Empire Games Series, Book 1(100)
Rita nodded. She no longer felt like speaking. She was simultaneously tired and keyed up. Let’s get this over with, she thought wearily.
The Colonel was waiting in the taped-off area. “You know the plan,” he said quietly. “Eyes open, mouth shut, free-form. Come back whenever you find yourself outside your comfort zone. Call me on this and we’ll come fetch you.” He handed over a tiny dumbphone, the voice-and-text-only variety that had a monthlong standby life. “And remember the real objective.”
“Okay. If I’m not back in two minutes, expect me in three to eight hours.” Rita grinned, then rolled back her left sleeve, squeezed her forearm, and clicked her heels. “There’s no place like home—”
She jaunted.
The parking lot vanished. She stumbled in the dark, felt damp grass underfoot. It was colder here. In her ear, the clicking of a radiation counter. Time line one was still hot from the nuking of the Gruinmarkt, even this far south. She raised her wrist, cued up the next trigger engram, and jaunted again.
Noise assaulted her: a screech of metal on metal. She stumbled, felt hard asphalt underfoot, took a step backward, and nearly tripped over a curbstone. She managed to catch her balance on a narrow strip of sidewalk. The amber washout glare of streetlights cast multiple shadows in all directions. There was a windowless building behind her, concrete or stone. Steel rails gleamed as a streetcar rumbled and swayed toward the spot where she’d been. The narrow strip of paving she’d found was barely wide enough to stand on, and as the streetcar passed she saw more tracks beyond it, and heard the snap and crackle of overhead wires. If it isn’t one train station it’s another, she thought, dismayed, then kicked herself mentally. No, it’s a streetcar depot. The Colonel said they’re big on public transport. I’m standing in the middle of the tracks. She looked round at the wall. It vanished into the near distance, and high overhead there was a vaulting arch of metal girders supporting a dark ceiling.
The streetcar was slowing. Across four or five tracks she saw a low platform, notice boards that might have been timetables, and boxy station furniture that might have been ticket machines. Did the driver see me? she wondered. She’d nearly jaunted in front of the tram. I could have been run over, she thought with a sick feeling.
There was no platform in this part of the station, and no way out that didn’t involve crossing several tracks. Swallowing, she glanced at her wrist and tried to jaunt again. She felt a silvery flash of pain, but nothing happened. “Ow!” She squeaked aloud, seeing the station still around her. She stepped sideways and tried again. This time it worked: she was back in the rainy nighttime forest. She closed her eyes, trying to remember how far away the station wall was. Took another step sideways, holding out her right arm to avoid obstacles. Stepped sideways once more. There was no tree in this direction. Now she looked at her wrist, squeezed to light up tired phosphors. “Come on,” she murmured, focusing again.
She dropped almost a foot to the ground, landing hard. This time the wall was to her left. She stood on a broad sidewalk. Turning, she saw buildings opposite in a variety of unfamiliar styles. It was dizzyingly, achingly close to familiar: street markings that were somehow wrong, signposts bearing old-fashioned traffic directions but in a style nothing like the road signs she had grown up seeing. It was dark, the street lighting dim and the walls stained black with old soot. Half the storefronts were shuttered with metal grilles. The brick and stone of the buildings gave them a curious air of permanence, and they hunched close together. “Okay, I’m round the back of the downtown station,” she whispered into the tiny mike in her lapel. She pulled out the inertial mapper and tapped a waypoint. “Let’s see if I can find the front.”
The station was, in some ways, comfortingly familiar: neoclassical in style, with the same stone columns and arches as many another nineteenth-century railway station. The surrounding buildings were less reassuring, though. There were few people about, although she spotted a man pushing a wheelbarrow slowly along a sidewalk, using long-handled tongs to pick detritus from the pavement. Mouselike, she scurried past behind his back. In front of the station there was a wide-open traffic circle, with many roads radiating away from it, like pictures she’d seen of Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. A huge plinth dominated the island in the middle, supporting a statue of a man on a horse. The color of the streetlights was somehow wrong, too orange for her eyes. They flickered slightly, and as she watched, one of them dimmed abruptly to a sullen neon red, then faded to dark.
There were one or two pedestrians out, bundled in long coats against the morning chill. Rita walked up to the front of the station and found metal gates drawn shut. A rattle of chains drew her eyes toward a uniformed man in an odd-shaped hat, the brim pinned up on either side. He was unfastening the gate at the far end, fumbling with a padlock. “Opening time,” she said quietly. “They’re just opening the public entrance now.” She checked her wrist. “Zero six zero nine. Hmm. They’re not early risers in the city.”
She turned and looked across the circle. Picking a street at random—three lanes wide in either direction, with broad sidewalks and four-to six-story buildings on either side—she jaywalked across as fast as she could go without running. On the other side she found herself looking into the darkened windows of storefronts. For some reason they didn’t seem to go in for big expanses of plate glass: the windows consisted of panes a couple of feet wide set in wooden or metal frames. Some things were constants, though. Proprietors’ names were proudly emblazoned across doorways and on signboards hanging in front. Headless dressmakers’ dummies swathed in odd-looking outfits loomed in the twilight. “Downtown shopping district, I think,” she whispered.