Invisible Sun (Empire Games, #3)

by Charles Stross

The people around her went hatless and it seemed both men and women wore trousers. But that was the least of the strangeness. There are no horses, she realized dizzily. No ever-present road apples with their sweet-sick smell of equine droppings, no boys with brooms waiting to sweep the crossings. Did they eat all the horses? Is there a famine?

This time line’s Boston seemed drab, grey, and lacking in vibrancy. It took him a while to realize what he was noticing was simply the absence of garish video hoardings. Nobody was light-bombing the roads with advertising. Other differences gradually emerged. There weren’t enough cars. The omnipresent Stars and Stripes flags flying over every federal and state building were absent. The police wore green. And there were a lot more streetcars. It felt oddly homely. All these tiny cues were alien, but the sum of the parts took him back to his youth. This looking-glass America resembled the GDR in so many tiny ways that it was felt more familiar than the home time line he’d just left.

Stalin was said to have been friendly and avuncular, with an impish sense of humor, and collected jokes about himself—he had several prison camps’ full of them.

But the DHS would have to be crazy to meddle in the politics of a nuclear-armed revolutionary superpower in the middle of its first ever succession crisis! Haven’t these people read their history books?

Growing up as a third-generation Communist spy on American soil had been just another part of Angie’s childhood, along with going to grade school, playing soccer, and being a Girl Scout.

The Germanies had been reunified and the Stasi abolished before she was even been born. It was just part of her family history, like being a secret practicing Moslem in post-reconquista Spain. There were quaint family rituals and observances, practiced behind closed doors out of fear of discovery, and it was just another unremarkable aspect of her upbringing. But now, thanks to the freak accident (if indeed it was an accident) of Rita’s adoption by Kurt’s son and daughter-in-law, the Orchestra had inadvertently fulfilled its mission.

While they’d intended the Orchestra to remain in the US indefinitely and raise children there—it was a very long-term program—nobody in the office complex on the Frankfurter Allee had considered the possibility that the first generation of sleepers would enter their dotage on hostile soil. Nor had they imagined that the Workers’ Paradise would collapse and their agents still be living in the United States in their eighties, at risk of succumbing to dementia, babbling state secrets in nursing home day rooms. If anyone had given it any thought they’d have arranged to repatriate the pensioners before it got that far. But by the time the contingency arose, the German Democratic Republic no longer existed and the existence of the Wolf Orchestra had been frantically erased from the archives inherited by its successor state. And nobody wanted to murder their own grandparents to keep their history secret. It was a deadly quandary.

These people had cars and computers and satellites buzzing and beeping across the heavens. More: they had a Plan, and not a Gosplan-style Five Year Plan, a centrally-controlled economy like that of the Soviet Union. They’d given him a “Welcome to the Commonwealth” briefing booklet and there was some wild stuff in it: computer networks, real-time planning, a continuation and expansion of a thing called Project Cybersyn that had been suppressed in Chile in the 1970s by a US-ordered fascist coup—a plan to catch up that paralleled the way South Korea, Japan, and China had modernized in the twentieth century. And they’re going to make it, he realized as the jet banked across the Hudson and turned south.

One party, the conservatives—and by ‘conservative’ I mean monarchical and unsophisticated, the ones who weren’t educated in the United States—got it into their heads that they could seize power and ‘send a message’ to the US government. But they didn’t understand that the United States didn’t function like the nations they were familiar with. When you’re dealing with a king, if you don’t like his attitude you hit him with a sword until there’s a new king and hope he’s more amenable to your demands. Simple, right? Like hunting a mountain lion or a wild boar. But that . . . that doesn’t work so well against a superpower. They went hunting with a spear, expecting a wild boar, and attacked a hornets’ nest instead by mistake. Hornets armed with nuclear weapons.”

Anyway, Olga’s more used to thinking in terms of managing their jaunt allocation and avoiding exposure and arrest hazards than worrying about Brill—who is usually sensible—hatching a rogue operation. I have no idea what Brill was thinking: charitably, she was distracted by worry about Huw and his toy—” “So Brill fast-talked Olga into doing something risky with inadequate back-up? And Olga nodded it through because she was busy and took her eye off the ball? And nobody else—” his expression said it all—“even noticed?”

What is this, Toytown? Where are the video feeds? Where are the traffic records and the Stingray take?” He’d pushed too hard. The Detective-Major’s face froze over. “You will please listen to me, sir. Here in Germany we are required to respect the civil rights of the people. Those civil rights include a right to privacy. We cannot simply ignore the right of those not accused of any crime to go about their lives without surveillance.

Smith’s credentials as a senior officer in Homeland Security would once have compelled obedience from police departments all over the EU, much as a KGB general’s badge would have caused Romanian or Polish cops to jump to attention during the Cold War. But the tighter the US ran the domestic ship of state, the more suspicious and frightened their former allies became. There had been excesses during the war on terror, faked-up extraditions, extraordinary rendition, and torture at black sites. Even greater excesses had ensued during the war on the multiverse. The blowback had eroded trust catastrophically. Outside the USA the DHS was resented and resisted these days, rather than respected and feared—especially in Germany, with its historic and horrible historical experience of secret police.

The cantonment was overrun by uniformed soldiers: both regular Army and members of the Commonwealth Guard, the gendarmerie created by the Radical Party to be its military wing, during the revolution that overthrew the Emperor seventeen years earlier. The Commonwealth Guard was the mailed fist of the Deep State, the state-within-a-state that the Party presided over. It existed to preserve the revolutionary framework of Democracy from counter-revolutionary threats, both internal and external. (Democracy was a new and supposedly fragile ideology in time line three, which had missed out on the revolutions of the eighteenth century, never mind the nineteenth and twentieth.) The Guard had started out fighting street battles with monarchist mobs, then faced down the heavily armed blackshirts of the Internal Security Directorate during the immediate post-revolutionary chaos. Eighteen years later the Commonwealth Guard had become a sprawling paramilitary bureaucracy with its own armored divisions, air support, and assault landing ships. Not unlike Hitler’s SS and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, it saw itself as an elite force loyal to Party over Nation.

But it was a very strange computer, made from the precisely machined steel gears, cams, and drive shafts of a battleship’s analog gun laying calculator. No one was entirely sure how well modern microelectronics would handle several hundred nuclear bombs detonating nearby, and nobody wanted to find out the hard way.

It felt like a sluggish travesty of a launch, some kind of clockwork steampunk fantasy of space travel. A real rocket would be in supersonic flight by now, approaching maximum dynamic pressure as it soared into the stratosphere.

Rita shook her head, trying to come up with a metaphor to help her grasp what Miriam had just told her. My birth mother married Lenin’s secretary, then joined the politburo as commissar for industrial espionage. It didn’t seem like something she could write in one of her reports to Colonel Smith and Dr. Scranton. It was too enormous: eyebrows would be raised and they’d discount her reliability as a witness. On second thoughts, that might not be such a bad thing

“Please don’t think that I’d willingly serve a monster.” “I don’t.” Rita crossed her arms uncomfortably. But you’re saying other people will tell me he was a monster. Later, behind closed doors. And despite Miriam’s special pleading, what if he had been a monster? Was it even possible to lead an empire of a billion people without setting in motion wheels that would grind human blood and bones into paste?

“Your mother’s not just steering a technological revolution, she’s been quietly pushing a social agenda. More education, equal rights for women—in practice, not just in law. We’re trying to quietly engineer a stage four demographic transition by being selective about what new technology we prioritize. Raising female workforce participation, pushing family planning services, nudging quietly from the sidelines.” Brill looked across the room at a group of grey-haired male dignitaries, her eyes narrowing. “She’s pushing too hard for some: we may be a revolutionary government, but there are still people who think that if somebody else benefits, it means they’re losing.”

“Are you?” Rita asked. “I mean, are you planning on acknowledging me as your heir? Or was that just a bluff, to mess with his head? What does that even mean?” she finished plaintively. “You know,” Miriam said reflectively, “until just then, I wasn’t entirely sure. I simply wanted to mark you as off-limits to conspiracies. But you know what? If you’re going to start your career in Commonwealth politics by telling that little tin-pot Stalin to GTFO, I can’t wait to see what you’re capable of . . .”

“The US is a democracy in form and theory. But they developed a bureaucratic security apparatus dedicated to fighting wartime threats and allowed it to persist in peacetime. Now it’s mostly self-perpetuating. No elected politician dares tackle it because it’ll get you the enmity of the security apparat, the voters won’t notice the absence of something they’ve grown used to, and if there is an attack, your opponents will crucify you. At least our deep state was designed to support democratic norms while they were becoming established.” She snorted, by way of adding ironic punctuation.

“It’s just a bluff. I don’t really know what I’m doing.” “Do you think Adam knew what he was doing?” “Not hardly.” Her husband slowly closed his hand around hers. “It’s not as if any of us know what we’re doing, not really: we’re just faking it until it feels natural. At least, that’s what I’ve concluded after all these years.” It had been eighteen years since the revolution. Nearly nineteen years had passed since they’d met, fifteen since they’d married. And he still managed to surprise her from time to time. “I’m worried, ’Ras.”

Hulius stared at him. Then, slowly at first—despite the fiery pain in his ribs—he began to chuckle. Smith’s eyes widened: but Hulius only laughed harder, until the tears of pain made it impossible. “What.” “You want.” Hulius wheezed, drawing a deep breath. “You want to save the United States—for democracy.” And he was off again. “What’s so fucking funny?” Smith snarled, lurching to his feet. “You turned your country into a prison camp, to protect it and make it safe for Democracy—” Hulius wheezed painfully, then closed his eyes and continued, gauging each word for effect: “You murdered everyone in my former homeland. Now you want to defend your democracy against the Commonwealth by sponsoring a hereditary dictatorship . . . have you looked in a mirror lately?” Funny. He should have punched me by now.

“There’s an Interpol red notice out with my biometrics attached,” she explained, looking slightly smug: “I made the Global Terrorism Top Fifty list!” She sounded like a pop star boasting that her latest album had gone triple platinum. In time line three Olga was a respected government official, but in time line two she was a candidate for drone strikes, extraordinary rendition, and SWAT teams. She might be able to bribe her way past the police in Caracas, but even a private jet wouldn’t get her into the EU unnoticed.

“Bullets extracted from the body of Lieutenant Gorki and his men are of unfamiliar caliber and type. The Directorate of Forensic Science further report that they are apparently formed of atoms not from this world—something wrong with their weight numbers . . . my people used magnets to separate them, very advanced stuff. The perimeter around the Schloss was not breached either, pointing to an intrusion from another universe, one of the paradimensional world-walkers we have been hearing rumors of for so long.” The tempo of his pacing increased, heels drumming on the marble floor. “And now the latest affront! Have you seen the news from New London yesterday?”

No-one—not the Commonwealth, not even the United States of America or their former Soviet and Chinese rivals—had sent astronauts into orbit aboard a nuclear spaceship. Huw’s crew now held three records: they were the first astronauts from the New American Commonwealth, the first to launch to orbit on a nuclear vessel, and the largest crewed spacecraft in any known time line. And, arguably, a fourth: the noisiest, messiest, most gut-liquefyingly terrifying launch ever.

Not to mention trying to get over the ringing in their ears and the residual dizziness from being strapped inside a giant steel yo-yo tossed around by an angry giant.

The thing is, confronting Ms. Beckstein’s Commonwealth—or should I call her Mrs. Burgeson now?—is no longer the gold-standard nightmare scenario. The new gold standard is dealing with a paranoid Soviet-style nuclear superpower in the middle of its first succession crisis, and an invasion by para-time aliens—simultaneously. COL. SMITH: The two great mistakes in warfare—never get involved in a land war in Asia, and never start a war on two fronts—needed a para-time update. Right? So which should we prioritize?

DR. SCRANTON: I haven’t witnessed such a furball of crazy since I read the declassified reports on Kermit Roosevelt’s coup in Tehran in the fifties. Or maybe the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Able Archer confrontation in the eighties? This is like all of those rolled up in a single horrible mess.

Welcome to the new cold war. You can have complete situational awareness or complete control, but you can never have both. It’s almost as if surveillance proactively creates new threats.

A humorless smile tugged at Kurt’s cheek. The smell of post-Communist freedom was, it seemed, no smell at all.

He kept his expression carefully blank as he surrendered to the impulse to look at her. Tried not to show any disappointment when he saw the same fine bone structure beneath skin that sagged from passing decades. The years had not been kind to Mona. Doubtless his face was equally shocking. A fragment of song stirred the dust of memories: they sentenced me to thirty years of boredom.

facial recognition was notoriously bad at handling skin tones darker than a typical whitebread silicon valley bro. (It went all the way back to the color cards used to optimize photographic film stock for white-skinned targets in the 1950s: algorithms embodied the prejudices and biases of their designers.)

Jackson looked at his captain, confused. “What just happened, sir?” He asked. Briggs drew a deep breath. “If we’re lucky, the department of ass-covering just got its ass handed to it by the department of getting shit done. But don’t bet on it. You don’t make O-6 without getting political.”

Spies (or agents, or streetwalkers, or HUMINT assets: whatever they were called these days) no longer identified each other in public with a red carnation through the buttonhole of a suit jacket, or a rolled-up copy of last week’s SPIEGEL under the arm. (Suits were conspicuously formal, paper magazines unusual.) But they still needed a reliable way of hooking up in public without attracting attention. The preferred method was always to disguise your recognition signal as something unexceptional. You could both play for the same team in an augmented reality game. Or you could pretend to be bluedogging: set your phones to say you were looking for casual sex by broadcasting a distinctive bluetooth ID, then wait for your contact to zero in on you. Nobody would spare it a second glance: the worst risk you ran was that you might be casually propositioned by a complete stranger.

“How do you take your coffee?” “Espresso. It’s five in the morning back home. Give me all the espresso. All of it.”

Compartmentalization meant that Angie and her cell were not supposed to know the identity or location of Kurt’s lamplighters. They were part of another cell, tasked with preparing accommodation and materials in advance. Kurt and Angie, as cell leaders, knew each other and coordinated the activities of their teams. Unfortunately there was no higher tier of management to keep them insulated, as would have been the case in a functioning intelligence bureaucracy. The Wolf Orchestra was the only surviving fragment of a long-dead agency: Kurt knew everyone, and could blow the entire ring if he was captured. But things would be structured to keep him as far from the opposition as possible. Direct contact was best left to the young, the dedicated, and the stupidly, recklessly angry—characteristics that weren’t in short supply in the twenty-first century.

Rita watched the slow-marching battalions for a quarter of an hour, growing bored. Rank upon rank of hunky men in uniforms might be of interest to some, but in her opinion there was such a thing as too much of a good thing.

“Think you can keep a secret for ten more minutes, until they announce it over the radio and the loudspeakers?” “What kind of secret?” Rita asked, only half paying attention. “Daddy’s in charge of a program to develop world-walking atomic space battleships! The first one took off a couple of days ago and Daddy’s on board, it’s in orbit—” “I’m sorry,” Rita said, then paused and mentally replayed the last few seconds of Nel’s excited monologue. “What?” The four-letter word slipped out before she could bite her tongue. “What did you just say?” It was so bizarre that Rita was certain she’d misheard.

Rita pinched herself, but the crazy stubbornly refused to go away. She looked around frantically, gripped by a sudden sense of alienation. Formalwear on every side like something out of a costume drama, missiles on tracked launchers like something out of a North Korean propaganda broadcast: these she could just about deal with. But: space battleships? Reaching into her clutch she pulled out her camera, switched it to record full audio and video, and turned to face the direction everyone else was looking.

The Sputnik Moment, when Americans awakened to a beeping sphere hurtling across the heavens and realized the Soviets had beaten them into outer space, had nothing on this. Dr. Scranton’s going to shit a brick, she realized numbly. The star brightened as it rose towards the zenith, brilliantly reflective. Juggernaut was enormous, far larger than her own time line’s Space Station Freedom. Rita engaged the tracking on her light-field camera and zoomed in until the tiny dot almost resolved into an oval.

Elizabeth Hanover didn’t know it yet, but by failing to discard her disguise in the correct recycling bin she’d blown her cover. And while she ate her room-service dinner, showered, and tried to figure out the in-room television, the net was tightening.

they were not of recognizable biological descent: their origins were lost in the depths of cosmological time, somewhere millions or even billions of jaunts away through the manifold of parallel universes. Whether they were a designed thing, or had somehow evolved in inconceivably alien circumstances on a world where nuclide-based DNA and RNA replicators had lost the race against organometalloid compounds, was now unknowable. But the hives existed. The hives were not limited by the constraints of carbon-based metabolism powered by sunlight: the hives burned hot and bright and dismantled entire planets, using their bones to build the black holes that opened the gateways they used to travel between time lines and star systems.

The human Forerunner empire was heir to primate consciousness and social behavior, and all the messy squabbles and inefficiencies that handicapped their ability to flourish in an essentially uncaring cosmos. Limited to just the one world and a limited environmental range, the Forerunners nevertheless iterated and prospered on a myriad versions of that planet. And at some point, centuries or millennia into their expansion, the Forerunners miniaturized their world-walking machinery and engineered it into their bodies, giving it the ability to self-replicate so that their infants were born with it. Like a new sub-cellular organelle, the jaunt nodes proliferated and replicated and their carriers flourished, threatening to become as indispensable as the mitochondria that had allowed humanity’s first unicellular ancestors to exploit an oxygen-based metabolic cycle. The Forerunner civilization expanded across millions of parallel Earths, reaching heights of wealth and sophistication that neither the contemporary Commonwealth or United States could imagine. They threatened the hives. But the hives had ways of dealing with threats.

It’s a long story and it all started before I was even born. The way I first heard it, I was four years old and my parents disguised the way the world worked as a fairy tale—except it was all true, in a manner of speaking. You see, once upon a time there was a magic kingdom, which had been conquered by an ogre. And the ogre was unpleasant and bad-tempered and suspicious, and from time to time he ate people, but . . .”

(Erasmus had spent years in the Imperial labor camps in decades past, then more years on the run and working undercover as a revolutionary quartermaster. It dwarfed her own experiences of captivity, however unpleasant they’d been. Three months mewed up in a baron’s castle, a year in a revolutionary labor camp: Erasmus had a postgraduate degree in imprisonment to set beside her mere diploma.)

Blindfolded and cuffed, he’d be feeling doubly helpless right now. But I’ve been here before. And I survived. She’d survived seeing a lover shot to death in front of her. Survived a massacre at a wedding feast. Survived assassination attempts and revolution and war. It’s not over until it’s over.

Something about this coup smells familiar, Huw told himself. School of the Americas familiar, Operation Condor familiar, CIA banana republic playbook familiar. There were American emissaries in New London. State Department diplomats, not just Rita. Huw had spent years in the United States, had attended college and grad school there. Adrian Holmes was ambitious enough, and the Commonwealth Guard paranoid enough, to mount a coup. But would they have thought to do so without someone whispering in their ears?

Seen from the perspective of the Hives, the Forerunners—and the related hominid subspecies they had somehow emerged from—were an abomination. They were tribal primate omnivores with a voracious appetite not only for biomass, but also metals and rare earth elements. Forerunners swarmed across the multiverse like a disease, breeding rapidly and expanding indiscriminately, bringing down biospheres and importing zoonotic diseases. In every time line where the dreaming apes took hold they precipitated a mass extinction event. Even the more enlightened Forerunner empires—ones that understood the environmental value of not shitting in the bed they slept in—were bad for the Hive, competing for resources and killing Hive workers when they stumbled across them.

But they were quaintly obsolescent (and downright gentlemanly) to Colonel Smith’s eye. Lacking Homeland Security’s access to the NSA’s unblinking oversight—the eye of Sauron, DHS’s critics called it—they couldn’t turn all the neighbors’ wifi hotspots into wall-piercing radar. Regular cops had to manually direct traffic away from the quiet residential street, for there was no blanket authority to override vehicle automation here. Nor could they remotely lock or unlock all the doors in the neighborhood. It was, in fact, a dismayingly old-fashioned raid: muscular men and a few women in body armor hanging around the entrances to an apartment building, ready to go in on foot, without a single killer robot or wall-piercing pain ray in sight.

After a minute or so and a second lean on the buzzer the sound of someone stumbling about answered them: then the door opened, to reveal an extremely sleepy bear wearing a stained tee shirt with a sarcastic gamer slogan and nothing else. He yawned, tugged his shirt down to conceal his beer belly, exchanged some words with the cop, then closed the door and went back to bed.

🖤🤎❤️🧡💛💚💙💜