Dark State--A Novel of the Merchant Princes Multiverse

by Charles Stross

  “Pay no attention to the cameras.” Scranton shook her head minutely.

  Ah, Julie realized sickly. “Uh, yes, ma’am.” So this was an official visit: today’s launch was important enough to rate someone who reported directly to the National Security Council as an observer. Even though the dome crew was barely into double-digits. (The dome counted as a hazardous posting: all the supporting personnel were stationed well away from the gate.)

  “All right. ERGO-1”—she pointed to the crate visible in the middle screen, sitting up against the airlock door—“is the first in a series of Ergosphere Reconnaissance Gravity Orbiter probes. Uh, ergosphere … black holes spin, right? It’s got all the mass, and angular momentum, and the magnetic field, of the planet that used to be here, squished down inside a golf ball? So it’s spinning really fast. The ergosphere is a zone just around the black hole where relativistic frame-dragging means we can extract info—” She stopped, seeing Dr. Scranton’s polite expression freeze. “I can get you references for later, if you want? Uh-huh. Anyway, ERGO-1 is designed to get in really close and probe the region right around the hole. It’s powered up and undergoing systems self-test and thermal equilibration, controlled remotely from base camp, while it comes up to ambient temperature and pressure—” Dr. Scranton nodded seriously, as if she hadn’t sat in on the budget committee meetings that signed off on the specifications.

  Julie took a deep breath and continued. For the record, right. “It’s basically a satellite, minus the regular launch platform—the big rocket we’d normally need to throw it into orbit. Here, we can just wheel it up to the door and throw it out. At which point, it begins to fall towards the gravitational singularity, because we’re not in orbit around it. We’re circling around the hole’s polar axis once per day, like the planet the other end of the bridge is anchored to. Because of the lateral velocity component, and the fact that we’re some way north of the equator, ERGO-1 won’t drop directly into the black hole. Instead, it’ll spiral towards it then end up in an elliptical orbit, oscillating above and below the accretion disk with an apogee—maximum altitude above the hole—somewhere below our current ground level.”

  She paused and checked the main screen. The bridge crew were withdrawing: the box containing ERGO-1 was now latched to the inner airlock door. In a few minutes, once the crew were clear, they’d depressurize the bridge completely and open the doors. “Of course we’re not going to leave it there.”

  ERGO-1 had a rocket motor. Not a very powerful one—although like all rockets it contained enough highly explosive fuel to kill or injure the bridge crew if anything went wrong while they were preparing it for launch. It was just sufficient to give ERGO-1 a kick as it made its closest pass to the planetary mass singularity, barely fifty kilometers away from the ergosphere. A kick that, thanks to something called a relativistic Oberth maneuver, would slingshot the satellite back up toward the level of the bridge station with vastly higher momentum than it had descended with. Once it rose above mean Earth surface level, the satellite would jaunt back to the skies above Camp Singularity, and squawk its telemetry log at the ground station there before disintegrating as it slammed into the atmosphere at well above escape velocity. How to burn through one hundred million dollars in less than three hours.

  Dr. Scranton was still nodding as Jose spoke up: “Bridge crew are clear of the number three pressure door. I counted them out and I’ve counted them in. We’re clear up to the thousand second hold.” Like all space launch processes, there was a countdown sequence with built-in hold-points where the ground crew could review the telemetry from the payload and verify everything was all right before proceeding. Rattling was audible from the other side of the control room wall, which adjoined the clean room disrobing area. The NRO folks would be unlocking their helmets and high-fiving one another when the probe itself powered up.

  “Well then, you may proceed.” Scranton pulled up one of the office chairs and folded herself down to watch the show.

  In Julie’s opinion it was the world’s dullest space launch. There were no exciting rocket flames and noises to reward them for plowing through the checklists. They’d already pushed out three cubesats this week—fist-sized titanium cubes, ten centimeters on an edge—via the number two lock. This was simply the same, on a bigger scale. It held all the excitement of taking the trash out to the Dumpster.

  Join the DHS, tour the multiverse, train as an agent, and spend your life clicking through computer checklists with an obsolete mouse. Sometimes Julie couldn’t figure out what she was doing here. The job varied a lot—the Colonel had deliberately kept the active core of the Unit small, so that everybody had to do a bit of everything—but some of the variations were tiresome and repetitive, so boring that only self-discipline saw her through her shifts. Jose and Max were part of the regular bridge crew: all Julie could do was watch screens when they pointed her at something, check off items in a list—

  “One hundred seconds,” said the synthesized voice of the launch clock.

  “Nearly ready,” Max remarked to nobody in particular. “Close out on oxidizer tank, pressure nominal—” Just like the stages in a real satellite launch, without the big-ass rocket sitting underneath.

  “Switching to onboard battery power now—” The voice echoed down the link from base camp, where a rather larger team were monitoring their progress from a safe distance.

  “Fuel filler line disconnect. Oxidizer filler line disconnect. All tanks pressurized—”

  “Thirty seconds.” The clock’s time check was accentless, dispassionate.

  Julie was aware of Dr. Scranton sitting up tensely, watching the big status display at the front of the room over her shoulder—

  “External door coming open now.” Jose bent over the airlock control panel. “Internal door in ten seconds—”

  “Confirm launch window open—”

  An obstructed view appeared on the main screen: it showed something blocky and indistinct surrounded by a thin rind of darkness, as if the camera had macular degeneration. The darkness around the edge gradually brightened.

  “Ten seconds. Nine. Eight … three, two, one…”

  The indistinct circle of darkness began to shrink and sharpen, details filling in. Now she could see the back side of a spacecraft, the bell nozzle of the main engine surrounded by a rat’s nest of pipework and the ducting of gas generators and attitude control thrusters. It slid smoothly out of the box, shrinking as it receded from the camera it had obscured. ERGO-1 began the long, silent fall through thousands of miles of vacuum toward the knotted pinprick of space-time that had once been a planet, before someone had murdered it.

  “We have complete separation,” said Max. He sounded smug. “High-gain transmitter is up and running, ERGO-1 says hello world.”

  “Range one kilometer and opening, fifteen seconds, mark.” This, from Jose.

  Julie turned to Dr. Scranton. “That’s it for now,” she said. “Perigee is about fifteen minutes away: ERGO-1 is running through its final test cycle. Main engine ignition is due in eight hundred and thirty seconds from the … mark. Between now and then it’s going to be about as much fun to watch as paint drying. Can I interest you in a coffee?”

  Scranton nodded. “Regular, half and half, no sweetener,” she said, her eyes intently tracking the main status display as the numbers attached to the blocky diagram of the probe’s schematics spiraled rapidly up. “Officer Mendoza. The wide-angle array is tracking the inner debris belts, correct?”

  Julie didn’t hear Jose’s reply: the door to the control cabin closed behind her as she turned toward the break room coffee station. Debris belts … she paused. What had dragged Scranton out here to the politics-free backwater of Camp Singularity? The probe launch on its own didn’t justify her presence: she had far bigger fish to fry. Unless …

  She shuddered as a thought struck her. She opened the door to the break room and crossed to the coffee robot, punched in Scranton’s order, and her own, and Max and Jos
e’s regulars. No, she thought, they wouldn’t be that crazy. Could they?

  A probe with a rocket motor on the base and a conical front end looked more like the maneuvering bus that carried a nuclear missile’s reentry vehicles than a regular research satellite. It had an ARMBAND unit for jaunting between time lines, and a conveniently compact black hole to provide a hefty change in velocity—enough to fling it on a ballistic trajectory that could come down anywhere on any other Earth in para-time, streaking in from the zenith without warning. But it’s not supposed to survive reentry, she reminded herself. Or is it?

  She shook her head, dismissing the thought. Don’t be silly, nobody’s planning a nuclear first strike on another time line so they can’t be testing a para-time ballistic missile, she told herself. That’s a crazy thought. She stacked the coffee mugs on a tray and walked them back to the bridge control room. Nobody in the administration today is stupid enough to try and play that card again. Are they?

  BERLIN, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020

  The game’s afoot.

  Hulius was not the only world-walker the DPR had assigned to the extraction mission. There were clearly at least two others, a lamplighter to scout out and secure the safe houses, and a courier to collect and deliver messages. But he was the only agent who would make direct contact with the target, and to preserve operational security he worked in isolation, never seeing his colleagues. Quite likely they never saw him either, so that if one was taken they could not lead their captors to the others.

  So Hulius was profoundly relieved to receive Elizabeth’s response via a dead letter drop in a bar near his hostel, operated by a maidservant who had been bribed or blackmailed by the unseen courier. He’d finished his conversion training on the Cirrus, and was cautiously confident of his ability to make it do what it was supposed to, weather in two time lines permitting. And he’d been getting bored lately, which was an ever-present danger during a covert operation. Covert ops overwhelmingly consisted of “hurry up and wait,” but bored agents cut corners and allowed themselves to get sloppy, which was how they graduated to being blown agents, or even dead agents. Neither of these outcomes was desirable, in Hulius’s opinion. But now that the Princess had signaled her intention to proceed, he could set the wheels in motion.

  The next morning Hulius headed for the tram stop as usual. He didn’t tell his landlord that he didn’t expect to return. The morning’s mission might yet abort, and anyway, what the hostel owner didn’t know the hostel owner couldn’t blab to a nosy secret police agent. He rode out to the furrier’s warehouse in silence, mentally reviewing his plans. In the office, he lifted the loose floorboard beneath which he’d concealed his satellite transceiver. He keyed in a brief coded message: EXTRACTION IMMINENT EXECUTE TOMORROW CONDITIONAL. Then he made the headache-inducing double-jump to time line two, to continue his preparations.

  The rented apartment in the other Berlin was aseptically sterile. He took his standard medication dose, massaged his aching forehead, then changed into local drag and made a brief sortie to check on the car parked outside. The BMW’s engine started perfectly: he checked the indicated fuel, oil, and coolant levels, allowed it to adjust its tire pressure, let the engine run for a couple of minutes, and shut it down again. Back indoors, he phoned the hangar at the airfield. “Yes, I’ll be flying out tomorrow,” he told the secretary of the service company he’d contracted to maintain the Cirrus. “I’ll arrive around eleven hundred. The flight plan’s already on file: two pax, full tanks. Bill it to my account and I’ll settle in full before departure.”

  He hung up, satisfied for the time being. There was a backup plan, of course, one that didn’t involve a James Bond–style world-walking stunt in a light plane—but it was actually riskier. If the Cirrus went tech or the weather was bad, he’d have to drive a very long way with a freaked-out young lady who might by then be having second and third thoughts. He’d have to go to ground while Control obtained a false passport for her, then coach her through the process of boarding a civil airliner to South America, or a boat ride out into the Bay of Biscay with a two-person hot air balloon on board … the risks exploded exponentially the further down the decision tree he got. Unlike Hulius, the Princess had no idea how to handle herself in the Germany of time line two. The world-walking light plane plan was technically risky, but minimized her exposure to an alien culture.

  But the hard bit was always going to be the extraction of Elizabeth Hanover from Schloss Britz, Berlin, the Holy Roman Empire, time line three. It had to be done under the noses of her guards, who were motivated and highly professional, and without scaring the lass into a state of panicky intransigence. Everything depended on her willing cooperation.

  But Hulius had one huge advantage over her bodyguards. He could penetrate their outer security cordon invisibly, while they were officially forbidden from operating inside the grounds of the ladies’ finishing school.

  Entering the apartment’s spare room, Hulius collected the bag that the lamplighters had prepared. They’d used a shopping list supplied by head office. Quite how they’d gotten hold of Elizabeth’s dress size and other measurements he had no idea: perhaps they’d suborned one of the servants at the school. Hulius would have found it quite disturbing if they’d done it to his own daughter, but … that’s the price of fame, he told himself. There was a certain comfort to be taken from being invisible, obscure, ordinary.

  Delivery of the extraction package had to be carried out by the officer conducting the operation. The courier and lamplighter in time line three couldn’t come into contact with the package, for if they were taken with knowledge of its contents, the target’s security detail would then be able to set a trap. And delivery of the package would constitute a dry run for the extraction officer.

  One risk factor in the extraction was that the Princess would probably find mainstream fashions in time line two scandalous. So Control had ordered up a Muslim outfit: nobody in Berlin would look twice at another dark-skinned Turkish girl in long dress and headscarf. The disguise only had to hold up until Hulius could get her to the airfield. He repacked the outfit in the otherworld carpet bag he’d bought for just this purpose, wrote down a concise set of instructions, wrapped it in a brown paper shopping bag he’d brought over from time line three, then returned to the car and drove off.

  In time line two Schloss Britz lay in the suburb of Berlin-Neukölln, rather than outside the city itself. It was open to the public as a museum, along with the beautifully preserved manorial park that spread out around it. And unlike Mme. Houelebecq’s finishing school, the Kulturstiftung Schloss Britz wasn’t swarming with imperial guards.

  Hulius parked up in the visitor’s lot, then walked to the public entrance. He paid cash for admission then headed directly to the house itself. He ignored the dubious temptations of the ornamental garden—with fall setting in, it was unsurprisingly deserted. He walked through the vestibule, then entered the terrace room, with its grand piano and rococo antique chairs, then the painted magnificence of the hunting room. Off to one side there was a discreet entrance labeled STAFF ONLY. He paused for a brief inspection, then eased the door open and stepped inside. The former servants corridor led through narrow passages past rooms refitted as offices and now all but deserted. He stopped at a janitor’s closet, stepped inside, then, taking a deep breath, pulled out a small locket on a chain around his neck.

  The room went away, replaced by forest. He stood atop a mound of compacted dirt, held in place with planks and carefully flattened to provide a platform at the same level as in the time lines where the schloss existed on this site. Despite the throbbing in his head, Hulius turned around slowly, checking for signs of disturbance. Then he sat for ten minutes while his headache eased. Finally he flipped the locket around and focused on the design on the opposite side of it.

  He looked around at a dust-sheeted furniture storeroom, occupying the same floor space as the closet in the time line two version of the schloss. He checked his watch. He h
ad plenty of time for it was nearly eleven, the ladies would be attending their classes, and his headache had intensified: he needed to rest up. So he crossed to the door and inserted a pair of wedges to hold it shut. Then he removed his chinos and hoodie, revealing the knee breeches and lace fronted shirt of a servant. He shoved the discarded clothes under a chest of drawers. Then he took two pills, dry-swallowed them, and sat down on a covered chaise to wait for the pounding in his skull to subside.

  When he was ready to open the door, Huw walked straight to the staircase and ascended, performing the part of a man who was exactly where he knew he was supposed to be. He’d walked this route before, of course: reconnaissance was essential. But every such exploration brought with it a risk of exposure, and there was no margin of error on this mission.

  Emerging into the main second-floor corridor, he headed toward the bend where, in that other Berlin, the house had been extended and the mistress’s residence added to the new wing. It was a short walk to the Princess’s rooms, but this was the most hazardous part of the job: he was in possession of items that could not be explained away if he was challenged. Hulius walked calmly along the corridor, exuding confidence. He held a key: as soon as he recognized the vestibule leading to Elizabeth’s rooms he extended it to the lock.

  “Excuse me, sir.” A woman’s voice, challenging. “What are you doing?”

  Hulius turned slowly, and gave a half-bow, keeping a tight grip on his expression. The woman was about thirty years old, her morning gown as impeccable as her cut-glass accent. Evidently one of the tutors. She looked curious rather than outraged. Hulius made a snap decision: “There is a special delivery for Lady Hanover,” he said apologetically, raising the carpetbag. “Her lady-in-waiting requested it to be delivered. I am to place it inside while she is attending her lessons.”