Empire Games Series, Book 1

by Charles Stross

  Rita noticed Smith’s brief expression of unease. Is that some sort of euphemism? she wondered. “The disinform reports may include elements of legitimate intel if, and only if, we have no reason to redact it—the best lies are parsimonious. In other words, as far as the peanut gallery is concerned, JAUNT BLUE deployment and orientation in BLACK RAIN will continue as planned. In reality, we anticipate that Rita’s tasking will increasingly diverge from the BLACK RAIN road map over time.” The undersecretary turned her unblinking gaze on Rita. “What do you understand from all this?”

  Rita’s lips were suddenly dry. “Jesus.” She tried to gather her scattered thoughts. “You’re, uh, exposing the operation internally so that you can use it as cover for a deeper operation? In the BLACK RAIN time line?”

  Dr. Scranton nodded slowly. Her face, no longer poker-still, was nevertheless serious. “They’ve got nukes, Rita. They’re at least late-1960s in technology terms. They’ve got computers and tanks and the proven ability to detect and shoot down stealthed drones. In some ways they’re ahead of us: they’ve got containerized multimodal transport, and they’ve also got electrified freight and high-speed trains. If you were in the White House, what would you be thinking?”

  “I’d be thinking—” Oh God, we’re fucked. If they have world-walkers, we are so fucked. “It’s a good thing they don’t have world-walkers, isn’t it?”

  Scranton nodded. Then she reached into her handbag and pulled out a tablet. “Watch this,” she said, toneless as an executioner as she handed the device to Rita.

  “Watch—”

  Grainy CCTV video showed a sidewalk on a quiet city street. A middle-aged woman, her black hair scraped back, walked into a questionable-looking establishment, half diner, half bodega.

  Cut to: red brick buildings, shuttered windows, locked doors.

  A man dressed in last year’s hipster uncool, with heavy-rimmed spectacles and urban sidewalk-warrior hybrid bicycle accessory, stepped out of a door.

  “Brooklyn, back in late March this year,” said Scranton. “Five months ago.”

  Under-eave cameras chased the cycle-hipster up an alleyway, along a street, up another alley, and into a wider avenue. Eventually he chained up his bike, shouldered his messenger bag, and approached the same diner as the woman.

  “Everyone knows about face recognition algorithms,” remarked Scranton. “They think wearing hoodies will conceal them. Somewhat fewer people know about ear recognition, but it’s a big deal: ears are nearly as unique as fingerprints. And then there’s gait recognition—you can’t easily change the length of the bones in your legs, so we’ve got software that can identify people by the way they walk. You’ll know it’s gone viral when you start seeing news footage of bank robbers in veils and hoopskirts. And of course everyone knows their fatphone camera can recognize cats.”

  “What most people don’t know yet is that we’ve got arbitrary package recognition,” said the Colonel. He sounded amused. “Bag recognition software. Mulberry, Ted Baker, Hot Tuna. Or in this case, Crumpler. Twenty-liter capacity. The bag goes in thin, it comes out fat.”

  “Look at the woman, Rita,” said Dr. Scranton. Something in her tone made Rita tense up, like fingernails on glass. “Look at her.”

  Rita froze the CCTV stream, backed up, and pinch-zoomed on the woman as she entered the diner, blowing her up until the image pixelated.

  “That woman,” said Dr. Scranton, “Is a former coworker of your birth mother, Miriam Beckstein. Her messenger bag, when she entered, was bulging: when she leaves, it’s clearly lighter. The man”—a bony finger stabbed at the screen—“we don’t know who he is. The Transit Police lost him in Brooklyn. We dumpster-dived the trash after they both left. He’s not on the National DNA Database, but we sequenced DNA traces off his meal tray, and they tested positive for the modified glutamate receptor required for JAUNT BLUE. Then we did a full workup. He’s your third cousin twice removed, Ms. Douglas.”

  Rita froze, chewing her lower lip. She felt oddly unaffected. “So he’s a world-walker. From the Clan. And she’s a, a covert asset.” She paused. “Why haven’t you lifted them?”

  “Because reasons.” Dr. Scranton stood, clutching her coffee mug, and began to pace jerkily, her power heels digging notches in the deep pile carpet. “Like I said, we nearly lifted him on the New York subway. The more pressing question is Ms. Milan—that woman. The FBI investigated her shortly after 7/16; they concluded she was harmless: a first-degree contact, not an associate. It now appears that they were wrong and she was a sleeper. Now she’s awake and she’s supplying one of their couriers with … you don’t need to know.

  “Anyway, he hasn’t shown up since that meeting. We’re now monitoring her activities, and next time the Clan make contact we’ll snatch them both. But the core takeaway we want you to be aware of is that enemy world-walkers are currently active in the United States—keeping a very low profile but conducting industrial espionage. And BLACK RAIN is one jaunt away from the Clan’s old stomping ground. Now do you understand why we’re briefing you on this?”

  “You’re afraid the BLACK RAIN people have world-walkers. And tanks, and computers, and nuclear weapons—”

  “Yes, and we know practically fuck-all about them. Except that what we do know is enough to have the President climbing the walls—well, she’s not, but only because she’s got liquid helium for blood. She is pushing for results, Rita, so we need to move to Phase Two and Phase Three fast, to get safe houses established so we can install ARMBAND transporters and send regular clandestine specialists through to establish a presence. But the real problem is that we urgently need to confirm whether or not BLACK RAIN have world-walkers. World-walkers would make BLACK RAIN a deadly strategic threat to us. And especially if they’re Clan revenants. Or, worst of all, if they’re in contact with the forerunners. Meanwhile, we’ve got to proceed on the assumption that the Clan are still preying on us, that they’ve penetrated our security perimeter, and that if this operation leaks they’ll be in a position to make us pay. Which is why I’m imposing the lockdown. I have a Presidential Letter authorizing me to set up an inner cell within the Unit, within the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Special Programs. And I am authorized to lie to everyone outside the cell, up to and including the National Security Council. Congress and the Supremes, if necessary.

  “This is a matter of national survival, Rita. And that’s why, sooner or later, on one of your missions into BLACK RAIN—not this one, but once you’ve got the lie of the land and established a safe location for clandestine ops with ARMBAND units to transfer, and once we have some idea of the political situation—we are going to ‘lose’ you.

  “Because we need to open a back-channel for negotiations.”

  PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  After clocking off until the next day, Rita set her alarm for a three-hour afternoon nap. She woke, showered, and checked her Facebook Friends page. As promised, Angie had changed her relationship status from “single” to “in a relationship.”

  She swallowed, heart pounding. With a tremulous feeling she couldn’t identify—somewhere between exultation and doom—she tapped on her profile. Watched the page flicker as it reloaded. With a sense of reckless abandon, she changed her status and tagged Angie as her partner. It gave her a shivery sensation in the pit of her stomach. She hadn’t gotten around to doing this with Kate: she’d sheltered in the ambiguity of her own emotional shadows, unsure about her own identity. And the uncertainty had eaten away at Kate’s trust until, in the end, it proved insufficient unto the day …

  To Rita’s generation, tagging a partner on FB was as public a display of commitment as wearing an engagement ring had been to her parents’. (Minus the size of the stone, of course. Checkboxes came in a single size, enforcing a social uniformity that left no room for carat-denominated ego preening.) So she was tiredly unsurprised when her wall exploded with distant tinny congratulations. And then, ten minutes later, her phone rang
.

  “Are you working, love?”

  She swallowed. The monosyllable still stunned her with its implications. “I’m free tonight. But they want me tomorrow—I’m on day shift for a while…”

  “Great! I’ll be right over!”

  Head still foggy from a disrupted sleep cycle, but fundamentally, anomalously, almost distressingly happy, Rita barely noticed what she was doing as she packed her suitcase. The checkbox on her soul was slower to respond than the one on her Facebook profile, but it felt as if everything in her life was slowly rearranging around it. The idea of spending another night in this characterless, concrete commuter cage filled her with revulsion. Then the hotel phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Ms. Douglas? Front desk here. There’s a Ms. Hagen to see you?”

  Rita started. “Uh, send her up?” A minute later, the doorbell rang. She walked to the door, leaving her half-packed suitcase behind: “Hey, room service sent me an Angel!”

  “Surprise!” It was her rustbelt girl. She opened the door, and Angie stepped inside. She opened her arms to accept her checkbox’s reward and found herself, an hour later, lying in a twisted wreckage of hotel bedding and discarded clothes. “Hey, you fell on your feet, girl! This is some nice shit they’re putting you up in.”

  “I, I was hoping to spend the night at your place instead?” Rita rested her head inside the protective curve of Angie’s arm. “If you can cope with a roomie, I mean. I’m getting to hate hotels; I’ve been living out of a suitcase for the past year.”

  “I didn’t know you were homeless.” Angie sounded amused.

  “No, I’m not homeless—well, not exactly.” Her shared lease with Alice on the apartment outside Cambridge had expired while she was in Camp Graceland, and Alice had found a new flatmate. The Unit had kindly cleared Rita’s possessions out and stashed her stuff in storage. Meanwhile, her modest pay was stacking up in her account faster than she could spend it. “I’ve got a job—they just keep sending me places so fast I’ve lost my center.”

  “No you haven’t.” Angie ran a fingertip down her spine, pausing at her coccyx and spreading a palm across her right buttock. Rita shivered. “You just temporarily misplaced it.” Rita kissed her. It paused the conversation for a while. When they were ready to talk again, the sky beyond the floor-to-ceiling blinds was dark. “I wasn’t expecting this, Rita. You’re moving fast.”

  Rita had looked at Angie’s time line that afternoon. She’d checked a long way back. “Ever got the feeling there was a hole in your life that suddenly got filled in?”

  “All the time, baby, all the time.” Angie sat up, leaned over, rummaged in her shapeless messenger bag, and pulled out a fancy e-cig. Chrome (or was that really silver?) gearwheels, implausibly meshed into immobility, cradled a transparent oil-filled chamber. She took a hit, leaned back against the headboard, blew white vapor back through her nostrils. “Why didn’t I notice you earlier?”

  “I was busy working. You were busy working. We lived too far apart.” Rita shrugged. “All the old excuses for drifting out of touch.” She pushed herself up, sat cross-legged, and glanced around the room. “It’s not like I even had the time and energy for speed-dating.”

  Angie leaned against her and draped an arm around her shoulder. “Are you hungry?” she asked. “We could hit room service, but there’s a diner I know—”

  “I’m starving. Why don’t we go there?”

  “Yeah, let’s do that.”

  They dressed, exchanging shy glances of complicity. Rita gathered her handbag, wrapping a sock around her fatphone for privacy before she tucked it away. Angie handed her a hotel notepad and pencil: that went in too. She hip-bumped Rita as she slid her room card key out of the light switch by the door. “I love you so much,” Angie murmured.

  Not holding hands, or sliding arms around waists and kissing as they made their way to the elevator, felt like a denial of self. But hotels were public spaces. The outraged were everywhere, disguised as ordinary people, but ready to show fangs and claws in an instant like so many werewolves of homophobia if their prejudices were affronted.

  The culture wars had been in overdrive for a decade now, energized by the dreadful unknowns that had tumbled the entire nation into post-traumatic stress disorder nearly eighteen years ago. Civil partnerships were legal in some states, their relationship unremarkable among friends and family: but random public spaces were another matter, the risk of queer-bashing far from negligible. And that was in those states that weren’t actively trying to turn the clock back to the seventeenth century. And so they stood just a few freezing inches too far apart until they reached the darkness of the parking lot doorway, whereupon Angie took Rita’s hand to lead her to the pickup.

  “You’ve been parked a while.” Rita thought for a moment. “If you want privacy, you should know—they’ve got me on a very short leash. I know they bugged my phone: I wouldn’t put it past them to have bugged your truck, too.”

  “Then we’ll give them something to remember.” Angie hugged her. “I’ll drive manually.” Then they climbed into the chilly truck cab.

  PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  They ate at a pizza joint and spoke, somewhat disjointedly, of inconsequentialities: of mutual unfriends, of distant contacts, of hobbies and horses and hopes for the future. Rita caught Angie looking at her from time to time with the stunned gratitude of a lottery winner whose dream ticket had implausibly come true. It gave her a shocked frisson of delight and tenderness to realize that she could have that effect on her—she couldn’t help seeing Angie as she’d been when they first met, over a decade ago, even though they were both grown up now, debauched by time and feeling the infinite weight of their mid-twenties adulthood upon them.

  “Do you want to move out of that hotel? You’re welcome to stay with me as long as you’re in town, if this is just a few weeks. If it’s longer, though, we might need to get somewhere bigger.” Angie carved a slice of pizza, slurped its dripping tip into her mouth, and masticated as she continued: “And with more of an eye to privacy, if you follow me.”

  “I don’t know how long I’m here,” Rita told her, eyes disquietingly clear, concealing her mouth with a cup of Coke: “I don’t really know what they want me for. Probably nothing good, but nothing good beats something bad, doesn’t it?”

  “Guess so. Let’s take a walk?”

  Leaving the remains of their food, Rita and Angie strolled around the food court and then out into the mall. It was safe enough to hold hands here, so they did, using finger squeezes for punctuation whenever the conversation took a turn toward more sensitive subjects.

  “So you got a job working for the DHS?”

  Rita nodded. “Yes, I sure did.”

  “OMG. Bet that makes you popular at parties.”

  Rita shrugged. Yes. “I can live with it. Before it happened I was looking for a job. At least this way I’m inside the tent.”

  “But your parents—”

  “They’re in Arizona. I haven’t told them much. They might be okay with it, but I can’t tell what the neighbors could think—Border Patrol’s part of DHS, too.”

  “They think people like us hate America because ‘freedom’?” Angie said, finger-waggling air quotes.

  “Who the fuck knows?” Rita spared her a black-eyed look. “But they tell all cops it’s a bad idea to let the neighbors know what you do. Just in case word gets around to the wrong ears.”

  “Well, no shit.” Angie thought for a moment. “Bet your employer has a handle on you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you talk about it?”

  “It’s complicated. Say, isn’t that the exit?”

  Contrary to TV and movie mythology, bugging people who move around a lot is difficult, unless they’re carrying microphones with them and speaking clearly. As Angie and Rita left the air-conditioned confines of the mall, their phones were swaddled in socks and hidden inside handbag and backpack. Once out of view of th
e mall’s own security cameras and mikes, and well away from bugged rooms and vehicles, they could finally speak openly to each other.

  Rita explained the context of her adoption, the kidnapping incident, Kurt’s suspicions: finally the world-walking elephant in the room. “There might be factions within the Clan, but they ignored me for my entire life. So my money’s on a stupid-ass attempt by the Colonel’s people to gaslight me. All I know is I’ve got this crazy ability and—”

  “You don’t know anything for sure.” Angie squeezed her hand tightly. Rita saw fear and anger reflected in her eyes. “Fucking assholes get their ideas from the movies, like everyone else. Maybe it was your employers. Maybe they thought you weren’t patriotic enough, didn’t have that old-time/new-time/para-time religion. Maybe they wanted to put some iron in your belly. But it could have been the adversary.”

  “I’m pretty sure it was the Office of Special Programs,” said Rita. “The Colonel’s bosses are kind of desperate.” Her eyes glanced sidelong into another space, as if reviewing something she’d seen.

  “Whatever. You know what I think? I think you should ask your grandpappy for backup. He knew your birth mother’s ma. He’s protective.”

  “Don’t say that!” Rita’s eyes grew wide. “If I drag him in, where will it all end?”

  “Who better?” Angie tugged her closer. “Your watchers aren’t going to take him seriously as a threat. Old guy, puttering around on a walking stick, chatting to his old-guy buddies. Give him something to do in his retirement.”

  “Angel, they did a deep background check on me. They’ve got to know about him. My entire family are at risk if—” Rita’s breath caught. “You’re at risk.”