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“How many hours is a life worth?” Schenk glared at her: “last year, German police officers fired only eleven bullets in anger. All police officers combined. In the same year your police shot and killed more than three thousand civilians, half of them innocent bystanders. No innocents will be shot in my city because of your impatience.”
But State had dived into the Commonwealth paddling pool without asking DHS for a sanity check. Indeed, State seemed to think the Commonwealth were some kind of yokels, like one of the central Asian ’stans, and had been gaslighting the Commonwealth Guard rather than taking Dr. Scranton’s more cautious approach of trying to induce the DPR to discredit themselves. The memories of the long face-off with the Soviet Union had faded from institutional memory over the last quarter of a century, leaving the State Department suffering from delusions of imperial omnipotence It was bound to get them
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“I want proposed solutions on my desk no later than five p.m., with preliminary costings and time lines from everyone with skin in the game, for how to deal with future visits from ships like this. If we’re still alive next week, I’ll take the most promising proposals to the House. Cost is no object: Manhattan Project rules apply, nuclear options will be considered because the other side already went there and fuck this shit.”
The Abilene paradox was a syndrome common to committees, where everyone went along with a consensus nobody actually supported because they were afraid of rocking the boat. Abilene paradoxes almost always broke bad: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Watergate scandal, the decision to nuke the Gruinmarkt.
“Did it not once occur to you that there might be unpredictable blowback from interfering in Commonwealth internal politics?” The President was quietly furious. “Did it not occur to you that you are not omniscient? Our intelligence sources in the Commonwealth are so poor that they were able to hang that thing above our heads—” her finger, pointed skyward, indicated she was referring to the visiting Juggernaut—“without warning. Did it not occur to you that neither you nor the State Department get to make foreign policy on the fly? That there’s a difference between pursuing a bunch of
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The Dome in time line four was an annex of one of these fortresses. The Hive had made several attempts to breach the fortress, but the repeated attacks on time line four were successfully repelled by its defenders. They built a dome atop the invasion gate to monitor and seal it. But despite their local successes, the Hive ultimately prevailed when they changed tactics. They flared the black hole by dropping vast amounts of mass into its accretion disk, then channeled directed bursts of hard radiation through all the gates they’d established. Having killed the defenders and slighted their
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We do not know the fate of the first world-walker to open up the time line that gave rise to the Gruinmarkt. They didn’t leave an obvious imprint at the time, no world-walking family, no invisible sun warping the orbit of civilizations around it. But in the wake of the Macedonian invasion of those territories, things went differently, and eventually the Seleucid empire suppressed certain troublesome tribal peoples who insisted on worshipping a single deity rather than the approved Hellenistic pantheon. Judaism was stillborn in that time line: nor did Christianity (or anything recognizable as
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Hail the Sky Father!
The contemporary Forerunner civilizations—no longer the ones that had first encountered the Hive: the Hive evolved—lost perhaps a fractional-percent of their population. And another fractional percent who survived the first attack ran and hid, brain-struck soldiers deserting their posts, civilians grabbing whatever they could carry on their person and taking to the time roads. A man who called himself Henryk Lofstrom ran and hid in a small kingdom on the north American coastline.
It is unclear precisely how Henryk came into possession of the trigger engram for transit between the Gruinmarkt and the New England colony of Massachusetts. Presumably it happened some time in the early eighteenth century, early enough for the butterfly to flap its wings again: evidently the wind of its passage gave rise to a hurricane in Scotland and split the time line yet again. In one alternate, the Stuart crown held Scotland in 1745. The English crown—held by descendants of the Elector of Hanover—entered exile in the colonies in 1758, when England lost a war on two fronts against the
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she ended up watching some sort of theatrical fairy tale romance. (It turned out people in this time line had really weird ideas about royalty: weird and wrong. She resolved to write the Disney Corporation a stern letter.)
“World-walkers.” She sat down before the other woman could freak out. “I have been told to inform you that this plane has been abducted by a world-walker—not me. The pilots have lost contact with the ground. We will be intercepted by fighters in another half hour and guided to a military airfield. When the pilots request it, I have a digital flight bag for them.” Now she had the cabin crew’s undivided—and unfriendly—attention. Nobody likes a hijacker.
“That’s above my pay grade,” she said, slightly ruefully. “I just do what my government tells me to.” Government. She could see the word sinking its barbs in, the implications flowering in the pilot’s imagination. “There is a diplomatic situation. Once it is resolved we will return you, your passengers, and your aircraft to your original destination, with apologies. You are not hostages and we will provide compensation for delays and damage in accord with the terms of the Montreal Convention.”
landing cards distributed with stern, but friendly instructions to fill them in (even though the plane was no longer even in the same universe as the Venezuelan Republic that had issued the paperwork).
One of the soldiers, an officer, ascended the stairs. “Elizabeth Hanover?” He asked, politely enough. From his epaulettes, she pegged him as an Air Defense Forces Colonel in his early thirties. A high flyer, then. It was now or never. “That is I,” said Liz. “Does this territory belong to the New American Commonwealth?” It was a formality, but she wanted a positive acknowledgement. The officer nodded. “I am Colonel Grayson, chief of staff to General Anders, commanding Maracaibo Air Station. The General sends his regrets, but he is currently occupied elsewhere. I need to be clear—are you here of
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“There seems to have been a misunderstanding by some elements of the Commonwealth Guard, who interpreted your arrival as a conspiracy to restore the crown,” Miriam said drily. Behind her the camera crew maneuvered for a better angle. “Gad, no!” Elizabeth’s deer-in-the-headlights expression spoke volumes more than any oath of allegiance. “Listen, if the Commonwealth can no longer give me asylum, can you at least send me somewhere other than St. Petersburg?” The microphone boom swung perilously close to her face. “I didn’t run away to avoid having to marry a pox-ridden lecher, or because my
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“I believe in the Commonwealth. I believe in the rule of the people, by the people, and the peaceful transfer of power, and the ability of men and women of good will to work together for a better future. I believe we are living in the early days of a better nation, and I want to be part of that nation, to help build something new, not remain stuck in the past like a fly embedded in amber, struggling as it suffocates.”
“I refuse to argue for my own neck at the expense of the revolution,” he said slowly, straightening his back, remembering the long-ago searing pain of the birch whips the old regime’s camp guards wielded. “This is larger than any of us. This is the Commonwealth’s first transfer of power. Its first opportunity for a peaceful transition. You may dislike me—I have no control over that—but if you take this as an opportunity to settle personal scores, then you will set a precedent. By doing that, you risk proving that Commonwealth politics is personal, just as much a matter of wealth and position
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“Look for signs of, well, anything. The worst case is, we can get back to New London. Just not inside a concentration camp.” She muttered something under her breath that sounded suspiciously unladylike (fuck my life, perhaps), then started to pick her way between the trees.
“Ras!” Brill rose and embraced him, but Rita froze in the doorway, eyes wide. “Angie?” She said it on a rising note, almost a question, as the other woman shot up out of her seat and opened her arms. “Oh god Rita,” Angie grabbed her and held her close. “You’re okay? Really?” Angie stared at her anxiously. “Hey, I’m not the one who’s been LARPing spy games in Berlin—!” “—No, you’re the one who’s been locked up in New London! Come here, you.” Angie hugged her again, then kissed her hard. “I was so worried—”
“Colonel Smith? I’m Captain Jacobs, and I’d like to welcome you to the Commonwealth on behalf of the Department of Para-historical Research. My colleague would like to see your passports, now.” He couldn’t put his finger on exactly why for a few seconds, but something about the reception party gave him a drenching shock of déjà vu. Brutalist concrete architecture, unfamiliar retro-looking supersonic jet fighters waiting to scramble from their dispersal bays, soldiers in emphatically non-NATO uniforms . . . and a southern accent? It was like something out of an old cold war movie: the United
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“It’s not kidnapping: they asked us for political asylum, and we’re granting it.” Brill’s smirk broadened. “They’re not doing so as American citizens, but as citizens of the German Democratic Republic. If you don’t like it, you can take it up with Erich Honneker’s ghost.” Eric couldn’t hold it any more: “this is bullshit! The GDR doesn’t exist!” Sonia Gomez’ reaction was less temperate: she swore viciously. “I told you they were spies and fucking traitors. We should have shot them!”
Rita was still trying to get a handle on how Commonwealth attitudes to sex and gender differed from those of the United States. The revolution just two decades past had junked a huge volume of traditional law and custom, but public attitudes were still playing catch-up. Erasmus had delicately hinted that having a high-profile interracial lesbian couple in the spotlight would be socially and politically useful, but Rita stubbornly resisted being pushed towards a career as an opinion shaper and influencer. She’d had enough of that for one lifetime, even though she could see why Miriam and
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Rita found the procedures here simultaneously alien and familiar. The history and politics of this time line had diverged from her own almost three centuries ago: some of the forms and language of the Commission sounded like congressional procedure, but other things kept her on edge. The Commonwealth had purged their legal code of Latin jargon while the United States still clung to it. And the Declaration of Democracy that everybody recited was straightforward, couched in modern language. “We create this nation anew on the basis of equality and fraternity, to collectively exercise our liberty
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There was cheering. Angie was pounding her on her back; everyone was on their feet. But Rita sat alone, paralyzed by a sudden realization. She’d chosen to make a new life for herself here—sliding into it as the path of least resistance, borne along in the wake of Angie’s asylum claim and Kurt and her family’s exile. She’d somehow imagined that she could still be herself, Rita Douglas, aspiring actor and accidental spy. But Erasmus was to be the new First Man, and her other mother was the First Lady of the Commonwealth. “Holy shit.” Rita stared at the stage in horrified realization. Despite
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