Empire Games Series, Book 1(82)

Casting around with her grainy noise-speckled green starlight scopes, Rita discerned no signs of motion. Looking down, she stepped across the first track, knelt, and used the right angle and laser range finder from her right thigh pocket to measure the interrail gap. Five feet, two inches precisely. Keeping her feet on the stony ballast between the sleepers, avoiding contact with the rails, she made her way across the switchyard toward the darkened signal house. Hulking transformers buzzed quietly in a fenced-in cantonment not far from the building, stacked insulators feeding fat cables up to an overhead gantry. Smell of damp wood, oil and ozone, distant trees. Odor of dirt, a slight sulfurous tickle at the back of the throat. An external wooden staircase ran up to the entrance to the signal box on the second floor. It was built of red brick, stained black with soot, and the paint around the window frames was peeling.

She scanned her environs again, then carefully checked the wall outside the signal box. Telegraph wires led under the eaves, or maybe they were low-voltage power cables—not the heavy traction current from the substation behind the fence—but there were no obvious signs of external alarms. The door at the top of the stairs was wooden, paneled, and secured with a bulky hasp and padlock.

“This isn’t a forerunner time line,” she said quietly, trusting the telemetry return module to capture her words for posterity. “Use of wood, brick, and natural materials. It’s closer to—”

There was a sign by the side of the signal box door. Without thinking, she climbed the steps until she was close enough to read it. It was made of embossed metal: rust spots showed through the enameled paint surface.

“Sign in English. Lifelogger, bookmark this.” She peered closer. “Eastern Imperial Permanent Way Rules and Regulations. Employees only. Trespassers will be Att—Attaindered. Maximum penalty, uh, squiggle fifty slash dash.” Excitement—I can read this! They speak English! Sort of—vied with disappointment—Oh, I can read this, it’s just English.

She hadn’t brought a lock-pick kit, and she wasn’t proficient enough to waste time fumbling around in the dark with a padlock on a semi-derelict-looking building. She contented herself by gumming a webcam up against one of the panes of glass in the door, where it would have a decent view of everyone working in the building by daylight (and the glass could act as a resonant surface for its mike). Then she descended the stairs and made for the platform with the station office, four tracks away. Her blood was humming in her ears: quick darting glances told her she was still alone.

The station building was a long, low, single-story structure with a gently sloping roof, sitting on a raised platform island between two tracks—it was clearly designed for passenger trains. Rita guessed its length at about five hundred feet, short by US standards per the briefing from the FRA guy. Do they use it to bring in the switchyard crew, she wondered, or do they run short commuter trains? Daylight and webcams would tell. She duck-walked along the track bed, checking for signs of activity in the building, then climbed the steps at the end of the platform. It was the work of a minute to climb atop some kind of low retaining wall sized for trolleys or supplies and to stick a couple of webcams to one of the supports of the long station canopy. Then she worked her way along the platform.

Rita came to what looked to be a waiting room or ticket office, shuttered against the night. There were posters on the wall outside in glass-fronted frames, just like a station at home. There was a timetable: she scanned it carefully at close range, trusting that the list of unfamiliar destinations would be meaningful to some back-office analyst. Other public information notices. She forced herself to glance at them quickly, but not allow herself to become absorbed. Some were strikingly familiar, as if they were a glimpse of home as seen through a semantic fun-house mirror. DEMOCRACY IS ENDANGERED: IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, TELL SOMEONE. That could almost have come from home. But then she came to another: LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION! EQUALITY, DEMOCRACY, LIBERTY. And below it, in smaller lettering, DOWN WITH ROYALISM.

Hang on, she thought, her perspective expanding dizzyingly, the rusting sign on the signal box door … It had said something about an “Imperial Permanent Way.” And now this: DOWN WITH ROYALISM. What does it mean?

She came to another locked platform door, beside a window. And for once the window wasn’t shuttered. It was an office, looking out on the platform. Rita peeped inside: there was no sign of life. With her low-powered flashlight, she lit up the room within until her night glasses could see clearly—barely a single lumen sufficed. There were swivel chairs of heavy wood and brass with leather seats, and green metal-topped desks. File cabinets loomed against one wall. A tall electric fan with villainously sharp-looking blades hulked over the largest desk like a frozen mantis. The desk was crowded, with several in-trays and an old-school computer. Paydirt, she realized, and climbed atop a platform bench seat to affix another webcam to the glass, looking in.

Then she glanced down at the desk and realized what she had seen but not registered.

There was a computer on the desk. It was an old-school bulky beige box with a metal cover, not a tablet or a flat display panel. A keyboard you could club someone to death with sat proudly in the middle of the blotter, but something about it didn’t quite look right. She fumbled for a moment with her webbing, then managed to pull out the super-zoom camera. “Come on, damn you,” she muttered under her breath. The autofocus didn’t want to work in darkness. She glanced around, nervously, then switched the flash to automatic and squeezed her eyes shut as she depressed the shutter button. Then she zoomed in on the image she’d captured. It was a keyboard, all right, but the key layout was all wrong. The keys weren’t staggered; there were too many columns and not enough rows. I guess we’re not in QWERTY City anymore, she told herself.