, what can I—”

  “You’re the spearhead for BLACK RAIN,” Patrick interrupted. His expression was serious. “That’s the code word for this operation, to investigate this time line. We need you to spy out the lay of the land. Your goal is to establish a toehold, learn the basics, and finally identify a safe location on the other side where we can drop non-world-walkers. Then they can take over the heavy lifting. Once we’ve established a transfer gate you won’t be needed there again—but we’ll probably want to do the same thing elsewhere. Maybe even overseas.”

  Rita stared at the rocks apprehensively. “What if they discover the rocks?”

  “They’ll be disguised as track ballast. Over here we lay three thousand tons of the stuff per mile of track. Even if they figure out there’s a bug in the ballast, searching a switchyard for passive transponders would be like looking for needles in a haystack the size of Iowa. You’ll only be able to find them yourself because we’ll give you a signaling device that can make them flash an infrared LED for your night vision goggles.”

  “And if they have infrared floodlights and CCTV, like an Amtrak depot?”

  Patrick shook his head. “Then you cut and run, and we have a very big headache. Rita, our number one priority here is to get you back safely. Never doubt that! Because you can tell us far more about what’s going on than any dumb sensor.”