Empire Games Series, Book 1(2)
Now seventeen years have passed since the Clan and the Gruinmarkt were both destroyed. Clan reactionaries made a disastrous miscalculation that led to a very brief war with the United States—ending when the US nuked the Gruinmarkt. Miriam saw the writing on the wall and led anti-Clan survivors into exile in the new world she’d discovered. But here she found a revolution in progress—and a new vocation.
Miriam is now older and wiser, and a minister in government. She works for the New American Commonwealth, the ascendant democratic superpower of time line three. She’d taken part in the revolution that overthrew the absolute monarchy of the New British Empire, now defunct. And ever since, she’s been warning the new government, “the USA is coming”. For seventeen years, she’s been working feverishly to ensure that when the US drones arrive overhead, the Commonwealth will be ready to meet them on equal terms. But she wasn’t expecting them to be expecting her—and to have made plans accordingly.
RITA DOUGLAS
Born in 1995 in time line two, and adopted at birth by Franz and Emily Douglas, Rita was eight when Clan renegades from time line one nuked the White House. Growing up in President Rumsfeld’s America, she has learned to keep her head down and her nose clean. But there’s only so much she can do to avoid attention. The paranoid high-surveillance state has her under constant surveillance in case the woman who gave her up for adoption (and enemy of the state) takes a renewed interest in her.
Rita has a history and drama studies degree, a pile of student loans, and no great employment prospects. At twenty-five years of age she doesn’t really know where she’s going. But that’s okay. Because the government has big plans for Rita.
See the end of the novel for a principal cast list and a glossary of key terms and vocabulary.
PART ONE
DOG AND PONY SHOW
The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.
—William Gibson
Prologue
BOSTON, 2004
A grandfather and his granddaughter walked under the leaf-bare trees of late autumn:
“Tell me again about Grandma Greta, Grandpa?”
Her gloved hand was fragile and small in his. The clouds were gray overhead, and the chilly Boston air, not quite ready for snow, nevertheless bore the crisp smell of incoming rain. The grass to either side of the metaled path had been mown for the last time this year. Kurt swallowed, rewinding the tapes of memory to a more innocent time. He tried to decide how much more he could tell his adoptive granddaughter about the extraordinary woman who’d died when she was three.
She was ten now, in these chilly dog days of 2004, old enough for another eyedropper-full of truth. Kurt glanced round, checking for eavesdroppers: but Kurt and Rita had come to pay their respects to Grandma late on a weekday, right before Thanksgiving. The only other residents of this park lay silent and unhearing, marked for eternity beneath gravestones and sculpted memorials.
They came to a fork in the path. Here, a narrower trail led off between a grove of trees toward a cluster of grave markers now falling into evening’s shadow. Kurt gently steered his granddaughter onto this path, proceeding on instinct. The cold air numbed his cheeks, matching his mood. Soon he saw the plot, and finally spoke: not looking at the girl, trying to order his thoughts.
“Look at the headstone and tell me what it reads.”
Rita trotted across the grass with the unstudied spontaneity of a child who’d never lost anyone close. She bent to read: “Greta Douglas, wife and mother, born February sixteenth, 1942, Dresden, died August nineteenth, 1998, Boston.” A puzzled frown shadowed her eyebrows at the next phrase: “‘Finally among friends’?”
Kurt nodded. For a moment he choked on his memories. “Everything except the places and the date of her death was a lie.”
“Lies on a gravestone?” The indignation of an outraged youngster had bite.
“Oh yes.” A ghost of a smile tugged at his cheeks: or perhaps it was the proximity of tears. “She was very insistent toward the end. I was to maintain appearances at all costs. Her illness … She was very tired, Rita, but she didn’t want her death to affect the rest of us.”
“But. If it’s all lies … is ‘finally among friends’ untrue too?”
“No.” Kurt took in the rest of the graveyard with a jerk of his chin. “She was buried under a false name, in a country foreign to her, among people who would have been her enemies if they’d known what she was.” Now he too stepped off the path onto the grass, shifting his grip on the bunch of flowers. “So lonely.”
“But…” Monosyllabic awkwardness struck. “Wife and mother?”
“Um.” Kurt squatted, going down on knees that creaked more with every year. He began to unwrap the paper from around the bouquet. “I suppose that bit was true, if you like.” His hands worked busily, without his conscious intervention. Dead flower stems, cold under his fingertips. He remembered Greta’s hands, the warmth of her shared laughter. Her voice a little throaty from the cigarettes, a warning of the emphysema to come. “As true as you want it to be. She was a wife and mother. And as misdirection, it’s perfect: nobody looks twice at a hausfrau, no? Exactly what she wanted on her headstone.”
“She wanted her headstone to misdirect people? Why?”