Empire Games Series, Book 1(70)
“Why? You’re planning on sending me through tonight?” she asked, half joking: They can’t possibly be in that much of a hurry …
“Yes. At three-fifteen precisely.”
PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO; IRONGATE, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020
At ten past three in the morning Rita shifted her weight uneasily from one knee to the other. They were standing around in the middle of a parking lot behind the windowless warehouse unit the Unit had appropriated. Rita, Patrick, a cluster of technicians, a pair of armorers, the peripatetic DHS agents Sonia Gomez and Jack Mercer—Rita had finally achieved a high enough security clearance to learn his surname—and a bunch of uniformed officers had established a secure perimeter around the entire block, thereby ensuring that every undesirable within a fifty-mile radius knew something was going down.
After the afternoon briefing on how not to lose life or limbs to a bump-shunted boxcar, Rita had crashed out until ten o’clock. But now she was awake, pumped high on bad coffee and strapped into a mall ninja’s parody version of a James Bond outfit. The ensemble consisted of boots, black BDUs, armor, and a mad-scientist helmet that sprouted VR glasses, a lifelogger, and a pair of night vision scopes cantilevered off the front. She lacked only a scary-looking gun to fit the part perfectly—but although Patrick had asked if she wanted a pistol, she’d declined: “First, I don’t know if I could shoot anyone, and second, if I did it would totally fuck the mission, wouldn’t it?”
“Right answer,” he’d told her. “If you see any sign of trouble, you jaunt away immediately. If we luck out, anyone who sees you will think they were hallucinating. But you don’t want to be seen. Got that?”
“Got it.” She’d nodded queasily, her head unbalanced by the helmet-mounted protrusions. Meanwhile the support team was laying out her planned ground track on the asphalt using crime scene tape. “Walk me through this again? Headset, capture map on.”
That had been a couple of hours ago. Since then they’d run through endless checklists, made her replay her choreographed series of steps in the head-up display of her glasses three times (following them in real time so that it became a habit to step within her own ghostly footsteps), and updated the folks “upstairs,” who were waiting with the Colonel in a committee room somewhere in Maryland. And now, Rita’s bladder was embarrassingly full.
“This is going to sound stupid,” she said apologetically, “but I really need to go to the bathroom.”
“You need to go? Can’t it wait—” Gomez sounded disgusted, but Patrick cut her off: “Let her go.” He glanced at Rita. “Just don’t take too long.”
Rita scuttled through the open door of the warehouse unit like a black-clad cockroach, making a beeline for the ground-floor restroom. Her bladder was full: coffee and nerves were a potent combination. Her stomach was also full of butterflies. I can do this, she told herself, self-consciously self-aware. It’s just another role. Front of stage. Your name in lights. “Today’s late-night billing: secret agent woman Rita Douglas in, in … BLACK RAIN.”
She made it back to the taped-out departure zone with two minutes to spare. “Stand there,” said Gomez.
“System check.”
Rita looked at the transparent cutout in the forearm of her left sleeve. She squeezed a now-familiar pattern, then switched on the ultraviolet light above her helmet visor. Phosphorescence glimmered against the darkness of her skin. “Test pattern works, GFP phosphenes work, black-light lamp works.” She looked straight forward through her night vision eyepieces. “Night vision works.” Her mouth was dry.
“One minute to go,” called Patrick.
Rita looked around, then cued up her captured choreography in a window at the side of her glasses. She felt curiously trapped, hot even though it was a cool night. The moon had set—
“Thirty seconds. Twenty. Ten. Five—”
She focused on her trigger engram, and jaunted.
Rita stumbled among trees in the darkness. A night rain was falling, pattering off leaves overhead: the air smelled overwhelmingly green. Damn: obstacles, she realized. She’d been lucky to come out between them. Trying to jaunt into the same place as a solid object was impossible, but the shock it gave her was like brief contact with a live wire. Or the jolting sensation of falling on the edge of sleep.
In her ear, mingling with the leafy rustling and the dripping of rain on trees, she heard the clicking of a radiation counter. Time line one was still hot from the nuking of the Gruinmarkt. She took a deep breath of forest air, squeezed to summon the next trigger engram in the sequence—dim green phosphorescent fireflies glowed on the back of her wrist, shimmering as they shifted into a tantalizingly not-quite-familiar knotwork design—and she jaunted again.
This time she slipped, feet sliding on sharp-edged, rough pebbles. The air on her face was warmer. She looked around: a tall wall rose beside her. It was right in the path of her programmed dance step through the switchyard. She blinked, focusing. It’s a shipping container, she realized. A shipping container on a flatbed wagon. I need to capture this. It looked, ironically, just like any other shipping container she’d ever seen: forty feet of corrugated steel with twist-lock connectors at each corner. It loomed above her like a wall, with another container stacked atop it. The wagon bed rose above the bogies at either end.