Empire Games Series, Book 1(86)

Rita shuddered, wrung out on an adrenaline spike, and slid farther into the shadows. Doors rattled elsewhere in the station as the crowd stamped and shuffled their way toward an unseen exit. In her head-up display she watched as the stationmaster—station mate, she reminded herself—picked up his phone and pushed buttons on a blocky console below it: “Eugene hailing. The four o’clock shift change multiple is discharging onto platform two now. Prithee let the night shift in as soon as you sight the discharge? Thanking you kindly.”

There was more rumbling elsewhere in the switchyard. A long, slow freight train hove into view behind an oddly quiet locomotive. It hummed as it approached, a deep sixty-cycle thrumming sound that carried even over the voices and echoing feet of the men from the passenger train. They were spreading out like an ant-trail leading into an open doorway just visible from one of Rita’s other webcams. There have to be three hundred of them, she realized. Maybe more. There’d been standing room only on the train. Men and women in coats or overalls, indistinctly glimpsed in the harsh station lights. She tried to get a look at them. Acquiring some idea of local fashions, Patrick had pointed out, was important in laying groundwork for future infiltration missions. But all she could really tell, without stepping out from her hiding place, was that most of them wore shapeless berets or caps and hats. She’d have to rely on the webcams for detail.

The swarm of small-hour commuters didn’t seem to be slackening, but now Rita noticed a new trend: people drifting back up the platform in ever-increasing numbers. They walked tiredly, stoop-shouldered as they climbed aboard the train. Going home, she noted. A four o’clock shift change. The train emptied out and refilled over a five-minute period. Increasingly edgy, Rita fumbled with her super-zoom, switching off the flash and diverting its output to her glasses.

Then (taking her courage in both hands) she slowly eased the barrel lens around the corner of the building to record the last stragglers in more detail. Men and women in long woolen coats, cut almost like dusters. They wore dark clothes underneath, suits or in some cases knee breeches and hose on the men. The women wore long skirts or Indian-style shalwar outfits—side-split tunics over loose trousers. Their faces were creased and rumpled by long, sleepless working hours. Factory workers, Rita speculated. Bethlehem’s bones were built on iron and coal and the first steelworks. Was it any surprise there was heavy industry here, too?

As the crowd thinned, she pulled back deeper into the shadows. An electric bell clanged harshly above the squeal and thud the freight train made as it crossed a sequence of points. Then the doors on the shift change train hissed shut, and with a buzzing whine it glided back the way it had come.

Looking past the empty platform, Rita saw flatbed carriages rumbling and squealing past. Tarpaulins covered most of their loads, but there was something ominously familiar about the hunchbacked shapes beneath. A coy glimpse under a hem of oilcloth finally forced another dizzying perspective change upon her. She followed the edge of a track wrapped around a toothed drive wheel, the outline of hull, then turret and horizontal protrusion—Are those tanks? she wondered.

“Hey! You! You missed your shift! Dinna you ken the—hey!”

Rita spun round. It was the station mate, waddling along the platform toward her, waving. Without thinking, she’d stepped forward toward the freight train, and now he’d seen her. “Abort, abort, abort,” she said aloud, trying to ignore her stomach churn. Raised her left forearm, squeezed for the return trigger—

“Hey, you! Let’s see your pass—”

She jaunted in a panicky moment, falling hard onto soft grass and going over on her left hip. Falling hurt, but she pushed herself upright immediately and jaunted again, this time into an empty parking lot on the other side of the highway from her starting point.

I blew it, she realized dismally. I totally suck at spying. And then the true implications of what she’d witnessed struck like lightning. Tanks. High-speed commuter trains. Computers. My God, what have we stumbled across?

BALTIMORE, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

FEDERAL EMPLOYEE 004930391 CLASSIFIED VOICE TRANSCRIPT

DR. SCRANTON: The way I read this action summary, we’re burned. She’s not going to be able to go back there again. Colonel? Anything to add?

COL. SMITH: We learned a lot, and I’m not sure it went as badly as you think.

LIAISON, STATE DEPT: Yes, but our JAUNT BLUE asset was exposed! She could have been killed! As it was, she barely escaped by the skin of her—

COL. SMITH: Nonsense. Don’t overdramatize.

LIAISON, STATE DEPT: But she could have been shot!

DR. SCRANTON: (wearily) Gentlemen. As you were saying, Colonel?

COL. SMITH: Rita aborted the mission early, but completely in line with her instructions: do not risk confrontation, avoid exposure. The telemetry capsule auto-returned on schedule, as expected. The mission was truncated but we made a full recovery, and we learned a lot. Let me go over the pluses and minuses—

DR. SCRANTON: Please do.

COL. SMITH: First, the pluses. She retrieved the logs from the Mission One nomadic surveillance nodes. She released the Mission Two micro-UAV spy birds. She planted six webcams on two different manned installations. We got an invaluable look at the inside of a railroad office, and at some rolling stock—our analysts are still drooling over the take because it’s gold-dust. And she got a look, up close with a telephoto lens, at a whole bunch of railroad employees and factory workers.