Empire Games Series, Book 1(87)

DR. SCRANTON: Analysis later.

COL. SMITH: Okay. The minuses: we weren’t expecting the station to be busy at four in the morning, and Rita was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The stationmaster—the station office video stream shows that he wasn’t armed, so she wasn’t in immediate danger. Nevertheless, she jaunted out of there. So we’re left with a witness, singular, to a JAUNT BLUE departure at dead of night. The platform wasn’t alarmed or surveilled, so it’s a subjective eyeball account only. Which means that unless they’re aware of world-walkers they’ll probably write it off as a hallucination or a funny spell or something. So while I don’t think it’s advisable to send Rita back to the switchyard, I don’t think she’s blown. In fact, I’d recommend bringing Phase Two forward.

LIAISON, STATE DEPT: What do the analysts say? What did we get out of this?

COL. SMITH: Lots. They’ve got computer terminals in offices. Old-style cathode ray tube monitors with odd keyboards, but it’s the real thing. And they use electric traction for railroads. That commuter train Rita witnessed is a big tell—it’s an electric multiple unit with Jacobs bogies—

DR. SCRANTON: What are those?

COL. SMITH: It’s a special wheel layout—French and Chinese high-speed trains use them. Saves weight, but means the cars can’t be uncoupled. It’s common on passenger trains that run upward of a hundred and fifty miles per hour. Not ours, in other words.

DR. SCRANTON: So it’s fast?

COL. SMITH: They have a fully electrified wide-gauge railway network and use high-speed commuter trains to move people to and from industrial plants. Those low-altitude records we got from the Gnats? Lots of twelve-story buildings surrounded by foliage. The lack of suburban sprawl and highways is all consistent with a planned social housing infrastructure, built around apartment blocks and lots and lots of urban light rail.

LIAISON, STATE DEPT: You mean they, they live in apartments and commute by streetcar and train?

DR. SCRANTON: Yes. This tells us something about their financial system and economy, by the way. They’re a rent-not-buy country, so their consumer economy probably isn’t debt-backed and underwritten by an asset bubble. I mean, we might be looking at condominiums, but then we’d expect to see some McMansions as well, and suburban sprawl around highways. And we’re just not seeing that. So either they’re old-school Commies who live in state-run apartments, or they’re like Germany or Japan, hardworking savers who don’t mortgage up and whose real estate depreciates after it’s built. Possibly they’ve got state land ownership.

LIAISON, STATE DEPT: That sounds pretty un-American.

COL. SMITH: Yes. And then there was the flatbed Rita spotted. I brought a print for you.

LIAISON, STATE DEPT: Jesus. That’s a tank … Jesus.

COL. SMITH: A shift change at 0400 hours suggests to me that they’re working round the clock, twenty-four/seven. The webcams got us an estimated head count of four hundred and eighty workers, plus or minus twenty. Now, they might have multiple staggered shifts, but even if they’re swapping out five hundred workers every hour, that maxes out at four to six thousand in whatever factory they’re at. And that train, well, our best estimate is that it was carrying about sixty main battle tanks. M1 Abrams class or similar, judging by what was visible of their hull box size, suspension layout, and turret design. Enough to equip the core of a mechanized infantry brigade.

DR. SCRANTON: Are they highly automated?

COL. SMITH: We might be wrong. The munitions train might have been a coincidence—but rolling out of the vicinity of Bethlehem? Appalachian coal and iron country? If you’re going to start building heavy metal in North America, that’s one of the places you’d begin. If they’re producing tanks there and the factory only employs a few thousand people, then that implies highly efficient manufacturing. I mean, there might be other satellite stations serving the other side of a big complex, or maybe they run a reduced maintenance shift at night and those were the cleaners and janitors going home, but … I’m calling this a clear indicator of 1960s technology or later, just not our 1960s. We might be wrong about the housing and finance stuff, by the way. It might just be a local dorms-for-factory-workers kind of thing. We won’t know until we get boots on the ground and noses in library books. But it looks like kind of a Soviet setup to me. Paranoid and heavily armed with nuclear weapons.

DR. SCRANTON: Okay, Colonel. Now here’s a leading question: if this was your show, where would you want to take it? Feel free to brainstorm, I’m open to ideas …

COL. SMITH: Well, I don’t think we’re going to learn much more that’s useful by having Rita stumble around a switchyard at night. For one thing it’s dangerous, and for another, we got what we came for. What we need now is cultural intelligence—all the little details our future agents will need to operate in place. We also need large scale SIGINT and ELINT snooping programs, but that’s a job for the National Reconnaissance Office. I imagine they’ve got ARMBAND-equipped spysats with capsule return systems like the old Keyhole series, or some equivalent. But we probably want to hold off on lobbing heavy metal into orbit until we know if these people have satellites of their own—we don’t want to set off World War Three by accident. It’s going to have to happen sooner or later if we plan to engage with them, but not yet. In the meantime, I’d strongly recommend pushing Phase Two: maybe into Philly proper. The social housing thing raises an added risk factor—fewer safe houses where agents won’t be under scrutiny from the neighbors—but we’ve got enough video that our wardrobe department say they can knock off a costume that will stand up at a distance. And thanks to the webcams we should have enough dialogue for Linguistics to start working up a training kit in a week or so. And we can iterate. It gets riskier from here on in, but Rita’s resourceful. As long as we give her as much support as she wants and as much elbow room as she needs, she’ll do fine.