Empire Games Series, Book 1(95)
They couldn’t have been more wrong.
Rita had been clearly seen by station mate Vance Schofield, age fifty-six. He was a forty-year veteran of the Irontown Regional Permanent Way and its successor, the Commonwealth Eastern Regional Rails, or the CERR. A sober-sided widower and abstainer from spirits, he had challenged Rita to display her ticket of travel: at which point she had vanished into thin air.
Aghast and worried that his eyes were failing him, Schofield had summoned his platform attendant, one Barnett Garrison, an Observer Corps veteran—who had also noticed Rita loitering near the end of the platform, but assumed she was merely a night-shift worker taken short and turned a discreet eye. Together they searched the platform and adjacent tracks. Returning with Schofield to the platform office, Garrison noticed an Unidentified Object attached to one of the windowpanes he had cleaned the evening before. And that’s when Schofield recalled the electronic memoranda about Persons Vanishing in Broad Daylight, Unidentified Objects, and If You See Something, Say Something.
Ten minutes later Schofield laboriously pushed the SEND button on the teletype terminal that linked his office, via telephone line, to the powerful new time-sharing mainframe in Port Richmond (which the CERR had installed to coordinate their railroad network’s back-office business just five years ago). Sixteen minutes later—the Commonwealth intercomputer network was chronically congested, the modems almost permanently engaged as messaging traffic grew by leaps and bounds—his message reached the in-box of one Inspector Alice Morgan of the Commonwealth Transport Police.
Inspector Morgan was in a morning briefing, so did not receive his e-mail at once. But half an hour after her return to a deskful of paperwork, she began to read—and the shit hit the fan. The Commonwealth Transport Police was responsible for securing a rapidly developing infrastructure network that had gone from steam locomotives and biplanes to passenger jets and high-speed rail in just seventeen years. They had been re-formed and trained along modern lines in the wake of the Revolution, as one of the key security services of the Commonwealth Deep State. They were fully briefed on world-walking and its implications. And Alice Morgan had not risen to the rank of Police inspector (in a society that was, in many ways, still deeply conservative and unaccustomed to such newfangled ideas as women working and voting) without being something of an overachiever.
News usually propagates slowly, if at all, through any bureaucracy not built on advanced information technology. Of necessity, the faster channels of communication are scarce and must be reserved for important bulletins. The Commonwealth’s Deep State planners were aware of this. They were also aware of their most likely adversary’s infowar doctrine (even though it relied on technologies that seemed like the most bizarre overextrapolation of current trends) and the vital need to get inside their decision loop. Inspector Morgan’s subsequent on-site report, filed from Schofield’s own railway network terminal using her priority key, went straight over the wire to the National Security Network, carbon-copied to the Force Commander and to the Director of the Department of Para-historical Research, flagged as a FLASH alert.
At three o’clock that afternoon, Miriam Burgeson took her seat at the head of a boardroom table to chair the resulting emergency briefing.
“Background first. What have we found, Commander?” she asked.
“Lots.” Commander Jackson looked extremely unhappy—as he should have, under the circumstances. “I’ve had men combing the Irongate South satellite switchyard since ten o’clock this morning. So far they’ve identified four suspicious objects, believed to be miniature televisor cameras with attached storage devices: so-called webcams. The first was spotted by accident by the platform attendant who cleaned the office window it was adhering to the previous day. He retrieved it and after Forensics finished with it—taking fingerprints and surface samples for DNA matching—it was handed over to a DPR courier. The other three devices have been left in situ by order of the incident controller until we know what you want us to do with them. They are attached to the left upper door windowpane on Signal Box Two, the side of one of the support pillars on the platform awning, and above the northern side door of the supervisor’s office on Platform Three.
“The switchyard is currently closed while my officers conduct a fingertip search of the entire yard, including the track beds. An hour ago, they identified another suspicious object: a device concealed in a lump of timber that had been placed on a walkway between tracks eight and nine. It’s a small sealed weatherproof plastic container, and it radiates magnetoelectric vibrations.” Jackson’s terminology was archaic, a product of an education that predated the arrival of the Clan exiles and the deluge of new science and technology they’d catalyzed.
“So. Witness sighting of a person who vanished into thin air—from a normally reliable member of staff—and indirect confirmation in the shape of concealed monitoring devices.” Miriam frowned. She wished she felt sufficiently at ease to relax her politician’s mask and actually vent her true emotions—scream and shout, maybe throw something at the wall—but it would send entirely the wrong message at this point. Deep breathing time. “Ken. Analysis? What do your people say? Anything else?”
Ken McInnes, her deputy director in charge of Operational Analysis, shook his head. “We’re still putting it together. There’s been a marked uptick in UFO sightings in Pennsylvania in general over the past month, described variously as ‘giant hornets’ or ‘tiny airplanes.’ Air Defense Command confirms some anomalous sightings, both from the Observer Corps and radar, but the objects were flying low and slow and nobody managed to get a lock. They scrambled interceptors for two of the sightings, but there was nothing there when the jets arrived. I would speculate—let me caution that this is uncorroborated guesswork—that the adversary might be using very small drones to conduct localized probes. If they pop into our airspace less than a thousand feet up, spend most of their time barely above treetop height, and hang around for less than fifteen minutes, we’ll have the devil’s own job spotting them.