Empire Games Series, Book 1(47)
DR. SCRANTON: DOOMWATCH?
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: It’s a special ARMBAND unit—a world-walking machine—with a flight data recorder attached. It’s switched on right before the drone transitions to its target time line and logs all the telemetry from the drone’s flight control system and instruments. If the drone does anything unpredictable, DOOMWATCH ejects and transitions back to the home time line immediately, then pops a parachute. That way, if there’s no breathable atmosphere or the UAV encounters a thunderstorm or some other irrecoverable situation, at least we get an idea of what happened.
DR. SCRANTON: So you got a positive for atmosphere and gravity using the preliminary sample return box, but then lost three drones in a row. The last of them a high-altitude stealth machine. But the Air Force aren’t totally stupid—
COL. SMITH: Thank you!
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: Indeed. So this morning we sent up a sacrificial Tier 1 UAV, a Gnat 750, programmed to bounce over to time line one, continue to time line 178, buzz around at five hundred feet for a while, then phone home. The first three drones were real aircraft, things that need a runway and ground crew; the Gnat is a toy with a ten-foot wingspan that you launch off the back of a jeep. Anyway, it came back bang on schedule. Its meteorology package said conditions over there were fine, too.
LIAISON, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: Shit.
COL. SMITH: The scatological commentary is getting old, Barney.
LIAISON, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: Sorry. It’s been a bad week.
DR. SCRANTON: If you’ve quite finished?
COL. SMITH: Sorry, sir. Please continue.
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: Well, we picked up something interesting from the Gnat. They sent it up from McGuire AFB in New Jersey, not Wright-Patterson, and it hedge-hopped around Pennsylvania for an hour, and here are some of its holiday snaps.
LIAISON, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: Holy—sorry.
COL. SMITH: Well, isn’t that interesting.
DR. SCRANTON: The cat is out of the bag, gentlemen.
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: (pointing) That’s a railroad switchyard. And here’s some kind of industrial plant—a factory, we think, but this is preliminary. That definitely looks like an ore conveyor, though—
COL. SMITH: Yes. So we have heavy industry for sure, and we can infer the existence of air defenses. Possibly even defenses that can take out an RQ-4. (pause) Has anyone briefed NCA yet? NSC? The Joint Chiefs?
DR. SCRANTON: There’s worse to come.
COL. SMITH: Oh dear.
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: I hadn’t got to the air samples yet. They show a surprisingly low level of PM10 and PM50 particulates, which mostly come from diesel engines. This tends to suggest that they use all-electric traction on their railroads. But then there’s the radiation issue.
COL. SMITH: Radiation … What did you find, Louis?
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: I’d like to remind everyone that you can get some radioactive isotopes in your air just from burning too much coal. We’re going to have to give the eggheads more time to chew it over, eliminate other possible causes … but we are seeing isotopes like Cesium-133 and Iodine-131, and the radioisotope mass/yield curve suggests they came from prompt—not thermal—fission of Plutonium-239, and a bunch of thermal-neutron-induced fission of Uranium-238—
LIAISON, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: What does that mean?
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: It’s fallout from an atmospheric H-bomb detonation. The Plutonium fission fragments came from the initiator and spark plug, the U-238 products come from the hohlraum. They—or someone on their time line—set off one or more thermonuclear devices quite recently. Less than a month ago, in fact, and it was probably in the hundred-kiloton-to-five-megaton range. This might indicate an active aboveground H-bomb test program. But the timing is right for them to have nuked our drones out of the sky.
DR. SCRANTON: We’re playing it close for now, gentlemen, but the White House is aware of the situation. A decision has been made, for better or worse. (pause) As of now, we’re treating this time line, time line 178, as a high-tech threat. It gets its own code name: BLACK RAIN, a hat tip to the fallout. While a National Security Order has been drafted and SAC are migrating a para-time-capable B-52 bomb wing armed with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to Thule just in case, the President has made it abundantly clear that this is a defensive posture only, not preparation for a first strike. She’s been briefed on Camp Singularity and is fully aware of the implications. She wants to play this very low-key, until we can provide some intel context on what we’re dealing with in BLACK RAIN. She doesn’t want to risk whacking a hornet’s nest with a baseball bat unless there’s no alternative.
COL. SMITH: This is what you were priming us for, isn’t it?
DR. SCRANTON: Yes, Colonel. I’m afraid we’ve run out of time. We’re going to keep probing with Tier 1 drones and micro-UAVs, but they can only get us so far; we badly need human eyes at ground level.
LIAISON, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: But she’s not ready to deploy yet!
COL. SMITH: Leave that to me.
END TRANSCRIPT
UPSTATE NEW YORK, TIME LINE TWO, JULY 2020
That afternoon, Rita flew into Rochester on a Delta connection via Minneapolis. She was as tired and irritated as usual on arrival (she had been mildly disappointed to discover that her DHS staff ID card didn’t give her the right to magically sidestep the airport security lines or the scrum at the checked baggage belt); all she wanted to do was rent a car and drive out to the transit facility for Camp Graceland. She was not expecting to find Colonel Smith waiting for her in Arrivals, looking impatient. “Your flight is late.”