Empire Games Series, Book 1(69)
The Unit. It had an ominous ring to it. Yet another sandbox, to keep Rita hemmed in and ignorant of what was really going on. “I don’t feel ready for this. There’s no alternative, is there?”
Smith spoke haltingly: “I am not … going to … strong-arm you into saying yes. If there’s one thing worse than having no agent, it’s having an agent who is scared out of their wits and doesn’t want to be there. So, uh. You are allowed to say ‘no,’ if you really don’t think you’re up to it.”
“But if I say no … there’s no one else who can do this job, is there?” she asked, deliberately pushing him toward another lie. Go on, tell me the truth, just this once. She knew it was foolish, but she found his evasion inexpressibly depressing.
“I wish there were. I really wish there were. But we’re out of time.”
Rita nodded reluctantly. So she was working for an unscrupulous liar. Worse: one who didn’t see anything wrong with lying because his motives were entirely pure. What should I do? she wondered. Then, What would Grandpa say?
PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020
“Rocks,” Rita said disbelievingly. “Really?”
“Yup. Rocks.” Patrick, her supervisor from Camp Graceland and now, it seemed, her field officer, hefted a chunk of misshapen pink granite a couple of inches long. “Like this one.”
“What’s so special about them?” Rita shifted her weight. The cheap conference seat creaked unfairly beneath her. I’m not that heavy! she complained silently. Like everything else on this site—an office suite attached to a light industrial unit in Allentown, on the outskirts of Philly—it was secondhand and had seen better days.
“It’s instrumented. The batteries are good for seven days, during which it will continuously record meteorological conditions and high-definition video—optical and infrared—whenever anything moves around it. It can report over Bluetooth if you go within a hundred feet of it while carrying an active transponder that’s paired with it, but it doesn’t broadcast its presence. This one”—Patrick picked up another object, which resembled a battered length of two-by-four—“has a six-month life, and inertial sensors. It works with a transponder disguised as a different rock. You drop the transponder in the switchyard and toss the mobile unit on top of a caboose or a shunting engine and it builds a map of the track network as it gets pushed around, then calls in whenever it comes back to the same switchyard. Uh, you probably don’t want to put it on a goods wagon, though. Not unless you want it to go on an extended tour of North America.”
“Uh-huh.” Rita stared at Patrick’s rock and scrap collection. “So what’s the plan?”
“The plan is to build out our knowledge of the target time line, starting with somewhere relatively safe. We know there’s a railroad yard, so we want you to go through there at night and scatter sensors around a couple of key areas without being seen. The first mission will be a double-jaunt into the switchyard via a place you do not want to linger in. It’ll be a quick in-and-out, fifteen minutes max. We leave the sensors in place for a day, then you go back to collect them. That gives us a preliminary site survey, so we can pick a better insertion site for the next mission, when you will plant hidden cameras and mikes on platforms and offices. We need to know a whole lot more—what language they speak, whether it’s related to any that we know, what their writing looks like, what they wear, their ethnicity or physical appearance—before we can develop a covert program.”
“An entire program?” It was a daunting prospect. “But I’m just one woman, what can I—”
“You’re the spearhead for BLACK RAIN,” Patrick interrupted. His expression was serious. “That’s the code word for this operation, to investigate this time line. We need you to spy out the lay of the land. Your goal is to establish a toehold, learn the basics, and finally identify a safe location on the other side where we can drop non-world-walkers. Then they can take over the heavy lifting. Once we’ve established a transfer gate you won’t be needed there again—but we’ll probably want to do the same thing elsewhere. Maybe even overseas.”
Rita stared at the rocks apprehensively. “What if they discover the rocks?”
“They’ll be disguised as track ballast. Over here we lay three thousand tons of the stuff per mile of track. Even if they figure out there’s a bug in the ballast, searching a switchyard for passive transponders would be like looking for needles in a haystack the size of Iowa. You’ll only be able to find them yourself because we’ll give you a signaling device that can make them flash an infrared LED for your night vision goggles.”
“And if they have infrared floodlights and CCTV, like an Amtrak depot?”
Patrick shook his head. “Then you cut and run, and we have a very big headache. Rita, our number one priority here is to get you back safely. Never doubt that! Because you can tell us far more about what’s going on than any dumb sensor.”
Rita tried to make it work inside her head. “Okay, so … Say we’ve got a surveyed location. At the designated time I suit up, cross over to the, the switchyard, drop a bunch of rocks, plant a couple of bits of debris on suitable cabs if I see anything, then come back. Is that it?”
“Yes. It’ll be a walk in the park—just like the Apollo astronauts had.” Patrick seemed tired. To Rita’s eyes he looked like he’d been working overtime for too many nights. “You’ll be wearing body armor and a night vision system. And you’ll have a bunch of cameras strapped to your helmet, along with inertial sensors—it’ll be like one of those HaptoTech motion capture systems you worked with, so we can put together a virtual map of the yard after you come back. But that’s about it. We’ve arranged for a trainer from the Federal Railroad Administration to come in after lunch to give you a basic safety briefing on what hazards you can expect in a switchyard. There are no guarantees that they do things the same way we do, but we can make some approximate guesses based on the photographs—their track and loading gauge, maximum track curvature and length of railroad cars—which tell us things like how fast and how heavy their trains are. Oh, and the switch layout and siding geometry tells us how they load and unload stuff. But I’d better leave that to the FRA guy. And then after his briefing I’m sure you’ll want to sack out.”