Dark State--A Novel of the Merchant Princes Multiverse

by Charles Stross

  Smith opened his mouth, but Dr. Scranton gave him a quelling look: “Eric, chill. Rita, we’re very sorry that we sent you into this situation unprepared. We didn’t do it deliberately and we’ll try not to do it again. But it’s vitally important that you lend us your full cooperation. Right now, I’ve got to prepare a summary for tomorrow’s daily presidential intelligence briefing, and you’re the lead item. We’ve got to hammer out a cover story that explains your overdue arrival without mentioning your birth mother, because if we disclose that aspect prematurely it will cause a full-scale crisis. We’ve got to coach you so that you’re ready to deliver this story to the circus of bureaucrats that is going to descend on us tomorrow. And you’ve got to do it without disclosing anything so sensitive it could blow back. I expect to have a tasking for your next mission tomorrow afternoon. I suspect SecState and SecHomeland are going to reach consensus to send you back to meet your birth mother, or her representatives, again, this time on an official basis. Are you going to be able to do that?”

  Rita looked at the Colonel, then back at Dr. Scranton. She opened her mouth, then closed it. She swallowed then cleared her throat. “I will do what I have to,” she said quietly. “I can, uh, I can even try and build bridges. If you think it’s necessary.” She could taste stomach acid at the back of her throat. “It was just a big, unwelcome surprise. I was scared out of my mind when they captured me, off-balance while they were interrogating me—all part of the process—then when they sprang the ‘I am your father, Luke’ stunt I completely lost my shit.”

  Scranton nodded. “How do you feel about your birth mother now you’ve met her?” she asked slowly.

  “She’s … a lot smaller than I expected.” Rita paused. “Not physically, I mean: I think she’s about my height.”

  “You can face up to her,” said Smith. It was a question phrased as a statement.

  “If I know what’s coming up.” Rita nodded, uncertain of her own resolve. A thought struck her. “Does she have any other children?” Do I have any long-lost brothers and sisters? It was an uncomfortable realization, that she might have a phantom family out there—“Miss Thorold said I was her only child.”

  “We hoovered up her medical records in 2003, when she came to our attention in the context of the FAMILY TRADE operation. She was thirty-four then.” The Colonel glanced sidelong at Dr. Scranton. “Your call.”

  “She was pregnant,” Scranton admitted. “Or rather, we have a record of a positive pregnancy test. It was filed about a week before she vanished for the last time. Right before 7/16.”

  “Oh.” Rita fell silent for a few seconds, digesting. “So she aborted or miscarried or…”

  “We don’t know.” The Colonel shrugged. “If you find out, it would be useful to us to know. For profiling.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” Her eyes narrowed. “What happens next?”

  Dr. Scranton tapped the leather document folder in front of her. “As I said, after tomorrow’s bureaucratic circus dies down we will probably send you back over in a day or two, with a message for Ms. Beckstein. Ah, Mrs. Burgeson, as she now calls herself. Anything you can find out about the presumed Mr. Burgeson would also be of interest … I am guessing here, you understand, that there will be a reply. As Clan world-walkers need hours or days to recover between jaunts, we would rather you didn’t disclose your ability to jaunt rapidly. They might have noticed your multiple rapid arrivals in the railway terminus, or they might not. In any case they probably won’t be surprised if you ask to stay there while they prepare their reply. And you can gather more nonspecific intelligence in a couple of days as your birth mother’s houseguest than in months of sneaking—”

  “Wait, what—” Rita began, but the Colonel beat her to it: “Are you serious?”

  “I’m completely serious.” Dr. Scranton turned her deceptively mild gaze on Rita. “This project will continue to pursue its objectives, which are to deploy HUMINT assets in BLACK RAIN, the New American Commonwealth, and—using this overt objective as internal cover within the DHS and other agencies—to develop a diplomatic back-channel with the Commonwealth government. So, that brings us to the matter of the cover story for general classified briefings. I propose that the best kind of lie is no lie at all: it’s just a shortage of truth. Rita, your report—and everything you tell the visitors who are about to descend on us tomorrow—will reflect the reality that you were captured and questioned. It will merely omit certain salient facts: they didn’t recognize you as a world-walker, and they didn’t take you on a side trip then send you back. Instead, you escaped when they put you back in a ground-floor cell after a second day of questioning. Do you think you can back that up?”

  “Yes, uh—” Rita swallowed. Her mouth was uncharacteristically dry. “I can say that. I tell them everything except that the adversaries knew what I was and kept me blocked. Uh. They kept my hands cuffed behind my back, so I couldn’t use my key generator until they dumped me in solitary. Right?”

  Smith nodded. For the first time, his expression relaxed toward its normal affability. “You got it, Rita. Less is more. Leave the stuff about Olga Thorold and Mrs. Burgeson and the document wallet out, and we can run with the arrest-and-escape story.”

  “Gomez saw the—”

  “Gomez sees what I tell her she sees, and hears what I want her to hear.” The twinkle in his eyes was the pale blue of liquid oxygen, chillier than ice despite the crow’s-feet wrinkles framing them.

  “So we have a story. I leave it to you two to flesh it out.” Dr. Scranton stood, picking up the leather document wallet. “I’m going to deliver this to Baltimore in person, eyes-only. I’ll be back in a day or two with a sealed reply. We’ll discuss what happens next at that point but, Rita, you should expect to spend a few days in BLACK RAIN as a houseguest of the, uh, Ministry of Intertemporal Technological Intelligence.” She gave a faint shudder of distaste. “They won’t lean on you—not while they’re trying to make nice—but they may try to evangelize you. Just be sure you know where you stand and you’ll be fine.”

  BERLIN, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020

  Hulius could world-walk relatively fast by Clan standards, but found it painful to do so—the headaches and blood pressure spikes were a major deterrent. Also, the geography in time line one in the vicinity of Berlin was a chilly pine forest. It made for a lousy rest stop between jaunts. Consequently, he left the rendezvous with the Princess by a more conventional route.

  Like many buildings in Berlin, the café entrance opened onto the street, but there was a rear exit into a cobbled courtyard at the center of the block. It was shared by all the other premises and used for deliveries via a gated alleyway. Hulius had entered via the back door and made himself at home in the upstairs storeroom an hour before Elizabeth and her bodyguards arrived. Now, having concluded his business with the target and her chaperone, he took his leave and left via the front door—in full view of her escort.

  It was a fraught moment. Thanks to the Princess making clear her desire not to be excessively supervised, the guards had merely glanced inside the café then staked out the front and back access routes, thinking it sufficient. If they’d had even an inkling that her destination was planned, they would have hurried her back to her apartments while assigning a detachment to search the premises thoroughly. The apparent spontaneity of her choice of refreshment stop had bamboozled them into a false complacency. But the instant Hulius emerged, the fellow loitering by the doorstep brushed past him into the café to check on his charge. And before he returned, the other nondescript gentleman (watching from across the street) began to move, tailing Hulius along the street.

  He strolled slowly and deliberately away from the café, hands clasped behind his back, giving no outward sign that the skin on the back of his neck was crawling. The sense of liminal danger set his heart racing. All it would take was a stupid slip of the tongue by that sheep-eyed lady-in-waiting. Or for the Princess, a better poker player by far than any overprivileged eighteen-y
ear-old had a right to be, deciding to throw him to the wolves in favor of a better offer from some other faction. To betray unease, even a casual glance over his shoulder, would itself invite suspicion. Pretend nothing is happening. Because nothing is happening. At any moment there might come a shout, a command to halt: more likely a sudden hammering of pistol bullets ripping into his back without warning or quarter. Every breath might be his last, yet he must continue to take steady, measured steps.

  A shop window beside him held newfangled float glass plates sandwiched between enameled metal strips. Hulius slowed. He swallowed, then glanced sideways at the display of cutlery and cookware. There were rows of kitchen knives, forming a splendidly eye-catching display of stainless steel. He stopped, using them as an excuse to turn his face to the window. He caught a hint of motion in his peripheral vision, then a pause. Retreat. He turned his head, as if to look at the display of bread tins. The man in the coat had turned back toward the café and was walking away, his tail abandoned.

  Hulius did not relax. The moment of maximum danger was past, but he was by no means safe yet. He turned back to his direction of travel and began walking again, lengthening his stride. Thinking, If I was her security officer I would have two teams, a close-in escort and a larger cordon farther out. Quite possibly the close-in escort had simply handed him off to the perimeter team, returning to their primary task of protecting the Princess, while their colleagues tracked everyone she might have come into contact with.

  The afternoon was cold and moist with the first chill winds of oncoming winter. The sky overhead was a wall of scudding gray vapor streaked with the yellow of coal smoke, but the humidity was clearing the smog from ground level, dissolving the sulfites, so visibility was inconveniently good. Hulius angled across the street, jaywalking between the back of a receding tram and the front of an oncoming horse-drawn dray. He took the opportunity to scan openly for both traffic threats and signs of followers. The shops and restaurants at this end of the street were more prosperous than at the other, meaning more of them had large, well-cleaned windows. There. Yes, there. He spotted the reflection of a man in a long duster-like coat and bicorne hat, following him about a hundred meters behind on the other side of the pavement. Hulius had seen him before, two blocks back. Now Mr. Bicorne was moving purposefully, swinging his head from side to side as he looked for a crossing place. Not a happy jaywalker, then.

  Hulius turned into a narrow side street leading to a parallel main road, away from the river, heading in the direction of the park. The rain was beginning to fall, big icy drops spitting in his face. Shuttered windows stared blindly down as he hurried past. He hung an abrupt left at the corner with the parallel road, and turned back on his path.

  Two long blocks away lay the park, with trees and footpaths and foliage to restrict lines of sight. Hulius accelerated to a fast walk. He body-swerved around a boy selling roasted nuts from a brazier, sidestepped two middle-aged women burdened by string bags full of kohlrabi, then crossed the road, narrowly missing a diesel-growling bus. Stealing a glance over his shoulder he saw a familiar silhouette bobbing along the other sidewalk. One block still separated him from the hedge-and-fence border of the park. Hulius grabbed his hat and broke into a run. Actual fear knifed into his gut: unhappy anxiety that he might have to ambush and kill a man who was merely doing his job as part of a personal protection detail. Hulius was no stranger to violence. He’d seen more violent death than any man ought to, before he even turned twenty. But committing murder in cold blood was something that he dreaded only slightly less than losing his own life. Such acts came easily only to monsters, and Hulius did not want to bear such a self-diagnosis.

  Halfway to the corner he heard a shout, cut off sharply by a squeal of tires and a bang, followed by a discordant braying of horns. He winced but kept going. There was a hedgerow to his right, with a gap coming up ahead. He ducked through the opening, stopped running, and peeped over the hedge from beneath an overhanging tree.

  The traffic a block behind him had gridlocked. Isolated horns still sounded, but people were bending over something in the road, a body on the ground in front of a delivery van. There was much shouting and waving of arms as witnesses urged the traffic to back up. He couldn’t see whether the man was moving. He feared not.

  Hulius took a shuddering breath and gathered his coat tighter across his shoulders as he forced himself to turn back to the footpath. That, he told himself grimly, was altogether too close for comfort. He hoped the man wasn’t dead or badly injured. The automatic pistol holstered at the small of his back weighed on him like a guilty conscience. He hadn’t made his pursuer run after him into traffic: nevertheless, If I’d world-walked instead … He made his way slowly away through the park, zigzagging along the footpaths under the chilly rain, periodically doubling back and changing direction to check for further tails. Only when he was absolutely certain nobody was following him—that the man in the bicorne hat had been his only pursuer—did he set course for his hotel, and the encrypted base station with which he would make his report:

  OFFER ACCEPTED PROCEEDING WITH EXTRACTION.

  PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  The debriefings—now with added misdirection—continued until dinner, then long into the night. Smith (with Gomez’s help, to add an adversarial edge to proceedings) coached Rita until she was prepared to recite her lines in her sleep. She needed to be ready for the skeptical and disappointed audience who would descend on the Unit’s field office the instant they learned of her return. Then Gomez and a couple of DHS cops escorted the yawning Rita up to a bedroom on the top floor of the hotel. “What is this?” she complained. “Can’t I go home?”

  “Not tonight.” Gomez’s gaze flickered to her colleagues and back. “Not until you’ve delivered your performance. Tomorrow, maybe.”

  Rita was too tired to fight back. Someone had procured a change of clothes so that she could peel out of the wardrobe department’s best guess at Commonwealth women’s wear (which she’d been living in for nearly three days now, and which needed washing). But getting out of costume was all she managed before the allure of the hotel bed overwhelmed her.

  The next morning she showered and dressed in the clothes she’d found in the hotel room wardrobe, then trudged to the elevator under guard—before breakfast, even before coffee—to face her first grilling. There were three sessions that day. The worst part wasn’t lying about the presence of world-walking murderers in the dangerously developed time line next door, but figuring out diplomatic responses to the most inane questions. “But, Ms. Douglas, surely there was some sign of the Church of Scientology being present?” Or, “Is the Book of Mormon known to them?” She was a good girl: she did not laugh in anybody’s face, or exercise sarcasm or irony. The wardrobe department had supplied her with a dark suit and a cream blouse, an office lady uniform she wouldn’t normally be seen dead in—but she got the message: This is a role I’m acting, serious civil servant woman. The closer she played it to the point of audience boredom, the sooner she’d be allowed to go home and collapse on Angie’s shoulder. So she consciously modeled the delivery of her canned report on the FBI agents she’d trained with, answered questions solemnly and without embellishment, called her interlocutors “sir” and “ma’am,” and did her best to convey the impression that she had all the personality of a piece of boardroom furniture.

  She must have been doing something right, for after the third run-through Gomez and Patrick rang the curtain down on the last group of rubberneckers. “Good work,” Patrick said approvingly after he shooed the last of the visitors out of the bug-swept hotel boardroom that the Unit had requisitioned for the dog and pony show.

  “It was very impressive. You almost looked like a real DHS special agent,” Gomez added, so drily that Rita couldn’t be sure if she was joking (although a joke from Gomez—any joke at all—would be a first).

  “The boss says you can take the rest of today off,” Patrick continued as if she hadn�
��t said anything. “And as tomorrow is Saturday, you get the weekend off as well. Be back here Monday at nine and, uh, have a nice time.”

  “Okay.” Rita patted her jacket’s fake pockets and frowned. “Any idea where my phone and purse got to? I left them with Gladys.”

  “Come with me.” Patrick held the door open for her. Gomez looked as if she was about to say something, but pivoted on one heel and stalked off.

  “What’s eating her?” Rita asked, once she was out of sight. “She’s had the knives out for me ever since…”

  “Come on.” Patrick led her toward a service staircase leading down toward the back of the hotel. “You’re not a co-religionist of hers, and you’ve got something she’ll never have. What more reason does she need?”

  Rita hurried to keep up. “I suppose…”

  “Jealousy sucks. Professional jealousy is no different from the personal kind. My advice would be to try and learn to ignore her. Unless she oversteps the line and does something unprofessional, in which case…” He shrugged.

  “I didn’t ask for this shit,” Rita said tiredly.

  “Nobody ever does. Come on, I think this is where wardrobe is currently holed up.”

  Ten minutes later Rita found herself sitting in the lobby of the hotel, holding a bag with last Monday morning’s leggings and dress, too tired and apathetic to change out of the G-woman suit. Her phone was almost flat, but when Rita called, Angie answered immediately. “Rita! Where’ve you been hiding? We’ve been worried shitless—”

  “I’m at the, uh, the hotel my employers use. Can you drop by and pick me up? They said I can go home for the weekend.”

  “Oh baby, you don’t have to ask.”

  Half an hour later, Angie bounded in through the revolving lobby doors. “Rita!” She stopped just short of throwing an enthusiastic embrace around her.

  Rita smiled weakly. “Hey.”