Dark State

by Charles Stross

  Twelve minutes later the front door opened. She looked up at the man who entered and stood over them, looking down dumbly. “Well!” she said, crossly—for this was absolutely not the defection she had signed up for, “you took your time! Are you the doctor?”

  “I called the paramedics. They’ll be here shortly—” The newcomer’s hair was as long as a woman’s, but he sported a full beard: his clothes were no more outlandish than those of the other people she’d seen around, but something about him made her acutely uneasy. “What happened? Was it the Americans?” He stared at her. “Are you American?” he asked slowly.

  It seemed there were layers within layers here. This man clearly didn’t know who she was, or who the Major was working for. Elizabeth frowned. “Make yourself useful, hold this in place.” This was a blood-soaked towel from the kitchen. “It’s vital not to let any more air get into his chest. Otherwise the lungs collapse. I need to go and find another one.”

  The stranger paled. Then he knelt down and took hold of the damp cloth. While he was distracted, Liz casually picked up the shoulder bag the Major had carried and moved it close to her side, allowing the flap to fall open. The bizarre carbine he’d shot the guards with was still inside: she wasn’t sure she could bring herself to use it—wasn’t even sure the Major hadn’t expended its entire magazine—but if strangers were going to barge in and out of this odd little tenement she wanted to keep it close. Especially strangers who didn’t trust Americans, and who thought she might be one. She scooped up the Major’s jacket and the concealed pistol. “I’ll just move these,” she said quietly, sidling toward the hallway.

  A bell chimed: a doorbell, Liz realized. She shouldered the bag and walked to the door, then recognized a spy-hole. A man in a lime-green coverall, carrying a bulky bag with a strange flag on the side—a plain red cross in a white circle—gesticulated from the doorstep. She let them in. “Are you a doctor?” she asked.

  “Nein, no—paramedic.” His voice was oddly high: in a dizzying perspective flip Liz realized she was talking to a woman. “Where is the patient?”

  “Come with me…”

  The shock-haired green-overalled medic took control in the bedroom. Liz went to the bathroom to wash her hands, then succumbed to a moment of acute disorientation. The fixtures were aggressively plain, starkly unadorned, but made to the highest standard, as if for an operating theater. It was as if these people took joy from the purely functional. So strange. She had imagined big differences, but it was the small things that shook her to the core.

  She collected bag and jacket and pistol and retreated into what she guessed was a parlor, judging by the plain leather sofa facing what had to be a film projector screen (for no television could possibly be that big or flat). The Major’s glassy pocket phone was incomprehensible, and in any case nothing she did made it work—it kept showing messages asking her to look at it as if it really was a magic mirror, then showed her a warning about “face unlock”—so she took the time to inspect her other spoils. The gun in the bag was a stubby black plastic thing, with a half-melted-looking handle near the front of the barrel. She gave up on it almost immediately and set it aside. The pistol was another matter. It looked not unlike the military automatics some of the royal bodyguards had carried, but felt ridiculously light in her hands, although the grip was oddly fat. She located the safety catch and magazine release then put it in the bag. There were papers, but they made little sense: diagrammatic maps of what appeared to be an airfield, technical listings of some sort. It was all very confusing.

  As she pondered the papers, the doorbell chimed again.

  I spoke to Fox. Fox called the doctor-nurse-whatever. So who is this, and who called them? The new visitor might be harmless, but she didn’t intend to take any chances. Elizabeth glanced at the corridor through the apartment. There was a front door, of course, but there was also a side door at the opposite end of the passageway. She stood up and slung the Major’s bag over her shoulder, then marched to the back door. She turned the small twist-handle and the door unlatched. It opened onto a cobbled courtyard with some small flower beds planted in wooden boxes and a shut gate. There were other doors to either side, clearly rear entrances to neighboring apartments.

  Squinting against the daylight, Liz closed the back door behind her and walked to the other side of the courtyard. She rapped on a random door paneled with frosted glass.

  There was no reply. Liz rapped again. There were no lights showing, so she unslung the bag and punched it hard against the glass in the bottom panel. The glass starred but did not shatter under the impact of the gun. She reversed the bag and hammered it against the panel again, heart pounding in her throat. She had a sense of imminent doom, like the unnatural calm before a lightning storm. The glass finally shattered all at once, turning into a spray of strangely smooth pebbles without jagged edges. She squatted, reached through the hole carefully, and fumbled around for the handle. There was a protrusion, a key negligently left in a lock. She turned it, and the door opened.

  She found herself in another apartment, colder and more cluttered than the one the Major had taken her to. “Hello?” she called, palms sticky and hot. She relaxed infinitesimally as the seconds inched past without an angry reply. As her eyes adjusted she saw a door leading into an interior corridor. There was a front door at the far end, on the other side of the block from the Major’s entranceway. The apartments were mirrors of each other. Yes, I can do this, she thought.

  She unlocked the front door and stepped out. There was a tram stop not far away. Tugging her headscarf tight around her hair, she scuttled along the sidewalk.

  If the Major was right, nobody here would pay any attention to one more dark-skinned Turkish woman shuffling along with bowed head.

  If her fears were baseless, she could return in an hour or so: Hjorth or van Rijnt or whatever he was called wasn’t going anywhere soon.

  And if not … well, this was just another Berlin. Fast, half-melted automobiles and glowing glass magic mirrors. How different could it be?

  NEW LONDON, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020

  Everyone in the Brunswick Palace seemed to be holding their breath in the calm before the storm.

  Erasmus Burgeson was chairing a meeting of the broadcasting budget committee when the news everyone had been dreading arrived. The red telephone on the table at one side of the boardroom buzzed for attention just as the Assistant Commissioner for Cable Communications was glibly replaying his pitch for an increase in the backhaul budget: “Demand for long range computer internetworking between metropolitan nodes is bound to double every fifteen months for the next two decades, and our current coaxial infrastructure is already overloaded—”

  “Thank you, Joe.” Erasmus nodded. “Excuse me.” He took the receiver from the receptionist: “Commissioner Burgeson.” He listened for a few seconds in total concentration. “Yes, I see. Thank you.”

  He put the phone down. “Ladies and gentlemen.” (There were indeed three women on this committee: the Party’s commitment to emancipation was slowly gaining ground.) “That was the First Man’s residence. They’re calling the primary list now.”

  “Oh.” Maria Smith (Board of Governors, Committee of Radio Broadcasters) looked stricken. “Adam’s condition is…?”

  Erasmus shook his head. “This meeting is adjourned,” he said tiredly. “Minutes will show that a two-minute silence was observed out of respect for the First Man’s passing. People, your departments all have death plans and you should activate them after you leave this meeting. You can go now—or stay with me for those two minutes.” He folded his hands, bowing his head.

  I regret to inform you the First Man has been pronounced dead, the switchboard operator had told him. He passed away peacefully, in his sleep. The Party Central Committee had decreed that two weeks of state mourning would follow this event. Then there would be an election by the Commissioners, and a new First Man would be sworn in.

  What are we going to do now? Era
smus wondered uneasily. An unwelcome sense of dread leached the warmth from his soul. Until this moment, he’d always known that the state was in safe hands. The first large-scale experiment with democracy in this time line had been secured by Adam Burroughs, whose commitment to the principles of the revolution was above question. Erasmus had known the First Man since he was plain Sir Adam, a firebrand agitator in exile: and he’d trusted him, hero-worshipped him as an object of emulation. But the ship of state was sailing into uncharted waters, making first official contact with a nuclear-armed and presumptively hostile alien superpower, and the captain had just left the bridge for the last time. Nor had he heard whether Miss Thorold’s high-risk/high-payoff scheme to protect the revolution from the machinations of the royalist threat had succeeded. I need to talk to Miriam, he resolved. She’ll know what to do next …

  PANKOW, BERLIN, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  The doorbell rang for a second time.

  “Make yourself useful and answer that,” the paramedic suggested to Fox. “It’s probably the ambulance.” She was busy with a bag and a sterile plastic tube, trying to stabilize the shooting victim. Not enough hands, not enough backup. Her rapid response bike was parked outside but it wasn’t going to get this patient to an emergency room, which was what he clearly needed.

  Fox stood up. He hadn’t been under any illusions about Herr van Rijnt’s shady activities—industrial espionage and smuggled GM organisms were a fine story, but why the light plane with the interesting vertical landing parachute system?—however, between the clearly not-Turkish girl with the odd English accent and the gunshot wound, he’d made up his mind to leave. Walk fast and don’t look back. The medic was here, van Rijnt would survive, and van Rijnt could help the Bundespolizei with their inquiries when they got their claws into him. If it wasn’t the Bundespolizei it would be the BND for sure. This affair had the fishy stench of terrorism hanging over it: concealed guns, women in Islamic dress. Fox had no intention of sitting here and waiting to be arrested.

  He walked to the front door and checked the CCTV screen. A woman stood on the doorstep. Long dark hair, office clothes. Not a paramedic, but she didn’t look dangerous. However, he’d have to get rid of her before he could leave. Fox opened the door, keeping his right hand in his pocket. “Who are you?” he demanded in German.

  The woman, who on closer inspection was middle-aged and thin-faced, gave him a weary look. “Do you speak English?” she asked.

  “Who wants to know?” Fox replied in the same language. Get out of my way. He bounced on his toes, eager to escape.

  The woman pushed her hair back distractedly. “I’m so sorry,” she said apologetically, “but is Major Hjorth here? It’s important.”

  “Major who?” Fox didn’t have to feign bafflement.

  “If he’s inside, tell him Paulette Milan is here, and I’m really sorry about this.”

  Fox took a step back and aimed his pistol at the American woman through the lining of his pocket. Her eyes widened slightly. “You’d better come in,” Fox told her. He took another step backward. “Slowly. Follow me slowly. Don’t move suddenly.”

  “What happened here?” Paulette stared at him. Suddenly she looked terrified. “Is the Major okay?”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about.” Fox gestured with his left elbow. “The doctor’s trying to keep van Rijnt alive. He was shot. It wasn’t me.”

  “Van Rijnt—who—have you seen Elizabeth Hanover? Is she with him?”

  “A Turkish girl?” Fox shifted his grip and began withdrawing the gun from his pocket: Maybe she’s worth something.

  “You’d better put that down. They’re going to storm the building and if you’re holding a gun they’ll shoot you for sure.” The woman’s vehemence took him by surprise: “They want the Major and the woman alive,” she continued urgently. “Listen, whatever you do, don’t trust the Colonel. They’ve got the apartment doppelgängered by world-walking special forces—”

  She was cut off in mid-sentence by the loudest noise in the world.

  NEW LONDON, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020

  “They what?” Olga exploded with disbelief.

  Brilliana glared at the staffer who stood before Miss Thorold’s desk. “You’d better repeat that from the beginning.”

  “Uh, yes, ma’am.” He looked almost too young to shave, and absolutely terrified of the two women focusing on him like a pair of cats confronting a cowering rodent. “Ma’am, the communiqué is from desk four, Operation CROWN. A transmission was received at nine twenty-eight local from Major Hjorth, indicating that all preconditions were nominal and he was going in. A second transmission at eleven zero six from Major Hjorth indicated that he had made the pick-up and was continuing to the next phase of the operation. But at eleven nineteen we received a copy call intended for Asset FOX, from Major Hjorth, requesting medical backup. Hjorth was then replaced on the call by a woman calling herself Elizabeth, who said, quote, the Major just fainted. I think he needs a doctor. He’s been shot, unquote.”

  “Lightning Child,” Olga muttered in Hochsprache. The staffer looked confused. In English: “What happened next?”

  “At eleven thirty-one, Asset FOX called a private medical service and requested that a paramedic attend an unspecified emergency at the safe house.”

  “And then?”

  “We don’t know,” said the staffer. His body language screamed don’t hit me. Possibly because Brilliana appeared to be taking the news personally—too personally. “Attempts to call Asset FOX were unsuccessful. Desk four logged some sort of major police incident in the next fifteen minutes, probably in the vicinity of the safe house, but we don’t know exactly what happened between then and—”

  “Play it again,” Brilliana said wearily. “Play it, Sam.”

  The reel-to-reel tape deck held the transcript of a conversation that had required an out-of-schedule courier delivery. Luckily the station chief in time line two was bright enough to recognize an emergency when it took a dump in his lap. The technical trooper, who trailed the staffer around like a sad-eyed spaniel, pushed the button.

  “Good morning, people.” The voice was male, with an East Coast American accent. “This is Colonel Smith. I assume I’m addressing Miriam Beckstein, Olga Thorold, or Brilliana Hjorth.” A pause. “In the course of his operation in your Berlin, Major Hjorth managed to get himself shot. This was not, I assure you, anything to do with me. Luckily my people managed to secure his safe house before the BND could move in and muddy the waters. He is currently stable but poorly in the base medical establishment at Tempelhof AFB, being treated for a collapsed lung and two fractured ribs. His future disposition is in your hands. Obviously, a positive outcome to the forthcoming negotiations will make it much easier to negotiate his repatriation.”

  A pause. Then the voice continued: “We are also holding Paulette Milan, or should I say Colonel Milan of your Department of Para-historical Research.”

  “Stop. Stop!” Olga gestured at the techie, who mashed his finger on another button on the tape deck. “Oh dear Sky Father, tell me this doesn’t mean what I think it does.”

  Brill stared at her. “Not going to say that.”

  “If they’ve got Paulie and Hulius, then they’ve got the, the target.”

  “Restart the tape,” said Brilliana.

  “—We trust future negotiations will be fruitful and I look forward to your concrete proposals as soon as you have resolved your current leadership crisis. Goodbye.” The call trailed off into smug silence.

  Brilliana looked at the staff officer and the technician, her gaze harsh: “You two, wait outside.”

  “Yes ma’am…” They beat a hasty retreat to the outer office, leaving Olga and Brill alone.

  “They got Elizabeth,” Olga said flatly.

  “What about Paulie?”

  “We ran out of time with the rendezvous protocol. They probably tracked Hulius on his last trip over, picked her up and drained her. I’m guessing the
y planned to use her as a stalking-horse to get close to him, only he somehow managed to get himself shot. Gods. Huw is going to be pissed.”

  “Huw”—Brill took a deep breath—“is not the only one. Someone’s going to have to tell Elena. Don’t get me started on what the HUMINT Oversight Group is going to make of it, either. But it’s the blowback that I’m really worried about.”

  “Think we’ve been penetrated?”

  “I’m not willing to go that far just yet. But something tipped them off and they got inside our decision loop. Instead of neutralizing the Pretender’s claim, we’re now wide open to accusations of abduction by the French, accusations of monarchist revanchism by the Radicals—and at the Department of Homeland Security’s mercy whichever way we play it. The question is, what do they want?”

  “We’ve got to get her back. By any means necessary.”

  “Yes, but getting her out of an Undisclosed Location that’s armored against world-walkers is going to be just a little bit harder than lifting her from a Ruritanian clown school in imperial Berlin, isn’t it?”

  “Wait one.” Olga waved a hand tensely. “Wait. I just had a thought.”

  “Just the one?”

  “Smith didn’t say anything about the Princess. He didn’t mention her.”