Empire Games Series, Book 1(59)
“Stuff.”
“Stuff we shouldn’t talk about outside of a secure conference room—or outside of Camp Singularity.” A Mercury winked its sidelights and rolled out of its parking bay, turning toward them. Doors slid open. “Get in.” They sat in the back as the sedan made its way to the exit, steering wheel spinning eerily under the fingertips of an invisible AI driver. “We’ve got one more body to pick up, then we’ll go—”
The car stopped at the top of the ramp, and the front passenger door opened. A few seconds later, Julie from HaptoTech climbed in. “Reporting for duty, sir! Hi, Rita.” The smile she sent Rita was just faintly apologetic.
“Make yourself at home,” said Smith, ignoring Rita’s frozen face. Julie’s door closed; a second later the car moved off, heading for I-83. “Transit point’s about an hour out of town. Julie, you’ve seen the Valley, haven’t you? Why don’t you fill Rita in on it.”
“Sure! Prepare to have your mind blown, Rita. Uh, sir, I assume she’s…”
“She wouldn’t be in this car if she wasn’t cleared.” Smith closed his eyes. He looks tired, Rita realized. Like he’s been up all night. “Tell her about your first time out.” The car turned onto Charles Street and ground to a halt in the sudden snarl of traffic. “I’m going to catch thirty winks.”
Rita wasn’t exactly feeling receptive. She fumed quietly behind a polite mask as Julie prattled on about the mind-expanding experience of a trip to some archaeological site in a capital-V Valley, somewhere over the rainbow. You set me up, she thought grimly, not sure whether to direct her venom at Julie, who was merely a pawn, or at the Colonel, snoring quietly beside her, his mouth disarmingly ajar, whose will was almost certainly the one in question: You set me up. There was no other plausible explanation for Julie to surface as a DHS undercover agent reporting to the Colonel. You had me under observation all the time I was at HaptoTech, and you want me to know it! But why?
“—Climate in time line four is a lot cooler than here, because it’s in an ice age right now. The climatologists say it began about two thousand years ago because of anthropogenic change caused by an, uh, nuclear winter—” Julie was surreally lucid. For the trade show in Seattle she’d done a convincing impersonation of a bottle-blond bubblehead. Since then she’d lost the perm, dyed her hair back to a more natural chestnut, and acquired a set of rimless aug-reality specs. In office-casual she was almost unrecognizable. But she still wore a gold pin on her lapel, a hieroglyph of a scarab beetle. “They had a nuclear war back when the Roman Empire was at its peak. Freaky, no?”
“I’m sorry?” Rita shook her head. “I didn’t catch that.”
“I’ll show you when we arrive.” Julie gave her a worried smile. “Is he asleep?”
Rita glanced sideways. “Yes for now.” Smith was in fact out cold, but she was not prepared to share a dust mote more than was strictly necessary with Julie right now.
“I hope you’re not sore at me. I was just following orders—nobody even told me to keep an eye out for you!”
“Well, that makes it all right.” Rita kept her tone even. “You don’t need my forgiveness, anyway.” Just the Colonel’s paycheck.
“Like that matters? Listen, in this organization you go where you’re told and follow orders. That’s all I was doing. No need to make it something personal!”
Rita nodded, reluctantly. Julie had a point: once you took the agency’s coin you couldn’t really blame anyone else for the consequences.
“Anyway, the Valley we’re going to really is a headfuck because those people were so far ahead of us it’s not even funny—”
“Wait.” Rita struggled with the phantoms of her distraction: “People? We’re talking about another time line here, right? One that was nuked?”
“Yes.” Julie was beginning to sound just slightly impatient with her. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“But … hang on. I’ve been to time line four.” The safe room in the clinic had been located in that time line. So was Camp Graceland. “Isn’t it uninhabited?”
“Yes! At least, it’s uninhabited now. We’re going to Camp Singularity, in the Valley.”
“But if they’re—are there ruins?”
“You bet,” said Julie, her voice rising slightly to match her fervor. “It’s every archaeologist’s dream, and more besides. You won’t believe your eyes!”
CAMP SINGULARITY, TIME LINE FOUR, JULY 2020
Camp Singularity was another DHS installation, a grim little cluster of prefab buildings huddled behind fences and surveillance cams that straddled the ridgeline of a forest valley. The trees were mostly conifers, dark green and spiny, and the weather was chill. A New England autumn transplanted to the latitude of Baltimore in early summer.
By early afternoon, Rita had been checked in and assigned sleeping quarters, and had caught a late lunch with Julie—not a terribly sociable affair, despite the latter’s attempts at conversation. As Rita deposited her tray at the collection point, Julie was checking her glasses. “Come on,” she said. “Time for the tour.”
There was a compact SUV waiting outside. Julie swung up into the driver’s seat; Rita took the passenger side. They bumped off toward the edge of the asphalt apron, then onto a dirt track that meandered toward the radar dishes and guard tower at the gatehouse. Rita finally cracked. “Is it far?”