Empire Games

Rita Douglas is plucked from her dead-end job and trained as a reluctant US spy. All because she has the latent genetic talent to hop between alternate time lines - and infiltrate them. Her United States is waging a high-tech war, targeting assassins who can move between worlds to deliver death on a mass scale, and Rita will be their secret weapon.

Dark State ups the ante on the already volatile situations laid out in the sleek techno-thriller Empire Games, the start to Stross' new story-line and a perfect entry point for new listeners, in The Merchant Princes series . In the near-future, the collision of two nuclear superpowers across timelines, one in the midst of a technological revolution and the other a hyper-police state, is imminent. In Commissioner Miriam Burgeson's timeline, her top level agents run a high risk extraction of a major political player.

Dark State is the second book in the thrilling Empire Games series - set in the same world as Charles Stross' The Merchant Princes series. In the near future, the collision of two nuclear superpowers - in two different time lines - is imminent. One America is experiencing its first technological revolution whilst a parallel United States is a hi-tech police state. But both are poised to wreak destruction.

The American Commonwealth is caught in a deadly arms race with the USA, its parallel-world rival. And the USA’s technology is decades ahead. Yet the Commonweath might self-combust first – for its leader has just died, leaving a crippling power vacuum. Minister Miriam Burgeson must face allegations of treason without his support, in a power-grab by her oldest adversary. However, all factions soon confront a far greater danger.... In their drive to explore other timelines, hi-tech USA awakened an alien threat. 

An inter-timeline coup d'état gone awry. A renegade British monarch on the run through the streets of Berlin. And robotic alien invaders from a distant timeline flood through a wormhole, wreaking havoc in the USA. Can disgraced worldwalker Rita and her intertemporal extraordinaire agent of a mother neutralize the livewire contention before it's too late?