Praise for the Fractured Europe Sequence
“The Europe sequence is some of my favourite fiction this century, and Europe in Winter is no exception. Mind-bending, smart, human, with espionage thrills wrapped up in a reality-altering Europe, all told with sparkling prose and wit that should, if there was literary justice, catch the attention of prize after prize. I love these books. I want more. Now.”
Patrick Ness on Europe in Winter
“As rich and as relevant as its predecessor. It’s funny, fantastical, readable and remarkable regardless of your prior experience of the series. Which just goes to show that, no matter how well you think you know something—or someone, or somewhere, or somewhen—there’s almost always more to the story.”
Tor.com on Europe at Midnight
“Europe in Autumn is one of the most sophisticated science fiction novels of the decade: a tour-de-force debut, pacey, startlingly prescient, and possessed of a lively wit. When approaching its follow-up, I felt both nervous and excited. Would Hutchinson be able to pull off the same magic a second time? The answer is undoubtedly yes. Europe at Midnight is pitch-perfect, bursting with the same charisma and intricate world-building as its predecessor.”
LA Review of Books on Europe at Midnight
“In a way, what is most striking about Europe at Midnight is not the hard edge of its politics, or even the casual brilliance of its science fictional reworking of the political thriller, but Hutchinson’s thrillingly assured control of his material. He writes wonderfully, his prose animated not just by a keen eye for character, but by a blackly witty sense of humor.”
Locus Magazine on Europe at Midnight
“The author’s authoritative prose, intimate knowledge of eastern Europe, and his fusion of Kafka with Len Deighton, combine to create a spellbinding novel of intrigue and paranoia.”
The Guardian on Europe in Autumn
First published 2016 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
www.solarisbooks.com
ISBN: 978-1-78618-027-8
Copyright © 2016 Dave Hutchinson
Cover art by Clint Langley
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
1.
THEY ALMOST MISSED the train. They had always planned to arrive close to departure time, so that Amanda had to spend as little time as possible on her feet, but there was a flash mob on the Place de la Concorde and all the streets leading into it were blocked.
“What the hell is this?” muttered William, who was driving.
“Anti-Union protesters,” Kenneth said, reading the placards being carried by the crowds boiling between the traffic.
“Well, God has a sense of irony, anyway,” muttered Amanda, shifting uncomfortably on the back seat.
William looked back at her. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m all right,” she said. “Don’t worry about me. Can we go another way?”
They were in a make of vehicle nicknamed La Rage by the French, basically a looming black mediaeval fortress festooned with bullbars and lights and antitheft devices. Kenneth had wanted something more anonymous, but William said the only thing Parisian drivers understood was force. It had one obvious drawback; although its defensive systems could cause epileptic fits and rectal bleeding in anyone stupid enough to try to steal or attack it, it was too large to go down many of Paris’s lesser thoroughfares.
“We’re stuck,” William said, twisting left and right to look out of the windows and hovering his finger over the icon on the dash display which triggered a 10,000 volt charge through the skin of the car, as protesters bumped and pushed by between the line of vehicles.
“Don’t hurt anybody,” Kenneth said. “We’ll be all right.” He looked at his watch, then at Amanda. “We’ll be all right,” he told her.
“Fucking stupid car,” she said with a little smile.
He shrugged helplessly and turned back in his seat to look out through the windscreen. From this vantage point, he could see a street filled with the roofs of lesser vehicles, the spaces in between them choked with protesters blowing whistles and waving animated banners. Most of the protesters were wearing gas masks or scarves around their faces, the traditional garb of the political mob; some were more self-consciously retro, sporting Guy Fawkes masks.
“Well,” he said, to nobody in particular.
Unable to use the car’s more proactive weaponry – the horn had a mode which, when activated, produced a note that could shatter shop windows – William had to amuse himself by depressing the throttle pedal every now and again; the low, rumbling throb of the engine was enough to make protesters shy away momentarily. But even that palled after a while; William really wanted to electrocute or nerve gas or incinerate or just simply drive up and over the wall of cars and people standing between them and their destination, and none of these options were available to him, so he just settled into a long loop of swearwords in French and English.
Eventually, the gendarmerie arrived. Kenneth, William and Amanda were treated to brief views of large grey vehicles driving back and forth across the Place, spraying the crowds of protesters, journalists and rubbernecking tourists with riot foam, at which point many people fell down fast asleep and were subsequently scooped up by other vehicles and deposited none-too-gently on the edges of the open space. There would be broken bones and damaged camera equipment and probably some deaths, and later many lawsuits and insurance claims and scandals uncovered by the news organisations, but for the moment the traffic could move again. Which pleased William.
“Now we’re late,” Kenneth observed.
“We’ll be fine.” William touched an icon on the dash and the car did his favourite trick apart from killing people – filling the windscreen with a head-up display which showed a GPS map of the surrounding streets, directions to their destination, and the location of anything the vehicle’s expert system judged to be a possible threat. A green carpet seemed to appear before them, stretching away into the distance, curving around the obelisk in the centre of the Place and fading out of sight. William depressed the car’s accelerator and it moved smoothly forward with the stream of traffic, passing police vehicles and straggling protesters alike.
The early part of their route had been something of a bone of contention. Kenneth had maintained that it would have been preferable to head directly north from the flat in the 8th and pick up the ring road. William had pooh-poohed that idea, saying it added miles to their journey and that it would be best to head almost directly south towards Savigny. In the end, the thing which decided the matter was the fact that William was the only one of them who could drive and could, basically, do whatever he wanted once he was behind the wheel of La Rage.
Once they were out of the traffic in the centre of town, William set the car into cruise mode and the note of the engine dropped to an almost subliminal vibration that pushed them gently back into the upholstery. Beyond the windscreen, the green carpet unrolled before them.
Kenneth looked at his watch, and from the back seat Amanda said, “We can always take another train.”
He shook his head. Travel on the Line was not like a
ny other kind of rail travel. One did not, for example, normally have to take out temporary citizenship in the company which ran the Channel Tunnel rail route. If they missed this train, they might not be able to travel again until the Spring, and he couldn’t put her through all this again. He glanced across at William, who nodded at the little numbers at the bottom of the windscreen to indicate that they were already at the speed limit for this road. The French had a particularly bloody-minded band of traffic policemen, known as guêpes after their black and yellow ballistic armour, who rode ferocious 3,000 cc BMW motorcycles and carried assault rifles. Nobody in their right mind wanted to tangle with them. Kenneth shrugged.
The Line itself did not pass anywhere near Paris; the amount of demolition needed to accommodate it would have been ruinous. Its track gauge was unlike any other in Europe, to prevent other rail companies using it, but this also meant that everywhere the Line wanted to go, dedicated track had to be laid; it could not share the rail infrastructure of the nations and polities and duchies and sanjaks and earldoms and principalities and communes it passed through. In the case of Paris, a long consultation period had accompanied the negotiations for a Line Embassy. There had been protests and riots and sit-ins wherever the government proposed granting a site, and in the end Savigny-sur-Orge had been chosen simply because the level of civil unrest had been slightly lower there than elsewhere. There was a general feeling in France that Savigny had wound up with the country’s Line Embassy because the Saviniens had just not tried quite hard enough.
France was an unusual proposition for the Line. Everywhere else it passed, cities and polities clamoured for branch lines and Consulates and Embassies; there was a certain – unfounded – cachet in having a connection with the Line. But in France there was, on the whole, very little welcome, and the Line Company had found itself having to deal with militant architects, conservationists, eco-terrorists, political terrorists of many stripes, politicians, heavily-armed farmers, the French Army and Air Force, and hundreds of thousands of annoyed property owners. The Line solved the problem the way it solved all the problems it encountered during its decades-long plod across the Continent. It just kept going and eventually the opposition gave up. The Line stitched its way from one side of France to the other, and in time a branch curled away towards what, in a gesture of capitulation, the French began to call Paris-Savigny.
The Line recommended that all passengers arrive at least two hours before departure, to allow time for security and document checks. In practice, this always resulted in a last-minute rush before the boarding gates were opened, and by the time Kenneth, Amanda and William arrived at the Embassy compound there was a long line of people waiting to pass through.
They had to park outside the compound – the Line allowed no foreign vehicles onto its territory – and find a concierge who could come up with a motorised wheelchair for Amanda, but after that everything went to plan.
William had no visa, so they had to part at the gate to the compound, and all of a sudden the events of the morning seemed to melt away and they stood there awkwardly, unable to think of anything to say to each other. They settled for hugs, and then William turned away and headed towards the car park without looking back.
Kenneth looked at his wife. She was sitting uncomfortably in the wheelchair, cradling the bulge of her pregnancy, her face pale. “We’ll soon be on board,” he told her.
“It takes ten minutes to process each passenger,” she said with a weak smile. “Baggage check-in, security, documents, more security. They can process a hundred passengers at a time. Each train has a maximum capacity of fifteen hundred passengers.”
He reached down and squeezed her shoulder affectionately. “I know,” he said. “I know.”
“Two and a half hours to completely board each train,” she went on calmly. “And that’s if everything goes smoothly, which it never does because passengers forget their documents or their phones set off the security scanners or their perfume sets off the explosive sniffers or they just decide to argue with the officials about any damn little thing that occurs to them.”
“We’re in a priority queue,” he reminded her.
“More expense,” she said. “This is costing a fortune.”
“Just a few more minutes,” he said.
She reached up and took his hand. “I love you,” she said.
He squeezed her hand and looked around at the lines of people waiting to pass through the boarding checks. These were not, it occurred to him, people who were normally used to queuing for anything. Very few of them – none at all, in fact, he decided as he scanned the crowds – presented as working class, or even upper middle class. There were furs and Louis Vuitton carry-ons and cashmere overcoats draped capelike over shoulders, and children with sunglasses worth more than your average Renault factory worker’s annual salary. One small group – beefy shaven-headed father with expensive wrist jewellery, slim mother with a pushchair designed by the same people who designed Formula One racing cars, and three large neckless men who were almost certainly bodyguards – he tagged as mafiye. He thought he caught a glimpse, at the core of another knot of passengers, of a German actress of a certain notoriety. The Line was not so much a mode of transport, more a lifestyle choice. He and Amanda looked the part, but their clothes were all cheap copies, their luggage bootlegs of Swaine Adeney Brigg classics.
The Line did not care what its passengers were wearing. Its French Embassy was a forbidding four-storey grey cube at the heart of the compound, its upper three floors lined with tall slit windows and its flat roof festooned with dishes and antennas. To one side stood a building which looked like a small out-of-town motel, and it was through this, shepherded by liveried and armed Line security personnel, that the queues of passengers were disappearing.
Amanda was speaking on her phone. “Yes,” she was saying. “We’re just waiting to get on board now. Very, yes. Some time the day after tomorrow. In the evening, I think.”
They had been living in Paris for five years now. Amanda had her own design business, producing limited-edition silk-screen T-shirts for film and theatre premieres. They had been here long enough, Kenneth thought, to get a sense of the city’s moods and rhythms. He had thought that apart from the obvious signifiers of architecture and weather and language, all European cities were much the same, but Paris had proved him wrong. It was quite unlike anywhere else he had ever lived.
“What are you thinking about?” asked Amanda. She had finished her call and returned her phone to her pocket.
He smiled and shook his head. “Nothing much. Who was on the phone?”
“The office.” She was worried about how the business would cope without her, even though Marie-France, her assistant, was more than capable of taking care of things in her absence. “The Luhansk stuff.”
Despite their name, Luhansk were a middle-aged stadium rock band from Leicester in the English Midlands. Amanda was trying to branch the business out into high-end concert merchandising. Kenneth said, “I thought all that was wrapped up.”
She shrugged. “It’s nothing. A couple of last-minute details. I’ll conference with Marie-France and their merchandising manager when we’re on the train.”
“You’re not supposed to exert yourself,” he told her.
She waved it away. “Fifteen minutes in a conference space. I won’t even have to stand up. Half an hour at the most.”
The queue moved forward a few metres, then stalled again. They were just outside the open glass doors of the departure building.
“Do you think William will be all right?” Amanda said. “On his own?”
“Yes,” he replied. He had gone over things with William over and over again; he was as sure as he could be that everything would run smoothly. Homicidal driving tendencies apart, William was a solid, reliable fellow. He was a credit to the group.
“I shouldn’t worry about him, I suppose,” said Amanda. “But still.”
The line moved again and they pas
sed into the departures building, and then there was a smartly-dressed young Moroccan, with a pad under his arm and a little badge on the breast pocket of his blazer identifying him as ‘Etienne,’ standing beside them, murmuring apologies in almost accentless English.
“Mrs Pennington, Mr Pennington,” he said, “I’m so dreadfully sorry. You were never meant to queue here. Please accept my most abject apologies on behalf of the Trans-Europe Rail Company.”
“We expected to queue,” Kenneth said equably. “Everyone else has to.”
“But Mrs Pennington’s condition...” Etienne shook his head. “Unforgivable. I promise you the staff members responsible will be disciplined.”
“We don’t want to get anybody in trouble,” Amanda said.
Etienne shook his head again. “Madame,” he said with a solemnity deeper than his years, “we do not treat our citizens like this.”
The exchange was carried out in quiet voices, but even so it was starting to attract the attention of other passengers around them. Kenneth said, “So what can we do?”
“Please,” Etienne said. “Please, come with me.”
“Oh, there’s no need for that,” Amanda said. “Look, we’re almost at the head of the queue now.”
“Mrs Pennington,” Etienne said, holding out his hands. “I insist. It’s the least I can do.”
Amanda and Kenneth exchanged glances, and he nodded fractionally. “Lead the way, then, Etienne,” she said, loudly enough for her voice to carry as she steered her wheelchair out of the queue and followed the Moroccan, the chair’s tyres hissing softly on the hardwearing carpet.
Etienne led them up to the line of Security desks and then turned off sharply and opened a door at the edge of the room. Beyond was a stark, utilitarian corridor ending in another door, and when they went through that they found that they had passed beyond the security and document checks. Etienne took them to a small side-room, where a young woman in a blue and silver uniform sat waiting beside a portable scanner.
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