Invisible sun, p.1
Invisible Sun, page 1
Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
Tom Doherty Associates ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
For Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden
TIME LINES
TIME LINE ONE:
History diverged from our own around 200–250 BCE in Time Line One. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all absent and the collapse of the Roman empire into dark ages was complete rather than just partial. Since then, civilization in Europe re-emerged and quasi-medieval colony kingdoms sprang up on the eastern seaboard of North America. (The western seaboard was settled by Chinese traders.)
The Gruinmarkt, one such kingdom, was home to the Clan—rich merchant-traders with the ability to cross between time lines. As world-walkers, they made a good living as the only people who could send a message coast-to-coast in a day in time line one. They could also guarantee a heroin shipment would arrive without fear of interception in time line two. But all good things come to an end, and the vicious civil war that broke out in 2003 (by time line two reckoning) led to the Clan’s discovery by the US Government. Their escalating cycle of retaliation ended in a nuclear inferno.
TIME LINE TWO:
This is a world almost identical to your time line, as the reader of this book—right up to a key date in 2003. Here, world-walkers from the Clan’s conservative faction detonated a stolen nuclear weapon in the White House. They assassinated the President and forced the government to reveal the existence of parallel universes and the technology for reaching them.
Our story starts in time line two.
TIME LINE THREE:
This time line was discovered by Miriam Beckstein. In this alternate world, England was invaded by France in 1760 and the British Crown in Exile was established in the New England colonies. There was no American War of Independence and no French or Russian Revolutions. Therefore the Ancien Regime—despotism by absolute monarchy—shaped the world order until the Revolution of 2003. Here, the New British Empire’s Radical Party overthrew the government and declared a democratic commonwealth. The country is now known as the New American Commonwealth.
The French invasion of England stifled the Industrial Revolution in its crib, so industrialization began a century later than in time line two. But economics and science have their own imperatives. And even before Miriam led the survivors of the Clan into exile in the Commonwealth, the pace of technological innovation was beginning to pick up.
TIME LINE FOUR:
Currently uninhabited, this time line is in the grip of an ice age—with an ice sheet covering much of Europe, Canada, and the northern states of the US.
But it hasn’t been uninhabited forever. The enigmatic Forerunner ruins pose both a threat and a promise …
MAIN CHARACTER PROFILES
ERIC SMITH
Born in 1964 in time line two, Colonel Smith, USAF (retired) has been a government man all his life. He worked for the United States’ National Security Agency, then inside a top secret unit within Homeland Security. It was tasked with defending the States against threats from other time lines; these included world-walkers, those who could cross between these alternative worlds and his own time line. Many might consider this easy—after all, most known time lines are uninhabited, or populated by stone age tribes at best. However, the exceptions are the problem. The notorious Clan and their world-walkers came from time line one. And contact with this secretive organization resulted in a national trauma—dwarfing both 9/11 and the war on terror.
Smith knows that there are other inhabited time lines out there—and they’re hostile. At least one vanished civilization left relics far ahead of the United States’ technology levels, evidence that they’d been fighting—and losing—a para-time war against parties unknown. And then there’s the BLACK RAIN time line, where reconnaissance drones and human spies go missing and air samples contain traces of radioactive fallout.
Defending the nation is easier said than done, when you can’t even be sure what you’re defending it from. But you can make a good guess …
KURT DOUGLAS
Born in 1941 in time line two, Kurt Douglas grew up in the German Democratic Republic—East Germany—during the Cold War. Drafted at eighteen, he ended up in the Border Guards. Then, in late 1968, he escaped over the Berlin Wall to the West, and emigrated to the United States. Marrying Greta, another East German defector, he made a new life for himself. Kurt raised a family, and lived quietly with his son, daughter-in-law, and their adopted children—Rita and River.
The East German foreign intelligence service didn’t send Kurt to the West to spy on the United States. For a defector to infiltrate their host nation’s intelligence agencies was considered impossible. But they had longer-term objectives in mind: to have children who would be US citizens by birth, raised and trained as loyal agents of the worker’s state. They’d have the perfect backgrounds to infiltrate the NSA, the CIA, and the government. But the Cold War ended and East Germany reunified with the West before the plan could be carried out. Old skills don’t fade easily, and Kurt has given Rita the best training he could for living in a police state. And she knows, if she ever gets in over her head, that she can count on Grandpa Kurt—and his friends—for help.
MIRIAM BURGESON
Born in 1968 in time line two, Miriam grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. She worked as a tech sector journalist before discovering, in her early thirties, that her mother had been lying to her for most of her life; mother and daughter were fugitives from the Gruinmarkt—a small kingdom in time line one, which had reached medieval levels of technology. They were women of noble birth, whose designated role was to produce more world-walkers and to serve the Clan. Miriam world-walked ‘home’ by accident and was expected to conform. But that had never been Miriam’s style. So, in short order, she discovered a route to a new inhabited time line and built a business start-up—using it to import high-tech innovations into this new territory. This triggered a crisis within the Clan, reviving a dormant blood feud and causing civil war.
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 you can do to avoid attention in a national security state when the government has you under constant surveillance in case the woman who gave you up for adoption (or her relatives) takes a renewed interest in you.
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.
ELIZABETH HANOVER
Born in 2002, just before the revolution that overturned the New British Empire and sent the crown into exile in St Petersburg, Elizabeth Hanover is the only child of his Royal Majesty John Frederick the Fourth, Emperor in Exile of the New British Empire. Unmarried, she’s a pawn in her father’s dynastic plans, which will come to fruition on the death of Adam Burroughs, First Man of the Commonwealth. But her father’s plans revolve around a royal marriage into the Bourbon dynasty, to a prince twice her own age (who possesses a mistress and, according to rumor, the pox). She’s supposed to be the Queen of a restored British Empire of the Americas. But Elizabeth isn’t stupid. She’s been watching the Commonwealth’s technological progress from afar, and laying plans of her own. Plans which will bring two nuclear-armed superpowers to the brink of war …
PRINCIPAL CAST LIST
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
RITA DOUGLAS, struggling thespian
FRANZ DOUGLAS, Rita’s father
EMILY DOUGLAS, Rita’s mother
RIVER DOUGLAS, Rita’s brother
KURT DOUGLAS, Franz’s father, retiree
GRETA DOUGLAS, Kurt’s wife (deceased)
SONIA GOMEZ, DHS agent
ANGIE HAGEN, electrical contractor, childhood friend
JACK MERCER, DHS agent
PAULETTE MILAN, a spy
PATRICK O’NEILL, Rita’s supervisor
DR. EILEEN SCRANTON, deputy assistant to Secretary of State for Homeland Security, Smith’s boss
COLONEL ERIC SMITH, DHS, head of the Unit
DR. JULIE STRAKER, Colleague of Rita’s
NEW AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH (AND FRENCH EMPIRE)
MARGARET BISHOP, Party Commissioner
MIRIAM BURGESON (previously Miriam Beckstein), Minister for economic development and inter-timeline industrial espionage, Commonwealth Government
ERASMUS BURGESON (Miriam’s husband), Minister for Propaganda, Commonwealth Government
SIR ADAM BURROUGHS, First Man (head of state)
THE DAUPHIN, Heir to the throne of the French Empire
PRINCESS ELIZABETH HANOVER, heir to John Frederick
JOHN FREDERICK HANOVER, the Pretender, King in Exile of the New British Empire
MAJOR HULIUS HJORTH (YUL), Brilliana’s brother-in-law, world-walker spy
ELENA HJORTH, Huw Hjorth’s wife
HUW HJORTH, Explorer-General
BRILLIANA HJORTH (Huw’s wife), DPR (espionage agency) director
ADRIAN HOLMES, Party Secretary
ALICE MORGAN, Commonwealth Transport Police officer
OLGA THOROLD, Miriam’s director of counter-espionage
PART ONE
SINGULARITY
Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
—Samuel Johnson, September 19, 1777
Drowning in Berlin
BERLIN, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020
Elizabeth Hanover scuttled along the grimy sidewalk, her shoulders hunched and eyes downcast, running away from the sour fear-stink of a rendezvous gone wrong.
She was two blocks away from the ground-floor apartment where the Major lay, bleeding and unconscious in the care of questionable strangers, when a thud that reverberated through her rib cage set her heart pounding. Was that a bomb? she wondered. It sounded like a bomb. She’d heard too many of them for comfort in her short adult life. She increased her pace as distant sirens began to rise and fall.
The streetscape of this other-world Berlin was disorienting and unfamiliar. Her Berlin was the fusty regional capital of the French Imperial province of East Prussia. This Berlin was apparently the capital of a united federation of all the Germanies, in a looking-glass world where France was a Republic and the Russias were splintered separate nations. And there was no respite, in any direction she looked, from the reminders of her exile. 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? But there were no obvious signs of starvation around her. Indeed, there were signs of outrageous wealth: street-corner grocery stores boasted outrageous expanses of plate glass. Some of the pedestrians talked to themselves, muttering or mumbling as if they were mad, while others walked heedlessly, eyes downcast at small, glowing tablets like the one she’d taken from Major Hjorth.
She’d imagined a future of melted-looking automobiles and streetcars, of flying machines and towers, but the small differences were far more disturbing. An infant pranced by in shoes with soles that flashed blue at every step, its hand held by a mother dressed in a Hussar’s jacket and tight trousers. A brightly lit advertising sign on a passing tram flared an incomprehensible message at her, then dissolved before her eyes into a picture of toothily smiling people. The unfamiliarity everywhere she turned her gaze was exhausting.
Liz gripped the torn messenger bag under her arm and moderated her pace to avoid attention. Her heart hammered as a green-striped vehicle roared past, blue beacons flashing from its roofline and siren wailing like a damned soul. Through its windows she glimpsed hard-faced men (or women) in uniform. It was heading towards the block she’d left behind. Major Hjorth’s scheme had clearly failed, attracting the worst kind of attention this world had to offer, and now she was stranded without any idea where to turn for help. Her unease veered towards suffocating panic. The Major’s proposal had looked so excitingly promising when she awakened this morning! But now it seemed like a snare into which she had thrust her head, and from which she could not withdraw.
Major Hjorth’s plan had gone off the rails when he’d been shot by Elizabeth’s guards. His body armor hadn’t quite stopped the bullet he took during her extraction. He’d brought her to his apartment and collapsed so she’d taken the glowing slab of glass he called a phone, but it stopped working for her, demanding that she look at it or enter some sort of code. A stranger called Fox turned up, then called a medic, and then the doorbell rang again. Scared, Liz had grabbed the Major’s bag with his hold-out pistol and bolted through the back door. A minute later there had been an explosion, then the gendarmes converging behind her like black-uniformed wasps …
She came to a platform beside a streetcar stop. It had a rain shelter and some uncomfortable looking furniture. Liz paused and leaned gingerly against the unfamiliar plastic rails of the seat. The cumulative sense of strangeness, relentless and disturbing, threatened to drown her but she made herself take deep, measured breaths, and fought back the urge to panic while she took stock of her situation. What should I do now? she wondered.
She remembered the Major’s words: “We’re safe from Captain Bertrand, but this is not your world. There are other hazards. We’d best get you to a place of safety as fast as possible.” Bertrand had been her chief bodyguard—a polite word for jailer. There are other hazards. This was the world the Commonwealth’s exiled world-walkers had angered. The one that had hunted them back to their original home and cauterized it with corpuscular weapons, if her father’s intelligence briefings were to be believed.
A peculiar flat chime like a recording of real bells announced the arrival of a sleek, glass-walled streetcar. Liz watched, careful to keep her face expressionless, as doors rippled open along its length. She saw no sign of a ticket booth or conductor before the doors hissed closed and the machine whined away. It was eerily quiet for a tram. An illuminated sign on the shelter wall flickered: OSTBAHNHOFF 4Km. Were there two main stations in this Berlin? She shook her head, the tight scarf tugging at her hair. The other people she saw wore very different costumes but paid her little attention, as if she was a servant. Maybe it was her skin color, not just the outfit the Major had provided? She hunched up a little then forced herself to straighten, irrationally angry with herself.
Take stock: she had a nasty-looking pistol she hadn’t trained with, a magic mirror that didn’t work, and a wallet containing some paper money and plastic wafers the size of playing cards (value: unknown). She also had a number of solid gold guineas she’d stitched into her underwear over the past three nights, not trusting the Major entirely, but turning them into local cash required some understanding of how things worked here. She could get by in German and Russian, as well as being fluent in French and English. Stacked against her were: the Major’s posited enemies, whoever they were. (Presumably, they were the ones responsible for the explosion). Whoever Fox had been afraid of—possibly the grim-faced gendarmes in their trucks? And the difficulty of making contact with the Major’s backers. How can I—
