Empire Games Series, Book 1(81)
For Mission Two, there were three times as many bodies clogging up the parking lot and getting in the way, most of them apparently bag carriers for rubbernecking bosses who couldn’t force themselves to let well enough alone and allow the people who knew what they were doing to get on with the job. Which was basically her, with Patrick for instructions and the DHS armorers and sysadmins for tech support. The Colonel had come along to keep a nervous eye on the teeter-tottering hierarchs who had descended from above, as if to watch the launch of a new long-range missile or something. People in expensive suits kept bugging Rita to talk to them, made her repeat herself endlessly until her cheeks were tight from nervous smiling. Even that bitch Sonia Gomez was trying to make nice in her direction. And the floodlights—
Rita finally cracked. “Will somebody kill those floodlights, please?” Half a dozen mobile telescoping masts with lights on them lit up the parking lot so bright that Rita was beginning to feel the need for sunblock.
One of the rubberneckers called, “We need them for the cameras—”
“They’re going to ruin my night vision!”
Colonel Smith heard her plea and took mercy. “You heard her! Everybody get ready for lights out at T minus five minutes! She needs to adapt to darkness before showtime! Who’s in charge of lighting? You, yes you, I want the floods out, out at T minus five, all of them…”
The lights began to dim, fading finally to a pointillist sparkle of isolated LEDs that simulated moonlight. It was still too bright, Rita fretted, but her eyes were beginning to adapt. “Are you okay?” Patrick asked quietly from behind her. “Anything you need?”
Yes: get rid of the circus, she thought. “There are too many people here. Isn’t that a security issue?”
“Yeah. I’ll have a word with the Colonel. If we’re lucky he can convince Dr. Scranton to lock it down again after this run, but she’s under a lot of pressure from stakeholders who want to get an eyeful of the promised land.”
“Who do? I mean, what? Why?” Promised land?
Patrick looked bone-tired. “The Mormons and the Scientologists are duking it out again. They’ll take any excuse: you just have to roll with it. Can I get you anything else? Can of Pepsi?”
“I don’t want to need a restroom while I’m out there. Have a coffee waiting for me in debrief when I get back?”
“Good girl.” He patted her shoulder, misjudging the weight of her pack, and she staggered. “Oops. Try not to, uh, break a leg.”
“Check.”
“T minus one minute,” some idiot intoned into a bullhorn, fancying himself the ringmaster.
Rita flipped her night vis goggles down, then squeezed her left forearm carefully. Oh Angie, she thought, please let it not just be my imagination that you—
“Thirty seconds—”
She forced herself back into focus. “Lifelogger, go to maximum bandwidth, record everything, and journal to backpack,” she muttered into her throat mike. “Over.” Then she jaunted, twice in rapid succession.
This time she thought she knew what to expect of the rail yard. So she kept her balance, swung her helmet-mounted glasses round in a circle to take in the tracks, recording everything like a good Girl Scout.
There were trains, but none of them were moving. Dim starlight gleamed off a distant fence. A faint breeze raised whispers in the overhead wires, and the station buildings formed indistinct black silhouettes on the far side of the tracks. “Headset, new capture map. Bookmark current.” She squatted, then hit the release on her backpack.
A hefty Peli case thudded to the ground behind her. She turned, squatted, and flipped it open. Dim LEDs began to blink as the data logger began to ping the scattered surveillance devices she’d planted before the weekend. Now she opened the flap covering the other half of the case. Four gunmetal bird-shapes nestled within like legless, beakless pigeons with synthetic sapphire eyes: Raytheon birds that laid Rockwell eggs. She lifted them one at a time, unplugged their charge cables, and ran through the checklist on her head-up display, then stood back as they spread their carbon-fiber wings and lofted into the night.
Once the micro-UAVs had flown, Rita did another 360 turn. There was nobody in sight: it was as quiet as a graveyard. She flipped the Peli case closed, then armed the dead man’s switch. If all went to plan, she’d pick it up on her return journey. If not, it had a world-walking ARMBAND unit of its own and would jaunt home in two hours. “Set timer to one hour forty-five.”
She didn’t like to think about what they would do if the base station went home without her. She’d tried to ask Colonel Smith, but he’d flatly changed the subject, not even bothering to evade. “You know better than to ask questions like that.” He’d looked pained, as if she’d turned up to a test without studying for it.
She’d swallowed. “You know I’ll come home on schedule unless, unless for some reason I can’t. Aren’t you supposed to offer me a cyanide capsule or something? In case I’m captured and tortured?”
“You won’t be,” he said, with calm reassurance that in retrospect gave her the cold shivers. “We’re monitoring you via the telemetry return module. And your wearable diagnostics”—the harness of electrodes taped to her skin, under her clothes. “If you glimpse someone, you jaunt home. If you fall and break a leg, you jaunt home. If someone shoots at you, you jaunt home. If the locals capture you—and they won’t if you’ve done the other things right—you jaunt home. Your only excuse for not jaunting home is that you’re dead, in which case the JAUNT BLUE program is suspended. The question of what happens after that is one for the National Security Council. It’s not my job or yours to second-guess them.”