Empire Games Series, Book 1

by Charles Stross

  The door led into a large conference suite, with an outer office. Patrick was waiting there. “Had a good weekend?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” Rita found it impossible to keep a smile off her face. “Thanks for the time off!”

  “Is she an old friend? Or a new one?” He stood up.

  “We were in the Girl Scouts together.” Rita forced her expression back to bland. “What’s this about? What’s going on?”

  Patrick paused with his hand on the inner door. “Everything blew up about six hours ago. Until then, it was hurry up and wait. Now—” He shrugged. “You ready?” His glance reminded Rita that she wasn’t exactly dressed for the office: hair tousled, clothes casual.

  “They’ll just have to take me as they find me,” she said, her assumed levity only half false.

  “Good.” Patrick ushered her in.

  “Hello, Rita.” The Colonel smiled like he was putting a brave face on a toothache.

  There were a couple of other men around the table, overformal in black suits with small gold lapel-pin crosses. Recalling her conversation with Angie, they reminded Rita of Mormon missionaries, except they were too old and senior for that. Their body language showed a subtle deference toward the third interloper. She was a middle-aged woman, her wavy dark hair sprinkled with gray. Rita would have pegged her as an HR manager first or an accountant second, but for the escort. Uh-oh, she thought as Patrick pulled out a chair and motioned for her to sit. “Is there a problem?” she asked quietly.

  “Yes, but you’re not it.” The Colonel’s smile was unreassuring.

  Okay, I’m not in trouble yet but he’s about to throw me in it … “It’s nearly midnight,” she pointed out. “I thought we were going for Tuesday?”

  “Yes, well so did I.” She caught Colonel Smith’s brief sidelong glance at the woman. “Rita, I’d like you to meet Dr. Eileen Scranton. Dr. Scranton is the deputy assistant to the Secretary of State for Homeland Security. “

  “Pleased to meet you, Doctor,” Rita managed to say without stuttering.

  Scranton smiled back graciously. “Likewise, I’m sure.”

  “Eileen is in my immediate reporting chain, two levels up,” the Colonel added. Two levels up from Major General equivalent, Rita translated internally. What does that even mean? “She reports in turn to the Homeland Security Council and, thanks to the miracle of matrix management, to the National Security Council. The HSC being DHS and the NSC being the Defense Department.”

  “Uh—uh—” Rita tried not to hyperventilate. Where does the President come into all this? She had a horrible feeling that the ladder of government didn’t have much headspace above the Homeland Security Council. Suddenly Gomez’s paranoid live-wire act was looking less like an overreaction and more like justifiable caution. “I’m honored. Um. What can I do for you, Doctor?”

  “For me personally, nothing.” Eileen smiled self-deprecatingly. She glanced at Colonel Smith. “I’m just sitting in as a monitor. Ensuring that the Homeland Security Council and National Security Council are fully informed.”

  Informed by a first-person witness, Rita decoded, in case the Colonel is an inaccurate correspondent. Smith looked as relaxed as he ever did, which corresponded to somewhere between overcaffeinated and hitting the crystal meth in normal-person terms. But he certainly didn’t look stressed out or upset, as he might if his superiors were investigating him for running a rogue operation.

  “We’ve become something of a sensation over the weekend.” The Colonel smiled tightly at her. “The Secretary of State was briefed on Saturday, and on Sunday we made headlines in a very small way—on the President’s Daily Brief.” Rita swallowed, queasily nervous. That document was more usually preoccupied by Chinese nuclear battle group maneuvers in the Yellow Sea, or the geopolitical consequences of fluctuations in the price of natural gas in Europe, than by the fifteen-minute foray of an agent blundering around a railway switchyard in the dark. To Rita, who’d grown up carefully keeping her head down, making it onto the Daily Brief felt wrong. “Dr. Scranton is here to ensure that the White House is kept fully informed.”

  Rita dry-swallowed. This was like something out of a bad Hollywood adventure game. “Okay, I guess. I’ll do my best—” She realized her mouth was in danger of running away from her, and forced it into silence.

  “We’re still on for 0300 hours on Tuesday,” Smith added. “Patrick, do you want to take it away?”

  “Um, yeah.” Rita took heart. Patrick was putting a good face on it, but she knew him well enough now to recognize the small signs: he was at least as unnerved as she was. “Our current mission plan repeats and extends the Mission One baseline from Thursday last, adding additional elements that extend the sortie duration to two hours. As before, there will be go/no-go checkpoints and emergency exits at each staging point. The objectives are to revalidate safe insertion protocol, check for signs of adversary awareness, collect uplink data from distributed surveillance nodes, then insert additional surveillance devices…”

  One of the suits who’d blown in with Dr. Scranton raised a hand as soon as Patrick paused. “How exactly are you going to check signs of activity on the part of an adversary you have not yet characterized?”

  Rita stifled a groan: It’s going to be one of those meetings, she realized. Not so much micromanaged as nanomanaged, every footfall to be structured for maximum carefully contrived defensive ass-covering on the part of the stakeholders. Her unique status as the only JAUNT BLUE operative meant that everybody was simultaneously shit-scared of losing her and eager to put their own grubby fingerprints all over the intelligence assessment that would be read by the woman in the Oval Office.

  It was simultaneously fascinating and tedious, like sitting in on one of HaptoTech’s marketing meetings before the trade show. Only Clive would have fired the fingerprint hounds on the spot. I should have stayed over with Angie, Rita realized. Except that, as an opportunity to be a fly on the wall at an intel operation that had just leveled up to Boss, this was unbeatable. Historic, even. The other girls at Spy Camp would have been slack-jawed with envy—and so would their parents.

  PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO; IRONGATE, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020

  It was nearly three in the morning and a light rain was falling when Rita climbed out of the trailer—actually a TV production unit’s mobile dressing room that someone had sprung for—and clumped over to the taped-out transfer location. Her back sagged under the weight of all the crap the committee had insisted she carry. This is just nuts, she thought. Tired and irritable, she wished she were brave enough to throw a quiet tantrum.

  Sunday night’s meeting had bled over into the small hours of Monday morning, then reconvened over coffee and cronuts at two in the afternoon, then run on again until eight. This deprived her of the chance to do more than catch a quick shower and call Angie—just for the blind reassurance of hearing her voice, a tangible reminder that she hadn’t imagined her life taking an extraordinary swerve for the better.

  She also managed to fit in an hour-long nap—one troubled by disturbing dreams of abandonment. Upon waking, the surreal sense of disconnection resumed: Why am I even here? she asked herself. Why can’t I just take the week off? The emotional flash flood, pouring across the rock-hard plain of a life baked by months of drought, made concentrating on what she was supposed to be doing almost impossible. She was besieged by the resurrected ghosts of unquiet memories: hiking together on the Appalachian Trail, lying awake at night in a crowded tent listening to the girl next to her slowly breathing, and wondering—

  For Mission Two, there were three times as many bodies clogging up the parking lot and getting in the way, most of them apparently bag carriers for rubbernecking bosses who couldn’t force themselves to let well enough alone and allow the people who knew what they were doing to get on with the job. Which was basically her, with Patrick for instructions and the DHS armorers and sysadmins for tech support. The Colonel had come along to keep a nervous eye on the teeter-tot
tering hierarchs who had descended from above, as if to watch the launch of a new long-range missile or something. People in expensive suits kept bugging Rita to talk to them, made her repeat herself endlessly until her cheeks were tight from nervous smiling. Even that bitch Sonia Gomez was trying to make nice in her direction. And the floodlights—

  Rita finally cracked. “Will somebody kill those floodlights, please?” Half a dozen mobile telescoping masts with lights on them lit up the parking lot so bright that Rita was beginning to feel the need for sunblock.

  One of the rubberneckers called, “We need them for the cameras—”

  “They’re going to ruin my night vision!”

  Colonel Smith heard her plea and took mercy. “You heard her! Everybody get ready for lights out at T minus five minutes! She needs to adapt to darkness before showtime! Who’s in charge of lighting? You, yes you, I want the floods out, out at T minus five, all of them…”

  The lights began to dim, fading finally to a pointillist sparkle of isolated LEDs that simulated moonlight. It was still too bright, Rita fretted, but her eyes were beginning to adapt. “Are you okay?” Patrick asked quietly from behind her. “Anything you need?”

  Yes: get rid of the circus, she thought. “There are too many people here. Isn’t that a security issue?”

  “Yeah. I’ll have a word with the Colonel. If we’re lucky he can convince Dr. Scranton to lock it down again after this run, but she’s under a lot of pressure from stakeholders who want to get an eyeful of the promised land.”

  “Who do? I mean, what? Why?” Promised land?

  Patrick looked bone-tired. “The Mormons and the Scientologists are duking it out again. They’ll take any excuse: you just have to roll with it. Can I get you anything else? Can of Pepsi?”

  “I don’t want to need a restroom while I’m out there. Have a coffee waiting for me in debrief when I get back?”

  “Good girl.” He patted her shoulder, misjudging the weight of her pack, and she staggered. “Oops. Try not to, uh, break a leg.”

  “Check.”

  “T minus one minute,” some idiot intoned into a bullhorn, fancying himself the ringmaster.

  Rita flipped her night vis goggles down, then squeezed her left forearm carefully. Oh Angie, she thought, please let it not just be my imagination that you—

  “Thirty seconds—”

  She forced herself back into focus. “Lifelogger, go to maximum bandwidth, record everything, and journal to backpack,” she muttered into her throat mike. “Over.” Then she jaunted, twice in rapid succession.

  This time she thought she knew what to expect of the rail yard. So she kept her balance, swung her helmet-mounted glasses round in a circle to take in the tracks, recording everything like a good Girl Scout.

  There were trains, but none of them were moving. Dim starlight gleamed off a distant fence. A faint breeze raised whispers in the overhead wires, and the station buildings formed indistinct black silhouettes on the far side of the tracks. “Headset, new capture map. Bookmark current.” She squatted, then hit the release on her backpack.

  A hefty Peli case thudded to the ground behind her. She turned, squatted, and flipped it open. Dim LEDs began to blink as the data logger began to ping the scattered surveillance devices she’d planted before the weekend. Now she opened the flap covering the other half of the case. Four gunmetal bird-shapes nestled within like legless, beakless pigeons with synthetic sapphire eyes: Raytheon birds that laid Rockwell eggs. She lifted them one at a time, unplugged their charge cables, and ran through the checklist on her head-up display, then stood back as they spread their carbon-fiber wings and lofted into the night.

  Once the micro-UAVs had flown, Rita did another 360 turn. There was nobody in sight: it was as quiet as a graveyard. She flipped the Peli case closed, then armed the dead man’s switch. If all went to plan, she’d pick it up on her return journey. If not, it had a world-walking ARMBAND unit of its own and would jaunt home in two hours. “Set timer to one hour forty-five.”

  She didn’t like to think about what they would do if the base station went home without her. She’d tried to ask Colonel Smith, but he’d flatly changed the subject, not even bothering to evade. “You know better than to ask questions like that.” He’d looked pained, as if she’d turned up to a test without studying for it.

  She’d swallowed. “You know I’ll come home on schedule unless, unless for some reason I can’t. Aren’t you supposed to offer me a cyanide capsule or something? In case I’m captured and tortured?”

  “You won’t be,” he said, with calm reassurance that in retrospect gave her the cold shivers. “We’re monitoring you via the telemetry return module. And your wearable diagnostics”—the harness of electrodes taped to her skin, under her clothes. “If you glimpse someone, you jaunt home. If you fall and break a leg, you jaunt home. If someone shoots at you, you jaunt home. If the locals capture you—and they won’t if you’ve done the other things right—you jaunt home. Your only excuse for not jaunting home is that you’re dead, in which case the JAUNT BLUE program is suspended. The question of what happens after that is one for the National Security Council. It’s not my job or yours to second-guess them.”

  Casting around with her grainy noise-speckled green starlight scopes, Rita discerned no signs of motion. Looking down, she stepped across the first track, knelt, and used the right angle and laser range finder from her right thigh pocket to measure the interrail gap. Five feet, two inches precisely. Keeping her feet on the stony ballast between the sleepers, avoiding contact with the rails, she made her way across the switchyard toward the darkened signal house. Hulking transformers buzzed quietly in a fenced-in cantonment not far from the building, stacked insulators feeding fat cables up to an overhead gantry. Smell of damp wood, oil and ozone, distant trees. Odor of dirt, a slight sulfurous tickle at the back of the throat. An external wooden staircase ran up to the entrance to the signal box on the second floor. It was built of red brick, stained black with soot, and the paint around the window frames was peeling.

  She scanned her environs again, then carefully checked the wall outside the signal box. Telegraph wires led under the eaves, or maybe they were low-voltage power cables—not the heavy traction current from the substation behind the fence—but there were no obvious signs of external alarms. The door at the top of the stairs was wooden, paneled, and secured with a bulky hasp and padlock.

  “This isn’t a forerunner time line,” she said quietly, trusting the telemetry return module to capture her words for posterity. “Use of wood, brick, and natural materials. It’s closer to—”

  There was a sign by the side of the signal box door. Without thinking, she climbed the steps until she was close enough to read it. It was made of embossed metal: rust spots showed through the enameled paint surface.

  “Sign in English. Lifelogger, bookmark this.” She peered closer. “Eastern Imperial Permanent Way Rules and Regulations. Employees only. Trespassers will be Att—Attaindered. Maximum penalty, uh, squiggle fifty slash dash.” Excitement—I can read this! They speak English! Sort of—vied with disappointment—Oh, I can read this, it’s just English.

  She hadn’t brought a lock-pick kit, and she wasn’t proficient enough to waste time fumbling around in the dark with a padlock on a semi-derelict-looking building. She contented herself by gumming a webcam up against one of the panes of glass in the door, where it would have a decent view of everyone working in the building by daylight (and the glass could act as a resonant surface for its mike). Then she descended the stairs and made for the platform with the station office, four tracks away. Her blood was humming in her ears: quick darting glances told her she was still alone.

  The station building was a long, low, single-story structure with a gently sloping roof, sitting on a raised platform island between two tracks—it was clearly designed for passenger trains. Rita guessed its length at about five hundred feet, short by US standards per the briefing from the FRA guy. Do they use it
to bring in the switchyard crew, she wondered, or do they run short commuter trains? Daylight and webcams would tell. She duck-walked along the track bed, checking for signs of activity in the building, then climbed the steps at the end of the platform. It was the work of a minute to climb atop some kind of low retaining wall sized for trolleys or supplies and to stick a couple of webcams to one of the supports of the long station canopy. Then she worked her way along the platform.

  Rita came to what looked to be a waiting room or ticket office, shuttered against the night. There were posters on the wall outside in glass-fronted frames, just like a station at home. There was a timetable: she scanned it carefully at close range, trusting that the list of unfamiliar destinations would be meaningful to some back-office analyst. Other public information notices. She forced herself to glance at them quickly, but not allow herself to become absorbed. Some were strikingly familiar, as if they were a glimpse of home as seen through a semantic fun-house mirror. DEMOCRACY IS ENDANGERED: IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, TELL SOMEONE. That could almost have come from home. But then she came to another: LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION! EQUALITY, DEMOCRACY, LIBERTY. And below it, in smaller lettering, DOWN WITH ROYALISM.

  Hang on, she thought, her perspective expanding dizzyingly, the rusting sign on the signal box door … It had said something about an “Imperial Permanent Way.” And now this: DOWN WITH ROYALISM. What does it mean?

  She came to another locked platform door, beside a window. And for once the window wasn’t shuttered. It was an office, looking out on the platform. Rita peeped inside: there was no sign of life. With her low-powered flashlight, she lit up the room within until her night glasses could see clearly—barely a single lumen sufficed. There were swivel chairs of heavy wood and brass with leather seats, and green metal-topped desks. File cabinets loomed against one wall. A tall electric fan with villainously sharp-looking blades hulked over the largest desk like a frozen mantis. The desk was crowded, with several in-trays and an old-school computer. Paydirt, she realized, and climbed atop a platform bench seat to affix another webcam to the glass, looking in.