Dark State--A Novel of the Merchant Princes Multiverse

by Charles Stross

  His brother elbowed him gently. “Yul, stop thinking. It’s not what they pay you for.”

  “Sorry, I was away with the fair folk.” Hulius took a deep breath. “You’ve got something in mind that needs a world-walker who can fly a plane and warrants an impeccable top-secret cover story. And it has to be someone you trust like your own, uh, brother-in-law.” He stared at Brill. “It’s deniable. Jeopardy so high that you can’t trust an outsider. Something so secret you’d use the Manhattan Project as a cover story. So it’s politically embarrassing.” He glanced at Huw, who looked as mystified as he felt: “What’s going on?”

  “It’s a deep penetration mission via time line two,” said Brill. Hulius felt dawning dismay. In the Clan’s old terminology, time line two meant the world of the United States. “The operative we eventually choose—it might not be you, but you’re the lead candidate—will travel through time line two and then pop up here in time line three to carry out an, uh, political neutralization.” Frown lines deepened on either side of her mouth. “It’s a very high level target. Options have been considered, including abduction and assassination, but there’s a third alternative that we’re pursuing.” She met his gaze directly, unblinking. “The target is Princess Elizabeth of Hanover. The only child of the heir to the throne of the former New British Empire. She must not under any circumstances be allowed to marry the Dauphin.”

  Hulius stared at her, a mild sensation of nausea creeping over him. “You’re playing with fire!” The Pretender is planning on marrying his daughter to the French emperor’s son? Hulius tried not to boggle at the news. The Pretender still claimed to be the legitimate ruler of the British Empire, his Crown-in-Exile a symbol of political opposition to the revolutionary Commonwealth. Then another thought struck him. “She’s only eighteen!”

  Huw nodded. “She’s not much older than Nel.”

  “Wouldn’t it be more expeditious to kill the … the French prince?” Hulius speculated.

  “Yes.” Brill nodded guardedly. “But Olga ruled out assassinating the Dauphin. That would be an overt act of war. It would be equally problematic to act against John Frederick himself. Our priority is to prevent the Dauphin acquiring a legitimate claim to the territories of the, the former British Empire. Sir Adam is dying”—she took in their shocked expressions—“and we will be facing enough pressure for a restoration of the monarchy as it is. So the weak point is the lynchpin of the alliance that our informers tell us is being negotiated.”

  “Sir Adam is dying?” Huw demanded.

  “Cancer.” She frowned. “The doctors think he may have as little as three months to live. Then the Commonwealth has a constitutional crisis: he’s been the First Man”—effectively the President for Life—“ever since the revolution. We know how the succession of powers should operate, but the machinery is untested…”

  Hulius crossed his arms. “I am not going to murder a girl barely three years older than my eldest daughter.” A nasty thought crawled out of the darkness, a memory of the way the nobility had done business in the Gruinmarkt: “I’m not going to despoil or rape her either! This Commonwealth is founded on the rule of law, the idea that there are universal standards, basic rights that apply to all. If we stoop to such depths of skullduggery, what claim will we ever be able to make for legitimacy?”

  Brilliana glanced at her husband. “Told you he’d gone native,” she murmured. Hulius twitched: she sounded approving.

  Huw chuckled. Hulius stared at his brother and sister-in-law, fuming. “Well? What are you holding back?”

  “You missed the third possibility,” Brilliana said quietly. “Do you think a spirited eighteen-year-old girl can possibly be looking forward to marrying a debauchee who is half her age again, has a mistress, and is also reputed to have the pox?”

  Suddenly Hulius had an inkling of where this was going. He leaned forward. “Where did you learn about the impending nuptials?” he asked. “I haven’t seen anything about this in the press or on the wire.”

  “Sources.” Brill raised a cautionary finger. “According to the boss herself, we have them.” She took another sip of whisky. “Back channels through which deniable negotiations may be conducted. Yul, if you agree to this task, the first cover story is that you are to train as a pilot for JUGGERNAUT. The second cover story, for use only if you are captured, is that you are being sent to murder, rape, ruin, or otherwise render Elizabeth, Princess of Hanover, unmarriageable spoiled goods.

  “In reality, the mission is somewhat different. The young lady in question—who is currently mewed up in her father’s palace, a gilded cage in the middle of the French capital—contacted us herself to tell us she’s interested in negotiating the terms of her defection to the Commonwealth. As you might imagine, offering her the moon on a stick is not a problem. The real headache is how to get her out of French hands and spirit her halfway around the world, under the nose of the military and intelligence complex of the largest empire on Earth.

  “And that’s where you come in…”

  Arrivals

  MARACAIBO PARA-TIME STAGING COMPLEX, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020

  Hulius spent a week with his brother and sister-in-law. He took pains to phone and (later, once he was assigned an account on the base mainframe) to e-mail his wife Elena and their daughters. He was, he assured them, sorry to be called away, but for the next few weeks he was working on a project that he could not discuss. As a world-walker herself, Elena understood the need for regular government service. The quiet conscription of the para-time-capable had been the bedrock of the Clan for centuries, and their forced migration to the New American Commonwealth had merely changed the taskmaster.

  In reality, Hulius’s week was crammed with preparatory meetings with the DPR’s local Latin American and European specialists because Hulius was about to embark on a hazardous clandestine operation.

  “Head office set up an identity and a background for you,” Brill explained. “Use it well, it’s very expensive. Your biometrics will be captured on your way into the Schengen zone, along with your passport details, so you won’t be able to operate in the EU under different cover ever again. Or in South-East Asia, for that matter. How’s your German?”

  Hulius shrugged. “Indifferent to crap. I have a lousy accent, they think I’m Dutch.”

  “That’s actually useful.” She slid a passport across the desk toward him: it was drab green, slightly creased, and embossed in faded gilt lettering with PASPOR REPUBLIK INDONESIA. “You are Manfred van Rijnt. You were born in Cape Town but moved to Jakarta when your father took a job in the oil industry when you were eight. Your mother is dead. You have a degree in plant genomics, studied management—you have an MBA—and you work in the rubber plantation industry.” She slid a manila document folder across to him. “Read and memorize this backgrounder in case you have to bore random strangers with your anecdotes. Incidentally, you speak Malay—actually Bahasa Indonesia—as well as Dutch, English, and some German.”

  Hulius cleared his throat. “But I don’t speak Malay…”

  “You won’t need to, and there’s virtually no risk of you outing yourself unless you spend a lot of time in Amsterdam. The reason we’re using Indonesia for your documentation is that they’re a weak spot in the global air passenger advance notification system. They don’t have a national DNA database or capture biometrics beyond the minimal facial stuff, and it’s easy to bribe a passport out of them. Your cover story is that you’ve been in Brazil and Venezuela negotiating the South American side of a supply deal. Genetically modified latex is going to be a big thing, hypoallergenic and biodegradable. If anyone asks, you’re flying to Germany to talk to a medical appliance company. You have a visa valid for entry to the Schengen area, applied for via the Dutch embassy. Your port of entry is Schiphol Airport, and once you’re through Dutch immigration you can head for Berlin.”

  “They’ll still capture my biometrics—”

  “Yes. But you’ve never been out of North Ameri
ca before, and the Schengen group of nations follow German standards on data privacy. The Americans don’t share domestic biometric captures with foreigners, and the EU only share travelers with the USA if they’re flying to North America. So unless at some later date you get on a plane bound for North America, nobody will realize your biometrics match the world-walker the Americans are hunting. You’re clean as a whistle, at least for a single mission in Europe.”

  “Ah!” Hulius beamed. “I see where this is going.”

  “Yes! We can insert you into the heartlands of the French Empire without anyone knowing—not the United States, nor the French over here. The idea is, we send you through time line two under a clean cover identity. Still in time line two, you establish a safe house, then do the same in time line three. Then when it’s time for the pick-up, you can penetrate the Princess’s security cordon in time line three and extract her to time line two.”

  “Yes, but what happens afterwards?” His smile faded. “I don’t see how you can fake up a biometric passport for a woman from another time line—”

  “We can’t. That’s not in the plan. But once you’ve carried her across to time line two, the next step is for you to drive her to an airfield. We budgeted to buy you a Cirrus SR22T. When we’ve got everything lined up for exfiltration, you’ll fly due west—it has a range of nearly fifteen hundred kilometers without ferry tanks—then world-walk and pop the plane’s recovery parachute over the Atlantic. It avoids all the air defenses around the French empire and avoids having to fake up ID good enough to get her on an airliner.”

  Hulius couldn’t contain himself. “That’s suicidal!” Even without factoring in a possibly unwilling passenger, deliberately ditching a light plane in the middle of the North Atlantic—even one with a built-in parachute recovery system—seemed like a really bad idea.

  “Not if there’s a fleet of spy trawlers waiting right under your flight path with orders to retrieve you. And you won’t take off until you get confirmation that they’re in position and the weather conditions are favorable.” She held up a finger. “Added bonus: it gets Manfred van Rijnt’s identity confirmed dead in a general aviation accident. If his biometrics ever filter their way back to the NSA or DHS, they’ll be tagged as ‘deceased.’ Oh, and we get some up-to-date general aviation avionics from the light plane, a bunch of composite materials and one of those neat ballistic recovery systems for the air cadets to pick over. But mostly Princess Elizabeth gets to vanish mysteriously, right under the noses of her chaperones and bodyguards and secret police monitors, avoiding a marriage she doesn’t want and an entanglement with the French monarchy that the Commonwealth really doesn’t need. And then”—Brill smirked impishly—“the real empire games begin!”

  VENEZUELA, TIME LINE ONE/CARACAS, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  Venezuela, in time line one, was heavily forested and decidedly unsafe for random pale-skinned interlopers—the empire of the Quiriquire took a robust and gruesome approach to intruders on their territory. However, the Department of Para-time Research had constructed a small camp on the steep hillside of the Caracas valley. Electric fences and sharpshooters had taught the neighboring villagers to give it a wide berth. The camp functioned as a forward base and covert insertion site, allowing clandestine agents to cross over into time line two outside the heavily-surveilled police states of North America.

  Hulius arrived in the camp as a passenger on the twice-weekly supply hovercraft, along with a couple of tons of trade goods and four other agents. Two were buyers from Technology Acquisition, tasked with obtaining samples of pharmaceuticals and electronics from the more advanced time line. The other couple were research librarians, looting the stored academic heritage of time line two for the benefit of the DPR. They chatted among themselves in rapid-fire Spanish (too fast for Hulius to follow) and seemed to be very excited. Like old-time KGB agents on foreign postings to the decadent fleshpots of the West, they were dizzily intoxicated by the novelty and wealth of Venezuela. The panoply of luxury goods and high technology laid out all around them was fascinating. Despite the Commonwealth’s best efforts to catch up (and they’d come a long way in the past two decades) visiting time line two still felt like taking a leap fifty years into the future. Hulius, however, faced a more challenging mission than draining academic pre-print Web sites onto storage devices and buying equipment for the MITI teaching labs. He kept his own counsel, reading and rereading his travel briefing. Finally the duty world-walker arrived, took her seat next to the hovercraft’s pilot, and blinked them into a different parallel universe.

  The time line two terminal was a windowless warehouse with a thick industrial carpet floor and deafening aircon fans running overhead, the walls lined with foam baffles. As the hovercraft settled on its skirts between the red-and-white barber’s pole guides that marked the arrival platform—carefully surveyed and leveled to exactly the same height in both time lines—Hulius grabbed his carry-on and made his way to the gangway. “Manfred van Rijnt. I’ve got a flight to catch?”

  “Certainly, sir. Please follow me.” The Resident was a pleasant-faced woman, apparently a local. “There’s a taxi waiting for you out front.” Behind him the DPR agents were picking up their suitcases and chattering, much like any other group of tourists starting a vacation in the fleshpots of para-time.

  The para-time terminal was separated from the front of the operation by a cinderblock wall and a succession of locked doors ending in the inevitable Staff Only sign. Up front, it was disguised as a (real) wholesale designer clothing outlet, selling seconds and rejects from big brands. Shoppers chattered and rummaged around the aisles as the Resident led Hulius out to the parking lot. A black SUV was waiting for him, baking beneath the brassy afternoon sun. She leaned close: “This man will take you to the airport. He’s prepaid, but you should tip him five dollars.”

  “Thanks. Take these and return them to Control for destruction.” He handed over the last of his background papers—just his travel itinerary, indistinguishable from that of any other business traveler—then climbed in.

  “Maiquetía? ¿Qué terminal?”

  “I’m flying Air France…”

  “Si, senor.” The driver hit the throttle immediately and screeched out into traffic. Signaling was clearly considered giving information to the enemy.

  An hour later they arrived at the airport terminal. Hulius relaxed infinitesimally as the driver pulled up, double-parking beside a line of similar black taxis. He passed over a crumpled five dollar bill from the wallet he’d been given, then went inside.

  Check-in was routine, security cursory. Huw was traveling on a full-price business class return ticket that guaranteed polite and expeditious treatment. He had a checked bag and a carry-on, a tablet and a burner phone loaded with a promising selection of bootlegged movies and anodyne pornography. If anyone examined it they’d find a carefully curated selection of cloud e-mail and storage accounts with contents designed to lull suspicious border inspectors into complacency. There was nothing overtly felonious on it, but it was risqué enough to explain away any guilty vibes he might exhibit at a border checkpoint.

  Over the years the DPR had carefully assessed the best way for a clandestine agent to travel without attracting the attention of the Five Eyes. It was a far cry from the days of James Bond antics. There were no false-bottomed suitcases with silenced guns and knives, no weapons or exotic espionage devices. The only giveaways on his person were the knotwork designs that he needed to focus on in order to world-walk between time lines. They were concealed in a sideloaded app, disguised as pornographic clock faces, and he had a plausible explanation if they came to light: he’d accidentally infected his smartwatch with malware by downloading a movie from the Internet with his phone.

  If Brill’s back-office people had done their job properly, the Manfred van Rijnt cover was watertight; and if they hadn’t, well, he was committed now.

  He had some hours to kill after check-in, but with business lounge access and
a tablet the hours slid by like cheap liquor until it was time to board the airliner. The wide-body Airbus struck Hulius as wildly, extravagantly luxurious, from the seat that turned into a lie-flat bed once airborne to the in-flight Internet access. He felt a stab of envy as it taxied for takeoff, the engine noise barely rising above a subdued rumble. His last flight had been with Brill aboard a diplomatic courier from New London to Maracaibo. It wasn’t any slower than the Airbus, but the wax earplugs hadn’t quite blocked the dental-drill screech of the engines, and they’d had to land twice for refueling along the way. The New American Commonwealth was still learning to build passenger jets: the first DC-10-like wide-body wasn’t quite ready for passenger service.

  Hulius had grown up in the Gruinmarkt—in time line one, where horse-drawn wagons were the height of transport technology. The irony of his discontent with the Commonwealth’s early jet airliners was not lost on him. Nothing underscored the technological superiority of time line two like the experience of long-haul air travel—or underlined the importance of MITI and the DPR’s work.

  Hulius kept his in-flight entertainment screen switched off (to avoid any subliminal in-flight trigger engrams inserted at the request of the US authorities). After a meal served on fine china that stunned his stomach into a food coma, he poked at the button that turned his seat into a bed. The jet rumbled on through the night, trailing frozen water vapor across the stratosphere, as it carried him north and east across the Atlantic. He dozed through the gravel-bumpy flight across the intertropical convergence zone, and as the crescent moon beyond the windows slowly rolled upside down above the equator his sleep was haunted by dreams of black princesses and red queens dueling in the Tuileries of Imperial St. Petersburg.