Dark State--A Novel of the Merchant Princes Multiverse

by Charles Stross

  “Well enough, thank you.” Rita felt her hackles going up defensively. Brill was probably just trying to be friendly, but the words “bossy” and “intrusive” also sprang to mind.

  “Good. I’ve got to be in the office today, but Alice Morgan will be dropping round in an hour to take you shopping, then—”

  “Shopping?”

  “Yes.” Brilliana looked slightly impatient; Huw leaning back, stayed out of the firing line. “If you’re going to visit for any length of time you need clothes you can be seen in without every street urchin you pass calling the Polis to report a foreign spy. You also need a personal protection detail, at least until Ras introduces you in public as his wife’s daughter, and therefore somebody it would be unwise to arrest on charges of, oh, trespassing on the Permanent Way, for example? Inspector Morgan is in the know, so we might as well use her. And she’ll be a good deal better at steering you around department stores and preventing you from committing fashion crimes than his lordship here.” Brill reached over and tousled Huw’s thinning hair affectionately. He managed to keep a straight face, but Rita recognized the dynamic at work with a twinge. “So: you’re to go shopping this morning, then after lunch you have a session with Erasmus’s people, and then Huw can show you around the DPR survey offices in town. I’m sure Colonel Smith will be fascinated by your report!”

  “Um.” Rita paused a moment. “Can I ask a favor?”

  “Sure.” Brill’s response was so studiously noncommittal that Rita almost chickened out. “You can ask, whatever you like.” A quick flash of a smile: “I can’t guarantee to give you the answer you want.”

  “Is it possible to send a message?” Rita licked her suddenly dry lips. “I mean, if I write a letter, would there be some way to see it gets into a USPS mailbox with a stamp on it?”

  “A letter”—Brilliana focused on Rita with the intensity of a laser beam—“to whom, and why?”

  Huw cleared his throat. “Sending an anonymous letter to someone in the United States is extremely dangerous for whoever has to do the job,” he said. “We’re not exactly welcome there. What you’re asking for would—hypothetically, I mean, assuming we have any such people—expose a covert asset to an elevated risk of arrest. And while we could in principle arrange to have a letter or postcard mailed from somewhere outside the Continental United States, it’d be scanned as soon as it crossed the border and it’d take up to a week to get there and it’s still not a trivial job. Essentially you’re asking for an international courier package, a scheduled para-time transit drop, and someone to actually go and execute the task and then confirm the letter was mailed as specified. This is a government bureaucracy: mailing a letter in another time line normally requires committee approval and costs the equivalent of six or seven thousands of dollars.”

  “But you could just send an e-mail,” Brilliana suggested.

  “An e-mail—” Rita nearly choked on a mouthful of coffee. “How is that even possible?”

  “Oh, we have our methods.” Brill’s face relaxed into a smugly bland mask.

  “Stop playing with her.” Huw sounded amused. “Rita, we have people—agents—overseas, outside the United States, in places where they don’t have to worry about the DHS breaking down their door or the CIA dropping a Hellfire missile on them. There are some countries the USA doesn’t mess with: China, Brazil, Indonesia. Every few hours we ship a memory stick over, and every few hours stuff comes back. It’s called store-and-forward, it’s slow—it’s no way to surf the Web—but it suffices. So if you can remember an e-mail address, we can get a message to it, and fetch you a reply. But—this is a big ‘but’—we’ll be reading your correspondence before we send it. And the NSA will be reading it on its way to your recipient. And we’ll be reading your reply.”

  Rita took a deep breath. “I don’t want to be any trouble,” she said, “but…”

  Brilliana looked at her. “You’re thinking about your family, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.” She took another deep breath. “If Colonel Smith’s been keeping me in a sandbox, he thinks I’m disposable.” There was no point denying it. “If he tries to dispose of me, that’s one thing. But what about my…” She trailed off.

  Huw and Brilliana exchanged a look. “It hasn’t happened yet,” Brill said calmly. “And it probably won’t.” She’s trying to be reassuring, Rita thought queasily. She’s trying to spare me. “And—this is hard—when that sort of thing happens, it’s up to them, up to your relatives, your partner, to decide what they want to do next. If you ask for asylum we can help you. And if they want refuge, we can do something about that. But you can’t make their minds up for them—”

  “What she forgot to say,” Huw interrupted, “is that yes, we’ll help you warn your relatives if it becomes necessary—but it probably won’t do any good. You can tell them the sky is about to fall, but they’ll probably smile and ignore you and go about their business as usual. And if they’re your relatives, Smith’s people are certainly monitoring their e-mail, so your message will be spotted.”

  “Been there, done that,” Brilliana said, and fell broodingly silent for a few seconds. “So. Is that all…?”

  “I guess.” Rita pushed her bowl away. She didn’t feel hungry anymore.

  NEW LONDON, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020

  The Chamber of People’s Magistrates occupied the premises of the disgraced and disbanded House of Lords. It had been built in the 1960s by the last king’s grandfather, in an attempt to abolish adversarial party factionalism by requiring their Lordships to mingle with no clear dividing lines, and the debating chamber consequently featured a horseshoe-shaped arc of seating. But after the revolution, the elected magistrates—elected only if their views met with the approval of the Radical Party’s Commission for Democracy, which basically meant being opposed to the restoration of the monarchy—had gradually partitioned into a rainbow of beliefs. Those who trod dangerously close to monarchical restorationism tended to sit at one edge of the aisle, to the left of the Speaker’s seat. Their foes, the Egalitarians and Ranters, spread to the right.

  Both wings had their own preferred dining rooms and drinking dens in the complex scattered around the Chamber building. And it was in one that leaned to the right that Adrian Holmes took his lunch with Commissioner Sánchez of the War Ministry.

  “I’m worried about the Burgesons,” Holmes said bluntly. He’d already laid his groundwork. Sánchez, a heavyset man of late middle age, with lugubrious features and a bulbous red nose, nodded tacit agreement as he bent over his seafood platter. “I don’t know how much you’ve heard about what they’re doing right now, but I thought I should keep you inside the charmed circle.”

  Sánchez laid his fork down and swallowed. “Do, please, by all means,” he said. His voice was surprisingly mellow and high-pitched for such a large fellow. It was not the most surprising thing about him. The grandson of an Amazonian logger who had migrated to the coastal islands of the Incan dominions and made a fortune importing guano, Sánchez had gone on to spend his inheritance on a low-level guerilla war against the brutal Samurai tax-farmers brought in by the last king’s own father—losing everything, then gaining a new respectability in the wake of the revolution. Now he was a member of the commission charged with defending the Commonwealth from royalist and imperial conspiracies abroad, the sword and the shield of the Party. He was not a particularly subtle man, but his loyalty to the principles of Democracy and Revolution was unimpeachable.

  “You are privy to the background briefing on the Department of Para-historical Research,” Holmes began. “You know we are dependent on these world-walkers for access—a small clique of families who have a highly unusual talent that runs in the direct bloodline. What you might not have paid much notice to is the fact that it appears the primary power in time line two, the alternate the Burgesons are always warning us about—the United States of America—has for some time had access to machines that can transport payloads across para-time. They�
��re ahead of us in some ways—”

  “I’ve seen their gizmos.” Sánchez snorted. “And the other stuff.” The War Ministry had access to samples supplied by MITI, dangled tantalizingly in front of them as proof that the super-technology MITI promised to deliver in future was actually possible. Wonders like 3-D printers able to extrude turbine blades, sniper rifles with supercomputer-assisted gunsights. Nothing the Commonwealth could manufacture for itself yet—not for another decade, anyway—but nothing they wouldn’t be able to match eventually. “Where did they get para-time machines from, though?”

  “There are rumors about chopped-up brains in boxes.” Holmes’s expression of distaste was genuine. “When they stumbled across the world-walkers they were desperate. On a war footing. In confidence: we know there’s something odd in world-walkers’ brains. The Ministry of Health has been conducting some discreet research, and our electron microscopes are apparently good enough to see—well, a handful of world-walkers die every year, and they’re all Persons of Interest, and MiniHealth are in charge of the autopsia program, so of course some slides were prepared. We’re not going to be building any world-walking machines—it’s all the proverbial ten years away, like fusion reactors and landing on the Moon—but I believe some of our colleagues are working on it.” He pointedly didn’t say whether or not such a research program was being conduced under the auspices of MITI. That way, Sánchez could maintain deniability.

  “Well then.” Sánchez picked up his fork and resumed eating, stolidly focusing on his meal. Holmes wasn’t fooled: he had the Commissioner’s full and undivided attention.

  “I am pretty certain that Mrs. Burgeson and her relatives must have guessed this is going on. They’d be fools not to. They’d also be fools not to realize that they have had a tidy little monopoly for nearly twenty years, and sooner or later it will evaporate. So some or all of them will be making plans for the future, for a time when they are merely citizens with a curious and useful talent rather than the gatekeepers of unimaginable riches. And, of course, they must be considering their probable future after the First Man takes his final curtain call and leaves the stage. As are we all.”

  Sánchez merely nodded.

  “I think Mrs. Burgeson herself is fundamentally loyal to the Party,” Holmes continued. “She supported our cells in Boston before the revolution, that much is a matter of record. And Erasmus is Erasmus: he’s as twisty as a left-handed corkscrew, but his dedication to the cause is above question. What worries me is what their protégés might be planning. I’ve received some disturbing reports of activities conducted by the DPR in our time line. Activities which might represent a melted stovepipe between Propaganda and what is admittedly a highly competent intelligence agency, but which might equally well be a rogue operation, or even preparations for an act of treason on an unprecedented scale.”

  Sánchez dropped his fork. “Treason?” he echoed.

  “That is a worst-case interpretation,” Adrian averred, dabbing delicately at his lips with a handkerchief. He picked up his glass and took a sip. “I sincerely hope I’m wrong. But consider the nature of the world-walking ability. It’s an inherited trait, one that those of us not born within the charmed circle can never hope to emulate. As such, I submit that all world-walkers are unconsciously predisposed to elitist deviationism. Not through malice, as might be the case among the rent-farming aristocracy”—he noted the subtle tell as Sánchez’s face stiffened—“but simply because of what they are. So a couple of years ago I directed SCEP’s Office of Internal Affairs to keep an eye on the senior management of the DPR, in case they were running wild. And about two months ago a report crossed my desk concerning the sudden redeployment of a Major Hjorth, who happens to be both a world-walker and the younger brother of the Explorer-General. Which means he’s related by marriage to the very top of his own reporting chain, to one Brilliana Hjorth, who directs para-time intelligence operations in the United States.”

  “Major in which agency?” asked Sánchez, his tone ominously mild.

  “Commissioned in the Army, on permanent secondment to the DPR’s Acquisition of Technology Program. Late thirties, special forces training, pilot’s license, fluent in at least three languages. He is one of the few officers considered sufficiently acculturated and reliable to operate in the other New York as an illegal from time to time—you are aware that they are a full-blown police state, yes? Miniature television cameras trained on everyone all the time? Invisible flying killer robots to assassinate their enemies at home and abroad? Well, Major Hjorth is a heavy hitter. One may speculate that the only reason he topped off at Major is that he is a hands-on kind of fellow, disinclined to administration. Anyway, he’s gone under deep cover, and SCEP is getting some very suggestive reports.”

  Sánchez pushed his plate aside. “Do you want me to reel him in and squeeze him?”

  “Not yet. You probably couldn’t find him, anyway. Our reports suggest he’s in Germany, of all places. In Berlin.”

  Sánchez frowned. “What’s in Berlin?”

  “Have you been reading the weekly digests about the Pretender’s household activities?”

  Sánchez’s frown deepened. “Wait, now I recall—oh no, you cannot be serious—”

  “I hope I’m wrong, Commissioner.”

  “Surely you can’t believe the world-walkers are going after the Crown Princess?”

  “I don’t know. Short of arresting Mrs. Hjorth or confronting Mrs. Burgeson directly there’s no easy way of resolving the question. But I find it highly suspicious that elements within the DPR are engaging with the Pretender’s court at the very highest level, behind our backs, just as we ready ourselves for the greatest leadership crisis the Commonwealth has faced since the revolution. My fear is that as instinctive elitists, their minds turn more easily towards an elitist solution to the question of succession than to the preservation of democracy…”

  “You fear they may be preparing a coup on behalf of Elizabeth Hanover. That would be your treason right there, would it not?”

  Holmes smiled tightly. “You read my mind.”

  “Your mind is an open book, sir—when you leave the bookmark in view.” Sánchez’s normally affable expression darkened. “And if you’re right I believe we are going to have a fight on our hands.”

  PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  FEDERAL EMPLOYEE 004930391 CLASSIFIED VOICE TRANSCRIPT

  DR. SCRANTON: Sitrep, please.

  COL. SMITH: Rita first: she’s over there. Transit confirmed. Gus…?

  LIAISON, AIR FORCE: The Dragonfly micro-UAV dump confirmed successful contact. They had a car waiting for her. Dragonfly only has a fifteen minute loiter time when it’s carrying a transit pack, so all we really know is that she got into the limo without obvious signs of duress. By the time the second Dragonfly sortied, the transponder in her navkit was out of range, so at a guess they were heading for one of the turnpikes we mapped. Range is about ten klicks, so an undirected search was obviously not going to work, but I took a gamble on Manhattan and requested another Dragonfly sortie, and it hit pay dirt. Her transponder is in a row house near the downtown administrative complex, in what would be Little Italy in our New York. The transponder data dump says they drove her up the highway, stopped at another government building, then she went to a different row house, then to this one which is about a quarter of a mile away. And she’s been there ever since.

  DR. SCRANTON: So we can assume she’s in the administrative capital. What they call New London. Is that right?

  LIAISON, AIR FORCE: Yes.

  DR. SCRANTON: Okay, Colonel, please continue.

  COL. SMITH: We’ve had no direct inputs from Rita: there isn’t enough bandwidth in those micro-UAVs to upload the entire audio recording from the bugs in her camera and navkit without risking interception, especially in a high-security zone like their capital. So unless you really want it, I’d prefer to wait until she brings them home. She’s only been there 18 hours—


  DR. SCRANTON: Understood. Proceed as planned for now. The others?

  AGENT GOMEZ: Nothing significant to report on Kurt except that he went online to American Airlines yesterday to book a flight back to Phoenix, departing next Friday. It’s likely he’s planning on sticking around Philadelphia until Rita returns. He phoned Angela this afternoon but it was all trivia, apart from a brief reference—by Angela—to Rita being, quote, away on business, unquote. As for Angela, she drove Rita to the office then went to work as usual. No new audio drop-outs, no signs of evasion. Whatever they were talking about the other evening seems to be over for now.

  DR. SCRANTON: Okay, that’s looking good. Now, in the short term I’d be astonished if Rita returns in less than 48 hours elapsed—more likely 3–5 days. So I’d like to work up a plan to drain the audio capture, if any, with minimal risk of exposure if it turns out she’s on a protracted jaunt. Can you figure out a safe way to send a transponder over that isn’t going to attract attention? Assuming she’s in a safe house.

  LIAISON, AIR FORCE: I think we can do that, if they aren’t observing COMSEC around the items. I wouldn’t like to bet on these people being unaware of our capabilities … I’ll need authorization for another two Dragonfly sorties to get an exact fix on the house, maybe peep through some upper story windows as well. Then we can send a small return-capable robot through at night, inside the building. If possible we will identify a handy piece of furniture for cover—a bed or a chest of drawers or something it can hide under, within radio range of the bugs. I’d call this a medium-risk strategy, but we can minimize the hazard by sending the probe packages on ten second jaunts at dead of night during the mapping stage. Once we’ve mapped out the interior of the house and identified target spaces, we can do all sorts of things: download the voice dump from the bugs, send insects and micro-UAVs through, turn the whole DARPA/CIA toy chest loose on them if we turn up anything interesting.